by Chamber Four
These memories were soon lost to the business of the reading room and the familiar faces of the Korean lady and the man with his lists of words. Pym claimed his usual seat and placed his bookbag and coffee down and retrieved volume one of Lawrence’s book. The text seemed recently thumbed and slightly dirtier than he remembered, with newspaper ink marks and rings of what appeared to be tea on the pages.
The second chapter concerned an analysis of the area Crow Hill in Brooklyn and its change to Crown Heights in 1916. Lawrence detailed the names of the Jewish families to chart any future diaspora to another neighborhood. As a self-taught historian and linguist, he wanted to compare the situation to his own observations in England. The ensuing chapters revisited this data in unusual ways; a red ink graph displayed surname length on the x-axis and years in the neighborhood on the y. A common name like Miller corresponded to 16 years, whereas Auerbach had 22.5 years. In his conclusions, further on, he found a disturbing correlation. Tables of data supported one hypothesis: residents were being forcibly removed. On a topographical map, an elliptical curve had the St. Ignatius Church as point O. The nearby tenement buildings and brownstones were repossessed, or leases terminated, the land bought up by a fronted property company, Allmen Inc., located in Weehawken, New Jersey.
He read all day to finish the book, eating only some granola from his bag and drinking water from the fountain. He considered Lawrence’s views but was unsure whether to believe them. Lawrence seemed to be looking for patterns, a way to understand the world in front of him. Pym remained unconvinced; however, he knew he wanted to know more. Each subsequent book was longer—probably denser—and he was eager to get through them. At the shelf, volume two was missing. He examined the surrounding books to see if it had been misplaced. He walked parallel to the shelf, running his index finger over dozens of spines until he saw, on the other side of a cart, the woman from before. She was sitting on a small wooden stool. The late afternoon light revealed a few grays in her hair, which seemed shorter than the previous time, like she’d had a buzz cut in the last few days. She was wearing a beige cotton cardigan over a white vest and blue jeans with black pumps.
He rounded the cart and stood next to her, thinking about what he should say. She was not conventionally beautiful like the girls he’d dated in the past, trust fund types who were only interested in living the same lives as their parents.
She glanced up. “Are you okay?”
“That book you’re reading,” he said pointing at it. “I’m reading the entire set—”
“And you thought that gave you priority.”
“Something like that.”
She stood, closed the book, and pushed the stool with her foot to the side. “When I’ve finished, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
He grabbed her arm, and then just as quickly let it go. “No, I need it. My time is limited.”
She gestured for Pym to follow, and they walked over to his table. “I believe this is where you were sitting.” She placed the book down. “We need a contract. Not a legal one, more an understanding that we should discern our reason for reading these books.”
He nodded but was unsure of what she meant.
She pointed to the chairs, and they both sat down, allowing the contract to begin. Through June they read together. She came every day, her clothes barely changing, just slight color variations on the same vest and jeans. On Fridays, though, she wore plain dresses and wedge sandals and she carried with her a cup of herbal tea that smelled of peppermint and lemon and she would slowly sip it, making it last the entire day. Only rarely would they talk. Occasionally there would be a stuttered conversation in which he attempted to ask her out or tried to make a date with her somewhere else. She would lean in, and he could smell a hint of perfume that had perhaps been put on days before. “This is our place,” she would reply to his suggestions.
After these obtuse statements she would leave and come back days or sometimes weeks later. He wondered if she was ever married, and he often looked for a band of white skin or an indentation from a recently removed wedding ring. In their brief talks she never mentioned anybody else, or that she had to go and meet somebody. He often toyed with romantic notions of who she was and why she read with him. He thought, perhaps, she didn’t live in the city but commuted in when she was able.
One late afternoon, when the library was full of people trying to escape the humidity, he decided to follow her as she left. He gave her a couple of minutes, then grabbed his bookbag and headed for the main exit. As he ran down the stairs, he saw her from the window, her thin body visible as a strong breeze tightened the back of her sundress. His face pressed to the glass, he thought of calling out to her, but he didn’t know her name. He knew nothing about her. He could only watch as she disappeared into the crowds heading toward Grand Central.
* * *
A few weeks later, he was in a midtown coffee shop with Philip. They had stopped there briefly at Pym’s suggestion. He could tell by Philip’s foot tapping that he was annoyed that he’d brought him away from his studies without giving any explanation. As they waited in line, Pym recalled his mother telling him how caffeine eased her headaches. “They’re caused by my medulloblastoma,” she said. “It’s a type of brain tumor.” The magnitude of what she was saying took a minute or so to sink into Pym’s mind. Before he could reply, she smiled and asked, “How’s school?”
“Take this,” said Philip, passing Pym a cup of coffee. He gestured his thanks and they walked to the nearby rear entrance of the library. Following Pym’s lead, Philip passed his bag to security. As the guard rummaged through the textbooks and back issues of Nature, Philip turned to Pym: “What are we doing here?”
“I need you to see her.”
“I knew this was about a girl.”
Pym didn’t speak, but directed him to the stairs.
Philip slung his bag over his shoulder. “Are you stalking her?”
“I haven’t seen her for a while.”
In Room 315, he guided Philip to his desk. They sat for a few moments watching the archway. He pointed out the man with his wordlists; he had two bound folios of completed work and a thick sheaf ready to be inscribed. Far to his right, the Korean lady was hunched over her desk. She appeared to be editing the galleys of her monograph, noting typos and errant commas. It was difficult to see her work, but it must have been nearing completion.
Philip appeared bored by Pym’s odd bits of commentary. To mask the time Pym showed him Lawrence’s books, but he displayed no interest. “It’s got science stuff in here too,” Pym said, pointing to a histogram that compared heights of city buildings. “Singer Tower, the Metropolitan Life Tower, the Woolworth—”
Philip stood. “I’ve got to go.”
“Stay one more hour.”
He shook his head. “Try working on those theories of yours.”
For the rest of the day Pym went through his notebook blotting out all of his sentences. In our short time together, I tried to decipher some of the words and I pointed to a few on the page. This led to questions, though he asked them of me: Why do you insist that I fill out a child’s connect-the-dots drawing? Why are you so obsessed by Edward Lawrence? Why did you offer me money to visit your office?
I stood and pulled down the blinds, cutting out the view of the cold storage warehouse and the outline of Manhattan beyond. He complained about the darkness and his left eye hurting again. As an experiment, I told him the blinds were not shut. That, in fact, he just imagined they were. He became quiet for a while, his eyes closed, as though he was about to meditate. I retrieved my camera from the drawer and took his picture, and although later the negatives were destroyed in the darkroom, he remained unaware of my actions. After a few minutes, I told him I would open the blinds if he abandoned his questions and continued. He nodded.
His past attempt in trailing her led, although he was not sure how, to a prolonged absence on her part, and as the summer wore on he read by himself. In volume three, he
found a lengthy description of the changing color of the Hudson River. Lawrence observed the water shift from a grayish blue at dawn to a blackened orange at sunset. Over a two-month period he became enamored with the river and spent much of his time watching the fishing boats come in and out of the harbor. In late September of 1920, he acquired passage on an aging sailing trawler that had been hired to transport scientific instruments to Troy. On the hurried journey upriver he often wondered about the crate locked in the hold. It didn’t seem worthwhile to take such a small cargo. His queries to the captain went unanswered, and this fueled his paranoia about what they were really carrying. For days he speculated in his notebook: a cache of forged Liberty bonds. Photographs of women in unnatural states. A dismembered body.
As the trawler passed Cortlandt he found the hold open. For a couple of minutes he examined the crate, noting the same Allmen Inc. stamp he’d seen on the mortgage documents in Crown Heights. Before he could look inside the cook discovered him, and he was confined to his cabin. Inside he only had a bed, a wooden slop bucket, and his trunk, which contained his second set of clothes (short suit jacket and cuffed trousers, waistcoat, and black leather belt) and some matches, which he lit to make crude charcoal. He used his time to sketch the landscape he could see through the porthole. Slowly, as they neared Troy, his drawings of the low hills and the maple and cedar forests became otherworldly, branches elongated across the whole sky. After his release, he put this down to some sort of poisoning. He returned to New York by train convinced his sickness had originated from the river, his drinking water tampered with by the crew.
Pym studied the facsimile reproductions of the drawings. Several pages were a smudged mess, a conglomeration of black lines merging into one another as though white space needed to be eliminated. It reminded him of his failed attempt to describe a new aesthetic, a system of explicating the abstract and the unreal. Since his mother’s cancer had worsened he hadn’t been able to see her face; his memories of her lost to another time. He stared at the drawings for a few minutes, and then he closed the book.
He began to attend a movie club situated at the north end of Central Park that put on old black and white films using a 16mm projector and a white tarpaulin pinned to the side of Belvedere Castle. Run in secret by organizers in balaclavas and thick woolen jackets, each film lasted only fifteen minutes. They played avant-garde montages. Some days it consisted of porcine copulation and ironclad warships going into dry dock. Others had Chinese women pointing to their foot binding and the open sea, cloudless to the horizon. Each film ended in a serene moment: calm water, clear sky, a painted wall. Like a Rorschach test, each film provoked different interpretations, new ways for the audience to understand what was going on. He felt there was a system at work, something dynamic and overarching. The image of the boar mounting the sow seemed to exist for shock value; the close up of the penis intercut with the warship closing in on the dock was almost a pastiche of the old conditioning films he’d seen in his psychology classes.
Several times he considered not going back but instead reinstating his trips to the library. Yet something about the club, the hurried manner of the organizers, who stripped the equipment down in a couple of minutes and strolled quickly out of the park, kept him interested. One night he watched them at a distance from behind a ginkgo tree, a pocket telescope aiding his view. They erected the impromptu cinema in less than half an hour, using ropes and a pulley to hoist the tarpaulin, and a crate on a park bench to support the projector. The film started with a lion dying from an epileptic fit, the body shaking for a few minutes on the floor of a circus cage. A crude splice transitioned to a grass field. At the edge of the screen, he could see the girl from the library naked. She had on a wig; it looked coarse, like theatrical hair. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, or even able to assess whether it was her in the film.
He knew he had to act. He ran for fifty yards. Then he crept up on the man packing the projector away in a leather gym bag. He took off the man’s balaclava. The man’s face was sweaty, his beard unkempt, and he looked around the park as though people would identify him and call the police.
“Who is she?”
The man started to walk away. “I don’t know.”
“How did you get her picture?”
“These are the things we do,” he said.
* * *
The day before Pym was to head back to Harvard he found her at his desk, reading the last book. He approached, attempting to be casual, with one hand in the back pocket of his jeans and the other loosely holding his sunglasses. As they made eye contact she didn’t speak, but pointed to where she was on the page.
He put his hand on her shoulder. “I want to see you outside.”
“We can only be together here in this room.”
“But why?” he said, taking his hand away. “I don’t understand.”
She watched as he awkwardly crossed his arms, leaving his sunglasses to jab his ribs.
“I saw you in a film,” he said.
“That’s unlikely.”
“You were naked.”
“Let’s read.”
Volume four concerned Lawrence’s self-imposed containment and his continued sickness, which now consisted of muscle cramps in his legs and arms and severe headaches throughout the day. He kept within ten blocks of the flophouse, fearing the rivers on either side of the island. One morning, while he strolled through the neighborhood, a tourist took his picture outside of an Italian café that served cannoli and strong coffee for a nickel. As the man walked away Lawrence wondered why he’d been in the picture: Had his illness been apparent? Or was the man just interested in the picturesque frontage of the café?
Over the next few months these questions troubled him more as he saw the growth of photography in the city, particularly the underground trend of solarisation. While in the darkroom, prints would be subjected to bright bursts of light, changing the tone, shadows, and lines of contrast. The images, according to Lawrence, were absurd. Models were rendered androgynous—flesh seemed to disappear into the ether. He remarked upon the exhibitions that circulated through Paris, London, and New York; they had names such as “Light—Visions,” “Dada: The Magic Binary,” and “City/Gray/Space.” At his lodgings he set up a darkroom using an enlarger, printing frame, and stoneware tanks, bought from a bankrupt camera club. At night, he walked the streets and took pictures of Lower East Side prostitutes. Often they posed for him, sometimes clothed, sometimes not. Rarely did they charge him. After developing the photographs he attempted his own solarisations, but the images came out gray and muddy. For almost a year he worked on the process, slowly getting closer to an untainted print. He used different light sources: a flashlight, a candle, a flare, a carbide lamp. All failed. Only an editor’s note indicated what happened next. Lawrence had abandoned the flophouse, owing several months of rent. His writings, sketches, photographs, clothes, were found by the landlady and sold, somehow ending up with a publisher based in New Jersey.
The woman, it appeared, had grown tired of the accumulation of facts, events, and observations. She turned the pages with a listless pace. Her eyes were sunken, and her skin had grown visibly pale. He wasn’t sure, as they read in silence, if this was related to the film or his presence being anathema to her health. He knew as she came onto the last page he needed to break the impasse: “I leave tomorrow afternoon.”
She pointed to the sentence she was on.
“I have my answer,” he lied.
She smiled and closed the book. “I’m sad it’s over.”
“I thought maybe we could read something else. But I see now why that wouldn’t work.” He stood and collected his things.
* * *
That afternoon was the only time I saw Pym. I gave him a check for an amount that would get me thrown out of the organization. He looked at it and told me to put it away. He suspected that I was the man in the park, perhaps also the gum man and the man with his wordlists. For hours he’d been talki
ng, projecting his fantasies onto me. But still I wanted to know more. I needed more information for the report: a way for me to get Lawrence’s books. I offered him anything he wanted and he pointed to the Seurat. I agreed. Carefully, he lifted the print off the wall and leaned it against my desk. He sat back down and I gestured for him to finish his story.
At the Christmas break, Philip invited Pym to watch the apartment while he visited his family in Philadelphia. He hesitated at first, unsure if he wanted to relive the strange events of the summer. He went, though, taking the same train as before. Philip’s place was close to how he remembered it, only cleaner and with a new chrome bookcase shaped like a wave and filled only with his textbooks. Philip had put enough food in the icebox to last for a few days: cold cuts—mostly pastrami and corned beefa bag of Cortland apples, a fresh carton of skim milk, two loaves of wheat bread, and a can of tuna. The supplies came with a note, held down by a bacterium-shaped fridge magnet, which had instructions for living in the apartment and, underneath, a pamphlet detailing the library’s opening hours over the holidays.
For a long time he looked out the window, taking in the view now dashed with a cold gray sludge, and drank vermouth mixed lightly with tonic. Through the warm haze of the alcohol he thought about his mother, who had died a month or so before. His last day with her had gone poorly; she barely remembered Pym’s name. She did instruct him, though, after Pym told her of his summer experiences, to “Appreciate truth in all its forms.” Pym left the hospital unsure what to do with her advice, but in New York he realized he had to know if the woman still visited the library. After sleeping on these considerations, he awoke the next morning and took the subway to Times Square. He exited past the heavy crowds shopping for gifts, to East 42nd, toward the Chrysler Building. He sat in Bryant Park shivering in the cold wind and rain and stared at the library until the doors opened with a muffled clang. He headed up the marble steps, past Corinthian columns, and into the cool, quiet interior. He drifted through corridors and anterooms, switching floors by double staircases without fully realizing where he was going.
