“I gotta see those arcades,” Derrick said. “It’s … it’s just beautiful, you guys. You did something great. They’re gonna hate it, and they’ll never know.”
“Never know what?” Seth said.
“Who it was,” Derrick said.
“I hope they do know!” Seth said, too loudly. Alex had caught a catnap in his booth at around 5:00 a.m.; Seth was still going. “I hope they see this and think: Better just leave whoever did this shit alone!”
Derrick flashed on Anthony Hawley’s last phone call with Evelyn Gates: How he’d tried, and failed, to ask for his key deposit back. How he’d hung up the receiver in silence. How he’d had to swallow his anger in the end, leaving behind thousands of dollars in wasted inventory because it felt like the only counterpunch available to him.
“Landlords don’t think like that, dude,” he said, trying not to lecture. “The last thing they think about is leaving people alone.”
“Wait til they see the booths!” Seth said. “They will shit themselves! They’ll never come back!”
Derrick looked at Seth until Seth returned his gaze.
“They will come back and clear everything out,” Derrick said. “That’s what they’ll do. If anybody’s inside, they’ll be cleared out, too. We have to get out of here.”
Alex scowled. “At least they should say it to my face,” he said, with audible effort; when he paused midsentence, he felt like he might never arrive at his destination.
“They’ll bring cops,” Derrick said. “Miss Gates will definitely bring cops. Come on, you both know this. You could get killed. Think about it. Put a tent under the freeway and be safer than in here.”
Alex returned to his silence, which was now clouded by bad possibilities.
“This is our house,” Seth said.
“It’s not anybody’s house,” Derrick said, sounding like his own dad. He felt bad after he said it, but it was true. “Nothing personal. But this isn’t your house, it’s not our clubhouse, it’s not anything. It’s just an old store where we were fucking around after Mr. Hawley bailed on it.”
He was trying to look at things the way adults would look at things. But Seth and Alex watched him as he spoke, awaiting the moment when he might attend to their expressions, to better divine for himself their meaning: for in their faces lay this news, that a castle in which one finds shelter, be it the meanest dwelling place in all the land, is home and hearth to those it guards from harm; and that the right of those within its walls remains, to defend themselves from the intruder, and from the thief, and from those who would encroach upon their rightful domain.
“It’s kind of my house,” Alex said. He sounded healthier than he had just a moment before. Seth’s mania was getting contagious.
“You know he has to sleep here,” Seth said, nodding in Alex’s direction.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Derrick said. “When they come to take their place back, it’s going to be too late. Please, you guys. Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not stupid,” Seth said to his childhood friend, who dreaded the possible consequences of neglecting to argue until he’d gotten his point across, but who also, after so many years, knew better.
THE EVIDENCE OF SULGRAVE
Behold the first chamber: the depth of black ink, the white spaces between those deep alleys too narrow to afford the fugitive escape. Behold the writing along its three walls, in script too crimped to parse save those few words that leap to the eye through the pure splendor of their desolation, devil and grave and witch, blood and fire and sacrifice. Behold a lone image, a monster arising as if from the depths of the sea, only to drown again in the disordered frenzy of waking dreams. And behold the subsuming totality of the Word, every surface flowing with it, betraying and perverting the human function of language— to share, to bridge a distance—and setting, in its place, this labyrinth with no center, this maze with its blocked exits. Set up here devil time in 48 bitch when they come for me been here better than you, it said. Gave blood 1x military hospital 3x First Baptist hopstial 10x Mmeorial hospital checkt your sacrifice records bitch. Fire kingdom lord of the seventy-ninth degree to the unknown and still too good for this world, it said. It went on like this forever; had anyone read the whole of it, which in its execution took two hours to complete, they could not have come away without pity. Pain leapt from its lines. But in truth, these lines bore hidden testimony to Alex’s empathy: the whole of it was a performance, one drawn from men he had met on the street, men who transcribed their screaming internal monologues onto empty cereal boxes and discarded newspapers as though driven by an irresistible need, scribbling late into the night until they passed out from exhaustion. He wondered, as he worked, if his ability to embark upon such labor so easily meant difficult days for him down the road. He marked, as he ran out of empty space on which to write, that this indeed had been his home and hearth this short time, and that his true presence here had now been disguised: the spare handful of things he’d already written in the preceding days was, now, buried beneath the outpouring of this imaginary tenant, this conjured spirit, to confound the coming invaders.