But to offer the space as a shelter: that was another thing entirely. He and Seth had covertly assumed shared stewardship of the store, it was true; and any place friends spend time together eventually starts feeling like a sort of home. They’d logged long hours in the half-dark together for more than a month now, drawing pictures and shooting the breeze. He knew of a couple of nights Seth hadn’t gone home, it was true. He’d let these occasions pass without comment.
But Alex was homeless; when he talked about his situation, “homeless” was the exact word he insisted upon to describe himself, much to Derrick’s distress. Derrick didn’t want to be a person who turned his homeless friend back out onto the street. He didn’t want him to have to go back to San Jose, or San Francisco; he pictured Alex at the on-ramp with a sign in his hands, waiting for somebody to take pity on him, and he couldn’t stand it. It didn’t matter how long ago they’d lost track of each other. His own self-image required him to offer his help.
“You look pretty bad,” Derrick said after Alex took his parka off: it was a puffy army parka, too warm to wear in the fall. His face was dirty, and so were his hands.
“They took me downtown a couple of times,” Alex said in the slow, clear cadences people sometimes teased him about. Derrick and Seth waited for him to explain further, but sensed that no further explanation would come; he stood with his head half-hung, looking like he expected to be insulted, or rejected, or attacked.
People said his mom was Vietnamese, but nobody really knew. He talked like a guy who’d grown up in a suburb someplace, but the only place he ever mentioned living in besides Milpitas was Washington, D.C.; when people asked him where he was from, “I’m from D.C.” was always his answer. But he never elaborated any further about it, and he’d been no older than seven when his family moved to town. Seth heard that young echo in Alex’s voice now, the sound of a child grown older under pressure, and wondered how much he’d never really known about Alex.
There wasn’t much certain about who he’d been before he ended up in the foster system. Alex himself was unreliable when it came to information about his birth family. In grade school, he’d often made up stories, trying at first to keep them all straight; but it gets exhausting after a while, and you learn to just stick to whichever story you find yourself telling, whether it contradicts some earlier version of it or not. After years in the system, he wasn’t really even sure himself about what he believed. But it was hard to discern even the outline of that vigorous storyteller in the gaunt figure who stood by the front counter now, trying and failing to make conversation with a couple of old friends.
“You all right?” said Derrick. Seth was subdued; when he looked at Alex, he knew he was seeing a version of what people expected he himself would end up looking like, sooner or later.
“I’m always all right.”
Seth couldn’t take the tension. “We thought it was Weland,” he said. “Weland fucking around.”
Alex found Weland in his mind’s eye and looked like he was about to smile, but he only said: “Nah, man.”
Derrick pointed at the grimy backpack slung over Alex’s shoulder. “Is that, like, a mattress pad in there?”
Now Alex did smile. “Factory-fresh from behind the Kmart,” he said.
“There’s two bigger booths back that way,” Derrick said, pointing very demonstratively at the arcade; he wasn’t sure of how conscious Alex really was of his surroundings. “You could go get some rest.”
I wonder if anybody who’s never been trusted with any kind of responsibility can understand how it must have felt to be Seth in that moment—to be part of a mechanism that would afford a friend shelter, to have even partial responsibility for a space of comfort and relief. To provide safe harbor for a comrade in need. I try to imagine it, and I picture a young man suddenly seeing that the body in which he lives has grown bigger without him noticing it. I imagine him looking at his hands, just a passing glance, and thinking momentarily about his redecoration of the arcade just a short while back. I see him leading Alex to the arcade to help him find a place to sleep, and I want to tell him: Seth, in this moment, you are exactly who you think you are—a helper, a minister almost. The keys to the fortress are yours; in the right light, to the weary traveler, the luster of their gleam is almost holy. But of course I can’t tell Seth that. I can only hope he had a brief glimmering of it when the moment came, a sense of how sweet the face of the one who lowers the drawbridge appears to the one whose need for passage to the castle, for a home within its walls, has become critical.