If Stone Could Speak

11. coming to life

Lexi is waiting on the steps outside her high school - my old high school - when I'm walking up the path toward it. She's perched against the metal railing, scrolling through her phone; her boots are black and reach halfway up her shin. Her jacket is leather. It's funny: I don't think we would have been friends in high school. I was always prim and proper and I didn't swear one single time. I was a music nerd, spending all my electives on band and spending all my free time in the stuffy cubicles of the practice rooms. When Lexi does things, she doesn't do them because they're proper or look good on a resume - she does them because she feels them. That's the only criteria. She picked up the saxophone for a bit, but she only played songs she liked. When I picked up the flute, all my attention turned to technical mastery until the soul of each song was eclipsed and I'd totally forgotten why I started playing in the first place. I turned it, like everything, to a chore.

I hate, hate, going to my old high school. I cower a bit before it, trying to be invisible. I don't know why. It's like a teacher might look through the blinds and say that's Lena? That's what she's been doing with herself since she left here? I don't know what I imagine they'd expect or why they'd care, but I'd like to be some PhD candidate in my office with no time at all but for literature. I'd like to be the elusive archetypes of my mind; but I'm just Lena. With muddied shoes and clothing faded from all the washes. Still in this town. Hands in pockets, looking up to the old red brick through my curtain of hair. "Hey," Lex says as she sees me, and slings her backpack around until it lands on a thump against her back. "Where's the car?"

"Dad had to take it," I pause, and she can tell I have more to say - that my mind's elsewhere - because she's leaving the silence there, open and expectant, for me to continue. "Listen... I need to, uh, go to the asylum. With you."

"Need to?"

And I tell her. "I know you'll think I'm crazy."

"I won't."

"I didn't believe in those ghost stories. But now I'm gonna need to know every damn thing that tour guide was saying about the place."

•·················•·················•

I don't know what I expected. Somehow it was both nothing resembling this and at the same time exactly this. Just as we come up on the crest of the hill, the stone façade beckons us in the distance. It feels softer today; I know stone can't be softer, so I know its something in me that's softened toward it. It's not so foreboding. It seems familiar as a lighthouse; and even the ivy wrapped around it doesn't look so dead and the copper doesn't look so rusted.

"Thanks for coming, Lex."

"Are you kidding me?" she's walking faster than I am. She's practically running.

Maybe she sees it before I do - the hundreds of eyes that are blinking behind the bars of the windows.

I clasp her hand until I think her knuckles will turn white. "Do you see..."

"Uh-huh," she's dazed. But she's smiling.

Each floor has layers and layers of faces, of eyes, packed in behind the bars like sardines, and they're all turned to us with laser-precision. It's us they're looking at, there's no doubt about it. And they're real. They're not holographic or translucent. They're as real as anyone.

The snowy hills behind us, already bathed in afternoon light, reflect off the face of the windows and the light multiplies; it's nearly blinding. But I keep my eyes fastened, and my expression is steady and measured. I face them squarely, and each of them faces me squarely in return. It's such an electrifying thing, to make direct eye contact with anyone - especially through time, as I know I'm doing right now. They resemble nothing of the twenty-first century, and they're all dressed in that horrid canvas uniform. Each face is different, as different as a hall of sculptures, and indeed they look so gaunt, so angular, so pale like they might be carved from marble, like they've never seen the sun, but each face is variations of the same expression: waiting. Silent, patient hope. A hope dulled through time, but budding still.

"Are you afraid?" Lex turns to me. I know already in the tone of her voice that she's not.

"No," I shake my head and I'm surprised that I mean it. "I know they just want to be heard." And I think about Donna-from-the-archives and how she told me, as she led me to those suitcases, that she knows I'm interested in hearing their stories. Maybe that was their permission slip to step out. Maybe they've been watching me (is it egotistical to imagine it?), just waiting to see if I was someone they could trust.

I am, I try to say with my eyes.

A figure steps up through the snow, making his way around the western-most edge of the asylum. His footsteps are as real as anyone's. He's solid. Leather shoes and tailored jacket and all. He's so real and solid I could reach out and touch him, and yet I know that'd be reaching through time.

"Jonah!" I call when I know he's near enough to hear me, and he smiles - the first real smile I've seen from him - it wrinkles his eyes - and I know that he knows I must have dug through some archives to find his name. I use it now confidently.

"See? I knew you'd figure it out," he says, smug, hands dug deep in his pockets as he trudges through the snow toward us. He speaks as pointedly and measuredly as ever, except now I know his speech is different in the same way people's writing scrawled across old archives and old letters is different. Both seem cursive. And yet he's right before me, plucking that same chord deep in my chest that rings out whenever I look at an old photograph and think this is history but it is now; it is history coming to life. Except this chord is louder. And it's growing. History is not only coming to life, it is life; and I wouldn't know where the present began and where history ended (although I suppose we never do, layered and entwined as they are).

"So," he exhales and his breath sends those scarves of evaporation up into the freezing air, "are you ready to meet them?"

I look up to the windows and my heart pounds so loud it might break through my ribs.