“Please just check one more time.”
The secretary smiled wryly at me—it was actually a sympathetic expression.
“Mr. Ellis . . .”—(and it was maddening that desirable young women were now calling me this)—“the school directory—do you know what that is?—has confirmed that there is no one with the name Clayton—either as a first name or a last name or a middle name—attending this college.”
It wasn’t just the information but her tone that shocked me into silence: I should have known the moment I walked into the admissions office that finding Clayton was a remote and unlikely thing. The secretary’s search had answered something, but another false beginning was opening up. I slowly stepped away from the desk as the secretary continued studying me as if I were dwindling into another world. Since I was not offering any explanation for this waste of time, her face became taut with impatience and then she simply regarded me quizzically and said, “Mr. Ellis, do you feel okay?” But her concern was utterly superficial, even if she genuinely tried to make it seem unintended.
I couldn’t let this challenge diminish me. I had to take this information and do something with it. I now knew—for fact—something about this boy who had called himself Clayton and had appeared in my office and in the front seat of Aimee Light’s car and in my own home and I now knew that he had lied to me, and even worse—I felt with a premonitory shiver—that whatever intentions he had were not fulfilled yet. I was light-headed and my muscles ached from lack of sleep and I hadn’t eaten anything except a cracker smeared with cheese in the Buckley library the night before, and as I walked out of the admissions office I stared at the Commons—the flat center of campus. It had been warm that morning and the air dead and still, but now a breeze caught the rust-colored leaves carpeting the field, revealing the green lawn hidden beneath them. The questions were too myriad (and outlandish) to systematically and rationally contemplate. It was a Tuesday—that was the only fact. I couldn’t stand on the steps of the admissions building—lost and spacing out on a lone, scrawny dog sniffing around the perimeters of Booth House, a kerchief tied around its neck—any longer. I took off in the direction of the student parking lot to see if I could locate either the cream-colored 450 SL or Aimee Light’s BMW. It was the only plan at the moment that could move me out of my stupor. In the distance, the sun glanced off the white dome of the art building and then the sky started darkening. Indian summer vanished rapidly that afternoon.
The student parking lot was situated behind the Barn, and as I walked under the entrance arc of the black ironwood gates a wave of panic-infused nausea flowed through me, then subsided. I recovered and then started scanning the rows of haphazardly parked cars, and the frantic worry returned when I could smell the sea and knew this was the scent of the Pacific thousands of miles away, and clouds were moving swiftly backwards, and crows flew high over the unpaved, dusty parking lot. It seemed as if the temperature was dropping in degrees by the second, and while looking over the roughly two hundred cars that occupied the lot I realized I was suddenly breathing steam. When I thought I saw a flash of white three rows over from where I was standing I started stumbling toward it, my shoes crunching the gravel beneath me.
As I passed a student waxing a Volvo—in that instant—a wind machine was activated.
Freezing air scorched the campus, piercing it.
Piles of dead leaves blanketing everything exploded upward and suddenly formed cones that raced across the ground. My coat flapped wildly behind me as I struggled through the lot. The air rushing forward felt like a knife. The crows were now reeling above me, black and cursing, their shrill cries drowned out by the roar of the wind, and the wind whipped the flag so hard that thwacking sounds echoed out from the pole it was attached to. The wind subsided briefly but then another huge sheet was literally pushing me out of the parking lot, and when I saw students, startled and grimacing, running for cover into buildings, I lowered my head and staggered against the wind, heading for shelter in the campus pub, The Café, and stood beneath the awning, where I grabbed a wooden column to support myself, but then gave up, letting the force of the wind slam me against a wall. The wind lashed out with such force that a vending machine I was standing beside toppled over. When I looked up, squinting, I could see the hands on the clock tower swinging like pendulums. You could actually hear the wind snarling.
(I shut my eyes tightly and wrapped my arms protectively around myself and asked mindlessly: what was the wind? And, just as mindlessly, something answered: the dead screaming.)