Time and Space in Steubenville

You get in the habit of trying doors. They’re locked, of course, forty-nine times out of fifty; but you have to give luck a chance to operate. The front door of that old Ohio corpse-barn was locked, and the windows boarded up—the cellar door, not so. The knob came off in my hand, and I pushed my way inside through the drifted snow.

I come back now, at thirty-nine, to this still-abandoned place. Other vagrants have come and gone, I see: the copper wires are stripped, the tatterdemalion laundry piles looted. There are more empty bottles than before. But the sagging soul of this forsaken edifice remains.

It will be here waiting in another twenty years. Still moldering, still standing. I’ll return one final time to bid farewell to the barn that sheltered me, that shelters me; I’ll read the letter that I write now, as I now read the letter I wrote back then.

“To Ash Overlook, 39,” I wrote, “from Ash Overlook, 19. Welcome home, old boy. I trust this letter finds us well.” I huddled in my blanket, sipping Boone’s Farm apple wine. My breath was a curious specter peering down at the notebook on the floor. “As you’ll no doubt recall, we came to Steubenville two weeks ago looking for work. With any luck, you’ll have found some by now.”

Is it here? A broken board in the frost-scathed floor, where I hid a crumpled sheet of paper twenty years ago. (Jesus, twenty years. When, and how?) Cobwebs like memories. I brush them off and find the board. It’s here. “To Ash Overlook, 39. . .”

That board will be there when I come again. I’ll bring a bottle of The Glenlivet and three glasses, and we’ll all drink together, I and the shades of my past and present selves. It will be deep winter, as it was then, as it is now. I’ll bundle myself in warm, soft clothes; I’ll have a thermos of hot soup, and I’ll send that comfort back to a freezing, starving boy.

I drank, I shivered, I wrote. “I hope we’ve retained our humility. Obviously you now dwell in a mansion of some kind, but I urge you to re-evaluate its ostentation. Perhaps we can do away, for instance, with the Ionian columns in the third-floor bathroom?”

I smile. Thanks to the back-then apple wine, my recollection of the letter’s content is hazy—hence, I’m reading it for essentially the first time. I glance out the old cracked window at the snow-specks hanging in the bitter air, and take a long draught of almost decent bourbon. “To Ash Overlook, 59, from Ash Overlook, 39. Welcome back, old man.”

I’ll nod and raise a glass. Old man indeed. I’ll set one glass on the letter from Ash, 19. Somehow we survived. You kept your fists up, kid. You did good.

The wind was prowling in the rotten eaves. The sun went down at 4:00; the stars were cold and alien. Factory smog from the nearby rust-town rubbed a thumb across the moon. “Maybe we should buy this place, once we’re obscenely pecunious. Turn it into a home for disadvantaged youth. Or set it on fire. Probably the second one.”

“As you’ll no doubt recall,” I write, “we have not yet achieved vast wealth. The buying and/or burning of this barn, I must therefore leave to you.”

I’ll set a glass on the letter from Ash, 39. I won’t have wealth. But I will have matches.

“Well, my illustrious future self,” I wrote, “I wish you all the best. Farewell for now—or rather, for back then, as it will be when you read this. God speed. Sincerely, AO19.”

“Two decades on this earth,” I write. “Lord knows where we’ll be by the time I’m you, my friend. Still alive, still free? I guess we’ll see.”

With ancient, wry serenity, I’ll strike a flame. A splash of Scotch will make a fine accelerant. “Hail and farewell, boys,” I’ll say. “Let’s close the circle.” Now forty years abandoned, the barn will be ready to meet its rest.

But tonight, I write. I drink with my past and my future, and I write of all the things I hope to do. My past is freezing, and my future burns. But tonight, in our old phantasmal homestead, we’re at peace.