by Joe Clifford
THE SHADOW PEOPLE
Joe Clifford
The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Joe Clifford
Cover and jacket design by Mimi Bark
ISBN 978-1-951709-40-2
eISBN: 978-1-951709-65-5
Library of Congress Control Number:
available upon request
First hardcover edition July 2021 by Polis Books, LLC
44 Brookview Lane
Aberdeen, NJ 07747
www.PolisBooks.com
CHAPTER ONE
The night I learned Jacob Balfour was missing, I’d just gotten a date with Samantha Holahan. We were halfway through a marathon Thursday night class. Three hours of Shakespeare. Brutal way to end the long week and even longer semester, my last at SUNY before transferring to Syracuse in the fall. Not dismissing Shakespeare’s obvious place in the pantheon of great literature. He has some terrific lines. All our yesterdays lighting fools and tomorrows creeping in their petty pace. Wonderful. But it bored me stiff. Whenever I read class assignments, I had to do so standing up. Soon as I lay in bed, I’d fall asleep.
I needed the lit requirement before Syracuse would take me. Might not have been so bad, but it was Shakespeare’s histories. Not his comedies or tragedies, which have all the killer parts and memorable quotes—it was the goddamn histories, Richard III and dull crap like that. The only thing that kept me showing up each week: Samantha Holahan.
Sam was so cool. Any other girl tries wearing a little red beret, and I’m screaming fraud. But Sam? The short black pixie cut, the rotating men’s vests and ties, the rest of that week’s thrift store haul, however haphazardly arranged—it fit; her whole presentation was so relaxed, so spot on, so…cool. Even the name sounded cool. During my shifts at Ledgecrest Convalescent, I couldn’t help rolling it around in my head. Sam Holahan. The lilt and rhythm of it. Twenty-three years old and I was one degree removed from swapping out last names inside swirling pink hearts. I was in a bad way.
I felt pressure to make a move. All evening I’d been besieged by a growing unease, big clock ticking down, cosmic judgment about to be cast. Blame it on the Bard. It was now or never. Three months of sharing the same space as Sam, and the best I’d mustered was a “hey” in passing. I had no game. Not like I was ugly or socially awkward. I was normal. Which was the problem. I was too normal. I looked like every other guy on campus: normal height, normal weight, normal everything. So normal I was in danger of disappearing.
Maybe my gut recognized dire stakes—fourth quarter, Hail Mary, they-need-a-big-play-and-need-it-now desperation—because during break, fifteen minutes where you could grab a Coke and stretch your legs, I surprised myself, primal instincts replacing my usual trepidation. Sam was getting one of those little packages of Oreos from the vending machine. I took off my glasses and stuck them in my pocket. Smoothing my hair, I came up behind her, keeping appropriate distance, and made a joke about taking a picture. Because they use the same chemicals in those cookies as they do in developing film. Stupid. I must’ve managed not to sound condescending because she laughed. More courtesy chuckle. But she didn’t run. In fact, she moved closer. Probably because it was so cold. Despite being on the cusp of summer, the skies had cooled, thunderheads rolling in gray waves of tragic doom and beauty. The campus’s open-air veranda invited gales, making the second-floor landing a perpetual wind tunnel.
Students bustled between brownstone and brick, cutting out for the day, heading to get drunk. The tall clock tower loomed large, and the newly mown grass smelled so sweet. On the muddied horizon, a burnt orange ball held on before those thunderheads blotted it gone. Ragweed weighted the air, June bugs chirped in fruit fields, and, for once, Upstate New York didn’t feel like the ugliest place on Earth. We’d been in the grip of an early season heat wave. Now the night offered relief, a cloudburst to wash everything clean, start over. Not uncommon for this time of year, heat bubbles punctured by sweeping cold fronts, lighting crashing, thunder rolling. I took comfort in raging elements.
After that, conversation came effortlessly. The more we talked, the more I questioned if Sam was just being nice to me. I’d never lacked confidence, but this total lapse in self-esteem couldn’t have come at a worst time. Outside of finals, the semester was over. And my Shakespeare class didn’t have a final, only a term paper. Which I’d already written. It was now or never.
Before we headed back in, I made my move.
“What are you doing after class?”
“Nothing,” Sam said. “No plans.”
“I was thinking of grabbing a drink at Thee Parkside.” I hadn’t, in fact, been thinking of grabbing a drink. And certainly not at Thee Parkside, which was this hipster Pabst and billiards bar out by Blodgett Mills that I’d been to once. I’d blurted out the first bar that came to mind because I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
I braced for the rejection, certain Sam was running through excuses of the better things she had to do. Instead, she shrugged and said, “Sure, Brandon. Sounds like fun.”
I stood there, slackjawed, flummoxed, gobsmacked. Forget her saying yes—I didn’t think Sam Holahan knew my name. The moment couldn’t have lasted longer than two or three seconds, but moments like that have a way of dragging out indeterminately long.
For the rest of class, I had a tough time paying attention. Never had I less interest in the primogeniture of fifteenth-century fiefdom. I wasn’t sure I’d survive the final bell. I felt my cell buzz in my pocket a few times. Calls, not texts. I couldn’t pick up in the middle of class. Who talked on a phone anyway?
When class cut out, I played it cool. One chill head bob, nonchalant, stopping short of a finger point and wink. I pushed through the glass doors, into a swirling night, storm winds exposing the undersides of maple leaves. A fat raindrop plopped on my wrist. Checking my cell, I saw I had several missed calls, all from the same number. I knew it was bad news.
I hit redial.
“Hello, Mrs. Balfour.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, Brandon.”
I turned around and saw Sam Holahan standing on the top steps, backpack slung over shoulder, one strap, looking around like she was waiting for me to walk her to her car or maybe drive with her to the bar.
“Not at all,” I said, ducking around the side of the Old Main Building. Even though I was shielded by shrubbery, I felt exposed by interior lights.
“Have you spoken with Jacob?” she asked.
“Not in a few.” I hoped Mrs. Balfour interpreted “few” as days or weeks, and not the months it really was. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” she said. “Jacob is missing.”
CHAPTER TWo
The drive from Cortland to Utica takes over an hour in good weather, and at that moment conditions were anything but—heavens dumping sheets, rain splatting on the tin roof, brake lights shimmering red waves of gasoline, tractor-trailers riding low gears to avoid the glut of emergency roadside vehicles treating storm casualties on the shoulder. I had a lot of time to think about Jacob, especially the end, how it all came crashing down, the apex of his mental illness coinciding with my decision to leave Utica. The two were not unrelated.
Jacob’s deteriorating condition wasn’t my fault—he was sick—my leaving for college wasn’t bailing, wasn’t abandonment—sticking around to watch a man slowly drown wasn’t doing service to anyone. After everything I’d survived, I owed myself a future. But long drives on Upstate New York highways in the pouring rain at night have a wa
y of worming regrets into your brain and calling you on your own lies. I’d given up on Jacob, leaving him to contemplate the murky waters of insanity—and people like Mrs. Balfour and Chloe to drag the river after he went off the deep end. There was no positive way to spin it.
Jacob and I met fifteen years ago when we lived down the street from each other at Farewell Commons. The upbeat name does a disservice to the squalid apartment complex that sat in the crumbling shadows of the old insane asylum. When you’re a kid, you don’t pick up on the universal metaphors life throws your way. Like the giant mental institution serving as a hundred-thousand-ton harbinger for the hell that awaits one of you. The closed hospital seemed to tower ten stories tall when I was a kid, like Batman’s Arkham Asylum, minus the heroes to protect you on the darkest nights, leaving only the madmen who want to watch the world burn.
Cultural pride, gallows humor, morbid curiosity, call it whatever you want, but over the years I’d read up a lot on the Utica Psychiatric Center, New York’s earliest state-run attempt to treat lunatics. That’s what it was originally called, The New York State Lunatic Asylum. Not exactly a great moment in signage. I’d spent this past semester picking out literary clues from centuries-old plays, so perhaps I was overanalyzing. But it’s hard not to draw the correlation doing eighty on the 81 because your bipolar best friend may have lost it for good this time.
When I moved in with the Balfours, I was pretty messed up. Doctors suggested medications. A stable living environment fixed most of the damage.
Farewell Commons was like several of the sleazy apartment complexes you find in Utica, places you didn’t want to be born, places you got stuck, places you died. Slabs of concrete slapped on undesirable plots, unruly sprouts of urban scruff, uneven acres squeezed between liquor stores and laundromats and passed-out bums face-planted in their own sick. Waves of collapsing chain link rippled through high ragweed grasses, discarded appliances and illegally dumped trash. Overturned shopping carts, an oven, the occasional engine block. Stray boots jutted from fields like abstract art on coffeehouse walls. Unlike my parents and me, the Balfours weren’t born there. Their inclusion was a pit stop, a temporary embarrassment. The Balfours landed at Farewell Commons, cast out of their more affluent Hills Hart neighborhood, after Mr. Balfour hanged himself in the family’s two-car garage.
For eight-year-old boys, even in the midst of tragedy, the world shines bright. The first afternoon I met Jacob, he was riding his Fuji mountain bike around the cul-de-sac, taking air off the ramp he’d made from a busted bench. It was the end of winter, those glorious early days of spring creeping in.
Could’ve been the timing, the lack of options—maybe it was because I didn’t have a dad either—by that point my father was a shell of a human being. Bitter, drunk, inaccessible. He never got over my mother leaving. He’d sit in that chair for days, gazing at a blank spot on the wall, clutching the bottle like a street preacher and his Bible.
Jacob and I became best friends, inseparable. We liked the same music, sports teams, even looked alike, a pair of skinny mop-tops, so much so that people often mistook us for brothers.
In middle school, we decided to start a band. Neither of us could play an instrument or sing. But we wrote songs on the computer and picked out a name, The Hanging Chads, which we thought was pretty clever for the eighth grade. Jacob designed our band insignia, an intersecting figure eight, friends forever. In industrial arts class he made us rings. I lost mine. He never took his off.
Mrs. Balfour, now tasked with putting the family back together, worked more than one job—nursing, waitressing, selling merch on eBay, anything to keep the family afloat. She was seldom home, Chloe was in daycare, and Jacob and I had free rein. Come summertime, the neighborhood was ours to conquer, unencumbered. Those were my most vivid memories of Jacob: exploring the hidden crevices of St. Agnes Cemetery, down to the muddy banks of the Mohawk River, crawling through condemned buildings and houses half underwater, the untended wild terrain of impoverished Upstate New York.
We didn’t stay at the Commons long. Once the life insurance came in, Mrs. Balfour bought a regular house, and we moved across town. You’d think that’s when things would’ve gotten better. That’s when they got worse.
It’s easy to see now, after the fact, what triggered Jacob’s mental problems: his dad killing himself. Even if he didn’t talk about it much. This wasn’t based on anything the doctors said or his mom relayed; it was common sense. Jacob’s issues, which manifested slowly at first, grew worse when we got to high school. Always a skinny kid, he began putting on weight. He broke out in bad acne, which isn’t uncommon for that age. But in Jacob’s case it was because he’d stopped showering, washing, attending to basic hygiene, greasy skin hidden beneath a mass of unkempt hair.
I found it impossible to talk to Jacob as he grew increasingly obsessed with strange things. Finding single shoes. Car doors slamming. The TV started talking to him. There was a secret code to life, a mathematical equation to unlock. The number twenty-three really freaked him out. God, the devil, demons and angels battling for his soul. Crazy talk. I remember the first time the police were called. Jacob had stripped naked and run out on the lawn, bellowing at the moon, begging the heavens not to forsake him.
His mom brought him to experts. He was hospitalized. When he got out, Jacob started outpatient therapy. Nothing seemed to work. I tried to get through to him. But looking in his eyes, there was no light left, like black holes in the sky. Sometimes he’d glance in your general direction. Even when he responded, he wasn’t talking to you. More like he was conversing with an invisible person beyond your shoulder. He began having altercations at school, fighting with everyone, lashing out, screaming if he felt another student was looking at him funny or talking about him. And students were. How could they not? You’d see this big fat guy, last year’s baseball star, walking down the hall, hair greased like he’d smeared a pound of margarine to his scalp, muttering curses, hitting his own head with his fist. Then one day he swung at a teacher, and that was it; they kicked him out. Jacob finished the second half of his senior year having to be homeschooled, various tutors brought in, basically babysitters. None lasted long. Mrs. Balfour did her best to stay positive, writing off bad behaviors as manic episodes. Who was I to argue? I was a guest.
The last year living with them had been hard, and I know after I left it only got tougher. I loved the Balfours, but it was too much. I had to go lest I be infected as well.
I hadn’t planned on attending SUNY, the state university ninety miles southwest in Cortland. When it came time to apply to colleges, I found my options limited. SUNY wasn’t a safety school; it was the only one that would accept me. SUNY is nobody’s first choice. The long-standing joke about the university: where future gym teachers are bred. I wasn’t the greatest student in high school. I’m not blaming anyone for my mediocre grades, least of all the Balfours, who saved my life by taking me in, but when I should’ve been prepping for college, I was trying to repair Jacob. I’d escaped a bad situation with my parents, and now the brief stability I enjoyed with the Balfours had been threatened too. I knew I was smarter than my grades showed.
After I got my own apartment, I stayed in frequent contact with the Balfours; it’s not like I cut them off. I loved the family. We’d have Sunday dinners, spend most of the major holidays together. Over these meals, Mrs. Balfour, Chloe, and I would catch up, laugh; and there was my best friend, poking at his turkey and dumplings, silent, staring intently, as if trying to communicate sage wisdom telepathically to a baked bird.
When his mother called to say he was missing, I wasn’t surprised. A part of me dreaded this would happen. Another part had been resigned to the fact. I didn’t need to say goodbye; I’d been saying goodbye for the past decade.
I hadn’t returned to Utica since Easter a year ago. I had a pocketful of viable excuses. Work. School. Assorted assignments. But I spent this past Thanksgiving watching football and eating left
over pizza alone in my tiny apartment.
I don’t mean to make it sound like Jacob was completely certifiable. That’s not fair. He had good stretches too. When he was on his meds. He complained these pills dulled his sharpest edges, but when he was taking his medication, he could hold down menial jobs, bagging groceries at the Price Rite, sweeping up at the community center. I remember one summer he worked at a coffee shop in Reine. Unfortunately, Jacob had this annoying, unfathomable tendency to stop taking his medication. Especially when things were going well. Which made no sense. But he’d wake one morning and decide he didn’t need to take his medication anymore. Never occurred to him that the pills were the only thing keeping him sane.
CHAPTER THREE
When I got to the house, Chloe bounded down the steps, wrapping her arms around my waist. In the year since I’d last seen her, she’d sprung up bean-sprout tall and roller-skate skinny. To me, she’d always be that little girl. But here she was, a full-fledged teenager. Mrs. Balfour beamed a pained smile from the porch, descending to give me a hug, saying how happy she was to see me. Worry seeped between the cracks of reassuring words. I wanted to assuage her concerns—this wasn’t the first time Jacob had stayed out. He took off frequently, disappearing to Rotterdam and its many surrounding nature preserves. My mind flashed on that one time he climbed the water tower and spray-painted “repent,” hiding on the girders, till the fire department had to be summoned to haul him down. The local authorities were sick of his antics, and we were long past the point of repenting.
We tried to catch up like a regular family. Mrs. Balfour asked me about classes, work, plans for the future. I told her about training to be a medical assistant. I asked Chloe a few questions about school and friends, until she grew bored of the dull adult conversation and returned to her laptop, sitting cross-legged on the couch, out of earshot.
