The Healthee Hut is still here, which I think is miraculous. On a Saturday it won’t open for a few more hours. Sandy Park looks about the same except the swing set, slide, and playhouse all seem smaller than I remember.
The vacant lot behind the police station got paved over since we were here. There are trailers parked on it with police badges painted on the sides. I keep pedaling.
The stationery store is out of business, with a huge FOR LEASE sign in its window. Inside it’s completely empty, stripped down to unpainted drywall. I pull the now-mangled joke book out of my back pocket. It falls open naturally, to a page toward the middle, the page it’s been opened to the most.
MODERN PSYCHIATRY
Q: Why didn’t the psychiatrist believe anything his patients said?
A: Because they were all lying on his couch!
Q: Why did the psychiatrist use the spatula to flip burgers at the Bar-B-Que?
A: To avoid a slip of the tongs!
Back when Nolan bought it we found every page hilarious. I can’t believe I understood half these jokes then. Now that I do, they’re not laugh-out-loud funny. I want to go back to that time, to understand what we were thinking. How we felt.
I pedal through town. It’s quiet except for the few people who need to work Saturday mornings and some old people who don’t but are up anyway, out hunting up breakfast, looking for news still printed on paper, or taking slow walks.
I park at the bank in the same racks as the time Nolan and I came. It’s the right building but I don’t know if it’s the same bank. Doesn’t matter. It’s closed today. That’s fine. I’m not going inside.
Three years ago we did.
Ready to see something awesome? Bring your Magic Wand. You’re gonna love this.
I didn’t. I loved everything that day up to this point, when he led me through the glass doors in front and I saw the intense artificial light flickering hotly in his eyes. I didn’t love anything for a long time after.
I worried the photos I saw online earlier were old and the fire escape would be gone. It’s still here, around the side, though out of reach. I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with that and figured I’d work out something when I got here.
A dumpster at the far end of the alley has wheels. Crappy wheels. Rusty. But it moves. Slowly.
The bottom of the fire-escape drop ladder is still a few feet out of reach. I climb back down and open the dumpster to look for a box or anything else to stand on. I see the answer right away: a beat-up umbrella, the classic black kind with a hook for a handle. This clinches it. I’m meant to get to the roof today.
*
“We’ll get in trouble!” I say after the elevator doors close.
“You never get in trouble. Everything’s always my fault.”
“Let’s go. The security guard was watching us. I think he was picking up the phone.”
“You haven’t seen the awesomeness yet! If they catch us they won’t throw us in jail. They’ll just tell us to leave.”
Nolan bounces on his toes, making me nervous. He’s really worked up and not looking at me much anymore. To get his attention, I say, “Where are we going?”
“All the way!”
The elevator goes to the top and stops on the seventh floor. Nolan leads me down a hall of closed wooden doors, through a big steel door, up some concrete steps, out another steel door, and into the sun. I can’t imagine how he ever came to find whatever he wants to show me.
It’s windy. Under our feet is loose gravel. The wall around the roof is only a foot high. It’s obvious people aren’t supposed to be up here. Not only for those reasons, but for a much bigger one.
There’s a large skylight before us, maybe ten feet wide but very long, almost enough to cut the entire roof in half. Instead of being a flat grid of square panes, it’s three long rows of dozens of glass pyramids sticking up, each about a foot tall. It’s pretty, but it also looks like a hazard in a video game, an obstacle to jump over where you lose a life if you touch any part of it.
“My metalworking class came here to see this and I saw they didn’t have to unlock any of the doors on the way up. Come look!”
He trots to the edge of the skylight. I walk slowly over and stop a few feet away, craning my neck to look. Even from here I can see how the space under the skylight goes all the way down to the ground.
“Come closer,” Nolan says. “It’s safe.” He leans out and bends over to plant a hand on one of the glass pyramids. “See? It’s solid. Good metalwork.”
“Wow,” I say. “Cool. Amazing. Awesome. Okay, let’s go.”
“That’s not the awesome part! Stand over there.” He points to a spot uncomfortably close to the edge of the roof.
“Why?”
“It’s the best place to see.”
“The wind will blow me off!”
“It won’t. Okay, fine, come on …”
He walks me over to the far side of the roof. It takes a minute to go all the way to the front of the building, to get around the skylight, and then back to the middle of the other side again. He stands me in front of a fire escape. I grab its railing.
“There, now the wind’s pushing you toward the building. Wait here.”
“Where are you going!”