A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  Part Seven.

  Omaha.

  1.

  may 2, the 1970.

  so begins the grand march; the righteous rally, close to either the beginning or the end.

  omaha is a city with a pulse; a city where they see the full portrait of america; resiliency. we met in secret on hollowed grounds, our holy temple of diversion.

  far & wide, we spread our message of revolution, & from far & wide, they came, flooding our false temple,

  & now the false temple begs to be made true; full of heads, who am i to call it empty?

  we built this Great library to be our Great diversion, & now it begs again for truth,

  duke tells me it will be fine; that we were destined for this & we’re merely answering the call.

  i tell him i have my doubts, but duke tells me this is weakness.

  what is the virtue of doubt? if exploration is the engine of discovery; & questions are the engine of answers; is not doubt the engine of truth?

  which would make not doubt, but certainty, its opposite.

  the world knows no shackles so rigid & unforgiving as certainty. for certainty leaves no room for debate, or for questions, or the delicate nuance of fact-and-fiction.

  duke is certain. i have my doubts.

  to duke, we are gods, but to me, we only act like them,

  & it makes me wonder:

  at what point does the misdirection become the direction?

  at what point does the fiction become the fact?

  at what point does a believed lie become the truth?

  who are we, ourselves or the people we pretend to be?

  who are you,

  & who am i?

  —arthur louis pullman

  2.

  STEPPING OFF THE platform in Omaha, everything felt uneasy, like a million eyes were fixed on my chest. I could feel something terrible, but whatever it was, it stayed just beyond my periphery. I walked with my hood up, reminding myself that if the panic was in my head, so was the calm.

  The Westwood Library was an enormous building in the middle of an average neighborhood, like it had been placed by an arrow thrown drunkenly at a map and left there to rot. There were four resolute stone pillars in the front, two slanted staircases leading to the front door on either side of a slanted fountain that still spewed water despite the cold. Inside, there were three floors of wall-to-wall books. Banners celebrating the most illustrious authors and their readers hung from the ceiling like championship titles in a basketball arena—Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, and, sure enough, a black-and-white portrait that showed my grandfather in his early twenties, clinging one-handed to the railing of a train: the Arthur Louis Pullman that Henry knew and I had never met.

  “Excuse me, sir.” The librarian at the front desk had noticed me scanning the room. “Anything in particular I can help you with?” She didn’t look like the librarians of California; she was young, round, and very pretty, curls bouncing on the sides of her face to frame a small-lipped smile.

  “I, oh, I, uh, I’m looking for, for a book.”

  She had enormous boobs.

  “Well, we’ve got a few of those,” she said. “Three million, in fact.”

  “What about, uh . . .” I motioned to my grandfather’s banner. “Him?”

  “Oh, Arthur Louis Pullman is one of our favorites.” Her face lit with excitement. “And if you’re a fan, you’re in luck. This is truly the best possible place.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said under my breath.

  “The whole place is designed like a maze.” She shuffled her heels as she led me up the stairs, weaving in and out of aisles of books. “You know how they say you can get lost in a good book? Well, here, we think you should get lost in three million! As for Arthur Louis Pullman, we’ve got a display—a shrine, really—over here. It even has a couple of first-edition copies of his book, signed and everything.”

  I wasn’t surprised anymore.

  “I’m a huge Pullman fan. I think I know everything there is to know about him. Not sure if you’re familiar with the story, but they say he was working on a masterpiece for forty years before he died, and there’s a copy hidden in a vault in the basement of his mansion in California.”

  “It’s not really a mansion.”

  “What?”

  “I said, uh, wouldn’t that be amazing?”

  “I certainly think so. But then again, I’ve also heard that he was torturing his family while he wrote it, psychologically, you know? Keeping them as slaves in his basement, like test subjects. And if that’s the case, I don’t know if I’d want to read it.”

  “I think I’d want to read it more.”

  “Either way”—she ignored me—“at least we have this.” Like a game show model, she gestured to a glass case at the end of an aisle with a few photos, the obituary from the Chicago Tribune, and three signed first-edition copies of A World Away. My grandfather had been generous.

  “This is great, thank you so much . . .” I looked for her name tag.

  “Suzy.”

  We both noticed how blatantly I was staring at her chest. “Arthur.”

  “Great name. Let me know if you need anything else, okay, Arthur?” And she walked back to the front of the library.

  Nothing in the display looked out of place, or like it had been touched for years. None of the books had any marking or insignia or difference to indicate a clue. I considered cracking the display open and looking through them. It wouldn’t be difficult; it was the same kind of security that guarded condoms at grocery stores, not like stealing the Declaration of Independence or anything, and even Nicolas Cage could do that. I leaned close to study the glass, and in the reflective glass surface, a bright yellow image flashed past behind me. I turned, hands up, adrenaline protecting me from—

  A small child, holding a Curious George book, running from his mother to the water fountain behind me.

  I steadied my pulse and made my way toward the back wall. The library was almost too big, too many rows of books for any single person to take in. I found myself in the classic literature section, surrounded by all the books my grandfather had always talked about. Every title, I remembered by his reaction.

  A Tale of Two Cities? “Genius! Thing’s a goddamned masterpiece.”

  Tom Sawyer? “Bullshit! Twain couldn’t write his way out of a left turn.”

  A World Away? “Eh, that one might be worth a read.”

  I circled the aisles on the first floor three times before moving up the stairs. There were doors all along the back wall, but clearly marked, and no back room: “Staff Only,” “Surplus,” “Supplies,” “Men’s,” “Women’s.” None of them looked like the birthplace for a revolution.

  “Find what you were looking for?” Without realizing it, I’d made my way through the entire library and was standing where I’d started, in front of Suzy’s desk. “Shouldn’t be hard, he only wrote one.”

  “Oh, no, I guess I, I haven’t,” I said, and her brow furrowed. “I haven’t really been looking all, all that closely.”

  “Alright, then tell me,” she said, lowering her voice. “What is it that you’re really looking for?”

  I took a small step back. “I’m, I’m looking for your back room,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

  She gaped at me, her cheeks tinting pink with disgust.

  “No, I, I mean, not like that, not a back room . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, quick and cold. “This library doesn’t have a back room.”

  “No, I just, I read this newspaper article about it, and I’m pretty sure—”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but you must be thinking of somewhere else.”

  Five days ago, I’d have walked for the door without looking back. Five days ago, I’d have sat outside the library, helplessly replaying the interaction and hopelessly lamenting my failed experiment. But I was five days and two thousand miles from all of that.
<
br />   I took two steps toward her. “Can I ask you a question? And you promise you’ll answer it honestly?”

  She nodded.

  “What is it you serve?” Her face flushed red again. She wrung her hands nervously, staring down into the desk. “Because I serve a Great Purpose.”

  Her eyes flickered, a few quick blinks, glances around the room. “Okay,” she muttered. “Now you answer my question. Arthur what?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Who are you?” She swallowed. “Arthur what?”

  I nodded to the banner, to the photo of my grandpa fearlessly hanging off the train.

  “Well, if you must use the bathroom”—she spoke at twice her normal volume—“I suggest you do it quickly.” She slid a key over the counter in my direction and whispered, “Second floor, end of the hallway by the religion section. Through a door labeled ‘Surplus.’ It’s your first door on the right. It’s labeled ‘Great Surplus.’ I know it’s not clever or anything, but—”

  “It’s perfect.”

  I raced upstairs.

  The door labeled “Surplus” was directly across from my grandpa’s display. It was at the end of a small hallway, which led into another small entryway with two doors, one without a door, full of mops and brooms, and the other, “Great Surplus.” The key fit perfectly. With one last glance around the deserted entryway, I pushed it open.

  The smell hit me before I entered the room. It was musty and recycled, the smell of books that had existed long beyond when they were intended to. The air in the room was stale, cold, unaffected by air-conditioning or human breath. As I edged around the corner, I felt out of place, like I was an intruder on holy ground; Alice entering Wonderland.

  But the room itself was a masterpiece.

  The ceilings were vaulted to make room for all the books, three of the four walls covered with shelves that ran all the way up to the top; gray, black, brown, and maroon bindings. Two pulpits stood in command at the head of the room, displaying a dictionary and a Bible. An old fire stove sat between them, its chimney funneled out the back of the building. Light streamed in from a small square window about six feet off the ground, low and dim, interrupted by the rough texture of the glass. In the center of the room was an oak table with only one thing on it: a tiny pile of shredded paper.

  I felt the weight of once-ridiculous rumors materializing in front of me. I felt my grandpa.

  I was standing in the Great Library.

  My heart raced faster with every detail I took in. I moved in circles beneath the books. I breathed the leftover air my grandfather and his prophets had left behind, the ideas and words and legend that had once shared this room. I slid my hand along the table, my fingertips brushing the smooth wood finish. I ended at the Bible, a bright red, sixth-edition King James, on display like an untouchable truth, watching over the room from on high. I recognized the book and chapter—Corinthians 2, Chapter 5—the mark of my grandfather. In black block letters across the top, penmanship I didn’t recognize had written, No mortal has ever seen God.

  I swallowed. It was his verse. All of this was left here for me.

  I turned the banner, hung from the ceiling, covering the only wall without books; the banner that let me know I was exactly where I needed to be.

  GREAT PURPOSE, it read. There was a bird painted onto the corner—a tanager, I was sure.

  I could see Mara, apologizing for abandoning me, begging to be around me again, drowning in regret.

  I could see Jack, watching the news on TV, how crazy it would make him that there was a Great Library, and how furious he would be that he wasn’t a part of the discovery of it. “I guess you can just pay to visit the museum like everybody else,” I told the air in front of me.

  I could see Kaitlin, watching the news on television and rushing to call me.

  I approached the banner, wondering if I should bow before it. I touched the bottom lightly, and behind me, the door slammed shut.

  3.

  THE CEILINGS WERE so high in the Great Library that every decibel of sound chased outward, with so much space to fill that it kept making noise long after the noise should have ended; deep echoes, shooting back off the books as if coming off the walls of a canyon.

  The slam of the door. Echo.

  Three slow footsteps. Echo, echo, echo.

  I didn’t move, silencing my breathing.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see the poker for the stove, hanging sheathed like a medieval weapon against the black metal fireplace. I inched toward it, craning my neck to get a look at the figure in the doorway, but it was too dark.

  I acted first. Without waiting for them to emerge, I leapt for the poker, grasping it firmly and attempting to draw it like a sword. I pulled it, swinging my arm forward, but the sharp end caught and hooked the log rack next to it, and as I pulled, the whole apparatus came crashing with it; the brush, the shovel, and the rack itself clattered to the floor, covered in so much dust that a cloud rose and formed around me. I was a magician who failed to disappear.

  Falling metal against hard linoleum floor. Echo.

  From the doorway, Mara burst out laughing.

  “You really are very intimidating, you know that?” She looked the same as before she’d left, and now entirely different in front of me. Her voice, her accent, her demeanor; the exact images I remembered, now painted in a bright red. The tiny light in the room shot outward across my field of vision. Anger flushed through every vein and vessel in my body, swelling up in my chest and pushing outward. I swallowed it silently.

  “You’re also just about the easiest person in the world to track down.” She wandered around to the far end of the table. “Seriously, I wait for exactly one train at one station, and now here we are.” She was avoiding my eyes, or I was avoiding hers. “Although I am impressed you found this place so fast—it took Leila years.”

  My heart sank, and she must have noticed my face slip.

  “Oh, no. You thought—no, I’m sorry, this isn’t the Great Library or whatever.” I hated the pity in her voice. “No, it’s a total bust. All history books and encyclopedias. We looked through the whole thing. Does look like it ought to be something, though, right? That’s why they did it, Leila thought. A Great Diversion.”

  I clenched the chair in front of me, chips of splintered wood pushing painfully into my right hand, but I could barely feel them.

  “Arthur—”

  “Why are you here?” I asked, tempered and timed and so slow that it gathered some of the gravel from the lowest register of my voice.

  “Right.” She pursed her lips and nodded. “I apologize for the French exit. I realize that must have felt—abrupt. And not good.”

  I fought back the pain in my chest, numbing it by squeezing my left hand underneath the cast and my right hand against the breaks in the wood.

  “I understand it may not have made sense to you right away, but I hope you can understand the position I was in; I had to show them. There was no other way to. And now”—she gestured to the room—“here we are. They sent me to watch for you, but I’m doing the opposite. I want to help you. A double cross, they call it. And I swear I can prove to you I’m in earnest.”

  She moved toward me, now just ten feet of noticeable silence between us, and surveyed me, up and down and back again, my unkempt hair and my clenched fists and cheeks, bright red from the blood bursting behind them. “Are you alright, Arthur?”

  “You left.”

  Echo.

  “Yes. I know, and I’m so sorry. But I had to.”

  My body pulsed, firing into my legs, my voice taking over. “You didn’t say anything to me. You didn’t leave a note, or something . . . or anything.” I tried to fight the light backward from swallowing my vision, tried to take even breaths so I didn’t explode, but I could feel the tips of my fingers going numb against the wood.

  “Arthur, I don’t—”

  “No.” My whole body shook as my breath shuddered.

  Sh
e pursed her lips.

  “You abandoned me.” My tongue slapped the back of my teeth, clicking with every word. My face was red with rage. “And now you’re back . . . because you realized you needed me. Right?”

  Mara stared intently back, looking entirely unsorry, almost like she thought I was kidding, the way her mouth hung slightly open. “Arthur, I understand this reaction, but it had to happen like this—”

  “Because that’s what you do.” My voice was soft but it didn’t feel small; it swallowed hers, echo and all. “Because that’s who you are.”

  Mara’s eyebrows sharpened, then softened as she took a breath. “I don’t think you realize how serious this is to them—to him. When you told him about the journals, he demanded them. Not asked, demanded. If I hadn’t taken them, they would have done it themselves, and hurt you in the process. And I told you who they were, and I told you who I was, and you chose to involve me in this—”

  “I chose to?”

  “You told me about the journals—”

  “You forced me to tell you.”

  “No I did not.”

  “You manipulated me. You said I had to explain everything to you or get the fuck away from you—”

  “Which means I gave you the option to leave! And you chose to stay, and to involve me, even after you knew who I worked for. I’m not sure where you think this implied loyalty is coming from, but these people—my sister—that was my life, Arthur. And I told you that. Unambiguously.”

  “I said I didn’t want to share them, and you said okay, then you—”

  “I said you didn’t have to share them yet. And I told you not to tell Jack the other night. And you did. Willingly. You put me in an impossible position.”

  “That doesn’t—”

  “Also.” I could see Mara’s finger twitching on the chair in front of her. “For the record, I am here now. I don’t think you’ve even yet seriously considered how fucking difficult that is, for me to be here. I left a group that I’ve worked with for three years, just to help you. All the danger you’re in right now, I just put that on me, too, because I want to help you. But you wouldn’t consider that, would you? Because it wouldn’t fit right with the monster you’ve made me in your head, would it?”