The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  Ian couldn’t see me from where he was, so I pointed silently down the biography aisle. She disappeared where he had, and after I heard Ian’s high screech, I watched her drag him back to the stairs, pink fingernails around his shoulder. Ian’s voice echoed down the steps: “But Mom, you can’t be mad at me, because—ow!—because when I was hiding, I already repented! Mom, I already repented, you’re not allowed to get mad!”

  I should have paid more attention, then, to his sneakiness, his slipperiness, his tendency to hide. I also should have noticed, the next week, when he started asking about the janitor. He stood in front of my desk, his face studiedly bored, his voice a monotone.

  “Who cleans this stupid library?”

  “I’m sorry, Ian, I didn’t understand that.”

  “I said, who cleans the library.”

  “A very nice lady named Mrs. Macready comes and vacuums. She has white hair.”

  “Does she clean it every day?”

  “I have no idea. Probably not. More like every other.”

  “Does she clean it before you get here, or after you leave?”

  “Okay, I have some work to do.”

  “I thought your work was answering questions for kids.”

  “Yes, questions about books. Do you have a question about a book?”

  He picked up Carry On, Mr. Bowditch from the edge of my desk. “Yes. If I dropped this, and we waited for the janitor to clean it up, would she clean it up before the library opened, or after it closed?”

  “The answer is you would clean it up, because you made the mess.”

  He dropped the book on the floor and ran upstairs.

  I didn’t see him for ten days after that, which might have been a record. The next time he came in he brought me a plate of cookies, each covered in bright blue frosting with a splotch of green in the middle. He looked almost like his old self, walking on tiptoes to where I stood by the return cart. I had decided not to sit down in my desk chair for a week, to see if the rash would clear up. Sonya waved at me, pointed her daughter toward the puppets, and headed back upstairs.

  “Even though it’s still January, I made cookies for St. Patrick’s Day, because it’s the next good holiday! The blue is to represent the ocean, and the green is to represent Ireland! I food-colored the frosting, and my hands are still blue.” He put the cellophane-covered paper plate on the return cart and showed me his pale blue palms.

  “You look like a Smurf.”

  “A what? And also, I’m sorry about throwing your book. And, the reason I haven’t been here is I had my baptism, and we had a party, and I got about five thousand books.”

  I peeled back the cellophane and took out a cookie. “What did you get?”

  “I got some origami books, and then these five books from this series called Towards the Light. It’s about these kids at the end of the earth, and most people have risen to heaven, but these kids stay behind to try to get everyone else saved. They’re really for teenagers, but they’re easy.”

  “Huh. Are they any good?”

  “Yeah, they’re really fun. There’s a movie of them, too, but my mom thinks it might be too scary. She has to watch it first, to see. Do you have any here?”

  I was trying to swallow the cookie, which was somehow both dry and sticky at the same time. “You know, we don’t have a lot of kids’ fiction that’s religious. But we do have nonfiction books about religion.”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s the ones like the stupid Eyewitness book with the dumb India gods with all the arms. I already read them all. You should get Towards the Light.”

  I knew the kind of series Ian was talking about. One week when I was twelve and staying with a born-again neighbor, I read three books off her daughter’s bookshelf and found them tremendous fun, the closest thing I’d ever read to a romance novel or a crime thriller. The only one I can still remember started on a charter plane flying over Africa, with a “backslidden” Christian noticing that the pilot prayed before he ate his sandwich. He asked him about it and they talked, but before long the plane crashed, leaving them all lost in the Sahara, et cetera, et cetera, until everyone found Jesus or died. But I hadn’t actually thought those books were good. How could Ian, the child who’d read The Wind in the Willows seven times, fall for it?

  “Anyway, it was pretty cool because I got to have friends from church come to my open house after, and that’s all I get this year because I’m too old for a birthday party.”

  His birthday was in April, I knew from his computer account. “What, eleven? That’s not too old at all,” I said. “Is no one in your grade having a party this year?”

  He sighed, peeled back the cellophane, and rearranged the cookies to fill the gap from the one I’d taken. “It’s not exactly that. It’s more that, okay, last year? I had my party and all the people I wanted to invite were girls, and we had this very fantastic party that was mostly just a treasure hunt outside. But my dad said this year it has to be either all boys or exactly half and half. And no one even does a half and half party anymore. Everyone does a sleepover, and I just really don’t want to. So my dad said I can’t have a party at all, and then I said okay, could I have my friends from this religion class thing instead, and he said definitely not, but I don’t even get why. So then he said I was too old for birthdays anyway, and I should just save up my allowance and buy myself something.”

  Ian seemed sad—devastated, really—but I got the impression the wound wasn’t fresh. His birthday was still four months away, but he’d already been stewing on this one awhile. I had tried, all along, to be noncommittal, the neutral and friendly librarian—kind of like the therapist who just sits and nods. But in this case, I couldn’t help taking sides. I said, “Ian, that really doesn’t sound fair. I don’t think that’s fair at all.”

  He smiled at me, looked over his shoulder to make sure Sonya wasn’t coming down the stairs, and helped himself to an Ireland cookie. I took a second myself, although the first was still mostly lodged in my throat.

  What I needed right then was the perfect novel to put in his hands, the one that would fly him fifty thousand miles away from his mother and Pastor Bob Lawson and Hannibal, Missouri. Instead I said, “These cookies are fantastic.”

  11

  Pumpkin Head

  I found Tim the artistic director leaning against the wall outside his apartment, his eyes wet and happy. I was back early from Glenn’s, having made an excuse about work in the morning.

  “Lucy the librarian!” He kissed me on the cheek. “I’m completely drunk! We’re having a State of the Union party! I’m getting the costumes! Come help me!” He sat on the floor to tie his shoe. Inside his apartment people were laughing, and it sounded like plates were breaking.

  “Tim, here’s a question for you,” I said as we headed down to the costume shop.

  Tim unlocked the door and pulled the chain on the overhead lightbulb. This was the room where I came to do my laundry and had once shrieked at what I thought was an animal on the table but turned out to be a wig. It was a carefully organized space, with rows of labeled plastic bins: “Sparklies,” “Hats,” “Military,” “Tights,” “Women’s Shoes, 7–9,” “Elastics.” The walls were decorated with old show posters and an enormous buck’s head with a straw hat hanging off one antler.

  “Yes!” he shouted. “A question! Ask!” He pulled a cardboard box from under the table in the middle of the room and started pawing through it.

  “Okay,” I said. “What books would you suggest for a ten-year-old boy who needs some indirect support on some sexuality issues he might or might not have?”

  “Oh.” He picked a red bathrobe out of the box and tossed it across the ancient avocado green sewing machine in the corner. “There’s tons of good stuff out there now, but it’s mainly for older kids. Is he a good reader? Pick out some costumes. Pretty much anything. We have, like, sixty-five people, I swear to God. I didn’t know Lenny had friends.”

  I pulled the Hats bin from its shelf
. There was an Abe Lincoln near the top, which I figured was as good as anything. I took it out and put it on the table. “The thing is, it has to be innocuous. His parents would have a fit if I gave him, like, Come On Out of the Closet, Bobby.”

  “An excellent piece of literature, if I recall.” He was draping both his shoulders with piles of what looked like housedresses. “Seriously, I can answer this question.” He pointed his finger at me and squinted. “ ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ That’s what you want.”

  “No,” I said. “This kid is ten. And smart. He’d laugh at me.”

  “Okay. Then what you want is definitely the Oz series. The whole thing, not just the first one.” I started to agree, but he kept talking. “Because, here’s the thing about Oz.” He emptied the whole Sparklies bin onto the table, then scooped it all back in again. He put the bin in my arms and set the Lincoln hat on top of it. “Because you know there’s this whole rabid gay cult following, right? Which is only partly due to Judy Garland.” He grabbed two shiny Elizabethan-looking tunics off the clothes rack, picked up the red bathrobe, and opened the door. “Two things: in the whole series, no real love stories. Can you grab the light? There’s only these really farcical ones. So it’s like this realm free from hetero love. And there’s even a boy who turns into a girl. Just, poof.”

  “Right. Ozma,” I said.

  “And second, everyone is so weird, but they’re all completely accepted. It’s like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy’s made of tin, and you’re a talking chicken, but what the hell, let’s do a road trip.”

  Lenny met us in the upstairs hall, looking as drunk as Tim. He grabbed the dresses off Tim’s shoulders, shouted “Costumes!” and flung them into the apartment. People were already putting them on over their clothes as we came through the door. Beth Hopkins, the red-haired actress whose photos I’d helped desecrate, ran and grabbed the Sparklies bin from my arms and started tossing the glittery headbands and scarves and earrings around the room.

  “Everybody, you know Lucy!” Tim shouted. “We love Lucy! She puts up with everything!”

  Beth wheeled around and grabbed my shoulder. “You were a fantastic bride! A beautiful bride!”

  I laughed. “How long did it take you to figure it all out?”

  “Oh my God, like, two weeks! Literally!”

  I ended up watching the party more than participating in it. The Lincoln hat was placed on my head at one point, and I settled into the love seat with a beer Lenny got me. Most of the men put on dresses to become Republican housewives, some of the women lounged around as prostitutes, others were various Shakespearean characters, and Tim slouched in a big chair with the bathrobe and shouted racial slurs across the room. Lenny turned up the TV as the president stepped to the podium and the white-haired men behind him stood to applaud. The point of the party seemed to be to react to the address in a manner appropriate to your assumed character. Lenny, in one of the Elizabethan tunics, would scream and cross himself whenever the space program was mentioned. For the most part, Tim and the Republican housewives shouted encouragement at any hint of bigotry. Whenever the president said “nucular,” everyone was obliged to take a drink.

  I leaned my head back and stared at my president, his satellite-dish ears and stern eyes. He spoke into the camera about preserving civilization. “We are all ambassadors,” he said, “spreading the good news of America abroad. American values, American freedoms. And we will fight for those values. And we will preserve those values.”

  “Yeah, hegemony!” shouted Tim, tossing his empty beer bottle towards the bookcase.

  “Hail Caesar!” shouted a prostitute.

  Someone started singing “O Canada.”

  I wondered, as I sat there, if there were ever moments of unadulterated reality in Tim’s life. Every time I saw him he was either drunk or wearing a costume or both.

  I watched him now undoing his ponytail and pulling his blond hair straight down around his face. “I’m John Lennon!” he shouted in a British accent. “I’m bloody confused by all this shit. Who the bloody hell is this large-eared bloke? Hey! Abraham Lincoln! You’re bloody silent! What do you make of this president?”

  I tried to think of something Lincolnesque to say. Parts of the Gettysburg Address went through my head, but that wasn’t exactly funny.

  “Give him a break!” the stage manager shouted for me. “He’s dead, for chrissake!”

  “Well so am I!” wailed Lennon. “We’re two bloody victims, we are!”

  The president told a man in the front row to stand up. This man had been laid off two years ago, and now because of business growth he enjoyed a new job managing an assembly line. He could feed his six children now. The man looked left and right like a nervous squirrel. He didn’t seem sure when to sit down again. I always hated the presidential speeches even when I liked the president, hated their upbeat transparency. Our national actor, hired to tell us it would all be fine.

  “You are lucky,” my father would often say, “that you can make fun of your president this way. You know what happened if you made jokes about Stalin? If someone wanted to tell you a joke about Stalin, he took you first in a dark closet and checked for wires. People died all the time because of jokes. Most men who were dragged away in the night, it was because someone overheard their stupid joke. Have I told you the one about the cat and the mustard?”

  Around midnight, Tim came over suddenly and sat beside me, his hand on my shoulder. “There’s another thing,” he said. “About Oz.” He looked very drunk, but he didn’t sound it. “I think part of the appeal is that there’s this guy who can fix everything for you. They all go to the wizard to be normal, you know? That’s what draws some kids in. But then it doesn’t work out, and the book totally sucker punches them with the humbug thing. And that’s what resonates, because it’s what they knew all along in their gut.” And then he belched and laughed at himself.

  I fell asleep fast that night with beer sloshing in my stomach, and slept like I always do, with my right arm straight up under my head like I’m the Statue of Liberty, like clueless me is trying to light someone’s way.

  12

  The Week Before

  Anyone who’s heard this kind of story before, the kind where someone does something rash and throws away everything she has, will be looking for what I was running away from. Because surely I was running away from something, too. Surely I must have been deeply dissatisfied with my life. Or I had a failed and embarrassing affair, or I didn’t want to face that I was subconsciously in love with Rocky, or I felt like a fake because I was, believe it or not, illiterate. Yes, there you go. I was an illiterate librarian, who needed to run away because I’d stolen money from Rocky after he broke my heart by having an affair with Loraine.

  No. There was nothing. I wasn’t at a boiling point; I’d just been simmering along. Granted, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with my job. I’d always thought that by twenty-six I’d be doing something a little more glamorous with my life. Hannibal was a little stifling. I was fairly bored. None of those qualifies as a reason, an excuse, or even a motivation for doing what I did. If that makes me seem somehow selfless, like everything I did was for Ian, it shouldn’t. I was more hapless than selfless, and dumb luck had a lot to do with it.

  Hapless, clueless, directionless. Selfless only by default. A Hull, through and through.

  So there it is: I had no particular reason to leave, no particular reason to throw my life away. But I didn’t have much holding me there, either.

  The rash on my legs and back had turned to thick red scabs. After the fifth prescription lotion failed to work, Dr. Chen told me to get more sleep. “And drink more water,” she said. “Sometimes our bodies are just trying to tell us something.”

  The snow was a crust on the grass that March, but the parking lots were brown slush. Every morning, I thought of calling in sick.

  Rocky and I hadn’t been to a movie in two months. When I asked how things were going, he’d say something l
ike “Lots of Nora Roberts.”

  “Yeah, but how are you?”

  “Superb.”

  Ian came downstairs one afternoon, his eyes red around the rims like he’d either been crying or rubbing his face on a cat. He called hello on his way to the new science fiction display that I’d decorated with tinfoil aliens, and then said, “Mr. Walters says to send up staples.” Mr. Walters was Rocky, and I wondered why he hadn’t phoned down or e-mailed. When Ian checked out The Little Grey Men ten minutes later (or rather, when I checked it out for him under my own name and watched as he shoved it halfway down his pants), I handed him a box of staples and asked him to take it up. Ian hadn’t been staying long, lately. His fingernails were half gone from biting.

  “Is Mr. Walters your boyfriend?” he asked. He balanced the staple box on top of his head, and stuck both arms out for balance.

  “No. I have a different boyfriend.” I didn’t like that it felt so urgent to set the record straight.

  “You should have Mr. Walters be your boyfriend. He has a red cross.”

  “A what?”

  Ian turned and the staples fell onto the floor. He put them back on his head and held them there with one hand as he walked to the stairs. “I forget what it is,” he called back. “A red something. I’m a Nigerian woman, and I’m crossing the Sahara.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  When I went up to get lunch across the street, I thought I’d ask Rocky if he knew what Ian meant about the red cross, but both when I left and when I returned, Rocky was back in the office. I got the feeling he wanted me to ask what was wrong, but I didn’t feel like playing that game.

  And this is where the story should end, and sometimes, sitting here, pressing the top of my knee against the bottom of the table, listening to the shallow keystrokes of the graduate students at their laptops, waiting for the sun to sink into the window frame and blind me with red light, sometimes I think this is where it ended, that everything that followed was a dream. That maybe I’m looking back now, imagining what might have happened if only I’d done something. When really I did nothing. When I spent the next five years sitting peacefully in Hannibal, watching Ian turn eleven and then twelve, then realizing he hadn’t been in to see me for a while, then seeing him only a couple of times a year as I drove past him on the sidewalk and wondered how his life was going, not wanting to embarrass him by rolling down my window and calling out.