We crossed the street to the car and stepped inside. I slid the door shut and handed the envelope to my father. “A Soldier, eh? Kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species. Go.”
“Ergh,” I said “Animalia…” My father had worked for the Audubon Society. “Animalia… Arthropoda, Insecta… Lepidoptera?” He nodded. “Nymphalidae, Danaus, eresimus!” I finished, quickly.
“You forgot Danainae,” he said, as we pulled away.
“Didn’t ask for subfamily,” I muttered, looking out the window. I wouldn’t have remembered, even if he had.
Klingus Stefanis. The Father. Six foot wingspan. Very difficult to approach.
The lush, rural landscape of upstate New York rushed past the car, separated from the clear azure sky by a bold, never-ending strip of mountains. Hundreds of butterflies peppered the scene, flickering little pinpricks in the scenery. This time of year, every type of butterfly you could think of took a trip to these fields. Somewhere in the vast expanse between the small town of Port Henry and the even smaller town of Westport was nestled our cabin. Right on Lake Champlain. We had been coming up about once a month in the summer, every year since before I was born.
We reached the almost invisible turn from the highway and pulled onto the rocky, uneven path that my siblings and I had affectionately nicknamed “the Bumpy-Road.” Two minutes later, we reached a pair of cedars with a homemade “KLING” sign nailed to each of them. Between them and through a small field was the cabin. Built by my great-grandfather and his son, finished by his grandson, my father, the cabin was a marvel of amateur architecture. The lumber all came from the forest around it, the rocks were collected from the lake’s edge, and there was still a faded red cement mixer by the outdoor table where the mortar had been made.
The three of us got out of the car. My parents walked down the path to the cabin to start making lunch. “I’ll be right there!” I called. I slid the door shut and made my way through the foot-high grass to the front of the car. I bent down and examined the grill. I squinted and peered into it, then I grinned, picked up a twig, and fished out the corpses.
Two Monarchs (Danaus plexippus) and what looked like a Zebra Swallowtail (Eurytides marcellus). There was a West Virginia White (Pieris virginiensis), but there was a large portion of the left wing missing. I nudged them out carefully and let them drop onto a maple leaf that I had picked. Then I picked it up and walked a few yards into the woods until I reached a clearing, where I set the leaf down. These new catches were added to the mass of almost forty other dead butterflies, all more or less intact. This was my collection, a beautiful mass grave. Aside from the fact that they weren’t moving, and perhaps a bent antenna here or there, nothing about them betrayed the fact that they had been peeled from the bumper of a car. They were as vibrant as ever; some were the color of autumn leaves, some looked like stained glass windows.
I looked up at the sky. Still pure blue. I tried to think back to art class. What was a complimentary color to blue? I tried to see a color wheel in my head, but it wasn’t working. I glanced down at the array of butterflies, each on its own leaf. Then kneeled and dragged a few out of their lines. Using an empty leaf for green and what I think was a Karner Blue (Lycaeides melissa) for violet, I made a color wheel out of the insects. Right across from blue was orange. I picked up the Monarch’s leaf and brought it into a sunnier clearing, where there were wild strawberries growing. I gingerly pinched the very tip of its wing, like Thetis dipping Achilles in the River Styx, and placed it on top of a berry. I rotated it to obscure a missing leg, and tweaked a wing so it would appear poised for flight. Then I wound up my camera, and click.

When the daguerreotype, one of the earliest forms of photography, was invented in 1839, it opened up a world of possibilities. The ability to capture an image directly, without relying on a human interpreter to recreate it, is a concept that amazes me still today. A problem with the daguerreotype, however, was the incredibly slow exposure time. This meant that the subject had to refrain moving for an extended period of time while the picture was being formulated, making portraits difficult to produce. Matthew B. Brady, known for his iconic daguerreotypes of Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, and other titans, discovered a loophole to this: photographing corpses. He invested his entire life savings in a massive effort to document the American Civil War, by photographing the piles upon piles of bodies that lined the trenches. He amassed a collection of hundreds of images depicting the horrors of war, which he intended to sell to the United States government for historical purposes. The government was, not surprisingly, uninterested in preserving even more evidence of this scar on the face of US history; Matthew B. Brady died alone and in debt.

Photography of the dead was applied not only for historical purposes, but sentimental purposes as well; especially in the Victorian era, when infant and childhood mortality rates were extremely high. The bodies of children would be posed and photographed as though they were living, so as to preserve their memory. Afterward, paint or makeup was often applied to the image to enhance the illusion. The cheeks were sometimes drawn up to produce a lifelike fullness, as well. This created what could be mistaken for a grin, during a time in which people never smiled in photographs. It was not unusual for parents to be photographed with their dead child as well, although this resulted in an interesting phenomenon. Due to the long period of time in which the camera’s aperture had to remain open, the living subjects in the picture, because of slight movement (especially eye movement and blinking), were faintly blurred. The deceased, however, were in sharp focus and clear contrast. The effect is an eerie, silver image in which the living subjects are smeared and solemn, and the only eyes that can be viewed clearly are soulless, perched above a haunting grin.

Then again, the smile of a dead person isn’t any more artificial than the forced smiles that most people pull when their picture is being taken.

The relationship between one’s image and one’s soul is the subject of much cultural and philosophical debate. It is said that a vampire has no reflection in a mirror. This stems from the ancient belief that one’s image is, in reality, his/her soul. Indeed, the practice of manipulating a soul by means of manipulating an image of the soul is fairly well-known; many have heard of Voodoo. Australian Aborigines believe that when a person is photographed, a piece of his/her soul is captured. This notion is most often applied by those who hold it to avoid having their image taken. However, it presents another concept to consider: the true value of a photograph. If it does, indeed, contain a piece of soul, a photograph is an immensely valuable relic. A model profiting from copies of his/her likeness would be tantamount selling their soul. And to own a photograph of another! To happen upon a lost photograph of someone else’s would engage one in an intimate relationship with a stranger. The pursuit of found photographs is a hobby of mine, because I find this relationship fascinating. Even if a photograph doesn’t contain a slice of soul, there is a singular connection between, for example, the man in the Yankees jacket with the shocked expression on his face and myself. I found him fluttering under a subway seat, like a butterfly with a broken wing, and pocketed him surreptitiously. I will never know his name, nor will I know what caused the expression, but I know his face, in that moment, as well as anyone in his life. I’ve considered endlessly the bag in his hand, and wondered about its contents. I’ve mused over his haircut, clearly recent and clearly botched. He’s looked over me as I’ve typed countless essays, watched movies with friends, learned to moonwalk in front of my mirror.
And Yankees guy is just one in the collection. All of these strangers, tacked haphazardly onto the wall, form sort of a patchwork family. Sometimes during warm summer nights, I like to think, to the hum of the window fan, that one of the old women posing in front of the deli at the grocery store is the grandmother of the kid with the orange shorts on the skateboard, who maybe almost ran into the guy in the Yankees jacket, startling him as his picture was taken. It strikes me that there could very well be someone, or several people for that matter, studying my nose or chin, wondering where I got the scar on my arm, or where I am running to in the picture on their wall. I’d imagine that each of us is in the background of a whole score of pictures, scattered around the country in albums and frames. Are all of our souls fragmented, then? Do we lose a little of ourselves each time, fading throughout life like an old Polaroid? I don’t think so. I think it serves to connect us. The fact that you might be in a glass elevator near Times Square in the far corner of someone’s family photo is exciting, isn’t it? And just as post-mortem portraits served to remind families of a loved one that was once here, a found photograph, or the presence of a background stranger, serves to remind a mailman in Kentucky that a 6-year old in a karate uniform was here–is here–and that this kid’s life brushed up against his own, touched it, just for a moment.

During his senior year of high school, my brother worked for one of the last photography business in the area, the majority of them being forced to close because of 1-hour photo places. He spent most of his time doing busy-work, but one of the perks of his job was that he got to develop photographs. As a private establishment and a small business, his place of employment was ideal for two types of photograph: post-mortem photographs, from crime scenes and coroner’s tables; and amateur pornography, most often the sorts of things that would be shunned at the local Walgreens kiosk. Often it was difficult to decide which of the types was more repulsive. Both are developed with the intention that they be seen by only a select few. These are the photographs that aren’t left lying under subway seats, trembling in the wind from the tunnel. One type depicts a person, devoid of soul, with only the empty wrapping. The other exposes the secret inner layer of its subject; for once, without any cover.

There’s an antique store in my town that sells everything from crumpled, leathery cameras to ancient prosthetic limbs. This kind of store is very much like a graveyard, stuffed full of artifacts from past and finished lives. Near the back, where the knives and mirrors are kept, is a folder, fastened to the wall. This folder contains old portraits and daguerreotypes, as well as postcards. When I first discovered this, I became addicted to purchasing and studying these 75-year-old postcards; forming biographies for the subjects and continuing the story post-mailing.
I reached a point, however, when I had purchased every one of the fifty-something postcards in the folder. I expressed my displeasure to the woman who ran the store, to which she rather unnecessarily assured me that she couldn’t produce antique postcards at will. Frustrated, I returned to the folder to double-check. I felt around and pulled something out at random. It was a portrait, a landscape-oriented oval-shaped affair. From the center, seated side-by-side, five gaunt faces stared. Five girls with dark, sunken eyes and morbid expressions. Even in such a high-contrast, black and white photograph, I could tell their skin was ghostly white. White like the tubers of a plant grown without sunlight. They looked very much like photographs I had seen of Tuberculosis patients. I flipped the picture over and read the words scrawled on the back: “The Minninger Girls. Left to right: Annie – Gertie – Elsie – Emma + Julia.”
I returned my gaze to the girls. Save the pallid skin and the severe brows, not one of them resembled another. Annie, the leftmost, sat perfectly straight. She was the only one of the five that might be considered attractive. Soft, high cheekbones, shadowy eyes capped with bold eyebrows, and an aquiline nose; she might have been Indian had her complexion not been lighter than her white dress. Shadowy eyes like two candles in a cave on a dark cliff face. Her face conveyed nothing, save an impassive lack of concern. Gertie’s thin hair weaved around her sickly face, tied up into a bun that stuck out just half as far as her notably square jaw. She very much resembled a female Poe, if not perhaps a touch more masculine. Next to her, Elsie’s head was titled slightly to the right. This, and the position of her eyes, gave the impression that she was focused on something beyond the camera. Hers was the only face that could be considered full; the others ranged from thin to dreadfully emaciated. Emma–where to begin? Emma’s hair was done up mostly above her head, giving it an appearance of volume. This, coupled with the normal size of her head, perched atop the thinnest frame, made her appear as though she was constantly struggling to keep her head up. She seemed to be leaning it back slightly to alleviate this discomfort. Her mouth was the widest of the five, and she hardly seemed to have any lips, giving her mouth the look of trembling firmness that you might find on someone burdened with a secret. Her eyes, though, were the most different. She was the only of the five whose eyes were not dark enough a brown so as to appear black. Either blue or hazel, and I am inclined to think blue, her eyes were wide and imploring. And unlike the others her eyebrows were not straight or furrowed, but open, the way a drawbridge opens, with some tragic and now petrified secret. Last was Julia, whose appearance was nothing worth mentioning, aside from perhaps a facial structure that suggested she was Eastern European. Julia was also the only in the portrait to don what might be called a smile. Sometimes when I look at it, I see the smile. When I look back, it is often gone. None of their eyes meet mine.

I paid fifteen dollars for the portrait, and it is now mounted above my headboard. As much as their faces are haunting–I’ve often considered that they could be dead in the photograph–I feel that someone needs to stay with Minninger Girls. I like to think that I am their hero, years after their death, wondering what could be in Annie’s locket; what is Elise looking at; what is causing Julia’s smile? I like to think that it helps Emma to have someone with whom to share her secret, even though she can’t. I like to imagine who they met and who they married; where they live and when they died. And sometimes I come across the thought that they might not have lived at all past that moment, or even up to it; That their ghostly faces and sunken eyes are the result of a fatal illness, and that they were arranged, five limp little butterflies, and frozen in that empty state. But it doesn’t matter, really. Not as long as there’s always someone to look at it and feel any way about them.

I don’t remember much about my childhood. I don’t even remember what I did yesterday. I do, however, remember the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone, word for word. I also remember the title of every episode of Seinfeld, ordered chronologically. This should give you a good idea of my situation.
The years of my life devoted to developing basic human skills were uneventful. Or maybe they were eventful. All I remember is that once I ate Cap’n Crunch in a high chair and noted the abrasiveness of the berry pieces with a high pitched squeal. Another time I mixed every component in an edible chemistry set, assuming erroneously that the result would be edible. I also remember that, at one point, I raised a pair of geese.

The barn across the street from my house on Warren Street was an eyesore. Everyone said so. Far from emanating a rustic charm, the decrepit old shack appeared to be on the brink of collapse. Though Warren county and the surrounding areas are host to many a rural panorama, I lived in the heart of Hackettstown, a bustling blend of quaint colonials and ornate Victorians that thrived with small industry without threatening to expand. Warren Street was busy enough to be considered an important vein, branching directly from the aortic route 46, sometimes called Main Street by the nostalgic. So what, in the name of all that is bay windows and porch swings, was this little barn doing so far from the nearest farm?
The Whitt family, in the decades before my birth, was a prominent one in Hackettstown, having established, by way of business, public appearance, and numerous progeny, what can best be described as a small town dynasty. Like all empires, theirs eventually collapsed; the Whitts in their various posts pulled up their roots and migrated to other parts of the state. The more ambitious among them may have even moved to Pennsylvania. This diaspora left in its wake a patriarch whose roots were deep enough to keep him in place. Charles Whitt Senior, unable to cope with his shifting surroundings, was squeezed back to his property on the edge of the town. Sandwiched between a highway and a nudist colony, the Whitt property, with its farmhouse and murky pond, was an oasis of things that had once been; The vestigial remains of Farmingville, USA.
As for Charles Whitt Senior, he was reduced to an oddity, making occasional appearances in town in his antique car. He was nearing the end of his nineties, and his son, Charles Whitt Junior, was dead. The one fingerprint that he had left in the entire town was a dilapidated barn on Warren Street. And so, it came to embody his stark refusal to embrace the changing times.
My parents were friends of Whitts’, so I heard them mention one day that Charlie Whitt was in town. In the coming days, I became increasingly confused as they addressed a forty-something man in the street as Charlie. I inquired, and was informed that this was Charles Whitt III, the estranged grandson of Charles Whitt Senior. Under circumstances not made clear to the kids’ table, Charlie had left his family in Florida and returned to the town where his life had begun.

One December day, I spotted Charlie in front of the barn with a canvas and charcoals, tracing the angles of its roof. From early childhood, I had developed a passion for art, and was excited to have found one of my kind.
“You’re an artist?” I asked.
“You betcha. I’m just laying out a sketch that I’m going to fill in with watercolors later.”
“Wow, you mean you’re a real painter?”
He chuckled. “Well, I use real paints.” I watched him, mesmerized by his strokes, rigid but fluid, structureless and free. In all of my art classes, I had been taught to grasp the pencil tightly and to wipe away the charcoal dust to prevent smudges. He held the pencil loosely, swooping and smudging wherever he pleased. The effect was a sort of ragged, chaotic set of overlapping lines, more bold than any single straight one.
After a few minutes, he became aware of my captivation.
“Hey, Ben, want to see my studio?”
“Really?” I said, excitedly. Then I remembered, I had parents who would be upset if I went off with a man that I didn’t really know to someplace that I had never been. My smile fell. “Well, I can’t go today, because I have to stay close to home.”
“Where do you think we’re going?” he said, and slid open the door to the barn. I followed him inside, and rubbed my eyes as they adjusted to the absence of the winter sunlight.
Junk. Everywhere I looked, there was junk. Rusted tins full of equally rusted bolts and screws, a box of rolling pins, mannequins, a tent, rotting shelves covered in yellowed books, stacks of flaky newspapers. License plate shingles adorned the walls like a parody of their rooftop counterparts. And up in the rafters, I saw something stir.
“There’s a bird in your studio!” I told him, pleased with my observational skills.
“This part isn’t my studio,” he said, “this is all the garbage my grandfather left in here. My studio’s upstairs. And that bird is Pidgie. She’s a homing pigeon.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that no matter how far I let her fly away, she always comes back to this barn. She’s got a special part of her brain that gives her a perfect sense of direction.”
As I digested this incredible fact, he led me up the splintering wooden planks that acted as stairs to the loft of the barn.

Something touched my hair as I emerged into the darkness of the second floor. It jingled playfully and slid off of my head as I moved further up. A few strips of light streamed through cracks in the boards, lighting up the swirling particles of dust that filled the room. These dazzling beams would have rendered everything else black by comparison, had it not been for the art. Because the thing that had dangled on my head a moment ago was a piece of a mirror, suspended by a length of fishing line. It hung, along with countless other shards, from a metal faucet, from which rays of straight metal wire burst, each supporting a cluster of reflective fragments.
As my eyes adjusted, yet again, I saw that the room was full of these glittering mobiles, throwing strips of light in every direction. There was one, centered around a Styrofoam head, made from pieces from a broken stained-glass window. It twirled around, flinging flighty, colored stains on the slanted walls. The peeling wood was aglow with sparks and patches of color. Then I noticed the sculptures. There were figures of pondering men, ballerinas, pianos, elephants, all constructed of twisted wire and metal scraps. These were illuminated by the mobiles, and they sparkled as the light slid over them.
There were canvases, too. Propped up on stands made out of stolen firewood and stale two by fours. There were sketches of lean, graceful dancers, of peasants working in fields, and, most of all, birds. There were large sketches of swans, pheasants, and sparrows, and one that was unmistakably Pidgie. I walked up to a wall to examine a piece of paper that was tacked up. It was a sketch of a man hauling a load of hay on his back. He bore a definite resemblance to Charlie.
“You like that one?” He asked.
“I like them all,” I said, still awestruck, “but yeah, this one’s really cool.”
“Take it,” he said, “I have hundreds.”
“Really? Thanks, Charlie!” I exclaimed, and removed it from the wall. I looked around for a desk or shelf to put the tack on, but there wasn’t any. What I saw was a mattress, laid over an arrangement of crates. Next to that was another crate with a gas lamp on it. Around it was strewn a small amount of clothing, a tiny space heater, and a bucket. Charlie followed my gaze.
“I don’t have much, but this is what I’ve got,” he said, motioning to the corner with the bed in it. Something began to rustle outside, and Charlie walked past the bed and pushed against the wall. The loft door swung open and light streamed in. Pidgie swooped inside and landed softly on Charlie’s hat. The gleaming of the mobiles intensified, and the wind from outside set them to swiveling and tinkling. I watched the cloud of my breath in front of me, then looked back to the space heater, then back to Charlie. Charlie, in his fingerless gloves and his stubble and his fedora. His eyes, in this light, were the uncertain, blue-grey color of a lake, right before sunrise. I stared at them for a long time.

In the following months, I visited the barn across the street daily. I became well acquainted with the cluttered, tangled mess of the barn. I also became acquainted with its other inhabitants. In addition to Pidgie, it was home to a dozen sparrows, two pheasants, a rooster, and a brood of panicky hens. Most of them spent their time milling around the first floor, or in the basement, which I was told was both dangerous and uninteresting. I occupied myself with sifting through the goldmine of garbage as I listened to Charlie’s stories. He told me what Hackettstown used to be like, and how different things were in the other places he had lived. He had hitchhiked through five states, met Arlo Guthrie at a bar, and shared a truck with someone who he was sure, he said, was a murderer. When I held up an item, he’d explain where it had come from; a sombrero that had been won in a poker game with a bullfighter, an ashtray from the White House. Upon retrospect, it’s very likely that he made those stories up to entertain me. Most of the things had belonged to his father and his grandfather. But I didn’t question them for a moment.

On the first day of spring weather, with my parents’ permission, he took my brother Sam and I to visit his grandfather’s property. He said the old man wouldn’t even notice, let alone mind, and, sure enough, we never once saw his face. We walked around the perimeter of the pond for a while, occasionally jumping out at a nesting goose to elicit an angry hiss. There were about a dozen nests, stuffed with stumbling goslings, guarded by a more aggressive adult. They were too young to swim in the pond just yet, but the water was placid, and we decided to glide around in the little rowboat for a while.
The surface was speckled with tiny leaves, and I watched the blurry seaweed slide beneath our oars. When we came close to a bank, though, I noticed something moving in a tangle of vines near the water’s edge. It was the tiniest gosling I had ever seen, trapped in the weeds and struggling not to drown.
“Charlie, get it out!” my brother and I yelled.
“Alright, alright,” he said, extending his oar and poking at the tendrils of the plant. They did not break, and the little bird continued to writhe and flap.
I repeated over and over, “Charlie, it’s going to die!” He considered it for a moment, looked down at what he was wearing, shrugged, and, without warning, jumped out of the boat.
The splash nearly soaked us. When he surfaced, he sloshed over to the bank and pulled out a knife. He sawed through the weeds and cupped the wet little gosling in his hand. Then he waded back to the boat and dropped it into my lap. Then he took off his hat, turned it upside down, and emptied out a stream of water into the pond.
When we had brought the boat back to the shore, Charlie took us around the pond in search of the bird’s nest.
“Geese are very protective of their young,” he said, “If this one got away from the nest, chances are its parents are dead.”
Sure enough, we reached a nest that was empty. We heard a loud hiss, and looked over to the neighboring nest, where another little gosling was trying to force its way past an angry mother. The goose began to peck at the little thing, and struck it with its wings.
“This one must be from the same nest,” came Charlie’s voice. “It’s trying to join another one, but it won’t succeed. The parents know which ones are theirs.”
“Then why don’t we take that one too?” my brother asked. Charlie thought for a moment.
“Well, they are siblings. And I guess a couple of extra birds around my place wouldn’t hurt.”
Sam and I had a good time distracting the adult goose as Charlie grabbed the gosling. We retreated to the side of the house, and he examined the pair.
“Well this one’s a girl, I think,” he said, examining the one from the nest. “And this one is definitely a boy,” he said, laughing as he held up the one from the water. “So what should we call ‘em?”
“How about Bruce?” suggested Sam. “Bruce the goose!”
“I like it,” Charlie said. “And how about her?”
“Papoose?” I offered, struggling to come up with a female name that rhymed.
“Maybe,” laughed Charlie. “How about…Lucy? Brucey and Lucy Goosey?”
“Yeah!” we said in unison, as he handed one to each of us.
When we brought them back to the barn, they began to explore. They didn’t get far before they ran into the pheasants, who circled them, sizing them up. The other birds followed suit for the next few days, and eventually, they were accepted.
I visited them after school, and then into the summer. The months passed quickly, and Brucey and Lucy grew surprisingly fast. They were the size of small ducks by June. However Charlie’s existence in the barn, by now, was drawing attention. People weren’t exactly happy with the thought of this unkempt, unemployed squatter becoming a permanent resident. His door was usually open, exposing the wealth of refuse in the barn, which had been deemed an eyesore, and the people who lived next to the barn weren’t happy with him emptying the bucket from his room in the grass outside. I heard rumors from other kids that Charles Whitt Senior had hidden a small fortune somewhere in the basement, buried beneath the floor or behind a brick. They said that Charlie was trying to find it so he could steal it. Even my parents, who had invited him for Easter dinner and even occasionally given him money, began to grow weary of his presence. I was told I shouldn’t spend so much time in the barn.
“It’s dusty.”
“There’s rusty metal.”
“You’ll get hurt.” It struck me as suspicious that these concerns were only surfacing now.

One day, when I arrived at the barn and called up to Charlie to come down. Pidgie flew down and landed on my arm. I waiting for a few minutes, and then noticed the opening in the floor that lead to the basement. I succumbed to curiosity, and I lowered my head into the opening. It was pitch dark, except for a small, rectangular window near the ceiling. I withdrew my head and lowered my feet down until they made contact with a ladder. I stepped down cautiously and looked around. There were bricks all over the floor, along with piles of dirt. Most of the floorboards had been torn up and rested against the walls. Half of the bricks that remained in the walls had marks on them. Suddenly, something shuffled past me and out of the opening. I almost fell off of the ladder, and had to hold back a cry of surprise. It was just one of the birds. So the rumors were true, then. Charlie was looking for his grandfather’s money.
“What are you doing down here?”
My head jerked upward and I nearly fell down again. Charlie stood above the opening, looking down, Pidgie on his shoulder.
I groped for an excuse, “I…well, I was waiting, and I saw–”
“I told you not to come down here. It’s dangerous,” said Charlie, sharply. He extended his arm down for me to grab, and I hoisted myself out of the basement.
“Sorry,” I said, looking at my feet.
“It’s alright,” he said, “Here, I have something for you.” He picked something up from a nearby bureau and handed it to me. It was an old record sleeve that I had absentmindedly covered in black and white checkers with Charlie’s paint.
“But…what–”
“Look,” he said, handing me a plastic bag. I peered inside and saw an assortment of nuts, bolts, gears, clothespins, and other small knickknacks. “It’s a chess set,” he said. “The kings are the big bolts, the queens are the clothespins–I painted them so you know which is which–the pawns are the bus tokens, and the… well, you can figure it out.”
I was ecstatic. I had a chess set of my own at home, and we played often. But this one was so much better. It was so…Charlie.
“This is great!” I said. “Thanks a lot, Charlie.”
He hi-fived me and said, “It was nothing.” Then he told me he had to go out for a while, and that I probably shouldn’t be in the barn alone. “In case you get hurt. You know, the people around here.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s okay.” I thanked him again for the chess set and walked back to my house. When I got in, my mother was on the phone.
“Well, the pool hasn’t been cleaned for a while. We haven’t been using it. But when we got home from church, we found footprints in the algae on the bottom, and a bar of soap in the grass. We were just wondering if you saw– what? Oh my god. Yes. Yes, that’s what I thought, too. No, we’re going to deal with it right now. Well, thank you Rhonda.” She hung up the phone. “Do you know what that was about?” she asked.
“No, what?”
“Charlie has been using our pool when we’re at church. Not only that, he was swimming in it with the geese!” I imagined Charlie doing a leisurely backstroke as Brucey and Lucy circled him. I laughed. “It’s not funny, Ben,” she snapped. “We’re going to have to talk to him about this.”
“Well he doesn’t have a bathtub; at least he’s keeping clean!” I said, defensively.
“It doesn’t matter. Swimming or bathing or whatever in our pool, when we’re not home, is going too far.” I didn’t want to admit it, but I could see her point.
“Well, I’m sure if you ask him to stop, he will,” I said, casually.
“I sure hope so,” she said.
It started to rain later in the day, and by about six o’clock it was a downpour. I was organizing the bag of chess pieces when I heard an argument from outside. I left my room, went downstairs, and looked outside. My father and Charlie were yelling at each other across the street.
“That doesn’t give you the right to come anywhere near our house!” yelled my dad.
“Oh, okay!” Charlie retorted. “Mr. Christian. Mr. Generous, Righteous, Good Samaritan! What happened to…the…high and mighty…charitable heart? Huh?” He was clutching a bottle, and he had clearly been drinking. He staggered forward a few steps and shouted something too slurred to understand. I didn’t like seeing him like this. His long hair was soaked and stringy, and his eyes were half-closed.
The door to the barn was open, and one of the geese peeked its head out. It was the size of a small swan, and its yellow fuzz was now brown, with real feathers here and there. Inside, I could see water dripping from several places. I guessed that the roof was leaking. Charlie had probably asked to stay in the house until the rain stopped, but my father just having found out about the pool, it was the wrong time to ask. My father stood on our side of the street, yelling back at him to go away, and somehow, I knew it was Lucy that was peeking out.

During the last few weeks of summer, I only visited the barn about once a week. Charlie seemed a little distant, and I noticed that he had begun packing some of his things. I asked him if he was planning on going somewhere, but I never got a straight answer.
Before I knew it, it was late autumn. Brucey and Lucy were now full-fledged Canada geese, covered in brown and white feathers. They were black from their bills all down their necks, except for a white patch on their faces.
“Are you going to take them with you?” I asked Charlie one day.
“No, they’ll be migrating soon. They can’t stick around here forever.”
“So we’ll never see them again?” I asked, upset.
“Well, the interesting this about geese is, they always come back…at least once.”
“What do you mean?” I said, puzzled. “They’ll remember us?”
“No, but they’re sort of like Pidgie,” Charlie explained, stroking the bird on his finger. “They have an amazing sense of direction.”
“But why do they leave and come back, instead of just staying?” I asked him.
“Well, they’ve got to go and see other places. But even if it’s only for a while, they’ll always find their way back to the place they were born, before they leave for good.”
The next time I visited the barn, Charlie was gone. His canvases were all gone, and most of the junk had been sold or thrown out. The basement was mostly empty as well. I wondered if he had found the money, or if he had just given up.

About a month ago, I ran into Charlie in town. I almost didn’t recognize him, because his hair was shorter and he was almost clean-shaven. He had a briefcase and he was wearing a white shirt and a green tie. It looked strange on him; it clashed with his blue-grey eyes. He told me about how he got a job and an apartment, and we talked about the barn and his art. I asked if Pidgie was still around, and he told me she had died the previous year. I told him I was sorry, and he said “Me too.” Then I said I had to go, but it was nice to see him. He said he had to go, too. But he told me something interesting before we parted.
He asked me, “Do you know what the difference is between a pigeon and a dove?”
I told him I didn’t.
He told me, and then said goodbye and walked the other way down the street. I thought about it for a long while afterward.
I walked home, yelled “Mom, I’m home!” and walked into the kitchen, where my little sister was making a sandwich.
“Hey Maddie, do you know what the difference is between a pigeon and a dove?”
“Yeah,” she said, “pigeons are dirty, and they go to the bathroom on statues and all over the city. And doves are used in magic tricks and weddings and stuff. And they’re pure white.”
“No,” I told her, “They’re the same bird. The only difference is the name.”

The building, though, is nothing compared to the patrons that frequent it. The frantic nanny who scoops up however many hundreds of children’s books she can hold before scurrying out without her card. The lonely college student who sits at the table reading the Times until we close. The registered sex offender who’s afraid to register for a card, and just piddles on Microsoft Word all day. The wide-eyed Pakistani man who tries furiously to barter for his books, unwilling to believe that they are to be borrowed for free.

“No, Mr. Hasaan, I wouldn’t have much use for a goat. Yes, I’m sure it’s a very nice goat.”

These are people you’re not exposed to in everyday life, the square pegs. These are the people who are attracted to public libraries. If I encountered these oddities in any other setting, I would probably treat them like most people treat a roadside attraction: glance in momentary interest, and then write it off as not worth the effort.

“No, Mr. Hasaan, I’m sure your daughter is very lovely. I’m just not sure I want to get married just yet.”

But in this setting, in this isolated, creaky wooden box, what else is there to do? There is an alternative, I suppose: read.

Day to day life in the 1800’s. The Idiot’s Guide to Postpartum Depression. You read the nearest book, regardless of the subject. How Salt is Made. The Bhagavad Gita. Ten Biographies of Philo Farnsworth. I can tell you how to take apart a fuel injector, or how to make home-made glaze for pottery. I can tell you what Neville Chamberlain’s favorite food was. There is no better way to acquire a gangly, sprawling spread of knowledge than to read the books that no one checks out. Besides, perhaps, reading only the books that people check out.

By this I mean walking over to the pile of recently returned items, the contents of which are controlled entirely by the interests of 100 different people at any time, and picking a book at random. If someone was remodeling their kitchen, you get to learn about tiling and caulking. If somebody has lost a loved one, you’ll find “Coping with Personal Loss”. Maybe some of the letters on the first page are pushed up into soft little bubbles, warped by teardrops. Maybe they left a bookmark in the chapter on “Survivor’s Guilt”.

It’s this voyeuristic quality of my job that I enjoy most. The relationship between a librarian and his patrons is an intimate one. When a thirty-something woman stumbles in, hair plastered to her face with rain-water or tears, and drops a pile of books on the table, I know her story. She’s returning “A Freudian Primer,” “Roadmap to the Human Brain” and “How to Bounce Back: An Unemployment Guide.” This one’s a struggling student. Also available to me are the titles she’s checked out before, her street address, phone number, e-mail address, and various other information. Mine is a privileged position.

So to what use do I put this power? Sure, I could snigger covertly about the old woman who returns “Men’s Health” magazine with full page photos torn out, or break the sacred librarian’s code by outing guys in my school as Twilight fans. And alright, yes I have. But I also want to be a part of them. I want to extend a finger and poke their lives.

So when the anonymous girl checks out an Ellen Hopkins book stuffed with addiction pamphlets, maybe I slip in the number of a local rehab center that helped out a good friend of mine.

When the bullies in the Juvenile room steal the introverted 3rd grader’s time travel books, maybe I type out a “mission from the future”, print it out and slip it in his backpack.

Or when the solitary, silent Mr. Gibbs picks up his tenth mystery novel this week, maybe I’ve scrawled something on the back page like “Gazebo, Monday, 4 PM.” Maybe those lonely eyes of his sweep over it at the same time that the widow with the British accent, who checks out all the same authors, sees the one I wrote for her.

Maybe when I see that the 19 year old father racked up a fifty dollar fine on a late Clifford DVD, I accidentally make it disappear.
And when the middle-aged Nazi guy checks out Apocalypse Now, maybe I accidentally gave him the disk for American History X.

Am I abusing my position then? No more than the psychologist who takes pleasure in listening to and directing their clients’ lives; a pleasure completely separate from professional interest. No more than the mailman who occasionally peeks into his loot, the darkroom technician who makes extra copies of the quirkiest photos for his own collection. The desire to observe a thing and perhaps prod it with a stick is not a flaw or sin, but a tendency of all humans.

The grunts of these things harmonize with the groans of the plumbing. The door squeaks in time with the little girl who spots a mouse. These people are a part of the building just as much as it is a part of them. Yes, it holds the knowledge and stories written by people before us, but the most important things it holds are the stories lived by those around us.

“Seriously, though, make sure you understand what you’re getting into. This is both dangerous and illegal.”

His words echoed in the stiff silence, along with the distant whistles from the highway. Weeds and brittle twigs cracked beneath our feet as we trudged up the steep, winding path. My fingers, ghostly white and frigid, ached for the warmth of the car that I had left parked in the shadow of a funeral home in town.

The moon was full, by some unholy coincidence, sunk into the sky like a lost pearl earring. It was barely visible between the jagged fingers of trees whose job it was to shield this place from its wandering, cataract gaze. Only now that it had become deadly silent did I realize how comforting the hum of sparse traffic had been.

“Keep your lights down, because the last thing we need are cops.”

I disagree, Alex. The last thing we need are rapists and murderers who squat these sorts of places and prey on curious youth. I spoke this aloud and heard a feeble whimper from the walking ball of fleece that was Lizzie; she was already regretting the decision to come along. Alex led the way, although I was a few paces ahead of him, and Keegan trod wordlessly beside us.

The path eased its incline as we approached the top of the climb. The woods shifted with our steps, a tattered curtain, withered by unyielding soil. It slipped out of sight and in its place, there it stood: the dirty secret of this town. The skeleton of an institution, rotting meat still clinging to its frame. The long-abandoned Lambertville High School.

A chill wracked my body as I stood at the foot of the ghastly structure. Not from fear, but excitement. The rush of exploring, and of sneaking into a place that I was undeniably not supposed to be, was enough to convince me that the risk was negligible.

Life, especially for a suburban teenager, is bound tightly in laws, prohibitions, and boundaries. These are, of course, necessary for our protection and for the maintenance of our society. But the more they become a part of us, a part of the way we act and the way we think, the closer we get to our breaking point. You can cap a pot of boiling water, but only for so long. The restriction just serves to condense the steam, to provide it with a chamber in which it can collect, build up power, and eventually explode into freedom. So it is with people. Eventually, we realize how tightly we are constricted by the forces that govern our lives, and we seek to tear them down, rip them from our minds. It is at this point that we find ourselves breaking character. We run away, or we set fire to our life savings. We go on a soul-searching back-packing trip, or we catch gonorrhea on a one night stand. Or, we break into an abandoned, burned-down high school.

The latter of these five required the least sacrifice on my part, and so it was this that I had decided to do. The light from our four flashlights swept quietly across the front of the building, crawling between cracked windows and blackened bricks. It slid across the front tower, each chipped tile pulsing and fading in turn, and then onto the enormous clock, forever frozen at two forty-one AM. Then it slipped down into the entrance, where it was swallowed by blackness.

While the others prepared to enter, I took note of a dilapidated toilet, rolled and dragged near the entrance. It was clear that at least twenty people had made use of it, and that figure doesn’t account for evaporation. I did have nearly a gallon of tea on the way over, though, and figured what the hell, it was there. I relieved myself, then walked back to the doorway.

Had I not been blind with adrenaline, I might have taken time to exchange a nervous glance with one of the others. As it was, I strode excitedly ahead, and was plunged into stale, icy darkness. I savored the absolute black for a few moments, sliding my feet cautiously across the floor, never raising them more than a few inches above the ground. Lizzie followed behind me, and her light pushed aside the shadows to reveal walls, peeling and cracked, wooden ribs exposed.

I shifted aside broken porcelain and fallen rafters with my foot. My eyes and interest were drawn immediately to a nearby staircase, but the rest of my party was cautiously advancing into another room, so I reluctantly followed.

I noticed the pace at which they were advancing, and knew that thoughts of pale, transparent children and lunatics with axes threatened to break the spirit of exploration. But not for me. The real danger, I knew, was in the exposed wires above me, the trembling foundation below me, and the glass, insulation, and rusted pikes all around me, not one of which served to repel me in the slightest.

We descended into a crumpled hallway and moved slowly ahead. Classrooms, torn apart by heat and weather, recoiled from our beams at every doorway, their every wall canvassed in graffiti and ruin. I entered one at random, crunching glass and plaster beneath me. This was a room where a boy my age spent interminable hours learning about isotopes, writing persuasive essays, staring at the clock. If only he could have seen this sight. God, I wish he could have known that the blackboard he was staring at would be cleaved in two, a swastika sprayed on one side, an anarchist haiku on the other; that the seat beneath him would be burnt beyond recognition, then someday hurled through the glass pane behind him. I wish he could have seen his locker, melted and skewed, filled with empty spray-cans and crawling with ivy; this ancient relic, overtaken by nature and natural rebellion.

Every room in that place yielded the same epiphany. I heard the same echoes in the debris that littered the floor, in the shallow corners and charred, empty cabinets. I saw the same fleeting mirages in camera flashes that split the darkness. And everywhere, on almost every surface, was the graffiti. Tags, names, poetry, and signatures. Artwork and scribbles. Evidence of prior exploration; testaments to the might of suburban conquistadors.

When we hit a solid blockade of wreckage, I dragged my company to the second floor, only to find that a room had collapsed onto the first floor. How many history projects, I wondered, made up the dust that covered the broken railings.

The others were satisfied, but I spotted another staircase. Keegan point blank refused to ascend even higher on this rickety tangle of wreckage, but I ignored him. I was numbed by my own audacity. I eased up slowly and carefully, and called down to them: “Guys, you really have to come up here.”

Their heads emerged, one by one, from the darkness of the stairwell, into a pool of cold moonlight. The night sky stretched across our view. All above us were stars, and all around us were the lights of the town and the passing cars. And right above us was the moon, now freed from its place in the trees. There were walls and fragments of walls encircling the entire floor, but the roof was now the rubble we walked upon. Small trees and thick vines reached skyward from the floor, from the piles of charred wood and the broken cement blocks.

I looked around at the pieces of blackboard and the shipwrecked equipment, and I heard the crushing and the uplifting words written on King Solomon’s ring so many thousands of years ago:

“This too shall pass.”

And then I looked around at the walls, covered with the graffiti. Vines snaked in and out of byzantine twirls of text, and underlined the signatures of the few that had resolved to climb to this level. Then I thought of the dozens on the floor below us, and the hundreds on the floor below that. Even the toilet down by the entrance. And then, I squinted up at the full moon, flooding the whole floor with its blaze. I laughed, and I stamped my foot down in the dust that was once a ceiling. I pressed hard, ground my shoe into the carpet of debris, and then walked away, leaving a single footprint.

At two thirty-nine AM, the flames dance into a classroom. They eat up stacks and stacks of history books, and then advance to the front. For a moment, they linger, poised on the floor. Then they leap onto the world map, pulled down across the blackboard. They sweep from pole to pole in seconds, melting everything.

And up on the tower, the clock hands shudder to a stop.

As I made my way down these streets of sales, my eyes slipped from box to box with unfounded desire. I was conscious of my conditioning as a consumer, yes, but I was not immune to it. Perhaps this place was a monument to excess, but…this little Zen fountain would melt away the stress of everyday life. After all, the package read “Melts away the stress of everyday life!” And the miniature iron was certainly a necessity. I mean, it’s an iron, but look at it! It’s so much smaller than an average iron! This is gold! The two twenty dollar bills in my shoe were aching to be spent; on what, they did not care.

With each new television I passed, the inferiority of my current set became more and more evident. Every new row of clothing presented at least two articles that I would surely wear once or twice. Even home appliances, which are of little use to a teenager, seemed to call out to me, boasting the ability to puree faster than ever, or the addition of a fancy LED thermometer. The newer the better. If it gets old, you throw it out. That’s the way things work. I rounded the corner, heading for the electronics section, when I came upon a row of massage chairs. Yes, massage chairs: the epitome of suburban decadence. We will actually spend hundreds of dollars on a device created to relax us during the most stressful daily activity of all: sitting on our bums.

Sitting in one of these massage chairs was a man of about seventy. He appeared to be either asleep or comatose, and one eye was slightly open. As I passed, my curiosity regarding the machine’s quality outweighed my distaste for strange old men, and I took a seat one chair over from him. As I fumbled with the controller, I heard the man grunt. “Sick, innit’?”

“Sorry?” I said tentatively, not entirely sure if the man was awake.

“It’s sick, innit’? All this garbage in one place.”

Assuming the man to be either senile or somnolent, I replied with an unenthusiastic, “Oh, uh, yeah.” The man opened his one eye wider to get a better look at me, as if to size me up.

“S’yer name, kid?”

“Ben,” I replied, hesitantly. This was already becoming awkward.

“Ben, look at that shelf next to yeh.” I glanced to my right and saw a rack of paperweights with shamrocks painted on them. “What do yeh suppose them’s for?”

“They’re paperweights,” I said, patiently. “They keep your papers from blowing away.”

“That right?” asked the man, amused. “Seems like it’d be a fair sight easier to do yer paperwork indoors, don’t it?”

“I think it’s for when breezes come in through the window,” I replied, resigning to the conversation.

“Well of course it is, but why would yeh spend four dollars on a hunk of glass to weigh down yer papers when you could use a stapler or even a pen?”

“I think they’re designed to be given as gifts, not purchased for yourself,” I explained.

“Who in the hell would want a piece-a-crap paperweight for a gift?” the man asked, gruffly.

“I suppose somebody Irish,” I said, eyeing the shamrocks.

“Let me tell yeh somethin’, Ben, I’m a hunerd’ percent Irish, and I’d knock a tooth out of the sonofagun who tried to get away with givin’ me one of those for my birthday,” said the man, leaning back in his chair. He must have noticed me rolling my eyes, because he went on. “Oh, so yeh don’t believe me? Don’t think an old man like me could throw a punch, do yeh?”

“No, no, I’m sure you could.”

“Yer damn, right, I could,” he shot back, irritably. He seemed like he was going to say something more, then swatted at air in my direction, as though abandoning the effort. I was glad to be free from the conversation, and leaned backward onto the soothing, kneading cushion behind me. Hardly a minute had passed by, when…

“This isn’t even close to a Shiatsu massage. This is just pointy machinery moving around on your back.” I looked over at the old man, who was reading a sign near the chair he was sitting in.

“Actually,” I said, “Shiatsu is a painful massage technique from Japan. It’s not supposed to be comfort–” “I know damn well what Shiatsu is. Atsu means pressure, and yeh know what Shi means? It means finger! Not a yo-yo on a motor. Human fingers; fingers that touch, and knead, and heal. I was stationed in Japan for 3 years. I know what a Shiatsu massage is.”

The old man had gained some serious points. Just as I was in the middle of showing off my Wikipedia-gained knowledge of Japanese massage, he comes up with this. “So, do you speak Japanese?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeh’ve got to learn the language if yer gonna leave the base at all. What was I gonna do, sit around playin’ Solitaire as an excuse to stare at the women on the back of my cards, or go out and get some with the rest of the boys?”

“Alright,” I conceded, “tell me about it.”

Forty-five minutes later, my ears ringing with tales of war and romance, adventure and mischief, I was leafing through his wallet, looking at photographs. I stopped on one of a healthy-looking youth with dark brown (I assumed; the photo was black and white) hair lying spread-eagle on a light carpet. “And what’s this one?” I asked, rotating the wallet to see it from different angles.

“Aye, that was my first time jumpin’ out of a plane.” I looked closer, and realized that what I had taken for a carpet was a cloud-streaked sky. “I tell yeh, Ben; it’s a feelin’ you never forget. I woulda shit myself right there in the air if I warn’t afraid it’d end up on my head after a 10,000 foot drop.” He kept a straight face for a moment, then we both burst out laughing. A mother passing with her two young children scowled and walked a little faster. “Hey, yeh wanna see somethin’ real special?” he asked me after the woman had hurried past.

“Yeah, definitely,” I said, my curiosity flaring up once again. He reached over and undid his right cuff with his left hand, then rolled his gray flannel shirt halfway up his arm. There on his heavily creased forearm, only slightly-faded, was a line of four Asian characters. “You have a tattoo?” I asked, amazed. He nodded, looking proud. “Well, what does it say?” I asked, more curious than ever.

“I can’t tell yeh that, my boy,” the man said, seriously.

“What? Why not?” I asked, indignantly.

“Because it’s in Chinese! I haven’t a damn idea what it says!” He burst out laughing again, harder than ever. He gasped out “I got drunk…on a week-long trip with my unit and had that little number done!” I joined in, laughing harder than I had laughed in a long time. Just then, I noticed a vibration on my leg that wasn’t caused by the chair. I pulled out my phone and answered it.

“Hello?”

“Ben, where the hell are you? I’ve been calling for twenty minutes!” came my mother’s voice.

“Sorry, I met this guy in Macy’s and we were just talking, and I didn’t feel my phone because the massage chair was vibrating the whole–”

“You were talking to a…just a guy you met at Macy’s? Ben, that’s weird. Come over to Bed Bath & Beyond, we’re leaving soon,” she said, and then hung up.

I looked back at the old man, and I was amused by the bewildered look he gave the cell-phone. “I have to go now, my mom’s leaving.”

“Alright, then. It was good talkin’ to yeh, Ben. It’s not too many kids that’d stop and talk to an old putz like me when they come to the mall.”

“Oh, no, it was my pleasure, Mis…wait, what’s that one?” I was distracted by a photo that had been flipped to the top when his wallet had fallen to the floor. I picked it up; two men, one white and one black, in a locker room, with an arm around each other in brotherly affection.

“Oh, that’s me and Mister Ali after a fight,” he said, taking the wallet. I believe that the dumbfounded look on my face amused him ten times as much as his bewilderment at the cell-phone amused me. “I told you this old man could throw a punch.”

As I walked through the mall on my way to my mother and sisters and from there back to the car, I thought about the people I admire; that I aspire to be like. Edward Norton, Simon Pegg, Ben Folds: all young, attractive, shiny new people. All top-of-the-line celebrities; people you see on television or hear on iTunes. Someone like Jerry Seinfeld is only good as long as he’s in the number one sitcom on television. Once he’s off the air, you forget about him. You throw it out. You buy a new one, a shiny one. When you sprout your first gray hair, you’re a washed-up has-been; a relic of the stone age; obsolete. Well, since that day, I’ve found that Macy’s is not worth the money. I’ve found that my best purchases–come from garage sales.