COLUMN ONE : ‘A Piece of Me Is Buried With Him’ : A friend remembers one man missing in the rubble--their childhood dreams, teen-age schemes and the songs they never got a chance to finish.

I last heard from Steve Williams on April 7, when he sent an e-mail computer message seeking help with a song he was writing, a song about overcoming stage fright and other emotional trauma. He was struggling with the verses, but had penned a chorus that he liked, ending with a call to action:

“Grab the world and shake it now, or maybe you never will.”

Looks like the world reached up and grabbed Steve before he could finish his song.

Can anyone comprehend it, rationalize it, explain it? William Stephen Williams, 42, comrade-in-life since second grade, musical co-conspirator for 29 years, husband and father of three, suddenly buried--perhaps dead, perhaps alive--in a mountain of rubble created by a bomb. A piece of me is buried there with him.

Steve worked at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where he had some kind of managerial job with the Social Security Administration. I never bothered to ask him what it was.

His office was on the ground floor, north side, just a few feet away from the spot on the street where some embittered soul attained his 15 minutes of fame by detonating a truck full of explosives. The bomber could have chosen any of a million other locations, even in Oklahoma City. For reasons that might go forever unexplained, he chose to park at Steve’s doorstep.

Nearly 30 hours after Wednesday’s blast, this much is known: Steve commuted as usual to Oklahoma City from the country home he built a few years ago on land farmed by his grandfather. His only sibling, Mike, built his home right next door, and the two families raised their children together, providing each other with the kind of parental backup that is rare these days.

Steve arrived at work after dropping off his wife, Barbara, at her office a few miles away. He was supposed to preside over a 9:15 a.m. meeting on the fourth floor of the Murrah building. Social Security officials are not sure where he was when the bomb exploded at 9:04 a.m.

Of 61 agency employees who reported to work, 46 survived the blast and have received treatment. Steve is one of the remaining 15 whose fates are still unknown as emergency personnel begin the process of retrieving bodies from the wreckage. A Social Security official said the 15 apparently worked in the area near Steve’s office, where the bomb damage was extensive.

After learning of the explosion, Barbara headed for St. Anthony Hospital, where the first round of survivors was being treated. She then rushed to Baptist Memorial after someone recalled seeing a bomb victim who seemed to fit Steve’s description being sent there. But he wasn’t there, and no one had any information about Steve. It might be days before everyone was accounted for, Barbara was told. Yet there was room for hope. Some people trapped in the wreckage apparently were still alive, and emergency crews were doing their best to locate and retrieve them.

Maybe one of them would be Steve. Maybe.

Barbara was sent home, where she joined her three daughters, who range in age from 15 to 22. By midday Thursday, she had received no new information about Steve. She planned to drive to an Oklahoma City church where the families of bomb victims were to receive updated information later in the day.

As a journalist, I have developed my profession’s trademark callousness toward the horror and tragedy spawned by such events. How senseless, how sad, we say to each other, shaking our heads before turning our attention to the next big development.

But this was no ordinary earthquake victim, no routine battlefield casualty. This was my best friend, and I don’t make friends that easily.

Steve and I grew up in the little town of Kingfisher, Okla., about as far away from the hot spots and nerve centers of the world as it’s possible to get. We became good friends in grade school, but the relationship was cemented when it became clear to us, at the age of about 13, that we had been put on Earth to be rock ‘n’ roll sensations.

Steve promptly got an old Fender guitar and amp; I got the world’s ugliest drum kit, a set of used, champagne-pink Slingerlands that I later sold to Steve’s little brother, who probably still bears a grudge. We played together in a succession of adolescent garage bands, regularly antagonizing neighbors and family members and occasionally performing publicly in Kingfisher and surrounding towns, where farm kids would pay $2.50 apiece to hear bad renditions of old Stones and Creedence Clearwater songs while they pretended to dance, made out in the corners, or slipped outside to guzzle beer.

Our first official band was called Synthetic Image, its one public performance notable only because the bassist played a demented, 20-minute version of “Gloria” on his back, writhing around the stage of the local parish hall to the dismay of church officials and the delight of the eighth-graders in attendance. Later came Flagship, a lineup that briefly included a black bass player who arranged for us to practice in the vacant gym of the town’s abandoned “colored school.”

We were joined now and then by old guys from the neighborhood who played harmonica or guitar and sang country blues.

The band survived several incarnations, until we suffered the collective misfortune of graduating from high school and going our separate ways, some to college, some to military service, all of us convinced by a succession of parents, teachers and counselors that there could be no future in music. Drums were dutifully packed away in the attic, guitars consigned to dusty closets.

Steve was a college freshman when he married Barbara, who grew up a couple of blocks from us in Kingfisher. (She was the first person I ever kissed, aside from a third cousin, but she apparently saw more potential in Steve.)

Steve received a degree in mathematics and landed a job with the government. He worked for a few years in Illinois before he and Barbara decided that living near their families was more important than career advancement. Steve arranged a transfer back to Oklahoma, where the family has lived since. Sure, he acknowledged when his family came to visit a couple of years ago, Oklahoma’s hard-right politics and slow-paced lifestyle get old sometimes, but at least it’s not a dangerous place like Washington.

I haven’t seen Steve since last summer, when he and I and two other old friends got together for a short tour of Mississippi and Tennessee, where we gambled at river-side casinos, critiqued Nashville bar bands and fished for imaginary trout.

During the trip, Steve and I had an extended discussion about traits that distinguish one person from another. Suppose you were a battlefield general, he said, and you became convinced you could end the war and prevent the deaths of thousands of people, but only by ordering hundreds of soldiers under your command to march into machine-gun fire that was certain to kill nine out of 10. Could you give the order?

Steve thought he could; I figured I couldn’t. I assumed that reflected a certain cowardice on my part. I can’t help but wonder now whether it was a twisted form of battlefield logic that made someone load a truck with explosives and park it outside Steve’s office Wednesday morning.

Over the years, as Steve’s domestic obligations multiplied and my job took me from one end of the country to the other, we managed to play music together only once or twice. But we talked about it frequently, both of us apparently harboring the same unstated fantasy that one day we would pick up where we left off.

Steve broached the subject directly only a few months ago, sending me the garage-band equivalent of a Chamber of Commerce promotional video, his meandering narration and storytelling interspersed with howling guitar solos performed on the patio of his country home. Move back to Oklahoma, he said at the end, and the band will be there. I never really responded to his offer.

Steve, old friend, know this: If your heart is still beating under the weight of all that concrete and steel, if you’re still able to reach out and grab the world and shake it, I swear I’ll help you do it someday.

Vieth is a news editor in the Times’ Washington bureau.