by Guran, Paula
“So why are we going there?” I said.
“Because he’s sick.”
“Who’s sick?”
“Erick Kinney.”
Whatever else I’d meant to say evaporated from my lips. “The Librarian, Erick Kinney?”
“Yes, The Librarian Erick Kinney. He’s really sick. I mean, a lot of us are sick. Bad flu bug or something. But he’s all twisted up. I think he’s going to die.”
For a long moment, I just looked at him. My long-ago almost-stepson. The closest I was ever likely to get, now, to an actual son. Once upon a time—not so long ago—when he’d still wanted me in his life, that had seemed very nearly enough.
“I’ll get my coat and my keys,” I said.
“You can’t take your car down there. To the Library. It’s not safe.”
“My Saturn? Too yellow, you think?”
“Jesus Christ, that’s still your car? What is it, twenty years old? Aren’t you a doctor?”
“Probably still got the dirt from our Sequoia trip.”
“The one we took when I was twelve?”
“You’ll find it under the dirt from the decade since then.”
“We can take that car,” Aaron said. This time, his smile was bright and unexpected and gentle. I was so grateful that I almost cried out, but controlled myself.
He leaned his head back, rolled it very slowly around his shoulders, stopped halfway with a wince.
“Are you all right, Aaron?”
“Get your keys.”
“I’m getting you antibiotics, too.”
“Later.”
The homeless had already gone in to dinner, and the smell of burnt tomatoes and chicken grease wafted from the doors of the shelter. From somewhere not far, metal clanged, but we were the only things moving on the entire block. All around us, forever leaning and tilting on its hills, San Francisco rode the waves of marine layer like a fishing trawler.
“Isn’t it a little bright yet for Morlocks?” I teased. “Moon might still peek through.”
“Funny, Aunt A.”
He kept putting his hands in the small of his back, stretching. Once, stumbling on a raised square of sidewalk, he unleashed a violent, unintentional grunt.
“Aaron, what’s wrong? Come on, seriously. Are you really sick? Let me help.” We’d reached my car, and I watched him ease in, tilting sideways to keep his back straight.
Once settled, he glanced up. “It’s just from crawling. You know, around the Book Depots. Occupational hazard.”
And badge of distinction, apparently. “Bay Bridge Base, right? Somewhere down there?”
Traffic proved predictably dismal. Wisps of fog drifted through the dead ducts of my Saturn’s fan, floating between and around us. I couldn’t decide whether I was warm or cold, and didn’t care. We didn’t speak. It felt as though we’d cast ourselves adrift, floated into the bay. I kept my eyes on the road and hoped we’d never arrive.
But all too soon, as we reached the empty warehouses and glass-strewn lots of the wasteland under the Bay Bridge, Aaron began pointing me to the right. Then to the left. I saw the building before he told me to stop, recognizing it from newspaper photographs.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” I cut the engine, let the car drift to a stop against a curb that in classic Frisco fashion wasn’t long enough even for my Saturn. Somehow, I suspected the parking patrol wouldn’t be by. I pointed toward the mottled, rectangular gray and green warehouse, hunched between two much larger derelict structures on either side. “That’s the Library.”
“There’s no place like home,” Aaron said quietly. Lovingly. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”
“Stop it,” I told him. “You sound—”
“Brainwashed? Isn’t that what you think I am? What we all are? SLA’d? Jonestowned?”
“Well? Are you?”
Aaron just pushed open his door, grimacing as he pulled himself from the car. “Come and see.”
The fog felt warmer, here, almost fetid. It had been such a strange, damp summer. The street was devoid not only of people but other cars. A few blocks to the right, just visible through the mist, the glassy towers of the latest Rincon Hill revitalization project blazed like great, blue lighthouses. They were mostly empty, too, I knew. Prospective renters had vanished with the housing bust.
“I’m going to have to blindfold you so you don’t see the secret knock,” Aaron said.
“You try it, I’m gone,” I told him.
“Kidding, Aunt A. Gullible as ever, I see.” He put an arm around my shoulder, squeezed me. “I’ve missed you,” he said.
Through new tears, I watched him scoop a handful of pebbles off the curb and pitch them at the lowered, metal door of the Library. The clatter they made seemed farther away than it should have, like children’s footsteps racing around a corner.
Nothing moved or changed. The fog had a stench, here, to go with its disconcerting warmth: cat urine, old tar, mold.
“Maybe they didn’t teach you the secret knock,” I said.
The Library door hoisted itself slowly open.
It was like a cave. No overhead lights. Just a few glimmers floating in what appeared to be a single, cavernous room. No one moving. Fingers of fog began to walk up my back.
“Aaron, why did you bring me here?”
He looked genuinely surprised. “I told you why.”
“I just want to make this clear. Whatever rejection you’re imagining, it was all on your side, at least as far as I’m concerned. I can’t speak for your dad. You hear me? I love you.”
“I know you love me, Aunt A. I love you, too.”
“But I reject this.”
“You don’t know anything about this.”
“I reject brilliant young people living in rank poverty as some transcendent, subversive statement against the status-quo. I reject malnourishment-by-choice. I reject wasted time. I reject bombing.”
“Not one person has been hurt. Not one, except that guard, and he wasn’t supposed to be there, and even he only lost a couple fingers.”
I turned, mouth agape. He looked away.
“Someone has to fight, Aunt A. Someone has to stand up and say, you can’t just take it all. We want it back. We’ll take it back.”
He moved off, shoulders rigid, head rolling again around his neck. The shadows swallowed him. I hurried and caught up.
As I soon as I was through the door, I realized it wasn’t actually dark in there. Every twenty feet or so, all the way to the back where some towering red curtains had been suspended from the ceiling, kerosene lanterns balanced precariously on old camera tripods. At the foot of each tripod, arrayed in a sort of daisy-petal shape, lay four or five blue tumbling mats, the kind one finds in elementary school gyms. Stuffing bulged from rents in their vinyl covering, and they seemed to be sagging into the cement. Most were unoccupied.
But not all. As we continued forward, I saw occasional, curled shapes draped in shabby overcoats or humped up under some other improvised covering. I even glimpsed a few faces. Most of those were young. Late teens. Twenty-somethings. The great majority male, almost all of them prostrate. Some were sleeping or staring blank-eyed into the shadows spread like spider webs across the length of the ceiling, their heads sinking into moldy mounds of paperback books, their legs curled up underneath or folded over each other, as if they’d been frozen in the midst of a long-form yoga exercise.
The ones who weren’t sleeping were reading, tilting books toward the nearest kerosene lantern. No one spoke. No one looked up at Aaron or accosted me. Shuddering, I realized the place really did feel like a library. Kind of. Certainly, it was nowhere to raise one’s voice or shout hello.
“How many of you did you say there were?” I whispered.
“I didn’t. I don’t even know for sure. People come and go.”
I was relieved to hear that, anyway. Also glad that as yet, no one had hoisted himself off his or her mattress and pulled the door down
behind us.
“Not a single one of you knows how to dust? Wield a mop? You lie down in this? It’s not sanitary.”
“Aunt A., have you seen your car?”
Not quite like a library, I thought. All the way back to the curtains, I tried to place the sensation, and then I had it: it was like a Natural History Museum diorama. Something you’d see between the Cro-Magnon room and the Animals of North America hallway. The Reading Chamber. “Look now, children. See those things in their hands? They called those ‘books.’ See how still they all are? This is what it was like . . . ”
Glancing behind me, I was startled to find that the outside door had been drawn down after all. And yet, the only thing moving in the whole expanse was lantern-light dancing down wicks, spinning shadows through the dust. A few mats away from where I now stood, someone coughed. Someone else whimpered.
The curtains hung in a circular ring suspended fully fifteen feet off the ground. Not until we were right in front of them did I hear the voice.
There really was something goat-like about its quaver, its nagging, monotonous bleat. It wasn’t soothing, and it wasn’t friendly. And it almost yanked me through the curtains.
“Then the butterfly stamped . . . ”
“Aaron, don’t,” I said suddenly, but too late. He’d already pulled back the curtain.
I don’t know what I was expecting. A throne, maybe. A white orgy-couch straight out of Caligula. The Wizard, working levers.
The first startling thing was how many of them there were. Twenty, at least, maybe more, all seated in a rude semi-circle, tilting against one another or else stretched lengthwise on the filthy floor mats. None of these people was sleeping, and not a one so much as glanced around. Except the Librarian.
He was hunched almost double on top of a stool. The lantern at his feet cast a reddish glow up the side of his face, which made him look less Satanic than molten. His eyes were small, yellowish-brown, and after lingering on mine for an uncomfortable few seconds, they drifted to Aaron.
“I told you, no doctors,” he said, in the same bleat he’d used for reading.
“I brought one anyway,” said Aaron. “This is—”
“Your not-Aunt Ariel. Yes.”
“You’re going to like her, Erick. She’s not much for taking shit. Even from people she likes. And I doubt she’ll like you much.”
There it was again. The ghost of Aaron’s smile. I grabbed for his hand, squeezed it, and felt him suck in a sharp breath.
“Sorry,” I murmured.
Erick Kinney stared me up and down. Everything about him, from the blades of his shoulders to his drawn-up knees to his hawk’s beak of a nose, looked pointy. If he’d had antennae, he could have passed for a grasshopper.
“Aaron, maybe we should go,” I said.
Abruptly, the Librarian smiled. Except for the lantern light in his teeth, it was just an ordinary smile. A lopsided and tired one.
“You think you can help? Doctor? Solve the mystery?”
“You mean, How the Morlocks got their limp?”
The Librarian’s smile widened. Which made it look more lopsided, something sketched with a crayon by a six year-old. “Well. All right, then. Make way, boys and girls. The doctor’s come to tell us a story.”
I shook my head. “Not here.”
That gave him pause, briefly, and I wondered when he’d last left the Library. Certainly, there hadn’t been any news footage of him recently. His bony fingers trailed over the pages of the chipped, cracked Kipling from which he’d been reading, probing into the crease of the binding and scratching softly at the words on the page, as though he were petting a cat.
“Then Brother Aaron will finish tonight’s reading,” he said, and held up the book. “Make sure each of you gives it a goodnight kiss.”
He didn’t so much stand as slump forward off the stool. Very slowly, clearly in pain, he straightened. His right arm dangled, and he dragged his right leg behind him as though he were some Dickens character with a club foot. His ailment was exaggerated, I was certain. Also clearly real.
“Aaron, please tell me you’ll come again,” I said. “Tomorrow. The next day. Please.”
He turned, and in that one moment I forgot where I was, forgot the light and the bombings and everything else except the love I was never going to lose for this boy.
“Soon, Aunt A. You owe me a birthday sandwich.”
I don’t know why it seemed so important to keep Erick Kinney from seeing me cry. Spinning away fast, I walked straight across the warehouse and out of the Library. Once back in my car, I sat in the driver’s seat with the door open to the fetid fog, waiting for the Librarian to make his slow way out of the world he’d created and into mine.
Seated on my examination table in a backless paper gown in the ruthless fluorescent light, Erick Kinney looked no less pointy. His sallow skin seemed stretched too thin, and his dirty blond hair fell in scraggles to his shoulders. His satyr-goatee dangled listlessly off his chin. Except for the angry red rash spreading up his back and curling into his ribs, the man was almost entirely bones and hair. A talking owl-pellet.
Or, not talking, as had been the case since the moment we’d reached the clinic. “Are you in pain?” I asked, arranging implements on my little pushcart next to the table.
As I moved about the room, I could feel his gaze, but every time I looked up, his eyes were aimed past me, out the door and across the hall. At my bookshelves, I realized.
“You’re not answering,” I said.
“You’re not actually asking,” said the Librarian. No smile creased his face, but something flickered in his eyes. Whatever it was, it was hard to look away from.
“Hold still,” I told him. “Say aah.” I stuck a swab in his throat.
He had his knees open, so I had to stand between them. Up close, he appeared even more grizzled, with little hairs sprouting from virtually every pore. He was also looking right at me, now. There was a draw to him, all right. I could feel it in my knees and under the soles of my feet, like an undertow. I held the swab in place a split second longer than I usually do. I think I wanted to see him gag.
He just sat there. Shoulders hunched, eyes dancing.
As soon as I removed the swab, he asked, “Can I look at your books?”
I held up the blood-pressure sleeve. Sighing, he extended his bony arm. In the end, I had to get the child-sleeve to fit him. I was squeezing the bulb, pressing the bell of my stethoscope into the crook of his elbow, when he said, “Is he really that stupid?”
I kept my attention on the pressure gauge as it nudged up, plunged down. “Which ‘he’ would that be?”
“Aaron’s father. For not marrying you.”
When I just ripped the Velcro open and removed the sleeve, he laughed. “No mock outrage? No how-dare-me? No how-much-has-Aaron-told-you? Oh, you’re one of mine, all right.”
“Hold out your hand,” I said, separating the tiny needle from its sterilizing bag. “I’ll try to get enough from your finger. I don’t need much.”
“Blood from a stone.”
“A suddenly talkative stone.” I jabbed the needle down, watched the blood well vibrant red in the yellow light. He stayed silent as I collected droplets. Somehow, his silence made me more nervous than his chatter did, so I asked, “What else has Aaron said?”
“That you’re my kind of doctor.”
“Meaning?”
“You serve the people who need serving, not the people who can pay. You read every spare second of your life. You don’t judge anyone, except sometimes Aaron.”
“I don’t judge Aaron. Except about bombing. Want to talk about involving idealistic young people who damn near worship you in bombing, since we’re talking?”
“That you keep yourself to yourself, because deep down you know that’s not only for the best, it’s better.”
It was his voice as much as his words, that grated in my ears and all over my skin. That bleat, sharp and quavery, too raw, like
notes struck on a ruined piano with the lid thrown open. Or vocal cords with no sheath of skin. I had a momentary but powerful impulse to strap this Morlock, or faux-Weather Undergrounder, or whatever he was, to the examination table, rush back to the warehouse, roust the rest of them, and light the whole place on fire. Bring Aaron home.
“You can look at the books, now,” I said, pushing a hard breath through my teeth. “I’ll just be a minute. A couple more tests, and I’ll run you back.”
“So you’re going to discover what’s wrong with us?” he said, sliding off the table, the gown slipping up his thighs as he landed, too close to me. He wasn’t attractive. Just . . . present. In a way I’d almost forgotten people could be.
“I’m concerned that I already know,” I said, making myself look away, but not before I saw him startle. “You’re going to need a spinal tap to confirm. It’s going to hurt.”
“What do you know?” he said quietly.
“Your joints hurt, yes?”
“All the time.”
“Your back?”
“All the time.”
“That rash been there long?”
“A while.”
“Fever?”
“It comes and goes. Or, it came and it went.”
“Diarrhea?”
“Some. Yes.”
“Tired a lot?”
He didn’t answer that.
“I’ll need a stool sample before you go. Bad luck living where you live. By the water, I mean. Especially this particular summer. With all the mosquitoes. This isn’t just about you, by the way, and I’m not giving you a choice. I think you’ve got West Nile, and I’m going to contact the CDC, and they’re going to make good and damn sure you get checked.”
I was in the process of turning away, and almost missed his grin. My limbs had become heavy, as though Erick Kinney had poured concrete into them in the seconds we’d been standing there.
“West Nile Virus,” he said. “Imagine that.”
“Bound to happen here sooner or later. And given where you live, and the filthy way you keep yourselves . . . ”