Almost everything had been torn down, and the shrubs and trees had been growing for so long that the block looked more like a meadow than a patch of city. On the left, poplars sprang out of the sandy pits of buried foundations, oaks loomed over the cracked fragments of lost sidewalks, and a towering black walnut dropped its poisonous fruit onto the weedy grass. Only one building was left standing: a vacant-looking bar made out of green painted not-cinder-blocks with rounded corners and splintery wood siding. A rust-stained metal sign hung out front, and if you squinted your eyes, you could make out the words: “TREEMONISHA CLUB ~ MEMBERSHIP REQUIRED.”
“That isn’t the place,” said Lucy, a little nervously.
“Where is the place?” asked Quanla.
“It’s out there,” gesturing to the right. What had once been a parking lot receded between two large hills toward a grove of sycamore trees. I could only tell that it was a parking lot because the grass and bushes were patchier there than on the hills. Inside the grove, I couldn’t see anything at all.
“Quanla,” said Darius, with an edge in his voice. “I don’t know about this. Mom and dad would be pissed if they knew what you’re doing. I don’t know it’s safe.”
“I’ll be fine, Darius!” Quanla snapped. “Lucy knows what she’s about.”
“I’m coming with you,” Darius said.
We got out of the car and started walking through the waist-high grass.
“Won’t someone see us?” I asked.
“Nobody lives over here.” said Lucy. “Nobody works over here.”
More than anyone else I knew at Radcliffe, Lucy looked and talked like a suburban kid. It surprised me that she’d be taking us to this part of the city so inner it had gone to seed.
“So what does your dad do?” I asked.
“He’s sort of like a realtor,” Lucy said. “I mean… he buys a bunch of properties all at once, and then if there are people from out-of-state who want to buy something, it’s like he sells it to them. He doesn’t just work in Akawe. He does it in Pontiac, Flint, Detroit… we even live in one of them. I mean, my mom and my brother and Steven and me. My dad rents it to us. It’s big too, because the house is connected to an old business. ‘The Tent and Tarp Shop.’ It looks pretty crappy from the road.”
I heard the low rush of cars coming from the taller hill, which loomed off to our left and was completely choked by shrubs and brambles.
“What’s over there?”
“992,” said Lucy. “It sounds weird up here. The cars do. It’s like it’s got something to do with the way that the sound goes between the hills.”
We entered the sycamore grove and the drab gray light dimmed into pale greens and yellows through the fluttering leaves overhead. The mottled bark – brown and rust, black and ivory – had a stone-hard solidity to it. The place seemed old. The sycamores had been planted a long, long time ago.
“These trees always make me think of a church,” Lucy said. “Not my own church, but where I went to school. The light goes through the leaves… like stained glass.”
“Where did you go to school… before Radcliffe?” I asked.
“St. Brendan’s.”
“That’s where I go to church!”
“We’re not Catholic. But my mom sent me to school there because she didn’t like the Akawe Schools. But it got too expensive, which is why I went to Radcliffe after sixth grade.”
“Shit, you probably sat through more masses there than I have. My family’s Catholic, but we never had the money for St. Brendan’s, and I didn’t get the scholarship, so I’ve always gone to the public schools.”
“Well, you know, we’re both in the same place now.”
We truly were.
Finally, we saw the building at the center of the grove.
I’d been expecting something as old as the trees, a looming cathedral built out of brick or even stone. Instead, I was looking at an octagonal concrete mass that was wider at the top than at the bottom. It was thirty, maybe forty feet high. There weren’t any windows except on the ground floor, which opened onto a sort of lobby. All the glass had been smashed, with seed pods and oak and sycamore leaves littering the red carpeted floor. Despite the broken windows, which we could have easily stepped through, Lucy walked up to a reinforced metal door and turned the combination on a padlock until a small key popped out of the back. She unlocked the doors and let us in.
“Where are we?” asked Darius once we were all standing inside the lobby.
“I don’t know the whole story,” Lucy admitted. “But it used to be an elementary school. The theater here was built as an add on, and when they demoed the school, they kept using the theater for a while. They’d do concerts and put on shows here or something.”
“It got a name?”
“I don’t remember the name of the school, but the theater is Sycamore Grove, I think. That’s what they called it.”
“Damn.”
Paper and plaster and brittle paint covered the floor. Blues and oranges – the remnants of bright mosaics – wrapped around columns and up the walls, but many of the square tiles had fragmented and fallen. Elsewhere, shreds of the maroon moll carpet clung to the foundation and, where the rain had gotten in, grew fuzzy tufts of moss.
“Lucy,” asked Quanla. “Should we not do things here? I mean, should we not touch things? Since your dad is trying to sell this place?”
Lucy laughed, nervous again. “He’s not going to sell this place. It’s a death trap. I mean, they could only buy it to demo it, and there are places in town you can get better land a lot cheaper. Just don’t get hurt. If you get hurt on something, I’ll get in a lot of trouble, and so will my dad.”
Something in Lucy’s tone told me there was more to it than that, but I didn’t want to pester her.
Instead, I moved across the lobby toward the huge double doors that opened into the auditorium.
Adam and Cora had moved ahead of the rest of us, and I saw his flashlight beam moving wildly against the walls and ceiling. It had been a large auditorium, with seats for a few hundred people, but some of these had been ripped from the floor with crumbs of concrete scattered about like the place had been hit by an earthquake. Tattered crimson curtains hung over a stage at the front, and there were heaps of other curtains lying about in holey, moldy piles. The leaves hadn’t blown this far inside, so we couldn’t smell the damp anymore. The air was dry, stale, almost chemical. It felt still. Watchful. It wasn’t a dark feeling, but unsettling… as if whatever ghosts had been left from the auditorium’s living days might still be floating around. They weren’t about to speak to us or hurt us, but they certainly watched us. They would see what we did, and if they disapproved, they would judge. If ghosts here disapproved of our presence and gave God their testimony, or if God really was omniscient, omnipotent, what would he think? What would he do?
Adam had reached the stage. I watched the flashlight beam against a pile of old books scattered at his feet.
“John! Check it out!” he said. “Someone left a Bible here.”
“Great,” I said.
“We can read from Revelations. That talks about the dead, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does,” said Quanla.
She kept surprising me.
Adam sat down on the edge of the stage, Cora at his side, the Bible open on his lap, the flashlight beaming downward. He read:
“Then I saw a great white throne and the one who sat on it; the earth and the heaven fled from his presence and no place was found for them…I saw the dead, great and small stand… before the throne… and books were opened.”
Adam closed the Bible. He held it solemnly on his lap for a moment before speaking.
“Okay,” he said. “I believe that there is a dead soul floating right behind me now, and if you ask it a question, it will whisper the answer in my ear. So I’m gonna pass this Bible and when it’s your turn, you ask it a question.”
He passed the book to Darius, who sneered at it for a moment. He opened it. Flipped through briefly, then snapped it shut and said, “Fine. Am I gonna end up with some phat trick, or am I gonna end up lonely?”
“Darius, you fag!” said Quanla, but Adam spoke in a low and creaky voice: “Nooo. Yooou willll hoook uuup with a straaange and exoootic woooman born in a dissstant laaand.”
Darius grimaced and shook his head and passed the Bible to his sister.
“Jesus, protect me,” she said. “But I have to ask. What am I gonna go to college for after high school’s over?”
“Yooou willl gooo into cheeemissstreee.”
“Huh,” said Quanla. She scratched behind her ear and passed the book to Cora.
“Oh dead soul!” intoned Cora. “Am I, am I, am I going to get lucky before Christmas this year?”
“Soooner thaaan thaaat!”
Cora giggled and passed the book to Lucy.
Lucy didn’t even glance at the Bible but she looked hard at Adam.
“I want you to tell me what I am thinking about right now,” she said.
“Aiii telll the fyooochooor, not the preeesent.”
“Then tell me what I’m going to be thinking about an hour from now.”
“Yooou willl beee thiiinking about how you fiiinally haaave sooome frieeends youuu caaan trussst.”
Lucy didn’t say a thing, but handed the Bible, almost dismissively, to me.
The whole time, I’d been wracking my brain: What am I going to ask? Urgent question after question flashed through me: Has Patricia been leading me on or did she not even know that I liked her? Does anyone at our school like me? Am I really a coward? Why did the man with the knife ask about my sunglasses? Why did those kids jump off that hospital roof? Who is Lucy? But was I really going to ask any of these questions in front of my friends?
Connor Coyne is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan. His first novel, Hungry Rats has been hailed by Heartland prize-winner Jeffery Renard Allen as “an emotional and aesthetic tour de force.” His second novel, Shattering Glass, has been praised by Gordon Young, author of Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City as “a hypnotic tale that is at once universal and otherworldly.” His essay “Bathtime” was included in the Picador anthology Voices from the Rust Belt, and he has authored a short story collection: Atlas. Connor’s work has been published in Vox.com, Belt Magazine, Santa Clara Review, Moria Poetry Zine, East Village Magazine, Flint Broadside, Moomers Journal of Moomers Studies, The Saturnine Detractor, and Qua. You can view a complete list of his publications here. Connor is on the planning committee for the Flint Literary Festival and in 2013 represented Flint’s 7th Ward as its artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town grant, documented at Intersect 7. In 2007, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School. Connor lives in Flint’s College Cultural Neighborhood (aka the East Village), less than a mile from the house where he grew up. To interview Connor or receive a review copy of Urbantasm: The Dying City, please email Darcie Rowan at darcie@darcierowanpr.com.