Since it’s dark by now, I doubt it’s smart to start wandering around outside; I have no idea who or what may be out there. I feel safer the longer I’m inside the buildings I’m familiar with. As a bit more courage winds through my veins, I emerge from my little hiding place and make my way back upstairs. With the faintest of residual light filtering down here, I choose to—cautiously, taking care not to trip—thread my way through the debris in these basement lab areas and corridors.
I’m glad to return to a brighter ground floor, lit sporadically by fantastically brilliant incandescent bulbs. However, my relief is short-lived. Immediately upon re-entering the lobby area I see the tall metal library doors are shut.
Blimey, I must have missed the cut-off time for the library closing!
The realization I squandered my chance to catch the librarian as she left for the weekend while I cried like a little girl down in the basement hits me like a steam train. I cannot believe I was so stupid to forget about the librarian; even though I couldn’t find her during my search of the building doesn’t mean she wasn’t around somewhere. I should’ve staked out the entrance instead of wallowing in my unfortunate sorrows. Granted, I had good reason to be upset—and naturally I still am—but I pledge right now to stop letting my emotions overtake reason, clarity of thought, and determination to get back home.
There might be a night owl still working in this complex of buildings!
Surely there’s someone here who can help me, somehow. With new hope, I start off down the long, wide hallway. Along the way I pause to read a plaque on the stone wall; in gold-plated letters it describes a Mr. Frank Dawson Adams for whom this structure for Mining and Metallurgical Engineering and Geology was built in 1951 and who served as Vice Principal of McGill in the 1920s. My heart skips two beats, I’m sure of it. Reading about events happening in the future—well, my future but this present time’s past, I guess—violates nature. My head spins, but I keep walking.
Dark, empty classrooms flank the corridors, which jig right and left as the Adams building blends messily with the McConnell Engineering building—which I learned about from a simpler plaque emblazoned with black block lettering stating it was donated eight years after the previous building. I marvel at the expanse of engineering that must have occurred at McGill during the middle of the last century—and then, as if prompted, my brain shouts back, “Add that to the rest of the one hundred years of occurrences you don’t know about!” I simply cannot contemplate what might have happened in my “absence” . . . but it’s enough to twist my innards as if I’m about to be sick.
Clack, clack, clack, clack announces the heels of my shoes on the hard floor. Muted echoes follow against the bare walls of plain, rectangular blonde wood and glass. Every noise is magnified here, as if cruelly and purposefully underlining my solitude. Still, not a light in any room nor any sign of a teacher or student.
Of course, who would want to be at school on a Friday night with a summer weekend looming?
There’s the possibility someone is in an office, which is probably on an upper level. To my left are double doors whose pair of eye-level windows reveal a dimly illuminated stairwell leading up and down. I’m tempted to enter, but I see my hallway is about to open up into a larger area, so I press on, etching the stairs’ location into the rough floor plan my memory is storing.
This larger area is another lobby filled with a few offices and a closed-off general store and ice-cream shop. I salivate when I catch the sugary scent of the cones wafting through the metal grate barrier. At the farthest end, a thin hallway veers off in the direction of the campus commons, and I have to follow it. With relief I recognize this hallway with its tall windows, at last: the Macdonald Engineering Building. I know my way around here! I turn left into a dark, dirty vestibule with a heavy door closing off a large staircase I know leads up to the classroom and office levels.
Like the basement of the chemistry building I saw hours earlier, every surface of this building, which was recently completed, has instantly aged. Yellowed walls match chipped, worn stair treads replete with ancient dust bunnies inhabiting every corner. Thick layers of paint hint at decades of maintenance. The jarring state of things continues to make me nauseous.
All the same, I mount the enclosed stairway and leap my way up to the first floor and its large, grand, familiar lobby. This is what architecture should be. Oversize brass chandeliers—though these, in dire need of polishing, are unlit now—fill the high ceilings lined with dark wood molding, mullion windows at the front façade, niches with stone busts, and decorative wall and door frame tiling.
I pirouette lightly on the limestone floor. It’s nice to know some things have endured.
These classrooms are all closed up for the night, but I wander around the main room a little longer, dawdling at the doors and staring inside, then make my way to another hallway at the opposite end of the room. Here I find yet another set of stairs, wide and shallow like all those in Macdonald. Naturally, I keep expecting them to be in near-pristine condition, being only thirteen years old, but here, now, each tread is battered and tired. My heels settle into their worn concave centers.
Another half hour passes by the time I’ve meandered up and down the familiar hallways of Macdonald’s floors. These floors too connect now to the other engineering buildings, and soon I’m completely turned around due to the myriad of stairs, hallways, and building abutments. Still, not a soul to be found.
By now my curiosity is starting to wane; I’ll have to explore this further with sunlight and more energy. A few hours’ adventure starts to take their toll on my body finally. My stomach growls louder than an angry mountain lion, so much so I jump in surprise; I hadn’t felt an ounce of hunger since “it” happened. Despite the hunger pangs, eating is the last thing I want to do at the moment. In any case, I feel it wiser to ration my food. I take an extended sip from the nearest water fountain instead.
It must be past nine o’clock by now, and my eyelids are heavy and my limbs are ready to stop moving. I need a place to sleep, not that it’ll be a soft, warm bed tonight. Oh, how I miss home right now! I imagine a filling, home-cooked meal in our tranquil house and my cozy little bedroom with its comfortable quilted bed. It brings pools of tears to the corners of my eyes and pushes a lump up my throat, but I force them all back.
You’re stronger than this, Elie. Buck up. It’s only been four hours; you can’t break down yet.
There will be no bed tonight, nor even a blanket, but I can settle for the floor, if I must. Maybe there’s a windowsill I can lay on. I remember the generous upholstered chairs I saw earlier on the second floor of the library and rue its closing. Then I remember the black granite bench facing the library, in the dark library I once fled from. While cold and hard, it was secluded and seemed like it offered some degree of protection—from what, I’m not sure, but I need to be enveloped in security right now. And strangely, though I don’t know where he is tonight, it’s comforting to know I’ll be near Father’s old labs—whatever happened to them.
As for what will happen tomorrow morning, or the morning after that. . . . Someone must be here, and even though a harsh voice in my brain contradicts me, I hold out hope Father could possibly be here too. Tears threaten again, but this time I can’t hold them back, and they roll silently down my cheek until they splash onto the cold, granite bench. In the silence of the night, I can only hear the echo of those tiny splashes.