Evan called up a second directory, keyed in the number again, and waited as the loading bar filled.
Number last used in 1996.
He stared at the screen, his stomach roiling. How the hell had the boy called him from a line that had been retired twenty years ago?
The previously associated address was available provided he endure a fifteen-second car commercial. His fingers drummed the desktop as he waited through a jingle promising 0-percent APR for seventy-two months.
That gnawing feeling made some more headway, chewing through his assumptions.
He glanced nervously over at the RoamZone plugged into the outlet by the mouse pad. No lights, no bars, no indication that it was charging. Slowly, he reached across, picked up the shattered case. He unplugged the charger, plugged it in again.
Nothing happened.
The phone wasn’t just out of juice. It was completely smashed, an untenable mess of broken glass, fragmented circuit board, and obliterated SIM card.
It had never worked.
Not since René had crushed it underfoot that first morning Evan had woken up in the chalet.
In the harsh light of the Baltimore day, it seemed painfully obvious. A phone that withstood a Godzilla stomping, that never ran out of juice, that magically got reception in a far-flung valley under a snow-thickened sky. Evan thought about how the gas had poured through the heating vent, tipping him into a drugged stupor. The blood-loss hallucinations he’d experienced at the end as he staggered for the summit.
The unconscious pulling strings, opening trapdoors, spinning its webs.
Of course.
A sheen of sweat covered Evan’s body.
On the computer the car commercial ended, the link to the address springing up. Dazed, he dropped the ruined RoamZone into the blue recycle bucket under the desk and swung his attention back to the monitor. He felt drunk with disbelief. His hand reached for the mouse, clicked the link.
An instant before the fresh screen came up, the truth dawned on him, setting his skin tingling. He knew what it would show even before it loaded.
An East Baltimore address.
He knew it well.
63
The People No One Wants
The battered row house leaned against its neighbors, the whole lot of them tall and narrow and crooked, drunkards staggering arm in arm from a bar. The flaking paint was a different shade of green now. Same front window that the pack of kids used to peer through when the Mystery Man made his mysterious appearances. Same basketball courts across with the same chain-link fence surrounding the same cracked asphalt. Same handball walls layered with new graffiti.
The Lafayette Courts projects that used to loom in the background were long gone, replaced with a health clinic. Satellite dishes perched pigeonlike on balconies and rooftops. A licensed marijuana dispensary now squatted on the plot that once housed the apartment building that had gone up in smoke when Jalilah’s nana dozed off smoking a blunt.
Evan turned back to the dilapidated row house. Bumblebee hazard tape crisscrossed the front door, orange cones lining the sidewalk in front. Bulldozers and backhoes lingered in the wings, construction workers chewing sandwiches, shooting the shit. Flyers fluttered from telephone poles, announcing that the building was slated for demolition.
The street had been blocked off, a crowd gathered at the sawhorses as crowds did in East Baltimore. The same faces on different bodies. Crack-ravaged cheeks. Coyote eyes. Elaborate press-on nails. A few industrious souls rolled coolers across the chipped concrete, selling bottled water and Doritos to the spectators for a buck a pop. Dinner and a show.
Evan walked over to a worker crouched near a spool of cable.
“Mind if I take a closer look?”
“Not safe, pal. The boom’s kicking off in a half hour. Don’t wanna get your hair blown back, ya feel me?”
“I feel you.”
The worker swept an arm at the piano-key row of façades. “I wish we could take down the whole lot of them. You wouldn’t believe what a shithole the place was.”
“What was it?”
“Housing for the elderly — and I use the term loosely. ‘Housing,’ that is. My cousin had his mother-in-law here, said it was worse than the dog pound. Asbestos in the ceiling, mold in the drywall, rats beneath the floorboards. Used to be some kind of facility for retards and before that a foster home for boys.”
“I’d heard something about that.”
“All the people no one wants. They cram ’em in, let ’em rot. It’s a crime, really. Not that anyone gives a shit to do anything about it.”
Evan stared at that front window, saw his own twelve-year-old face pressed against the pane with all the others. Danny and Jamal and Andre. Tyrell, who caught shit because his sister was a whore. Ramón, so skinny his hips could barely hold up his stolen Cavariccis.
“Look, man, I’m sorry, but you gotta clear out before my supervisor comes over.”
Evan nodded and withdrew.
He circled the block, cut through the glass-strewn alley next to Mr. Wong’s ancient dry cleaner, where they used to loot the dish of Tootsie Pops every chance they got. The back of the row house appeared at the alley’s end.
In his memory the rear slat fence towered overhead, a castle wall. Now it came up to his chest. Resting his hands on the top, he looked down onto the stamp of crumbling concrete that passed for a backyard. When he hopped over, his shoulder was none too happy about it.
Hazard tape blocked the back windows and door. The kitchen pane had been shattered, shards poking up from the frame like teeth. He peered through the mouth. Explosive charges had been placed on the walls and ceiling to make the building implode. It would collapse in on itself like so many of the lives lived here.
Carefully, Evan pulled himself through and climbed down off the sink. Piles of beer cans. A heap of stained blankets. Cigarette butts worming up from a pickle-jar lid. The place had been abandoned for a time, no doubt in preparation for the demolition. But the bones were the same.
There was the ghost of the kitchen table where plates slopped with generic, no-brand mac and cheese had conveyor-belted across the days and nights, a neon orange blur.
I’m trapped here. There’s never enough food.
Here the counter edge Danny shoved Andre into, earning him seven stitches across the forehead.
I don’t want this life. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask for any of it.
And across in the living room, the spot where Papa Z reclined in his armchair, remote in hand, Coors nestled in his crotch.
No one cares. If you don’t exist, then it doesn’t matter, right?
Evan walked over and stepped on the floorboards two feet inside the threshold. Sure enough, they gave off a creak.
He and the boys had done a lot of sneaking in and out of the Pride House Group Home.
Staring at the ragged carpet of the living room, Evan saw a specter of the scene that had played out between these walls so many years ago: the Mystery Man talking to Papa Z about the boys, weighing pros and cons, a chef at a butcher counter. And Evan and the boys spying from down the hall, elbowing and whispering and wondering what the hell it all meant.
In the hall the det cord wrapping an exposed beam in the mold-eaten drywall was a few inches off the stress point. Probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. Next to the gaping hole, the wallpaper seam bubbled out. Evan grabbed a lifted tab and peeled it away, revealing a dagger of the old wallpaper, an awful plaid pattern that Tyrell had christened White Man Pants. Evan stared a moment, the memory vibrating his cells.
Then on down the hall to the bedroom he’d lived in for two and a half years, a submarine-berthing area crammed with bodies. Closing his eyes, he pictured the bunk beds lined side to side like livestock pens.