halfway to the snowy courtyard where the existentially absurd and beautiful combat between Yuki and her final enemy was appointed—halfway to the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center, which opened onto a cement plaza with a sculpture fountain—when he heard a strange howl behind him, canine and low at first, then rising to articulate a screech of mock Japanese challenge.
Julie whirled just in time to see the kid, Titus, coming at him, glasses returned to his shirt pocket, eyes twisted up with homicidal glee, kick-flying through the air while whirling an imaginary blade over his head.
“Hi-yah!” he cried, alighting only inches away and bringing his sword down as if to cleave Julie from cranium to coccyx. Julie drew and parried in a single swift motion, then stepped back in a shower of sparks and let the other kid’s crazy momentum carry him forward with an ungainly lurch. As the kid went past, Julie jabbed downward with his left elbow (stopping just short of striking the small of his back).
“Yah!”
The other kid regained his feet and swung around, and they exchanged a quick series of attacks and parries, simulating with their mouths the clash and clang of steel on steel as Titus backed out of the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center and into the summer night.
Yah!
Hah!
Hah-YAH!
As the ladies and the geezers in their ball caps shuffled past, Julie and his opponent hacked and ducked, slashed, feinted, thrust. They dashed around the wide floodlit plaza with its random scattering of concrete oblongs, hopping up and off, circling the fountain at the center. Julie, with two disappointing years of fencing lessons in his recent past, had the advantage of knowing what you could do with a sword if you actually held one, while Titus had the advantage that he always would have: The whole thing was his idea. He was the one causing things to happen, driving them, taking them seriously long enough and intensely enough—and in public—to make them somehow be. Julie chased him, and Titus ran, laughing. He leaped up onto the broad lip of the fountain and took a deep breath. Three concrete-jacketed light fixtures led like stepping-stones across the water to the sculpture, a big mutant hand of steel entitled Dancing Group II that grasped at the night sky from the center of the fountain. With the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, Titus island-hopped the lights along to the sculpture. He scrambled up onto the steel palm of the open hand and stood there, beaming at Julie. Way down along Fourth Street, the train for Sacramento mourned its own passage. The air smelled of chlorine from the fountain, of cut grass from the soccer field on the other side of the Southside Senior Center.
“Dude, what’s your name again?” Julie called, though he knew it was breaking the spell. “Are you— Is Mr. Jones your, like, grandpa or something?”
For answer, Titus leaped from the sculpture into the air, out over the turbid pool water and the scattered wishes of pennies and dimes, helicoptering his blade over his head, legs outstretched fore and aft like a hurdler’s, clearing a gap of six horizontal and four vertical feet to land with a dainty stutter step on the lip of the fountain. Julie stopped breathing.
“Titus Joyner from Tyler, Texas,” he said. “And I am here to dismember your pink bicycle−riding, plastic shoe−wearing, Jethro Tull−singing, faggoty Mr. Spock ass.”
Julie’s heart seized, and then a strange fizz of wonder seemed to engulf him, as if he had been dropped like an ice cube into a glass of sparkling water. The previous evening, he and his parents had gone to Archy and Gwen’s for fish tacos, a specialty of the house. After a while, Julie had grown restless with the trend of conversation at the table and had wandered outside with his eight-track player to kill some time. On the little grass island where the neighborhood children were wont to abandon their toys, Julie had come upon a girl’s bicycle, pink with white handlebar grips and white rubber tires. Wearing a blue science-section Star Trek T-shirt with a black collar and the little flying “A” over the left breast, from which he had cut away the sleeves, Julie rode the pink bike around and around the cul-de-sac, singing along with the eight-track at the top of his lungs about how a bungle in the jungle was all right with him. He had not been aware that even then he was being observed by a cold intelligence from another world. Now he gaped up at Titus Joyner as the other boy brought down his weapon hard, and Julie, deeply interested and intensely embarrassed, allowed himself to be killed. He died.
“I can stay here?”
Julie jumped. Titus lay motionless under the shelter of the comforter, eyes closed, somniloquent.
“Uh, okay, yeah,” Julie said. “My dad went back down to the store, he probably won’t be home for a while. I think my mom’s at a birth, so she’s probably gone all day. You can shower. And I could, I have to do some laundry. I could wash your clothes.”
Julie, under the guise of a sudden blossoming of self-reliance and a desire to help around the house, had been washing Titus’s clothes secretly along with his own for the past two weeks. Titus had only three pairs of pants, three shirts, and five pairs apiece of socks and briefs, but he was obsessive about keeping himself neat and clean. He had a horror of bad breath that approached the pathological, and he spent an aggregate hour a day, at least, in the maintenance of his modest little ’fro.
“Nah, nah,” Titus said. “I mean can I stay here.”
“You mean— What? You mean, like, can you move in?”
From the time of his arrival in June on a flight out of Dallas, Titus had been cribbing, as he put it, in West Oakland, in an undisclosed location; at any rate, he would not disclose its location to Julie. Mr. Jones and Fifty-Eight were neighbors, that was all Julie knew. The house held nine people in three bedrooms, cousins and unrelated relations, all living under the furious, disregarded administration of Titus’s ancient auntie, who was actually a great- or maybe even a great-great-aunt. No one in that house, which—in Julie’s imagination—teemed at every window like a cartoon asylum with madmen and psychotics, knew or cared if Titus came or went, if he dressed and fed and cleaned himself, if he lived or died, smoked crack, or built himself a suitcase bomb in the basement. And yet every day, more or less, he appeared before Julie in crisp jeans and a bright white T-shirt, with the white oxford or one of two plaid short-sleeve button-downs, a blue-black and a green-black, worn unbuttoned over the tee. And the starship shoes, scrupulously tended. Julie was obscurely moved by this scrupulousness, so helping Titus maintain it felt not like a chore but an honor. An offering of love.
The eight-track cassette punched to the next program with a loud clunk, and Titus sat up, wild-eyed and startled. He reached into his pocket for his glasses, and Julie noticed for the first time the coiled plug of black electrician’s tape holding together, at the nosepiece, the right and left halves of his big Spike Lees. Titus had seemed weird last night when they first rendezvoused in Frog Park, but it was too dark then for Julie to spot the evidence of trouble.
“What happened?” Julie said. “Did you get in a fight? Did somebody— Did they say you had to leave?”
Titus appeared to be awake, blinking, swallowing, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, but it took a long time for a reply to emerge.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally managed, his voice little more than a whisper. Then he shook it off. “Shake it off,” he told himself.
He got up and came over to Julie’s bed, staring down through his lenses, and his expression was mocking, of himself, of Julie for his solicitude.
“I’ve seen things,” he said, looming over Julie, close enough for Julie to smell the orange and cloves of his own brand of underarm deodorant, smeared somehow across Titus as they had grappled that morning in the dark. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”
“C-beams in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. You can’t stay here.”
“Just tell them I’m your imaginary friend,” Titus said. “A only child, come on, you got to have a imaginary friend.”
“I did when I was little.”
“Yeah? What was his name?”
“His