The only place you're real is the place that wants you gone. Alex carries what remains of himself—paper ghosts, maps in pencil, an envelope addressed to Maya—back to the mouth that has been chewing his life. At the gate, the chain is looped but not locked. Inside, the cold smells like carved stone and cellar damp. The walls remember where pictures hung not because of what was there, but because of what's missing. A boy appears and speaks in a voice the building refuses to erase.
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The road to Blackstone was shorter than it had ever been. Either he had driven faster, or distance shrinks when you're going back to the place that counts you.
He had made a nested bundle of his remaining proofs. On top: a contact sheet, ink-scribbled and smudged, some frames already gone faint, but still there if you held them under a lamp and believed. Beneath it: a map he had drawn from memory, corridors and doors, rooms that had multiplied in his sleep. Beneath that: the printed first draft of the feature—inkjet lines wavered by a cartridge protesting its duty. And beneath all of it, the thin carbon copy of the envelope he had addressed to Maya, the paper a whisper against his fingers, the address still legible. He held it like a receipt in case the world asked him to account for what he'd bought.
Stone. Wrought iron. An inscription that had been sandblasted off when the county decided rebranding would be a fine remodel. The gate's chain was looped twice through the fence but not locked, as if the building had been told to secure itself and was a conscientious objector. Alex stood in the slough where the gate wore the road thin; he touched the chain and felt the chill, the particular cellar-cold smell he now associated with the place—earth over stone, damp over something that has been damp a century.
He unwound the chain and slid through. Behind him, it fell back into its loop, as if it preferred the look of being closed.
Inside the grounds, he did not sneak. He walked. The air had a practiced hush. He had the feeling of returning to a country that had issued him a visa against its better judgment. The hedges had been trimmed since his last visit; a broom leaned against the side door like evidence of domestic chores in a house no one inhabited. The windows were that particular old-hostel narrow, meant to let light in but not people. Some of them had plastic over the glass, stapled in, tightened as if the building had caught a chill.
He went to the east wing because that's where the building had been loudest. There had been lights once; now the corridor was dark, the exit signs dead, the emergency glow strips scuffed to the color of a dry bone. He clicked on his flashlight and made a slow stripe along the wall.
He saw them right away: rectangles slightly different from the paint around them, faint as breath—the "absence frames." Not a ghost of a painting. The size of the photo prints he had pinned and lost. He stopped before the first: a faint rectangle, the exact size of a 5x7, a floor-level scuff where tape had caught dirt. He must have been the one who had put that photo there and then watched it vanish. The wall was proud of it anyway. Memory worn into paint like an outline where a couch used to be.
He moved the beam. More frames. A corridor made of the absence of his own evidence. It felt like the building had allowed him to exist only long enough to hang pictures of his existence, then taken them down and kept the dust-free halos for itself.
He reached one hand out and placed his palm inside a frame. The paint there was cooler, the chill of late habitation. He thought of the first time his mother had asked him to help peel away old wallpaper, and the way the walls had new sentences written under the old ones—the previous owners leaving messages dated summer of nineteen eighty-nine in pencil, their declarations hidden until the next peeling. This felt like that, except the new sentences were the old ones, and the author wanted them hidden.
"Ask it to keep one," someone said.
Alex swung the light. Elijah leaned against a doorjamb as if he had been waiting there the exact amount of time it takes to be so casual. He wore a hoodie, per school, jeans cuffed to precisely the place on a shank you place your cuffs if you feel you do not own the world's stares. He was not ghost-white; he was not fog. He looked like a local. There was enough to him that the light fell and stayed.
"You look worse," Elijah said, matter-of-factly. "You look like a photo left in a window."
"You—you're—"
"Here," Elijah said. "That's the easiest part to say."
"How are you"—Alex began, found no grammar willing to serve, and ended up with the softest possible thing—"how are you?"
Elijah considered the question as if checking a pocket. "Not hungry," he said. "You?"
Alex barked a sound that wanted to be a laugh but tripped on the lip of the word. "I brought proof," he said, because the fact of that was the only thing he felt acting as ballast. He held out the contact sheet and the map and the feature draft—like a pilgrim at a shrine, laying tender offerings in the little bowls left under a saint's coat.
Elijah didn't take them. He looked at the contact sheet and winced at the yellowing center in one frame. "It's losing faster now."
"You see it?" Alex said too quickly. "It isn't just me? It's not—it's not my mind, it's not chemical, it's—"
"You tried to leave the building with its voice," Elijah said. "So it took yours."
Alex stared. "It took… what? My speech?"
Elijah shook his head. "Not your mouth. Your lines. The way you draw things so other people can hold them."
"Writing," Alex said numbly. "Notes. Names. The photographs."
"That's one way," Elijah said. "There are others. You draw people. You drew us. You tried to carry that out there"—he flicked his chin toward the road—"and the building said, sorry, that's proprietary."
"Is there any way to keep it?" Alex didn't recognize his own voice—too thin, too ragged around the inside. "A way to get proof to stay?" He felt like his question was an insult, demanding special procedure from a system that had decided all outcomes before he arrived.
"Not outside," Elijah said. "You make it here. You carve it. Paint it. Burn it into wood. It will keep. For a while."
"For a while," Alex repeated, the phrase a prayer and a mockery both.
"You need something it considers part of itself," Elijah said. "Beams. Plaster. Bones. It's not like we have letterhead. This is the letterhead." He struck his knuckles on the wall, and the wall yielded just enough to tell Alex that it was not merely wall.
"Then how did you—I mean—your notebook—I saw it—"
"Elijah's circles," the boy said and gave a little theatrical bow undercut by shyness. "Those belonged before I drew them. My hand learned from a hand that was already handwriting. That's what you feel when the pen pulls you."
"I've been trying to—" Alex started to say too much and then didn't. "I mailed the letter. To Maya."
Elijah looked at him with a compassion that tasted like failure. "You addressed it right?"
"I printed the address, I wrote it, I taped the flap with so much goddamn tape I was proud of myself. I photographed the envelope and the mailbox and the act. I wrote it down and then I wrote a note to myself to remember that I wrote it down."
"Good," Elijah said, with the tone of someone noting an adult does not understand the rules of a game but is trying hard not to embarrass him.
Alex pulled the carbon envelope free of his bundle. "See—this is the copy—the address—"
He held it under the flashlight. The address had bled, little rivers streaming downward as if the ink had sat out in weather. Across the top, at a tilted angle, the old stamp—bruised purple ink—RETURN TO SENDER. And underneath, a block stamp: ADDRESS UNKNOWN. He had to wiggle the light to see it, and then wished he'd kept it dark. Where his neat second-line apartment number had been, the paper had a thin eroded place, like a scab.
"She's coming," Elijah said, not looking at the envelope. "She would have even if the envelope had arrived with prayers stuck to it."
"How do you know where she is?"
"I don't know where she is," Elijah said. "I know the house she will walk into. I know the door that is sized for her. There's nothing special about knowing the present when the present has been under construction since your great-grandmother tied her hair back."
"And when she comes," Alex said, because he wanted to hurt himself with it, "you'll do what you did to Daniel."
Elijah's face rearranged itself so gently it hurt. "We didn't do anything to anybody. That's not how agency works here. The building does things with you. Sometimes for you. If you let it."
"I didn't let it," Alex said, and the childishness of that sentence threw a flare on how much he had already let be done.
"You came back," Elijah said. "It let you in without locking the chain. That's not nothing. You're more real here because you're part of the story. Out there, your name is competing with a lot of noise. In here, the noise is tuned to you."
Alex thought of his reflection in the lab glass lagging behind his own movements, as though his face waited for the building's permission to move through time. "Will you—" he began, and anger clamped his mouth shut. He didn't want to ask favors of the boy who had taught him to look at circles until circles looked back. "Help me keep anything?"
Elijah tilted his head as if listening. Maybe to the HVAC, maybe to the thing that used the HVAC as a throat. "I can show you where to carve so that it keeps awhile."
Alex reached into his jacket for his pocketknife. It felt tacky with the oils of his earlier attempts. "Where?"
Elijah led him to a place where the corridor turned. He put his hand on a square of wall no different than any other. Alex understood, with the instinct that had served him wrong and right, that this was not where the building kept walls—it was where it kept itself.
"Here," Elijah said.
Alex touched the plaster and thought he felt it touch back. He set the tip of the knife and began to pull down: a long, slow line. The blade made a shush. He carved the simplest line item he could: A W. The letters came hard to the material, and as he focused, he could hear the lullaby in the duct change to a different key—curious. He carved more letters: ALEX WINTERS WAS HERE. He hadn't scrawled that phrase since he was nine. It looked foolish. It looked right.
Elijah watched, approving as a cat approves, without ceremony. "That will keep," he said. "Maybe a week, maybe a year. Or long enough for someone who needs it."
"Is there someone?" Alex asked. He meant: will I still be someone?
Elijah didn't answer that. "There are always people in buildings," he said, smiling at the bad philosophy. Then: "If you're asking whether the building keeps your proof out there—no."
"I wrote the draft," Alex said, feeling a sudden rage at his own carefulness, his own faith in better habits. "I wrote it and saved it and backed it up and photographed the thing and printed it, and each time it kicked like a dog until the letters came out shape-less. I—" He didn't want to say, I sent a letter to a girl I am not allowed to know. So he said, "I would like one thing to stay."
Elijah gave a small, crisp shrug. "Then keep it here."
"So," Alex said, trying to convert mysticism back into action, "I carve what I know into the walls of a condemned hospital and the hospital keeps it for me. Meanwhile, out there, I'm a person who doesn't exist on lunch rosters."
"You are a person who exists where the story counts you," Elijah said. "You think that's wrong because you want to be counted at lunch. I get it. Less bone-deep. But if you stay in the building long enough, your name grows lichen. Somebody comes along and touches it and says, oh. That was a person, and he stood here, and his hand drew this line."
He wanted to ask the boy if he regretted letting the building adopt him. He wanted to ask if he remembered his mother's voice as something other than a slowed tape.
"I'll probably be here," Elijah said, the way a boy says I'll be at the court after school. "If you need to be counted again."
"I thought you were—" Alex flailed for language that respected an ontology he had not earned—"you know—inside."
Elijah smiled with his mouth and not his eyes. "If you think of it as a border, you will always be late for your own life."
They stood in companionable non-silence as the HVAC exhaled and inhaled.
Alex tucked the knife away. He put his palm on the letters and felt the grooves, the scraped white in the plaster, the small uplifted crimps of dust. He placed his forehead against the wall and let it steady him.
"Go home," Elijah said finally, like an older brother. "Try to eat. Don't try to tell anyone the story in a room with overhead lighting. Write it in pencil on wood. Use that laundry marker on the back of a closet door."
Alex looked at the envelope in his hand, and in the flashlight beam, he watched the block stamp shimmer, some trick of the printer's ink. RETURN TO SENDER. ADDRESS UNKNOWN. The letters looked like they had bled and then dried, as if the paper had sweated.
He could not decide if he felt better or worse. Less alone, certainly. Also less hope: the letter had done what letters do on bad days. It had returned—not simply refused, but branded with a message that had a cheerful bureaucracy tone: Unknown. No such person. Address not found. As if the map had stopped including certain towns. As if they could keep your family out by forgetting they exist.
He slid the envelope back into the bundle and pressed it against his belly, a substitute for pressing a hand to a wound, keeping the stitches from undoing. He walked out the way he had come. The chain lifted, fell; the gate swallowed itself and showed no sign of being unlatched.
On the road, the car's dashboard clock read 3:17. He laughed then, for real, because even the pettiness of fate felt like a friend now. The radio found a station with a man shouting about baseball, then the station softened into a voice that might have been a lullaby or a commercial for mattresses. He turned it off and drove with the window down, rolling the cold over his face again and again to make sure he could feel.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
The building's patience ends where Alex's does. On his return to campus, his door key turns to soft metal in the lock. He finds his initials fading in the plaster he carved, only to see new letters—his hand but not his will—scratching themselves below. The vent begins to sing words clear enough to almost understand. Inside a blank picture frame, something starts to write him back. Then the lights blink once, twice, a third time.