Oakland at 4 a.m.

Oakland at 4 a.m looks like a scene pulled from a wintery, post-apocalyptic horror movie.

A fresh coat of snow covers any surface exposed to the 28-degree windchill, and the streets are empty besides the rare truck or charter bus, racing through traffic lights from intersection to intersection. Visitors aren’t welcome into most of the buildings that make up Pitt’s campus.

It’s the Sunday before finals week, but if you venture outside and into one of the few spots that are open 24 hours on campus — the Cathedral of Learning, 7-Eleven and Towers — you’ll see a side of Pitt reserved for the inebriated and the insomniatic among us.

4:06 a.m. — Cathedral of Learning

The Bigelow Boulevard crosswalk hasn’t been traversed for the last hour — apparent by the lack of car tracks and footprints on the lightly dusted pavement. The intersection of Fifth and Bigelow, usually a choreographed exchange of students bustling from one side of the street to the other, now only saw the swirling of snow every time the occasional car passed by.

At the top of the Cathedral steps, first-year Caleb Kim holds out his hand for Ester Lee, who is moments away from falling flat on the sidewalk. Besides their water-repellent puffer jackets, the duo’s shoes suggest they didn’t expect the weather change. Then again, the last time they were outside was 9 p.m.

Kim and Lee cooped up in a fourth floor conference room to study, a new regimen that’d manifested itself in the weeks leading up to finals.

“During the day, I find myself very distracted by floormates and such. I have a prime time from about 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. where I’m just super into academics. But before and after that, it’s just a little … meh,” Kim said.

Instead of studying in Hillman for his pre-physical therapy classes, Kim is now accustomed to leaving the Cathedral to the sounds of Christmas music playing from the security guard’s phone — today was “Frosty the Snowman.”

Kim doesn’t anticipate waking up before 2 p.m., but before making a pit stop at 7-Eleven on his way home to Tower A, he’s knows there’s a chance of experiencing something unusual.

“I remember earlier in the year there were naked cyclists. That was weird.” Kim said. “They were like in their underwear and cycling down the road … maybe not 4 a.m., maybe 2 a.m. — not quite this late.”

4:17 a.m. — Hillman Library

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when or how it gets this way, but sometime between the exodus from Oakland’s watering holes and the alarms of UPMC’s morning shift workers, Hillman Library becomes a glitch in the matrix — a sea of sleep-deprived scholars working toward a deadline, but having crashed from their last caffeine dose, have little concept of time at all.

On the ground floor, there’s a group of guys so far gone that a couple of them have twisted Joker smiles plastered on their faces while the others look shell-shocked, staring through computer screens. Next to them is a whiteboard, a collage of equations and penises.

Nick Bersin, one of the men in the group, looks freeze-framed — slightly slumped in his chair, smiling, holding a mandolin. When he’s startled from whatever post-exams fantasy he’s in, Bersin talks like he hasn’t seen another human being in hours, raving about his mandolin, giving the strings a pluck or two every other sentence.

“I had one guy on the bus on the way here — God, it was like 2 p.m., this is so depressing — who asked me about [the mandolin] and was really fixated on the fact that this didn’t look like any mandolin he had seen before,” Bersin said.

Bersin, a junior German, Eastern European and French major, just came from an event for Cornerstone, a campus Christian group. A box of Count Chocula cereal, standing tall to the left of his laptop, is his fuel for the night. He bought the treat on impulse at 7-Eleven a few hours ago on a caffeine run.   

“I’m six years old in my mind,” he said. “Sometimes, if I really hate myself, I’ll get cookie dough and just eat it.”

And the work. There’s his capstone paper, three essays and three finals, which normally would be doable, except he’s an interpreter for a young German student at the Falk school, so he has to get up at 10 a.m. — if he even decides to go to bed.

“I’m actually writing a paper that was due four and a half hours ago,” he said. “Honestly, at this point I’m not tired, and I have a perpetual stack of work.”

4:31 a.m. — 7-Eleven

Kalina Bland, 21, and Raelynn Davenport, 23, shuffle around the counter restocking supplies as they started settling into the quieter hours of their 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift.

Davenport leans on the counter and watches her night manager rattle off a story about some of the drunken shenanigans that take place on a traditional weekend night in Oakland.

“I legitimately watched a girl stand at the donut case for a half an hour, drunk, just staring … I kept asking her if she needed help. She said she knew what she wanted, but she really didn’t,” Bland said.

Bland’s pink hair — which matches the icing on the donut that the drunk girl never bought — and colored contacts show no signs of fatigue. Meanwhile, Davenport, who just started working here on Thursday, slowly rests her head further into her arms near the cash register.

Besides the hourly visits from Pitt police in need of caffeine, Bland and Davenport aren’t expecting a lot of visitors before the end of their shift. For Bland, nothing will top an incident three months prior when a group of basketball players from a visiting school posted up near the slurpee machine one night.

“[These guys] sat at the slurpee machine, under it, pulling the slurpee machine and drinking it. It was literally about who could do it longer, and they were under there — one had a brain freeze — and I was like, ‘You guys are crazy,’” Bland said.

4:43 a.m. — Towers Lobby

She looks like a mannequin — still, eyes closed, behind a glass pane.

As 5 a.m. nears, Ciara Smith, Tower B’s security guard from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. that morning, slowly lifts her eyelids and peers through the window. With finals week approaching, this shift is an easy one so far: No red and blue lights, uniforms or screaming students.

“Tower B, there’s always the ambulance,” Smith said. “There has never been a shift the ambulance didn’t come — well, tonight, they didn’t come. There’s always either an ambulance or police.”

Smith, 18, says that Tower B usually doesn’t slow down until 3 a.m. She’s numb to it all at this point — first-years trying to sprint past her station and up the stairwell without swiping in first, others paranoid that she’ll write them up.

Although she expects an alcohol-related incident or two a night, Smith enjoys the relative peace and quiet, especially considering that she’s pregnant.

“[The night shift] is easier than the daylight shift because you don’t get bothered by anyone,” she said.

4:58 a.m. — Central Oakland

Past Forbes and down Atwood, through Louisa and Bates, it’s all silent, except for the occasional car passing through, warding off the temptation to walk down the middle of the street or make snow angels on a stranger’s lawn.

All of it serves as Pitt’s backdrop, its movie set: porches only populated by a bike or a beer can, neon lights outside pitch-black storefronts, the snow falling faster, lit by the orange glow of a parking garage or a lamp post’s white light.

Oakland at 4 a.m. — the silent neighborhood, inhabited by the characters who carry the stories of our drunken nights and half-conscious study sessions — is something that most of us will never see.

In bed, at work or somewhere in between, almost everyone is where they’re supposed to be, from the Hillman heroes to the clerks and guards that keep it all running, even with Oakland’s eyes shut.