SEVENTEEN 

–

Mikey suggests two options for continuing. We can go directly to the water supply, stock up, have a proper breakfast, and spend the rest of the day exploring. The stipulation was that Nico couldn’t carry all our water around all day, so we’d have to hide it somewhere and come back. We also would be exploring in tandem with the most active times for the tours, and that was much riskier. The alternative was continuing to explore for the rest of the morning, and circling back for water and lunch during the peak tour hours. We would go back and collect our rucksacks and use the afternoon to move camp deeper into the city, so we could continue exploring again in the evening once the tours were wrapping up for the night, and early again in the morning.

The options are clearly directed at me, since I am, just by experience, the weakest link. In one case, I would get a meal, which I definitely wanted, but it limited our options a lot more, and was more dangerous. It’s clear to me that the second option is the better, if I can manage.

I thought it would be a tougher choice to make, but honestly, the adrenaline from the climb has me feeling invincible, and my hunger for more was truly outweighing my need for food. So we agree to keep exploring for the few hours we have left before midday. 

The boys mess around at the bumper cars for a little while as I photograph their antics, before we cut through the forest, the back way, towards the Pripyat Town Hall. On the way, we get glimpses above the trees of the Polissya, and I take pace with Lex to question him. “Our tour guide called that the ‘Stalker Hotel’. Said it was the tallest building in Pripyat.”

I realize as I say it what I’m really asking. If that was true, why weren’t we climbing that roof? Lex just offers his easy chuckle, mixed with a bit of a scoff. “You’d have to be stupid, or an amateur, to make camp at the Polissya. Security is always scouting the area. Some Stalkers can’t resist though.” 

Mikey chimes in with an addition. “The hotel is for COD fanboys, not real Stalkers.”

This makes the three boys laugh, though I’m a bit lost on the reference, and I see Lex scowl at me playfully. “I thought you were writing a story on this? You don’t know about Call of Duty?”

“I don’t write about video games.” 

“No, but it’s one of the reasons the tourism here even exists. And definitely the reason Stalkers exist.” He refuses to give me more on the matter, so I make a mental note to myself to do some more research, because I feel embarrassed for the lapse in my knowledge. Instead, he answers my second inquiry. “It’s also not the tallest building in the area. The tallest building is on the other side of Pripyat, across the city center, and we’ll be camping there tonight.” 

I could tell he was smirking under his mask, because he also knew exactly what I’d been asking and likely already had plans concocted in his crazy brain. At least the roof of a building, even if it was the tallest one available, likely wouldn’t be as terrifying as the Ferris Wheel climb had been.

We continue through the forest, thick and overgrown despite being only a stone’s throw from one of the usable roads, and we stop instead at the Pripyat music school. Our Guided Tour had been limited in time, so we mostly hit the most popular areas, and I’d only gotten to see a lot of the building in passing, but I remember the beautiful stone-carved mural on the outside of the music school from when we’d walked by the first time. 

Now, we were going inside. 

We enter through a broken window to a fairly well preserved rehearsal room, books still on the deteriorating shelves and old and rusting-away instruments all over. Without Mikey’s gloves, I was tentative to touch, but Lex eases my concern a bit by running his fingers over almost everything, even taking books off the shelves to finger through the pages. 

So I allow my curiosity to drive me and I touch as well, over the edge of a bronze trumpet, swiping the dust from a shelf to see the build up on my finger, gliding a hand across the spins of the books that were still in place on the shelf. 

“Do you read much?” I ask him, now that we both linger at the books. I remember him immediately going for the novel back at my hotel room, and wonder for a moment if he had been judging the trashy romance novel I’d borrowed from Natalie for the flight. 

“Not as much as I’d like,” he admits, moving onto another room with me on his flank. “When I was a kid though, I read a lot. Probably learned a lot of my English that way, to be honest.”

“Your English is impressive.” I offer the compliment despite myself, and he accepts it with little more than a grin, hidden under the mask. 

In the next room, there are string instruments, including a broken cello propped up against a high-back, plush chair. He plays with the tuning knobs, then when he moves on, I pluck at a string. It attempts to make a noise, but the sound flats immediately, the old strings too brittle to resonate. Like a dying cough. I step into the corner of the room to take a picture of the cello, a halo of sun peeking in from the window. Maybe this cello was still making music somewhere else. Heaven or, in another timeline, far away from here, in the fingers of a little girl just finding her love for music.

“Have you read Life Begins on Friday?” He distracts from my thoughts, and I have to think for a moment, filter through my head to see if the name sounds familiar.

“I don’t think so,” I respond, then offer a sheepish addition. “I guess I don’t read as much as I’d like either.”

“It’s a Romanian novel. I read it when it was published, I was twelve or thirteen, maybe? I think it’s my favorite.”

“You think?” I smirk as I watch him tilt his head a little and the flex of his jaw gives away the grin under his mask turning a bit sheepish itself. 

He explains. “It’s been a long time since I read it. But I still remember it. I remember it giving me hope about things. The past, and the future. The things we can’t change.” He moves to exit back out into the hall again, and adds as I follow. “you should read it. Tell me what you think.”

I catch the ghost of what he’s suggesting. Stay in contact? But I can’t help snorting at the idea, and offer a joke to lighten the implication. “You want to be penpals? Who will I address my letters to if you won’t even tell me your name, and you don’t have a mailing address?”

He rolls his eyes, but I can tell he’s still smirking. “We’re not actually in the 1980s, despite the surroundings. Email exists, Vulpiță.”

I hum teasingly, but then nod. “OK. I’ll let you know what I think then, once I read it.”

“Good. I look forward to it.” 

We’ve made our way down the main hallway to the other boys, who have been exploring the concert hall. The room is full of rubble now, but the bones remain intact, beautiful windows letting in streams of gold light that shine down on the stage at the head of the room, the skeleton of a grand piano still standing, haunting and alone.

Nico sits himself in the front row of the aisle of benches that lead down to floor level, and Mikey finds a stool that’s just intact enough to sit on in front of the piano. I take a picture, including them in the shot, because I love that they look like they belong there, in more ways than one. The space, even though only a glimmer of what it used to be, was still recognizable as a performance stage, and they take up the roles in the photograph, of performer and patron, a glimpse of the past shining through the image due to their presence.

I sit also, but mid-way down, where the light cuts perfectly through the dusty air and bleaches Mikey’s hair in light, looking all golden blond, shadowing the sharp edge of his jaw as he sweeps his fingers over the non-existent keys of the piano. 

And as I’m taking another photograph, he places his fingers expertly over where his starting notes are, and begins playing the skeleton-piano, humming the notes that should be played when the piano cannot produce them. I watch him carefully, listen to his humming, and recognize Beethoven’s Moonlight when he crosses his hands and hums the higher key notes that join the Sonata at the half-minute mark. 

I want to keep watching Mikey’s hands, because I can tell he knows exactly what he’s doing and I’m fascinated by this skill, unexpectedly uncovered in this most unlikely place. But when he continues to fill the silence with his ghostly rendition, bringing the piano back to life with just his imagination, I can’t help but close my eyes and sink into his performance. And I imagine the room full of others, as silent as I am, bated breaths, enthralled by every note of his song. 

“You should see him play for real,” Lex has taken the spot next to me, and his comment is barely a whisper, only appropriate during such a performance. 

“I would like that. But when would that be?” I get nothing back from him besides a shrug, and I can’t help but roll my eyes. “I know what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?” Lex asks under his breath, his tone shifting with a dare. Like he wanted to add, ‘say it.’

But, when I open my mouth to respond, I realize I don’t really have the words. What was he doing? Sharing bits of himself, of the others, showing me pieces of this hauntingly beautiful place and stirring something in me that I can’t really describe. Offering the idea that going back didn’t mean the end? That leaving Neverland maybe didn’t have to mean leaving these lost boys behind?

Like he wants me to fall in love. With this place, this lifestyle, these boys; the real them, hiding behind masks. With…

“You’re making me feel guilty.” I say, because it’s the only way I can think of expressing it.

I watch him from the corner of my eye. He keeps his gaze on Mikey, but I can see his expression shift under the mask. Softening, like on the roof when he spoke about the orphanage. We sat in Mikey’s song for another long moment before he whispers, “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I’m sorry.” 

I let his apology sit, because he seems to want to say more, but he only does when I allow myself to look back at Mikey as well, while he nears the end of the Sonata.

“Showing you why we love this place has been like experiencing it for the first time again. I’m going to be sad when you return to civilization. I want to show you more. Everything.” 

I turn back to him with this admission, but I can’t speak. He’s taken my voice entirely. So I just gap at him, his expression unreadable, before Mikey has hit the last hummed, heavy notes of his song and Lex stands to applaud the performance along with Nico.

Mikey rises from his stool also and gives a bow, straight backed and exaggerated, but it resembles a ghost of someone who’s made that exact gesture of gratitude to a stage before. I wonder, while I join the clapping, what life Mikey leaves behind to make these trips. A life where, at some point, he’s learned to play piano. Maybe I considered them all to be outcasts like Lex, permanent vagabonds, but I remember Mikey mentioning these tours “paying the bills”, and now find myself wondering if there was a nine-to-five that he also escapes from during these adventures. And if he was tied to civilization, a part of him at least, what is keeping him there? A family? Siblings, parents, a lover, or children even, maybe?

I’m not like Mikey in that way though, with human connections to keep me grounded. Nor was I like Wendy, who returned from Neverland because she knew she wanted to experience life and grow old. 

I was like Lex. An orphan. An outcast. A ghost, even, sometimes. I never seemed to fit into society in the way that others did, and it only became more obvious after the death of my father. I always felt more at home in the forest with him, and since his death, I barely felt right in my own skin. I knew how to read animal tracks better than the intentions of other humans.

I’ve been wearing a mask also. It wasn’t like their masks, but it kept the real me hidden regardless. Maybe even to myself. And maybe this was the first time I felt like I was seeing a glimmer of who I really am. The daughter my father forged in the forest. A portrait of a wild girl, a Stalker, on the Chernobyl skyline. Was he showing me, through his eyes, the parts of myself slipping through?