Stadham Rice

Short story inspired by an article from my college newspaper I found in a box of stuff when moving. I guess it's about the footsteps we leave behind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stadham Rice

 

 

 

 

 

He stepped out into the cold morning air, crisp with winter chill, and followed his own breath and the breaths of those who preceded him onto a narrow cement platform, hands clenched inside his pockets, willing themselves warm.  It wasn’t very long until his breath was the only breath--all the rest of the passengers had departed, following their various lives wherever they wandered; and, surveying the station in a quick, but complete, sweeping arc, he shuddered.  Not because of the cold, but this shudder escaped from within, born of the sudden but wholly supportable fear that he had done it again--again!

     Sweeping the snow from a nearby bench, a curving metal thing from which bare skin would not quickly part, he sat; and, with the hollow presentiment of what he would see, withdrew the crumpled ticket from the inside of his jacket pocket.  It was only a second, a momentary glance; and then he crumpled the ticket and threw into the nearby receptacle, closed his eyes and tilted his head backward.  At which moment, naturally, the snow began to fall anew--soft, fluffy flakes, the kind that build up fast and disappear fast, too.  If he wore a hat, he could have used it to cover his face and so continue to enjoy his stupidity--but, as an example of said stupidity, he had also forgot to wear one.  He was not generally a forgetful person, but take anyone out of their element and shove them into unfamiliar ones and they will become susceptible to all kinds of mistakes. 

     First, he’d overslept.  No--not first, not really, but it was the first mistake he was conscious of making.  A phone call had alerted him to this oversight--a wrong number, as luck would have it.  Rushing around his hotel room and then running to the station (it’s amazing that he didn’t fall!), he only just arrived in time; the bus itself was relatively empty, but he was not able to relax, watching constantly the hands on his watch as they crept ominously toward the appointed time.  The nature of buses, of public transportation in general, did little to slow the march of time; not a stop passed that didn’t add to its occupancy, some having the gall to travel with bicycles or wheelchairs.  Pressed for time, even the most patient man may have these thoughts; generally, he was a very patient man. 

     All this, and he still arrived at the station on time.  Which brings us back to the present scene: him sitting on a bench, hatless and now ticketless, alone, and content to be buried in the morning snowfall.  The reason for this?  Simply that he had purchased the wrong ticket.  If he had meant to arrive at Station A, he had somehow bought passage to Station C.  Not a terrible difference, but more than enough in this case. 

     From the corner of his eye, he checked the schedule; it confirmed his terrible luck.  By the time another bus arrived, the appointed time would already have come; by the time it deposited him at the correct station, any chance at all of meeting his client would be long gone. 

     “Waiting on the thingme?”  From somewhere outside the pale of falling snow, these words echoed in his mind.  No, in his ears--somebody had spoken them; and for the silence that followed, he guessed that he had been their target.

     He opened his eyes, shielding them against the falling snow.  “Excuse me?”

     The young man who stood beside him was tall, a gangly fellow with dirty red hair and a sarcastic smile.  Which is not to say his tone was sarcastic, or that he looked down on anyone or that he enjoyed the misfortune of traveling businessmen who had mistakenly purchased the wrong ticket--it just had that kind of a curl to it, a sneering curl that was probably nothing more than a physiognomic quirk. 

     “The thingme,” this young man repeated, gesturing at nothing in particular.  He spoke with an accent--an accent he had clearly scaled back, but it remained in no small measure.  The man on the bench could not identify it, but neither could he identify the meaning of the word ‘thingme’.

     “I’m…”  He looked about for salvation in any form, desperate to not appear as one lost in a strange city at the wrong station in the snow--his nervous desperation accentuating the truth of his situation all the more.  In the end, he said nothing.

     The young man smiled--rather, that curl in his lip reached almost up to his nose--and he pulled the zipper of his sweater up as far as it would go, his narrow chin swallowed in a fold of grayish-brown wool.  The snow settled on his dirty red hair, and his eyes seemed to glisten.

     “Do you need a ride?” the young man ventured to ask. 

     “Suppose I do,” said the man on the bench.  He could not hide the defeat in his voice, nor the uncertainty as to where such a ride should take him.  At this hour, it was almost certain he would miss his meeting; should he then return to the hotel, drown his sorrow in the work that he always carried with him, and that carried him all over the world?  But he had come this far, endured humiliation and disappointment and the snow--might he not, in the end, trudge onward, banking on the notion that luck is like whim of a child--prone to change at the slightest of turns.

     As it turned out, they were headed in the same general direction; the younger of the two men having a job in the small town of T a few miles beyond the rural college campus at which the older man had arranged his meeting.  The only difficulty would be the snow--rather, ice.  The younger man’s car--a 1991 Buick Regal, in dubious condition--was not known to handle the ice very well, and it didn’t matter if the tires were studded.  If they were, then it was still likely to slide all over the place, stall and die in the middle of an intersection somewhere if they were lucky, in a ditch if they weren’t; if they weren’t, well…

     Just starting it was an adventure, the younger man confessed--though, in truth, the car showed model eagerness at the turn of the ignition; not to say it purred, but it surely sounded a lot more reliable than its reputation.  The heater sputtered a little, but worked; so, too, the radio.  In other words, they were soon on their way.

     The college campus stretched vertically from the street level up into the neighboring hills; the dorms and the faculty buildings all spread over three primary tiers, until finally buried in the trees the whole lot was crowned by the school’s old gymnasium.  This much he had learned on his own; and, watching through the morning haze the telling signature of a single, obscenely modern clock tower, he tried to imagine the various buildings as they approached.  Not much existed between this narrow side-street and the campus, only a long and lifeless field to which clung the frozen mist: a sea of white, awash in waves of translucent gray.  The snow no longer fell.

     Going around a corner, the wheels skidded slightly toward the driver’s side; the young man apologized, his Scottish accent thickening with his dismay.  Ahead, a series of red lights shone through the deepening fog; they did not seem to be moving.

     “This isn’t good,” the young man remarked.  He glanced sidelong at the analogue clock imbedded in the glossy dash--a move that reminded the older of the two men to check his own watch (as if it might be different, more lenient) and cursed under his breath.  As the car idled in anticipation of some change ahead (what could be stopping traffic?), that breath appeared before him in a series of lingering clouds.  The heater, the young man explained, didn’t work unless the car was actually moving.  Not very good in a jam like this, but what can you do?

     “This really isn’t good,” the young man reiterated.  Rolling down his window to lean out like a dog (as if this altered perspective would reveal through the gathering fog the true cause for their delay), he shook his head; and turning to face his passenger, his brow furrowed, a stern and meaningful look fixed upon his foreign features shifted subtly to something like apology; and his passenger anticipated what he would say.

     Saving him the effort, he said “We’re close enough, and you’re on a schedule, too.  I can walk from here.”

     The driver’s features softened; he forced a smile and exhaled, his breath pooling between them.  “Are you sure?”

     He was.  He could even see his destination through the fog--he was in no danger of losing his way; he owed the young man for his kindness and couldn’t stand the thought of inconveniencing him further.  Would he accept twenty dollars for gas?  The young man politely demurred; but, presented with said twenty dollars, he did not refuse.

     And so they parted, each following their own path--two strangers, brought together in a storm that would outlive the memory of their meeting.  Neither would ever see the other again.

    He still had time.  Not much, but a little--eight minutes, to be exact, from the moment he left that car and trundled as briskly through that winter morning as his legs and the gathering fog would allow; with one eye fixed on the clock tower to the left, the other upon the roadway to his right, he marched.  He could hear the sound of humming engines, and he could hear the sound of the snow crunching beneath his feet; he could feel his heart beating in his fingertips inside his jacket pockets; and he could sense the progression of time, almost as if it was the mighty sail of ship in harbor that was about to embark--a ship he was supposed to be aboard, but would not wait for him if the appointed time came and he was not.  What, then, would become of him?  In all likelihood, this would not be what he was looking for--but what if it was?  Such thoughts kept him moving, numb not from the elements but to them; he must carry on.

     He did not know how much time had passed, but eventually he arrived.  Taking a left at the nearest intersection onto a road that was named for some historical significance attached to the campus (he couldn’t remember what), he’d followed that; and, recalling the map he’d memorized the night before, walked past the first entry and into what that map had described as overflow parking area--now empty, but for a car or two that appeared to have been left there over the holiday.  At the far side of this parking area, a series of concrete steps had been set into the hillside; these, he climbed (carefully), and found himself eventually in yet another parking area--a much smaller one, amenable to perhaps eight cars at most (four on either side)--that opened to both the left and right; to follow the rightmost path would only lead him back out to the road, while to the left stood what his map designated as a certain administrative center (named for one of the founding administrators, E).  A slightly ominous path also ran parallel to this, ending in a single door that opened to a dark hallway; a white van was parked outside, on the side of which was printed the logo of some well-known commercial food supply company.  An industrial-sized blue dumpster sat off to the left of this, fenced and in the shadow of a single, drooping willow tree.

     Having made it this far, the man at last wrenched his hands from the relative warmth of his pockets to check the time.  Sighing, his shoulders dropped.

     “Well,” he said, to no one particular, “maybe I can at least get something to eat.”  He had missed his meeting, of course.  This silver lining was born of the fact that his meeting had been arranged to take place in this small school’s cafeteria--the lowest level of the administration building and set into the side of hill.  Even during these holiday hours, it remained open for the student-athletes and for those who lived too far to make the return trip; ostensibly, it made little financial sense--the cost to run the various appliances, the amount of food that was prepared and wasted, hourly wages paid to workers who had almost no work to do--but this school was a special school in the sense that financial sense (and common sense, for that matter) often gave way to the greater good.  In other words, if there existed a single mouth to feed, then they would be there to feed it.  It may be a stretch to say it did so happily--but that is merely the jaded opinion of one too old and full of disappointment to understand.  Or, rather, to remember--for surely I understood it once.

     For a moment, he stood outside the administrative building in apparent awe of his surroundings.  No longer anxious to be anywhere, no longer drawn by the ticking of a clock toward some inexorable let down (these quests of his--if ‘quest’ is the right word--often culminated in disappointment; why he chased the ghost he did so fervently, still, after so many disappointments, only he could say), he could allow himself to enjoy the world: the gently falling snow, the quiet, the serenity of a small college campus, the company of the trees that dotted the landscape, the character of a place that refused to be like the rest of world--that retained the soul and the personality it was born with, sixty years ago when the hillside was purchased.  Once upon a time, it had been a hospital--a tuberculosis hospital; in fact, the dining hall that he should have arrived at some twenty minutes ago was rumored to have been the place where the bodies went when they were no longer people.  Of course, this particular bit of history interested the storyteller in him to no small degree; but it was not why he’d arranged this meeting, and neither did he plan to investigate it now. 

     Now, he wanted only something to warm him from the inside out--something to put in his stomach.  To wash it down with hot cider.  These were his only desires.  At some point, he would call a taxi and return to his hotel; but he would worry about that later.  So, bidding adieu to this quiet, empty world that surrounded him, he pulled open the old door and stepped into the light and the artificial warmth of the E Center, brushing from his jacket and his hair giant, fluffy flakes of snow that fell onto the brown carpet and quickly melted, leaving behind them not a single trace of their existence. 

     A stairwell opened to his immediate right; it both climbed to the second story and delved to somewhere below--and the dining hall being below, he tried that way first.  Arriving at the door at the bottom of the stairs, however, he found there was no handle--a one way exit, it would seem.  So he returned to the main floor; as someone was passing through, he excused himself and asked for directions.  The woman directed him along a passage to the left; through the doors there, she informed him, he would need to turn right and go through another set of doors--there would he find the dining hall.

     “It may not be open yet,” she added, “but if you just wait outside the doors, I’m sure someone will let you in.  It’s obvious you’re a visitor.  If you were a student, they might not--you’d know the rules then…but, even then…”  She trailed.  By her tone, it seemed that she couldn’t make up her mind to be exasperated or amused by the general liberality of the dining hall hours, as moderated by the student workers.  She disappeared into an office outside of which a nameplate read ‘Registrar’; and when she had gone, he followed her advice.

     The doors were indeed closed--locked, even--but he could see through the narrow vertical windows a single girl sitting behind a bulky computer; she wore a thin red jacket, and he recognized the logo on the outside as being the same as the one he had seen on the white van outside.  Seeing him--hearing him first when he tried to open the doors, then looking up and seeing him--she rose, leaving behind her an open register; with a blue leather pouch in one hand (filled, he could see, with money), she sorted through a ring of keys with her other.  After a moment of two of sorting, of smiling through the glass, he heard a familiar click; and stepping slightly back as the doors opened inward, he greeted the girl by way of a bow.  She seemed to find this amusing.

     “Come on in,” she said, bending down to wedge open the door.  “We don’t open for another couple minutes but don’t worry about it.  Everything should be ready.”

     He hesitated, glancing at the register and at the girl, in turns.  She merely waved him along.

     “Just come back and pay later,” she said, returning to her register.  Then adding, smiling, winking conspiratorially, “Or don’t…”  He didn’t know if she was making fun of him--he could hear her laughing quietly as he crossed the brief distance into the kitchen--but he rather liked to think she was just the kind of girl who liked to have fun, no matter the situation.  And, drawing the breakfast shift in a cafeteria during holiday was probably a situation that called for a little manufactured humor.  So he was smiling, himself, by the time he reached the kitchen. 

     I said ‘kitchen’, but what I really mean is the cafeteria--the place where the food was set out.  It was a meager display--even having never been there before, he could see the conspicuously empty trays, warming stations that could easily house four or five dishes having one or perhaps two lonely options set out; the coffee was still brewing, but the hot water was ready and without much difficulty he located the cider packets.  He was mixing these together a plain, green plastic mug when he felt the approach of someone from around the corner; the somewhat rubbery sound of her non-slip shoes preceded her.

     “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we’re not technically open yet…”  Like the woman above, she seemed to prefer an elliptical style of speech.

     “I was told it was okay,” he said, still stirring his drink.  The young woman--a student, but probably the manager he thought--looked past him to where the girl in the red jacket now sat smiling at the apparently empty space in front her, and shook her head. 

     “That Sara…”

     “Do you want me to go back outside and wait?” he offered, sipping his cider.

     “No,” said the manager, whose nametag read ‘Stacie’, “it’s close enough…”

     She took a quick inventory of the cafeteria; the dishes on the warming stations were all covered in saran wrap and so she removed it, telling him to help himself.  The staff would be out soon enough but he didn’t need to wait, it was fine.  Stacie the manager then walked to the front of the cafeteria and switched on the lights, turned left and then turned back around, laughing quietly to herself, and left him standing alone with his cider.

     “Don’t mind her,” a low, gruff voice sounded from the left.  He turned, and found there standing in the frame of a doorless doorway--filling that frame with his own--a very large man with brown skin, dark brown hair, even darker brown eyes, and a handlebar mustache.  His eyes twinkled almost childishly, mischievously--at complete odds with the man’s intimidating size--and he rested one giant hand on the corner of a grill station, watching the wall behind which the manager Stacie had disappeared.  He then twirled one stubby finger in a circular pattern around his ear, whistling.  “She’s loco,” he whispered, but not really--the kind of whisper that carries, intentionally. 

     “I heard that, Ruben!”  Apparently Stacie, from somewhere offscreen.

     Chuckling, he shuffled his massive frame behind the grill and proceeded to pour eggs out of a carton.  When the man lingered there, fascinated by the amazing transmutability of modern breakfast, Ruben raised his head.  “I’ll be ready in a minute, sir, sorry for the wait.”

     “No problem,” the man said.  Not that he’d been picturing liquid eggs when above outside the E Center thoughts of a warm breakfast entered his mind--but now that it had come this far, he felt it would be rude to say otherwise.  And, surely enough, in unnatural time, the eggs were ready for consumption.  Ready, though perhaps not fit.

     Adding to this a small helping of vegetable oil covered in hashbrowns, a bowl of something that slightly resembled porridge but he was assured to be oatmeal, and an orange, he ventured out into the dining area to enjoy his meal.  I should point out that, even after all this, not a single diner beside himself had arrived.  He could hear through the silence the sounds of the dishwasher blowing steam, smell the sterilized scent of industrial labor.  A single partition separated one half of the dining hall from the other; to avoid the signature of the dish room, he chose the side overlooking the fields that he had walked along before.  Looking down on them now, they filled him sadness--nostalgia--though he couldn’t say why.  And as he ate in silence, watching the snow fall and settle on those forlorn fields, he tried to imagine their history--what grew there, if anything, during the warmer months.  He tried to project onto them a life that he had no way of knowing had ever been there, as if to compensate for their current emptiness.  And he wondered why it was always that way, that people who found anywhere any kind of emptiness immediately would try and fill it with something--anything at all--and consider the change an improvement.  As if there is nothing created that is meant to be empty.

     He had some time ago finished his breakfast.  He checked his watch, and was about to return his dishes to the dish room; having risen halfway, he was surprised when somebody sat down directly opposite him--a young man, another student he thought.  Pausing, lingering for a moment half-risen, he eventually returned to sitting.  The young man wore a dark blue jacket, exactly like the red jacket Sara wore except in color; on his head was a hat of the same dark blue, but turned around backwards.  He had in one hand a mug of coffee, steaming but smelling burned.  The boy himself smelled like food of all kinds--probably an unavoidable trait for the dishwasher, which the boy was; he was clean-shaven, except for a tuft of hair that grew between his bottom lip and his chin; he stared across the table at the man, eyes mildly hazel and a little dull.

     “Looked like you could use some company,” said the young man, by way of apology.  

     Interesting, thought the man, I could have sworn I looked like someone about to stand up and leave--but of course he didn’t say this; he merely smiled, inclined his head in a kind of bow, and observed the dishwasher. 

     “My name’s Frank,” said that dishwasher.  “I’d shake your hand, but they’re probably all covered in gravy or something.”

     Is that really the sort of thing someone who carries clean dishes out into the cafeteria should say?  Again, he merely nodded.

     “You’re Midas, aren’t you?”  Frank watched him knowingly.

     “I am,” said the man.  “But how did you know that?”

     “Oh, I heard the name a time or two,” Frank replied, leaning back.  The bill of his hat bumped against the headrest of the booth; he leaned forward and hastily straightened it.  “Weren’t you supposed to be here earlier?”

     “I was.”

     “Well, guess with all that snow it couldn’t be helped.  Don’t worry,” he leaned forward as he spoke, sipping gingerly his burnt coffee.  “Bethany wasn’t too annoyed.  Boy,” he sat up straight, “this--” then he rose, suddenly, looking over the top of the partition.  He lowered his voice.  “Don’t say anything to Sara, but this coffee is terrible.”

     “I won’t,” said the man called Midas.  “Say, tell me--will Bethany be back any time soon?”

     Frank considered this--considered the coffee--considered the man sitting across the table--considered the table, itself--and then shrugged.  “Who knows?  I only wash dishes.  If she’s here all day long, I might see her for maybe three seconds in passing.  I’m not exactly lowest on the totem pole around here, washing dishes.”

     “Don’t you mean highest?”

     Frank braved another sip.  “No, I meant what I said.  Most people don’t realize they’ve got it backwards, about totem poles.  They just assume that the top is where you want to be, because pretty much anywhere else--big companies--heck, small ones, too--everybody always talks about wanting to make it to the top.  I think they equate totem poles with food chains, or something.  But the truth is, in the case of totems anyway, it’s the lowest spot that holds all the power.  That’s where the Chief lived, or whatever--right down there at the bottom.  And I’m pretty much as far from Chief of this place as--” he lowered his voice again, “--as this coffee is from being Starbucks.”

     “Or these eggs from being eggs,” Midas added; Frank laughed. 

     “So that’s how it is.  I can check if you like?  Her office is just down the hall.”

     Midas thanked the boy Frank, who left behind him a recent edition of the school newspaper, The Hillside News, telling him to help himself.  In the short time that Frank was gone, Midas did just that--the paper was student-run and -written, and the articles were mostly bland, unopinionated and/unoriginal; there were movie and music reviews, a fairly obvious crossword, the latest boxscores from the basketball teams, an update of the plans for a new dormitory on the third tier of the hill.  All of these he skimmed without interest; and on the very last page, a small article caught his interest.  It was entitled ‘Remembering Stadham Rice’, and set just below that title was the picture of a student: his round face, sloppy hair, his somewhat crooked smile, his eyes that seemed to be looking just over your shoulder.

     “Sorry,” said Frank, returning, “but she’s gone for a couple days.  She goes back and forth between here and another caf in M, Linda said she wasn’t sure when she’d be back.  Will that work?”

     “No,” said Midas, a little distantly--in truth, he’d resigned himself to the fact that Bethany’s story would never join his collection, and his interest rested entirely with this young man, the late Stadham Rice.  “Sorry, but I am leaving tomorrow morning.  I’m on a business trip, of sorts.”  This was always his response when asked what he was up to--a business man on a business trip--and usually that ended all inquiries.  It seemed that not very many people liked talking about business unless they were involved; and his was not that kind of business.

     “Well, that’s unfortunate,” remarked Frank, at a loss.

     “Tell me,” Midas said, “who was this Stadham fellow?”

     “Oh, Stad?”

     Midas nodded; set the paper down between them as if to assure they were on the same page--that Stad and Stadham Rice were the same.  Frank looked down at the picture, nodded solemnly but showed little more emotion--no more, in fact.

     “I don’t really know what to say,” he said, after a brief silence.  “I didn’t know him.  Saw him around, mostly up at the coffee shop.  Big guy, but quiet, sort of unassuming.  We didn’t really have any reason to cross paths, I guess--different areas of study, and he lives in the dorms and I don’t.  I’m sure the article would tell you more than I could.”

     Midas nodded again; but for some reason, in the presence of Frank the dishwasher, he couldn’t bring himself to read a single word concerning Stadham Rice or his memory.  It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, or that he lost interest--the words, themselves, seemed to blur on the page, become unfocused, refuse to be read.  Only his picture remained unchanged, and the title: ‘Remembering Stadham Rice’.

     “But…”  Frank said this, sipped on his (now warm but still terrible) coffee, and then seemed to reconsider what he was going to say, or that he was going to say anything at all.  In the end, he never finished that sentence.  Instead, his eyes darted over Midas’s shoulder; there appeared a short woman, with skin that was also brown but a softer brown than Ruben’s--almost the color of one of those really sweet coffee drinks.  Turning to face her, this was what Midas thought. 

     “Are you Mr Midas?” she wondered--her smile as sweet as the coffee she resembled. 

     “I am,” he replied.  “Can I help you?”

     “Well, I was more wondering if I could help you,” she answered. 

     “Bethany?”

     “No, gosh,” the young woman said, stifling a laugh.  “But maybe I can help you anyway.  What did you want to talk with her about?  I’d hate for you to come all this way for nothing.”

     “Well,” he began, and proceeded to tell her why he had come--that he was a in a certain business of collecting certain things, and that Bethany had heard of him and contacted him, had something that he might be interested in adding to his collection; but he had been delayed by the snow and his own stupidity, and so had missed his chance at collecting it.  “And I have business elsewhere, the day after tomorrow; from what I hear, that will be too late.”

     The young woman looked down, then out onto the empty, snowy fields.  A single car braved the elements and crept slowly along from the right to the left, toward the road junction where Midas had previously left the Scottish man’s company.  Just as the car was passing below, and seemingly for no reason, it began to slide sideways; it seemed destined for the ditch, but at the very last moment it corrected itself and carried on its way.  The young woman shook her head.  “People just don’t make any sense,” she remarked--probably picturing herself in a similar situation, suffering a worse fate.  Remembering, maybe.

     Apologizing again, she left Midas and Frank alone with Stadham’s memory. 

     “To be honest,” Frank said, after a little while, “I don’t know many people who could tell you much about Stad.  At a school like this…most people know most everyone else at a small school like this, you know?  It’s almost like a big family, one of those really big families with cousins everywhere that maybe you’ve only heard of before or seen in pictures, but you still feel like you know them because they’ve got some of the same blood you do.  It’s like that here.  But even still, every now and then someone shows up and you don’t have any idea who they are, you don’t see them with anyone else you really know; and they just show up and then they go away, and you don’t ever know who they are or what they’re here for.  What they’re studying, I mean.  And then, one day, you just don’t see them anymore.  Why’s that?”

     “They graduated, I guess,” ventured Midas.  It seemed logical enough.

     Frank went on as if he’d said nothing at all.  “You miss them once or twice, you wonder…but pretty soon, you don’t.  And it’s like they were never even here, you know?  Then you go and pick up the school news and you read an article about how they’ve passed…’Remembering Stadham Rice.’  Well, what if you don’t remember them, at all?”

     For some reason, this question really struck Midas.  He couldn’t come up with anything like a suitable answer, and so he said nothing.

     “I wish I could tell you something else, tell you some funny story about old Stad, or something good he did for someone once because he was just a good ol’ guy who did good things--but I really can’t.  We never spoke a word, I don’t think we even ever smiled at each other.  It’s strange, isn’t it?  Reading that article…it could say anything at all about him, right?--and I wouldn’t be able to say, ‘No, that’s not it, that’s not the Stad I know’, or, ‘Exactly!  Isn’t that just like him?’.  Maybe he wasn’t like that at all.  To me--and I hate to say this because I don’t mean it like it sounds--he’s nothing more than that picture right there.  That’s the only him I know existed.  And I’m not the only one.”  Again, he fell silent.  Then, “So, tell me, Mr Midas--when even that picture gets forgotten…what’s left?  What’s left of old Stad?  If nobody remembers a single thing about you, can you really say you existed at all?”

     “In his case, I don’t think he’s in the position to say one way or the other.”

     Frank looked at Midas, not sure what he meant; then he curved his smooth face into something like a smile--forced something like a laugh out of his lips--and looked away.  The snow was falling, the flakes big and fluffy and covering all.  Even those one or two cars parked in the overflow below were invisible under the blanket of white.  If somebody--if Frank told him now that those cars did not exist, would he be able to argue that they did?  He wondered.

     “I don’t know,” Frank said, finally standing.  The sound of conversation on the other side of the partition spoke of the morning’s first arrivals--and heralded the requirement of Frank’s presence elsewhere.  He never said what he didn’t know.  Instead, he wished Midas good look on his business trip, and the two parted; they never saw or heard of each other again.  In one year from now, would Frank even remember the face of a single old, wandering business man?  To be remembered--it was not something he’d ever wanted before, because it was not something he’d ever considered; but as he rose, taking with him the newspaper that Frank had left behind, he found himself wishing, hoping, that the day would never come that the name Lennie Midas would mean nothing to anyone.  A man can live forever, even after they are dead, so long as they are remembered; true death only comes to the forgotten.

     He returned the dishes to their place; and, folding the paper under his arm (in true businessman-like fashion), he walked to the register, wallet in hand.  Sara looked up from the book she’d been reading--it caught his eye, and in the midst of opening his wallet he asked what it was.  The art appealed to him--it looked almost like a children’s book, and he had grown fonder of those types of books the further he had grown from his own forgotten childhood.  By way of answer, she held it up for him to see.

     “The Boy and His Friend, the Blizzard,” he read.  “I’ve never heard of it.  Is it good?”

     Sara nodded enthusiastically, her ponytail bobbing behind her like, well, the tail of a pony.  “It’s very good,” she answered, “but a little sad, too.  It wasn’t what I was expecting.”

     “No?”

     Taking this as an invitation to summarize for him the entire plot of the short novel, she did exactly that--all the while providing him correct change and taking meal cards from six students and two members of the school’s faculty. 

     “I see,” he said, when she was finished.  He was a little touched by the fact that little tears seemed to be gathering around her eyes.  He made a note to look for the book, himself.  In fact, if she would direct him to the school’s library, he would do exactly that--considering he had no other plans for the rest of that day.  And, happily, Sara did just that.

     Two hours later, he set the book aside and understood the tears that Sara had not been able to check; it took everything he had to check his own.  Returning the book to the librarian, a red-headed student who seemed to amuse himself by turning everything on the front desk upside down (placard, bell, stapler--anything not fastened in place), Midas thanked him for his assistance and made to leave through the front doors.

     “Wait up, old boy,” said this student, with a friendly, jocular warmth, “those steps get treacherous this time of the year.  Why not take the elevator?”

     “Elevator?”  He wasn’t aware one existed.

     The student, Jim, rose from his seat behind the counter.  “Follow me,” he said.

     “Follow…?”

     “Come on, it ain’t exactly rush hour around here.  Give a guy an excuse to stretch his legs, why don’t you?”

     Oh, Midas thought, he’s bored.  Guess it can’t hurt.  He nodded assent; and so Jim, leading Midas all of five feet across the hall to where a set of double doors that could easily have passed for mere wall space stood facing a discount book shelf, filled with books the library was trying to get rid of, paused to pull a small keyring from the pocket of his khakis and fit one of the keys into the wall; after a moment or two of mechanical groaning, a single chime sounded and the doors parted.

     “Just hit the ‘B’,” Jim said.  “It’ll take you downstairs to the mail room, and it’s just a straight shot out of there.  Don’t have to worry about a lawsuit--I mean, injury.  Actually,” he seemed to consider Midas, something about him.  “You like interesting things, old boy?  Old stories, things like that?”

     He didn’t just like them--he lived for them.  Of course, he didn’t say this; instead, he merely nodded.  Jim’s smile widening so much that he had to squint his eyes to make room for it, he beckoned Midas into the elevator, taking the lead for himself.

     “What about the desk?” Midas wondered.

     “What about it?” posed Jim.  And that was that.

     In the elevator, Jim pressed the ‘3’ button.  At Midas’s confused look, the librarian only told him to wait--he’d see.  Each button on the panel (there were only four: 1-3, and B) was backlight to show which floor the elevator was currently at; Jim watched the panel like a hawk might watch behind a tractor in a field, ready to strike.  When the button denoting Floor 2 lit, he moved his finger to hover right over the Emergency Stop button; the light disappeared, Jim waited a second and then while still no light shined behind Floor 3, he stopped the elevator.  Chuckling to himself, to Midas in a strange, somewhat comically maniacal manor, he then pressed the Emergency Open button. 

     “Here, help me out,” he said, reaching into the crack to try and pry to the elevator doors open.  Midas did just that; the newspaper fell open at his feet. 

     Eventually the doors did open; Midas hadn’t known what to expect, but certainly it had not been this.  Which is not to say he was very impressed--it was interesting, certainly, but being a stranger on this strange, remote campus, what significance could he attach to something like this?

     “Pretty curious, right?” Jim said, admiringly the wall those opened doors revealed.  But it was not just any wall: it was covered in names--names in all sizes, all colors of ink, in lead, some faded and some appearing quite fresh--names that of course meant nothing at all to Midas, that most of which probably meant just as much to Jim; but it could not be denied that the wall contained an aura of mystique.  Like a monument to some forgotten past, a time capsule--names that would survive, that probably had survived, much longer than the people they had belonged to.  Jim pointed out his own; Midas saw also that a ‘Frank’ was included among the roster of names, that a ‘Bethany’ was there also; and though he looked, he could not find anywhere written the name ‘Stadham’.

     “Here, old boy,” Jim said; he was holding a pen, a black sharpie.  “Have at ‘er.”

     “What’s the story?” Midas asked, while carefully writing his own name, Lennie, in some inconspicuous corner of the monument. 

     “Story?”

     “Didn’t you say there was one?”  He could feel the disappointment welling--but no surprise.

     Taking back his pen, Jim shrugged.  “The story is whatever you want it to be, Lennie.  Take a look at these names, these guys and girls.  Some of ‘em been dead for years, I bet.  Most of ‘em I’ve never met and never will.  So they can mean whatever you want ‘em to, can’t they?”

     “I’m not sure they’d agree.”

     “Well, they aren’t here.  And you know what?--some day you and I won’t be here, either, but someone will find this wall and see ‘Jim’ or ‘Lennie’ and they won’t know you or I from Adam--” (Midas started--hearing instead the name ‘Stadham) “--and so we’ll become whatever they want us to.  We’ll become someone else’s story, that’s what I mean.  You see?  This wall is full of stories--more stories than we’ve got in this whole library, even.  Pretty interesting, don’t you think?”

     It was, but Lennie couldn’t find it in himself to feel that interest.  Maybe later, days or weeks or years later, looking back, he would; if the name ‘Stadham’…  Leaning down, he gathered his fallen paper; he perused the pages quickly to make sure it was in order, but for some reason he could not find the memorial article anywhere.  Everything else was there, but the page including Stadham’s memorial must have slipped through the cracks and gone.  Crestfallen, he didn’t even notice the closing doors, the whirl of the elevator’s old gears, or the chime of the mailroom door opening.  Only vaguely would he later recall Jim’s farewell.  Maybe he’d merely overlooked the article--later, in the comfort of his hotel, he was sure…

     It was almost ten when Lennie Midas stepped out of the mailroom, into the swirling snow.  Having borrowed the library phone to call for a cab back to his hotel, he’d been told that no cabs would drive the narrow roads surrounding the school because of the snow and ice, that he’d have to catch a bus; and so, newspaper tucked firmly beneath his jacket, he made the slow journey back toward the junction, followed his earlier path exactly to the place where the Scottish man had deposited him about three hours previously; and if he noticed in setting out that his earlier footprints had been erased by the falling snow, in looking back at this particular juncture he was alarmed to find that even these returning prints had already disappeared.  Looking back in the direction of the dining hall, he tried to picture the scene as it would look from there--to put himself in the shoes of that caramel-colored young woman, looking out on those empty fields and the road below; with nothing telling of his ever having walked this way or that, he wondered just how many people would look down now--just now--and yet have no idea he had ever been?  It was a lonely thought, a depressing thought--and he wished he could have learned something more about Stadham Rice.

Author's Note

Old story.