Marc didn’t have access to this vision. He was just hoping to close the deal in Milpitas next week. He imagined it as the start of something big and beautiful.
THAT THE GOSSIPS MIGHT REJOICE
It was on the afternoon of the following day that Derrick beheld the work; he’d come by to tell Seth and Alex that this was it, that their autumn clubhouse was closed, that everybody had to keep moving. They weren’t used to having people in their lives who told them what to do, he knew. Not his problem. As he pedaled to the store from school, he tried out different ways of saying it: he didn’t want to be mean, but he needed to be sure Alex and Seth knew he meant it. Time to go.
The initial shock of entry gave way to total glee as the scope of Seth’s project revealed itself to Derrick’s near-speechless gaze. Hawley had left all the porn behind on purpose: forfeiting his cleaning deposit, money he could have used, for the pleasure of inconveniencing a landlord who’d raised the rent on him four times without any explanation during his brief tenancy. It’s a helpless feeling, paying rent to people like Evelyn Gates. You remember their names for years. But Hawley was beyond her reach now; the interior of the store, a cardboard-and-wire-frame nuisance boasting hundreds of practically useless videotapes and magazines plus seven heavy arcade screens in the back, had been his goodbye note.
This note now had several anonymous cosignatories, whose work both clarified and complicated the message. Think about it: If you owned a property, and you arrived on the premises one day to find that your tenant had just left everything behind, what might your assumption be? That they couldn’t afford to hire a moving company. That they were in a hurry. That they, who had to rent their storefront from somebody who owned dozens like it, lacked the means to clean up after themselves. Arriving at a vacated property to find old dishes still in the cabinets or nonreturnable stock still on the shelves was not unusual for Evelyn Gates; she had a couple of guys who helped her clean up when it happened.
Her guys would have their hands full when they got here. A sort of porn angel oversaw the great hall now, a seraph whose body, made up of disassembled cardboard VHS sleeves stapled together, hung by its hands from the ceiling. Its head slumped down over its chest; Angela had tried to help Seth and Alex find a way of keeping the head upright, but, after three efforts, they decided that the nodding angel had a unique sort of menace of its own. “It looks hurt,” was how Alex had put it.
The angel was immense. The images that formed its bones ranged from solo shots of San Fernando Valley models in leotards to garish collages of graphic sex. Oral, vaginal, anal, gay, straight, group, and solo, stylized and raw, slick and no-budget, the entire imagined commercial spectrum represented in patches torn roughly or cut carefully from sleeves whose black splashes of all-caps text popped like word-bubbles from the covers of comic books: XXX. NO DIALOGUE! FOUR HOURS OF HOLES AND POLES.
If you circled around to the back of the angel, overkill gave way to understatement: white cardboard, the insides of the sleeves, framed the shape of the body a little more plainly to the eye, imparting a mood of helplessness to the figure. About a foot short of the floor, its feet dangled; any slight disturbance of the air caused them to sway, as if trying to kick themselves free of their staples.
Even as he examined it, admiring its balance—both legs the same length, a color gradient that could only have indicated a heavy hour in the Seth zone where attention deficit and deep focus were two sides of the same coin—he felt all the action out on the walls in his periphery, dozens of details begging to be noticed. “You gotta be kidding me here,” he said, his eyes finally reaching the carpeted floor, where the outlines of bodies, seven in all, had been drawn in chalk, adrift in a sea of trigger-words written in frenzied capital letters: ANGEL and MURDER and PRINCE and PLAYPEN and a half dozen others, a confusion of voices, a great chord of terror.
Seth emerged from the arcade. He’d forced himself to stay hidden all morning in case Derrick came by.
There is an entry in Seth’s journal about all this, in the journal I believe to be Seth’s. Like all the other entries, it’s brief, to the point, and undated. It says, Derrick had to admit we did it up right. Beneath, there’s a sketch of the angel in silhouette. Stripped of its lurid skin, rich with menace, it dances on the page like a lesser tormentor in an aberrant book of hours.
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
There are no army surplus stores in Milpitas. It’s too small a town to support one. There aren’t any over in San Jose, either; in San Francisco, you can find secondhand stores with decent supplies of outdated military stock, but you have to know where to look. In all likelihood, given the need to return inconspicuously with unwieldy cargo in tow, San Francisco is too far afield.