So it was that Morse made up his mind one day to pay a visit to the camps. He went to the bus station and stowed his shopping cart in one of the large roll-in storage lockers across the lobby from the ticket counter, then caught the northbound train from the platform across the street. He got off at the third stop after the river, hiking past strip malls and used-car dealerships until he reached the warehouse with the painting of the American flag on its side, where he slipped through the rent mesh of a chain-link fence and cut through the tree line to the freeway. The culvert was dry, so he followed it under the road, then scaled the bluff that looked down over the traffic. Sometimes, during rush hour, he would sit on the bare mass of marble at the top and watch the cars and trucks streaming by. Every so often a squirrel or a possum would dart out of the woods and vanish into the chaos of wheels, reappearing as a flash of golden light that popped open and scattered across the concrete.
The camps were a quarter-mile into the trees. Morse walked through tussocks of yellow grass and over the slanting roofs of half-buried stones, then past a rickety wire coop where a line of chickens sat meditating eggs. Suddenly a clearing opened up, and there it all stood: the lawn chairs and the clotheslines, the circles of charred dirt, the clumps of nylon tents that seemed to bloat out of the ground like sheeny orange mushrooms. A stop sign had been nailed to the trunk of a white oak and along the bottom someone had spray-painted the word TIBET. Toward the back of the clearing was a pile of trash, filled with all the waste pieces and bits of metal the camp’s countless fires had not succeeded in consuming—beer cans with their labels whitened away, clothes hangers straightened into antennas, the spoonlike keel bones of chickens. And to the west, beneath the arms of an ancient chestnut, was a canvas tarp with a soft glow leaking from inside.
Something drew Morse toward the light. He found a dozen men sitting hunched on crates and logs around a gas lantern. Their bodies seemed to whisk around inside themselves. Tucker was the one with the eczema scales on his face and the respiratory ache in his chest, the cramps in his stomach and the chilblains on his feet, and God only knew what terrible baroque infection casting its glow from the beds of his fingernails. His body had become a horror novel: The Fall of the House of Tucker. He couldn’t remember the last time he truly felt like himself, the last time he sensed that old strength of spirit pulsing inside him. When he was thirteen or fourteen, probably, around the time he met Jeff Moody and that crowd and his parents tossed him out for huffing paint and breaking into storage units. Those were the days. All that ravaged holiness. Things had never been better. Show me a person who rambles on and on about his childhood and I’ll show you a person whose life has disappointed him. Tucker watched a praying mantis take a few stiltlike steps across the ceiling of the tarp. Praying, preying, praying, preying. Praying, he decided. It seemed to be moving in slow motion. He put his knuckles to his eyes and rubbed them. The hissing sound surprised him. Then he looked up and realized it was just the lantern, venting propane into its chamber. The one letting the matchstick bob between his teeth had turned up the burner. His name was Aaron, and he’d be damned if he went back to the shelters, where they tried to steal your backpack while you were sleeping, except you weren’t sleeping at all, were you? No, no, you were pulling the old fluttery eyelash trick, and when you bounded up from the mattress to bust some skulls, they nailed you from your weak side with a twelve-inch Maglite. So what if the volunteers gave you a hot meal and let you use the showers? So what? The place was full of crooks, perverts, and evangelicals—f-a-c-t fact. Him, he would rather be safe and freezing on a pallet of oak leaves, lying where he could stare out of his own sleeping bag, and not at the walls or rafters but the sky, watching the birds light up the trees with their own little infections and heart attacks. He held his hands out toward the Coleman lantern. His fingertips seemed to waver in the fumes. What was with everyone? A silence had fallen over the group, a heavy quilt of exhaustion. Screw that shit. Time to liven things up with his favorite joke. “Hey, fellas,” he said, and he nodded across the circle. “Why does David here smell so bad?” David. That was the one whose hair was receding in a perfect arc, like the gently spreading ripple on the surface of a pond after a goldfish lips at a mayfly. Her real name, though, was Kristi, and she had known it ever since she was a little boy, gazing at herself in the mirror as she tucked her penis between her legs. That wonderful tightening of the skin. That glorious nectarine smoothness. She should have paid for the operation fifteen years ago with her student loan money, just like she had threatened she would. Whose body was it, after all? I mean, really, Mom—whose? A bent green insect dropped onto the lantern, casting its giant shadow onto the tarp. In a million years Kristi could never explain why it startled her into beating Aaron to the punch line, but it did. “So that blind people can hate me, too,” she said. Everyone laughed. The joke never changed. Oh what a riot. What a fucking, fucking riot. How dismal it was to wake up every morning as the same gamy, balding mammoth of a man she had been when she went to sleep. Oh to wake up one morning as what she truly was—a gamy, balding mammoth of a woman. Hah! Now that really was funny. Good one, Kristi.
Morse picked up an orange crate and edged his way into the circle. Reluctantly the others made room for him. He had just settled down when the one with the smudge of oil on her glasses asked, “Say, man, you got a cigarette?”
“A cigarette?” Morse made a show of checking his pockets. “No cigarette.”
“Pfft. What makes you think you’re welcome here without any cigarettes? I don’t even know you. Does anyone else here know this joker?”
“I don’t know him.”
“Never seen him before.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. You got a light, at least?”
“No, no, got no light.”
“Then here’s a question: what exactly are you good for?”
“Good. Good. Good. Good.” Morse took a breath. “Good question.”
Accidentally he had delivered a wisecrack. That, it seemed, was all it took—he had established his credentials. He was the squirrelly guy, the comedian, quiet but sort of funny if you gave him half a chance, and nobody would object if he sat with them around the lantern, watching as they held their fingers to the heat or drank from a bottle of liquor, smoked a joint or played high-card-low-card. The one suffering from the trembling disease that caused a hard light to glare from his body invited Morse to join the game, but he declined with a shake of his head. The one who had been chewing on the matchstick touched it to the burner, watching it ignite with a fizz of sulfur. The one with the dragonfly tattoo squeezed the knee of the one whose long black hair fell almost to her waist, and she closed her eyes and passed him a slow, stretching, easy-baked smile. Morse had the impulse to squeeze her other knee, that fat little beanbag he saw marking its shape in her skirt, but he knew better than to try it. All the goodwill he had earned would evaporate in an instant if he did. The sun was nearly gone. It was only a few seconds before the last moment of left light came angling over the field and disappeared.
An hour or so later, shortly after the one with the broken veins on his cheeks snuffed out the lantern, Morse dragged a sheet of cardboard to the border of the clearing and lay down. For warmth he brought his legs together and pulled his arms inside his clothing. As usual, he found himself tracing his scars with his fingers. His wounds had healed long ago, forming raised white lines that remained stiff and pale no matter how flushed he became. He was fascinated by them, by their singular alien braille. They still hurt when he prodded them, not unbearably, not even unpleasantly, but enough. Enough so that he noticed. Enough so that his awareness yielded itself over to them and whatever else he had been thinking about gradually gave way and drifted out of his mind. He had learned to love them, those firm embossments of stitched skin. They gave him the same feeling of comfort he imagined devout Catholics must experience fingering the beads of a rosary.
Nearby an owl filled the night with its blooming sound, a stra
nge low death call that grew softer and softer until Morse woke to the sight of the morning graying the trees. His heart sank. Once again, it was a question of inside versus outside, a question of proportions. The hotel rooms he rented were 90 percent inside; all they lacked was another living person—a wife, say; a child—to round them off to 100. The alcove behind New Fun Ree, by contrast, was 90 percent outside; sure, now and then, as he crouched behind the barrier of his shopping cart, a dreamlike inside seemed to form itself around him, wrapping him in an illusion of protection and tranquillity, but it was only that—an illusion—and he never quite forgot it. The camps were something else altogether. They were just as outside as the alcove, but because he was surrounded by other people, with their odors and their voices and footsteps, the illusion was even stronger, even worse. And when that beautiful inside fantasy of his finally thinned away and broke in the sunlight, he felt completely exposed and forsaken.
It happened the same way every time. Why could he never remember?
——
On Friday afternoons, when the weather was clear, he liked to go book hunting. He would push his shopping cart from one block to the next, rattling over every seam in the sidewalk, every steel vent, until he had returned to the subway entrance. To walk the whole circuit of thrift stores and libraries took him two hours and forty-five minutes. His cart’s left front wheel had become detached, and when he forgot to apply his weight to the handle, the empty holding bracket scraped the pavement and left a streak of orange rust. He was always nervous some police officer would cite him for vandalism and arrest him, so he shuffled along with his head down, glancing up only when he saw a light so bright he was sure someone must be dying, though invariably it was only the sun rebounding off a windshield or a manhole cover. Or almost invariably. One day, shortly after the Illumination, when Morse had just returned to his books, he was offering his usual pitch to the pedestrians when a few yards away, beneath the lamppost in front of the subway entrance, the one plugging quarters into the parking meter put his hand to his head and collapsed. The one walking her dachshund rushed to his side to perform CPR, and the one in the business suit phoned 911, but already the rules were second nature to Morse: light equaled pain, and as the glow from the man’s body sharpened to a million pinpoints that bleached together and then faded to a shadow, he knew that death had taken him, in his polished shoes and Burberry coat, away.
By now everyone along Morse’s route knew him so well that his question—“Any books for me today?”—was merely a formality.
“Well, someone donated a few Harlequins I can give you,” they said.
Or, “I left a couple for you back by the restrooms.”
Or, “Sorry, brother. Try us again next week.”
Or, “Here you go. They’re in pretty ratty shape, but you’re more than welcome to ’em.”
Welcome to ’em, he thought. Well come two um. Welc’m to’m.
One mid-April evening, he had just completed his itinerary when he passed a pile of furniture resting at the base of someone’s stoop, the remnants, he guessed, of an estate sale or an eviction. The lamps, chairs, mirrors, and such had already been picked over, but he found a stack of old books sitting in a cardboard box and loaded them into his cart. When he reached the subway entrance, he fanned them out next to the rest of his merchandise. At the bottom of the stack was a flat wooden coffer that hardly resembled a book at all, but he included it anyway, using it to shore down the corner of the blanket.
A school bus backfired, striping the air with a plume of black exhaust. The sidewalks were bustling with people. The one taking the tiniest, most judicious steps as she walked out of New Fun Ree winced at the blast. She felt as if she were crossing a high wire hundreds of feet above the ground. Her name was Zoe, and for her it had been a long life of falling ill whenever the seasons changed, regarding her body as it slowly broke down and defeated her. Its agonies and odors. Its sad animal deterioration. They always followed the same pattern, her sicknesses: first the raw burred patch of a sore throat spread slowly across the roof of her mouth, and then she felt a tack in her left ear when she swallowed, and then her neck grew stiff, and her eyes burned, and finally her joints ached and her nose ran and every inch of her incandesced inside the bright aura of a fever. But that wasn’t right, was it? The pain was old, as old as she was, but the light was new. It was easy to forget it had not always been there. It was so soft, so intimate, like the colors in a Giroux print. Or that was how she saw it, at least. Some of her colleagues in the Art Department described it rather differently: like the marshy blotches of a Jaeger painting; like the sun-streaked elliptica of an Ozu film. She would not have been surprised if every person in the world observed her own distinct version of the phenomenon, eight billion unique, privileged variations. Another car honked. She tried to keep going. How would she ever cross the street to her apartment? Feed a cold, starve a fever, they said, but she really needed to get something solid in her stomach.
Because the sky was bright and the air was warm, Morse worked later than usual that night. The traffic was fitful, moving forward in clots and gaps, and the moon was already rising over the buildings when three boys dashed across the street, cheating the signal. They leaped onto the curb a few steps in front of a pickup truck and headed toward New Fun Ree, the colors of their clothes shuddering around them. The one whose shoelaces were whipping at the pavement was named Wallace. He had three pizzas from Pie R. Squared in his hands: a cheese, a pepperoni, and for Camarie, the vegetarian, a black olive and pineapple, which was pretty damn disgusting, if you asked him. He was thinking about the campaign he was running—how if the group followed the Eastern path, they would encounter the last of the elder folk, and if they followed the Western path, they would find the seal of Raxhura, but if they strayed toward the Smoke Mountains, the fire genasai would consume them in flames—when he spotted it, a pale wooden box the size of a laptop computer, sitting at the margin of that old book guy’s blanket. Holy shit, was that what he thought it was? He said, “Hey, hold up, guys,” and Ben P. and Conrad turned around. Wallace handed the pizzas over to them, then bent down to give the wooden box a closer look. His palms were sweating something ridiculous. His heart was racing like he didn’t know what kind of crazy engine. Everything was exactly right: the scorched brown lettering, the blurred illustration of the Phoenix, the “Arise, Oh Generations of the Dead” slogan with the famous “Generations of the Dad” misprint. No doubt about it—what they had here was a first-edition Cities in Dust manual. And not only that, but the brads on the corners of the box were still in place, which meant that odds were the set was intact, with both the Twelve Nations supplement and the original Gazetteer. Unbe-fucking-mazing. Buy it, Wallace. Buy it. Borrow the money. Do whatever it takes.
“How much is that book right there?” he asked, keeping his voice nonchalant.
“One for two or cash money.”
“Mm-hmm. What exactly does that mean?”
And after Morse had explained it to him, the one with the loose shoelaces said, “Dude, my mom’s got a whole wallful of books at home. Come with us. You can take your pick.” So Morse followed the boys to an apartment building on the 1400 block, then onto an antique elevator with an operator’s stool in the corner. The walls were so narrow the four of them were barely able to fit inside. He had to leave his shopping cart in the lobby. The one with the crickety voice led them into the front room of his apartment, which, just as he had promised, contained seven full-length rows of recessed shelving, jammed with several thousand books.
Morse took his time looking over the selection. In the next room, gathered around a coffee table strewn with dice, papers, and metal figurines, was a cluster of seven young teenagers. The one with the green silk fillet braided into her hair, the only girl in the bunch, was sitting on a futon with her knees folded to her chest, clutching a throw pillow like a mother protecting her baby. Camarie was her name, and no matter what she tried, she kept falling in love. With Wa
llace and that ribbed blue sweater of his—its smoky sort of pencil-shavings smell. With Mr. McKim, her math teacher, and the dry-erase marker bruises on his knuckles. With the News at Nine anchor—the weekend guy—and the way he pressed his lips together and made a little mm sound, as if he were scratching a hard-to-reach itch, whenever he had to report something tragic. With Ben P. and that lock of hair he couldn’t keep out of his eyes. With Ben F. and his strong brown tennis-player’s arms. With Wallace again and how he laughed louder than anyone else at his own jokes. With Nathan and the hundred different ways he had of saying “dude.” With Conrad and how he bit the loose threads from the cuffs of his shirt, bringing his perfect white teeth together like nail clippers. With her brother’s friend Hal and his beard that looked as soft as Jesus’. With Wallace one more time and that night she rolled a ninety-nine for agility and he said, “Kick-ass,” and then winked at her. Boys!
Morse had already chosen the first of his books, a thick volume of Impressionist paintings he knew would sell right away, when the phone on the table rang. Without thinking, he picked it up. The one who lived there flung his hands about as if flailing at a mosquito. “Shit, man. That’s gonna be my mom. Why did you answer? Give me the phone. No, quick, find out who it is, and say, ‘How can I help you?’ ”