The Book of Joe

Mikey!”
    “What, you don’t think your mother’s hot? Be honest.”
    “Bite me.”
    Having resolved all of these matters, the goateed boy, whose name I now know is Mikey, steps forward. “Yo, Jared, what’s the deal with bringing a grown-up to the game?”
    “He’s cool,” Jared says easily. “He won’t tell. And it’s just this once, since we need to replace Gordy.”
    They all consider me for a moment, frowning thoughtfully, and I feel like the class geek standing in a dwindling crowd, waiting to be chosen by one of the teams for dodge-ball. Finally, Mikey steps forward and shakes my hand.
    “Okay, man,” he says. “As long as you don’t, you know, have a heart condition or anything.”
    “I’m good,” I say wryly.
    “Okay,” Jared says, flashing me an approving smile. “Let’s do it.”
    “It” turns out to be paintball. Mikey opens the back of his Jeep, and everyone clamors around as he hands out a slew of pneumatic air guns designed to look convincingly like cutting-edge terrorist weaponry. The boys are all business as they outfit their guns, speaking to one another in technical jargon about flip loaders, barrel plugs, hose kits, butt plates, and twenty-ounce CO bottles. There is something almost 2
    professional in the easy familiarity of their references to cockers and beavertails, and if they were ever amused by the sexual innuendo in those terms, they’ve long since gotten over it. Jared hands me my gun, an Autococker 2000, and gives me a brief lesson in loading my vertical CO bottle and 2 feeding my cylindrical magazine of paintballs into the barrel.
    He hands me a black knapsack containing a pair of goggles, extra ammunition, and CO bottles.
    Once everyone has a gun and gear secured to his body with Velcro and shoulder straps, they begin scaling the chain-link fence one by one, flipping easily over the top, and dropping down softly onto the grounds of the Porter’s campus. I can’t remember the last time I climbed a fence, and when my turn comes, I throw myself at it with a burst of physical intensity, determined not to embarrass myself by getting hung up or crushing my balls as I straddle the top.
    Once we’re all assembled on the other side, we jog silently through the dense woods, which in the impenetrable darkness seem to go on forever. We fan out when we hit the large expanse of the back lawn, the titanium casings of the guns we clutch gleaming in the blue light of the moon. It’s easy to imagine that we’re a team of commandos infiltrating an enemy compound, and I feel a burst of childish adrenaline as we come over a knoll and I can make out the massive black structure of the office building looming in the distance.
    I slow down as we pass the small lake where Sammy, Wayne, and I hung out so often that summer. I remember how Wayne looked flying through the spray as he jumped off the geyser’s platform. Now the geyser is off, and the dark water lies still as a sheet of glass. In my head I hear the faint strains of Springsteen singing “Spirit in the Night,” like an echo, and I feel something hot tremble briefly in my chest, but I don’t stop running. This place is spooky enough; I don’t need my own ghosts adding to the atmosphere.
    This is clearly not the first time these kids have trespassed here, and they all move as one toward a loading bay on the far left side of the building. Two of them disappear into some shrubbery and return with crowbars, which they place under the rubber rim of one of the loading bay doors and force it up. The door moves smoothly on its rollers and we all file inside, the last ones in pulling down the door behind them.
    Jared now takes the lead, and we follow single file down a hallway and into a stairwell. We climb four flights and step out into an immense atrium filled with attached cubicles that extend across the width and breadth as far as the eye can see.
    “They shut the place down when they went out of business,” Jared explains to me as the other guys throw their gear down onto desks and begin loading and making adjustments to their guns. Apparently, silence is no longer required.
    “Everything is locked up while the lawyers fight it all out, so nothing’s been touched.”
    I walk slowly through the continuous rows of cubicles, all still furnished with desks, chairs, computer terminals, phones, and fax machines. Many cubicle walls still have photos and posters adorning them, the accessories of low-level employees trying to