Adam Johnson - Emporium

I wish I could say the moon that night was tinged milky-bay, or that it sang in the sky, remote as the call of a tangir parrot. But it was only flat and white and blank, all the more reason that others would want to print their image upon it. I understood that the Amerinauts and the Mexinauts would one day make it to the moon as well, but I also knew they’d stand weakly on the lighted side, staring back at home, the place they’d just come from. They’d bring things like golf clubs and martinis, horse around with Slinkys in zero G. They’d make home movies of the smart speeches they’d fashioned and upon a safe return, spice their talk with God.

But Jacques’s view spanned into dark space, into the future, which is cold when it comes to truth. I knew Jacques was already wandering from our puny nodule, into the absolute black, crossing craters and plains wiped clear of features. Moving by feel, he hunted the right location to set an iron-jawed trap for the next man with balls enough to search the heavens for sympathy.

When I arrive at my first Adult Redirection meeting, my arms are dyed rusty pink, though the color’s official name is “Anasazi Sunset.” The meeting is on the third floor of Tempe City Hall, a creepy building, even at night. It’s an upside-down pyramid of gray glass and green steel that leans farther and farther over you the closer you get. Crossing the lot, the night air is Arizona-April perfect: lemon blossoms, freshly cut grass, a sky black enough to see the moon actually move, its hips chonga in the heat waves.

I stop when I catch my reflection in the glass doors of City Hall. My hair is black with sweat. I’m so thirsty my skin is tight, and my shoulders glow with sunburn. I hauled like ten thousand cement blocks for my father today and shoveled tons of sand. Then there were all these wheelbarrows of cement and heavy bags of Anasazi Sunset, which is black in the concentrated powder, fluorescent red when it touches water, and pink when it dries in the mortar. I flex my red biceps and check them in the reflection. Yes.

Inside, I drink a half dozen little cones of water from a blue cooler and begin peeling an orange, stuffing the rinds in my back pocket as I take the stairs two at a time. In conference room C, the other redirectees are seated at an oval table, around which a heavy guy circles, lecturing dramatically about something or other. He’s wearing a blue, pearl-buttoned shirt that’s worn thin enough to see the dark shadow of his chest hair. He makes a show of stopping his speech.

“We start at eight,” he says and holds his hand out for my court docket. His name tag reads Mr. Doyle.

My red arms make him pause, but he takes the slip and reads my charge: D&D/urinated on police horse. His eyes flash from the docket to me as he reads, shaking his head in mock disgust. “Decision making, Ronnie,” he says, then for the benefit of all, adds, “We’re going to talk a lot about decision making in the next few weeks.”

But I don’t sit down just yet. “I know you,” I tell him.

Right away, he’s on my case. “Do you know what’s it’s like to lose a child to the ravages of alcohol?” he asks me, like it’s my fault. I’m not worried, though, because if things get out of hand, I know a couple jiu-jitsu strikes.

“Have you been forced to witness,” he continues, “a young, hopeful soul torn from the breast of life by booze? Then you don’t know anything about me, son.”

“Oh, come now, ” says a woman in a white half-shirt.

“I know I know you,” I tell the big guy and take an empty chair by the woman in white. She’s not exactly pretty, but rare in a certain way, like some women you only see at the supermarket, ones in tight jeans who push carts full of steaks and import beer. She grabs my wrist and squeezes once, quick and strong, before letting go. It’s the way you let a child know you are right there for him, and though I smile back at the way her look says they’re kidding us with this guy, all I feel is the cool, lingering trace of her wedding ring.

Mr. Doyle talks on and on about why he teaches these classes, how it’s his duty, after enduring the kind of tragedy most are spared, to save as many of us as he can. He tells the story of his daughter, booze, pain, drugs, whatever. I’m checking out this woman beside me, who takes long pulls from the ribbed straw of an insulated cup, when it finally hits me. I stand up and say, “I remember now — I had you for traffic school last month. Didn’t you tell us a totally different story about your daughter in traffic class, about how she died in a car crash, like from a drunk driver or something?”

Mr. Doyle closes his eyes in frustration and then glares at me like he’s going to blow his top, but I look him in the eye. All the magazines I’ve read say that if you start looking at your opponent’s strike zones — like the collarbone or solar plexus — then you lose the edge of surprise.

“She was the drunk driver,” Mr. Doyle says.

“Oh,” I say.

At break time, I walk outside to bask in the dark heat. Down the street is the Mill Avenue bar scene, where “real” college students party, and across the way, past the sorority dorms, is the Arizona State University Aquatic Center — the blue-tang of its pool chlorine mixing with the waxy smell of City Hall’s citrus trees.

I find the woman in white sitting on the tail of a ’69 Chevelle, trunk up.

“That air-conditioning was killing me,” I say.

“I was about out of vodka.”

Her name is Loren, it turns out, and the Chevelle is so cherry it’s obviously a man’s life passion. Its paint job is a custom glitter-green, deep and flashy as raw mica, giving the swept Chevy the night-shine of a desert beetle. The license plate says POWER.

She sits in white shorts on the chrome bumper, the black trunk open behind her, pouring Sprite and Popov into the sport cup between her knees. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“I got a daughter who’s nineteen,” she says, adding a final top-off of vodka, some of which splashes on her thigh. She wipes it off with her hand, then licks her palm.

“I don’t act my age, though,” I say. “I’m an underachiever with difficulties facing maturity because of early instability in the home. I also need to learn I won’t get far in life on charm alone.”

“Consider yourself lucky,” she says. “My daughter’s a nymphomaniac.”

“There’s worse fates,” I say, trying to be smart or something.

Loren offers me her vodka cocktail. “Like recovering alcoholic?”

My eyes sweep back to the drink in her hand.

She smiles. “That’s kind of a joke.”

“I’ve also been told I have problems with decision making,” I say and take the vodka.

She reclines a moment, resting her elbows on the black rubber seal of the trunk well, stretching her legs wide across the pavement. From down the street, snatches of salsa music reach us off and on.

“Everybody finds their own way to deal with a tricky setup,” she says.

“Tricky, like bad?”

“Tricky, like complicated,” she says. “Labyrinthine.”

From the all-Greek parking lot beyond the hedgerow come the sounds of girls talking, though I can’t make out what they say. When they laugh, it gives me a small thrill and kind of needles me, too. Loren doesn’t seem to hear them.

“Do you believe in God?” she asks and begins fixing another cocktail, using the same method, right down to the little spill and lick.

“Jacob wrestled the angel,” I say, “and the angel was overcome.” This is a song lyric from U2 that pops into my head.

“Amen,” she says as she stirs the drink with a finger. She tests it, approves, then sets the vodka bottle back in the trunk, next to a stack of chrome crowbars.