They had fled a pack of dogs on one floor and then before they had caught their breaths behind the stairwell door, slammed shut behind them and still echoing through the corridors, they were sent into flight again at the blast from the caretaker’s shotgun outside. This took them as high in the building as they could go, which also happened to be where Fleece kept what he called his penthouse. It had been a suite of offices at one time but he had made a home there and now as they stumbled into it they found the rooms nearly barren again, no different from any of the others falling apart throughout the building. A pleather desk chair faced one corner, an arm rest torn off. A few books were stacked spines-out on a windowsill—mostly Catholic theology texts that he must have found somewhere in the building, but a few mystery novels as well—and they were warped from water and stank when opened. Beside them on the sill paper clips burned to a copper shine stood posed in models of twisted disfigurement. Through a second door slumped on its highest hinge they discovered bed sheets wadded in the corner and a pair of mismatched socks. Spunk asked if Cole was sure they had the right place and Cole told him angrily that sure he was sure and the three followed the two flashlights illuminating empty corners.
“Well by the evidence I’d judge he is not here now,” Spunk said.
It took a moment for his words to sink in to start their snorts of laughter at his stating the obvious. He put his flashlight on the floor and pulled out the baggie he’d stolen from his father and they all three sat down while he made his preparations and they could smoke up again in the dark, waiting until the police lights flashing outside had disappeared before moving on.
Somehow they end up on the roof. The seminary’s shaped like a capital E with the facade stacked one floor higher than the two wings that extend out either end, the chapel in the building’s center. Spunk has wandered off on his own. Alone for the first time, Shady and Cole follow a gray glow that wavers within a long passageway—a passage, he thinks, like what people are said to see when they die, an obscure light at the end of the darkness. In this case the light turns out to be the night visible through the window in a steel door. The door wings open with a retch onto the rooftop, and the cool fresh wind feels as necessary then as longed-for water. Shady squeals in stoned delight; she jumps down two wooden steps and skips the length of the roof some fifty feet, her shoes scattering wet gravel over tarpaper to the far ledge, her white top glowing phosphor beneath silent lightning flares.
Thunder follows the lightning and lingers in such a continuous roll it could be a jet circling overhead. Cole doesn’t join her until she motions to him. The drugs in his body, his success in tracking down his friends after they had abandoned him, have instilled a weird confidence in him tonight and he wraps his arms around her waist from behind, rests his chin on her shoulder. Wind shushes the trees in the distant Possler Woods, and it is good wind, wind as God must imagine it, pure and singing.
“What are you doing,” Shady says. Softly. He can hear the smile in her voice as she leans into him, presses one hand into the back of his head to keep him there.
The smell of her up close jumps in his blood like another heavy and wondrous drug; he could pass out in it, his nose against her neck, inhaling the moist heat off her skin. His hand moves toward her breast, drawn there by the arch in her back—but then his eyes part, and the view stops him still. He has been in this very spot before. Yes, he had been here with his brother. When? They had sat with their legs dangling over the edge on a bright afternoon, taking in the old cemetery and its crumbling stone perimeter, listening for the gravel they tossed into the air to hit the asphalt court below. This would have been before their mother sent Cole to live with his dead father’s family. He remembered it had been maybe the third or fourth time he had ever smoked weed and he was still cataloging the effects it made in his body, trying to note the difference between stoned and not-stoned, between cottonmouth and thirst, and he was smiling stupidly when Fleece declared that in that cemetery stood headstones so old they had been rained blank and smooth.
No names or dates, nothing left, he said. Nothing but an old stone to mark somebody down there that nobody remembers.
He gestured again as if directing Cole toward specific headstones even though they were too far away to see more than the suggestion of stones, winking white beneath the dense trees’ dipping limbs. He said something about how the bodies lying buried there, how the lives those bodies had once led, which must have seemed very important to them in their time, may as well have never happened at all. Know what I mean? he asked.
No, Cole did not know. He had been eleven or twelve. Fleece always seemed to be on to things Cole was too young or too dull to come upon on his own.
That’s pretty sad, Cole said.
What is?
Being forgotten like that. Being so forgotten it’s like you never even lived here.
Fleece turned from the cemetery toward the horizon of trees that, at that time, appeared to go on forever, before old man Possler sold to developers who began to carve out the woods into bedroom communities and condos and office parks. Naw, it’s not sad, that’s not what I mean, Fleece said. It’s beautiful. It’s only sad because life is kind of sad. And still beautiful.
I’ll remember you.
You do that, puppy. But then one day you’ll be gone too, won’t you?
A sound like a pigeon’s coo rises in Shady’s throat. She asks what’s on his mind.
“Do you miss him?”
Power lines lift to the rooftop from a pole in the meadow; a rusty transformer hums hanging at one corner. It seems strange that live power connects to this empty place, and again Cole can only shrug at what he doesn’t understand, which appears to be many many things as his head glides off to imagine electrical grids covering these acres and this land and off to the townships and county after county, stretching over the entire nation and all of it connected, all of it coordinated by hands and minds he will never see and leading to this small forgotten cylinder to throb with it.
“Fleece never needed me. That’s no fun for any girl I know,” Shady says.
“Still, you miss him?”
“Sure I miss him, sometimes. Not always. Sometimes I miss being a little kid, too. Doesn’t mean I want to be five again.” She turns in his arms and politely breaks their embrace. She moves to the inside of the roof over the campus interior, where a basketball court crumbles surrounded and broken by high grass, leaving Cole to stare at the trees where the cemetery would be.
What could Fleece have got up to? It’s odd that Greuel would confess so much of his trouble to Cole unless he was genuinely perplexed by the situation, honestly at a loss as to what has happened, a parent unsure whether to be angry or worried at a child yet to come home. That seems hard to imagine; Greuel always knows what he’s doing, and who could guess what he’s thinking? Could Fleece vanish and leave no sign behind? Is that even possible? That day with his brother on this same ledge they held in one of their casual drawn-out silences—when he thinks of time with his brother there is a typical silence attached to it, so much time passed with neither of them speaking a word, just staring out at fields or the car window, listening to music or to the Nova’s engine—Fleece had stood on the raised ledge near where Shady stands now, arms raised at his sides, eyes closed, his face contorted in this combination of grin and grimace as he leaned back as far as his strength allowed. The breeze that day feathered his smooth dark hair as if he were already falling, and he waved his hands dramatically.
Stop it! Cole yelled. Stop it! and he kept yelling until his brother stepped from the edge.
Relax, pup, nothing’s going to happen to me.
The picture of Fleece swaying on the ledge near Shady hovers in his eyes like a ghost image, the afterglow