There were high towers in the distance, pinnacles of construction with so many offices and businesses housed within that the radiance of the windows were like tiny cubes of light. But those were far from us. In contrast, the buildings on the streets below were littered with pawn shops made of wind-worn bricks, nightclubs with flashing lights and provocative window signs. Patrons wandered in and out, getting into cars and swerving onto the road, three drunken girls leaving in a limousine. Their clothes sparkled vibrantly and their fake laughs rose to the sky. They were counterfeit diamonds: beautiful outside, repulsive within.
“I bet this would make for a lot of good pictures,” Thad said.
Pictures. I hadn’t snapped a picture in what felt like decades. All of my stuff was destroyed now. But that couldn’t stifle the urge that managed to crawl from under the ashes in my heart. Taking pictures always makes you feel better, Michael.
It just wouldn’t feel the same now, though. My Great Work was gone. A part of me had died with it.
“I already have loads,” I replied emptily.
“You could take more,” Thad said.
“Where would I put them?”
“Well I don’t know,” he said, eyebrows furrowing. “Look, I’m trying to make you feel better but you’re really trashing it all.”
I almost reared up in anger again but chose to glare over the edge instead. After all, I was the one who’d just lost everything. Who was he to tell me that I shouldn’t feel this bad?
A girl in a black dress caught my attention, stumbling between her friends drunkenly and shouting indecipherable nonsense into the night. She and her posse were migrating from one nightclub to another next door, obviously not satisfied by their levels of intoxication yet. Ugh. That type of shallow pointlessness was exactly what I loathed in the normal people who surrounded me at school. Another reason I never fit in with them.
“It’s weird how those people have no idea,” Thad said.
He’d followed my gaze down. Confusion was etched on his face. He studied the people further, almost in the grief of jealousy—the way a lepidopterist might study a butterfly and yearn to be as beautiful.
“I mean,” he went on, “how can we be up here flying around and they’re just down on the ground living their lives? Why were we picked? Why are we sacrificing all this when they don’t even seem to care?”
I didn’t respond. What had been such a fine canvas was now a melancholy portrait of the city below. He was right. Why was this our duty? We were only seventeen.
Thad shook his head, gaze following the people as they disappeared. He looked more worn than before, the façade to keep Callista and I in some semblance of order now removed. He wasn’t even studying the people anymore—he just stared down into nothing.
“I loved people too, before this,” he said abruptly. “So I know how it feels to lose everything, Michael.”
He didn’t look at me as he said it. My hands froze against the flat top of the wall. He cleared his throat.
“I don’t know if she’s alive or dead,” he continued. “They just took her.”
He shielded his face from me by looking at the street, probably not wanting me to read the anguish in his eyes. At first he hesitated, then his fingers slid away and pulled out the shiny skeleton pocket watch. He clicked the watch open out of habit and glanced at the time, before he snapped it closed again and hid it in the fold of his hands.
“Her?” I pressed. He nodded slowly.
“Yeah,” was all I could get out of him at first. There were volumes of stories behind that single word just itching to be free. Thad was doing his best to keep the covers closed. In the end though, he sighed.
“It’s a funny story how we met actually,” he said. “See, my uncle is kind of a bum. He lives in this old singlewide trailer in Washington and drinks most of the day, so I’m the one who has to run out and get jobs if I want food to eat that’s not like…microwave macaroni. Or sardines. I got to be a waiter, so I’d take all the money I made and put some of it to pay for my truck, and some of it for gas, and the rest I’d either save or buy food at the Walmart.”
He couldn’t manage a grin, but his lips turned slightly upward at the memory. “I liked the frozen stuff because it could sit in the freezer all month and I wouldn’t need to waste time going to the store every week. So I’d pile things into my basket and go check out. That’s where I met Sophia.”
Thad said her name sweetly, like the way a composer might speak of his most enthralling sonata. He shifted one of his legs on the ledge.
“She was the checkout girl,” he went on. “I was piling all my frozen pizzas and frozen noodles and frozen lasagna on the belt. She looked at me weird and said something like, ‘Should I be worried that you’re feeding an Italian army at your house?’ I laughed like a crazy person.”
He finally smiled at that part, though he had to lift a hand to wipe away a tear.
“So that was our thing,” he said. “Every month I’d go in to the store, buy a bunch of frozen food, and she’d make fun of it. If I bought frozen enchiladas or burritos, I was hiding the Mexican army. If I got rice she said the Asians were coming. I started doing it on purpose, and then I started going back more than once a week because it started to get funny.”
Thad shrugged. “But then they started to cut some of the checkout jobs. Sophia lost hers. So the last time I was there, she told me that she had to start working at another grocery store way down the road. She didn’t think she’d see me anymore.”
He crossed his arms. “I didn’t think so either. And I felt silly to be sad about it. But the next week, when I went to go get food, you know what I did? I drove all the way across the whole town to go shop at her new store and check out in her line again. It was like a habit. I couldn’t help myself.”
“I told her it’d be much less of a drive if we met somewhere in the middle. So the next day we did, and that was the first date.”
His voice had gone warm with the recollection. With some hesitation, he lifted the skeleton watch between us.
“On the first date, we got bored but neither of us wanted to go home,” he said. “So to get out of the rain we went in to this old shop. Sophia had this grand idea for us to pick cheap things out for each other and then use them as surprises at the end of the day. I was nervous so I got her something boring, some pin-thing for her hair. But I think she already knew me well. She got me this watch. It was crazy and I loved it, because you know me—always checking the time, and this just made it more fun.”
He brushed his fingers through the sides of his hair tensely.
“That was six months ago,” he said. “We’ve seen each other every day after that except three…”
His voice trailed away. “Well, now that count’s off, since they took her.”
He didn’t want to go in to this part of the story; his desperation to stay afloat had turned into an anxious flailing. But he had to go on.
“It was 4:56 PM on March 15th,” he said. “We were walking in one of the parks near the trailer. I’d just checked my watch and told her how all the numbers were consecutive. Then all of a sudden, there was this—” he stopped, then shook his head. “I don’t need to go into it. But I was knocked out, and when I woke up, I was in the white room.”
Each word was a heavy block of stone he had to heave out of himself.
“Maybe it was a different white room from yours,” he said. “Maybe there are a dozen white rooms all over the place. I don’t know. But they had Sophia there too, and I just barely remember seeing them drag her out the door screaming for me before I was dozing off again with a needle in my arm.”