He chewed slowly. The sound was nauseating. “I don’t know,” he finally said, “just that it’s night. Don’t you think violent places have more ghosts?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Actually, I guess I don’t really believe in ghosts. Maybe I haven’t seen enough to convince me otherwise. We’re always a little too eager to believe in just about anything.”
“I just thought I’d ask,” he said. “I’m scared. But I believe.”
“Somehow ghosts seem less frightening here,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said distantly. “If that’s what you think.”
I could hardly make him out in the darkness. I couldn’t even see my feet, so all I had to hold on to was his voice. “Cancer,” I said, “now that’s something to be scared of. Sitting in this building is something to be scared of. Meteorites, high school, the Muppets. That’s the shit.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Wind chimes,” I added.
“Wind chimes?”
“They freak me out,” I said.
He let out a tiny laugh, probably just to let me know he heard.
“This girl, Angela,” I said, “sent me a book when we were back at Fort Drum, about all the strange sexual things that have happened to historical figures. There was this guy, a poet I think, who was afraid of his wife’s pubic hair. Think about that, the disappointment after the long wait.”
“Yeah,” he said. But he didn’t laugh, and I wondered if he had even heard me.
“I can’t wait to go to college,” I said, hoping to bring him back.
“It’s just this place,” he said. “I never really knew it before.”
“But you know more about it than the rest of us,” I said. “You could go it alone if you had to.”
Cooper had been born here. It must have been a strange place to return home to. Some are born to the war, and others are not.
“This is a bad place,” he said.
“There are worse,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I was just trying to be scared of something else.”
“Fair enough,” I replied.
Cooper had a heat rash on his neck, which made him look a little younger than he actually was. He was nineteen, with dark brown eyes, and he dreamed of going to college and getting a degree in architecture. When he laughed he was all teeth and slaps on the back. He would put his hand out to touch you, to let you in on the joke.
Cooper was the only virgin I knew. Or at least the only one that admitted as much. He was religious, more so than the rest of us, and I knew this had something to do with his virginity. Because we weren’t the same religion, he’d already assured me that I wouldn’t be at his wedding, that no outsiders would be allowed at his wedding. Otherwise, he said, you’d be the best man. It was a nice gesture. He had a girlfriend and he was waiting to marry her, waiting to be with her.
Cooper told stories about how he and his friends could get anywhere in New York by going underground. They knew every tunnel, every hidden passage, everything about underground New York. He’d promised to show me what he meant if I came to the city with him one weekend, but I never did. We were always making plans to go, but then something else would come up, something like going to Quebec for the weekend because someone told a story about the women and the bars. Or we’d go to Syracuse because we heard a rumor about a hot rod.
Cooper was the oldest in a family of eight. His grandmother had raised them after his mother and father were murdered just before he came to America. I never asked him about his trip across the water.
I listened to the night, waiting. When Cooper finally leaned back, the darkness and silence settled into the stairwell. There was a lull in the bombing. Even the dogs of the city were quiet. It was so still that I could hear the hum of my body. There’s no such thing as silence, I thought, straining to hear something.
I stood and looked over the edge of the railing, struggling to see a few floors down in all that darkness. The stairwell curled out of sight like a tail. I felt as if the night was being pushed into me. I wondered how much more I could hold. Fear was in my eyes and in my ears. The buzz of mosquitoes filled the air. I slapped at them a few times, then gave up.
I let Cooper fall asleep, and got to wondering what people out there in the city were dreaming about. Then I wondered whether any of the girls I knew back home were dreaming about me at that moment. I was eager to fall in love. I’m always falling in love. Leave me alone for a moment and I’m falling in love with the very idea of a woman. But we always love what is lost to us, so all I could imagine were girls I’d never see again.
Leaning against the railing, I stood and looked down into the stairwell. I couldn’t see anything, but I listened intently to the night.
At first I thought it was the wind, but then I could distinguish voices. Someone was whispering at the bottom of the stairs, and somehow I knew that they were going to make their way up to us. They were careful to be quiet, but I heard steps, like the soft tap of the tongue against the roof of the mouth. They sounded far away, yet their silence was more threatening than anything that could be spoken.
I touched Cooper lightly on the shoulder. I didn’t have to say anything. He was quickly awake and aware enough to not make a sound. He stood and stepped to the door that led onto the roof, opening it just enough to let a tiny sliver of light appear on the floor. Then he let
