I stood in silence, looking down at the chiseled letters of the name.

When I had realized the place was almost on my way, I'd decided to divert to pay respects. As the time was within the holidays, I'd found the place - my old high school - deserted. Every few years, I seem to wind up back there, a hundred miles or so from my home, when I know I can be alone with the reminiscence.

The name is on a brick set in a walkway, just within the smoking area. At least I think it's in the smoking area; without a surveyor and a historian, I couldn't tell you on which side of the invisible borders of the smoking area the brick is laid. It would be good to think his place is in the place where my rebel classmates stood, though I didn't smoke back then, and I doubt that anyone can smoke there now.

Standing in that place, and looking hard enough to really see it, is always disorienting to me. The school has prospered somewhat in the quarter-century since I left it. The spot where I stood in silence had been just the muddy corner of the building, perpetually strewn with disrespectful cigarette butts. These days that spot seems to be meant as a decorative walk between part of the "old building" and a newly added wing. Construction has happened literally on all sides of what I think of as the school, and has obliterated all the little corners where I once would have momentous conversations. It took some moments of judging all those new angles before I managed to find that particular brick.

First name, middle initial, last name - the runes for these are carved upon that rock, along with a year of graduation. It was one of the sedate formats suggested for a memorial brick on this walk, back during the fundraiser that culminated in some of this pesky new construction. I remember scrawling those selfsame runes on the order form, let's say fifteen years ago, with that unnatural intensity drunkenness can bring to important things unexpectedly encountered. I remember my determination to avoid a screw-up of spelling or spacing in front of my old friends and classmates, the other drunks who were reaching into their wallets in memory of him, to help cover the donation that bought us the brick.

It was the ten-years-later edition of the pranks we'd so often pulled, to get our invisible classmate yet another official mention. The history of it demanded that we execute well.

The name on that order form first appeared in a saga we were writing, "we" mostly being those same people who went on to be, a decade later, drunk and solvent. The saga evolved out of those sheets of looseleaf notebook paper we were forever passing back and forth, in parallel with the learning. The narrative rambled and swerved, grew stick-figure drawings with explosions, incorporated Monty Python sketches... it was abysmal, and I wish I still had some pages of it. The name first appeared as that of the victim of a particularly hilarious explosion, and the hilarity ennobled the character sufficiently that he began to recur. His improbable survival was eventually explained in slapstick flashbacks. Eventually, as often as not, the saga became about him, since we had (somewhat accidentally while explaining) proven he could do anything.

It was a natural extension for his name to begin to appear on real-world sign-in sheets. In conversations, remarks nobody wanted to be caught making were described as overheard, and attributed to him. Girls began to ask who he was. His description grew in detail, always scrupulously noted and shared among the conspiracy so that there should be no inconsistency. One day he grew a last name, on another a middle initial. Some girls we liked were brought in on the story, and some others are probably still wondering why he didn't make it to their parties. We swore we hand-delivered the invitations.

During my senior year, I think, I was the one who first argued that he needed to go legitimate, that looseleaf wasn't big enough to hold him anymore. Soon enough, due to our complicated manipulations of local traditions, he was mentioned on the morning loudspeaker announcements as a student of note. Twice in a week. This livened up those damned announcements considerably, and got me handshakes from near-strangers in the lunchroom. I'm certain the school administration knew what was going on, it wasn't so big of a school that they wouldn't notice a new name, but the fact that ghosts were walking with us never really got mentioned until the class ring debacle.

The class ring debacle may have been a step too far, though in fairness, we were provoked. Or bored, I forget. Anyway, on the day our school administration insisted on keeping the entire senior class trapped for an hour to be forcibly sold high school class rings, my invisible classmate fell for the sales pitch hard. Since all ya had to do was fill out the form and they'd make rings or whatever else you could write down, an order went in on his behalf for two of everything, or close enough. Totaled about two weeks' pay for the job I worked that summer.

Nobody had bothered to add up that total, of course; the only reason I know the number is that I was called into the school's office one day, after the order had arrived, and I was asked how my friend would be paying. Heart pounding, I told them effectively that I had no idea, and that they should call him in and ask him. This left us at something of an impasse, so I was released with only my schoolboy pride damaged. Looking back, I'm amazed I was so terrified.

Our class president apparently had been the guy to put me on that hook, which pissed me off - though he did later explain that the heat had been on him to pay, and he did hand me a stack of the graduation announcements from that order before they were trashed. Honestly, I'm still not sure it wasn't my school administration's way of getting in on their share of the fun, while stopping us from doing something stupid on my invisible classmate's behalf before we left, like chiseling his name into the building or something.

After we graduated, the saga folk went in all different directions, and therefore so did my friend. Our letters to one another told of triumphs in creating evidence of his existence. Software we built was documented with examples showing his name. Petitions were signed by him, which made us the only people who looked at page eighteen when they were published. Reporters looking for men on the street were given his opinion and name. We shared all these things just as unreferenced enclosures, treated them all as self-explanatory. To this day, when someone hands me a piece of paper without explaining it, part of my initial scan of it is screening for that name.

Paper was still a requirement then to write a letter to a friend, providing ways and spaces to keep him alive in the margins, even if he had no recent appearances to share. Return addresses tended to use the invisible classmate's name, or letters were simply addressed to him in care of the actual recipient. Finding new ways for him to make Hitchcock cameos in the movies of our lives was just part of how the guys stayed in touch.

The girls approached this, as you would guess, as a different affair entirely. Truth be told, I was visiting his memorial to think about his women, as much as about his deeds.

Rather than silent, subtle appearances in the correspondence of that time, some of the girls we'd let in on the secret would simply write me and ask outright how my invisible friend was doing. They would pass along stories that they felt he should be in - they wished he would come to their parties, come back for the weekend, see their new hairstyles, hear what they had been up to lately. Were there ever any awkward silent moments on those rare, so-expensive long distance calls, asking about him was always a way to get the conversation restarted. I knew by then that girls who would be on the phone with me in the first place would generally appreciate a good running joke.

Eventually, my mail would include trinkets to forward on to him - notably, Polaroid pictures. Yes, kids, even in days predating instant worldwide digital, there were girls who would get competitively slutty given a chance to share a camera. Makes me wonder if this has been going on forever, and if so, how da Vinci ever managed to focus on inventing, with all the nagging he must have gotten to paint progressively more daring portraits of mysteriously smiling women.

Of course, none of these girls would send A Picture Like That to me, even as a form of appreciation of a good running joke. But sending it to him was OK, and kind of fun. He was, by definition, a fantasy man - who wouldn't be progressively more daring for that? I was happy to pass his compliments back, of course - I'd been writing his stuff for years by then, I knew just what he'd say about those trinkets and memorabilia. By and large, I was enamored of those women, after all - more than enough to want to send them a page they'd save.

Pictures, more than once, led to visits, during those years after my high school class were set loose to begin drifting apart in our own ways. Visits led to his name appearing on hotel registers, and then to his name being shouted in the halls, just like back in high school.

Well, not quite like back in high school. Make up your own damn details - the point is, I got familiar with what women would share, would dare with a fantasy man. I got comfortable with the idea that there were women who wouldn't mind fucking me as long as it wasn't on the record, as long as it wasn't actually me per se.

Well, not quite comfortable - it's a perverse kind of compliment at best. But certainly, there are worse ways to be insulted, worse wrong names for a woman to shout, and there were ample ways to soothe any discomfort that would arise.

About the time I realized how awesome all that could get, it just quietly stopped happening. Perfectly natural that we all were tending to drift apart; with some notable exceptions, there were no hard feelings about it. We traded postcards and/or wedding invitations from wherever we wound up, all of them using our original names, sharing and daring nothing of any kind. We stopped as soon as it was polite to do so, or slightly before.

With every day the mailbox stayed empty, the imaginary friend began slipping farther back away from what was real. Soon, only the guys were referring to him anymore, and his reported escapades became inevitably duller. To my knowledge, I still am the only man ever to hear that name in certain tones of a lady's voice - but then, it would have been poor form for any of us to speak of him doing such a thing, even to each other. It's not like I ever mentioned my adventures to any of the other guys, even when said adventures were going on rather blatantly in front of them. Certainly no letters between the guys ever mentioned such a thing.

Electronic mail began to be the way the guys in my old crowd kept in touch, and while there were advantages, it's almost impossible to doodle in the margin of an email. There was that much less space for him to flourish, and so he became mentioned even less frequently, deprived of his natural habitat. The drunken evening on which we ordered the brick was pretty much his last hurrah. At some point after that, we started to speak of him in the past tense - what he would have liked to do, rather than what he was going to do next. He turned into someone to whom one would raise the occasional solitary glass of liquor on a pensive night, someone whose memorial one would visit.

I thought of all this, as my toe underlined his name on that brick, in the foolishly prominent place where it is displayed within the school's memorial walk. (Was that random, or more quiet complicity from the administration?) I thought back to when we'd given a name to something that took on a life of its own, a name you could mention to people and men would say "yeah, I knew him," and women would simply smile.

It seemed to me a thing magnificent, and I was proud to have been involved in it, as intimately as I was. There was a small familiar ache of regret that I couldn't really add to the legend of him anymore. That there wasn't enough left of him, of the stuff his dreams were made of, to make any appearances anywhere else.

But ya know what? Everything ends, and it's important to have things that ended well. So that you can memorialize them, make pilgrimages. It's that sort of memory that keeps you knowing where you are in the world.

I stood there as long as it took, to draw all out of the memory that I could. I lived within that selfish impulse that makes us reopen our high school yearbooks, makes us sniff at a pressed corsage, makes us more like who we are (or once had been).

Then I walked away from that name I helped build, that I'd proudly worn. From that moment until I began typing this, I felt no need at all to look back. After I finish rewriting and rereading, perhaps I'll find no need for it at all.

If I ever do, I'll know exactly where to go, just where to be. And for that alone, that name is special.