The institute is hidden from view by an abrupt fold in the ground, around which the road veers unevenly. What is visible is a sign. It looks like a sign for a pedestrian crossing. It is yellow or white, I can’t remember. There’s a button, exactly the shape and size of one you press to indicate intent to cross. The text reads, “press to talk”. It’s only in retrospect that I realize they must have made a mistake. It ought to have read “press to listen”.
I know what the button does, it isn’t complicated. Just like the reason for the bronze on the hillside isn’t complicated. There are three hundred and ninety sculpted boulders above me, shaped like the concrete rock formations at the front of the zoo that children climb on. They glisten in the sun. Someone from the institute must have resealed them recently. Perhaps the same meticulous groundskeeper who trims the grass.
On each boulder is an embossed name and date. They are victims, all of them, of the institute. I know what will happen if I press the button. Their voices will come on, thin and crackly like in a war memorial. They will tell me their stories and what happened to them.
There is a solitary pine tree near the crossing sign. Its shadow reaches like a finger to touch a nearby memorial for a a woman born in 1921. Her name is Adeline Alive. I do not see any other date.
1921 I think. That’s just two years before Cather wrote My Antonia. It’s the time when Betty Smith remembered growing up as a girl in the pressed streets of Williamsburg. I’m not sad for those women, I think, I admire them. Then, why is the feeling so different with Adeline? And what kind of person is named Alive? Here at the institute, on the face of a memorial marker, that name seems almost a rebellion.
I turn back to the sign reading “Press to talk”. That’s a funny one. I’m hope that if I push the button, it’ll be Adeline’s voice on the other end. But when I reach for it, the scene dissolves and I’m back here in own room, now wide awake. Only the sadness stays with me. For a moment I hold it close to me, like a postcard or keepsake from that quiet place on the road to the institute.