The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai

  I slept in the apartment that night, as soundly as I had in months, and Tim knocked on my door at 10:00 a.m. to tell me he was “heading into battle.”

  “Seriously,” he said, “Lucy, if that pastor is there, and I stab him with my keys, will that ruin everything?”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t help laughing. “Stick to the script, Tim. And the pastor won’t be there. You look great, though.” He did. A gray suit from the costume department, a white shirt, no tie, scuffed dress shoes. His hair in a neat ponytail. He had a briefcase, and a clipboard with a pen and some kind of form on it. I looked more closely: it was one of the theater subscriber forms from the lobby, with the top folded back. The magazines were tucked under his arm. “You know which one is which?”

  He nodded. “Most definitely.”

  “Break a leg.”

  I spent the next hour cleaning, not because I thought Tim or the next tenant would particularly care how vacuumed the carpet was, but because it was the only thing I could think to do. I wiped the windows with vinegar, and I scrubbed the rotating plate from the microwave, and I emptied out the medicine cabinet.

  Finally there was Tim, banging on my door with both palms, racing in—out of breath and red and jubilant—and galloping circles around my coffee table.

  “I was brilliant!” he said. “Lucy, I was fucking brilliant, and there wasn’t a single reviewer there to see me! But I don’t care! I was fantastic, and yes, for the record, that kid is definitely one hundred percent queer. Flaming. You should have seen me! I’m like, ‘Ma’am, I have a free trial subscription here for you,’ and she’s about to just take it out of my hands, and so I go, ‘Listen, I actually get in trouble unless I give this directly to someone who’s in our target demographic,’ and then I say that I saw the basketball hoop outside, surely she has a teenage son, and she goes ‘No, he’s only eleven,’ and then suddenly he’s behind her in the doorway going ‘What? What?’ It was perfect!”

  I said, “Did he look okay?”

  “What, like healthy? Sure. Kind of, like, high-strung though. I would say maybe agitated. But he wasn’t bleeding or anything. They actually let me into the house. I’m standing there in the front hall, and the mom is asking what our affiliation is. So I say evangelical. I didn’t even know if that made sense, but apparently it did. So then I say exactly the part you said. I go, ‘Yes, we’re based in Vermont, but we also have offices in Iowa, Ohio, and Oahu, Hawaii.’ You should’ve seen the kid’s face. I think he thought I was about to out him. He was glaring at me, from behind the mom. And then it’s like I could see the wheels turning, and he’s figuring out that the only one who knew that was you. Meanwhile, the mom is going on and on about what’s our philosophy, who’s our publisher. So I hand her a copy, the clean copy, and I say, ‘You don’t have cats, do you? My eyes are watering.’ The kid goes, ‘No, just a guinea pig,’ and I say, ‘Oh, I grew up with ferrets.’ The mom is busy reading the magazine by this point, so I’m able to just wink at him, but then he gets it, you can tell he just completely gets it, and that’s when I hand him his copy. I say, ‘Look it over, see if you find something in there to relate to. Just really spend some time with it, when you have a moment to yourself, and see if it speaks to you.’ He practically crams it up his shirt. Didn’t want the mom to get it. That woman is completely anorexic, by the way.”

  Tim was still circling, and I was still sitting, shaking, watching this strange windup toy I’d set in motion. I said, “Tell me what the house looked like.”

  “Normal, I guess. There weren’t any huge crucifixes or anything, if that’s what you mean. It was really, really clean. I could see a piano in the living room. It was all very, like, Pottery Barn, but kind of cutesy. It was the kind of house that would’ve had needlepoint pillows of sailboats. Not that I saw any.”

  This was comforting, for some reason, this vision of normalcy. Or maybe it was just nice to have something to picture. I said, “So then what?”

  “Then check this out: I go, ‘So can I get your subscription today, or will you be filling out one of the cards in the center of the magazine?’ And the mom is in the middle of making some excuse about wanting to look it over some more, and Ian goes, ‘Mom, can I go upstairs and read it?’ I got the feeling she almost wanted to say no, like she wanted to check it out more first, but I was standing right there looking hopeful, so she says yes and shows me out. The kid was up the stairs before I even made it to the door. I’m betting he ran up there and locked his room. If he’s smart.” He stopped his pacing and held his arms out. “So? Did I do good?”

  He was probably just looking for applause, but I got up and hugged him. “You’re amazing. And you will never tell anyone about this.”

  After Tim left, I grabbed a few more things and walked in a daze to my car. It started raining as I headed out of town, and I drove by the Drakes’ quiet house once more, honked three times, and left Hannibal forever. I imagined Ian, up in his room, peeling back the magazine cover. He’d recognize my sloppy handwriting right away.

  What I’d written, sitting there in my ransacked apartment, were reading lists: “Books to Read When You’re 11” was the first one. It began with Danny, the Champion of the World, that charming paean to civil disobedience, and included the Oz series (“But make sure they’re by the real L. Frank Baum!” I’d written. “Not just plain Frank!”) and ten more books that I couldn’t stand the thought of Ian not reading, that I’d have piled on his outstretched arms if I were still his librarian.

  “Books to Read When You’re 12” started with The Giver and The Golden Compass and ended with Lord of the Flies.

  It was hard to picture Ian at fourteen, Ian at sixteen, but as the lists filled I could see his mind taking shape, and I could see that the fifteen-year-old Ian who’d just fallen in love with The Catcher in the Rye would be ready next for A Separate Peace and The Things They Carried and large doses of Whitman.

  I told eighteen-year-old Ian to read David Copperfield (“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”), and I told him to read Middlesex and A. E. Housman and Jeanette Winterson.

  I’d wanted, in those later lists, to include something more directly helpful, some books that would tell a sixteen-year-old how to reason with the father who wanted to throw him out of the house, or the mother who insisted he was going to hell—but all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

  After I finished the lists I’d tried, I really had, to write something of my own in there—a note, an encouragement, anything—but I couldn’t. The pen refused the paper.

  Because what it’s come down to, after that whole messy spring, that whole tortured summer, all the time since, is this: I no longer believe I can save people. I’ve tried, and I’ve failed, and while I’m sure there are people out in the world with that particular gift, I’m not one of them. I make too much of a mess of things. But books, on the other hand: I do still believe that books can save you.

  I believed that Ian Drake would get his books, as surely as any addict will get his drug. He would bribe his babysitter, he’d sneak out of the house at night and smash the library window. He’d sell his own guinea pig for book money. He would read under his tented comforter with a penlight. He’d hollow out his mattress and fill it with paperbacks. They could lock him in the house, but they could never convince him that the world wasn’t a bigger place than that. They’d wonder why they couldn’t break him. They’d wonder why he smiled when they sent him to his room.

  I believed that books might save him because I knew they had so far, and because I knew the people books had saved. They were college professors and actors and scientists and poets. They got to college and sat on dorm floors drinking coffee, amazed they’d finally found their soul mates. They always dressed a little out of season. Their names were enshrined on the pink cards in the pockets of all the
forgotten hardbacks in every library basement in America. If the librarians were lazy enough or nostalgic enough or smart enough, those names would stay there forever.

  If a Book Lacked an Epilogue, Ian Would Frequently Offer His Own

  I am the mortal at the end of this story. I am the monster at the end of this book. I’m left here alone to figure it all out, and I can’t quite. How do I catalogue it all? What sticker do I put on the spine? Ian once suggested that in addition to the mystery stickers and the sci-fi and animal ones, there should be special stickers for books with happy endings, books with sad endings, books that will trick you into reading the next in the series. “There should be ones with big teardrops,” he said, “like for the side of Where the Red Fern Grows. Because otherwise it isn’t fair. Like maybe you’re accidentally reading it in public, and then everyone will make fun of you for crying.” But what warning could I affix to the marvelous and perplexing tale of Ian Drake? A little blue sticker with a question mark, maybe. Crossed fingers. A penny in a fountain.

  But in real life, I won’t be in charge of those blue stickers ever again. No more deciding if a book is fantasy, or if it’s appropriate for the fragile youths of Hannibal. I found my new job after a summer at home—far from Hannibal and far from Chicago, and that’s all I really cared about. Here, twenty-year-olds check out books on feminist theories of vegetarianism or contemporary criticism of Hemingway, and no one ever asks me for salvation. All they need me to do is scan and stamp, scan and stamp. I’m content here. I’m stable. Or at least, I’m stationary.

  If I ever go back to the Hannibal library, it will be as a ghost. Ian always believed the library was haunted, and perhaps he was right. Isn’t it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and clichés? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust. My hands will still hold the book, will sweep the picture around the children’s circle, left to right, but nobody’s back there behind the spine. I’m the Nothing Hand. (Don’t let the rabbits know where I’m hiding.)

  Here are the pictures, then. Gather around and look close: runaways and borrowers, angels and aurochs and actors, crafty villains and small, scrappy heroes. Now, complain that the girl in front was blocking your view. Squint hard and ask why the artist drew it all wrong.

  I’m practically a ghost here already after all, pale and haunted behind my new desk, and I’ve realized this is what happens to characters no longer central to the main plot, the ones whose greatest adventure is now behind them. This is what becomes of the Mad Hatter, the evil stepsister, the used-up genie. They sit at an empty table and remember the day something extraordinary blew through town.

  For one brief moment that October, I was part of the story again—or maybe the story just caught up with me. Heading home from work, I got pulled over for speeding. I thought even then that it was all over, that Ian had turned me in. “Do you know how fast you were going?” the officer asked. So fast you wouldn’t believe, I wanted to say. So fast that I haven’t stopped moving in months, not even in my sleep. I opened the glove compartment for my registration, and five thousand restaurant mints fell onto the floor and the passenger seat and bounced off the gearshift into my lap. So Ian had been prepared for the long haul. We could have stuck it out another week, could have crossed some field into Canada half-starved but with fresh breath. I handed over the paper and felt my heart tighten and my bones break into a million sharp splinters: at least for a while, Ian had believed we would make it and never go back.

  Come closer for the final page now, and push aside the girl who keeps getting in your way. Demand to know first if it’s a happy ending or a sad one, if the good are rewarded and the evil punished. Peek at the last words. See if you can tell. Ask it again: Does it all turn out in the end?

  But I don’t know. I don’t know. It depends what you mean by end. The end of my story, or the end of his? Here is all I know: I still search for him, in the recesses of my computer, and I still come up with the Cape Cod plumber. But if he gets out, when he gets out, I’ll be able to find what becomes of him. There are a million ways it could all come out fine. There are a million ways it could end very badly. He must be fifteen by now, and maybe I won’t have to wait much longer to see. I remind myself again and again that in this day and age, we don’t really lose each other forever. There is no more Siberia.

  Squirm on the carpet and look at the clock. Ask if this story was true.

  Here are the final pictures. Here are the helpful captions. Here are some hopeful last words for the peekers-ahead, the ones like Ian and me who couldn’t help but read the last sentences first. (Perhaps I’ve misled them, the way I myself was misled—the way that deep down, I always assumed our courage was some kind of guarantee, that a happy ending was waiting for us, if only we could get there. Or perhaps I haven’t. Because who can say that it won’t still come true?)

  So here, patient listeners: your soothing epilogue. Imagine him happy. Imagine him spinning in circles. If I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Imagine him hiding those lists for eight long years. Imagine his heaven, where he can float through characters and books at will. (Let’s dream him up a king, a giant, a boy who can fly.) Imagine him already there, under his covers with the flashlight. For a blissful eternity, such a world should suffice. For now, it should save him.

  Let’s say that it does.