* * *
THIS, FOR ME, IS THE HARDEST PART of talking with the exiled knights of Devil House: they all know that suspicion coalesced around Siraj, both among the investigating officers and out in the community; they all know that, as a figure in the public imagination, he became a spectral presence, a name that evoked fear without proximal cause. A bogeyman. But Siraj, as they also all must have known, could not be connected to the crime scene in any way. The people who’d pointed fingers at him were busybodies looking for an outsider to blame, long-standing locals eager to shift any blame from their own. Had the Devil House Four talked among themselves, at all, about the net that was closing around Siraj and his family in the days and weeks after the news hit the wires? If anyone could answer, it would be Seth; he would remember.
“I know Derrick felt bad, but that’s just because he’s Derrick,” Seth says, back at the gym. It’s empty now; Seth teaches a class at four-thirty, so I’ll need to make the best use of our time together. “He knew enough to get people to leave Siraj alone. We all did. But he also knew if the finger started pointing at me, they’d send me away again. Once you’ve been in, they’re always looking for an excuse to send you back.”
He’s talking about his time in care facilities—brief stints both times, but acutely unpleasant experiences, brought on by manic episodes when he’d gotten his medication schedule mixed up and his mother hadn’t had the time or the energy to keep it straight for him. Several of the boys he’d known on these wards would only be graduating to even more restrictive environments, and knew it; his old friend knew it, too.
“It would have gotten really bad if they started looking at me,” he says, getting up. “Or Alex. Derrick and Angela could handle the heat, but if anybody’d gotten their hands on my notebooks, they would have made a connection.”
I actually have some of your old notebooks, I say, and he breaks into a smile so big it could power a naval substation.
“Did you bring them with you?” he says, sizing me up, wondering if they might have been in the room with us the whole time, and I tell him they’re in my car.
* * *
WITHIN SECONDS we are halfway through the gym, headed for the parking lot. I’m not quite sure how to read Seth’s eagerness to revisit his younger days; as he’s told me himself, they weren’t always the happiest times. There wasn’t a lot of money left over after his mom paid the monthly bills, and people who’ve spent time behind the locked doors of treatment facilities seldom return with good memories of their time inside. But Seth leads the way back to my car, his monologue gathering steam: “You had these on you the whole time? Wow. Just wow. We were at that table eating burgers and these were just sitting there? Man. Wow.”
I retrieve my backpack from the trunk of my rental car— I always stash it in the trunk, just in case; Seth reaches for it as soon as I have it in my hands. I follow his lead, even though sitting down at a desk or a table away from the wind and the weather feels like the obvious move when handling what are, essentially, antiques.
Each notebook is individually sealed inside its own Ziploc bag, just as they were the day I got them, when I took pictures of every page before returning them to safety. Treasures like these are vulnerable to wind and weather and sunlight and air; they’d been safely stored in a cabinet at the Milpitas house ever since.
In Seth’s hands they are living entities, not artifacts but vital presences in the present day. He grows quiet when he extracts them from their housings; the shock of his silence is considerable, as I’ve been listening to him and making few interruptions for several hours now. He leafs through the pages roughly, his eyes scanning down each one, searching for something. If there is something specific he’s trying to find, it could take ages; Seth’s style back then was a riot of detail, and almost no blank space emerges from the dense thickets of line, shadow, angle, curve, accent, and annotation.
But it only takes him a minute. “There,” he says. “I did this one just a day or so before. Wow. It’s all coming back. It’s like—it’s like the whole experience was highly negative for all four of us, but when I see this, I think, even then I was a guy who knew how to plan something and make it happen, I just didn’t know it.”
He is quiet again, and he’s stopped turning the pages. He stands still and concentrates. He’s looking at a gigantic block-letter 7 that takes up a whole page by itself, drawn in a comic-book style that makes it look three-dimensional, like one of the letters on the Hollywood sign casting its own shadow against the hillside beneath it.