Telegraph Avenue

She nodded, chewing her lip, and he saw that under the lipstick, it was already ragged with chewing.

“Go on, Valletta,” he said, pressing the money on her. “If you promise not to tell me where he’s living at, or what he’s doing, or how bad he looks, or give me any information at all, that’s worth eighty-seven to me right there.”

She considered it. Her tongue emerged from her lips and ran around her mouth once hungrily. Then she knitted up the money in her long fingers and made it vanish so quickly and completely that she might have been alluding to the length of time it was likely to spend in her pocket. She would not take the empty DVD box.

“Nah, y’all keep that, anyway. He got five more just like it.”

“All right.”

He took the box, Jack with a handful of beans, already awash in eighty-seven dollars’ worth of regret over his own stupidity.

“Maybe I should come back next week,” Valletta said, and a smile lacking one lower bicuspid made a brave appearance along the lowermost regions of her face. “Come up with a few more things about him you don’t want to hear, see what that gets me.”

“Funny,” Archy said.

“Don’t worry, you won’t see me again.”

“Valletta—”

She’d started for the Toronado, but he called her back.

“Come on,” he told her. “You got to say it.”

During the summer of 1978, Valletta’s summer, the T-shirt shops of urban America had offered for sale an iron-on transfer that depicted Valletta Moore in a bell-bottom zebra-print pantsuit, surrounded by the glitter-balloon letters of the catchphrase with which she would forever be associated, first spoken in Strutter at Large. The iron-ons were produced by Roach, kings of the rubber transfer, who had divided all the profits, presumably considerable, with retailers and the movie’s distributors.

“You want me to say it?” she said, doubtful, pleased.

“I think eighty-seven dollars buys me that,” Archy said.

She sighed, pumped her fist once, like it was the head of a very heavy hammer, and said, “Do what you got to do.” The fist burst apart in slow motion, fingers blooming. “And stay fly.”

She wrestled with the steel of the car door, resuscitated the engine by patience and finesse, and rolled, shocks creaking, away.

“Stay fly, Valletta,” Archy said.

Julius Jaffe was rereading his memoir in progress, working-titled Confessions of a Secret Master of the Multiverse. He had begun to write it two months earlier in a six-inch Moleskine, in a fever of boredom, drug-sick on H. P. Lovecraft, intending to produce an epic monument to his loneliness and to the appalling tedium he induced in himself. That first night he had cranked out thirty-two unruled pages. Page one started thus:

This record of sorrow is being penned in human blood on parchment made from the hides of drowned sailors. Its unhappy author—O pity me, friend, wherever you lie at your ease!—perches by the high window of a lightning- blasted tower, on a beetling skull-rock beside the roaring madness of a polar sea. Chained at the ankle to an iron bedstead, gnawing on the drumstick of a roasted rat. Scribbling with tattered quill on an overturned tub, his sole illumination a greasy flame guttering in a blubber lamp. A prisoner of ill fortune, a toy of destiny, a wretched cat’s- paw for gods of malice who find sport in plucking the wings from the golden butterfly of human happiness! Thus shorn of liberty and burdened with the doubtful gift of time do I propose to ease the leaden hours in setting down this faithful record, the memoir of a king in ruins.

The night after he penned these words, Titus Joyner had appeared on the scarp of Julie’s solitude, swinging his grappling hook. Since then Julie had not added a word to his chronicle of boredom. He closed the Moleskine, fitted his memoirs with the little elastic strap, his own heart cinched with a tender compassion for their boy author in that distant age.

The front door slammed and the secret master of the multiverse said, “Shit.”

“Titus,” Julie said. “It’s my dad. Get up.”

Titus Joyner lay on his back with a pillow mashed down over his face, held in place by the hook of an arm. That was how he slept: shielded. Titus from Tyler, in Julie’s imagination a sunblasted and horizonless patch of infinite Texas, a necromantic Dia de los Muertos city of prisoners and roses, where Titus had been raised by a forbidding grandmother known as Shy. In Julie’s imagination, Shy was all in black, lit by lightning. Dead now, and Titus cast to his fate, claimed like a lost hat by an auntie from Oakland, a stranger from a house of strangers.

“Dude!” Julie said in a whisper. “T!”

Julie reached for the portable eight-track cassette player Archy had picked up for him at the Alameda swap meet. It was tank-corps green, styled like a field radio, and it had a webbed strap so that a Soldier of Funk, Julie supposed, could march his groove around. He popped out Innervisions (Motown, 1973) , one of the few among the small stock of eight-track cassettes he had managed to scrounge that Titus would consent to listen to, and shoved in, with a meaty thunk, Point of Know Return (Kirshner, 1977), aware of how it would irritate his father.

“Julie? You up there?”

Enigmatic white midwesterners of the 1970s aired curious ideas about the role of the violin and the organ in a rock-and-roll context. Titus dragged the pillow from his head and sat up. Awake, looking right at Julie; then, before Julie was quite aware of it, scrambling up out of the bed. Buck-naked, as Titus called it. Titus crumpled his clothes into an armload, went to the window, spun around, and confronted an art deco chifforobe that had belonged to Julie’s great-grandmother. It opened with a great-grandmotherly creak, and Titus climbed inside.

Julie accepted this move without considering whether it was necessary or desirable.

He knew. He knew more than me or you. You can tell by the pictures he drew.

“Hide the hookah,” his father said. “I’m coming up.”

With a solemn intake of breath, Julie activated his secret master training. He would use his Field of Silence, he thought, in combination with his Scowl of Resounding Finality. The door swung open and his father looked in, eyes bright and sunken, cheek nicked by the razor, in one of his old-time hepcat suits. He had that shifty-eyed look he got whenever he had just done something he probably ought not to have done. This might not be a bad time, Julie saw, to confess or at least allude to his own most recent instance of bad behavior. Yet there was something he loved about the way Titus had entered into conspiracy with the chifforobe.

His father covered the fact that he was sniffing the air of the room for the molecular residue of burnt cannabis by making a show of sniffing the air of the room. “You just sitting around?” he said.

Julius Lovecraft Jaffe (though on his passport the middle name, by one of those metaphysical clerical errors forever being committed by reality on the true nature of his being, read Lawrence), gazed calmly back at his father. He sat on his bed, cross-legged in his tie-dyed long johns. Not the tie-dyed long johns with the infinite Escher stairway silk-screened across the chest but the ones with the space galleon setting sail for Tau Ceti across a sea of stars, which he had purchased last spring in the women’s section at Shark’s, where they had been labeled with a handwritten tag on which was printed, in an architect hand and in terms guaranteed to finger the deepest chords of his soul, COOL 70S SPACE KITSCH. The Field of Silence pulsed steady and thick as a stream of annihilating syrup. The Scowl burned shimmering hot pathways in the air between Julie and his father.

“What is that?”

His father’s face seized up around the eyes, and his cheeks went hollow. He looked like a man with inner ear problems, halfway between disoriented and about to vomit.

“My God,” he said. “Please tell me you aren’t listening to Kansas.”

There was a small prog bin at Brokeland, but it spurned the pinnacles and palisades in favor of the dense British thickets, swarms of German umlauts. Wander into Brokeland hoping to sell a copy of Point of Know Return or, say, Brain Salad Surgery (Manticore, 1973), they would need a Shop-Vac to hose up your ashes.

Julie took his wallet from the back pocket of his cutoff denim shorts. It was a yellow plastic wallet printed