Prologue

Trouble like this probably always starts in someone’s basement. Or maybe a derelict garage plastered by salacious calendars and beer advertisements. In retrospect, after a disaster strikes, people like to remind their neighbors about what they should have seen coming and what the summer was like before it happened. People like to talk about the way things change.

A young housewife would talk to reporters, a toddler fussing at her hip.

“He was a good kid, never bothered no one. Just kinda mixed up is all.”

A janitor from the local high school would stand restively gripping the handle of a mop, staring into the reporter’s camera.

“The little fucker was a menace! That goddamn father of his. A whore mother. Nobody but that prick to look after him. I worked on the line with that kid’s dad, and let me tell you…”

The tales went on and on, opinions and perspectives as fleeting and subjective as the political climate. Local and national papers printed pictures of them—Patricia, Lucky and the rest, always smiling. Except for Isaac, the bastard child. No one ever seemed to bother finding a picture of him smiling, at least not one worthy of the obituaries. After it all happened, something about the way those “wayward sons,” those “devil worshipers,” those “extremists,” —those kids—the way they looked in those pictures became evidence of malice rather than the joy of being young and in love and in California.

Leon still shows up from time to time, never looking well. I think about how his blue eyes have changed, years after that place when I’d put my hand under his shirt and he’d slip his tongue in my mouth, and I’d just stare at the wrong time as he kissed me. By nineteen, his eyes, like his soul and what remained of our friends, would be gray as ash. He doesn’t remember me most days he shows up on the street, too scarred and smacked to think about the day we met. And what he would do to me. Or to feel anything outside the broken body he lives in now to care about what happened in 1983.

That summer, when my parents moved me there from Seattle, and before I’d choose myself instead of saving him, it was a basement. A time capsule as pure a product of the 1970s anyone would expect from the home of an alcoholic father who’d survived the Vietnam war.

Wood paneling encompassed the space making us all look like rats in a maze. A rusty-looking American flag hung over the kind of standard-issue couch you’d find now in a junk yard. Its elaborate wood frame and orange polyester flowers faded dank from cigarettes and beer and teenage filth. Strings of fat-bulb Christmas lights were slung haphazardly in various corners, which added a sickening haze to all the oranges and yellows and reds. In fact, the whole house looked like a freshly broken blister.

It was so ugly it was almost beautiful, in a deranged sort of way. So dangerous that it felt safe. And I suppose looking back on the experiences we followed like blind lambs straight down to the middle felt like the right thing to do. Not because there wasn’t anything else to do, which there wasn’t. But because we were young, and things weren’t good at home. And if things were good at home, those kids didn’t know what to do with it. The future, we were told, was happening soon. Too fast for us to catch our breath. So those kids ran away from the sunshine and all its responsibility, and we lived together in suspended disbelief that time would catch up to us. School and home and rules were the subculture prescribed to us in the margins, only placated in public by the guise of innocence.

We were aimless and bored. We loved each other in spite of not understanding what the hell was going on. But love was what we needed. And whatever acid-trip version of that our minds blossomed into felt stronger than a sober heart could manage. Until it didn’t. Until we pushed so far into ourselves that the pressure exploded into a black hole.

Isaac was naked the first time we met. He was on the floor masturbating while a cheerleader flipped through a magazine on the couch. Leon watched me from the top of the stairs until I turned back with furrowed brow. He stood tall and shrouded in florescent light from the kitchen above. Full lips parting into that sweet smile, exposing the crooked teeth where my brain had been eaten just days before.

“Keep going,” he whispered.

And I did what he said. I kept going. Deeper and deeper into the house on Brockmont Drive where palm trees covered everything in shadow.

No one lives there now. It continues to dissipate into time as an urban legend. Just something to look at when a late-night special is rehashed on cable, or for students to take pictures of doing research for their thesis.

I wonder how much of what we had is left in there. Shreds of the past living in the walls before the FBI tore the place apart and vandals spray painted windows. My therapist says it’s okay to wonder but not to act. Distraction is the best medicine. And after all, you got out, didn’t you? Why on earth would you ever want to go back? And I always agree, end the session with a plan for my day that doesn’t involve getting on a plane.

But I can feel them down there, at the base of the staircase where we created a world together out of nothing. It comes to me at night in a cold sweat. The thoughts, the ghosts. I can hear them screaming from a thousand miles away, begging me to relapse into their arms and sleep on the couch with the radio on. And it’s times like that I truly succumb to the fear that the person I am now is still the person I was back then, and I’m stuck down there too. Just calling out my own name, asking myself to come inside. Lay down. Say goodbye. Set the timer on the bomb myself.