In another block the neighborhood ended. Rather than walk through Beverly Hills he turned around. Before long he was back at that same store with the dark windows. The sun’s angle had changed just enough for him to see the straps and restraints and locks inside. At the end of that block he could’ve kept going but turned back once more. The way he drifted made him feel depraved, but he liked it. On his fourth pass, the young man from before popped his head outside. “For your sanity and mine,” he said, “you should probably just come inside.”
The store was brighter than you’d think—the glass so tinted it looked like a nightclub from outside. He stood just inside the door, his eyes fixed on all the ways men could be tied up, locked together, pinned down, held apart, and—he saw shyly—plugged up.
“You look young,” the man was saying, “so I didn’t want you hanging around, drawing attention. I know you’re eighteen and all, but it’s better people don’t ask, you know?” He was standing behind the counter, a binder full of CDs or movies laid out in front of him.
Colin looked at the floor. “I’m actually—I mean I’m not—”
“Because we’re not supposed to allow minors in the store. So it’s good that you’re eighteen years old. Otherwise you’d have to leave. Right away.”
Colin nodded. He slipped his hands into his pockets and came toward the counter, where the merchandise was graphically visible. Rings and bands and leather. Shiny, cold steel. There was almost nothing he could identify. He felt made of stone. The binder was full of burned DVDs, titles scrawled in black marker. “Porn,” he whispered.
“We start in the afternoon.” The man flipped the pages as though he’d never been more bored. “Just to get sales moving after lunch?” He plucked a disc from its sleeve and bent beneath the counter. The man wore some kind of jock under his jeans, but with a chain instead of a strap. A small moan fell out of Colin’s mouth and he stretched his jaw to pretend he’d been yawning. A flatscreen he hadn’t noticed, mounted in the corner, flickered to life. After several antipiracy warnings there was nothing he could see, in the entire world, except those young, young men as they undid each other’s jeans without even speaking, without needing to.
“You look like you need to sit down.”
“I’m okay,” Colin said. He turned away from the television and looked down at the counter, trying to make sense of all those devices. It only filled him with more heat, more violence. He closed his eyes and counted to ten, twenty, now thirty.
The man behind the counter laughed—nothing cruel or pleasurable, just an honest laugh. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Maybe I misjudged you.”
“No.” Colin shook his head. “No no, it’s fine. It’s—it’s a hot day and stuff. Like I can’t concentrate or whatever.” He looked around the room as though nothing impressed him. “Oh, you have handcuffs,” he said, crossing to a center display. Stupid, he thought, but he kept up the act. “The last place didn’t have them.”
“Where were you before?”
“Down the street?” Colin waved toward the window. The men onscreen were swallowing as much of each other as they could. “Just some place. It wasn’t as cool as this one.” He took up the handcuffs and pretended to read the back, instead transfixed on the young model in the photo, gagged with his hands behind his back. They’d tried to make him look worried, like a prisoner, but it just looked like he had to fart. Colin bit his lip as he threatened to smile, thinking of this guy letting one rip in the porn studio. He put the cuffs back and kept looking. There was so much he didn’t know—why you’d want to stretch your balls or let someone put alligator clamps on your chest. The expensive stuff, under the counter, was even more baffling.
“Those are sounding rods. You slip them into your urethra after you’re fully hard.”
“Urethra,” Colin said. He recognized the word, then its meaning. “What the fuck?”
“You’re probably more into blindfolds and hot wax, huh? The Disney stuff?”
Colin shook his head. He’d moved on to something else—a series of rings with a hole for a lock. This he recognized, a unique type of cage. “I’m into it all,” he said, his voice choosing this moment of all moments to crack and poison his cheeks with a blush. “I’m into everything.”
“Absolutely everything.” The man scanned the case as if he were looking for the most dangerous, terrifying thing they sold, and Colin could feel himself waiting for it. Instead the man shook his head. “Kid, how old are you?”
“I’m eighteen.” He pointed to a door at the far end of the shop. “What’s in the other room?”
“Just employee stuff. Fridge, office, WC, all that.”
“WC?”
“Bathroom. Not for customers.”
Colin glanced at the young men onscreen, now rocking against each other. He realized what most of their customers would do in that bathroom—himself included.
The man came around the counter and Colin saw he wasn’t wearing shoes or socks. “You really should get a move on.” He placed his hands on Colin’s shoulders and spun him toward the door. “You have no idea what kind of trouble I could get in for this.”
“For touching me too.” Colin grinned up at him, but when the man let go he wished the word touch had rolled off his tongue like it meant fuck or fondle. He gave the man his best pout. “I’m gonna come back. What’s your name?”
“You’re not coming back. And my name’s Arlene for all you care. Hey, I’m sorry to be so rude or whatever but it was dumb to begin with, letting you in here. You know, thinking with the wrong head and all that.”
Colin turned around. He’d planned nothing, but plans can happen by themselves. His mouth felt stuffed with paper towels as he put his arms around this man whose name he didn’t know, in this city where he didn’t live. “Don’t,” he said, the word coming out like the creak of a door’s hinge. He wasn’t sure what it meant. Don’t send me away, don’t let me do this, don’t tell my mother, don’t show me any mercy. The man was stunned into paralysis. It was only after Colin placed his lips on his and tried to push his tongue into his mouth that he broke away and shoved him toward the door. It was one of those times his body played every note, as if someone had suffered a heart attack at its piano and collapsed on the keys. He giggled as his eyes filled with tears and his hands pulled themselves into fists. The man let him cry and lash out and laugh into his shoulder until he could function, once more, like a human being. Then he told him to leave.
“For real. Please don’t come back.”
Colin looked out the window where the street was dark and tinged a sick, haunted house green. “Fine,” he said, and gave the name, intersection, address, phone number, and room number of the place where—for several more days, he hoped—he was sleeping. As he walked back down Hollywood Boulevard he was glad he hadn’t told his mother, the night before, that they should turn back. It’s too late now, she’d say with a sigh. We might as well stay another week. By now it was two o’clock and the sunlight felt like the inside of a microwave, boiling the blood in his shoulders and neck. “I need a shower,” he said when he burst into their room. Only after he reached the bathroom did he realize he was alone. What if she died? he asked himself, and the fantasy of vanishing into the city to live as an orphan helped him enjoy his brief solitude. When it was over, all he could think was how he’d wished death on his mother.
For the first time in weeks it came back to him: the image of his father’s burst-open skull like a squeezed fleshy fruit, oozing onto their basement floor, demon-winged from his dreams and colorless as he drifted over plains of ice—and all because Colin put bullets in what was until then an innocuous thing, a hunk of steel, a little gadget that made clicking noises. That he wanted his mother out of his life made him think he knew what would happen after he loaded that gun. Was there a half second, a tiny flash of knowing, during which his father understood? Did the explanation—Colin!—boom out over the gunshot? Was his name the last word that passed throu
gh his father’s head, the name that tore his brain apart? Did he know?
He was in the bathroom throwing up when his mother walked into the room singing. She accused him of not feeling well. “We’ll have to stay a few more days. You need lots of rest. Here at the motel.” She tended to him—a rag on the forehead, a glass of water when he asked for it. “My boy,” she said, and it sliced him into pieces. He flipped over and hid his face in the pillow while she rubbed the tension out of his shoulders. “You’re so stressed out,” she said, as though his hair was too shaggy or his nails all bitten down. As if he were a thing that’d stopped working. “I had the best day,” she said as she kneaded ropes of muscle out from under his shoulder blades. The way she almost sang it felt like she’d extinguished a cigarette on his spine. He clenched his teeth as she talked about her stupid coffee shop, as she told him how much life there was left in her, as though it was his fault she’d forgotten it.
The first voicemail came at seven thirty on Monday morning. She was in that same coffee shop with Liam when she felt the vibration in her pocket. Fuck, she mouthed as she recognized the number. Liam didn’t notice, making his case for real pastries. “The doughnut’s a perversion,” he was saying, resting his chin on his palm as he looked down at her plate. “Set it next to a Parisian beignet and you wouldn’t believe it was food.” He chuckled and went back to reading the paper. Like a married couple, she thought, and tried to expunge it. This is what vacation does. This is all fantasy. She pocketed her phone. Sometime around ten, when it was noon in Minneapolis, she would call her boss. There had to be a way, in those next two and a half hours, to come up with something plausible.
Her phone vibrated again only a half hour later, this time from her mother. At eight fifteen Shannon called but didn’t leave a message. She called again at eight twenty-two and Diane shut off her phone. They ordered their refills to go. Museums were closed on Mondays, Liam explained—they’d have to find another way to pass the time. “I’m sure we can think of a few things,” she said, and the tension between them felt sharp in her back. In love, Diane had always been fast—she preferred this word—and she couldn’t think of any man she’d met with whom she hadn’t made love on the second date or sooner. “How far a walk is the beach?” she asked as they stepped outside.
“I knew you’d ask that. It would be nice to walk, yeah? Sadly, it’s more than twelve miles.” He pointed over his shoulder, off into the haze. “Nobody ever walks here. It’s sad. Terrible even. But everything is so far apart. It’s not like New York or San Francisco. Or even Minneapolis, from what it sounds like.”
“The tundra,” she said. It was hard to think back that far, to conjure the numbness in her fingers as she stood holding a cigarette on the dock outside the plant. “You go outside and the weather tries to kill you. Murderapolis—they used to call it that back when everybody was getting shot. I pretended it was just about the cold. My finger fell off, you could tell someone. I barely escaped Murderapolis. It’s a fucking joke.” She plucked a cigarette from a fresh pack and sucked in a chestful of smoke that tasted, still, like funerals and long nights without sleep or sound. She thought of the voicemails waiting for her, all those people who expressed, now, such concern, but weren’t to be found when all she had was snow under the streetlights.
There was an earthquake that morning and when they arrived at the pier they saw what it had done. She’d been asleep when it happened, looking up from her bed at the window’s outline of light, just starting to purple. “Was that an earthquake?” she asked. Colin groaned yes from the other bed and she went back to sleep. It wasn’t until she shared the morning Times with Liam that she thought, astonished, I survived an earthquake. “It wasn’t even a four,” Liam said. All Diane knew, in disaster terminology, was tornadoes. Four was a step shy of annihilation.
“It was epicentered a few miles out,” Liam said, sweeping his arm over the horizon. “Epicenter is where the earth actually moved. What happens when it’s in the water is the water shifts. It smacks together and makes a wave. That’s what all this trash is. All the junk that washed up with the wave this morning.”
There were trucks parked along the beach, people in neons bagging sodden garbage. From where they stood she could see the seaweed wrapped around the pier’s wooden supports, a shredded tire, a car bumper. “Must’ve been pretty serious,” she said, and stepped closer to the edge of the boardwalk where a wall separated the beach below. There was a line just above the lowest stones, dry now but crusted with the ocean’s salt. She backed away. “Christ.”
“This change your mind about the city of dreams?” Liam reached for her hand and tried to tangle her fingers into his but her palms were sweating and she shook him away. She felt the air open up next to her and she knew she’d upset him.
“Of course not,” she said, still surveying the beach. “You should’ve seen Minneapolis after that tornado a couple years ago.” She turned and found him leaning against a palm, his hands in his pockets as though any minute someone might take his picture and sell it to a magazine. “I can handle a little shake now and then, even some garbage on my beach.”
“Just don’t go to San Francisco.” He leaned away from the tree and tried, again, to hold her hand. This time she let him. “They get all the big ones. My cousin was there in ’89 when the freeway collapsed. She wasn’t on it, thank God. Talk about a mess, yeah? More than some garbage on your beach. More than a few dead birds.”
She glanced out at the water. She hadn’t noticed any birds, but right then someone hoisted a tangle of seaweed. Before he stuffed it into his bag she saw the grey webbed foot. It could’ve been a lily pad, if Liam hadn’t said anything. “We almost went to San Francisco instead.”
“Yeah?”
“That was the plan. Then I got in the car and it wasn’t the plan anymore.” She turned to him, the beach at her back. “I was there when I was younger and I’d never been here, not even passing through. Something new, I guess, is what I wanted. So here I am.” She smiled as if it were some great moment, but everything sounded like a bad script. She was aware of how hard she was trying to believe it was love.
Liam, back up against the palm tree, gave her a cockeyed grin. Over his shoulder she saw a girl waiting for the bus. The way she checked her phone looked straight out of a commercial. Everyone looked like a movie star, Diane realized, and she pushed back her shoulders. She’d never been gorgeous or even all that charming, but in a place like this you couldn’t stop yourself from playing along.
He rented a room not far from the beach and afterward they ate a long lunch—four courses plus a cup of coffee. Even when she reminded herself of things like endorphins and hormones and the body’s cabinet of chemicals that exploded at another’s touch, she swore, over and over, that it was the best meal of her life. This was the best everything of her life. The sun would be up for several more hours but the shadows had arrived. It was the long afternoons, if nothing else, that forced you to fall in love with the palms and the flowers, the cars without a speck of rust, the entire sky an orange she’d never seen in her life. Pollution—she never fooled herself it was anything else. But was that so bad? “I hope you still have that room,” she said as they sipped their coffee, and she ignored the other room, waiting for her on what felt like the other side of the solar system. Her youngest was there and in that moment he seemed infallible—the most innocent, loving boy in the entire world. But not a boy you couldn’t ignore, just a little longer.
Right away, Allie told Colin the rules. They could never kiss or even touch—he wasn’t going to jail. He could never give him porn or merchandise, not even if he paid for it; Colin had to steal it or find it. And their clothes would stay on. All this after he’d picked him up at the motel, that first day. “Think of me like a guardian,” Allie explained, and Colin thought of all the filthy stories involving teachers, Scout leaders, football coaches, family friends, pastors. As they lay on the garbage-covered beach he invented a world where Allie was some
old friend of his father’s, here to take care of them. He’d already convinced him to break one rule when he handed over the sunscreen and pointed to his back. From then on, he decided, it was all patience. He couldn’t believe that only three weeks ago he’d cowered in his house as an older man—not much older than the one next to him—sat waiting in his car across the street. Victor was just someone with too much sadness—a bumbling, unsteady creature for whom everything seemed both too much and not enough. Colin no longer understood why he’d been so afraid. The world wasn’t a monster that wanted revenge. His father wasn’t a soul traveling through hell, trapped there because of his son. Hell wasn’t waiting for him. It was just a thing inside you, and knowing this undid it. In his heart, hell’s flames hissed and pinched themselves into pillars of steam, washed out by everything he’d learned. He’d grown up, he decided. All he’d needed was a friend.
Even so, there were leftovers: his silence whenever a black Toyota passed by, his weightlessness whenever he heard what could’ve been Victor’s laugh.
When Colin woke up on Saturday morning he was planning to return to the shop on Hollywood Boulevard. His mother had left instructions—drink ten glasses of water, eat three oranges, stay in bed for four of the eight hours she would be gone, call if he needed anything—and he checked them off as he ate mouthfuls of day-old doughnuts from the office downstairs. The oranges he dumped into the trash and covered with tissues and torn-up paper. He’d just stepped out of the shower when he heard a soft knock that didn’t belong, he knew, to housekeeping. The man from the sex shop blushed, and even though Colin, wrapped only in a towel, begged him to come into the room, he refused. “Not until you’re 100 percent dressed,” he said, and turned to look over the railing. Colin changed with the door open, right there for all the world to see, but the man never peeked. By the time he pulled on his shirt he’d gathered enough sweat for another shower.
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