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."

Coney Island 3

Dear Jack,

Because a man needs a mission, Lucky tells me.

The Warriors are born of the necessity of that mission.  There's no need for the Warriors to be in Coney Island until we feel like it's our land, and we want to protect it from outsiders.  Until we know in ourselves that there's something special about Joshua worth defending.

I'm sorry about what happened with Joshua.  Maybe you would've been able to stay if things went differently first with me, and then with Joshua, and then with Rosie.  Maybe everything would've been different.  We really couldn't know what we were getting ourselves into, but there was no way to tell you that back then and have you believe in it.  There was no reason to believe in us.

In a way, it's good you left.  Joshua is home now, and safe, but he's a scar on my heart a mile long, like where the wing of Buddy Holly's plane tore the frozen ground of Clear Lake.  You don't want a scar like that.  After you left, me and Rosie probably both had them, but we kept accidentally opening them up again, over and over.

When she said she was going to die if we kept at it, I shut up all my love for him and my hope for him into a little box, and I buried it inside me.  I remember she screamed it at me one night: "Joshua is never coming back."  So I chose to believe that, and move on, so we could both survive.  I guess you decided that, too, but on your own out there.

I'm glad you weren't home when my brother died because I think I would've gotten pretty arrogant with you and driven you away anyway.  I'm glad you weren't home when Joshua left those other times because we would've let you destroy anything you wanted to.

Hey, you want to hear something funny I just realized?  I always drive you away and Rosie always lets you leave.  Ain't we got fun?

I never had the right idea about you, Jack, but at least I was man enough to admit it.  You've never had the right idea about me, and you walk around with your head up your ass thinking the whole world is wrong and you're the only right one.  The whole world is out to get you and you're the only sane one.  The whole world is going to kill you and you've got to fight me to exist.

Maybe you do.  I was the one who shot Joshua, after all.  But who cares, right?  Who cares because this is the house where dead boys don't stay dead and with the right combination of words, maybe you could make Matthew love his way out of hell and back to you?

Yeah, maybe.  But I don't know.  It feels like we didn't account for... death being fine for the dead and ultimately damaging for the living.  We couldn't live here with Joshua, and just knowing that about myself makes that hole appear in me, not anything I did because of it.  I just couldn't love him enough to believe it was going to all work out.

But on the other hand, you never knew what I knew.  You never heard what Clyde said to me that night on the cliffs, when he confessed to me the truth of Gray House and all it's occupants.  Do you want to know what he said?  I've read it over and over and over again, just so I'll never forget.  On the cold cliff-side, he blinked back tears and he said:

Got a secret. Theeeeeese walls, theeeeeese bones, theeeeese cracks, theeeeeese skies, if they're empty they're full with let's do a little regret. Too hard to climb so tie it to a chair n beat the shitoutofit. We think we're men but we're children, fox. Okay?

You and I always wanted to believe that Clyde was the grown-up, but he never was.  And I guess it kind of makes it worse to think about Joshua's innocence at the same time I think about how he had to stop existing.  It kind of makes me wonder what happened to my own innocence.  We're children, aren't we Jack?  We get so stupid and careless with people's hearts.  Everything you did to Clyde - it makes it worse you did it to someone innocent.

But you couldn't face it, and I did.  I don't know if that makes me braver.  I think it makes me more masochistic, and maybe that's the same thing.  What I do know is that I came out on the other side of it knowing Joshua - maybe all of them - are worth defending.  Sometimes I feel I know it best because while it was me who pulled the trigger so many times, I cleaned up the blood afterward.  I buried the bodies.  I tried to bargain with God.  And that's how I became a Warrior.

-Evelyn

Coney Island 2

The streets of Coney Island at night buzzed with low whispers and insect movement.  In intervals, the train clattered through.  I went to sleep there at night with Brad under the bumper cars in the park, and the neighborhoods beyond it shimmered in the streetlights with something less innocent, bordering on the sinister.  Joshua's own unrest, maybe, and all the ways he's a derelict tow truck driver, a street magician, and an unscrupulous porn star.

The fact that things turned on us outside of the park did not go unnoticed by the Gray Family.  The seaside resort town could be as glittering of a gem as the sapphire set in a high school ring on the finger of a virgin, and embody just as much romantic and wholesome fun.  But it was still the drain for the cesspools of Brooklyn, the train bringing out knot after knot of listless teens and bored junkies.  After all, fun comes in all shapes and kinds, and Joshua is its master.

But maybe I said all that already, in the mention of the Rough Rider.  Invoking the name alone takes us down the rabbit hole of terrifying youtube videos and prickling sense of dread that is someone's idea of fun, and not mine.

It's in this way that angels are terrifying - the way I might call their amorality.  Rides are Fun, sex is Fun, games are Fun, candy is Fun, drugs are Fun, pranks are Fun, and Joshua's innocence will never distinguish a difference between them.  So there are syringes in the dumpsters on Neptune Street.

It didn't take long for something to overtake the mood of the Gray boys.

Gray House is a family, but Rosie and I are outnumbered two against ten, and it's easy to forget that while they're brothers, the Gray boys are also wild dogs.

They run through the bayou this way, yapping and biting one another's necks, their social strata unsure and undefined.  Is Clyde in charge?  Is Grady?  Is Brad, today?  Is Adam?  Jack comes home and always tries to make a guess, but what he doesn't account for is this - is Coney.  Jack thinks the social order of dogs is about power.  The Gray boys know it's about Fun.

Slowly, as the nights fell over the carnival lights and the midway games, they each started to chase their own Fun, the way a pack of dogs would, crawling out of the wet alleyways and smelling the air and running fast and deft on silent feet.  Rosie and I watched what they did, from the safety of the second tower loop of the Cyclone, our feet swinging out into black air.

Adam strolled the boardwalk half as casual and his ironclad adulthood would normally allow, itching the insides of his arms and lolling like the sun into the sea.  Brad bit his nails to nothing watching the girls on the beach and one by one, they began to disappear.  Clyde ventured to the far points of the beaches and slept close enough to the water to be drowned by the tide.  Drama vanished into the mechanical heart of the carousel and the songs on the wind.  Grady's hands got caked in layers of paint and engine grease, and his eyes hollowed from lack of sleep as he nightly rode the M train.  John watched the tourists with the ravenous glassy eyes of an unseen voyeur, and they, too, began to disappear.  Joshua made the mood dangerously summerish keeping the air warm and the rides running all night.  Matthew stalked the dark warehouses and store fronts for things to steal.  Nicholas glutted himself on food and beer and sex in the park bathrooms with strangers.

And something happened to Dean.  I've been trying to say what happened to him, exactly, for three weeks now.

Dean is the most mysterious and vexing person in Gray House.  At the drop of a hat, he is one thing and then another, one person and then another, and beneath all the people he can become is a shining white marble statue of blank-eyed perfection without personality.  Dean dresses himself in people, but the "real" part of him is as of yet unknown beyond the cool and self-contained emojis of his vapid text messaging.

Only Rosie will ever really know or understand what's inside all that marble.  But of course, she's still trying to get there, like the rest of us.

I feel like I know him.  I've watched him a long time, in order to know him at all, and I think I've seen the real him before, but it's his place to say who he is.  I think I also understand the dance he does, and who he adorns himself in, and when.  I think I understand the reasons he has for hiding himself.  I think I know him best of all, but I guess mothers are like that.  And how I know him - through mostly observation - means that I'll never love him beyond this place where I've become his caretaker.

The one part of Dean I could always count on to explain himself to me is Lucky.  Lucky is the most human and charming part of Dean.  In many ways, he's the simplest and most communicative part.  The trouble with Lucky is that he is either mistaken for the "real" Dean, which he emphatically is not, or he's seen as existing for the purpose of being charming and communicative, over the cold ice of Dean's real heart, and that makes him seem wicked.  It makes him a lie to mask an obvious truth.

The truth is...

The truth is that Lucky exists for a very special reason, that is also not my business to tell.

I had seen Lucky here and there in the park, usually at night.  Lucky looks just like Dean, but doesn't dress like him.  Lucky is the nickname earned because of his heavy accent and Irish charm, as well as the way things seem to turn out right when he's around.  When you see Dean, you'll know it's Lucky by the sound of his heavy, war-torn black boots and the smell of his sweat.  While Dean's hair is clean and highlighted and trimmed, Lucky's is long and dirty and hangs in his eyes.  Dean's movements are rigidly executed with a dancer's precision.  Lucky's shoulders are lax and usually dropped in a laugh.  Dean's eyes are warm, always, and forgiving.  Lucky's eyes turn both cold and angry.

See, he's a person, seemingly designed to shrug off all that which is familiar in the angelic sharp corners of Dean.  The antithesis of the Dean we know, I might even go so far to say.

What makes him Lucky here is evident by his red leather vest, sewn with the familiar insignia of a winged skull, declaring him a Warrior.

I want to be a Warrior, too.  Maybe we all do.  So somehow, Lucky became this voice in my head, explaining the story of us to me while I watched it unfold.

"Look there," I heard him whisper, and I saw four of the Gray boys, ignoring one another as they went about their business of Fun.  Clyde, Grady, Joshua, and Brad.

"D'ye see what I see, just over there?" he asked me, and I looked.

"What?"

And he whispered on, his hand light on my shoulder.

"Ah, so you want me to just tell you.  Alright, alright.  See, there's four men waiting for the word of God to fall on them like lightning."

Clyde watched the ocean.  Grady painted a message onto a wall.  Joshua threw old hot dog buns to a stray dog.  Brad carved his name into a telephone pole.

"How do you know?" I asked him, unable to resist throwing my own voice into the same lilt as his, and become Irish myself.  I felt him laugh from where he stood just behind me.

"Well, miss, I know because I know.  Can you not smell the fire in them?"

"I only smell the water."

"Oh my, that's what's got them restless," he told me.  "They need a purpose.  A mission.  A man needs a mission, I'll have you know."

"I didn't know."

He squeezed my shoulder with his dirty hand, and I felt him smile.

"Yes, he does.  Something is about to happen, you'll see."

That was on February 13th.