by Paul Auster
Your family is well-off, but not exceedingly well-off, not rich by the standards of the rich, and although your father is generous enough to provide you with an allowance to cover basic expenses, more money is needed for the books and records you want to buy, the films you want to see, the cigarettes you want to smoke, and so you begin looking for a summer job. Your sister has already found one for herself. She is just sixteen months older than you are, but her interactions with the world have always been more sensible and prudent than yours, and within days of learning that she would be studying at Columbia and sharing an apartment with you on West 107th Street, she set about looking for a job compatible with her interests and talents. Consequently, everything has been arranged in advance, and immediately after she arrives in New York, she begins working as an editorial assistant for a large commercial publisher in midtown. You, on the other hand, in your scattershot, haphazard way, put off the search until the last minute, and because you resist the idea of spending forty hours a week in an office with a tie around your neck, you jump at the first opportunity that presents itself. A friend has left town for the summer, and you apply to fill his spot as a page at Butler Library on the Columbia campus. The salary is less than half of what your sister earns, but you console yourself with the thought that you can walk to and from your job, which will exempt you from the ordeal of having to cram yourself twice daily into a subway car filled with hordes of sweating commuters.
You are given a test before they hire you. A senior librarian hands you a stack of cards, perhaps eighty cards, perhaps a hundred cards, each one bearing the title of a book, the name of the author of that book, the year of the publication of that book, and a Dewey decimal number that indicates where that book must be shelved. The librarian is a tall, grim-faced woman of around sixty, a certain Miss Greer, and already she seems suspicious of you, determined not to give an inch. Because she has just met you and cannot possibly know who you are, you imagine that she is suspicious of all young people—as a matter of principle—and therefore what she sees when she looks at you is not you as yourself but you as yet one more guerrilla fighter in the war against authority, an unruly insurrectionist who has no business barging into the sanctum of her library and asking for work. Such are the times you live in, the times you both live in. She instructs you to put the cards in order, and you can sense how deeply she wants you to fail, how happy it will make her to reject your application, and because you want the job just as much as she doesn’t want you to have it, you make sure that you don’t fail. Fifteen minutes later, you hand her the cards. She sits down and begins looking through them, one by one, one after the other, all the way through to the end, and as you watch the skeptical expression on her face melt into a kind of bafflement, you know that you have done well. The stony face cracks a little smile. She says: No one ever gets it perfect. This is the first time I’ve seen it happen in thirty years.
You work from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. You make it a habit to arrive promptly, entering the broad and pretentious faux-classical building designed by James Gamble Rogers with your lunch in a brown paper bag. Pomp and stuffiness aside, the building never fails to impress you with its bulk and grandeur, but the crowning touch of idiocy, you feel, the greatest embarrassment of all, are the names of the illustrious dead chiseled into the façade—Herodotus, Homer, Plato, along with numerous others—and every morning you imagine how different the library would look if it were adorned with other sets of names: the names of jazz musicians, for example (Fats Waller, Charlie Parker, Benny Goodman), or movie goddesses from the 1940s (Ingrid Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, Gene Tierney), or obscure, barely remembered baseball players (Gus Zernial, Wayne Terwilliger, Clyde Kluttz), or, quite simply, the names of your friends. And so the day begins. You go in through the front door, the heavy front door with its polished brass fittings, walk up the marble staircase, glance at the portrait of Eisenhower (former university president, then the president who reigned over your childhood), and enter a small room to the right of the front desk, where you say good morning to Mr. Goines, your supervisor, a small man with owl glasses and a protruding belly, who doles out your chores for the day. Essentially, there are only two tasks to perform. Either you are putting books back on shelves or sending newly requested books to the main desk via dumbwaiter from one of the floors above. Each job has its advantages and disadvantages, and each can be carried out by anyone possessing the mental skills of a fruit fly.
When putting books onto the shelves, you must confirm and then reconfirm that the Dewey decimal number of the book you are shelving is one notch above the book to its left and one notch below the book to its right. The books are loaded onto a wooden cart equipped with four wheels, roughly fifty to a hundred books for each shelving session, and as you guide your little vehicle through the labyrinthine stacks, you are alone, always and everlastingly alone, since the stacks are off-limits to everyone but library personnel, and the only other person you will ever see is one of your fellow pages, manning the desk in front of the dumbwaiter. Each of the several floors is identical to all the others: an immense windowless space filled with row upon row of towering gray metal shelves, all of them stuffed to capacity with books, thousands of books, tens of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of books, a million books, and at times even you, who love books as much as anyone on this earth, become stupefied, anxious, even nauseated when you consider how many billions of words, how many trillions of words those books contain. You are shut off from the world for hours every day, inhabiting what you come to think of as an airless bubble, even if there must be air because you are breathing, but it is dead air, air that has not stirred in centuries, and in that suffocating environment you often feel drowsy, drugged to the point of semiconsciousness, and have to fight off the urge to lie down on the floor and go to sleep.
Still, your shelving missions sometimes lead to unexpected discoveries, and the cloud of boredom that envelops you is momentarily lifted. Chancing upon a 1670 edition of Paradise Lost, for example. It is not the original printing from 1667, but very nearly so, a copy that came off the presses during Milton’s lifetime, a book the poet conceivably could have held in his hands, and you marvel that this precious tome is not locked away in some temperature-controlled vault for rare books but is sitting out in the open in the musty stacks. Why is this discovery so important to you, why do your hands tremble as you open the book and begin scanning its pages? Because you have spent the past several months immersed in John Milton, studying Milton more closely than any poet you have ever read. During the tormented spring of Rudolf Born, you were one of several undergraduates enrolled in Edward Tayler’s class, the renowned Milton course taught by the finest professor you had all year, attending both lectures and seminars, carefully plowing your way through Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and a host of shorter works, and now that you have come to love Milton and rank him above all other poets of his time, you feel an instant surge of happiness when you stumble across this book, this three-hundred-year-old book, while making your lugubrious rounds as a shelver in the stacks of Butler Library.
Unfortunately, such moments of happiness do not come often. It is not that you are particularly unhappy with your job at the library, but as time goes by and the hours you spend there accumulate, it becomes increasingly difficult for you to keep your mind on what you are supposed to be doing, mindless as those tasks might be. A sense of unreality invades you each time you set foot in the silent stacks, a feeling that you are not truly there, that you are trapped in a body that has ceased to belong to you. And so it happens that one afternoon, just two weeks after you earned your job with the only perfect test score in the annals of pagedom, as you find yourself on yet another shelving foray, working in an aisle of medieval German history, you are half startled out of your wits when someone taps you on the shoulder from behind. You instinctively wheel around to confront the person who touched you—no doubt so
meone who has slipped unnoticed into this restricted area to attack and/or rob the first victim he can find—and there, much to your relief, is Mr. Goines, looking at you with a sad expression on his face. Without saying a word, he lifts his right hand into the air, crooks his forefinger at you, and with an impatient, wiggling gesture beckons you to follow him. The little man waddles down the aisle, turns right when he comes to the corridor, walks past one row of shelves, then a second, and makes another right turn into an aisle of medieval French history. You and your cart were in this aisle just twenty minutes earlier, shelving several books on life in tenth-century Normandy, and sure enough, Mr. Goines goes straight to the spot where you were working. He points to the shelf and says, Look at this, and so you bend down and look. At first, you fail to notice anything out of the ordinary, but then Mr. Goines pulls two books off the shelf, two books separated by a distance of about twelve inches, with three or four books standing between them. Your supervisor shoves the two books close to your face, making it clear that he wants you to read the Dewey decimal numbers affixed to the spines, and it is only then that you become aware of your error. You have reversed the placement of the books, putting the first where the second should be and the second where the first should be. Please, Mr. Goines says, in a rather supercilious voice, don’t ever do it again. If a book is put in the wrong place, it can be lost for twenty years or more, maybe forever.
It is a small matter, perhaps, but you feel humiliated by your negligence. Not that the two books in question could have been lost (they were on the same shelf, after all, just inches away from each other), but you understand the point Mr. Goines is trying to make, and although you bristle at the condescending tone he adopts with you, you apologize and promise to be more vigilant in the future. You think: Twenty years! Forever! You are astounded by the idea. Put something in the wrong place, and even though it is still there—quite possibly smack under your nose—it can vanish for the rest of time.
You return to your cart and continue shelving books of medieval German history. Until now, you have not known you are being spied upon. It puts a sickening taste in your mouth, and you tell yourself to be careful, to keep on your toes, to take nothing for granted ever again, not even in the benign, soporific precincts of a university library.
Shelving expeditions eat up approximately half your day. The other half is spent sitting behind a small desk on one of the upper floors, waiting for a pneumatic tube to come flying up through the intestines of the building with a withdrawal slip commanding you to retrieve this or that book for the student or professor who has just asked for it below. The pneumatic tube makes a distinctive, clattering noise as it speeds upward toward its destination, and you can hear it from the moment it begins its ascent. The stacks are distributed among several floors, and since you are just one of several pages sitting at desks on those several floors, you don’t know if the pneumatic tube with the withdrawal slip rolled up inside it is headed for you or one of your colleagues. You don’t find out until the last second, but if it is indeed meant for you, the metallic cylinder comes bursting out of an opening in the wall behind you and lands in the box with a propulsive thud, which instantly triggers a mechanism that turns on the forty or fifty red lightbulbs that line the ceiling from one end of the floor to the other. These lights are essential, for it often happens that you are away from your desk when the tube arrives, in the process of searching for another book, and when you see the lights go on you are alerted to the fact that a new order has just come in. If you are not away from your desk, you pull the withdrawal slip out of the tube, go off to find the book or books that are wanted, return to your desk, tuck the withdrawal slips into the books (making sure that the top portion is sticking out by a couple of inches), load the books into the dumbwaiter in the wall behind your desk, and push the button for the second floor. To top off the operation, you return the empty tube by squeezing it into a little hole in the wall. You hear a pleasant whoosh as the cylinder is sucked into the vacuum, and more often than not you will go on standing there for a moment, following the sound of the clattering missile as it plunges through the pipe on its way downstairs. Then you return to your desk. You settle into your chair. You sit and wait for the next order.
On the surface, there is nothing to it. What could be simpler or less challenging than loading books into a dumbwaiter and pushing a button? After the drudgery of shelving, you would think your stints behind the desk would come as a welcome respite. As long as there are no books to retrieve (and there are many days when the pneumatic tube is sent to you just three or four times in as many hours), you can do whatever you want. You can read or write, for example, you can stroll around the floor and poke into arcane volumes, you can draw pictures, you can sneak an occasional nap. At one time or another, you manage to do all those things, or make an attempt to do them, but the atmosphere in the stacks is so oppressive, you find it difficult to focus your attention for any length of time on the book you are reading or the poem you are trying to write. You feel as if you are trapped inside an incubator, and little by little you come to understand that the library is good for one thing and one thing only: indulging in sexual fantasies. You don’t know why it happens to you, but the more time you spend in that un-breathable air, the more your head fills with images of naked women, beautiful naked women, and the only thing you can think about (if thought is the appropriate word in this context) is fucking beautiful naked women. Not in some sensuously decked-out boudoir, not in some tranquil Arcadian meadow, but right here on the library floor, rolling around in sweaty abandon as the dust of a million books hovers in the air around you. You fuck Hedy Lamarr. You fuck Ingrid Bergman. You fuck Gene Tierney. You couple with blondes and brunettes, with black women and Chinese women, with all the women you have ever lusted after, one by one, two by two, three by three. The hours inch along, and as you sit at your desk on the fourth floor of Butler Library, you feel your cock grow hard. It is always hard now, always hard with the hardest of hard-ons, and there are times when the pressure becomes so great that you leave your desk, dash down the corridor to the men’s room, and wank into the toilet. You are disgusted with yourself. You are appalled by how quickly you give in to your desires. As you zip up you swear it will never happen again, which is exactly what you said to yourself twenty-four hours ago. Shame stalks you as you return to your desk, and you sit down wondering if there isn’t something seriously wrong with you. You decide that you have never been more lonely, that you are the loneliest person in the world. You think you might be headed for a crack-up.
Your sister says to you: What do you think, Adam? Should we go home for the weekend or stay here and sweat it out in New York?
Let’s stay, you answer, as you contemplate the bus ride to New Jersey and the long hours you would have to spend talking to your parents. If it gets too hot in the apartment, you say, we can always go to the movies. There are some good things playing at the New Yorker and the Thalia on Saturday and Sunday, and the air-conditioning will cool us off.
It is early July, and you and your sister have been living together for two weeks now. Since all your friends have vanished for the summer, Gwyn is the only person you have seen—not counting the people you work with at the library, but they don’t count for much. You have no girlfriend at the moment (Margot was the last woman you slept with), and your sister has recently parted ways with the young professor she was involved with for the past year and a half. Therefore, you have only each other for company, but there is nothing wrong with that as far as you are concerned, and all in all you are more than satisfied with the way things have worked out since she moved in with you. You are entirely at ease in her company, you can talk more openly with her than anyone else you know, and your relations are remarkably free of conflict. Every now and then, she becomes annoyed with you for neglecting to wash the dishes or leaving a mess in the bathroom, but each time you fall down on the domestic front you promise to mend your lackadaisical habits, and little by little
you have been improving.
It is a happy arrangement, then, just as you imagined it would be when you proposed the idea in the first place, and now that you are slowly going to pieces at your job in the Castle of Yawns, you understand that living in the apartment with your sister is no doubt helping you keep your sanity, that more than anyone else she has the power to lighten the despair you carry around inside you. On the other hand, the fact that you are together again has produced some curious effects, consequences you did not foresee when the two of you discussed the possibility of joining forces back in the spring. Now you ask yourself how you could have been so blind. You and Gwyn are brother and sister, you belong to the same family, and therefore it is only natural, during the course of the long conversations you have with each other, that family matters should sometimes be mentioned—remarks about your parents, references to the past, memories of small details from the life you shared as children—and because these subjects have been unearthed so often during the weeks you have spent together, you find yourself thinking about them even when you are alone. You don’t want to think about them, but you do. You have spent the past two years consciously trying to avoid your parents, doing everything you can to keep them at arm’s length, and you have gone back to Westfield only when you were certain that Gwyn was going to be there as well. You still love your parents, but you don’t particularly like them anymore. You came to this conclusion after your sister went off to college, leaving you alone with them for your last two years of high school, and when you finally went off to college yourself, you felt as if you had broken out of prison. It’s not that you pride yourself for feeling the way you do—in fact, you are revolted by it, appalled by your coldness and lack of compassion—and you constantly berate yourself for accepting money from your father, who supports you and pays your tuition, but you need to be in college in order to stay away from him and your mother, and since you have no money of your own, and since your father earns too much for you to qualify for a scholarship, what choice do you have but to wallow in the ignominy of your two-faced position? So you run, and as you run you know you are running for your life, and unless you maintain the distance between you and your parents, you will begin to wither and die, just as surely as your brother Andy died when he drowned in Echo Lake on August 10, 1957, that small lake in New Jersey with its eerily appropriate name, for Echo too withered and died, and after her beloved Narcissus drowned, there was nothing left of her but a heap of bones and the wailing of her disembodied, inextinguishable voice.