I can’t seem to stop walking: the night is pulling on my steps. Reeling me in.
On the corner just ahead, a door opens in another anonymous lump of warehouse. It’s on the street crossing this one, and a wash of inviting gold pours out into the night.
Laughter, music. It sounds like a party, but not kids; more like sophisticated adults at a gallery opening or something. Do they have gallery openings this late? Whoever they are, they’re clearly the kind of people Geneva and I will be when we’re older: smart and accomplished and still fun. I can tell that by the way their voices coast along slopes of wry amusement, by the distinct vocal tang of witticisms being fired off. They’re the kind of people I should introduce her to, who might be able to help with her career. She’ll be impressed that I know them. That they consider me a friend, even if I am nineteen.
Find a way, Margo said. Maybe this is it, the whole reason for the thread winding me through the darkness.
I peer in. The walls are covered in sculptural objects made of ornately carved wood, patches of fur, lenses, gilded flowers. And just as I expected, beautiful people are milling around holding wineglasses.
“Hello, Angus,” a warm voice says near my shoulder. “You’re on an awfully long walk for the hour.”
Lore, her silver hair piled on top of her head in a big looping bun. She’s wearing her pebble jewelry and a black dress that sort of swoops off one shoulder. I should have known she’d be here.
“Hi,” I manage. I have trouble getting it out. My throat is raspy, and I have no idea why. I want so badly to go in, to meet all those beautiful people and snarf their hors d’oeuvres, but something’s holding me back. Shame, maybe?
“Why don’t you come in and join us? When something’s weighing on me, I find that looking at art usually provides some helpful distance from the problem. Maybe it will work for you too,” Lore says. She’s so damned beautiful, so refined, with that single brown shoulder exposed by the slant of her dress.
“Thanks,” I say vaguely. I’m leaning on the doorjamb, still in the night, while Lore faces me from inside that luminous room. I want to tell her about everything that happened tonight. Beg her to help me figure out what to do. I’m ready to blurt random words and fraying sentences in all directions, to spew and spew everything in my mind until I collapse like a popped balloon on the sidewalk. “Lore, do you think I’m a beamer?”
It comes out in a pathetic whine. Why do I care so much, when Julian’s definition of a beamer sounded not half bad at all? I still don’t know what he was driving at, honestly.
“I’m afraid that’s not a matter of opinion, Angus. You are what you are.” Ugh, is it that obvious? “But that doesn’t mean you’re helpless, and it doesn’t mean you can’t make something unexpected from what you’ve been given. You need a measure of independent agency to be effective. Imagine a gun, or a sword, that has some small will of its own. One that can reflect on its experiences. At what point will it rebel against the hand that wields it?”
First I was a beam in a darkened theater, and now I’m a gun? The images run together, and I start to picture a movie, the old black-and-white kind. One where a detective faces off against a murderer, both shooting at each other from behind the water towers on a city rooftop. What does the murderer inevitably say then?
We’re just alike, you and I. That’s what. Every damn movie, the same lines. Always pointing in a single direction, both of us. You tell yourself that you beam love where I project death. But love can turn into a killing force, Detective Angus.
Wait. That second part didn’t sound quite right.
Lore is still looking at me. Waiting patiently for me to finish processing.
“I feel like I am helpless,” I say, surprising myself. It’s something about the magic of talking to Lore, that she brings these things out of me. “I feel like I’m just playing some pretend game where I can change what happens next, but really nothing I do will make any difference.”
“Then don’t limit yourself to pretending,” Lore says, with a touch more acid than I expect from her.
But the people in movies are always pretending, aren’t they? They’re not really chasing killers across rooftops. Hell, they aren’t even really in love.
There’s something real about those stories anyway, though. I know there is. A real wound, hiding just behind the light.