The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

by Richard Brautigan

  I believe it’s a mistake on their part. I have seen too many couples who went to Mexico and then immediately broke up when they returned to America. I believe if they want to stay together they shouldn’t go to Mexico.

  The librarian before her was here for one year. He was killed in an automobile accident. An automobile went out of control and crashed into the library. Somehow it killed him. I have never been able to figure this out because the library is made of bricks.

  The Twenty-Three

  Ah, it feels so good to sit here in the darkness of these books. I’m not tired. This has been an average evening for books being brought in: with twenty-three finding their welcomed ways on to our shelves.

  I wrote their titles and authors and a little about the receiving of each book down in the Library Contents Ledger. I think the first book came in around 6.30.

  MY TRIKE by Chuck. The author was five years old and had a face that looked as if it had been struck by a tornado of freckles. There was no title on the book and no words inside, just pictures.

  ‘What’s the name of your book?’ I said.

  The little boy opened the book and showed me the drawing of a tricycle. It looked more like a giraffe standing upside down in an elevator.

  ‘That’s my trike,’ he said.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I said. ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘That’s my trike.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very nice, but what’s your name?’

  ‘Chuck.’

  He reached the book up on to the desk and then headed for the door, saying, ‘I have to go now. My mother’s outside with my sister.’

  I was going to tell him that he could put the book on any shelf he wanted to, but then he was gone in his small way.

  LEATHER CLOTHES AND THE HISTORY OF MAN by S. M. Justice. The author was quite motorcyclish and wearing an awful lot of leather clothes. His book was made entirely of leather. Somehow the book was printed. I had never seen a 290-page book printed on leather before.

  When the author turned the book over to the library, he said, ‘I like a man who likes leather.’

  LOVE ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL by Charles Green. The author was about fifty years old and said he had been trying to find a publisher for his book since he was seventeen years old when he wrote the book.

  ‘This book has set the world’s record for rejections,’ he said. ‘It has been rejected 459 times and now I am an old man.’

  THE STEREO AND GOD by the Reverend Lincoln Lincoln. The author said that God was keeping his eye on our stereophonic phonographs. I don’t know what he meant by that but he slammed the book down very hard on the desk.

  PANCAKE PRETTY by Barbara Jones. The author was seven years old and wearing a pretty white dress.

  ‘This book is about a pancake,’ she said.

  SAM SAM SAM by Patricia Evens Summers. ‘It’s a book of literary essays,’ she said. ‘I’ve always admired Alfred Kazin and Edmund Wilson, especially Wilson’s theories on The Turn of the Screw.’ She was a woman in her late fifties who looked a great deal like Edmund Wilson.

  A HISTORY OF NEBRASKA by Clinton York. The author was a gentleman about forty-seven who said he had never been to Nebraska but he had always been interested in the state.

  ‘Ever since I was a child it’s been Nebraska for me. Other kids listened to the radio or raved on about their bicycles. I read everything I could find on Nebraska. I don’t know what got me started on the thing. But, anyway, this is the most complete history ever written about Nebraska.’

  The book was in seven volumes and he had them in a shopping bag when he came into the library.

  HE KISSED ALL NIGHT by Susan Margar. The author was a very plain middle-aged woman who looked as if she had never been kissed. You had to look twice to see if she had any lips on her face. It was a surprise to find her mouth almost totally hidden beneath her nose.

  ‘It’s about kissing,’ she said.

  I guess she was too old for any subterfuge now.

  MOOSE by Richard Brautigan. The author was tall and blond and had a long yellow moustache that gave him an anachronistic appearance. He looked as if he would be more at home in another era.

  This was the third or fourth book he had brought to the library. Every time he brought in a new book he looked a little older, a little more tired. He looked quite young when he brought in his first book. I can’t remember the title of it, but it seems to me the book had something to do with America.

  ‘What’s this one about,’ I asked, because he looked as if he wanted me to ask him something.

  ‘Just another book,’ he said.

  I guess I was wrong about him wanting me to ask him something.

  IT’S THE QUEEN OF DARKNESS, PAL by Rod Keen. The author was wearing overalls and had on a pair of rubber boots.

  ‘I work in the city sewers,’ he said, handing the book to me. ‘It’s science-fiction.’

  YOUR CLOTHES ARE DEAD by Les Steinman. The author looked like an ancient Jewish tailor. He was very old and looked as if he had made some shirts for Don Quixote.

  ‘They are, you know,’ he said, showing the book to me as if it were a piece of cloth, a leg from a pair of trousers.

  JACK, THE STORY OF A CAT by Hilda Simpson. The author was a girl about twelve years old, just entering into puberty. She had lemon-sized breasts against a green sweater. She was awakening to adolescence in a delightful way.

  ‘What do you have with you this evening,’ I said.

  Hilda had brought in five or six books previously.

  ‘It’s a book about my cat Jack. He’s really a noble animal. I thought I would put him down in a book, bring it here and make him famous,’ she said, smiling.

  THE CULINARY DOSTOEVSKY by James Fallon. The author said the book was a cookbook of recipes he had found in Dostoevsky’s novels.

  ‘Some of them are very good,’ he said. ‘I’ve eaten everything Dostoevsky ever cooked.’

  MY DOG by Bill Lewis. The author was seven years old and said thank you when he put his book on a shelf.

  HOMBRE by Canton Lee. The author was a Chinese gentleman about seventy.

  ‘It’s a Western,’ he said. ‘About a horse thief. Reading Westerns is my hobby, so I decided to write one myself. Why not? I spent thirty years cooking in a restaurant in Phoenix.’

  VIETNAM VICTORY by Edward Fox. The author was a very serious young man who said that victory could only be achieved in Vietnam by killing everybody there. He recommended that after we had killed everybody there we turn the country over to Chiang Kai-shek, so he could attack Red China, then.

  ‘It’s only a matter of time,’ he said.

  PRINTER’S INK by Fred Sinkus. The author was a former journalist whose book was almost illegibly written in longhand with his words wrapped around whisky.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, handing the book to me. ‘Twenty years.’ He left the library unevenly, barely under his own power.

  I stood there looking down at twenty years in my hands.

  BACON DEATH by Marsha Paterson. The author was a totally nondescript young woman except for a look of anguish on her face. She handed me this fantastically greasy book and fled the library in terror. The book actually looked like a pound of bacon. I was going to open it and see what it was about, but I changed my mind. I didn’t know whether to fry the book or put it on the shelf. Being a librarian here is sometimes a challenge.

  UFO VERSUS CBS by Susan DeWitt. The author was an old woman who told me that her book, which was written in Santa Barbara at her sister’s house, was about a Martian conspiracy to take over the Columbia Broadcasting System.

  ‘It’s all here in my book,’ she said. ‘Remember all those flying saucers last summer?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘They’re all in here,’ she said. The book looked quite handsome and I’m certain they were all in there.

  THE EGG LAYED TWICE by Beatrice Quinn Porter. The author said this collection of poetry summed up the wisdom she
had found while living twenty-six years on a chicken ranch in San Jose.

  ‘It may not be poetry,’ she said. ‘I never went to college, but it’s sure as hell about chickens.’

  BREAKFAST FIRST by Samuel Humber. The author said that breakfast was an absolute requisite for travelling and was overlooked in too many travel books, so he decided that he would write a book about how important breakfast was in travelling.

  THE QUICK FOREST by Thomas Funnell. The author was about thirty years old and looked scientific. His hair was thinning and he seemed eager to talk about the book.

  ‘This forest is quicker than an ordinary forest,’ he said.

  ‘How long did it take you to write it?’ I said, knowing that authors seem to like that question.

  ‘I didn’t write it,’ he said. ‘I stole it from my mother. Serves her right, too. The God-damn bitch.’

  THE NEED FOR LEGALIZED ABORTION by Doctor O. The author was doctory and very nervous in his late thirties. The book had no title on the cover. The contents were very neatly typed. about 300 pages long.

  ‘It’s all I can do,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want to put it on a shelf yourself?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You take care of that yourself. There’s nothing else that I can do. It’s all a God-damn shame.’

  It has just started to rain now outside the library. I can hear it splash against the windows and echo among the books. They seem to know it’s raining here in the beautiful darkness of lives as I wait for Vida.

  Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?

  I must tell you right now that most of the library isn’t here. This building is not large and couldn’t begin to hold all the books that have been brought in over the years.

  The library was in existence before it came to San Francisco in the late 1870s, and the library didn’t lose a book during the earthquake and fire of 1906. While everybody else was running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off, we were careful: no panic.

  This library rests upon a sloping lot that runs all the way through the block down from Clay to Sacramento Street. We use just a small portion of the lot and the rest of it is overgrown with tall grass and bushes and flowers and wine bottles and lovers’ trysts.

  There are some old cement stairs that pour through green and busy establishments down from the Clay Street side and there are ancient electric lamps, friends of Thomas Edison, mounted on tall metal asparagus stalks.

  They are on what was once the second landing of the stairs. The lights don’t work any more and everything is so overgrown that it’s hard to tell why anything ever existed in the first place.

  The back of the library lies almost disappearing in green at the bottom of the stairs.

  The front lawn is neat, though. We don’t want this place to look totally like a jungle. It might frighten people away.

  A little Negro boy comes and mows the lawn every month or so. I don’t have any money to pay him but he doesn’t mind. He does it because he likes me and he knows that I have to stay inside here, that I can’t mow the lawn myself. I always have to be in here ready to welcome a new book.

  Right now the lawn has many dandelions on it and thousands of daisies sprawled here and there together like a Rorschach dress pattern designed by Rudi Gernreich.

  The dandelions are loners and pretty much stay off by themselves, but those daisies! I know all this by looking out the heavy glass door.

  This place is constantly bathed in the intermediate barking of dogs from early in the morning when the dogs wake up and continuing until late at night when the dogs go to sleep and sometimes they bark in between.

  We are just a few doors down from a pet hospital and, though I can’t see the hospital, I am seldom without the barking of dogs and I have grown used to it.

  At first I hated their damn barking. It had always been a thing with me: a dislike for dogs. But now in my third year here, I’ve grown accustomed to their barking and it doesn’t bother me any more. Actually, I like it sometimes.

  There are high arched windows here in the library above the bookshelves and there are two green trees towering into the windows and they spread their branches like paste against the glass.

  I love those trees.

  Through the glass door and across the street is a big white garage with cars coming and going all the time in hours of sickness and need. There is a big word in blue on the front of the garage: GULF.

  Before the library came to San Francisco, it was in Saint Louis for a while, then in New York for a long time. There are a lot of Dutch books somewhere.

  Because this building is so small, we have been forced to store thousands of books at another place. We moved into this little brick building after the ’06 business to be on the safe side, but there just isn’t enough room here.

  There are so many books being written that end up here, either by design or destiny. We have accepted 114 books on the Model T Ford, fifty-eight books on the history of the banjo and nineteen books on buffalo-skinning since the beginning of this library. We keep all the ledgers here that we use to record the acceptance of each book in, but most of the books themselves are in hermetically-sealed caves in Northern California.

  I have nothing to do with the storing of the books in the caves. That’s Foster’s job. He also brings me my food because I can’t leave the library. Foster hasn’t been around for a few months, so I guess he’s off on another drunk.

  Foster loves to drink and it’s always easy for him to find somebody to drink with. Foster is about forty years old and always wears a T-shirt, no matter what the weather is about, rain or shine, hot or cold, it’s all the same to his T-shirt because his T-shirt is an eternal garment that only death will rob from his body.

  Foster has long buffalo-heavy blond hair and I have never seen Foster when he wasn’t sweating. He’s very friendly in an overweight sort of style, jolly you might say, and has a way of charming people, total strangers, into buying him drinks. He goes off on month-long drunks in the logging towns near the caves, raises hell with the loggers and chases the Indian girls through the woods.

  I imagine he’ll be down here one of these days, red-faced and hung-over, full of excuses and driving his big green van and all ready to fill it up with another load of books for the caves.

  Book Two: Vida

  Vida

  When I first met Vida she had been born inside the wrong body and was barely able to look at people, wanting to crawl off and hide from the thing that she was contained within.

  This was late last year in San Francisco.

  She came to the library one evening after she got off work. The library was ‘closed’ and I was in my room making some coffee and thinking about the books that had come into the library that day. One of the books was about a great octopus that had leather wings and flew through abandoned school yards at night, demanding entrance into the classrooms.

  I was putting some sugar into my coffee when I heard the bell ring ever so slightly, but always just enough to alert me and to summon me.

  I went out and turned on the light in the library and there was a young girl at the door, waiting behind the heavy religious glass.

  She startled me.

  Besides having an incredibly delicate face, beautiful, with long black hair that hung about her shoulders like bat lightning, there was something very unusual about her, but I could not quite tell what that thing was because her face was like a perfect labyrinth that led me momentarily away from a very disturbing thing.

  She did not look directly at me as she waited for me to unlock the door and let her in. She was holding something under her arm. It was in a brown paper bag and looked like a book.

  Another one for the caves.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Please come in.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, coming very awkwardly into the library. I was surprised that she was so awkward. She did not look directly at me and she did not look at the library either. She seemed t
o be looking at something else. The thing that she was looking at was not in front of me nor behind me nor at the side of me.

  ‘What do you have there? A book?’ I said, wanting to sound like a pleasant librarian and make her feel at ease.

  Her face was so delicate: the mouth, the eyes, the nose, the chin, the curve of her cheeks all beautiful. She was almost painful to gaze upon.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you. It’s late.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not at all. No. Please come over here to the desk and we’ll register your book in the Library Contents Ledger. That’s how we do it here.’

  ‘I was wondering how you were going to do it,’ she said.

  ‘Did you come far?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just got off work.’

  She wasn’t looking at herself either. I do not know what she was looking at, but she was looking at something very intently. I believe the thing that she was looking at was inside of herself. It had a shape that only she could see.

  She moved very awkwardly over to the desk, stunningly awkward, but again the almost tide-pool delicacy of her face led me away from the source of her awkwardness.

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you. I know it’s late,’ she said, kind of hopelessly, and then broke away from the thing that she was looking at, to glance lightspeed at me.

  She was disturbing me, but not in the way she thought. There was a dynamically incongruous thing about her, but I still couldn’t find it. Her face, like a circle of mirrors, led me away from it.

  ‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘This is my job and I love doing it. There’s no place I would rather be than where I am now.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I love my work.’ I said.

  ‘It’s good you’re happy,’ she said. She said the word happy as if she were looking at it from a great distance through a telescope. The word sounded celestial upon her mouth, stark and Galilean.