The Future for Curious People

by Gregory Sherl

  “We love each other,” she says. “We can survive taking our time.”

  “You’re not going to put the ring on, are you? This is conditional. That’s what you’re saying. I do it your way or it doesn’t happen.” I swing my arms around angrily and the mittens come flapping after them. I try to pull the mittens off, but the clips seem permanently clenched. I use the voice I usually reserve for customer service personnel. It’s the only way I can stop myself from further losing it. “If you aren’t going to put the ring on, you should give it back. That’s customary, isn’t it?”

  She tightens her grip on the box and refuses to look at me. She looks at everything but me.

  “Do you know how ridiculous we look right now?” I am saying this, but my mouth is barely moving.

  She doesn’t answer, doesn’t move.

  “What? Do you want me to wrestle that box from you?” I’m trying to joke now, but it’s not going over.

  Madge is breathing hard. The steam is rising from her mouth into the cold air. It is her pre-cry panting. I am softening or melting or both. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Once when Madge’s parents were in town, they pulled me aside and her mother said, “Madge has had a very affirmed childhood. We want her to spend her life with someone who truly appreciates everything about her. Everything.”

  “Everything?” I said.

  Her father then said, “Madge’s affirmed childhood was her mother’s idea. It makes her a force of nature. All that affirmation and no real failure for her to apply it to? Well, it’s all bottled up. It’s a force field, Godfrey. Good luck.”

  I don’t want to give in. I stiffen up and try to sound definitive. If I had a necktie on, I’d straighten the shit out of it. “I’m not going to look into our future, Madge. I’m not. It goes against everything I believe in.”

  She looks up at me. “You have a belief system?”

  I nod weakly. “I think I do.” I look around the street, the row of trees buckling the sidewalk. “I’m pretty sure I do.”

  Evelyn

  SAVING GATSBY

  My boss, Mr. Gupta, walks over to me behind the desk in Youth Services. He’s typically bookish. His shoulders slope toward a doughy center. The fuzz of his sweaters seems to have molded to his body. And of course he’s wearing bifocals. He was raised in India and therefore has no tolerance for whining of any kind—even the completely valid inner-city Baltimore variety. Much less if you try to tell Gupta that you don’t want people eating out of the take-out box you put in the communal fridge for lunch on the grounds that it’s unsanitary to co-eat from take-out boxes, he’ll say, “Oh, please. Afraid of a few germs? In India people just die on the streets. You step over bodies. It’s just how it is!”

  But today he doesn’t have his normal bravado. “Evelyn Shriner,” he says, as he often refers to me by my full name. “The woman in the bathroom on the third floor is dying her hair in the sink.” Fadra is a homeless woman who’s been living in the library—for all intents and purposes—for a couple of years. She has the strange habit of bringing up the fine art of taxidermy at certain moments when she feels attacked and with a glint in her eye that makes me feel like a muskrat about to be stuffed and boxed in a small display case. “I just feel like dying your hair is really bold,” Gupta says. “A new level of bold. I need you to go talk to her.” Gupta shrugs apologetically and then makes a shooing motion with his hands, flipping them forward on the hinges of his wrists.

  “Mr. Gupta,” I say politely. “Wouldn’t that be Cherelle’s area?” The library is a carefully organized landscape of territories drawn by a group of carefully organized human beings. I reside in Youth Services. (I should note that I’m the whitey minority in this library, which means I sometimes don’t get the jokes.) It’s as if the third floor is an arctic region clearly out of my domain. Plus, I’d like to pawn this off on Cherelle because I’m scared of Fadra. This is why Gupta himself isn’t going in after her.

  Gupta shakes his head vehemently. “There was the incident,” Gupta says, pushing up his glasses, “as you well know. And Cherelle has become a little nervous, you know. I’ll never understand it, but she can no longer confront others. Personally, it strikes me as an American privilege to suddenly claim your nerves are shaken. Still, I have to be sensitive or they will send me back for another training session. I deplore sensitivity training sessions, Evelyn Shriner. They make me completely insensitive!”

  A few weeks ago, Cherelle, who grew up in this area of Baltimore—which isn’t the safest part of town—is very tough and officious woman, but she accidentally aided and abetted a criminal who’d just held up a liquor store and was looking for the best way to catch a bus to Philly. Cherelle was exceedingly thorough, the man was truly grateful, and she’d felt good about the whole thing until the cops showed up.

  I look around at my little protected area of the library—my nest of Youth Services. I point to the group of teenagers, a brilliant group of kids, all in all—the oddballs that gather, as I once did and then stayed on . . . “I can’t leave now. We’re about to start the book club meeting,” I say. This is actually a ways off. “Right, Keisha? You need me to be here, correct?”

  Keisha says, “If it weren’t for you, I’d be doing meth in an IHOP bathroom. Of course we need you here.”

  I wasn’t expecting this. I feel all warm in my heart. “Really?” I say.

  “No, of course not,” Keisha says. “That shit short-circuits the pleasure part of your brain, but it’s the thought that counts, right?”

  I turn to Gupta. “It is the thought that counts. Clearly.” I lower my voice. “And she probably read about the bad effects of meth here in the Youth Services area of the library.”

  “This is a beautiful moment,” Gupta says, just lightly laced with sarcasm. “I’m choked up.”

  “Can’t Chuck go?” Chuck is our deputy sheriff, a sweet man with an overly large head. He has to special order his cop caps. His young offspring are similarly large-headed.

  “He and I would both go, but it is the women’s room,” Gupta says. “Look, I will stand here while your book club starts to talk about the book and you won’t be gone long.”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, feeling screwed over by my own gender.

  Gupta smiles, chin to chest. “May the force be with you, Evelyn Shriner.”

  I head to the elevators, wringing my hands. This wasn’t what I thought my job would entail when I first went into library studies, but I love my job. I truly do.

  Libraries are my homeland. So, yes, I tried to make Adrian’s family my own—one popover at a time—and his family wasn’t the first, but I also chose a career that would land me in a place I could call home. When you grow up in the deadened air of loss, you get used to quiet, but you never get used to the loneliness of living with parents who are despairing. As a kid, I went to the library because, in books, there were people really living lives, and unlike my parents, they talked to me about important things. My own house was austere, hushed, and dusty like a library, but once you understand that each book on the shelf has a heartbeat, then you’ll want to stay. I don’t tend dead things—paper, ink, glue bindings. I tend books the way someone in an aviary tends birds.

  Bookstores, on the other hand, can make me nervous. All those books and I can’t possibly buy them all and tend to them properly, love them enough, give them the eyes they deserve. But, here, at the library, the patrons take the books out as a kind of foster care program—into the world and back again.

  If they don’t come back? Well, some books are meant to live in the wilds. There’s not much you can do about that.

  But nowadays libraries are in many ways the last public space. Robert Frost defined home as “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” Ditto public libraries. Our doors are open—to everyone. In the summer, kids are dropped off here to spend the entire day. Some really little ones manage a city bus route. They don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s sometimes overwhelmingly sa
d, and yet they’re here. They aren’t on the streets.

  Just this morning, I got to help an old woman trying to find a book that she’d read in her childhood. She didn’t remember the title or the author, but knew it was about a panda. When I showed her the cover on my screen, she said, “Yes, yes, that’s it! My father read it to me once and cried at the end. It was the only time I’d ever seen him cry.” Books can break a man open, even ones about a panda, maybe especially so.

  I love the smell of books, the dust motes spiraling in sun. I love shelves and order. I love the carts and metal stools on wheels. I love the quiet carrels and the study rooms. I love the strobing of copy machines, the video and audio bins. I love the Saturday morning read-alouds for kids and how they try to hush when they come in; all these books can still demand a bit of awe. I love the teen reading groups, clutching books to their chests, little shields protecting them from the world’s assaults—those are my people. I even love the homeless shuffling in—it’s warm here with running water, safe—and the couples who make out in the stacks. I don’t blame them: books are sexy after all.

  If Chin’s office did, in fact, bring in career envisioning, I wouldn’t need it. I’m happy here. One day, I could have Gupta’s job, overseeing the place—like head zookeeper of all the bookish heartbeats.

  As the elevator sends me up, I imagine Fadra as an auntie of mine—the eccentric kind that my family doesn’t possess.

  I pause in front of the women’s room door on the third floor. I hear the hand blower going and Fadra singing what sounds like Janis Joplin. Was Fadra a hippy at some point? I steel myself, brush back my bangs, and walk in.

  Fadra is in the final stage of the process, her bright red hair flipped upside down under the hand blower, which she must have pushed on many, many times because the entire bathroom is warm. She doesn’t hear me walk in. Her hair dye box and latex gloves are in one of the sinks, its basin tinged a pinkish red.

  “Fadra!” I call out.

  Her head snaps around and then she flips it over. It’s impossible to tell how old she is. Her face looks old and her teeth make her look ancient. Her new brash hair color makes her face, by contrast, look older still. But her body moves quickly, like her bones are young.

  “What?” she says innocently.

  “You can’t dye your hair in here.”

  “That’s not written down anywhere.”

  “I think that’s because no one ever thought that someone would dye their hair in here.”

  “People dye their hair at the bus station bathroom.”

  “This isn’t the bus station bathroom.”

  “Well, I can do it!” Fadra says. “I already did it.”

  “I’m not saying you don’t have the ability to dye your hair in here. Obviously, you’ve proven you can. I’m saying you’re not allowed — in the future, okay?”

  “I don’t like it when you talk to me like this.” She curls her hands in and looks at her fingernails and I know what’s coming.

  “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t go to your dark place.”

  “I used to have bone-cutter forceps and ear openers and gooseneck hide stretchers and—”

  “I’m serious, Fadra! I do not want to hear about your previous life in the world of taxidermy!”

  “I once created a little scene of Canadian squirrels having sex in a little handmade canopy bed,” she says, which strikes me as oddly tender for Fadra, borderline sentimental. “Taxidermy is Greek for arrangement of skin.”

  “I know. You’ve told me this before. And I don’t like the way you talk about taxidermy because I think you’re purposefully giving the impression that you want to kill me and stuff me and stitch me up and put me in some weird display. It gives off a very creepy vibe and it feels like bullying.” We talk about bullying all the time in Youth Services and I can’t help that it pops out of my mouth, but as soon as I see Fadra’s reaction, I know I’ve gone too far.

  “You’re going to kick me out. Aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not kicking you out.” We had to kick her out once. She had a screaming fit in the audio section, in which she told Gupta that she’d stuff his “Gandhi ass.” Gupta did not like the reference to his ass looking like Gandhi’s.

  “I don’t touch the books, you know,” Fadra shouts. “I never do! I never mess with your stuff !”

  “You’re supposed to touch the books, Fadra. We’ve been over this. This is a library.”

  “I don’t like to read because it takes me to other places. I’m trying to just be where I am. Inside my own self.” I can appreciate this in a Buddhist kind of way. “You can’t make me read the books!”

  “You have to clean up in here. Okay? And don’t do it again. Gupta really wasn’t happy about it.”

  “Gupta can poop in a hole!”

  “No, let’s not rev up again, Fadra. Okay? Just calm it down.”

  “Okay, okay,” she says, “but I’m going to be me. You know that. Nothing anyone can do. I’m going to be me. You’re going to be you. Gupta’s going to be Gupta.”

  This feels like a compromise that I can accept—like the terms of some abstract peace accord. I say, “Agreed!” and I’m about to leave because there’s not much more I can do here, but then I stop. “Question: Do you think that our nature defines us or is it just our circumstances? Or is it something else? I mean, what did you mean that each of us is going to be ourselves?”

  She looks at me like I’m a child. “All I got is who I am. You have any more than that?”

  I think of José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher. “This famous thinker once said, ‘Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.’ ”

  “Ha!” Fadra says, looking at me sharply. “Are you still yearning? I thought you’d grown up already.”

  Is that what it means to grow up? Is the payment for adulthood an end to yearning? I’m flustered suddenly. It’s like someone’s lifted up the dirty wall-to-wall carpeting of life and revealed some ugly truth. “Uh, just don’t dye your hair in here anymore,” I say.

  “I’ll try not to,” she says, but, she is who she’s going to be, I guess.

  “And no more taxidermy talk, okay?”

  She stares at me. This she can’t promise, and I have to respect that.

  “Okay,” I say. As soon as the bathroom door swings shut behind me, I hear the hand blower rev up.

  I’VE SIGNED UP TO volunteer to record books for the blind in the back room of Special Collections. After my shift ends, this is where I’m headed.

  The visitors to Special Collections are as rare as the collections themselves: boxes of African American sheet music, war posters, rare books sheathed in protective wrappings, and my favorite—postcards, thirty-three boxes full of them, taking up twelve linear feet of shelving, most of them inscribed by the dead to the dead.

  I have to borrow a key to get into the Special Collections room by Jason Binter, who’s only here as a sub because Rita fell in love and joined the Peace Corps. Binter’s no genius, and how he ended up in library work is a ponderous mystery. But he has a lightly aged frat-boy look—without the date-rape vibe—and I’m eyeing him for a future.

  He sits in the sign-in room in Special Collections—a little glass room—as if Binter himself is the true rarity on display. I knock on the glass and he looks up a little dumbfounded. Is it because he was deep in thought or surprised to find himself in his surroundings, as if his life is a process of finding himself places he doesn’t expect to be? Hard to say.

  I smile and wave the apologetic sorry-to-interrupt half-hand crumple wave.

  He nods and waves me in.

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m here to volunteer. You know. Recording for the blind.” I lift my digital recorder and paperback as proof. I’m not going to lie: I want the points that come along with being the type of person who volunteers to record books for the blind.

  “You’re a good citizen,” Binter says, and it
strikes me as the kind of thing that might only be a hot come-on to a communist, speaking in a boozy Russian accent. Could this be Binter’s attempt at flirtation? I know, I know, this is a stretch, but librarian flirtation can be very subtle. He pulls a key from a desk drawer, unlocks the door for me.

  “Zank you, comrade,” I say, in a pseudo Russian accent, even though the Russian thing is something that only existed in my head.

  “Comrade?” he says curiously. I duck my head and shuffle past him and close the door.

  I sit at a desk, find my place in the book, and take a moment to collect myself. I’m supposed to pick books that haven’t been masterfully recorded already, but I always end up recording another version of a classic. Look, I’m a volunteer so I figure I should be allowed to read what I want. Today I’m working on The Great Gatsby.

  I’m reading about Mrs. Wilson at the party, after she changes her dress and how she seems to almost balloon into a different person. She expands and the room shrinks until it’s like she’s “revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.”

  I stop the recording right there. My hand shaking a little because I know she’s going to die. She’s going to be hit by a car. And then Gatsby’s going to be shot to death in his swimming pool.

  And, again, I think of my sister on her bicycle with its banana seat. Megan. A twelve-year-old girl I’ll never know. I imagine the car, though I don’t know what kind it was. I imagine a large bulky automobile, something that’s slow to start, slow to stop. It careens toward her. Her death will kill something inside of my parents. Figuratively, they’ll float like two dead bodies in a swimming pool. My birth, my childhood, my being are meant to revive them. But I know I’m a failure at this. It’s too much to ask of a little kid—of anyone.

  I hear Helen Keller whispering in my head, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” My parents tried to overcome suffering. I’m the result. Why am I thinking of my sister so often these days? Is it that I now believe that the tragedies that await us can be avoided, if fully envisioned?