“Masks,” I explained to the dog. It was unreasonable to expect him to comprehend, but we had been working so well together, and I had, I admit, gotten my hopes up. I raised my hands and mimed putting on a mask. I did a little dance, a few brisk steps in the water. I made faces — stretching my lips apart with my fingers, sticking my tongue out at the dog, trying to communicate — and pointed in the general direction, I thought, of the masks. Dogs don’t understand pointing. I scolded, “Wooden masks! African masks! That way! On the wall by the door to the rare-book room! Next to the tiger! Quit licking your nuts and fetch me a mask!”
For good measure I gave him a kick in the butt. “Hurry, boy,” I called as he disappeared down an aisle.
In my impatience with the dog I had forgotten, almost forgotten, for a moment, how scared I was.
Then William stepped out of nowhere and, in his hushed, baritone voice, said, “How dare you abuse Chuck’s animal.”
“William. God. You scared me.” Panic was coming on and I was thirsty for a double whiskey and it did not help to be talking to a person who hides in the stacks acting like a wraith. I said to this impertinent man, “What are you talking about?”
“You were beating him.”
“I was not. I gave him a friendly shove. It’s called encouragement. You have to be firm with animals or they won’t respect you.”
“You sound like Father.”
I was not certain how to respond to this. On the one hand, I felt complimented. On the other, I felt insulted. William said, “You think you know how people should behave. But you’re the one who doesn’t know how to behave, Doug. You mistreat people and you mistreat animals. You even mistreat flowers.”
William’s voice was barely audible, and in the dim light I could distinguish the outline of his face, though not William’s mouth or nose or eyes. He was dressed all in black, and his body in the dark seemed indistinct, borderless, a soft, porous form that lingered sickeningly before the shelves.
“I’m sorry about your lilies, William, but that was hours ago. It’s not polite to hold grudges.”
“Please don’t tell me how to feel.”
“I wasn’t.”
William confessed, “I used to like you but I’m not sure if I do anymore, Doug. I think there’s something wrong with you. You think you’re so important. You think we should all get down on our knees and pray to you. But you’re not important. I hope they catch you tonight. I hope they catch the Corn King. I really do.”
“Just tell me how to get out of here.”
“Go that way.”
Which way? Back the way I’d come? The dog had gone ahead. I did not want to lose the dog. I could see, looking farther down the tunnel, two or three smaller aisles branching from the main walkway. William said, “Take your first right through Minor Elizabethan Drama. Comedies will appear on your left and tragedies will be on your right. Keep going past Ralph Roister Doister and The Spanish Tragedy. About three shelves after Gorboduc, you’ll come to a narrow fork. Do not continue through Shakespeare because that whole section is flooded and you’ll ruin your shoes. Instead, you’ll want to detour through Cavalier Poets and Writers of the Couplet. Go straight all the way to Hobbes. Follow Hobbes through The Age of Dryden, then veer left. This brings you face-to-face with Pope and Swift. You will not have noticed anything in translation. If you do encounter any French political writing, you’ll know you’re in the wrong corridor. You’ll have to make a half-turn and backtrack through Sir Walter Scott. This is tricky. Be careful not to go too far because the Waverley novels will return you, inevitably, to The Castle of Perseverance, and you’ll never get out. It’s better to remain in the nineteenth century if you can get there. As you know, we’ve had shelving problems, so don’t panic if you see Russians mixed in with the triple deckers. Put your head down and charge through the War Poets. By now you’re smack in the center of The Modern Era. From here you can choose any number of directions. Pay attention because if you take the wrong route, you’ll wind up running around in circles and you’ll have to start over from Beowulf. Are you paying attention?”
“Yes.”
“The New Critics. Stay with The New Critics and you’ll get where you’re going.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Minor Elizabethans were not hard to find. These decrepit volumes were crammed onto shelves that sagged beneath the weight of crumbling bindings. Dust from the leather covers smelled oddly sweet; it was not unlike the smell of a very old person, a corporeal sweetness of glue and rotting paper and fading pigments. I was reminded of Hiram and promised myself I’d give the man a piece of my mind about friendship, kindness, and ordinary reciprocity in relationships. I could hear my brothers rampaging in the distance. And there were other ominous noises, things crashing and thudding. What in the world was happening in our red library? I forged ahead and soon, as William had promised, arrived at oily black water covering uneven floor beneath Shakespeare. “Gunner, what’s taking you so long?” I whispered as I squeezed past neglected poets. It was tight in these aisles and I was afraid I’d get stuck. You could insert yourself into a cramped corner and get hopelessly trapped, and no one would hear your calls for help, and you could waste away and die while your brothers drank and broke furniture, or so I thought in my terror of the darkness and the solitude. How long had it been since anyone had come this way and taken down one of these privately printed old chestnuts with the pages that had probably, for all anyone knew, never been cut? Years? Decades? It seemed to me, as I shouldered my way through, that no one had ever been in this place — or ever would be again, once I had found my way out to the open spaces where a person could think and breathe clean air that was not contaminated with such horrible smells, the kinds of smells that make you want to run away, were it not so dark that running would be dangerous.
How odd, then, that someone was, in fact, running. Toward me. I could hear the footsteps and they were coming fast and getting louder, louder. I longed to have the Doberman with me. Where was that animal — oh, if only Gunner were my dog! — when I needed him? I had nothing but the blue pillow and Barry’s stethoscope and those disposable hypodermic syringes crowded among the medicine vials in my jacket pocket. It was imaginable, to me, alone in our awful stacks — consider, if you will, my desperate, exhausted, late-night state of mind — that if attacked, I could hold the pillow before me as a soft-sculpture shield, while waving, threateningly, a syringe. This made a ridiculous picture, but on the whole it seemed better to wave a needle than to do nothing. I put my hand in my pocket and, carefully, fished out a syringe. Getting a good grip on it was a problem because I was holding the pillow and shaking all over from fear. The runner splashed through water and I pressed myself against a bookcase and stuck out my foot, and his foot hit mine and he exhaled a sound like “Ah” as he tumbled forward in the darkness. I could not make out who the man was, but suspected it was probably Angus, who had gone out for a short pass during football practice and disappeared into Eighteenth-Century Novels. I did hear, at the finish of the man’s long, arcing fall, his body’s collision with a shelf. The closest I can come to describing this sound is to say that it was the crunch a head of crispy lettuce might make if squashed beneath a steel tray. The fallen man groaned in pain, and I said to him, “Don’t follow me or I’ll stick you! Beware of the Corn King! Ha ha!” then quickly retreated in search of the main aisle. I was, as far as I could tell, lost in a maze of Liberal Theologians, Antiquaries, and Bibliographers; and water streamed across the floor; and my shoes were sodden; and all the excitement was having an effect on my bladder. It is true, absolutely, that a desire to urinate is intensified by any feeling of water against the skin. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, European gentlemen enjoyed the privilege of relieving themselves in the public squares. I unzipped and tugged it out. There is nothing quite like the primitive ecstasy of pissing somewhere besides the bathroom. I rate the act very highly. Pissing in nature or in some dark corner, as I was, captures and brings into consciousness certain archaic versions of a man’s most secret Self — those aspects of character and identity that remain, in civilized daily life, veiled, disguised, sealed away: the messy, narcissistic, bodily Self of infancy; the wild, magnificent, feral Self of mankind’s prehistoric beginnings; that communal, loving Self expressed in each man’s deep bond with his fellow men; and of course the sovereign, assertive, fiercely territorial Self that announces, Get out of my way! I’m taking a leak!