As Tommy came out onto the lawn in front of Gordon, Ben paused at the edge of the woods and watched him go inside. He jogged up to the door and pulled it open. He had no idea which room was Tommy’s, but he heard gritty footsteps on the stairwell above him and so he climbed up two steps at a time, trying to make his footfalls as quiet as possible. On the second floor he was just able to see Tommy’s back foot as it disappeared into the last room on the right. Ben was quietly disappointed. He had half expected Tommy to be living in an unknown turret or gigantic basement somewhere instead of in just a regular room.

Ben walked down the hallway toward the door Tommy had gone through. Taped to it was a postcard of the Vietnamese monk consumed by flame. Ben almost knocked, but then he caught himself—only faculty knock—and he was stuck standing there in the hallway, not prepared to go in but not able to leave.

Then he heard footsteps coming up the stairs and he didn’t want to be caught there just standing in the hall, so he turned the knob and went inside. Tommy had a delay bookshelf immediately behind the door with a black-and-white poster of Jack Nicholson’s ecstatic face pressed up to the chopped-open gap in the wood.

“Tommy?” Ben said softly after the door had closed behind him. There was no answer. Ben stepped around the delay and into the main part of the room. It was empty.

The windows faced away from where the sun had started to set, and so in the late afternoon with no lights on, the space was gray-blue and very still, as though whoever lived there had been sent home.

“Tommy?”

Tommy wasn’t there. Ben looked over the room, and even though he could see the whole place in one view, he looked back and forth from the unmade bed to the pink stuffed couch over and over again, as though looking for misplaced keys. The stereo was on, but it was a McIntosh tube amp, and guys never turned them off because it took a while for the vacuum tubes to warm up properly.

But there on the oval braided rug were Tommy’s dark brown docksiders with white soles. Ben wanted to kneel down and put the back of his hand up to the insides of the shoes to see if they were still warm. Then he did get on his hands and knees to check for Tommy under the bed. Four wide plastic storage bins.

“Tommy?”