Still there!
Paul and Virginia had been placidly standing on the island of a small fountain for more than a century, but tonight, the bronze faces of the two children looked cold and emotionless. I walked to the west, beyond the dismal statue, past the bust of a frowning Delyte Morris—placed where the halls of Old Main used to cross—and past the mausoleum-like Shryock Auditorium to the location of the brutal, concrete Faner Hall.
But Faner wasn’t there. I edged my way closer, and my knee bumped with a crack into a giant reel of wire. As I rubbed the bruise, I looked around and saw stacks of pipe and wire mesh, work trucks, and wooden planks lying in mud, bordered by deep trenches. I guessed a new building was going up, but where was Faner? The thing had been started in 1970 and finished in 1975, after being expanded to include classroom space that had been lost when Old Main was torched. Faner had been longer than the Titanic.
Maybe they tore it down, but why?
Suddenly, from the east, I heard shouts and dozens of feet running towards me from the direction of the overpass that stretched across Highway 51. It sounded like a live broadcast of a riot from a distant a.m. radio station, fading in and out.
My comfortable alma mater was starting to creep me out. The heebie-jeebies began buzzing in my chest as I quickly sought refuge in Thompson Woods, behind where Faner should have been. The woods were reeking with the odors of wet moss, leaves, wood, pot, tear gas, fear, and sweat. As I wandered in darkness, branches seemed to deliberately bar my way along the slick asphalt paths, and slippery leaves muffled my footsteps. Many of the trees were lying on the ground; others were split or missing limbs. The woods looked ghastly.
I broke out of the trees and into a swirling fog behind the Agriculture Building. A siren sounded in the distance, and as it got closer, the pitch lowered, but the volume increased to an ear-splitting scream, and an SIU police car careened into view. It looked as if it was going to miss the curve and crash into the trees ahead—but it faded away. And it didn’t drive off into the distance, either. No, it faded into invisibility, and I felt the physical sensation of fading along with it, though I was standing rigid with fear at the crosswalk.
Oh, Jesus.
I was hallucinating. Yet my mind was as lucid as a diamond. I reached in my pocket for the pill container and threw it into the street, where it broke open, and all of the colored pills bounced into the mist. By now, my head was congested, my ears were filled with fluid, and all I wanted to do was turn around, walk back to the train station, and return to Chicago. But I knew what I would face on the return trip: a riot, the ghost of brutal Faner Hall, pensive Paul and Virginia, and that pipe in the ashtray in the window of the American Tap.
I crossed the street and walked into the woods around Campus Lake toward a picnic shelter I remembered. As I got closer to the shelter, I saw a woman in a long dress lying on her back on one of the picnic tables, but her form dissolved into a shadow as I walked past. Beyond the shelter, I spotted the geometric roof of the campus dock, trudged my way to it, and stood at the flagpole in front of the boat shelter while I wound my pocket watch. It was 6:34
I didn’t care whether it was day or night, because now I was entering the time frame where my body had finished metabolizing the drugs and alcohol, leaving only the miserable dregs of aches, pains, confusion and profound depression. As I clung to the flagpole, I felt as if I were rushing toward the lake.
I inhaled the muggy air, and those little chemical gremlins in my nervous system polluted it with such profound melancholy that when I exhaled, my face was inundated in a miasma of gloom. My head was filled with boiling oil that splashed against the back of my eyes every time my heart pounded. The fulminating oil emptied into my throat, ripped down my esophagus, and hit my stomach with a splash of corrosive acid. I gagged, but the corrosion only got so far as my throat, and I started coughing and hacking phlegm. My right rotator cuff was attached to my shoulder with a nail, and down below, my hips and flat feet throbbed in agony. But my eyes hurt most of all: that cottony silver light forced the corrosive oil into the backs of them, until everything I saw was tinged with red. I tried to squint in an attempt to cut the glare, but my eyelids fluttered involuntarily and were threatening to close. The fog shifted a little, briefly revealing the Thompson Point residence halls.
The dorms looked like how I felt: washed out, colorless, joyless. The engineering buildings behind me were mere phantoms in the fog, and the trees in the woods looked as if they were sketched in pen and ink against the swirling gray mist, their reflections etched in water the color of gun metal. Many of the trees were broken and jagged, lying half in the water near the dock and across the lake on Thompson Point.
My God, there is absolutely no color to anything!
A cold, gray drizzle swirled around me, and I felt the gray of the ground pass through the soles of my shoes and up into my head until my feelings turned dark gray. Boiling oil in the rotator cuff, boiling oil in the feet, the hands, and the neck. Boiling oil in the cough.
This was worst day of my pallid 58-year-long life.
The police car I’d seen earlier came rushing back from the opposite direction on Lincoln Drive, and screeched to a halt. The big, boxy cruiser looked like it had been built forty years ago, but it appeared to be in mint condition. I could see the shadow of the policeman behind the wheel reach down and turn on the siren. The noise sounded as if the damned thing was going off inside my damned head.
The siren blew for at least a minute—60 seconds of audio spikes stabbing my ears. When I turned my head away from the siren, the broken black-and-white trees started rushing past me, and I felt as if I was flying a jet fighter at Mach 1 through the woods.
And that did it.
With catastrophic finality, the broken woods, Tammy, Testing Unlimited!, Bob, my trailer, the vodka, the pills and the gremlins came down on me like a piano and pushed me to my knees so forcefully that indentations were cast in the sod.
I was kneeling next to a rack of canoes with my hands over my ears when the siren stopped. I crumpled to the ground, rolled under the canoes, and passed out.
I was awakened by the mechanical pencil digging into my chest; the soldier on the train must have slipped it in my shirt pocket while I slept. As I rolled out from under the canoes, I was blinded by a bright morning sun reflecting off the lake. I stood up slowly, and was surprised at how I felt, considering the previous night’s bender. I had no headache, no nausea; the minor pains in my feet and back were gone, and so was the chronic ache in my rotator cuff. My eyesight had sharpened, so that I noticed the individual leaves on the Kodachrome green trees. The light blue roof of the boathouse pleasantly complimented the azure sky shimmering in the blue water of the lake. My sense of smell had intensified as well, so I felt awash in pleasant odors: blooming flowers, damp grass, and water gently lapping over the mud near the shore. I could hear the chirp of the crickets, which sounded higher pitched and more musical than they used to. The temperature must have been in the upper 70’s—not too hot, not to cold—and I felt all of these sensations with a passion that I scarcely remembered.
But what happened to fall?
It also seemed that the trees, dock, grass and lake were slightly out of place. Either that or I was.
As I walked over to a picnic table in front of the dock shelter, a bright green grasshopper jumped past me, and I felt as if I weighed only fifty pounds. Past the flagpole, the redwood trim on the Thompson Point residence halls glowed in the sun. But there was something off kilter with TP as well. It was there, right in plain sight, but it took a minute or so for me to realize that the trees around the buildings had been repaired: there were no broken branches, none of the trees were laying in the water, and none of them were split, yet they were shorter than they should have been considering that The Point was fifty years old.
I started