Homecoming, Rain
by Mark D. Baumgartner

There was an explosion on screen and a theme song, and a decision was made that we should mingle with the rest of the mob outside. Out on the quad the late afternoon sky was blue in the east and green in the west, and the wind was coming straight down from the north. I was surrounded by a farrago of people I felt I very nearly almost knew. Cecilia was there, and her lime pleather purse filled with festively colored edibles. She thought the whole thing was interesting and had come along to write about it. There was a restless energy in everyone gathered here. People are like locusts when you push them too close together; they rub legs and soon enough they’re ready to swarm. There were several hundred people on the quad now, and more coming, all of them wanting to recapture something that had already fled. Homecoming at a college that didn’t any longer exist. Football boosters in NCAA-branded t-shirts laughed and sang bravely as the wind picked up.

Cash donations were being collected by men and women my parents’ age, but it wasn’t clear who or what the money was for. The college, I guess. I had belonged to this place once, though the how and when seemed distant. The school had gone under the previous year—exigency they’d called it—and the idea was to bring it back. That was why we were here, what we were being paid for. Why us, specifically, I couldn’t understand. I guess they figured we’d come cheap, and they were right. It turns out the people who handle the money in this place get you coming and going, and then coming again. I felt like I recognized everyone and knew absolutely no one. Every so often a name would surface, but never quite reached my throat. To kill time I took another gummy from Ceci’s purse. This one was a pale off color, like it had too much or too little of something. Seven bucks a pop, gratis for me. We were in the hurry-up-and-wait phase of this particular gig. I played catch for a while but the ball was a long white tracer and trying to catch it was like trying to catch a glowing javelin of light. The bocce balls were big as ostrich eggs and couldn’t be moved.

I had a beer to calm my hands. The question of the day was about power. Who has it, how do we get a hold of it. Most of campus had been mothballed and only a few administrators still had lights on. Enormous cables snaked across the fen and field, through pools of standing water to the makeshift stage. The terminus of this mess was my bass guitar and the banks of electronics at my feet: myself and my band. I was very careful to only touch the things I was supposed to touch in the exact order I was supposed to touch them. Electricity and water are seldom friends. Our backdrop was just a black silk sheet with three holes in it and three strobing arc lamps behind, a giant ellipsis. A blue awning was stretched over our heads to keep some of the rain out. The gold glitter makeup Ceci had applied to our faces to make us “pop” ran in streams down my neck into my shirt collar. It was in my sleeve, in the nails of my fret hand. People danced out in the muddy grass. No music yet, just bodies moving in their own shapes at their own pace. The rain came in slantwise between the buildings.

I’d just stuck in the last pin when a blinding blue crash struck right over my head. I fell flat on the stage with my hands over my ears. When I looked up everyone was laughing and waving their arms in the air. There was another crash above my head and I rolled off the stage.

People were jumping out of the second story window onto the awning. They bounced and slid off into the bushes. Someone shouted at them, but too late. I watched as someone leapt, and in a moment of indecision put his feet down first. There was a booming rip as he went straight through the canvas, twisting slightly, and hit the stage shoulder-first just where I was standing a moment before. He sat up, making a noise very close to laughter. He gathered up his arm, which was disassembled now like a tent pole. Some girls whom he belonged to lifted him and helped him off. A guy in an official-looking golf shirt paced at the edge of the stage with his phone. This thing was definitely going to happen; this thing was definitely not going to happen. Vaughn, our singer and guitar player, gingerly touched his microphone like it might leap up and zap him. We took our places, waited.

At some point the golf shirt raised his hand, maybe in resignation or ambivalence. It was enough: Someone threw the switch. A deep sibilant thrum. You could feel it coming down the line the way a hose straightens when you open the tap. People started to push toward us and the stage.

“We’re …” said Vaughn, and we hit the first measure.

Everything was new and pure and green again. No one moved at first, and then everyone moved. Who doesn’t love a band on a tired Saturday afternoon, something loud and fast and a little dirty. People came running from high up the hill down toward us, but the grass was wet and they all started to hydroplane. Several of them went up underneath the stage, which was fantastic, because it looked like the stage was a giant mouth and we were eating everyone by the handful. They’d never seen anything like us. Today was their birthday. Welcome to the world, hello. Bodies packed in down front. One song ran into another. I leaned my bass against the nearest cab. I jumped into the ragbag crowd at my feet and sprinted to the top of the hill. It was elating—this is what my band sounded like. I could see why they’d opened their empty checkbooks to invite us. Three blurry black forms throwing shapes on stage, blurry black noise.

I charged down the hill and glided between a pretty girl’s knees up underneath the stage. There was a whole subterranean world down below. She kissed me on the mouth; she kissed everyone on the mouth. She had a bob of brown hair and glittery gray eyes. I shook a few hands, popped a beer, and went back to work. No one missed me.

Water poured through the rip in the awning. I dunked my head under and shook off, unconcerned. I was well-grounded in my ancient Reebok high-tops, and very nearly insured. Rain came down and there was no gap between the songs, no banter. I was a fiery lance aimed at the crowd.

There was no build and release in the songs, only a build. I waded out into the audience a second time, and everything was different. The stage was at the bottom of a sopping wet incline and sinking inch by inch into the muck. Everyone was pushing forward and back. There were bodies underneath bodies. I punched and elbowed and scratched until I caught hold of a hand and a shirt sleeve. Did no one see this? An undulation, push and pull, and a gray girl—gray all over but for her white eyes and whiter teeth—appeared out of the mud like a turnip. It was the girl from under the stage. She seemed shorter to me, then I realized there were people on top of her, walking up her legs and back. She was twisting like a bridge in the grip of a high wind. I’d had my mouth on her mouth—and now it seemed like she’d been folded in a way a person shouldn’t be folded. The music cut out and people were yelling. When I could move again I climbed on the stage and stood behind the bass. It was just something to do; I felt naked without it. A circle of bystanders had gathered around the girl in the muck. They were going to move her; they were not going to move her. Someone I didn’t know was speaking into the mic. A voice rolled between the buildings, huge and inscrutable as thunder.

Vaughn was standing next to me. “It’s time to go,” he said.

I didn’t answer. He wanted something from me, so I handed him the bass. Tents were coming down and everyone was scattering. I followed the push of bodies where ever it led.

I found Cecilia in the north with the wind at the top of a high hill.

“Go down there with me,” she said. “I want to see what’s happening.”

I pulled her toward the parking lot. She wiggled loose and continued down. I waited. Sirens sounded in the distance—the cavalry was coming, the machinery of normalcy had been triggered. All aberrance would be flushed clear; I was in danger. I walked to the parking lot, intent on hitching a ride, anything to get out of there. Then Cecilia came back and handed me the keys. She said she couldn’t drive.

I got us about as far as the Kroger on the edge of town. The band pulled up eventually. It was freezing in Ceci’s car, and I wasn’t getting in the van. I was done. I stood there in the parking lot.

“Get in the van,” said Vaughn.

“No,” I said.

Vaughn slammed the door and I watched as they pulled out. It was warmer outside, but I didn’t have any of my stuff, just my wallet. I started walking toward what I figured was the edge of campus. I kept on until I reached a sign with nothing on it but the name and the date the place was founded. The metal letters had been snipped off somehow, bolt cutters maybe, as a memento or just plain vandalism. You could almost read the sign, or the sign’s shadow. The sirens and lights had come and gone. I was glad to be away from Cecilia and Vaughn and the van and the band.

I sat in a gazebo until it was evening and the rain had run out, then walked some more. Soon I reached what looked like a fraternity row. A line of black three-story houses, four hundred yards worth of black empty fields, then more houses. Three months ago the fields would have been a main thoroughfare, people grilling or throwing a football around in the night. Now it was silent. I climbed up on the nearest patio. The wood had gone mushy and there was an odd smell lingering over everything. The house seemed empty, but the grill was still warm. It seemed like a logical end for this place. Fraternity brothers, huddling in the cellar, awaiting some glorious and inevitable return. As long as they sent their checks to the college or Sallie Mae or whomever, I imagine they were welcome to stay. Why not get your money’s worth.

I’d gone to this college once—it seemed such a long time ago, though it wasn’t. I washed out after a few years with a mess of debt and some notebooks filled with ideas that seemed to belong to each other but never quite fit together. My only vivid memory was my work-study job. Minimum wage to haul pallets of mass-packaged foodstuffs from the basement freezer through blazing steam tunnels to the cafeteria kitchen. Ten hours a week, five a.m. sharp, every weekday morning. I was sick instantly, and continuously. Snot came off me in strings. On my third visit, an internist there in town handed me a sample packet of decongestants. She touched my shoulder gently and told me there was nothing more that could be done, I had reached the outward limits of medical science. Eventually I misplaced a master keyring, and the cafeteria supervisor told me not to come back. Then I found the keyring, and my college career properly began. Evenings I’d glide through the pools, the weight rooms, the fast-food back pantries. Midnight picnics at center court. I was a popular date around campus, but often I just wandered the night alone. All the back pathways were open to me, all the secrets of this magnificent, silly place: a dream like the seven golden cities of Cíbola, or a joke like Dostoevsky’s crystal palace. I kept thinking I would be found out. Surely someone must see. Eventually I’ll be caught. But I wore the keys and my own indifference like armor. I had no idea why I left, no idea why I’d come in the first place.

By now the gold glitter makeup had adhered to my face, my hair, my eyes. I watched my reflection in a blacked-out window. Maybe these kind brothers would let me hole up for the night, or just a few hours. Long enough to dry out. They would poke and prod me like a space man fallen from the sky, rub the gold glitter flash paint between their fingers, maybe take a selfie. I lived in a house like this once, I would tell them. Look, I was once like you—only they wouldn’t believe me. No one believes in the future until it arrives, and mostly not even then. I kept looking back toward campus, thinking the flashing lights would soon head my way, searching. It was full dark that way now, like a container had broken and something had spilled out into the town.

I lit up a smoke. As I watched, I thought I saw a tiny blue curl of light way down at a fraternity house on the northern lip of campus. A second later there was another blue curl of light, and then something hit the side of the house with tremendous force. Cold damp particles fell from the sky like snow, and next I knew I was lying on the ground staring at the sky, a red sphere of pain blooming in the side of my head. My left ear was filled with ocean static.

I realized the patio itself wasn’t rotted; I was lying in half an inch worth of rotten mush. The whole south wall of the house was scored and pitted. The windows were dark because they’d all been boarded up. In the four hundred yards between the two lines of houses the empty fields were littered with rotting potatoes.

Several figures materialized on the patio, including the house president himself. He introduced himself as T. Daly. “It’s not safe to smoke out here at night,” said T. Daly. “They can see you when you strike a match.” Three of his brothers carried long PVC pipes, and behind them came a lone kid dragging a propane tank and a wholesale sack of moldering potatoes.

“Potato gun,” said one of the fraternity bros, holding the white PVC out like an offering. I sat up and looked down the black field. My whole face hummed.

“It’s more of a mortar, really,” explained T. Daly. “Keep your head down.” He raised his arm in a stylized gesture, dropped it.

There was an ominous hiss, followed by three pops and three bright blue curls of light. In the distance I heard people shouting, and the slow wail of a car alarm on a low battery. Cold white slurry rained down on our heads as a new volley of potatoes hit the house.

“Do you want to try?” he asked. “Just aim high. There are still a few cars parked out in the street.”

They propped me up like a straw man with the length of PVC. I thought if I went along maybe they would invite me in and let me lie down on a ratty futon, take a few sips of warm beer. It turns out I didn’t need to do anything, it does it on its own. Hiss, pop, light. The PVC gave a satisfying kick as it sent the potato down its proscribed path. It was everything you’d expect and more. They’d been at it for many months now, T. Daly said. The power had been shut off, and soon, the water. Bottle black ink still seeped from campus. I imagined a group of unreasonably intelligent people still standing there in the mud, chittering. Move her, not move her. Move her, not move her. Cecilia was right, someone should write about this. I felt like an anthropologist; I was seeing the end of an entire people.

“Potato gun war,” I said. “What’s next?” I thought maybe I should know where things were headed.

If T. Daly knew, he wasn’t telling. He lifted his arm in that peculiar gesture, and the patio again filled with light.