Coney Island 4

The morning of Valentine's Day in Coney Island was tense with plans.  Valentine's Day is Joshua's favorite holiday, and so when we woke up, it was to a cotton-candy sky the color of pink champagne, and while he denied it, we all knew it was on purpose.

He bounded around from person to person, casting his huge shadow and letting us all know, "I re-did the Tunnel of Love!  You have to bring your Valentine!"

To which the members of the House all began to eye one another suspiciously.  While no one would mind any random pairings, really, there was a certain urgency to not be the last two picked.  Glances were made sidelong, assumptions made, and arrangements quietly finalized.

While Valentine is maybe synonymous most days with sweetheart, to John and Brad and me, it has a different meaning which takes on a more sinister pall.  It's the same as murderer or mercenary, and it's a secret name we call each other.  I first whispered it into Brad's ear just after Joshua left for the last time.

Everything was dark and painful and hopeless, and Brad's eyes were cold and distant, and he kept smiling at me as if we were stranded in the most romantic place he could think of.  He started wearing black that winter, and he stole a red leather jacket from a women's Macy's.  The winter we divorced.  I whispered "Valentine," into his ear while we fucked on frozen ground in the literal middle of Nowhere.

"Because he steals hearts," Rosie agreed with me, her hands folded patient in her lap.

But Clyde's always called me Valentine.  And because it's Clyde, he's never explained why, except to give me a poetic impression that it's because I'm every wolf's favorite food.

Everyone knows about Clyde and me, and everyone knows that Adam and I were married on Valentine's Day, and everyone knows that the killer in Brad is named Valentine, and everyone knows the killer in John is named Valentine, and everyone knew that this Valentine's Day, Brad had asked me to be his.  So it wasn't any surprise when Joshua announced to us all to choose our Valentines, and everyone broke eye contact with me like they were afraid I was going to call on them.

"You're gonna go to the Tunnel with me, right Evie?" Brad muttered, unromantic and uncertain at seven in the morning.

"Yeah," I agreed with him, as brightly as I could, while I Adam rolled his eyes into his morning coffee at the picnic tables near the boardwalk.

"Yes, just pencil our wedding in anywhere," he growled, and stalked off to make his own date.

Not all the glances made sidelong at the other members of Gray House were romantic.  Some were friendly and some were murderous and some were curious.  Joshua encouraged us all morning to express whatever kind of love we wanted to, and everyone saw Matthew's smile get more and more twisted the more he considered the idea.

He managed to catch Dean's eye and Dean blushed to a deep reddish-purple.

Drama lined his mouth heavy with red lipstick into a cupid's bow to kiss Joshua's cheek.

Rosie and I decided to gift everyone a Valentine's Day music box with a special song inside.

Nick made shy advances toward everyone, part of a kind of Yom Kippur he engages in yearly, turning valentines into apologies.

Drama started saving love songs on his computer for a comeback Radio Nowhere.

The morning unwound, slowly and as we expected it to.

Wave after wave.

Under the pink clouds.

Until Grady began to cry.

It started quietly at first.  I'm sure only John heard, tying his boots at the foot of the cot he and Grady had slept in, having fallen asleep over whiskey and an olive green model Indian.  I'm sure John felt the same chill the rest of us feel when a child dies and they meet the Nowhere Man at the Crossroads.

"There, now," I"m sure John whispered in the dim light of Grady's store front.  "There, there, now, it's all right now."

And I'm sure Grady, both present in Coney Island and at the dirt crossing of the dead, would've responded to John in Spanish, calling him the word for Gravedigger, and told him students were dying.

"It's at his home," Clyde told me, approaching from the ski-ball arcade.  He looked dirty enough to be homeless, and thoughtfully drew a clean streak on his cheek with a finger wet in his mouth; the universal symbol for tears.

"What is?" I asked him.  "Whose home?"

"Ladybird, Ladybird," he whispered, sitting down next to me on the picnic bench.

"Fly away home?" I asked him, and he nodded, his dark hair hanging like a curtain between us.

Your house is on fire, your children are gone, I finished the rest of the rhyme in my thoughts.

"Heh," Clyde chuffed from behind his hair.  He smelled like salt ground into filthy clothes, and the slow fade of mildew from somewhere now exposed to the air.  He turned his head to look at me through mats of hair, tangled and coarse with seawater.  I could see through gaps in the strings his two black eyes.

"Hey.  Fox.  Can you dig it?"

The first reports of the Parkland shooting came through a few minutes later the way anything comes in from the "real" world.  Like my mom yelling at me to do the dishes in the middle of a hard level.  Like the morning alarm going off.  Like the jolt in my veins of adrenaline reminding me that I'm alive and that is a terribly temporary state.

I should take this moment to say that despite appearances, the politics of Gray House differ wildly, and we make room for all kinds of contradictions of circumstance and spirit.  No one has to be any one thing, and so we aren't ever really one thing.  What happened that morning has been editorialized and commented on and disputed and even wholly refuted, by us and the world at large.  But in the moment that it happened, we all shared the same opinion, which was that we prefer living children to dead ones.

Grady and Clyde know the most about the dead, and so it's them who conspire over school bus accidents, church shootings, casualties of war, and victims of abuse.  It's them who get tired the fastest and collude about how to best change the world, because they shake hands with them all, passing through the Wasteland into one of the other worlds.  Grady takes their hands, and shakes from them their alternate destines, to put back into the hearts of the little unborn babies.

It's romantic, I suppose, but Grady is a peace-loving man, and is sometimes confused about these very human acts of war.  Clyde seems to weather it better, but on some days I think he prefers war anyway.

A reason to put his boots on in the morning, Lucky reminds me in the back of my head.  Right, a mission, sure.  Grady's got the will and the time and the words for all the diplomacy he wants to enact.  Clyde is an inelegant creature made for vengeance.  More than one of our arguments has led to him kicking down a door.  But the mission for Clyde is getting the door down.  The mission for Grady is getting you to open it yourself.

Grady went down the beach to watch the ocean that morning, and mourn the dead.  And yes, he does the same for children who starve in drought and famine, and children who are never reported missing but get drowned in rivers for disabilities and every other terrible thing.  Some days he can stand it, and some days he can't, and maybe it's because it was Valentine's Day that he needed to watch the waves awhile, but I watched him watch the waves, and I talked to Lucky about all our fights.

In Gray House, I've fought the most with Grady.  They were all vicious in their honesty, and unrelenting.  He's stubborn and refuses to stop the course of his argument once it's begun.  I told all this to Lucky, who never witnessed them.

"He's got a temper," I told him as we strolled along the beach together.  Lucky's hair was greasy enough the wind barely lifted it.  "It's a quick one but I don't think he was ever cruel."

"He's got anger enough in his heart now," Lucky mused.  "That's what turns a man to cruelty, often enough."

"Well, Grady's not a man," I reminded him.  "So maybe he's not even angry in his heart."

"Sure but he is," Lucky disputed me, and turned me to look at him, and put both his hands on my shoulders.  "Listen close and you can hear it."

While I looked at Grady, Lucky whispered in my ear all the things Grady's heart was saying to us.  That he never understood hate and now he might just accept it instead of question it.  That to confront another person was always his path to understanding, but what good was that path when no one was willing to take it.  That he'd hurt Jack by this and was never given the chance to explain.  That the hardest thing about love and peace was all the work it took.  That he understood sometimes the violence which compelled people to do something harmful to make someone else look or see.  That he wanted an army of soldiers for love.  That his heart was broken and could only be mended with some kind of action.

"What kind of action?" I asked Lucky, and he lit a cigarette while considering his answer.

"Well," he thought, and picked tobacco off his tongue.  "Maybe he wants to be War Chief."