than sex, gender, race, and all that piddly shit. Julie felt that his life had suddenly, like amino acids in the primordial soup, begun to knot and pattern and complicate itself. How to confess that he had sneaked out with his skateboard every night to hook up with Titus, in slang but also quite literally joining himself by the hand to Titus’s shoulder as they rolled through the nighttime summer streets of South Berkeley and West Oakland, through the wildly ramifying multiverse of their mutual imagination? Titus preferred the street to the roof and walls within which a hard fate and a ninety-year-old batshit auntie had obliged him to shelter, and Julie preferred nothing to the feeling of Titus’s shoulder bone and muscle against his hand, preferred nothing to the grind of his wheels, each tree, parked car, and lamppost a whisper as they passed.
“It’s that thing at Habitot,” Julie added for verisimilitude. “I have to decorate them.”
His father nodded knowledgeably. There was no other way that he knew how to nod. “So what are you doing?” he said. “Playing MTO?”
As a matter of fact, before Titus nodded off, they had been taking turns at Julie’s laptop, logged on to Marvel Team-Up Online. Leveling up their latest characters, Dezire and the Black Answer, running them in their capes and energy auroras through the teeming streets of Hammer Bay, on the island of Genosha.
Julie said, “Filing my teeth.”
“Uh-huh. Not smoking dope.”
“Just crack. And a little opium. Just, like, this much.” He pinched an imaginary pellet between his fingertips. “Fuck, Dad.”
“Because you know it would be all right if you did.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Not all right, but I mean, if you were getting high, I would want you to tell me about it, right?”
“Right.”
“Not feel like you have to hide it or anything.”
“I get it.”
“Because that’s when you start to drift into stupid.”
Julie said that he planned to continue his lifelong policy of avoiding stupid at every opportunity.
“So,” his father said. “Just sitting here, what, feeling sorry for yourself?”
“I don’t need anybody’s pity,” Julie replied, seeing the words scrawl themselves across the page of his imagination in the florid hand he had affected when writing in his Moleskine with his fountain pen. “Least of all my own.”
That raised a smile on his father’s face.
“Why are you even here in the middle of the day?” Julie said.
“I, uh, came home,” his father said. “I guess I should probably go back.”
The shorter his father’s stories got, the more unwise or embarrassing his behavior turned out to have been. His father’s eyes wandered unseeing for the one thousand and seventh time across the artwork that Julie had drawn and pinned to the lath ceiling, the portraits of cybernetic pimp assassins and blind albino half-Jotun swordsmen and one cherished sketch of Dr. Strange produced with Crayolas and a Flair pen when Julie was five or six. A Nausicaä poster, the Israeli one-sheet for Pulp Fiction. The gatefold inner sleeve of a record called Close to the Edge (Atlantic, 1972), with its world of cool, enigmatic waterfalls that endlessly poured their green-blueness into infinity. His father seeing nothing, understanding nothing, searching for the line, the signal, the telling bit of repartee. Recently and unexpectedly, the fiber-optic cable between the continents of Father and Son had been severed by the barb of some mysterious dragging anchor. His father stood there in the attic doorway with his hands in the jump-jive pockets of his suit jacket, loving Julie with a glancing half-sly caution that the boy could feel and yet be certain of the uselessness thereof, that love occupying as it did only one small unproductive zone of the Greater Uselessness that seemed to pervade his father’s life from pole to pole.
“Did something happen with Archy?” Julie said.
“With Archy?”
“Something at the store.”
“At the store?”
“Question with a question.”
“Sorry.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing, I didn’t, I just kind of blew my stack.”
“Oh, Dad.”
“At Chan Flowers. Councilman Flowers.”
“Whoa.”
“Yep.”
“Is that guy kind of, like, scary?”
“I have always thought so, yes.”
“Kind of a creeper?”
“At times he gives off that vibe.”
“But he buys a lot of records.”
“An all too common conjunction of behaviors.”
“And you yelled at him?”
“Threw him out, actually,” Nat said. “Then I threw out every other shmegegge in the joint.”
“Oh, fuck, Dad—”
“Then I closed the store for good. How do you like that?”
“You what? For good?”
“As in out of business.”
“You closed the store?”
“I really felt I had no choice.”
“For good?”
“Question with a question,” his father said. “Look, I’m fine. I got over myself. Now I’m going to go back, say I’m sorry to Arch. I’ll apologize to Flowers, Moby, everybody else who needs it. Apologies are cheap, Julie, and effective all out of proportion to their cost. My father used to say, ‘Carry ’em like a roll of bills in your hip pocket, pass ’em out freely.’ Remember that.”
“Cool, okay.”
“Used to say, ‘They are good for business, and they make the world a better place.’”
Clearly, his dad was cycling high today, getting that Groucho Marx quality to his delivery. For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. Disastrous from the first dose or disappointing in the long run, each wore out its welcome in his father’s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him. His moods had little in the way of pattern or regular rotation apart from a possible intensification in Septembers and Februarys, but if Julie had over time learned to live unshaken by his father’s unpredictable temblors of mania, he had grown inured as well to their completely predictable aftermaths, however heartfelt, of apology and remorse.
“Say
