Creative Writing stories, #3: "Night Falls on Baxter"

Night Falls on Baxter

Best friends Trevor and Louis stood outside Baxter Academic Center and took in the familiar view. It looked the same—ugly. Pale brown bricks of varying hues surrounded monolithic, vertically slender rectangular windows. The doorframes were graphite-grey, metallic affairs surrounding glass panels. The roof was horizontal, which made the building look from afar like a child’s fort made of enormous cardboard boxes. The building was a child of the 60s, architecturally out of place on the grounds of a boarding school—Westminster, by name—founded in the 19th century. But today, both boys wanted nothing more than to hear the strange air currents coursing through the building and to stroll through its long, boring halls again. Having played golf together that morning, they had decided on a nostalgic whim to drive up Williams Hill and take a last look through the building.

The Connecticut late-August sun shone on Trevor and Louis as they gazed up at Baxter. They had graduated that May and would be leaving for college—Trevor to Haverford, Louis to Amherst—in a couple days. Trevor hadn’t gotten into Amherst.

They stood on the driveway in front of Baxter, leaning on opposite sides of the metallic turd of a dumpster into which the construction crew had tossed furniture from the building that was not worth salvaging—battered bookcases from classrooms, rickety metal desk-chairs, and other general academic paraphernalia. In another corner of campus stood Baxter’s replacement, a $41 million behemoth called Armour Academic Center that would vault the school into the 21st century. It towered over every other building on the campus. Students snickered that it was visible from outer space. Baxter—the building that held particular significance for they and their fellow day students at this boarding school—was to become a parking lot. The building was scheduled for demolition in a week and both would be off to school long before then. This was their chance to give the Baxter its Last Rites.

“Shall we?” Trevor turned to Louis after a few minutes’ solemn regard of the edifice.

“Might as well,” Louis sighed.

Trevor closed his eyes as he gripped the handle on the door and pulled. Thousands of hands have touched this handle, he thought to himself. How many owners of those hands took that cool smoothness of the metal for granted? He knew he had on almost every occasion until this one. He stepped into the vestibule, holding the door for Louis. That strange whirring sound—screwy air currents—filled their ears as it had so many times before. The ghosts of Baxter groaned.

“Jesus Lou, they’ve taken everything,” Trevor murmured, agape at the denuded upper foyer. The earthy-red-brown brick walls were void of the rudimentary wooden benches that used to line them. Juniors and seniors had always hung out between classes in the square upper foyer, while freshmen and sophomores filled the lower foyer. The school veterans would peer over the railings down at the “children” and heckle them until a spoilsport teacher barked at them to knock it off. The open center of the lower foyer was a stage for the class clowns of the lower grades, who would sometimes tell jokes or act out funny scenes from popular movies in order to curry favor with their elders. Every sophomore dreamed of the day after graduation that year, when he or she would enjoy an exam week’s worth of acclimation to the upper foyer before enjoying it fully the next fall. This tradition would die with Baxter. It isn’t right, Trevor thought. It was like closing Radio City Music hall—inconceivable.

The near left corner of the upper foyer was the site of one of Trevor’s great personal achievements. When school lunch on Wednesday or Saturday—when school was in session until 11 AM—was unappetizing, he, Louis, and some of their fellow day students would order mountains of spicy chicken wings from a local pizza place. They would bicker about who would have to trudge down a steep hill to the edge of campus to meet the deliveryman, usually resorting to drawing lots. The “winner” would slink out and return shortly with a greasy cardboard box of pungent orange hunks of meat, bone, and cartilage. Trevor had eaten 35 wings in 25 minutes one Saturday in the January of his junior year. He had felt like Neil Armstrong. Now, his stomach growled.

The boys turned right and strode through more metal double-doors into the main upper floor hallway. Directly across from them was room number 35. The room was nearly empty, desolate. Posters of fractals, Fibonacci sequences, and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album were conspicuously absent. In their places were rectangles of vaguely brighter, cleaner regions of wall-plaster.

Louis leaned against the back wall and removed his purple Amherst Golf cap. “Christ, it’s Mr. Ulrich’s room,” he said. Peter Ulrich had been their soft-spoken but intense math teacher they had had junior year for Honors Pre-Calculus. Ulrich was notorious for issuing weekly problem sets that even the Asian math wiz kids struggled with. Lou had been an Ulrich acolyte, having been one of the only students they knew who appreciated the man’s teaching style—he almost always responded to a question with a question of his own. Lou was eager to study mathematics and economics at Amherst, in hopes of becoming an actuary or an investment banker. Trevor, on the other hand, had never enjoyed or excelled at math. He looked forward to taking a slew of creative writing and literature courses at Haverford.

Turning right and moving down the hall a distance, they arrived at room 33, which Trevor held in particular regard. He alone entered while Lou sought out the bathroom to take a piss.

It had been known as “The Thinkery”—the domain of one Todd Eckerson, an institution at Westminster. Eckerson was the philosophy department, mostly renowned for Moral Philosophy, a fairly basic survey of general ethics. Not bad for most high schoolers. However, Trevor had been one of seven students in a class of Eckerson’s called Philosophy and Literature (Louis took AP Statistics that year instead). Eckerson called it a “great books” class, as it covered such intellectually weighty tomes as The Iliad, the Bible, Pascal’s Thoughts, and St. Augustine’s Confessions, not to mention Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and even a smattering of Nietzsche. Eckerson would challenge students with pointed questions about Job, Pascal’s Wager, and which Circle of Hell Paris Hilton belonged in.

The main inhabitant of the walls of the Thinkery was a large framed print of Raphael’s “The School of Athens.” In the central figures of Plato and Aristotle Trevor saw himself and Louis. He was Plato, pointing upward, trying to grasp the ungraspable, the abstract. Louis was Aristotle, pointing at the world around—Lou was concerned with what existed concretely: answers. Eckerson had long since taken the print to his new classroom in Armour. Now the Thinkery was indistinguishable from the other empty chambers of Baxter.

They made their way through other rooms. Room 38 was the main computer lab, where Trevor, Louis, and some of their fellow day students would gather during mutual free time and play computer games like Unreal Tournament, a multiplayer battle game where up to ten of their fellow day student boys would try blow each other away with futuristic guns. All games had been outlawed by Mr. Reeves, whose temper flared more abruptly than a bolt of lightning. One’s chances of getting “be-Reeved,” however, were far, far greater.

Mr. Marco’s office was across from the computer lab. He was the Director of Studies for the school but more importantly Trevor and Louis’ golf coach and mentor. When both of them had a free period, they would sometimes sit on the couch in Marco’s office and distract him from his work, bantering and psyching themselves up for upcoming golf matches and tournaments. Their freshman year, Marco called both Trevor and Louis into his office to inform them that he had selected Lou as the last player for their squad at the regional tournament that year. Trevor had sat silently on the couch for ten minutes after receiving the news. Now there was no couch or bookshelves or framed photos of golf courses. It was another empty chamber in condemned Baxter. But there was a touching bit of color on these walls. Other visitors to the dying building had taken to writing their names or drawing pictures in permanent marker in some rooms, which would be rubble before long anyway. Trevor and Louis grabbed markers from a nearby classroom and signed the white concrete above where Mr. Marco’s mahogany desk once stood. Trevor’s left hand shook as he made his mark.

The auditorium was barren. All the chairs had been pulled up and carted off to who-knew-where. The entire student body gathered there for a half hour each Monday and Thursday morning, where weekly faculty and student announcements would be made. The auditorium could never quite accommodate the entire student body. As a result, students who missed out on getting a proper seat packed into the aisles so snugly that the room looked like an MC Escher print. Trevor recalled the smoothness of the seat cushions and the shampoo of the girls who would sit in front of him. Lavender, coconut, lemongrass, vanilla. The empty odor of dust now filled Trevor’s nose. All that remained of this great hall was the sloping floor with its dingy grey carpet, rent and shredded in places where chairs had been wrenched up from the floor.

The school bookstore, just outside the auditorium, had empty shelves. Where bags of chips, candy bars and bottles of water, juice and soda once waited, only air remained. No crumbs; only dust. Every Westminster student was assigned some sort of task that served the general upkeep of the building; some students wiped down chalkboards after school, others picked up paper and other trash from the floors of the foyers. Trevor had worked in the bookstore, learning how to use the computerized cashier system. Ms. Brownfield, a mountain of a woman, would bark admonishments at him whenever he hit the wrong key or took too long to ring someone up. But at the end of every shift, she let him take a candy bar or a bottle of soda for his trouble. Now the space held the counter and a few wire stands that would in a few days be buried and twisted from the wrecking crew’s work.

The sun was a bit lower now. The blue part of the sky darkened and the yellow part had turned a faint orange. Trevor and Louis were running out of time. They returned upstairs to their final stop, the library.

Darling Library was now anything but darling. Dull beige carpet dominated the scene. It used to be largely covered or at least interrupted by study tables, computer kiosks, and bookshelves, but now there was nothing to distract their gaze from the utter drabness of the floor. The computers had been hauled away weeks earlier. Only the one that had almost never worked properly in Trevor and Louis’ time remained, its circular speaker ports punctured, wires protruding. Standing on either side of the defunct machine, Trevor and Louis studied the room. They turned to each other.

“Remember that time you really pissed me off at this computer?” Trevor asked.

“I don’t think so. Wait—vaguely,” Louis replied. He squinted slightly, trying hard to remember, to relive.

Trevor grimaced. “February, junior year. I had to email Ulrich asking a question about the problem set and you were too damned busy playing some game right here at this very machine. All the other computers were taken, and you had a hell of a score going and ‘couldn’t leave it.’ I had to run clear across the building and fire it off. I was late to class, got detention. I don’t think I spoke to you for three days after that.”

“Heh, yeah, I remember,” Louis chuckled. “You were livid. You got over it though.”

Sure, Trevor thought, but that was my one detention. In four years. Shit. It was easy for Louis to brush that little tiff aside in his memory, for Louis had never had a detention. One detention was not going to ruin his life or anything, but Trevor prided himself on never screwing up at school. Louis had never apologized for causing the detention either.

There was an upstairs part of the library called the Perry Room, where students sometimes studied above the rest of the space. But Trevor and Louis had only ever played card games like Hearts or Spades with other day students after school there. The big tables where they had played were gone, as was the whiteboard they used for keeping score in their games. But surprisingly, a window that opened to the roof was open.

“Lou, not once was that window open in all our years here.”

“I don’t think so, Trev. Heck, let’s see the roof for the first time.”

The window would only open so much, and there was a sizable step down onto the roof. Furthermore, Trevor, while no fatass by any means, was not svelte either. He groaned as Louis stuffed him through the opening and he tumbled to his side with a thud onto the hot, black rubbery plastic roof covering. Louis laughed as Trevor, grumbling, brushed himself off.

After Trevor helped Louis ease himself down onto the roof, the two friends looked around. “How about that Lou? Four years at this school, and here we are taking in this view for the first time. Damn; we can see the balcony of Memorial Hall from up here. If only we’d known about this on those spring afternoons when girls would tan up there.”

Louis grinned. “Shit, sure. Bikinis.”

Trevor and Louis walked over to the edge to get a clearer panorama. The deep green lawns stretched out before them, interrupted by yellow and brown stately Tudor-style buildings. Trevor sat down, his feet dangling over the edge. Louis sat to his left, silently taking in the view. Trevor spoke after a couple minutes.

“Never again will we be such good friends as we are right now, Lou.”

Lou sighed, acknowledging the heavy truth of his best friend’s statement. Fighting back a tear, he replied, “We’ll always have Baxter.”

Evening was coming fast. The boys had to be going home, where each had a good deal of packing to do. Louis rose first from the edge of the roof and extended his right hand to Trevor, who took it and pulled himself to his feet. Walking over to the window back to the Perry Room, Trevor spied a chipped, red-orange brick that had fallen out of the outer wall of the building. He tried to pick it up gently but much of it fell away, leaving only a solid lump the size of a baseball. It would be his souvenir of the building.

They squeezed back into the Perry Room through the window, descended the stairs, crossed the library, and reemerged into the upper foyer. Like pallbearers, they processed around the corner and out the double-doors. Louis walked ahead towards the car, not wanting to look back for fear of more tears. But Trevor stopped in his tracks a moment. Facing Baxter one last time, he planted a kiss on the metal doorframe before striding down the stairs after his friend.