A big blue man, spray-painted onto the side of the abandoned elementary school. An illegible scribble underneath it. The smell of swamp water and soggy marijuana joints. Broken glass. Discarded condoms. Rain-bleached jelly beans all over the ground.
I should have loved this place. Desolation is photogenic. Graffiti makes for great pictures. I raised my camera, aimed it at the tags. Bright blue smears. But I couldn’t stop thinking about those swastikas spray-painted on the side of Judy Saperstein’s house. The thought of them made everything uglier. Scarier.
I wondered if Solomon had heard. If not, I sure as hell wasn’t about to be the one to tell a Jewish boy who already thought the world was against him that there were swastika tags going up.
Greenport School had been closed and empty for three years. It was isolated enough, across from the abandoned match factory and up against the woods that ran along the railroad tracks, that you could hang out there and hardly anyone would ever mess with you. Cops never came around. Guys who were really up to no good had better places to go do that. Mostly the people who hung out here were teenagers nostalgic for the innocent kids they had been when they were elementary school students inside that building.
Those kids and, I hoped, Solomon.
I parked my car and made my way around the long single-story building. Past the playground, where the swings had all broken or been stolen so their chains hung loose in the wind. I took pictures of them, but I knew they wouldn’t come out right. I wasn’t skilled enough to capture their sadness.
And every time I looked through the lens, I saw some new impossible, awful thing. Skeletons sitting on the monkey bars; bees as big as vultures wobbling through the air.
My spine would not stop shivering.
When I went around the corner, I saw him, exactly where I’d thought he’d be. Asleep on the rusty old purple dinosaur seesaw he’d loved so much when he was in first grade.
What a happy kid Solomon had been. Back before his mind began to betray him.
He was smiling now, at something in a dream. Flakes of paint were stuck to his face. At his feet was a battered old library book: Illegal Identities: A History of Homophobic Police Practices Around the World. I thought about taking his picture, but it seemed wrong. Like I’d be taking advantage of him. Cass’s words echoed in my head. Being an artist sometimes means breaking the rules of civilized human behavior. But before I could debate it internally any further, Solomon opened his eyes and reached out to touch my face.
“Ash,” he said. “I was just going to go see you and Niv.”
“And here I am,” I said, settling down on the soggy gravel, deciding not to ask who or what Niv was. “Your tyrannosaur is looking rough,” I said, pointing to the places where the metal was worn thin, bent, broken.
“Her name is Maraud. She’s been through a lot. And she’s an allosaurus. T. rexes have two fingers; she has three. See?”
“Right,” I said, because I was pretty sure he’d explained this to me more than once before. “So where are you living these days?”
He shrugged. “Who lives?”
“Don’t you quote Natalie Wood at me,” I said, mock-punching his muscular shoulder. “I’m the one who showed you Rebel Without a Cause, remember?”
“And where would I be without it?” he said. “James Dean was how I knew I was gay.”
I paused. Best to jump right into it. “You’re not with your aunt anymore?”
He shrugged. “Her son got evicted. He’s crashing with her, so I don’t have a room. She says I’m welcome to sleep on their couch, but the place is pretty crowded.”
Solomon’s father had never been in the picture. His mother had gotten locked up, right around the time she divorced Connor’s father, Solomon’s stepdad. He’d offered to let Solomon stay with them, but Solomon refused. Ran off. Got caught, brought back. Ran off again.
“I did something stupid,” he said, looking at his hands.
“What’s that?”
“There were three guys, and they were picking on this old lady, and I just lost it. One second I was talking to them normally, the next I was just yelling gibberish into the air. And I couldn’t stop. Like I could see myself, from the outside, and I couldn’t control what was happening.”
“Oh my god,” I said. “Where was this?”
“Fairview Plaza.”
“Jesus.” That strip mall was as close as Hudson came to an actual mall. And usually it was full of people. Any one of them could have called the police.
And the police didn’t tend to respond well to emotionally disturbed young men who were six feet tall.
“What did they do?” I asked. “The three guys?”
“They ran. I don’t know if they were scared of me or just didn’t like all the commotion I was causing. By the time I calmed down, they were gone. So was the old lady, for that matter.”
“Did anyone . . . I don’t know, try to help you? Try to talk to you?”
He shook his head, then lowered it into his hands. I reached out to take his hands in my own. “We need to get you some help,” I said.
“No one can help me,” he said. “Not the way I need to be helped.”
“How do you need to be helped?”
Again he shook his head, pulled his hands away from me.
I wanted to tell him about myself. About the meds, how they were helping. How I was trying. How he needed to try.
But whatever was going on with him, it was way worse than what was happening to me. The treatment options for him could be extreme. Plus, Solomon didn’t want to be medicated. He’d said so over and over again.
But I hadn’t either, at first. It was a journey, getting to the place where you could admit how you need help.
“You need to talk to someone, at least,” I said. “Figure out what’s going on, and what kind of treatment options are available. I used to think—”
And then, with a nakedness and need that made me shiver, Solomon interrupted me and said: “I need you to remember.”
“Remember what?” I asked, and waited, but he never answered.
“Help me, Solomon,” I said. “I want to remember. Help me to remember.”
He looked off into the distance.
“It’s getting worse,” I asked. “Isn’t it? I saw—I think I saw something. . . .”
Solomon nodded. “Something is coming. Something that will upset the balance. Change everything.”
I waited for more, but there was none. Eventually, he shut his eyes. Smiled. Whispered something.
He was gone. Back into that dream world of his.
A tiny part of me envied him his ability to escape to a better reality so easily.
The rest of me felt sick.
I remembered the first time I ever saw a homeless person, on a trip to New York City with my family to go to a Broadway show. A woman was sitting on the sidewalk, hugging herself. Her clothes were filthy. Her skin looked awful. And I got so sad and nauseous that I couldn’t enjoy the show, and I was miserable for the next several days.
I kept seeing her in my mind’s eye. I wanted to help her, but what could I do? My mother and father had kept on walking, and so, so had I.
I kept wondering: What had happened? Where had her life gone wrong? Why hadn’t someone taken better care of her? Who had evicted her, kicked her out of her home?
Sitting there next to Solomon, shivering in the chilly air of the abandoned playground, surrounded by fallen jelly beans and shattered bottles, I wondered if I wasn’t watching the exact moment where his life went wrong.