Bob walked home through the October weather. A stream of leaves funneled down the road and pulled him toward his mint-colored house, the location of his life, the place where he passed through time, passed through rooms. The house rested in the bend of a quiet cul-de-sac, and it was a comfort for him whenever he came upon it. It didn’t reflect worldly success, but it was well made and comfortably furnished and well taken care of. It was a hundred-odd years old, and his mother had purchased it from the man who’d built it. This man had gone blind in his later years and affixed every interior wall with a length of thick and bristly nautical rope run through heavy brass eyelets positioned at waist level to guide him to the kitchen, to the bathroom, the bedroom, up the stairs and down, all the way to the workshop in the basement. After this person died and the property changed hands, Bob’s mother did not remove the rope, less an aesthetic choice than obliviousness; and when she died and Bob inherited the house, he too left the rope in place. It was frayed here and there, and he sometimes banged his hip on the eyelets, but he enjoyed the detail for its history, enjoyed the sight of it, enjoyed the rope’s prickliness as it ran through his hand.
He returned the Poe paperback to its place on the paperback shelf. He had been amassing books since preadolescence and there were filled shelves in half the rooms in the house, tidy towers of books in the halls. Connie, who had been Bob’s wife, had sometimes asked him why he read quite so much as he did. She believed Bob was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity. Bob thought her true question was, Why do you read rather than live?
As the day wore on, and Bob relived his experience at the center, he came to see it was not that he’d taken the task overseriously, but that he hadn’t taken it seriously enough. He hadn’t even preread the text. A cat is tortured and hung in the first pages of the story, and for some reason his appearance was unsuccessful! He telephoned Maria, explained why he’d failed, and told her he wanted to try again. Maria sighed a sigh that sounded like a no, but then she told him yes, all right, as you wish, and Bob spent the next six days preparing for his return. He put together a syllabus, a series of connected short stories and excerpts from longer works that he felt were of a piece thematically; he also wrote an introduction that illustrated his point of view. He wondered if he wasn’t giving too much of his time to the project, but he couldn’t stop himself, and didn’t want to.
He slept poorly the night before his second reading and arrived at the center thirty minutes early, where the janitor again was muttering as he set up the chairs. Bob stood at the podium, readying himself, looking over his texts; Maria approached and asked if she might inspect Bob’s books. He passed them over and she studied them one by one.
“Is Comet a Russian name?” she asked.
“No.”
“But these books are all by Russians.”
“That’s true.”
She passed the books back to Bob. “Do you read books by non-Russians?”
“Of course,” he said. “I thought it could be fun for the group to try to identify the cultural through-lines and buried political opinion.”
“Yes, that could be fun,” said Maria. She obviously believed he would fail again, but wished him luck and went away. People began trickling in; there were not so many in the audience as before. Bob began with the prepared statement, which he had memorized.
“Why read at all? Why does anyone do it in the first place? Why do I? There is the element of escape, which is real enough — that’s a real-enough comfort. But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know it to describe it. There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone. Sometimes an author’s voice is familiar to us from the first page, first paragraph, even if the author lived in another country, in another century.” Bob held up his stack of Russians. “How can you account for this familiarity? I do believe that, at our best, there is a link connecting us. A lifetime of reading has confirmed this for me. And this is the sentiment or phenomenon I want to share with you all today. I’m going to read some selections from the Russian canon. We’ll be starting with Gogol — an obvious choice, but obvious for a reason. The language is a little formal, but the emotional information is, I think, relevant as ever.”
Bob read “The Overcoat.” He read in a clear, bright voice, and with a faith in the sideways beauty and harsh humor of the work. He knew that he could get through to these people if only they would give themselves to the words, but before he arrived at the text’s halfway point they were shifting in their chairs. Soon they began to collect themselves, and then they did stand to go. By the time Bob completed the story the only people in the room were Chip and the muttering janitor, who had already begun the unhappy business of folding and stacking the chairs. As his muttering evolved to audible complaint, Bob learned the janitor blamed him for what he saw as needless busywork. Bob forbade himself from apologizing; he collected his books and made to leave, pausing to look down at Chip, who he now saw was soundly sleeping. Her sunglasses were crooked, and he corrected them. He walked past the long table in the Great Room, populated with people who had just left his reading; they were sitting side by side under softly buzzing fluorescent lighting, chatting, not chatting, doing crossword and Sudoku puzzles, cutting construction paper with safety scissors.
Bob went to say goodbye to Maria but saw through her door she was again talking on the phone. He stood around a while, then abruptly left, heading for home. He felt angry, which was not at all common for Bob; but he found himself wishing he’d never come to the center in the first place. It began to rain and he shielded the books under his coat and his face puckered against the damp. He was unlocking his front door when he heard the phone ringing. The kitchen was unlit; it was clean and orderly in the darkness of the day. He set his books on the countertop and lifted the phone off the wall and said hello.
It was Maria. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened. You were right, so I left.”
“But you didn’t tell me you were leaving.”
“You were on the phone.”
“You could have waited a minute.”
“I waited several minutes.”
Maria asked, “Are you pouting?”
“A little bit, yes.”
“All right, well I can’t say you haven’t earned it, and after I get off the phone you can pout your little heart out, but can you put a plug in it for a minute? Because I have an idea. Will you listen to me?”
“I’m listening.”
“I’d like to propose that you keep coming back here but without the books.”
“Come back without the books.”
“Leave those books at home, Bob.”
“And what would I be doing there?”
“Just that: being here.”
“Being there doing what?”
“Being here being around. Most of the people at the center are in a state of letting go. Some of them are unbothered by this, or unaware; but others are afraid, or confused, or angry. You’re the steady, hand-on-the-tiller type, and I think your presence might be useful. I just got off the phone with a man who wants to perform sleight of hand tricks for us. Half the people at the center have some degree of dementia. The whole world’s a sleight of hand trick already, and I’m not looking to give them any more examples of instability. To my way of thinking, that’s where you come in.” She pressed Bob to commit to visiting the following week, but he claimed he needed to think on it, affecting a coolness as he rang off. In truth, though, he was moved by Maria’s assessment of his character. The functional purpose he’d known in his professional life had been put away when he retired, but now that cold piece of his person came back to life. In the morning he called Maria to agree to the schedule, and on the appointed day he arrived at the center, and without any books, as prescribed.