continued, “is that when I’m a A-list Hollywood auteur, you get to help me out on the screenplays. I remember promising you that. Isn’t any other promise I remember.”
“You said you would… you know.” Julie felt his voice get very quiet. “If I came with you.”
Like Galactus, like some giant, timeless celestial older than the stars, Titus scooped up a handful of planets, tumbled them between his fingers, let them splash chiming back into the dish. “True,” he said. “But check it out, man.” He laughed, bitter laughter, contemptuous. “I’m afraid of
“Yeah,” Julie agreed. “She gets all Eastwood.” Then, “How often do you go by there?”
“I followed him home a couple times.”
“Just, what, stalking him or something?”
“Just looking.”
Julie envisioned Titus pedaling past Archy and Gwen’s house at twilight, the sagging porch with its freight of bougainvillea, the life in which Titus was not permitted or could not bring himself to share passing back and forth like a movie to be memorized shot for shot across the screen of the big bay window. Then Titus turned around, and Julie was shocked to see that he had tears in his eyes.
“I am not going back to my auntie’s, tell you that,” Titus said, and a flat, genuine twang of Texas crept into his voice. He took off his glasses to wipe away the tears with the back of his arm, and the two halves fell apart, the wad of black tape giving way, the sections of broken frame rattling against the plywood subfloor of the attic. “No way I’m ever going back to that house.”
They stood there with six inches and an adamantine membrane of the multiverse between them. Julie longed to put his arms around Titus, to console him, but he could not be sure that Titus would welcome such a touch. Indeed, he suspected Titus would reject it. Julie could only guess, the intuition guided if not shaped entirely by the dubious and histrionic hand of ghetto melodramas, cop shows, and the brutal lyrics of rap songs, at the latest trauma that Titus had undergone.
Julie knelt and picked up the pieces, then carried them over to the bare pine table, its surface an action painting of Testors paint, scorched black in patches by the glue guns and the glowing elements of soldering irons, inscribed with an illegible cuneiform of X-ACTO-blade scars, where he had been wont, in the limitless trances of his loneliness, to assemble his scale models of AT-ATs and Gundam Wing fighters, and to ornament his little metal armies of orcs and paladins, and to invest the unspent and endlessly compounding principle of his inner and only life. There were three neat plastic racks of screw and nail drawers, and he rummaged among them until he came up with a tube of superglue, the crusted tip of its nozzle forever pierced, like some allegorical wound in a story of King Arthur, by its tiny red-capped pin. He squeezed out two drops and then eased the acrylonitrile halves of Titus’s glasses together with the practiced touch of a modeler until they held and there was not even a fissure visible. Then he handed them back to Titus, who gingerly tested the join. Without his frames, his face looked vulnerable, raw.
“Anyway, they just glass,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“I got like twenty-ten. I just wear them to, uh, make me look smart.” He put them on again, and something armored, sealed off, unassailable resumed its dominion over the features of his face.
“You could stay here tonight,” Julie told him, and as he said the words, he felt a pang of regret for them, intuiting the valediction they contained. If Titus accepted the terms with which Julie was about to present him, the period of their secret friendship would come to an end. After today, the world would know about Titus Joyner, and knowing that, would begin to know, or believe that it knew, Julius Jaffe, too. Yet he felt so far from being ready to know himself or contend with the world and its definitions. “After that, I don’t know, we’ll see.”
“Cool,” Titus said. “Damn, thank you.”
“Okay, it’s on one condition.”
“I’m not eating any more of that tempeh. Shit is nasty.”
“We don’t actually eat that much tempeh,” Julie said, feeling himself blushing at the thought of the hopeless Berkeletude of himself and his family. “I don’t know why it was even in our fridge. And no, that’s not it.”
“What, then?”
“You know.”
“No,” Titus said. “No way. I’m not—”
“You have to. I mean, even if my parents let you stay, and I don’t
Julie went down to the bathroom to brush his teeth and, strangely modest, change into his clothes. When he came out of the bathroom, he found Titus sitting on the bottom attic step, fully dressed, upright, hands on his knees, as if awaiting a court date.
“What if he doesn’t like me?” he said.
Julie thought about squeezing in next to Titus, between him and the wall of the stairwell. Put his arm around the boy, lay his head against his shoulder, hold his hand. If he were Titus’s girlfriend, it would be the easiest thing in the world.
“I wish I were your girlfriend,” he said.
“Shut up, faggot,” Titus said gently.
“Hate speech,” said Julie. He sat down on the other side of Titus, where there was room for them to share the stair without touching. “Just do what I tell you. It’s going to be fine.”
Titus wiped his cheek with the back of one hand and snuffled once. Julie offered him a Kleenex. Titus waved it off.
“Tears in the motherfuckin’ rain,” he said.
On his way back to throw open the doors of Brokeland to the winds of doom, Archy decided to take a detour, drive past the site of the former Golden State market, corner of Forty-first and Telegraph, from whose shelves, as a pup, he had shoplifted all kinds of tasty and desirable items. The Golden State chain, small and local to the Bay Area, had suffered some kind of implosion while Archy was over in the Gulf. The site at Forty-first was sown with the salt of failure, and since then no enterprise had taken root at the cursed spot. Not the plastic-plant nursery. Not the store that sold novelty floor coverings, the kind you usually saw for sale draped over hurricane fences along vacant corner lots, shag-rug portraits of Malcolm X and shag-rug Aztec warriors cradling dead Aztec ladies in the deep nylon pile of their arms.
Archy parked and got out of the El Camino. In the same spirit of research that made him borrow Rolando (he hadn’t gotten the chance to tell Gwen about that, to show her he was capable, willing, and at this point, telling her would be like dropping a penny in a parking meter), Archy applied himself to the study of this slab of failure hewn from the greater zone of vicissitude that was his hometown. He tried to see it the way a successful businessman and top-ranked rich person like Gibson Goode was seeing it: as something that, unlike a plastic houseplant, could be made to grow. He studied the boarded-up plate windows, the rusting iron barrier around the empty cart corral. The mysteriously virginal circle of white concrete where, at the nexus of all earthly desire, there had stood a coin- operated peewee carousel with fiberglass horses, grinding around their tiny orbit in a way that only a kid could have found magical. As he ambled toward the back of the building to the shuttered and chained loading dock, he saw a pudgy man wearing a turquoise tracksuit and sneakers like a pair of tropical birds, murmuring into a cell phone. Big sunglasses made of turquoise plastic concealed the upper part of the man’s face, but the lower part gathered itself into a troubled pout. The man said softly, “Hey.”
“Tsup,” Archy said, fixating his connoisseurial attention on the completely featureless and uninteresting cinder-block backside of the building. He stroked his chin and nodded as if confirming some rumor about the building’s construction, as if noting that the ratio between the width and height of the cinder blocks echoed information that had been hidden by God in the works of Pythagoras, in the radio pulsing of the stars. Slowly, he walked on without giving the man in the bright kicks a second glance, heading down Forty-first Street toward Highway 24 like he had some proper business to attend to.
