A Matter of Life and Death or Something

by Ben Stephenson

  It was exactly how I’d always wanted my life to be, it was how I saw it: me in an exhausted delighted mood and walking home slowly with her, it’s just getting dark, there’s such complete certainty about her, there is no one else, just us walking in silence or not and it not mattering which.

  Then she said Isn’t it strange how they call them “the stacks?” and he asked why, and she said Because they don’t actually stack them. The books. They just stand them up next to each other, on shelves. They don’t stack them, that would be insane.

  She then proceeded to create a new library for him out of thin air. She said maybe it would have been built in a very small town, an isolated place, where they haven’t been informed that the proper “stacking” arrangement is side by side, not literally on top of one another. And they certainly haven’t been told about Dewey and his decimals. In this library, if you want to get a book out, you have to swiftly yank it out of the middle of the stack, as the iconic magician snatches a tablecloth out from under a feast. They would grease the covers of the books when they returned them to the shelves to make this possible, although still not safe, and people would be required to sign a lengthy waiver when applying for their library card. The librarians’ poor little arms would end up in plaster casts, and they’d never get as much injury compensation as they needed, but no one would ever step in and show them a better system, because they simply wouldn’t know one. So they would keep it up. After decades passed, and after enough book avalanches and broken bones, the librarians would get fed up, would let themselves get lazy, and they would start to reshelve the books via the tops of stacks, instead of trying to heave the pile up and slip them back into their correct spots in between. All the while, the soundtrack of the place would not be the usual passing whispers and shuffles of feet, but rather the irregular thundering, the CRASH CRASH CRASH of pillars of paper slamming down as the library patrons pull out their choices.

  It wasn’t so strange of you to be going on like you were, but you seemed to really be on a roll that night, so I didn’t interrupt. I listened. I did my best to remember every detail so I could save them for you later—for me later, for future remembering. I did that with so much of you, too much, all of it, like grasping at one long dream image fading in the stubborn morning. Vanishing. Too much detail to possibly capture. Still I feel like I know it all, like I could recite everything, I can’t let go, HOW DO PEOPLE LET GO. What does that even MEAN? Do some people actually get there? This is not why I’m here. I was looking up poetry and then didn’t get any. I got distracted and ended up in places no one should ever be. They have a whole suicide section here, if you’re into that, apparently. Lots of psych stuff but then weird stuff, too. I found practically like a how-to thing. I read way too much. I made myself reshelve it. So yes so then the worst part of all, you claimed, was that the most popular books, those borrowed most often, would always end up on the tops of stacks, tossed by the scowling librarians climbing their towering ladders, creaking around on their stilts. So the stacked books would then tragically go in approximate order of most popular to least popular from top to bottom, and some people tragically would even go as far as to assume that all the best books were therefore on the top, and the very worst at the bottom, and wouldn’t bother with anything below heart-level. The whole scenario then became a survival-of-the-fittest deal, with the “best” books actually crushing and mashing the “worst” books into a pulp.

  By this time you were walking at about half your normal pace, and poking one of your hands with the other with each new development. Then, you said, would come the minority fans, the lovers and rescuers of literary underdogs: snobbish, offended old men and women who’d make monthly pilgrimages to their favourite underrated and overlooked books and put them back up on the tops of the stacks, in the hopes they might be spared, or even read, and then,

  Then you let out a sigh and resumed your normal walk. The library dissolved. I didn’t know how to respond, I never did, so I just leaned my head in and kissed you on the neck. When I got home I meant to write it all down, but found myself just living inside it instead. I couldn’t get over the way you’d constructed it, in such a cause-and-effect way. The books would be stacked, so then logically this would happen, so then logically this would happen... Everything was so easy for you, so fluid. I had ideas too, sometimes, but for you it was different. For you life was a long chain of good ideas, with no space in between. Hundred-watt bulbs popped into the air fully lit at all moments, hovering, falling to your heels and shattering. A trail of broken glass music followed you.

  I needed to be around you forever, it was so clear to me. I had never wanted anything more. I used every idea of yours as fuel for my own dream of us, I told you I loved you. Kind of out of nowhere. How romantic. You didn’t answer that first time until a few hours later in your room. I appreciated that. That you had thought it out. I was ecstatic pretending to be calm. Then I woke you up by accident, I thought you were still awake, you could be gone in an instant, I woke you asking if I could use your idea for a film. You were annoyed: What idea? The Stacks. Oh, you said, Yeah sure. Fine. You said you didn’t own the idea, it was just an idea, and it just happened to have come out of your mind. You said you didn’t invent your mind. That killed me. I couldn’t sleep so I watched you do it instead.

  STACKS

  But I was this library, and you constructed me! I was a misinterpretation of a simple word. I was every librarian who obeyed the system with a faith that overcame paper cuts and broken bones. I was every stack of books, forever shifting and pounding and being pushed and rearranged but remaining essentially the same; I was every book in every stack. And I was a town of well-intentioned and good-natured citizens, all avid readers, not knowing any better system than the one they had learned. And I was every citizen who had left town on vacation and visited far-off libraries—quiet ones where things flowed smoothly and all was accounted for and on equal footing—but who felt uncomfortable, confused, even wrong to borrow a book there, without some massive effort required of them, without some permanent risk, and not even just in the finding, the ladder climbing, the heaving and pulling and crushing, but in making sure to put their whole soul and well-being on the line. I was everyone who knew an easy read was no read at all. And I was every resident of the surrounding townships as well, who’d heard of the painstaking library and visited it, and found it endearing and ridiculous. I was every reason for and against the stacking, and I was made out of the same metal as every shelf. But you were someone who saw the whole predicament from an even higher vantage point. You were the cloud drifting over the entire province, blowing in and out of shapes and observing the towns and the situation below, and seeing through it all and finding it all so peculiar.

  You’re none of those things. You’re not even the girl in these pages. She is nothing like you, and she knows nothing of you. I know this now. An eye-test chart isn’t you—it makes me sick. You’re not the details I tried to save—primary source documents written, drawn, even the ones I tried to keep safe and pure in my mind. “A trail of shattered light bulbs” isn’t you. If you knew the things I compared you to you’d kill me. I could gut this library and build the stacks myself and work and live here until death and still I’d never happen upon you in any aisle. Everywhere, every book and every shelf would only be hideous monuments to me. Even if you actually came back I wouldn’t recognize you. You’ll never be you in my mind or these pages or my life and you never were. I couldn’t let you. I know. No matter how hard I tried to understand and then how hard I tried to stop trying, only you were you.

  And I know this now.

  And I’m sorry.

  BLAH BLAH BLAH

  AFTER THE Mr. Peterson day, I took a couple of days off from interviewing. I tried to forget about how I hadn’t even found one single clue, and how I knew basically nothing. The last house I’d have to check out would be the hermit’s house, but I definitely wasn’t ab
out to just walk up there unprepared. I was going to need some time for doing research, and manufacturing bravery.

  On my second afternoon off I went to Finch’s house after finishing my school, because what else was I going to do. Victoria came over, too. We were all playing Scrabble, which was Victoria’s idea, because she was bored after Finch made us play Frisbee on his lawn for all eternities. Victoria wasn’t very good at throwing a Frisbee: it would always go way over my head or straight into Finch’s ankles, or more often would just end up miles away some place, in some mucky ditch or sharp hedge, and then one of us would have to walk excruciatingly far to get it back. Victoria was a really good catch though. Better than both me and Finch. She was pretty fast at running, and she would almost always catch the thing, even if me or Finch had a bad throw. Of course Finch tried to do all these crazy throws: upside-down ones, sideways ones, behind-his-back ones, but they mostly were horrible, and would just launch the Frisbee in some moronic direction, and then Victoria would run really hard and usually catch them. It was pretty hilarious. “I used to be able to do it perfect yesterday,” Finch kept saying, and Victoria said, “Can we please go inside now?”

  So we played Scrabble on the dark green carpet in Finch’s living room. I was winning, but Victoria was close.

  “That’s not a word,” I said.

  Finch looked at the letters he’d just put on the board, and then back at me.

  “Yeah it is,” he said, “triple word score.”

  “Trane isn’t a word,” I said.

  “Are you retarded?”

  “It’s T-R-A-I-N,” I said. “Take it off the board.”

  “No way. Pass the dictionary.”

  He never believed me until he looked in the dictionary. I sighed loud enough for him to hear so that he’d know how annoying he was being. He didn’t seem to know. I looked over at Victoria. She gave me a kind of smile that made me feel weird, one like she was very happy to see me. It was a smile she’d been making a lot lately.

  “If you don’t believe me, then why don’t you just ask your girlfriend?” I said.

  Finch froze. After a second he looked over at Victoria, smiled quickly, then glared at me.

  “I’m looking in the dictionary. That’s how you do it.”

  “Arthur’s right,” Victoria said finally. “That’s not a word.”

  “Fine,” Finch said. He started flicking the trane letters off the board. Some of them ran into other letters in the words that were already there.

  “Hey, you’re messing the game up.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Don’t be a sore loser,” I said. “Just make a real word and keep playing.”

  “I don’t even wanna play this retarded game anyway.”

  “Simon, come on,” Victoria said, “don’t be a baby.”

  “‘Baseballing’ isn’t a real word either, for your information,” Finch said, making mean eyebrows at Victoria. “You can’t just add I-N-G onto anything like that, but we let you keep that one.”

  “At least it’s spelled right,” I said.

  Finch got up and walked out of the room. On the way, he stepped right in the middle of the board, and all the letters fell out of their words and spelled a bunch of nonsense all over the place. I looked over at Victoria and she was trying hard not to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “He’s just so serious,” she said. “He takes it so seriously.”

  Then I laughed for a little while, because I agreed with her and because it’s really easy to laugh about Finch.

  “Do you want to set it back up again?” I asked.

  “It’s probably because I dumped him,” Victoria said.

  “What? When’d you do that?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “How long were you his girlfriend for?”

  “Four days.”

  “That’s weird. Why are you at his house?”

  “You guys invited me over.”

  “Yeah but, why’d you say yes?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What else was I going to do?”

  I didn’t say anything. I swept all the letters off the board and dropped handfuls of them into the slippery plastic bag they belonged in.

  “Maybe I want you to be my boyfriend instead.”

  Victoria was looking down at the carpet and tracing circles in it with her finger. I didn’t know what to say, so I still didn’t say anything. I kept putting letters into the bag.

  “Arthur?”

  “Mmm-hmm?” I didn’t look up at her.

  “Maybe I want you to be my boyfriend, I said.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Well why aren’t you saying anything?”

  “I am saying things.”

  “You’re being a jerk.”

  “I can’t be your boyfriend.”

  “Why not?”

  I stopped putting the letters in the bag. Victoria crossed her arms. I picked up the Scrabble board, folded it in half and put it back inside the box.

  “I don’t know, I’m busy. I just can’t. You should just go out with Finch, he’s not that bad.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing—I don’t know. I just can’t be your boyfriend.”

  “Do you hate me or something?”

  “No way. Obviously I don’t—”

  “Well then why’d you kiss me yesterday?”

  “You kissed me!”

  “You hate me.”

  “I don’t. Do you have any idea how old we are!?”

  Victoria’s mouth twisted into some new kind of smile that I had never seen anyone make before. It was kind of like a smile of someone who knows something you don’t, who is keeping a secret, and also kind of like a sneaky bad guy’s smile, except she wasn’t a bad guy. It wasn’t an evil smile, just a curious one. I didn’t know why she made it. She always made the weirdest smiles.

  “Fine,” she said. “But some day you’re going to be in love with me.”

  “I’m going home,” I said, and then I went to the hall, put my boots on and left Finch’s house. I had no idea where Finch disappeared to.

  It was beautiful outside again, finally, and I walked home thinking about how silly girls can be. They were only boyfriend-girlfriend for four days and she broke up with him. And then suddenly he thinks it’s fine to go around spelling fake words like “trane.” How come every time people dump each other they go mentally insane? I mean, come on. They never even hugged or held hands or anything whenever I was around—he barely even talked to her. And she said he never even tried to french her. I didn’t get it. Maybe she actually was in love with me instead. What a weirdo.

  I was glad to have escaped. I was in a good mood, for some reason I was feeling like I was just one tiny kid in the whole universe, but I felt OK to be that. I could do whatever I wanted: if I felt like spending all day in the woods, I could. If I felt like never talking to anyone ever again, I could. I was ten years old. I didn’t need Victoria to be my girlfriend, I mean look what it did to Finch. Besides, I saw her all the time anyway, whether I wanted to or not. I didn’t need anyone. I ran for a little bit, because it was fun to go fast, and ’cause I was in control of the whole solar system. I ran until my lungs burned fiery from not breathing enough, then I slowed down. I had infinite energy. I spotted an especially pretty rock on the side of the road, one of those crazy quartz rocks that looks like kind of a lumpy diamond. It was a big one too, almost as big as a baseball. I kicked it up the hill a bit—it flew along the ground for a while and stopped, then slowly wiggled and rolled back down to me. I kicked it again farther up the hill, and in a while it rolled back down to my foot again. I carefully kicked that one single rock all the way home and left it in our driveway.r />
  I couldn’t wait to start preparing for the investigation of the hermit’s house. I would be brave and go there and draw a map of his whole property first, sitting far enough away in the woods. And I’d write down investigation strategies on the side of the map. I already saw it in my head: a top view of the crazy cottage with all the measurements really precise and also showing how scary it looked, and with diagrams paying close attention to the scariest parts.

  In order to safely go there and make the map I would need a way of being invisible, and hopefully silent. But I had ideas about that. The first thing I would do was I would get some old clothes, like a shirt I didn’t wear anymore, or maybe one of Simon’s dirty old sweaters he uses for gardening, and a pair of old jeans, and I would lie them down on the forest floor like a two-dimensional person lying on their back, and take my white glue and pour it all over the clothes and spread it around with the edge of a stick. Then I’d pick up handfuls of leaves and also green cedar branches and soil and dump them all on top of the gluey clothes. When it dried in fifteen minutes, I’d flip them over and do the other side too, and when the clothes were all done I’d put them on and no one would be able to see me sitting in the woods making my map because I would camouflage into the trees like lots of animals can do without having to wear anything, and like humans should do when we finally evolve smarter.

  To be silent, I had an even easier idea. I would just find two clumps of green moss about the right size, and find some pieces of rope somewhere, and I would just take my boots off—which were red, so now that I think of it I’d probably need to paint them green first—and I would just tie the clumps of moss onto the bottom of my boots with the mossy side down, so that when I walked I would make a sound so soft it wouldn’t even really be a sound. And once I manufactured the camouflage suit and the silence boots, people wouldn’t even know I was there, and I could sneak onto the hermit’s property and do all my research. Plus Simon wouldn’t be able to see me, or Maureen, or Finch or Victoria or anyone. Because it would look like I didn’t even exist at all, like a zero-dimensional person, except secretly I did exist and I was getting stuff done, so really I would be a secret shaped like a boy.