But Will, it seems, just wants to weep some more. And why not? What’s happened to him has nothing to do with me. Even less than he thinks.
“Look, Dude. The woman I saw…This is why I’m here. This is what I’m telling you, the thing I’ve learned. It’s a breakthrough. Maybe the first one. It might help you, too; if you go find some of the others, I can even give you some addresses and—”
“You’re babbling,” I snap. Now I’m on my feet, too, waving my feathered arms and squawking in my ridiculous voice, hoarse from disuse. “What do you want here? Why are you bothering me? What could I possibly tell you about what happ—”
“I learned her name,” he says.
My jaw smacks shut. My arms are still out, as though I’m going to take flight. But I’m frozen again.
“The one I saw. Her name was Anna.” He wipes his tears with his long, bony hand. Despite his size, he looks even younger, now. The tiny bit of me that doesn’t want to hurl him through my window wants to make him hot chocolate.
“Her name was Anna.”
“Tell me,” I hear myself say.
“Like I said. There was nothing. Just blackness, and I was bleeding all over myself. I couldn’t even find the doors, let alone Bri. I started to get up, and for some reason, I looked to my left. And there she was.
“She was just standing there. Dark hair, kind of bushy, pulled back in a ponytail. Glasses. Pale cheeks, penny loafers, flashlight. Clutching a composition notebook against her chest, as though she’d stepped right off the cover of a Nancy Drew novel. She looked at me for about three seconds, maybe even less. This is the strangest part, except it won’t sound strange to you; everyone who’s experienced it says the same thing. It was the most peaceful three seconds of my life.
“‘Hey,’ I started to say, and that was it. Poof. No penny loafer girl. No light. Nothing but depot junk. “Hey!” I shouted, and once I’d started shouting, I couldn’t stop.
“I have no idea how long I was in there. Not much longer, I don’t think. Suddenly, I was at the doors, different doors than the ones we’d entered through, maybe half a block farther down the street. I ran back to the lot where we’d seen the old woman, but she was gone, too. I ran to the first set of doors, and I screamed Bri’s name over and over and over, but I couldn’t make myself go back in there, and my voice didn’t even seem to penetrate. It was like screaming into a mattress.
“Finally, I ran back to where the bus driver had let us off, and the bus came, and the driver radioed for the cops. They got there pretty fast, too, for all the good it did. For all the good they ever do.
“For weeks afterward—months—I kept waking up every night thinking I’d heard the key in the lock. Even now, I sometimes think I smell her. Hear her whispering ‘diphtheria’ in my ear. I went to a grief counselor, and he said losing a loved one like that, when you don’t completely know, is like losing a limb. There’s a part of you that won’t ever accept that she’s not there.
“I don’t know what made me go back to the depot forum websites. I didn’t ever want to go to a depot again. But one night I surfed by, and I started clicking around, and I kept following links, and somehow I wound up in a discussion thread marked “HAVE YOU SEEN…” which I assumed was about book-hunting. The first post read:
“Jamie. Twenty-four. Straight blonde hair, beach sandals, pink button-up shirt, gypsum pendant necklace, plastic cereal-box rings on fingers. Vanished Long Beach Depot, 7/22/10. At the end was a photo of her.
“There were 488 follow-up posts. The 432nd read:
“‘Laughing, dark-haired Anna. Twenty-eight. Penny loafers. Glasses. Always looks at you sideways. Vanished San Antonio Depot, 2/14/11. There wasn’t any picture. But I knew.
“Now, you see, right? Now you understand why I’m here. I just want to know she’s…somewhere. I just want to know someone’s seen her. So please. I’m begging.”
He’s begging, alright. Weeping again.
But I’m panicking. Trying to dredge up some face from my high school yearbook, someone I can pretend I glimpsed, so he can say Gee, no, that’s not Bri, and get out of my apartment and let me start throwing my things in a duffel so I can disappear again. He thinks this is news to me, that so many Crawlers have had the same experience. And it is, in a way. The fact that they’re seeing each other’s ghosts, that the lost ones are somehow finding their way back, but to the wrong places, or else they’ve become pressed permanently into some new universe of fictional characters who live (or don’t live) like dried butterflies in the pages of discarded books, forever who they were at the last moment they were anyone, still accessible to us but at random, a collective cultural memory instead of a personal one…
I’d be fascinated, really. If it had anything whatsoever to do with me.
“Dude,” says Will, and now, finally, he’s grabbed me. I knew he would. I have that effect, these days, on people like Will. “Please. I don’t mean to dredge up bad memories. Maybe there’s even hope, have you thought of that? If we’re all seeing them, maybe we can get them back? Or at least see our own again. Wouldn’t you like to? Wouldn’t it be worth anything—anything—just to see her one more time?”
I almost break, then. I almost give him exactly what he wants. The whole, pathetic story. Me getting mugged and beaten bloody by some cranked-up street thug who’d been using the Roosevelt Depot as a warm, dark place to freebase. The laughing Crawlers who found me an hour or so later and shoved cigarettes in my mouth and fed me beer and got me on my feet again. Going up that rotted, collapsing staircase in the dark to find Ezzie and show her my new bruises and bring her down to meet my new friends.
Finding her.
How much of it did she intend? That’s the only thing that haunts me. Most of it, clearly. Almost all of it. It was the logical extension, after all, of everything she’d done as an artist, but also as a person. That desperate, driving hunger to get inside other people’s stories. To leave traces. To cut deep enough below the surface of absolutely everything to determine, once and for all, whether there was anything in there. Or to prove that there wasn’t.
It must have taken her hours.
All around her, arrayed in a perfect square just longer and wider than her body, she’d laid paper. Some of it blank and white, some of it torn from whatever texts were near, or maybe she’d picked them specifically. Probably, she did. I’ll never know. Even if I saw, I wouldn’t remember.
The only thing I will ever remember about that moment is Ezzie lying atop the paper, stark naked in the icy February dark, head tilted almost onto her right shoulder, the spray of her blood fanning onto all that whiteness like great, red wings she’d finally unfolded. Her arms and legs a relief map of tiny and less tiny cuts, each of them flowing into the next, pouring like long, red tributaries toward the great, spurting geyser on her right thigh, where she’d pressed too hard—or exactly hard enough—and severed the femoral artery.
For too long, maybe the critical few seconds, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything but stare. I thought she was already dead, which was so stupid, I mean, I could see the blood still pumping. That new, red ocean bubbling out of the crack Ezzie had opened in herself and spreading across the paper continents she’d created. But she wasn’t moving, didn’t seem to be breathing. The color had gone completely out of her; she was whiter than the paper. And she looked…not happy, not even at rest, just…still. I’d never known Ezzie still.
Then she woke up, for the last time. That’s when she screamed. She even got out a sentence as I lunged forward. “Stop it!”
Did she mean staunch the wound? Or get away from her? I didn’t care. Slipping and sticking, I dropped onto my knees and plunged my hands onto the open spot, but they went straight through, her skin was like spring ice stretched too thin. It wasn’t even warm inside her, just sticky-wet. I could feel the severed strands of artery, or I felt artery, anyway, gristly bits, but trying to grab anything and hold it closed was like trying to tie silly string. I ripped o
ff my coat and started sliding it under her to make a tourniquet, but that just made her scream louder. I’m pretty sure I was screaming, too, and then—God knows how, maybe it was reflex—one of her hands shot up and grabbed my arm.
“Lawrence,” she snarled. “It hurts.”
And I understood. I still think I really did. It was already too late to save her. If I was going to do anything for her, I had to do it then. I grabbed the first thing handy, and it was as though it had been laid there for me. The World Book Encyclopedia, 1978. Heavy and frozen hard as a stone.
Lifting it, I looked once more into Ezzie’s eyes. I saw the defiance there. The ruthless, obsessive imagination. The unimaginable pain, and—more surprisingly—the panic. Because she thought I wouldn’t do it? Because she suddenly knew I would?
I didn’t ask. I slammed the book down and smashed in her skull with one blow.
I don’t know how long I stayed there. I remember noticing that the blood against my legs wasn’t pumping anymore, and stirred only with my own movements. I remember getting cold.
I have no memory of going downstairs. But the people who’d helped me were still there. What a sight I must have been. Beaten purple from my own encounter an hour or so earlier, shirt and pants saturated with Ezzie’s blood, fingertips dripping with her brains. Somehow, I must have communicated that they should go upstairs, because some of them did. When they came down, one of them lifted me out of my crouch and said, “Man, you need a hospital.”
Then they took me to one. The next morning, the police were by my bed to take my report. It was a long time before I realized they were asking only about the mugging. That they didn’t know about Ezzie. I told them they needed to go back to the depot, check the second floor under the phoenix mural.
They found blood there, gouts of it. But no Ezzie. “You’re lucky to be alive,” they told me the last time they came. I gave them my address, promised I’d let them know where I was, though they didn’t ask me to. Then they left me alone.
How did Sarah even find me in the hospital? How did she hear about what had happened? I have no idea. But she’s as relentless as her sister was. Also less creative, and less fun. An hour before the doctors discharged me, she called my bedside from her Connecticut home.
“Where’s Ezzie?” she said as soon as she heard my voice.
I hung up on her, unplugged the phone, and waited to be released. When I got back to our loft, there were seventeen messages from Sarah. The last one said, “I’m coming.”
I packed my duffel. Just clothes and bathroom stuff and a rye bottle. No notebooks, and definitely no books. Ezzie’s empty razor case, but none of the artifacts she’d made. I moved to Battle Creek. When I arrived, I let the Detroit police know my new address. The next time I moved, I did the same. If they ever find anything, or they want to do anything about me, I want them to be able to.
But not Sarah. I can’t face Sarah.
I look up at Will, who is still staring at me out of his childlike, teary eyes. Childlike, because he still really believes there’s more to his story. Maybe there is.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him, and I mean it, in my way. “I didn’t see anyone.”
He just puts on his hat, then. His shoulders have slumped. Shrugging back into his coat, he turns for the door. He’s got it open when I grab him, abruptly.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I say.
Now he just looks stupid. Blind, befuddled Oedipus again. Or is that me?
“How did you find me, Will?”
“I…don’t remember,” he says. “Wait, yes I do. There was an e-mail.”
“An e-mail.” From a cop, maybe? Someone working the chat rooms and message boards in the hopes of solving something?
“It mentioned you and gave me your address.”
“From whom?”
“Didn’t say. They rarely do.” He takes a step outside in the Marquette wind, turns abruptly back. “I think it came from Arizona, though.”
Now it’s my turn to stare. “Arizona?”
“I’m just guessing. From the e-mail addy. Phoenixgirl. At gmail, I think.”
In my hands, the empty rye bottle seems to throb. Pump. Against my chest, the razor case beats.
“Jesus,” Will says, “I’m sorry. I almost forgot. She asked me to give you a message if I saw you.”
“A message.” Are these tears in my eyes? Is this fear? Am I scared of what Ezzie will do when she finds me? Or heartbroken that her last great effort was a failure, that she couldn’t, finally, cut her way in. Or out. Or wherever it was she always wanted so desperately to go.
Am I even sure phoenixgirl is Ezzie? If it’s Sarah, then Sarah finally knows.
I’m grabbing the frozen doorframe. It’s so cold that it burns my bare fingers. I hang on anyway.
“It wasn’t much of a message,” Will tells me. “I think it was just…it just said, ‘Tell him I’ll see him soon.’”
After-words
The Second Book Depository Story
“…whilst evil is expected, we fear; but when it is certain, we despair.”
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Prologue
The first bombing occurred on a fogbound summer Saturday night, on the just-vacated premises of Harbor Lights Books, in the midst of the 7th Annual Naked Bike Ride. The damage proved minimal: a few blown-out windows; a foot-long splinter of wood driven through the windshield of a parked police car; an elderly upstairs neighbor rumbled out of bed and sent shrieking down the stairwell in her nightfrock, convinced of an earthquake, just as the first bikers swarmed past in their goose-pimpled, genital-beribboned glory. Days elapsed before anyone realized there’d actually been an explosion.
The second bomb went off near Fisherman’s Wharf in the middle of the night, in the exact spot where that half-senile bookwagon man tried to open a Left Bank-style antiquarian stall in the shadows of the shuttered Barnes and Noble. It was during the next day’s investigation that someone finally realized that the old card-catalogue notecards scattered amid the refuse in both locations weren’t debris. Were, in fact, messages. From the bombers.
The notecards really had come from some long-extinct branch of the San Francisco Public Library. The book titles on the fronts of the cards seemed random, at first—Insects Do the Strangest Things, Ferlinghetti’s Love in the Days of Rage—until police found the one marked Tom “the Bomb” Tracy and the Play that Shook San Francisco. Only then did some bright young sergeant think to flip the cards over, take another look at that seemingly innocuous stamp on the back: Property of the Library.
We’d heard about the Library before then, of course. Seen their self-proclaimed leader standing on his milk-crate under the Clocktower on weekday evenings. With his goatee and his stick-figure legs and his bleat of a voice, he reminded some of Satan, and some of Pan. We’d seen his followers, too. Most were dropouts from the gutted comp-lit program at San Francisco State, plus some runaways and junkies, all of them sallow, lurking around the Book Depots near Hunter’s Point and Potrero Hill. It was their uniform appearance that first marked them: tan overcoats, the pockets stuffed with moldy hardbacks scavenged from the Depots; black, rubber sandals; gaunt faces; most of all, that paper-white skin tone, those eyes blinking fast even against the lights from street-lamps, which drove some online wag to name them Morlocks.
And yet, somehow, it hadn’t occurred to us to fear them until that moment. Within hours of the bright young sergeant’s discovery, a SWAT team and the entire Homeland Security unit of the Bay Area Police descended upon Library headquarters en masse, arresting everyone in sight and dragging Erick Kinney, who’d taken to calling himself the Librarian, out of the group’s warehouse headquarters before rapt television cameras in handcuffs and ankle-chains.
“Do you have any comment?” one reporter yelled as Kinney was hustled past.
And Kinney had somehow dragged himself to a stop. One hand lifted against the glare of the lights, narrow eyes stutter-blink
ing, satyr-goatee wagging in the misting rain, Manson-smile dancing across his face. “Book ‘em, Danno,” he’d said. Then he was shoved forward into a squad car.
But despite a furious three-day search involving several dozen officers, the police found nothing more incriminating than a few small baggies of hash scattered amid the dust and food scraps and sleeping-mats and piles of reclaimed, moldering books in the warehouse. Late on a Sunday evening, to none of the fanfare with which he had been arrested, Erick Kinney was returned to his cavernous home and his adoring disciples.
The next bombing, of the rug store that had once housed the legendary Allen Ginsburg/Gary Snyder Six Gallery reading, was bigger. It blew out windows more than a block away and maimed a security guard who’d unexpectedly returned to his post to get his coffee thermos. This time, bomb crews confiscated every mat and scavenged book, testing repeatedly for explosive residue while BATF officials on loan from Washington grilled the whole group. That investigation, too, turned up nothing. There was talk of holding Erick Kinney as an enemy combatant, and also of condemning the so-called Library and driving all of Kinney’s followers onto the streets.
Gradually, though, over a period of weeks, the investigation lost momentum. And with virtually all of San Francisco’s bookstores now closed, and the libraries long-since eliminated or reduced to weekend hours, the bombings ceased, and the city and Erick Kinney seemed to reach an uneasy peace. Police still kept the building under surveillance. And Kinney still showed up from time to time on his street-corner at dusk, looking more pathetically thin and less threatening with each appearance. He bleated away, regaling tourists and passers-by with his agitprop poems about rotting fruit and dead brain cells. Sometimes people tossed coins at his feet.
Meanwhile, the Depots swelled with unwanted books, and the Morlocks from the Library took them over, combing the rows and rows of paperbacks, occasionally spiriting away volumes to their warehouse. And Erick Kinney joined the Naked Bike Paraders and the Beatniks and Emperor Norton on the roll-call of San Francisco’s legendary utopian cranks, forever hearkening back to an age few of them actually believed had existed, or else heralding a new dawn even fewer thought would ever come.
The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Page 22