OATH BOUND
Inside, Seth was holding court. He stood in the middle of the racks, gesturing excitedly as he spoke. He’d had an idea, and now he had hands to help.
“Derrick’s serious that we can’t hang here anymore,” he said. “He’s going to call time on this whole thing, today or tomorrow. I know he is. We ran together since we were little kids, I know when he’s serious.”
Angela felt like a parishioner in the wrong church. She’d only come to see Alex; she had no personal stake in the future of Monster Adult X. She found the porno tapes disgusting; she didn’t like having to be around them. Seth’s tales of marauding interlopers profaning the sanctuary held no resonance for her. Who would want to spend their afternoons in a place like this?
But she looked over at Alex as Seth’s exhortations grew louder and more animated, and she saw something stirring in his eyes: the look of someone drawn to a purpose, the look of someone with something to defend. He’d called the back arcade home for a week now, maybe two; he told her during the half hour they spent talking before Seth turned up. “It was nice to have a regular place to stay,” he’d said, and she heard the yearning in him when he said it, the need for a center. She’d worked as a candy striper in a convalescent home back in the summer of her junior year; she knew how much small comforts could mean to people. And she hated to think of Alex out on the street.
“This is our home,” Seth said insistently at one point, his pitch ascending the scale.
Alex laughed. “It’s not really anybody’s ‘home,’” he said.
“It’s your home right now,” Angela said.
“It’s my spot right now,” Alex corrected. “Sometimes you just have a spot.”
“Any other spot we find isn’t really going to be ours,” Seth said. “Fuck this.”
“I knew some long-timers in San Francisco who used to shit in their tents if they got cleared out of an underpass,” Alex offered; Angela winced.
“That’s no good, though. You know? Nobody can tell one person’s shit from anybody else’s,” Seth said, a vision upon him, the sort of thing that made him feel like when he finally found his life’s purpose it would be something special the whole world would understand. “We just have to show them something that says this place is ours no matter what else they do to it, something they’ll remember after they see it even if the next thing they do is tear it all down.”
Angela pursed her lips against a smile; Seth sounded like he was quoting something he’d seen on a Saturday morning cartoon, sprinkling it with dirty words to make it more applicable to the moment.
“That’s a good speech, Seth,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, already headed for the far wall. He shrugged his backpack off and reached into the top pocket, retrieving an X-Acto knife and a red Sharpie. For a second Angela felt panic: Was he crazy? Was he going to try something stupid?
But instead he did that which is recorded both in the Polaroids and in the tabloids which would describe the details of those renderings in future days, that act of wonder from which proceeded the great days of the castle, candle-short days marked both by mad revelry and the solemn raising of the ramparts: those thin but fearsome fortifications meant to guard the Knights of the Broken Mirror, who bore but few arms, if any, against those intruders then clearing the near horizon.
He slashed the number 7 into a section of the wall with his knife, then drew a circle around it in marker. Then he traced the 7 with the marker in one quick, intentionally sloppy movement, bringing it into harsh relief.
“They’ll put this place on the TV news when they find out,” he said in triumph to the gentle assembly.
MINOANS V
Seth was off to the races. In his mind, he imagined Alex and Angela joining in with abandon, caught up in his vision of turning the inside of the store into a scarecrow for the authorities. He was like this whenever an idea took hold of him. It had been causing him trouble all his life.
They watched at first. It was fun to watch Seth when he got wound up about something. Everybody knew it. After a while, Alex joined in; it would have been bad manners to sit and stare, even if his feeling for shared activity had been blunted by too much time alone. Awkward in his movements, he approached Seth’s backpack, leaning over it and asking: “Is it just pens?”
“There’s some cans in the storage closet,” Seth said. “They’re Derrick’s.” This was an untruth, if a harmless one: the spray cans belonged to the store, its quickest remedy for the regulars who kept writing their phone numbers and local meeting places in ballpoint on the walls and seats of the viewing booths. Angela saw Alex register Seth’s words and then turn toward the counter: first the turn, then the onset of forward motion, slow, mechanical. He moved his body like it didn’t belong to him. It was hard to watch.