by Lydia Millet
Ben had suggested more than once that Mr. Hofstadt was desperate to keep her by his side and encouraged Ann to deflect Mr. Hofstadt’s questions. He saw sinister possibilities. But she was a reference librarian and in general she did not mind humoring a patron, though sometimes, when there were other patrons waiting, she would concede defeat early and tend to them.
As the rain pattered on the roof and windows Mr. Hofstadt interlaced his fingers, leaned forward to place his elbows on the counter as usual, and asked her how to find out how many children with blond hair had been born in 1983.
—In this city? she asked. —Across the country? Or globally?
But before he could answer another man burst through the front doors, drenched. He was a long-haired man, darkly tanned with a weathered face; he wore a green Hawaiian-print shirt blaring with leaves and parrots, canvas shorts, and flip-flops on his broad feet. Her first thought was that he must be chilled by the rain. She noticed his calves were muscular but his midsection was flabby. Finally she saw he was holding a weapon, which she took for an instant to be a plastic toy. It looked absurd to her, a boxy gray thing in relief from the world around it.
In fact it was not a toy, or at least it was not in the category of toy that graced the aisles of children’s stores, but, as Ann would later learn, a Heckler & Koch submachine gun.
When the long-haired man waved it, and Mr. Hofstadt dropped out of sight in front of the counter, she decided to give the gun the benefit of the doubt, though it struck her as ridiculous. She raised her hands tentatively and waited for instructions, feeling awkward and somehow guilty of her own awkwardness. The man with the gun was muttering something, but she could not make out the words.
He looked around, not aiming the gun purposefully; it drooped in his hand, pointing down at the floor. Mr. Hofstadt was moaning a prayer that went No-no-no-no-no-not-me. Ann’s heart raced and her face felt cold and separate from her head. When the man began to walk toward the counter she stretched her hands a little higher and, fluttering and hiccuping inwardly, resolved to try to be serene. She thought Death be not proud and also Jack be nimble, Jack be quick. The man’s wet rubber flip-flops squeaked and slapped against his wet heels. Then he stopped in front of her and she could hear Mr. Hofstadt warbling in fear at his feet.
—You know that they’re arriving, right? he said. —They’re arriving today!
—Who?
The man looked to his right and left and then leaned toward her and whispered. There was garlic on his breath.
—The old ones.
Quickly he turned to Romance Paperbacks, which were on a revolving rack, and let loose a volley of bullets.
The rat-tat-tat was loud and shocking, and she forgot her vow of serenity, knees shaking, and dropped to the floor like Mr. Hofstadt before her.
It was silent for a few minutes after that, and when she rose hesitantly from her crouch the man with the gun had run off. She leaned forward to peer down over the counter edge and saw he had left his wet flip-flops behind. Dirty water pooled in the shallow hollows left in the rubber soles by the balls of his feet and his heels.
Mr. Hofstadt, squatting beside them, was staring up at her, his hands shaking uncontrollably. From the trail of gasps and shrieks she could tell where the man with the gun had gone: he had run past Romance Paperbacks and past Mystery, past the shelves of General Fiction and into the children’s books section. Luckily, she thought reflexively, all the children were in school.
She called 911 and said, —A man with a gun is in the library. He has fired several rounds.
Then she went around the counter and kneeled down beside Mr. Hofstadt, who was panting and gasping. Her own mouth was dry, drier, she thought, than she recalled it ever being in the past. She was afraid Mr. Hofstadt had suffered a heart attack.
And while she was fanning his face with her hand, urging him to tell her how he felt, there was another round of gunfire.
At this time Ben was digging a ditch for an irrigation hose, yet he, in contrast to her, was not thirsty. Santa Fe was seven thousand feet above sea level, and in the summer in particular, working at elevation, the sun could drain him of what felt like life itself but was more precisely water. So he had made a concession to this and underneath his plain work shirt, usually a cotton T-shirt, white or drab or gray, without logo or design, there hung against his hard and bony back a flattened water bottle with long, thin tube extruding, actually less a bottle than a bladder slipped inside a black foam sleeve. In the store they had called it a “hydration kit,” a plastic bag made for hiking and shaped to fit the contours of the back. From this he could sip as he shoveled, hoed, or knelt on his kneepads to plant. He kept it inside the shirt so that its faint and insulated coldness lay touching the skin.
When he was bored with his work he lived in scenes. Sipping the plastic-tasting water he might be a pioneer on a far planet, sowing the seeds of future life in angry fields, sustained only by the vein of liquid. Or he might be a plant himself among the plants, drawing rainwater into his barely mobile body.
Sometimes he imagined the son he would have, because he wished for a child as though it was too much to ask, as though it was a unreal dream, as some men wish for wealth or fame.
At lunch in a Mexican restaurant Oppenheimer looked up from his plate of beans and saw Fermi walking toward him as though in his sleep. He rose from his seat so fast that he hit the table and spilled his beer, and they looked at each other across the bright room as the beer cascaded off the table edge.
As she learned after the police came jogging in wearing their riot gear, a ricochet off a pipe had hit the gunman near the base of his skull. He had died quickly beside a display of Navajo baskets.
It had happened too fast for them to save him or, as one of the policemen said jauntily, the carpet.
Mr. Hofstadt had not had a heart attack but a panic attack. He got up as soon as the policemen came in, then waited for the Crime Scene Unit and hovered behind them, bulgy-eyed and avid, as they taped off the corner of the room. After that day he would seldom return to the library, and when he did it was not to ask her questions but merely to check out a few books, mostly whodunits, quickly and wordlessly.
So she never found out how many blond babies were born in 1983.
They closed the library that afternoon so that the police could come and go without obstruction. She stayed at the phone, away from the bustle and the eyewitness interviews, until late in the afternoon, when she walked over to the children’s books section, hesitant and stepping lightly. A policeman and a forensic pathologist tried to tell her how to “sanitize the area,” but she could not discern the meaning of the words from their sound. She looked down at the man with the gun and felt dizzy.
He was not the man with the gun anymore, in fact, because he had dropped the gun before he died. The police had picked it up and bagged it as evidence. He looked casual to her, a man who had tripped and fallen some time ago and was now lying on the carpet by choice, idly recalling an untended detail: a dog unwalked, a sink of dishes uncleaned.
She thought: When I die there will be an envelope without a stamp, or worse an envelope with no address, with no name on it, even. They will have to open it to determine its object, and who knows what they will find? She shuddered at the idea that some wrong detail might slip unintended beneath the wrong eyes.
She thought: Maybe this fear is what keeps some people from writing letters at all.
One of the parrots on his shirt, red and yellow and beady-eyed, was upside-down. By means of its precarious perch on the shirt and its long tail feathers it led her eyes to the wound on the side of his head, where the hair was not dry and light. Instead there was heaviness there, the inside like worms, and it was wet.
She glanced away again, and a few minutes later they lifted him onto a gurney, covered him and rolled him outside and into the coroner’s van. She had the feeling of watching television, then of being inside television, inside bad television, in fact. She watched th
e van pull down the drive and stop at the lights down the street. Then she turned to her fellow librarian, asking: —Was there something I could have done?
The other librarian, a portly vegan named Jeff with a brown ponytail, shook his head and reassured her. She was unconvinced. He stepped away to talk to a reporter, though he himself had been occupied eating a tofurkey sandwich on rye, lettuce, mustard, extra lite organic soy mayo, when the tragedy occurred. Ann had not spoken to the media and she did not plan to, but Mr. Hofstadt had talked at great length to a reporter from Channel 2, in sweaty agitation.
It was a loose, spare day. After the police and the reporters and Jeff had all left she felt the library to be empty, emptier than it should be. At the same time it was cloying: it was empty and suffocating at once. The metal shelves, the windowsills, the curtains, the tables and chairs and counters were washed with an unfamiliar veneer, somehow altered and not how they used to be. Their surfaces could not be trusted; who knew what they hid?
They were the last fixtures to be seen of the world, the last sight seen.
Above him as his heart slowed there had been long fluorescent tubes and beside him, open on a table, had been a children’s book called Make Way for Ducklings.
The last sight seen could not be designed, she knew, and this stung her, it grieved her, it made her beg secretly. It should be an entitlement, she thought, at least this should be guaranteed, shouldn’t it? Even if everything else was chaos. That you could be outside, under the sky at night, seeing the white blur of stars that was the Milky Way. Because why should it be that this was what you got, your last touch of anything, the instant then, the instant of disappearing forever, why should that be fluorescent tubes and formica tabletops?
Anyway, she thought further, no one dies too well.
This was not a comfort.
She went to the bathroom, and standing at the sink washing her hands she thought: Heaven is an idea, but it does not follow that an idea is heaven. Still, it seems likely that in ideas, she thought, and only in ideas is there heaven. It can’t be found in plain sight, where most of us live, she thought, because we have teemed over the surface of the world and stained it. Rich people look for heaven in Bali or Key West but poor people have to find it between the fingertips and the frontal lobe: cigarettes, booze, crack and heroin.
The library bathroom was fairly pleasant and none of these were in evidence.
Ben was brought out of his trance rudely when Lynn came to talk to him.
—It’s Yoshi. He just does not want to understand my needs. I really can’t talk to him.
—I’m sorry to hear it.
—So I was wondering: Could you talk to him for me? Like always? I can’t deal. I mean really.
He did not think it was a good idea. Yoshi was in the next room, so he said softly, —I’m sure you can find a way of understanding each other.
—You know why it is? He doesn’t respect me. I think it’s that, you know, Asian woman thing. They’re totally subjugated. They bind their feet.
Whining for a good death was weak when even a good life was a tall order. At the same time she felt imploring, and asked universe to hand out good deaths for everyone. What harm could there be?
Though her parents had died in an accident not too long since, she had not seen the accident or the death. They had only been reported to her. It was a secondhand death and had stayed that way, the abstract removal of parents who themselves, in recent years, had abstracted themselves. It had still wrenched her but she saw it differently at different times: it was fluid so the shape of it did not loom. Sometimes it was a sad blur, other times it was violent and the soles of her feet tingled up from the ground at the thought.
But this had been near, near and real like a slap.
She closed the plastic blinds on four windows in a row and said to herself self-consciously: And then he was lucky. She was thinking of her grandmother, now dead, who had by her own admission lived decades too long. For her grandmother, in the years before she died, the ground itself had ceased to be stable and balance could not be regained: the world shook and trembled and her hands followed suit, her unsteady hands, quavering voice, even the laws of gravity had let her down. Her skin was white and powdery as moth wings. Once lucid briefly, she had pulled Ann down close to her on the pillow and whispered, with wet eyes: —It isn’t me anymore. I’m all gone.
Even disregarded and packed away, she thought, in a home with the other old ones, in a home with the other defunct, we cling with our bodies in shreds to the smells, the branches dipping in the wind, the old worn pads of our fingers: the same fingers we have had all our lives.
And the light in the air.
The bodies, she thought, those sad oxen, tired, they beg us to go free. The bodies beg us to go free.
She sat down near a magazine rack and paged through a People, blankly and without engagement. She could think of nothing to do, nothing that would occupy her. Her hands hung useless and she was surprised by a rush of adrenaline followed by restlessness.
At certain moments of shock or stupefaction it is clear, she thought, that doing anything is a waste of time, that effort itself is a waste. Doing something appears more wasteful than doing nothing, while only doing nothing seems safe. This may be because something is always, at base, a distraction from nothing. Paradoxically nothing is full, whereas something is often surprisingly empty; yet in nothing all things are possible, whereas in something there are limits on all sides.
And it is possible to relax into nothing, let nothing envelop you like a love.
Fermi was even more lost than Oppenheimer himself, but this mattered less than the obvious fact that it was him. It was Fermi, his old friend.
He had never been so relieved in his life.
Ann left the building thinking of herself as a woman who had witnessed a shooting. Then she amended this: she was a woman who had heard a series of loud noises, ie. shots, one of which produced a death. A subsequent amendment: Violent death.
It did not occur to her to interrupt Ben at work. She was distracted and instead of going home she got into her car and drove up into the mountains, pulling off the shoulder where a trailhead led into the forest. It was still raining, with an occasional low shiver of thunder; she got out of the car anyway and began to walk, between tall ponderosa pines on a brown bed of needles and cones.
She walked fast, wanting to drain herself of what felt like a morbid, even lurid excitement. Whether she was pressed onward by fear or exhilaration was not obvious to her and this made her furtive and shameful even as her legs moved. The texture of the day, of time itself on this day, it seemed to her, had been altered, roughened and sharpened, and it occurred to her that she would be far safer as a tree among trees. Upright and unbending, her feet frozen and locked in soil, she would be solid and surely without confusion.
She looked up into the ponderosas and saw how long and bare their trunks were, how their riddled columns of rust-red bark soared up around her without branches for what she thought must be seven stories, eight or nine or even ten, to the height of tall buildings. Even though she walked and they were stationary she wanted to make herself vertical like them, stiff like them, like them surrounded by fellows, strengthened by an impassive and silent army.
Ben was also contemplating trees. He was considering the arrangement of trees in part of the garden, and how the sunlight fell on them.
To Ann lighting was everything. She liked to place frayed and beloved objects in careful positions, making sure the surfaces of scuffed old tables, worn rugs and torn chairs were never lit bleakly from above but always illuminated gently by sconces and floor lamps containing bulbs of dim wattage. She avoided bright lights both at home and in public places.
Recently she had refused to go to a home store with him. It made her feel bleak, she had told him. She often looked at the others standing in line to pay for their hardware products: here fat Stan with his two-by-fours, paint thinner and level, there Larry with the
ear tufts holding his drill bits and royal-blue air conditioner filter, swaying and moaning as they plodded heavily in single-file down a dull concrete road, cheap home-improvement wares piled up high in their carts like the spoils of a sad war.
He asked her why she felt this way at the home store but not buying groceries. She said the grocery store was better because it held the prospect of giddiness, impulse and lightness.
Men felt that way buying hardware, he had said.
Her lighting arrangements were directed toward soft handling. She had to flatter things, manmade things that fell short, as they almost all did. The ugly had to be treated gently, as though it was sick.
She kept walking even after she was soaked, touching her arms in their wetness, fingers against the cold slick skin. She felt bereft of ideas except for one that said Move forward.
After an hour she turned back shaking, her hair ropy and dripping down her back. She picked her way over tree roots gnarled and jointed like bones on the muddy trail.
She thought now, instead of Move forward, only Be warm and dry again.
When she got to the car she turned on the heater full-blast. She drove back down the mountain, teeth chattering, and toweled off at home, in the bedroom. She changed clothes, bundling herself in wool and denim. But she was still afraid she would begin to think morbidly: morbid thoughts would come to her unbidden. That she could not control what she thought was horrifying to her, though it had never been before. With all that was external and beyond control it seemed at least that thoughts should be a modest self-determined privilege, but no, not even there was relief. Everything overlapped and nowhere was privacy.