I'm crouched on the roof of the Holy Sister Mormon Tabernacle Church, leaning against the red brick base of the building's oversized, rusted brass cross. It's three in the morning and Alison's bedroom light is still on. I can see it from here just as I can see the silhouette of her body and the empty glare of the black and white television that rests on her dresser.

The last time I was in her house was two years ago, with Alison and her older sister, three months pregnant at the time. It was Halloween and we were sitting in her grandmother's bedroom, on the floor below the bed, surrounded by the old lady's extensive collection of Christian relics. We were watching part three of the Omen and I swear I saw the wooden cross above the bed shake every time Damien was on the screen.

Earlier that night, Alison's grandmother had asked me if I believed in God. The subtext of that question, of course, was did I believe in her God. I told her No. I didn't believe in hers or anyone else's God.

The old lady hated me. Still does, I'm sure.

Alison turns her bedroom light and the television off and there's nothing left of the night but pure visual emptiness. I climb down off the roof of the church and walk the two miles back to the second floor flat of a house that I share with my friend, James Madison Stein.

Earlier in the evening I had walked in on James as he was breaking up with his girlfriend. They were sitting on the floor of our cramped kitchen, surrounded by a dozen scattered records. James, who was using the covers of the albums like pictographs, was trying to explain to his soon to be ex that she was a Lita Ford while he needed someone closer to a Siouxsie Sioux. That he was part of the first generation to ever define beauty and love by musical genre and she represented metal and hair bands and he wanted nothing more to do with her.

I'd heard this theory before, when James informed me that Alison was my version of the exotic erotic. She was my Go Go's era Belinda Carlisle. Bleached blonde hair and California sand and sweet sugary lips that tasted like watermelon crush but were nothing more, James said, than a black hole of meaninglessness, emptiness and shallow, stale water.

The house that James and I live in used to be a funeral parlor and crematorium until the untimely death of the owner from hepatitis in the late seventies. It was boarded up when we moved in. The niece of the dead funeral director was a friend of James' mother and let us rent out the top floor for a hundred dollars each a month.

Rumor has it that the cellar is haunted. That makes sense. The place was filled with dead people, after all. But James is a curious bird and thought there might be something else. It's too cliché, he said. Ghosts of the buried. After a morning in the North Carolina History Section of the downtown library, he found out that long before this place was a funeral parlor, it was the private home of a Moravian preacher named Edward Rondthaler. This was in the 1860s.

Maybe Rondthaler was involved in the occult. Maybe he sacrificed a few babies in his time. While the Moravians may make tasty cookies, you can't help but be wary of a philosophy that espouses weakness and depravity as the defining facets of humankind.

The truth is that neither James nor I ever noticed anything paranormal in the house. No strange sounds, no surreal dreams and no glasses or plates falling from the kitchen counter and crashing on the cold, linoleum floor.

But our shared curiosity was tempted and, last week, James and I broke into the cellar. The dank space was filled with old caskets, the wood rotting and falling apart. And there was one headstone in the corner of the basement, covered in old and dirt-stained towels. The name on the headstone read: Madeleine Rondthaler.

James and I went back to the library and, after a bit of research, found out that Miss Madeleine was Edward's sister and had died in a shipwreck when she was in her late teens. Apparently, she was en route to North Carolina to marry one of Edward's assistants at the church but never made it far enough to speak her nuptials or be buried in mid-Atlantic soil. Her bones, instead, probably still lie somewhere between the scattered islands of the Outer Banks.

It's late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve and James and I are driving up a winding road in the Appalachian Mountains. A few Christmas trees still stand on the nearly barren hills we drive by. Everything else has already been looted and emptied by agricultural workers who uprooted every pine tree in sight.

D is outside his house, throwing a tennis ball for his black lab, Rudolph. The dog sees our car, drops the ball and starts to bark, but one word from his master and Rudolph quietly recedes down the hill and into a field of rolling, seemingly never ending grass and overgrown weeds.

Children, D says as we walk toward his house. Merry holidays and all that shit.

D, James and I were all religious studies majors at State. We met our first year there in a class on the teachings of the Japanese Buddhist, Nichiren Daishonen. Daishonen's claim to historical fame is the four word chant he came up with that supposedly will get you anything you want in this world, but I can't remember a word of it.

D had to leave school at the tail end of our junior year. Apparently, on the night in question, D had dropped three hits of acid and decided that an ornate and antiquated castle on the outskirts of campus was actually a front for a secret society hell bent on the destruction of his personal freedom and liberty.

D and his partner in crime for that hallucinogenic night, a runaway kid he had met earlier that evening named Snow or Rain or some similar weather condition, broke into the Castle and smashed all the furniture in its foyer with baseball bats.

D soon realized that the castle was actually the private home of a professor of urology and his wife and young daughter. The police were called and D was in jail for the night, but luckily for him, no charges were filed. The professor had experimented with LSD in the late sixties and decided to cut the kids some slack for nostalgia's sake. But the Dean of Arts and Sciences wasn't so nostalgic and D was kindly asked to immediately withdraw from the university and not return.

We're sitting on the floor of D's living room. He doesn't own a couch. Not since he decided the Japanese are the only culture with any concept of interior decoration. James and I lean against pillows thrown against the tiny room's exterior wall and D brings us cups of green tea.

James tells D about my two week long vigil on top of the Holy Sister. D knows Alison well enough. Even though I hadn't met her until my last year at State, long after D had moved on to less academic pursuits, and even though D has never physically met her, he has nevertheless heard ten thousand stories over the past few years. D knows that the reason I moved to Greensboro and James with me was because Alison wanted to go back home after her parents died and said she needed me near her, which was fine and understandable and admirable to everyone involved until she dropped me like a ten pound stone.

You know, D says, I dated a Christian once. She was a Mormon, I think. But we broke up after a few weeks. She listened to the worst fucking music. I hate Joni Mitchell. Last I heard she was studying law at Brigham Young. And that she got run over by a bus right outside the university library and walked away without a scratch.

Maybe, James says, that was God's way of giving her a break for not getting too involved with a schlemiel like you.

Or maybe she should learn to look before she crosses a street, I say.

D and James and I exchange gifts to each other, which this Christmas are a biography of Mishima from us and a quarter pound of homegrown bud from D.

As we're driving away, D calls to me from his porch. You know Amit, he says. It's not healthy for a secular Hindu like you to spend so much time around Christians and their churches. You ever heard of the Crusades?

Yeah, I call back. But the Crusaders were fighting Muslims, not Hindus.

You think your average American can tell the difference between a Muslim and a Hindu. Dream on, swami. Dream on.

The truth is that, while my friends have nearly always avoided girls of the cross, I have lived a life awash in a sea of Christianity. Every girl I've ever been with has been a practicing or former Christian of some sort: Catholics, Mormons, Pentecostals, Methodists. And every one of them broke up with me at some point because they couldn't see themselves with me forever. What kind of children would we have? they would say. Or: It's wrong that you don't believe in a god. How could I be with a man that doesn't believe in anything?

Or, as Alison said to me last Christmas: My parents would have never approved of you. I can't insult their memory any longer.

It's one in the morning and officially Christmas day. The Holy Sister's roof is a bit slick from the couple of inches of snow that fell this afternoon, but I brought a sheet and my heavy coat and a blanket that I wrap tight around me. Santa's long gone, drinking in a bar near the Coliseum with all his doppelgangers. But Alison's there and her light's the only one on in her house. Her grandmother deep in her own dream of dinner with Archbishops and her sister the single mother busy as a bird in baby land.

I'm starting to like it here. It's quiet. The view's great. If this roof had a vending machine, I could make this vigil last for months.

This church has been around for centuries and I wonder if Rondthaler ever sat up here, contemplating the transient and precious nature of life.

I lean against the aged brick base of the cross and close my eyes and imagine Alison here next to me. We wrap ourselves in my blanket. I unbutton her shirt, lean in and my lips touch the tender pale skin of her neck. She tastes like watermelon. And then we're kissing and my hand slides down, past her breasts and over her belly and she's wet through her jeans. And Alison whispers in my ear: Take me here. Take all of me.

The next morning I wake up to the sound of the kitchen sink running. James is on the floor, sitting in front of Madeleine Rondthaler's tombstone. He's got a pile of towels and is scrubbing voraciously at the stone, cleaning it of 150 years of collected dirt.

I was thinking, James says, Miss Madeleine deserves a proper burial. Her soul needs some place to call home.

Yeah, I say. Then maybe we'll get lucky and she'll start visiting the house. This place needs a ghost.

It's worth a try.

There's no rain tonight. The sky is a shallow black emptiness. I brought a tablecloth. A loaf of bread and some red wine. I light two candles and their flames flicker in the dead air like holy water dissolving. The tears of a pope, lonely, dried up. Hundreds of dead bodies at the base of the Andes mountains. Twisted and torn metal. A black box caught in a tree. Ants and flies on the carcasses and birds of prey in the sky taunting the now grounded humans.

It's midnight. Alison's bedroom light goes off. There's silence. And then her window cracks. She crawls out. Stands on the roof. She's staring at me, at the cross above me. I stare back. I pour two glasses of wine, then clink them together. And then she's gone. Back in the house. The window closes. No lights turn on.

A few minutes later and I see her front door open and then a flash of light, on and off again like Morse code. I blow out the candles. Climb down off the roof of the Holy Sister.

We're standing on her driveway, a few feet away from each other. She limps a bit, then decides to sit down on the cold pavement. I join her.

What do you want from me? she says.

I'm not sure, I say. Something. I don't know what.

My parents are the ones that died. Not yours. This is my pain.

It's not our fault, I say. You know that, right. We didn't make that plane go down.

It doesn't matter if it's my fault or yours or anyone else's. They're dead and we're not. But I'm not giving you closure. You don't get that.

What can I do? I say.

Nothing. I don't want anything from you. You'll never understand this. You'll never feel what I feel.

Back at the house and James is dressed in black and rolling a joint. The Go Go's play on the stereo. Belinda Carlisle singing something about taking a vacation.

James turns down the music, then says: It was just a crush, man. Don't take it to your grave.

Yeah, I say. You're right. Just a crush.

So, you coming or what?

Yeah. I'm coming.

Well then. Get ready. Madeleine's not going to wait forever.

Ten minutes later and we're in the parking lot of the Holy Sister. James and I lift the tombstone out of the trunk of his car and drag it past the church and through its adjacent cemetery. Past the fresh graves and the century old dead bodies and into a natural area between the Holy Sister and Alison's house. James runs back to the car and grabs a shovel. He digs a two-foot deep hole and then we plant Madeleine's tombstone into the freshly dug earth.

Should we say something, James says.

I don't know, I say. I've never been to a funeral.

Shit, man. We both spent four years studying religion and neither of us knows what to do? What use is a college degree, anyways?

All right, I say. Okay. I'll find something to say.

I close my eyes. I'm searching for the right words, the archetypal language for the dead. Generic phrases enter my head, like 'ashes to ashes' and 'dust to dust'. The clichés of the dead. And then I see a woman who could be Madeleine, in her last moments, knowing she's going to die. The ship slowly sinking and Madeleine's fear, the all encompassing helplessness. The water rising and nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Just death. The impending and lonely death and the end of one woman's life.

Madeleine, I say. Wherever you are. We're sorry you died such a shitty death. We wish you had made it to North Carolina, to your wedding and the life you were supposed to live. We hope this gesture of ours isn't in vain. That it gives you a home here at the Holy Sister. A home besides the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

And may you haunt our cellar until the end of time, James says.

Good enough? I ask.

Good enough. Now let's get out of here. I've got a haunted house to get home to.

Three years ago today. I had come to visit her at her parents' house. After her grandmother fell asleep, she climbed out of her second floor bedroom window and onto the roof. It had rained earlier that night and the roof was slick. She was trying to find a low spot to jump. Her foot slipped and she fell onto the concrete pavement of her driveway.

She broke both legs and fractured her pelvic bone. Her grandmother called her parents the next morning. They were on a missionary trip outside of Bogotá. They caught the next flight back to the States. When the plane crashed, killing everyone on board, when the landing gear didn't open in time and the plane scraped across the concrete of the landing strip, tearing the steel cabin open like it was cheap aluminum. When that happened, Alison says, she stopped believing in God too.