I'm trying not to wonder where you are. All this time, lingers, undefined. Someone choose who's left and who's leaving.

-The Weakerthans

----------------------------

Roger stands over me, grinning.

He's holding my camera, hugging it tightly to his chest, arms crossed.

He's just out of my reach.

"You're going to be late, you know." I tell him, pulling my backpack from the asphalt.

He keeps grinning.

"…Come on you fucking robot, gimme the camera, you're gonna miss it!" I try punching him in the shoulder but my fist falls inches short. He stares on with glassy eyes.

"Why are you just standing there? This isn't funny anymore Rog, you're creeping me out!"

I try standing, but I'm lying down, suddenly.

"Whoa."

Roger hasn't moved.

"Okay you fuck. You can't do that when I'm not paying attention-" A phantom thunderclap terrorizes the back of my mind and my skin explodes with goosebumps.

"Roger, can you help me up? Forget about the camera. Just put it down and help-" Roger's grin twinkles with a ghostly phosphorescence that I'd never seen. Roger has never been this happy.

"Why are you still smiling-?" And then the reverberations again, the back of my head booming and I am plummeting and Roger is shrinking, getting farther away until he is inches tall, encased in a square- a picture- a Polaroid- of Roger, grinning, holding my camera, hugging it tightly to his chest, arms crossed. The photo is delicately taped above my bed, in my room on the sloping roof of the house- the house I grew up in- my room?

I bolt upright in bed, my old bed, blinking several times. What the fuck am I doing in this bedroom?

Static crackles at my temples and the picture above my head disappears, fading into the paneling, corners curling and then they are gone.

In its place appears a cover of a gardening magazine, a backyard bursting with a idyllic display of petunias, and 'The Top Ten Tips for a Tip-Top Deck.' Nausea crams into my stomach and the whole room bobs in and out of focus, snatched pieces from a teenage memory and what actually in front of my eyes. Negatives hung adroitly from the clothesline strung from wall to wall, drying on the ceiling of an amateur filmmaker. But then the clothesline snakes away, slurping into the walls. It's been more than fifteen years since I'd seen this room.

Automatically I swing my hand out to the bedside table. My cassette player is gone. My record player is gone. My typewriter is gone. And in their place boxes and boxes full of paper, a pair of gardening shears, bags of potting soil, and a rake. The skylight filters four 'o clock sun over my bed sheets. Even these are wrong.

I reach up to try and find the picture of Roger. I pull away a corner of the magazine cover, but there is nothing behind it. There are footsteps on the stairs.

"Mark honey?"

"Yeah?"

"You're awake now?"

"…I don't think I really slept."

My mother nods.

I close my eyes and I see Roger at the back of my eyelids.

"…I took that picture the last day of summer."

"What?"

"Mom, what did you do with all my stuff?"

"What stuff, honey?"

"When I moved out."

"When you went to Providence? You took most of it with you."

"Did I?"

"The only things that you left were your bed and your dresser. And your father and I sold those at a rummage sale when you moved to the city. We figured you weren't coming back for them." She chuckles with a faraway look in her eyes.

"What about the typewriter?"

"You brought that with you."

"And my cassette player?"

"Yes, that too."

"And the record player too?"

"Well, you gave that to R- you brought that with. I imagine you have it buried in the apartment somewhere."

"Oh."

It's quiet. There's static at my temples again and I almost forget what I intended to ask. I point to the sloping roof.

"…It might be a while back, but do you remember the picture of Roger I had hanging there?"

My mother bites the side of her thumbnail, staring imprecisely at my index finger suspended over the nicely polished patio on the magazine. She shakes her head no, briefly, but then nods slowly yes, with more confidence.

"Really? Did you take it down or do I have it?"

"Mark, you're asking me about a picture. One out of the million you have taken in your lifetime. It's probably lost deep in a portfolio…" She pauses. "Why, did you need it?"

"No. I was just thinking about it. Or maybe I was dreaming. I'm not sure if I was awake. Anyway, I took that picture of Roger the day before he left for New York-" There is a convulsion in my mind that gives me shivers and I lose my train of thought. I stop and look up, out the skylight. The sun bleaches everything else. It is just white beyond the glass.

My mom touches my arm tenderly. "What were you saying honey?"

I blink.

"Um- I don't…remember."

Years, seconds, months, minutes, hours later I am alone again. I straighten the covers out and flip onto my back, prepared to stare into nothing. Out the skylight, the night is black.

There is no moon, no stars.

Maureen's voice is in my head, and again the room evaporates into a memory. The skylight stretches and sprawls the length of the cold, brick walls of the apartment.

"Where's Roger?" Maureen asks me.

We're sitting on the windowsill, staring up at a starless night.

"Out." I say distantly.

"For how long?" She grins mischievously and her hand is on my leg.

I smile, but hardly.

She pulls away.

"What's wrong?"

I press my forehead to the glass and try to see beneath the fire escape.

"I don't know…where he is."

"Who- Roger?" She blinks. "Do you ever know where Roger is? I think you're just worried he's going to come back too soon…" Her hand is back.

I don't notice.

"Have you seen him at all today?"

She pouts and wrings her hand in her lap. "No." She says apathetically, but then is incapacitated with my concern. "Well…this morning he went with April. I saw them on the stairs." She points to the door. "Why?"

"I just…I get worried."

"Worried?" he raises an eyebrow.

I scan the street.

"Wait, am I hearing you correctly, you get worried? About what- Roger?"

"I- well- nevermind…"

She laughs. "No really Mark, what is that supposed to mean?"

"Well…you don't worry about him?"

"Are we talking about the same Roger? No, I don't worry about him. Why would you- Mark, get away from the window. You should see yourself, you look like a fucking dog. He'll come home when he comes home. And right now, he's gone. Now get over here before I decide to leave."

Time stretches and snaps, shifting aggressively to the hours following Angel's death.

I am alone, on the hill.

My thoughts are interrupted by Mimi and Roger fighting, just out of earshot.

I am not in the mood to hear it anymore.

I can't even fathom how they can be feeling anything besides grief right now. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to filter out their voices, but there is nowhere else to go and nothing else to hear.

I walk over to the edge of the hill to witness Mimi grab Roger by the shoulders and shove him backwards with every ounce of ache and resentment she has kept bottled up until today. He stumbles over a headstone but catches himself on another. He stares in disbelief at the ground he has tripped on and looks up slowly, dramatically slow, into her eyes.

"…Where are you gonna go?!" She screams at him. Her voice rips through the placid air. She's trying so hard to hold everything inside and she trembles. I know that kind of conflict.

She steps back and he steps forward.

She shoves him again and he grabs her wrist. She balls a fist in his grip but does not try to pull away. They stand there like that for a long time in silence, Mimi's head cocked dauntingly to the side, and Roger bowing under the weight of his own selfishness.

"Roger." Benny is coming up the path from behind Mimi, walking briskly with a false sense of calm. "Let her go."

Roger closes his eyes and laughs, releasing her wrist but leaving his open palm hovering laboriously. Mimi sobs and immediately turns her face into Benny's chest.

"Let her go?" Roger mumbles. "Ha. She already left." He closes his hand and spins away.

"Then maybe it's time you leave too, Roger." Benny calls after him.

"I thought we already said goodbye."

Without delay he's struggling up the hill, crunching leaves furiously and staring impassively ahead. I don't have the impulse to run and he does not see me sitting in his path until the last second. I startle him but he barely lets it show.

"What are you doing?"

I stand up.

"You're really going?"

He starts to walk away.

"Roger!"

He stops.

"Why?" It's a futile question. I sound pathetic. And this memory is pointless. I already know why. In some warped dramatic irony from my blended past and future, I already know how he's going to answer.

He contemplates abandoning me, but softens his stare and whispers, very patiently, "To forget."

At the time, alone on this hilltop, this does not seem like a very effective solution. I cannot understand how running away could possibly help.

For someone who's always been let down…

And then thunder spits its frequency into the memory and the moon is shining through the skylight, full and bright.

I sit up in bed, and stare hard at the place where I'd hung the photo of Roger when I was seventeen. There is no thunder, no noise, no Roger.

I ball my fist and punch the wall, breaking a hole in the synthetic wood.

I cannot remember why I am back in Scarsdale.

New York seems far away, but, as he always has, Roger seems even farther.