At some point it occurs to him that he could live in the library. He could read all day and sleep on the floor at night. Use the restrooms, and nobody would be the wiser. And when he got hungry he could steal a pie from the windowsill and run into the woods and eat his supper under the trees, among the ants, just as the animals do.
Terrible things happen all the time, he thinks, but not today. Terrible things, beautiful things, things of such power, of such bewilderment, lucent and dark as tar. But right now the universe, restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence — a universe that flickers, its impatient forms blinking like fireflies in the night — astounds and delights him. Because he has in his hands a book of Vanderloon’s, its text scattered with peculiar sketches like the scrawl of restless spiders. Sketches of altars exhaling smoke, of volcanoes spitting gravel and sparks, of pearl divers and temple gates, of naked people wielding clubs, their faces lifted, stunned by the sight of a meteor.
That night when Stub and his father are at supper, Stub remembers with nostalgia the family lunch they’d had in town not long before his grandmother passed. He asks if they could go again. His father says no, not ever, because the people in there make a man feel like a rag, like a rope of tripe. But Stub’s memory is radically different. The waitress had been friendly and she had playfully mussed his hair. She had wrapped a fresh piece of pie in a shiny piece of foil for him to take home. Later on when Stub considers his childhood, that simple gesture will be one of the most benevolent instances he can retrieve.
Stub returns to the library often. Axel is always there for him, eager to talk, as he makes his way, doggedly, through Vanderloon’s books: Ancient Roots and Ways; Big Ears, Small Ears: Easter Island at War; Rules of Rage; Cannibal Ways; The Lost Archipelago; Primates in Paradise; Dream’s Dying. Axel advises: “Don’t let Loon get you down, Stub. It’s a dark vision.” He continues:
“However much
The trunk be mangled, with the limbs lopped off,
The soul withdrawn and taken from the limbs,
Still lives the trunk and draws the vital air.
Lucretius,” he says.
Stub cannot tell his father about Axel, Vanderloon, the library. Jiggs both resents the campus and fiercely protects his place in it. When Stub attempts to describe his first afternoon there, it is exactly as if he has unknowingly breached a taboo, desecrated the holy of holies. At home his isolation deepens. But instead of dying, his affections are displaced.
When Jiggs Wiznet falls apart, conquered by his frayed nerves, his injurious nights, his dromedary days, his fatal dawns — Stub has long split. He has claimed the campus for himself, knows it intimately. He is pragmatic and a thief. He has mastered the art of invisibility.
His first summer alone he bathes in the river, catches shad, builds fires. He sleeps in duck blinds, under a canoe, in an abandoned truck, graduates to the gym and showers there, uncovers an inexhaustible supply of soap. In the full heat of August he sleeps in the Dean’s formal garden, under the Founder’s Oak, on a purloined blanket. (The dorms are bountiful!) That winter he takes up residence in a spacious cabinet beneath the biology lab’s collection of bottled anomalies — a room rarely entered. The following summer he moves to the Utilities House, appreciates its homey smell of dust and lamp oil. He beds down in an expensive sleeping bag on the impressively thick and level floor, his few necessities stashed under the sink. The closet provides a wealth of paper towels and a pair of galoshes. Not much is locked, but when necessary he proves a master at rotating cams, knows how to stack them much as planets and their sun stack up during an eclipse. In this way the years pass. He is a recluse, a scholar. He is a dissembler. When in a tight spot, he invents identities. He is strange.
The fall Stub turns nineteen he claims the library’s abandoned storage room — the very place where Vanderloon’s personal library is stowed away. Here he builds himself a den within a maze of books. A scholar during the day, he roams the stacks, reads, takes notes in recesses provided with desks and ink. He finds a pen with a tip that appears to be made of gold. Dressed in preppy discards harvested from the dorms, he is inconspicuous. He watches the world around him unseen. A year passes. A child catches his attention. She appears often, suddenly, without warning — up a tree, on a roof, dashing across a lawn. Resplendent, she stands out among the faculty brats. Safely housed in the library, time on his hands, Stub begins a journaclass="underline"
The library space, if airless, is an oasis of privacy and peace. I have my reading lamp. It’s toasty. The toilet, pristine; the sink, ever ready for my little rituals. (A vagrant, I go about my days clean as a whistle.) Sometimes I think that had it all started out differently, I might have taken the world by storm rather than exhausting myself slinking about, purloining soap and other people’s galoshes. Yet I seem to have been born with a special instinct; it is amazing how instinctive this existence is if one is to be successful. Yet I often wonder — where does this invisibility lead me? What guides it? Whence the source of my impassioned scholarship (Vanderloon!) and, above all, impassioned interest in a little girl (and she is beautiful) named Asthma? What stars have marked us? What tropes of the blood?
Then again. . what is wonderful about this life — as sordid as it might appear (and it is sordid! How I long for a loving touch! An admiring glance! A word of encouragement!) — is the way the proximate world unfolds for me: it is mine. There is not a single nook or cranny on this campus and its environs (the graveyard, athletic fields, studios, theater, laboratories, classrooms, kitchens, dorms, staff and faculty housing, etc., etc.) I have not managed at sometime or another to scrutinize. (On moonless nights I move about as swiftly, as silently as a bat.)
I have wintered in the safety of the biology lab’s hospitable cabinet, its lowest shelf as deep as a coffin and ceiling twice as high (the lab sinks are big enough to soak in!). I have wintered in the mop room of the kitchen and with discretion supped on cans stacked there with seeming boundlessness. (Who could miss two months’ worth of cans abused in such a clever way that only eight cans [each lasting a week] are consumed: pork and beans, ravioli, clam chowder, minestrone, chicken noodle, tomato bisque, green pea, chicken gumbo.) Meals augmented by calculated visits to the faculty wives’ kitchens, always abounding in cottage cheese, cheddar cheese, sliced ham. And always in the cellar pantries: French pickles, homemade jam, seasonal apples. If one is clever, things vanish in such a way as to inspire no more than a brief moment of perplexity. This said (I admit to this; I am, after all, no enigma to myself!), I live by the seat of my pants.
Last summer, when all the families on Faculty Circle had walked over to the Dean’s house to watch the fireworks, I slipped into a kitchen and feasted on what remained of a Fourth of July supper, the few ribs sweet and sticky; I was nearly overcome by the taste, the slaw swimming in the bottom of the Danish bowl, the rolls in their basket, the butter in its dish. I feasted secure in the knowledge that they, in their affluence, swept along in the bustle and comforts of family life heightened by a national holiday, would never notice a few ribs reduced to bone, the salad bowl licked clean.
I am, as are all men: mindful, artful, perceptive, creative — and an animal. Determined to survive, to sleep in safety and not go hungry. I imagine that my chosen life says something about other men, about man’s nature. And that in spite of all these digressions I am leaning toward greater things. Capable of greatness. What if my life is not only the mirror of my own thwarted destiny, or the mirror of mankind’s thwarted destiny, but the mirror of my species’ capacity to overcome the worst odds? The odds of a collapsed infancy in a world shuddering with sadness. (It is true I could be doing better than counting cans of minestrone and bathing in sinks that reek of formaldehyde. I acknowledge this freely.) But back to the moment. As I return to my current den, drawn as are the fish by starlight, my path is illumed by the stars and the moon. The night sky has a child’s color; it is the color of her hair. . the twilight is the color of her eyes, the earth is the color of her mood, and I can hear her almost-imperceptible wheezing in the breeze; her perfume is the perfume caught among the thorns of the blackberry bushes that line the path. And I think as I approach the Night Library that she is all things to me: star, astral light, perfume of bramble, moonlight, and secrecy: life itself. Asthma.