Chapter Twenty One

1

Growing older, and soon we found ourselves in high school.  You were such a beautiful girl.  I don’t know why you had to set your sights on Psychology.  Or had it been Business?  Or had it been both?  I watched you from the back of the class, and every day I saw you added to my exquisite agony.  From the back of the class, your glorious long blonde hair and that easy smile.  Also your jealous friend, who would have fucked me.  

But I was too much the awkward boy, and it was all that I could do to be polite.  Even that one, disastrous date at the lake, when I wanted only to hold you and to tell you how much I loved you.  I was still so afraid and uncertain, prideful and arrogant, yet unwilling to take the chance.  I had dreamt of you for so long, but in the end you showed me a picture of some other, shirtless boy, and I knew that you loved him – more than you would ever love me.  

It was only years later, when I saw you and failed to recognize you, that I realized that you had never been, and only my longing had made you so.  The girl I loved and lived for was a stranger.

        But by then, when we were in the clothing store where I worked, we were already in the midst of college, and college was where I had meant to begin.  I was talking about libraries, I was, and all the trouble that they bring.  I was talking about a city by the sea.  And I will turn away from you now, you shameful thing.  I had not wanted to include you here.  You should have written something else.  You should have loved me.  But you didn’t.  I was only a replacement, and a poor one at that.

2

        Before college and libraries, and a prehistory of being alone.  Forget the happy childhood in Seattle.  That ended in high school.  He was a loner then, he was a self-decided outcast.  In truth, he didn’t know how to talk to people, and girls were frightening.  

He thought that he would grow up and be a great historian one day, but he was probably mistaken.  Instead of forging high school memories he lurked in the library at lunch – as yet undecided as to his future course of study – and read Shakespeare from a table where no one would see him.  Some girls found him alluring, this boy who seemed to neither want nor need friends, but it was all just a pose on his part.  It was all just a defense.  He really didn’t know what he was doing, and yes, he had been bullied a bit during the first two years of high school, so he tried very hard to be alone.

        Sometimes he wrote mournful poems in his notebook.  These are not to be spoken of.

        Again, years later, and he is graduating high school in the absence of any real sense of ecstasy.  He is standing there in his ridiculous gown and his square hat with the tassel on and everyone around him is so happy.  Yet he’s not so happy because he still has no idea what he wants to do with the rest of his life or even tomorrow and besides all that he’s just waiting and waiting and waiting and then.

3

        Down, down into the depths of the library.  No light here.  No sound.  The steps or an elevator leading into the bowels of the Earth, in a city by the sea.  No cannonballs to fear in this precinct, no worry over oppressors or oppression.  No economic miracles or energy crises within the presence of yellowed books.  Down away from the sunlight, and there is no more green, and if, occasionally, the lovely eyes of another are glimpsed, it is all the price you pay for your intrusion.  There is no way up from this defile, and for every pound that pulls one back to the surface, back to the drunken parties and nightlife, there are two pounds pulling downward, into the shadows of obsolete books.

        No one has any need for books anymore.  We can get it all online.  We can read it on our friends’ blogs.  Or at least we think they are our friends.  We’ve never met most of them.  We don’t know their phone numbers.  We’ve never had sex.

        So much to the good, perhaps, to pull down one’s pants and piss all over these books.  They are without meaning.  They are without purpose.  It amounts to the same thing.  

Yet, still, they offer refuge to the traveler, and one might find within this library an alcove, a place of silence, and a time in which to reflect.  What does it matter if the professors of the upper world have sent us searching after truths that no longer exist?  What does it matter that books within the Earth are little more than unmarked graves, for people whose importance was only ever questionable at best?

        Wait there, I think I am on to something now.  You follow the numbers down to the end.  345, 346, 347, and there is Cartridge’s work on cosmology.  Theia, as he would have it.  But this book is already several years out of date.  Better to consult the periodicals for more current information.  Better to consult Wikipedia.  Better, and easier.

        Someone has left an exam paper within the book.  But wait, no, it’s not an exam paper.  It is a note in blue and red ink.

        “Theia,” it says, “Was a planet before our planet, and the libraries of Theia were something else to see.  It is said that after the two planets collided, the molten libraries of Theia thrust straight through the mantle of our infant Earth, forming a core of knowledge within.”

4

There was that one time when Her Quiet Dependable Man was out of town.  She remembers.  She smiles at the thought.

        He came to her unawares, just after Her Quiet Dependable Man had packed off to his dusty university, and they made love for hours.  

He never thought that a woman could enjoy sucking him so much.  She actually seemed to enjoy it when his semen filled her mouth.  Girls/women from drama classes made a face.  Others ran to the bathroom, hand cupped beneath their mouth, trying not to gag.  She never minded the taste of him.  She actually seemed to enjoy it.

        After all their play they put their clothes back on, and headed back down the stairs.  He grabbed his coat off the coat rack, and she took her purse from the table in the carpeted hall, and as they opened the door they both realized what a splendid day it was, so ripe for adventure.

        They got into his car and drove all the way to Montana.  Her Quiet Dependable Man would be at some conference in San Francisco.  Her Quiet Dependable Man was taking the flight there right after work, and would not be returning home for many days.  

He knew that she was trying her best to appear cavalier about the whole thing, but beneath her easy smile there was calculation.  He knew that in the absence of certainty she would have never come at all.

        How many days did they make love beneath dead trees in the desert?  How many times did he fall asleep listening to the sound of her voice?  It may have only been a few days, but in the luxury of their love it was all one eternity, with the road stretching onward through desert, and mountain pasture, and alpine forest.  She held him close at some rest stop, and her soft words in his ear were like a shiver.  She was a metaphor for everything he didn’t have.  Rose, or not Rose.  She was not.  Metaphors are not.

        They entwined themselves in their own clothes, delirious within hotel rooms and trapped within the confines of his car.  The whole panorama of the world spread out on either side, and every time her fingers brushed against him he knew she was his forever, just as he knew the minute Her Quiet Dependable Man returned she would be foreign, alien, and incognito.  His love for her was something he felt in his throat, strangling him, and as with any strangling there was a sense of everything slipping away into darkness and dissolution.  At one of their diners they pretended to be man and wife, and she was always laughing over the other women who noticed him, their impatient stares.

        In Montana they slept next to a half-frozen lake, and when they woke in the morning there were bear tracks outside their door.  She told him that she couldn’t use her own credit card, because the name of the lodge would show up on her statement.  He didn’t have enough money to keep going, and Her Quiet Dependable Man would be returning soon, returning to claim what was his.

        And he still needed enough gas to get them back.  He still needed to be careful.  He still needed to pretend.

        He stared down at the bear tracks and he knew that the whole thing was over.  Her talk of credit cards had ruined it.  They had loved brilliantly for such a short couple of days, and now it was over for him, because she had reminded him that everything had to be paid for in its own time.  He looked up at the lake, and the lake was only half full.

        They drove back in near-silence.  His car labored all the way back from Montana.  Over hills the sound from the back left wheel grew worse, and no one knew which way they went, no one cared to know where they had gone.  She continued to talk on, he pretended to listen, but when they made love it was all a reenactment of former passions.

        They argued in Couer d’Alene over some harmless comment she had made.  His thoughts were racing, and it was all he could do not to cry.  It was hard to be so alone.  It was even more difficult to be alone in the company of other people.

5

        But I fell down in the library.  I had been sent there or I had gone there under my own steam, looking for relevant works on the subject of colonialism, or linguistic analysis, or the early history of the Chinese Republic.  You can’t remember what your major is.  She’s such a quiet girl, that one, and even though we invite her to all the best parties she never shows up.

        Grating against my fucking face.  Blades like serpentine.  I think that I will be better-informed tomorrow.  They are lying on the carpet now.  They were lying on the carpet yesterday.  They will be lying to us about the carpet tomorrow.  The artificial weave stretches ahead of us like a road, and the shelves are buildings, rising up on either side.  This one next to me, with all its babble speaking of forgotten topics and then the man on the cover is jogging in his 70s apparel and then from another cover peeks out a girl attacking a balance beam and we often try not to think about how sexy so many gymnasts are because they haven’t yet reached the age of menstruation.

        He was lying down in the middle of the road on First Avenue.  Wait, no, it wasn’t First.  It was Third and one of those cross streets past Pike.  Down in the financial/business sector.  An island of calm in the city, where tourists fear to tread.  I am not talking now, and you are not listening.  He was lying down in the middle of the street, and on his right there was the Arctic Hotel, built by polar explorers at the dawn of time, and just a little further up was the new library that looks like some kind of controlled Ikea experiment gone wrong and the asphalt over the road smells wrong and smells like a subway and it’s very very late at night and everything is closed and dark and all the lights are out in all the windows and across the street there is this shitty teriyaki place that is somehow still open and these gangbanger guys are accosting this third guy in front of a bus stop and one of them pulls out a gun but gets scared and fails to ejaculate his weapon and he runs off, down the street, and around the vacant corner next to a parking garage.  And I am just waiting here for my wife.  But I am not married.  And I am very drunk, and I can feel all the bars and the brightness down on First near Pioneer Square and I think it might be time to have another drink or at least get up off the road because his her friends are yelling from the car and telling him to get up and stop acting like such a crazy fucker.

        Pause, for an indefinite period of time.

        He rises now, and he is half-aware.  Were he a mythological creature on some knight’s banner one might say that he is half-rampant, while the other half is only drunk and crazy from loneliness.  He rises, and looks up at the mass of the city.  He wonders why the Arctic Hotel is composed entirely of obsolete fitness books.  He asks a passing homeless man why gymnasts would want to delay their menstruation.  An entire city composed of books, he sees.  An entire city composed of dusty books, he believes.  Yet these drunken moments are always passing away so quickly, and when he wakes whenever he wakes the next day he won’t remember thinking these thoughts and when he looks yet again upon the Arctic Hotel and the quietude of Third Avenue he will see only brick and concrete where books once were.  He will see only glass and steel.

        That Bank of America tower there.  He looks up and prizes the tallest stack of human sexuality resources that he has ever seen.  And he could never check out so many books, he thinks, and these people keep yelling at him from the car and keep asking him why he has to be such a crazy fuck all the time and he doesn’t want to listen.  He just doesn’t want to listen.  So what if he got in a fight last time they tried to take his car keys.  So what if he ended up punching some girl.  That was only because they ganged up on him whilst he was in his cups.  That was only because they were a bunch of drama fags and he hadn’t wanted any part of their sexual experimentation.  Even the drama fags who weren’t gay were especially extra specially boring that night.

        Dusting himself off, he staggers away from the car and the bothersome friends down the hill.  The night is so silent in Seattle because there’s never anything to do.  All there are is these sad frat bars down in Pioneer Square, and nobody really loves those places.  No one finds true love with anyone where they are paying so much for a goddamn Corona.  He just wanted to find himself tonight, but everyone else keeps getting in the way.  Crack dealers offer up their wares.  But he is too white for that tonight, too Caucasian.  He pretends not to know what they are talking about, but he remembers this one time when his friend really wanted to score some weed so his friend went into this Chinese restaurant down in the International District following behind some weird dude while he waited in the car and when his friend came out he thought he had made the big score but it turned out that he was just holding a plastic bag of wadded up paper that just looked like weed and the weird dude had run off with their money and neither of these two college white kids could find the ethnically challenged individual in the Chinese restaurant because he had run out the back and his friend cried and swore that night not so much over the money but because he had been bragging hours before and the sudden shame was almost too much for him to bear.

        Jogging.  Away.  From.  The.  Car.

        There’s this bar under the streets of Seattle and that is a bar full of half-expired Nazis.  They all fled to Seattle after the war ended, and the city council never paid them any mind because they refrained from alcohol consumption on Sundays and never said anything to offend anyone.  What the fuck?

        And she is looking for that bar now, but she can’t find it.  Perhaps down by the Iguana Cantina.  Perhaps down by the Underground.  I told you to meet me there, but you never showed up.  I waited and waited, but nothing.  And hours later I stumbled out of the bar in my rumpled clothes and I saw you in another bar, with another guy, perhaps that shirtless boy from the picture.  I wanted to curse you then, but you looked so happy.  I knew you had never thought about me at all.

        I see your name here, on this study of cognitive processes.  Something about Education, I guess.  Something you did in graduate school, between Freud and Warren Buffett.  Where have you gone?  What are you doing?  Who are you married to now?  I see your name here, next to many other names and I have found you.  This is a book about cognition.  This is a book and I am thinking that it must be a book about thinking.  It is one of those books in which they and you love to use the word “pedagogy.”  You must have worked very hard on it, and I wonder how many men you left behind on the way.  I am tired of trying to second guess you.  I think you are divorced.

        In the middle of the Nazis now, and it’s Saturday night and the club is packed.  Steel Pulse is on the stage, and everyone knows that Nazis are very fond of Steel Pulse because they sing songs about Babylon and ecological destruction.  The sick old men are all pressing up against you in your party dress, and one of the old guys has his cock out and he’s jerking it hard.  You smile at the display.  How to not be disgusted.  These old clammy men and not men but rather cyborgs sent back in time to the present day from a horrible future to fuck you, and you are just leering at some old guy’s penis and his penis isn’t even that impressive just a little bigger than mine and women might smile at this passage thinking how phallocentric I am and it’s really not about how big a guy’s equipment is but rather how good a listener he is and what kind of abs he has and how soulful his eyes look and women aren’t as simple minded as men unless they are trying very hard to be so.

        Shelves.  Books.  Down the aisles to the left.  On the run down through the streets along Seneca the buildings have melted back into books, and the sky has been capped by fluorescence.  A row of lights above.  A bank of lights.  Some kind of panel between metal slats.  The shelves are all so tall here, and they stretch up to the ceiling in monolithic proportions.  I turn my head and see the cover of a book.  On the cover of the book is a man jogging in 70s sweatpants.  On the cover of another book is a prepubescent girl making love to a Minotaur.