The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  “It’s about this hand,” Ian was saying, “that’s totally invisible, and it’s detached from any human body. It’s kind of like a Greek myth, but there’s a mortal at the end, and it’s on its own separate page. So at the end of the story, you have to guess what the mortal is, and then you can turn the page and see if you were right.”

  “So there’s a moral?”

  “No, a mortal, because of how it’s inspired by Greek myths. Get it? It’s a joke. Also, I forgot page numbers.”

  “I’ll bend the rules for you,” I said. I already knew it would win first prize for the fifth grade, because the only other entry was about some kind of ninja battle. I read the beginning as soon as he left. He’d printed it out in dark blue:

  THE NOTHING HAND

  by Ian Alistair Drake Grade 5

  There once was a hand that was made of nothing. It was invisible to all of your senses but it could do whatever it would like. Here was its life:Day 1: Steal doughnuts and hide.

  Day 2: Eat the doughnuts it stole, through a special mouth that it had.

  Day 3: Get revenge on bullies through using trickery.

  Day 4: Hide under rocks in the forest, waiting for trouble.

  I flipped to the end to see the moral.

  Mortal: Don’t tell even the rabbits where you’re hiding, because rabbits can’t keep a secret.

  I wondered why an invisible hand would need to hide. The first year I ran the contest, a very fat little boy had handed in a story about children who could shrink themselves to two inches tall and ride around in toy cars. I remembered thinking that children’s imaginary worlds were so closely connected with desire, how that poor boy had so obviously wanted to shrink. So what did this mean, coming from a child who was loud and omnipresent and somewhat demanding—this wish for double invisibility? Although, come to think of it, it wasn’t a coincidence he spent all his free time in a quiet room below ground, his face buried in biographies of Houdini. To the town of Hannibal, he was half-invisible already.

  I’d become friends with a woman named Sophie Bennett who was my age and taught fourth grade at Hannibal Day, and I decided to ask her about Ian the next time she came in. She poked through nonfiction for an hour almost every weekend, checking out whole armloads of books about Aztecs or mushrooms. That Sunday afternoon she sank loudly into one of the child-sized computer chairs near my desk.

  “I am so fucking sick,” she said. She put her big canvas bag on the floor beside her and looked around the room to see who was there. She hated running into her students. A little girl who had come in by herself was coloring at a table, an older boy was playing computer games, and a couple of middle schoolers were working quietly with tutors. “I think I’ve had twelve healthy days since I started teaching. And now all my kids have lice. Seriously, don’t touch anyone. Don’t even touch their coats.”

  I laughed and walked in front of the desk so we could talk more quietly. “I have a question for you,” I said, sitting next to her in one of the computer chairs. She took a big plastic hair clip out of her bag, put it in her mouth to hold it, and started gathering a ponytail.

  “Hmm.”

  “Okay, Ian Drake. He’s in fifth grade. Did you teach him last year?”

  “No,” she said, “I think Julie Leonard had him. But his family is legendary. Big nightmare.”

  “I actually had this whole confrontation with the mother. She comes down here, and she goes, ‘My son needs to read holy books!’ I’ve always had this whole speech prepared for that kind of occasion, where I single-handedly defend the First Amendment. And then she comes in here and the whole thing is just so silly, and I go totally blank.”

  “Yeah, no, they’re fucking nuts.” She looked around the room again, just in case. The little girl had her crayon lifted above her head and was apparently drawing in the air. “Very religious, which you might have gathered. The mother I think has had some psychiatric problems, and she’s very definitely anorexic.”

  “I didn’t notice,” I said. I tried to think back. Her boniness had just seemed part of her personality.

  “I mean, the good thing is Ian doesn’t seem affected by it. He can be very moody and melodramatic, but that’s just his big act. He’s really the happiest kid in the world. He got up there last year in the spring musical and they have this cancan line, of all things, and he’s the worst person in it, knocking everyone over, but he has this huge showbiz smile on his face. Totally into it. He’ll do fine no matter what. Shit will hit the fan when he announces he’s gay, but he’ll get through it.”

  I laughed. “My God, people need to stop that.”

  Though to be honest, my indignant insistence that Ian wasn’t anything-sexual wasn’t entirely sincere. The question had crossed my mind plenty of times, particularly during his phase of reading books about furniture history, and I’d always imagined that someday he’d come visit me with his partner and his adopted Chinese daughter, and I’d get to ask him what it was like growing up in Hannibal, and he’d tell me that reading had saved his life. And even if he wasn’t gay, he’d come back and visit me anyway, with his cute wife and his twin boys who looked just like him, and then for some reason the “reading saved my life” part was still there.

  Three girls came downstairs right then with backpacks and waved, giggling, at Sophie. She raised her eyebrows at me and bit her lip: we should stop talking.

  “Okay,” she said once the girls had settled in by the series shelf, “so what I need is books about lying. Picture books, folktales, whatever you got. We’re having a little epidemic.”

  I found her some Abe Lincoln stories and a Chinese folktale called “The Empty Pot.”

  “Seriously, I think he’s okay,” she whispered as I was stamping the books. “You should see the dad, though. I think he’s gay. That’s why the mother’s miserable. He’s so far in the closet he’s, like, back in fucking Narnia. Do I owe money?”

  “Of course you do,” I said, handing her the books and her receipt.

  “Thanks, babe.” She grinned and jingled her keys and headed upstairs.

  My father called that night, quite worked up. “There are librarians on the Chicago news! They are yelling about this USA Patriot Act!” My father has a Russian accent that I don’t register in person, but can catch the edges of over the phone or on my answering machine or when he tries to pepper his speech with strained American expressions like “I’m eating humble pie.” It gives me something to do when I don’t want to listen to what he’s saying. To everyone else, apparently, his accent sounds fairly thick. “Lucy, tell me about this: does the George W. Bush government come and ask you questions?”

  “I don’t think the government is too interested in picture books.”

  “Let’s say if a man with swarthy skin and a dark beard checks out a book about the making of bombs, does your boss telephone the FBI? Is the FBI already in the computer?”

  I was sure that if the government contacted Loraine, she’d be one of the only librarians in the country who was thrilled to cooperate. “I wouldn’t know. If they ask you for records, they simultaneously slap you with a lifetime gag order.”

  “Lucy, listen. This is Soviet-style tactics. If you have a head with your shoulders, you get out of this library business right away. This is how the trouble starts.” I’d heard the KGB comparison a lot lately, most notably from Rocky, but hearing it in a Russian accent made it sound like an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. (“In Soviet Russia, library book checks you out!”)

  “I agree,” I said. “But they really don’t care who’s borrowing the Dr. Seuss.”

  “These librarians on the news were shredding all their documents and erasing computer files. This is not a good idea, either. You trust me about this, as a victim of the Soviets. So you are damned if you help them and you are damned if you fight against them. This is not a good time to work in a library.”

  “Sure it is,” I said. “Because of the enormous paycheck. I’ll just keep my head down.”

>   Although, sure, I’d have been happier if we still just used the borrower cards in their little paper pockets. Those could have been burned in an emergency, could have been tossed out the window as the Feds approached, or swapped with the card in the back of Misty of Chincoteague. I was all for catching terrorists, but not at the cost of turning the libraries from temples of information into mousetraps. Perhaps because I had no library science degree, I tended to overcompensate by taking the First Amendment a little more seriously than some other librarians. And of course I’d internalized my father’s fear of Big Brother governments.

  There was a nostalgia element for me, too, wishing for those borrower cards. Quite a few of my older books still had them, left behind when we went to computer in 1991. They chronicled all the children who read a book in the months or years or even decades before that time, but then they just stopped, as if civilization had come to an abrupt end. I always read the names as I re-shelved, and I’d discovered that certain ones popped up on hundreds of the lists. Allie Royston, for example, who must have been about ten years old in 1989, seemed to have read every horse book ever written. Another child checked out Ellen Tebbits six times in two years. These lists catalogued the best minds of each generation—the self-motivated, the literate, the curious, the insatiable. If we still used them, Ian’s name would be in half the books.

  “Lucy, I tell you what you should do. First, you get out of this library job and you get a good new job. And then you write articles for all the newspapers. You are smarter than most of these librarian people, and you can write a good letter that explains what exactly is wrong with the USA Patriot Act. Freedom of the press!”

  “Dad, people have already tried that. Thousands and thousands of people.”

  “Ah, but you have a personal experience of being a librarian, and you can say how this has affected you!”

  “It really hasn’t affected me at all.”

  “Lucy, you are twenty-six, okay? You have to ask, what have you done in these years? By the time I was twenty-six I have had an illegal capitalist business defying the Soviets, and then I have escaped the damned Soviets, at risk of life and limb, and I have started a new life in the home of the brave, okay? So if this is home of the brave, where are the brave?”

  “They’re getting ready for bed. They’ve had a long day checking out books to six-year-olds.”

  “Listen, my friend Shapko the Ukrainian is needing an assistant for his real estate selling. You would be good at this.”

  “Your friend Shapko who was arrested for mail fraud?”

  “Not even indicted by grand jury! This American legal system is still good, until your George W. Bush gets his hands on it.”

  “I believe that’s already happened, Dad.”

  “Exactly!”

  As we hung up I wanted to shake my head and laugh, wanted to roll my eyes at someone, but at the same time I knew it must have been horrible for my father, having risked his life to leave Russia, having chosen America out of all the countries in the world, and then watching the government tighten its clench, chip away at the promised freedoms, haul young men off to Guantánamo with no charges, no lawyers, no warning. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t happening to him personally. The very fact that people’s phones were being tapped was enough to remind him quite viscerally of pre-Yeltsin “state security.”

  In May of 2002, I’d been visiting my parents in their Chicago apartment when the phone rang during dinner. It was Magda Johnson, my mother’s friend who’d grown up in Poland during World War II, and who now lived near Lincoln Park. I could hear her voice as my mother held the phone farther and farther from her own ear: “There are explosions in the street! Someone is shooting or bombing, and there is shouting all up and down the street!”

  “It’s Cinco de Mayo!” I’d called to my mother. “Tell her to turn on the news. It’s just Cinco de Mayo!”

  But Magda Johnson was still screaming, a five-year-old in a bomb shelter once again. For the past eight months, and maybe for the rest of her life.

  And I had to remember that about my father, too: he hadn’t bargained on this. He thought he’d left it behind.

  I checked the clock to make sure rehearsal would be done in the theater downstairs, and then I blasted music and vacuumed. My blood pressure was up, and since it wasn’t worth cursing an old Russian man for his idealism, I decided to take it out on my carpet. It never really did come clean, no matter what I did. Sections were oatmeal, sections were beige, and certain spots looked like details from crime scene photos. I had to angle the vacuum carefully around the stacks of books that served as a sort of second furniture, pedestals for coffee cups and mail and magazines. I refused to have bookshelves, horrified that I’d feel compelled to organize the books in some regimented system—Dewey or alphabetical or worse—and so the books lived in stacks, some as tall as me, in the most subjective order I could invent.

  Thus Nabokov lived between Gogol and Hemingway, cradled between the Old World and the New; Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Hardy were stacked together not for their chronological proximity but because they all reminded me in some way of dryness (though in Dreiser’s case I think I was focused mostly on his name); George Eliot and Jane Austen shared a stack with Thackeray because all I had of his was Vanity Fair, and I thought that Becky Sharp would do best in the presence of ladies (and deep down I worried that if I put her next to David Copper-field, she might seduce him). Then there were various stacks of contemporary authors who I felt would get along together at cocktail parties, and there were at least three stacks of books I personally loathed but held on to just in case someone asked me to loan them a page-turner about a family of circus performers, or an experimental novel about a time-traveling nun. I’d hate to have to say that I knew the perfect book but I’d just given it away. Not that people often asked. But once in a while my landlord, Tim, or his partner, Lenny, would invite themselves in to peruse the stacks and ask the world’s best question: “Hey, what do you think I should read?” It was nice to be prepared.

  These stacks were my apartment’s main decoration. I had some nice furniture from my parents, plus some standard-issue rectangular things from Ikea, but in the three years I’d lived there I’d never gotten around to hanging pictures. My bed was still a mattress on the floor. Maybe because of my father’s family stories, the idea of having to run across a border had never been far from my mind. Excepting the books, I never liked to amass more possessions than could be moved in a cartop U-Haul. You never know when the Cossacks are going to invade.

  A week later, a package arrived from my parents. It contained two issues of the Holyoke alumnae magazine on which I’d never bothered changing my address, a box of Frango mints, and an editorial clipped from the Trib about the Patriot Act. I was flattered, really, that my father suddenly thought my job was dangerous, if not exciting. I almost wished it were true. My whole childhood, hearing stories of Russian revolutionaries and refugees, I’d been primed for a grand fight. And here I was with no one to rebel against but Loraine Best. And Janet Drake, who didn’t even know my name.

  I lay on my back on the floor and read in the magazine about a former classmate, one who’d lived on my freshman hall and used to burn incense and drink wine coolers, who had started a battered women’s shelter in Maine and had recently spoken before Congress. On the next page was a girl who’d graduated just that spring and was measuring glacier melt when she wasn’t busy collecting grant money. A woman from the class of ’84 was lobbying for gay rights in California. There was a picture of her with her partner, in the nineteenth-century barn they’d restored together.

  I imagined what they might write about me:Lucy Hull, class of ’02, courageously checked out The Pushcart War to a ten-year-old patron today, despite the preponderance therein of peashooters and the fact that the book does not in any way contain “the breath of God.”

  “It really wasn’t a choice,” said the 26-year-old Hull, who has done very little wit
h her adult life besides stamping books, re-shelving books, and reading books aloud with funny voices. “It’s basically illegal to deny a book to someone with a library card. I’m not quite sure why you’re interviewing me.”

  Hull lives alone above a theater, frequently forgets to hydrate, and has recently developed a rash on the backs of her legs from the fabric of her desk chair.

  That night, I dreamed about the borrower cards. Loraine showed me a plain red book and asked me who’d checked it out. I read her the list: Ian Drake, George W. Bush, and God Almighty.

  4

  The Ark

  I had to give him credit: Ian was brilliant. He came one day in November with his babysitter, after several weeks of chaperoned checkouts in which he had halfheartedly borrowed various biographies and a collection of Native American myths and legends. (“They’re all about crows,” he said when he returned it. “My review is that this book is a little too crow-heavy.”) The babysitter, Sonya, was a bedraggled Filipina woman with her own five-year-old daughter who sometimes silently accompanied them and then sat in the corner stroking the puppets. When Ian picked out chapter books, Sonya would flip them over in her hands, flick through the pages as if their appropriateness would thereby reveal itself, and then ask, “What your mother is going to say? I will show her this, okay?” Ian would invariably grab the book, shove it back on the shelf, and storm off to nonfiction.

  That Saturday in November, he and Sonya came in without the five-year-old, and Ian immediately sat down at one of the computers opposite my desk—something he never did, not even to look up a book. He said, “Hey, Sonya, I’m going to play Noah’s Mission online. Want to watch?”