by B. E. Scully
* * *
Positioned at just the right angle at just the right spot, Cal could see out but no one could see in. If the weather wasn’t too bad, Cal liked to spend most of his time beneath the apple tree—it had sprouted a bunch of new leaves since the fire, and Cal was certain there would be even more come spring. The tree was going to survive just fine, the same way it had been doing for hundreds of years. Maybe even thousands, for all he knew.
But it did rain a lot here in Oregon, and whenever it was too wet and cold outside, Cal came upstairs to the turret room. He could see why his wife—correction, his soon-to-be ex-wife—used to like sitting up here all the time, rocking life away in her chair. Not only was it comfortable, but Cal could see the canal pathway plus a big wedge of Roy Crampton’s property.
Not that anyone walked on the pathway behind the houses anymore. It was back to being as pedestrian-free as it had been before they’d moved in. It looked as if Roy Crampton had won that battle after all.
The battle, maybe, but not the war.
Cal didn’t walk on the pathway behind the houses anymore, either. In fact, apart from a run to the grocery store whenever the fridge turned up empty, Cal didn’t go much of anywhere anymore. After all, who would keep watch on canal way if not him?
They’d come around for a while after the fire, the trucks and uniforms and men and women with serious, official-looking faces taking pictures and poking around. At first, a “For Sale” sign had been stuck into the ground at the front of the driveway, but eventually it had fallen down and blown away. So far no one had been back to replace it.
Eventually, Roy Crampton knew it was safe.
Cal didn’t know where he’d stayed hidden until the last of the official-faced men and women had come and gone. He also didn’t know exactly how long it had taken him to come back. Ever since Rachel left—ever since the fire—time had started to get away from him.
He’d willingly let it go. But eventually, Roy Crampton had come back.
Cal had known immediately—all of a sudden, the scar running a rugged path across the top of his right hand had started to itch like crazy. Cal had felt the ruined house awaken from its ashen slumber. Sure enough, that evening Cal saw a thin trickle of smoke rise from the half-toppled chimney and disappear into the wind.
Even the rain had pitched in to help with the clean-up, washing away the house’s top layer of soot. Not to be outdone, the ivy had been busy creeping up the sides and over the exposed ribs of the destroyed roof. It wouldn’t be too much longer before the ivy and blackberry vines provided Roy Crampton with a brand-new roof, free of charge. In fact, the entire house might eventually be swallowed if the vines kept going. If that happened, Cal might have to go over there and cut them back himself.
“Start attracting rats with all that overgrowth,” he’d mutter to himself beneath the apple tree.
Since the morning after the fire, Cal had only ventured down the pathway behind Roy Crampton’s house one more time. He’d noticed that one of the “No Trespassing” signs Crampton had nailed up along his back fence had fallen down. When Crampton didn’t come and nail it back up himself, Cal did it for him.
He couldn’t do anything about people walking on the main pathway, but they surely didn’t need any unwelcome visitors on their side of the canal.
“After all,” he reminded himself, “once a place starts changing, before you even know it, it’s not the same anymore.”
While he was nailing the sign back in place, Cal’s hand had started to itch. Someone had come along and boarded up most of the windows in Crampton’s house, but one remained open—the window in the back corner room. Even though its one remaining curtain was now threadbare and faded, the almost imperceptible hole was still there.
As Cal Goodman hammered away at the sign, he glanced at the back window and saw one brown, ancient eye staring out at him from the curtain hole—or was it blue? It always had been hard to tell. Every now and then when Cal was beneath the apple tree, his hand would start itching and he’d know the eye was there, watching.
He never saw more of Roy Crampton than that one brown/blue eye, but Cal knew he was over there just the same, waiting for Cal to make the next move. You see, when it was too rainy for the apple tree and too dark for the turret room, Cal would play chess. He thought he’d gotten rid of his college set years ago, but he’d found it in one of the unpacked boxes that still littered the living room.
As the light faded from the moody Pacific Northwest sky, Cal would sit in his turret room contemplating his next move. He was particularly preoccupied with the move known as castling, where a player moves the king two squares toward a rook on an opponent’s first rank, then moves the rook to the square over which the king crossed.
“Only move in chess where a player can move two pieces in the same turn,” Cal would mutter, fingering the black king lovingly, possessively. It was excruciating, exhilarating, that moment right before the piece left his hand, knowing that once he let go, that was it. No going back; no do-overs.
“Castling can only be done if the king has never moved and the rook has never moved,” he’d tell himself, scratching furiously at his hand. “And the catch is that the king can’t be in check or end up in check.”
Cal had forgotten that catch somewhere along the line, and it had cost him the game between him and Rachel. But he wouldn’t forget a second time.
“To each castle its king,” he’d tell himself, sitting in his chair scratching and clutching his plastic chess piece until it got too dark to see.
NOSTRI
If you want the wise man to be as angry as the unworthiness of the crimes demands,
he must become not angry but insane.
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca
PART I
1
The revolution started with a baby in a dumpster. Senz and Emma had been rummaging around behind the laundromat on 6th Street, but the only interesting thing they’d turned up was the broken-off nose of a surfboard.
Senz held it over his head like a shark’s fin and started circling around the alley singing the theme song from Jaws. He got closer to Emma and then snapped his fingers around her wrist. “Shark bite! Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the alleyway.”
“I never thought it was safe to go in any alleyway.”
“Come on now. You’re always safe with me.” Senz tossed the piece of surfboard into the air and then gave it a karate kick that sent it flying into the corner. “Junk.”
Emma tried to think of something to keep Senz from getting bored. “Hey, I know where we can go! I heard the market over at Main and Fourth throws away more food than you can carry.”
“Nah. Who cares about food?”
Even though she’d never admit it to Senz, Emma cared about food. A lot. Senz was as thin and reedy as Emma was what her mom pretended to think of as “sturdy.” She tried her hardest not to care about food, like Senz, but it never worked. She’d always end up stopping at a food cart and stuffing a sausage sandwich or handful of hot biscuits in her mouth while Senz stood there waiting for her to finish.
At first, she’d gone ahead and said what she knew he was already thinking. “I know, that’s why I’m fat.”
Senz had just shrugged “Probably.”
“Yeah, hey, thanks a lot. Really nice.”
Emma was ready for an argument, but Senz just laughed. “Hey, you said it, not me. What, you wanted me to tell you you’re skinny as a rail? If you want to go around calling yourself fat and then gettin’ mad about it, that’s your game, not mine.”
The subject never came up between them again. One of the many reasons Senz was Emma’s best friend. Not like there was much competition for that particular title.
Having vetoed Emma’s food idea, Senz went over and climbed onto the edge of the only dumpster they hadn’t checked yet. “You know what one of my uncles found in a dumpster once? An en-tire suit of armor. Can you believe it? Now, who even owns a damn suit of armor
let alone just throws it away—” Senz stopped talking and stared down into the dumpster. “No way. Just absolutely no possible way. Emma, come look at this.”
Emma climbed up beside him and saw what looked like a little doll sitting right on top of a pile of plastic trash bags. Its eyes were closed and its mouth was hanging open just a little, in a perfect, tiny ‘o.’ It was wearing a blue jumper and matching cap, the whole package wrapped up in a yellow fleece blanket with tiny giraffes all over it.
“Senz, please tell me that’s not a real baby.”
“Can’t do it. But if it is a real baby, it’s dead.”
Emma was usually right on track with Senz’s weird way of looking at the world, but sometimes he could be as harsh as gym locker toilet paper—and rub just as raw. “Why do you say that?”
When Senz didn’t answer, Emma knew a Seneca moment was coming on. If Senz’s world view was on the weird side, the weirdest part of all was his obsession with the Roman philosopher Seneca. Emma had never even heard of the guy, but Senz knew as much about him as any college professor. Emma hadn’t known Senz ten minutes without knowing his long-dead mentor, too.
They’d first met near a dumpster by the bowling alley on Morrison. School had just let out and Emma was more or less on her own that summer. Instead of coming home for college break, her brother Justin was helping to build playgrounds in rural villages in Guatemala, just like you’d expect a perfect person to do. With both her parents at work all day, that left Emma to roam.
Most of that roaming took her to the city’s most well-stocked dumpsters. Her interest in other people’s garbage had started after Emma read an article about underground communities known as “dumpster divers”—people who foraged the city’s trash for hidden treasures. The article featured one group who lived entirely on food thrown away by local restaurants and grocery stores. Unlike many of her fellow divers, Emma didn’t need or even want most of the things she found. But it beat sitting around watching television and eating ice cream sandwiches all summer.
On the day she met Senz, she’d spied something by a row of trash cans that she actually did want—a white and red-striped bowling pin with “Happy Birthday” printed on it.
But the skinny black kid with the close-cropped hair and long, narrow face had spied it, too. “That’s a genuine AMF souvenir pin. They give them out to kids on their birthdays. Could fetch about twenty-five, maybe thirty bucks.”
Emma hadn’t even known anyone else was in the alley with her. “I saw it first.”
The kid cocked his head, considering. “That’d be a hard thing to prove, ‘less you have a time clock in your head hooked up to your vision.”
He grinned to show he was just kidding around, but Emma could tell he still wanted the pin. “Fine. You can have it. I’m not going to fight over a stupid bowling pin.”
“Who’s fighting? Damn, you get angry quick. As my man Seneca would say, ‘Anger is a failure of the mind.’ Don’t you know, anger is the worst of all the passions? Like runnin’ yourself full speed over the edge of a cliff and then bein’ pissed off that you’re gonna hit the rocks below.” He shot his hand outward and then sent it into a nosedive, completing the effect with a dive-bomb whistle. Then he stuck the same hand out and said, “I’m Senz. Nice to meet you.”
Emma looked down at Senz’s long-fingered hand and then offered her own stubbier one. It pleased her to think of how horrified her parents would be to know she was in an alleyway getting friendly with some strange kid who was probably a drug addict or a criminal. “I’m Emma Kaster. Who’s Seneca?”
Senz pulled a tattered old book out of an even more tattered green backpack and pointed to the cover. “That’s him right there. Seneca. He’s a Roman philosopher of the Stoic school of thought, among other things. One of which is being my namesake. Only I shortened it and added the “z” for some pizazz. You know, to modern things up a bit.”
Emma leaned in to look at a picture of one of those creepy marble statues that for some reason always have all-white blind-people eyes. “Doesn’t look much like you.”
“Oh, that’s clever now! But it’s not about lookin’ like. It’s about thinkin’ like.”
“What way is that?”
“My man Seneca is all about logic. About takin’ control of yourself. Of puttin’ your money where your mouth is. Practicin’ what you preach.” He did a mechanical little backward moonwalk, like Michael Jackson if the King of Pop had been a robot. “Not just talkin’ the talk, but actually walkin’ the walk. Of first havin’ principles, and then livin’ by them.”
“What’s your real name?”
“I told you—Senz.”
“I mean your real name. The one your parents gave you. Come on, I told you mine.”
Senz gave her a hard sideways glance. Then he broke into a crocodile smile, all toothy flash and predator wile. “My parents never gave me no name, ‘cause they was never any more real to me than no so-called name. Alright?”
“Alright. How old are you?”
“Damn! You with the F.B.I. or somethin’?”
“Just curious.”
“Curiosity kills the cat.”
“Then I’ve got eight more times for satisfaction to bring it back.”
Senz nodded, flashing her the croc smile again. “Fair enough. I’m sixteen. Almost seventeen. Satisfied?”
“Almost. Are you still in school?”
“Sometimes. What about you?”
“I’m almost seventeen, too. I go to Lincoln. I’ll be a senior when school starts.”
“Then may I ask what you’re doin’ pickin’ through trash on this side of the river?”
“Just something to do. I like it. It’s interesting.”
“Huh. Interesting. Well, that bowling pin is twenty-five to thirty bucks interesting to me.”
“I already said you can have it. I mean it.” When Senz just stood there looking at her, Emma added, “I don’t have space for it in my room anyway,” which was a total lie.
After considering her a while longer, Senz finally went and retrieved the bowling pin, which disappeared into the green backpack. He tipped an imaginary hat in her direction and said, “Me and Seneca thank you kindly,” then disappeared out of the alleyway before Emma could think of a way to keep the conversation going.
That night she looked Seneca up on the Internet and found out that he was “a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and tutor and advisor to the emperor Nero.” The Stoic philosophy her strange new friend was so interested in was founded in the early third century on the principle that “destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of ‘moral and intellectual perfection,’ would not suffer such emotions.”
Emma was impressed by the idea that for Stoics, the best indication of an individual’s philosophy was not what a person said but how that person behaved. That and the fact that Seneca had been forced to commit suicide for his alleged complicity in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero.
She ordered a few books about Seneca and his life, but she figured she’d seen the last of Senz and the bowling pin. But two days later she ran into him again at the row of dumpsters behind the university dorm rooms.
Senz put his hands on his hips in an exaggerated pose of suspicion. “You followin’ me around or somethin’? Tryin’ to get in on my action?”
“Maybe you’re following me. After all, you’re the one who made off with my bowling pin.”
“Then maybe we should be a team.”
They stood there sizing each other up. Emma stuck out her hand first this time. “Deal.”
Senz offered his in return and they shook on it. “Deal.”
After that, Senz and Emma started bumping into each other almost every day. Without ever making any definite plans, he’d say something like, “Guess I’ll check out the dumpsters on Hawthorne tomorrow, maybe around noon,” or, “I’m officially declaring tomorrow ‘Hanging Out at Pioneer Park Doing Nothing Day.’” Most of
the time he’d be where he said he’d be, but sometimes Emma would wait around for hours before finally giving up and going home. Every now and then he’d say he had “things to take care of” and disappear for a few excruciating days in a row. But Emma eventually learned all of his places, and sooner or later he’d turn back up in one of them.
He never did tell Emma his real name, but one time she sneaked a look inside one of his books and found “Hand Off! This book belongs to DARRELL WARD” written on the inside cover. He had told her that he lived with a foster family somewhere on the southeast side of town, but “lived with” seemed like a general concept for Senz. As far as Emma could tell, he pretty much lived where he wanted, when he wanted, and how he wanted. He never talked about school, and Emma didn’t ask. She liked him better a little bit mysterious. He wasn’t like any of the other kids she knew. In fact, he wasn’t like anyone Emma had ever known. He was different, and just as important, Emma was different when she was with him.
That summer, it was as if she and Senz lived in their own secret world of alleyways and side streets that no one knew about but them.
Senz always had his green backpack with him, and now and then when they were dumpster diving or just hanging around seeing what the day would bring, he’d stop to pull out some book and start reading to Emma about his favorite subject—Seneca. Emma had ordered dozens of books since her first dabble into Stoic philosophy, and she stayed up late into the night devouring each new one as it came in the mail.
If she mastered Seneca’s methods, maybe she could be as calm and in control as Senz. Maybe ancient philosophy could do what she’d never been able to accomplish on her own—maybe it could kill off Evil Em once and for all.
Her brother Justin had been the one to come up with the name after some stupid incident had once again left Emma on the wrong side of her own self-created sulking contest. “Hey, Emma, you remember that cartoon movie where the mayor has this nice, happy face, and then his head spins around to reveal this totally mean, nasty face?”