The building itself has been unchanged in my lifetime: redbrick and blocky like the buildings in the town's warehouse district, rectangular windows lining the top and bottom floors, a main entrance at the vertex of the L, and a flagpole near the entrance that clanged in near-constant breeze. The school is situated at the extreme northern end of town where it was supposed to have enough room to grow if need be, but since there was no population growth, a multipurpose athletic field was built alongside where students could watch the football team lose all but one game every season and watch the baseball team win almost every game every season but in front of almost no one.
My first days at school began in the north-facing wing. I, along with a new group of kindergarteners, was shuffled through the doors as my mother drove away to work. I spent the days sitting apart from the others, each door slam stopping my heart, each shout making me jump. I sat alone and other students would turn to each other, whisper, then look at me. I'd look down at any book nearby, or sketch simple line drawings in the newsprint drawing pad Mom had given me, anything not to meet their eyes. Through the windows, I'd watch seasons shift from red autumn, to gray winter, to brown spring, to green summer. During playtime, I'd listen to windsong and river murmur, snowflakes, raindrops, the whispers of the kids who pointed at me, and the whispers from things unseen that drifted across the playground.
By the time I entered first grade, I'd written a story about a ghost who lived on a bridge over the river. Every night, it would jump off the side and fly over the town. I illustrated it with crayon layered so thick that it made the paper stiff. I showed it to Mom when it was done. She smiled, but said nothing, only running her fingers over the pictures, feeling the waxen lumps and bumps.
The elementary and middle school years passed, and my stories became more numerous. I'd hide them in shoeboxes when they were completed then destroy them when I was home alone, my fingers aching from tearing apart reams of paper and shoving them to the bottom of trash bags where they'd be covered by coffee grounds, egg shells, and old newspapers.
One night, after Dad had finally gone to sleep after raging about the work he brought home with him and while my mother was sitting alone in the kitchen, I sat by my bedroom window and watched vapors lumber down the sidewalk. One stopped, floated to the middle of the street, and slowly spun in place. I pulled out my composition book and wrote a story about a dancer on a cloud. Her name was Miriam, and she swam through air like a fish through water. She saw a boy sitting alone in his backyard. He was doing nothing in particular, just looking at the clouds racing over the hillsides. She stepped from the cloud, floated to Earth, and stood beside him. Miriam reached out her hand and smiled. She had black, curly hair and was tall and thin. Let me show you how to dance on clouds, she said, and the boy reached up, took her hand, and they floated away together, the sun warming their skin.
By high school, most teachers knew better than to call on me, that I'd often be freeze in fear or fumble in ignorance. I caused no problems, lost myself in the assignments or in diagramming sentences, or write short stories or quick journal entries of what I saw, smelled, felt, or heard around me. For my elementary and middle school years, the afternoons consisted of rushing home before my father did. By high school, the afternoons consisted of running home, cutting through alleys, hiding behind houses and among trees and shadows to avoid having pens, pencils, beer cans, or rocks hurled at me from students' passing cars. By my junior year, I still had no girlfriend and no friends to speak of.
For years, avoiding and hiding had worked. It made me smaller, less noticeable, like furniture. I'd not known that high school was a bit different, that, strangely enough, hiding made one more visible, more vulnerable. Appearances and behaviors were amplified and spotlighted. One particular day when I was fifteen, the spotlight fell on my orange shirt.
The orange shirt wasn't particularly bright. It was, in fact, burnt orange. I'd had the shirt for two years, and I'd worn it several times, but it finally caught the attention of Anthony Lorenzo, the police chief's son. He was stocky and had powerful legs and thick arms, black hair shaved close to the scalp, and a square neck that gave him the appearance of a standalone mailbox. He'd been the Blackbridge football team fullback since his freshman year, where he enjoyed aiming his head at anything in his way and powering through it. Even though our teams had losing seasons, Anthony enjoyed the opportunity to push someone down or knock them aside. Not letting him hit you was disrespect.
The orange shirt announced my presence, and that was enough. He'd asked me if I was wearing my deer hunting gear, if it was my leftover Halloween costume, why my mom and dad didn't get me any decent clothes, who taught me how to dress, and if I wore it to get girls to notice me. Usually, I found sanctuary in the cafeteria where I could stare out the windows and watch the Susquehanna roll by. Sometimes I'd get lost in writing an observation or a thought. But Anthony sat with his coterie at the table next to mine. Things pelted my shirt. Eraser tops. Napkin balls. I was afraid to run, afraid to say anything. I looked out the windows, watched clouds darken the sky and threaten rain, saw my face in the window's reflection. My father was in my eyes, my mother was in my nose and lips. Shame from my orange shirt and face twisted my insides into a knotted rope.
After school, I darted around the back of the building, trying to outflank the student body, holding close to the treeline. I ducked down an alley just as it began to rain, the drops big and cold. I cut across an empty lot and made my way to Orion Street. I knew that if I walked fast enough, I could duck down another alley, cut across another lot, then cut over to Vela Street, which would take me straight home, but by the time I made it to the intersection of Shrike and Orion, Anthony was there. He'd not noticed me at first, and I tried to hurry past him on the other side of the street, knowing there was a house I could duck behind, so I cut across a yard, looking out the corners of my eyes, caching only the sight of the copper dome of St. Gemma Galgani Church two streets over as quick footsteps shuffled behind me.
A rock-like punch slammed into the right side of my face.
I fell forward, things going black before I hit the ground. Afterwards, I was thankful my face had landed in wet grass. Another five inches to the left and it would have struck concrete.
I'd come to under a shower of raindrops. Someone had rolled me over and was shaking me. Rain fell onto my face, into my eyes and mouth. I shook from cold, mumbled from disorientation. I saw blurs, then shapes, then an olive-skinned girl with long, black hair and dark eyes over me, grabbing me by the shoulders. "Milton," she said. "Milton, are you okay? Milton? Jesus, Tony, you just wait 'til I tell Dad. Milton?"
Then a faraway voice: "For crissakes, I was just playing around."
"Shut the hell up," she said. "Milton? Can you get up?"
She pulled at me, placed her hands beneath my shoulders. My teeth were chattering, and my head throbbed. The back of my head felt heavy, my neck tight and wrenched. Something was on my face, and I clumsily brushed it away. Dead grass and dirt. I pushed away, stood up. The world around me bounced and spun, and the rush of blood from head to body made the throbbing worse. I spotted my books sprawled over the wet grass and my glasses on the sidewalk, and I reached down, picking everything up one by one. The girl tried to help, reaching for the tablets and books, but I grabbed everything before she could. I finally recognized her: Maria Lorenzo, Anthony's sister.
"Milton? You want a ride home?" she asked.
I turned away, pushed my glasses back onto my face, and stumbled down Orion Street, the earth rolling beneath my feet. Maria kept calling to me, but I kept walking. There was throbbing in my head and tears in my eyes, but I stumbled through the downpour as if intoxicated, water-soaked books and paper clung to my chest.
By the time I got home, howling winds whipped rain through the river gaps.
That night, Dad asked me how I got the marks on my face and the knot on the back of
my head. He saw blood that I'd not noticed caked in one of my nostrils. He asked who did it. "I tripped in gym class," I said. "We were playing volleyball, and I tripped when I tried to hit the ball."
"You don't know how to hit volleyballs?" he said.
"I just tripped."
"The volleyballs are slapping you around? Jesus."
I just tripped, I repeated in a whisper. I walked up to my room, softly closed the door, sat on my bed's edge, and watched the Blackbridge streetlights come to life and shimmer sodium orange.
That night, I held an ice pack to my head and let the cold numb me until there was nothing left to feel. I stuffed cotton balls in my ears until there was nothing left to hear. I counted the streetlights one by one until I fell asleep after midnight.
Days later, I wrapped the orange shirt around a stone and hurled it into the Lackawanna River. It sank in an eruption of bubbles and ripples.
***
No one knows where the vapors come from or who they must have been or even if they had been anyone at all. Some think they're just kinks in the energy of our corner of the universe.
Some think they're just illusions and nothing more, illusions that pass between walls, travel over roads and hillsides. Illusions that sometimes stand outside your bedroom window and fade when you awaken. Illusions that cry for attention but can't say what they want.
I never understood the motivations of vapors. If you're hidden, stay hidden. Hidden things can't be hurt.
Just keep your head down, disappear, let the pain pass.
Chapter Four
The town streets are usually empty by nine at night, everyone closed up in their homes until first light. The only ones on the streets are the occasional police cruiser or lonely soul, alive or not, that wanders aimlessly, turning the street grid into a circle, starting and ending in the same place.
Shortly after Mom's suicide, I took to night walking, first around the house then down the street, then, eventually, to the edge of Riverview Cemetery. I noticed how the night smelled different from the day, moist and heavy, and how noises moved through it like water: murky, directionless, but clear at longer distances. The dog barks at the northern edge of town bounced to the southern edge, the creaking of the wire-strung traffic lights downtown crept to the warehouse district, the hum in the hillside electrical lines filled the alleys like smog, the moans of the cemetery and forests dripped from eaves like rainwater, night sounds drifting everywhere until daylight burned them away.
One night I walked to the cemetery, my footsteps echoing between headstones and grave markers. Some Blackbridge residents would light headstone candles in red glass holders every night before they went home, either in remembrance or as beacons to guide loved ones back to where they slept before sunrise. The red glow threw shadows that twisted and intertwined. Near the entrance gate of the cemetery was the grave of a child whom I'd not known. Every few days, someone left flowers, toys, and inflatable figures to match the season. An inflatable Santa Claus was anchored to the ground, its plastic skin puckering and rippling. It leaned over, pushed by cold breeze, then righted itself, only to be pushed down again.
Mom's stone memorial marker was along the eastern side of the cemetery, far from Dad's grave, no body below ground, just a cold flat headstone resting on the earth. I'd not visited her marker or his grave for months and had no desire to visit them in the dark of night. I just stood at the gate, waiting.
Behind a concrete angel, a vapor emerged, dim green and poorly formed. It floated a foot off the ground, swirling like windblown smoke, and after a few minutes began to take shape. Arms snaked from a cloudy torso and legs dropped to the earth, forming thighs, knees, upper shins, but no ankles or feet. An oblong head with dark eye sockets and black mouth formed. It hesitated, then floated down the headstone rows, stopping, starting, stopping, passing through marble and tree, casting gloomy light over the snow-dusted ground. It approached the entrance gate, then stopped about twenty yards from where I stood.
Its mouth opened, then closed, and then the vapor backed away, farther and farther, exiting the cemetery's southern boundary, floating over the railroad tracks and Lowland Road, down the riverbank and into the rapids of the Lackawanna River until fading into the river water.
***
Classmates continued to avoid me, but also made me the subject of conversation, or, if not me, my mother's suicide, some saying they saw her as she leapt into the river, each account more dramatic than the other: she swan dived; she cannonballed; she stripped naked and ran off the bridge's midpoint, screaming as she fell; and so on; and so on.
"Nothing that dramatic," someone said.
I was sitting near a cafeteria window as usual, looking outside, avoiding what was inside. The trees were stripped of leaves, coloring the hillsides gray and brown. Clouds lowered over the hilltops, dropping light snow and swallowing the antenna lights completely. I looked over to my right at the student who'd said it.
His name was Robert Bentley Burke, or just Bentley. I never knew if he actually preferred that or if being called that had just become habit. He was the tall, brown-haired heir to the Burke name and family holdings. His family lived in a large white house on The Heights, a flat ridge cut into the eastern hills overlooking the town, which was also once home to a former regional state mental hospital that now sat empty a few hundred yards away from the Burke home. The Burkes had leased the hospital property to the state and had owned various properties around town, my home having once been one of them before the mortgage was paid off.
"It just . . . happened," Bentley said, picking at the sandwich on his lunch tray. I often wondered why he bothered to eat in the cafeteria when he could have taken his car and eaten anywhere or anything, but Bentley stayed close to school. None of us knew why he was in a public school in the first place when he could have gone to any number of private schools, in or out of state, and no one really asked him. He kept his choices and secrets close to his well-tailored vest. When I glanced at him, I became aware of my own clothing: the same jeans that Mom had bought me two years before, the same boots she'd bought for me three years before. I tried keeping my clothes and boots as clean as possible, trimmed away any stray strands, buffed away scuffs, but they were becoming threadbare and almost completely worn.
That day, Bentley wore blue jeans with fresh fabric and fresh creases, a brown cashmere sweater with a cream-colored shirt beneath, collar effortlessly popping above the sweater neck. His hair was slightly long, but styled and gelled. Beside him sat Anthony Lorenzo who drummed the table with a milk straw. I ran a hand through my hair and looked away, pointing my left ear in their direction.
"She was calm," Bentley said. "Just walked up the bridge and walked off."
Anthony shouted over to me: "You gonna jump off a bridge, too?"
"Jesus," Bentley said, "what the hell's your problem?"
"Oh come on."
"You think it's funny."
"I was just—"
"When something happens to your family, Tony, you better hope no one talks about it. You better hope people don't have stories to pass around for entertainment because they will." In the window's reflection, Bentley looked over at me, lowered his eyes, and said nothing more.
At that moment, I hated my mother. My father. Blackbridge. Anthony Lorenzo and his sister. Bentley Burke and his money. Outside, the hilltops were engulfed in snow, and I wished I was up there, so the clouds could completely surround me, wrap me in white, and erase me from Blackbridge forever.
***
When I turned eighteen, my parents' house became mine.
So did their cars, their clothes, their furniture, their anger, their sadness, their loneliness, and their silence.
***
No one knows why or when the rivers and hills around Blackbridge started to collect strange things. There are no ancient Indian legends, no songs from early settlers. One day, wisps floated from the woods, maybe one
or two a month, then every week, then every day. And one day a vapor stepped out of the treeline or out of an early graveyard and walked over a dirt road.
Sometimes things are born out of nothing. Things need to be seen, heard, or loved. There's no equation or geometric axiom for it. The universe was not born from the physics of infinite smallness and density. It was born from the emptiness and loneliness around it, and loneliness makes the universe do strange things. People, too. Like the people who stayed in Blackbridge despite every vapor, wisp, whisper, and wail.
"People get used to things," Mom said to me once. "No matter what it is, they get used to things other people couldn't possibly imagine. Some people grow up with wars, some live with poverty. It just becomes a part of their lives, no matter how much it hurts, and they start accepting it."
"Why?" I asked.
"I don't know. Maybe because sometimes what you don't know is even more frightening to what you do know. You'd be surprised what people get used to when it's all they know. Strange, isn't it? Finding comfort in what you're afraid of because you're even more afraid of what you don't know."
I used to think that didn't make any sense.
Used to.
***
When one strikes pen to paper, it ignites a fire that burns beyond the desk. The words are embers that float out the window, settle on something dry, and set it ablaze. If not extinguished, it rages over homes and hillsides, scorching everything you love and hate.
Maybe that's what pushed me to start writing in earnest in sixth grade, picking up disposable pens and scribbling down thoughts, descriptions, stories on ragged-edged tablet paper. Sitting alone in the cafeteria, on the grassy hill behind the school, in my bedroom with the windows opened wide even on wintry nights, I began sketching with words. I'd start with observing something like a tree, then give the tree thoughts, what it sees, what it feels, and let the words spill down the page like waterfalls into a river. I'd combine the random images and sensations around me, gather them, give them form. Like a vapor, the story would build from formless cloud to arms, legs, head, heart. Hours and pages later, I'd have something solid but disorganized, incredibly messy but strangely beautiful to me. In those moments when I looked in a mirror afterwards and wondered how those thoughts came out of my head, I felt elated. I'd created something from nothing.