Instead, he sits where he is, folding his long legs under him and his arms across his chest. Then he looks expectantly at me with wide, shiny eyes. I hold out the rye bottle.
“You’re going to need it,” I say.
“Not as much as you do,” says Will, without guile.
I laugh again, glancing down at myself. Feather robe with the feathers molting. Slippers with the toes poking through. I can’t see my hair, of course, but I can feel it trying to flap off my head in a thousand different directions every time the draft pours through the windows.
I take a gulp, extend the bottle again, and he says, “Look. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to intrude. I just…I have to know what you saw.”
The laughter evaporates in my throat, and the rye on my tongue.
“Please. I have to know.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I lie. My hands start to shake, and I slip the one not holding the bottle into my pocket.
But he’s all too eager to explain. “Oh. I see. You probably…I mean, since you don’t…since I’m guessing you don’t go to the depots anymore, you probably aren’t keeping up with what’s happening.”
“Probably not.” Ezzie’s lens case beats, and I sit down opposite my guest.
“I just need to ask you one thing, okay? Then I’ll leave you alone. At the moment your wife—”
“She wasn’t my wife.”
“Sorry. Lover—”
I start to squelch that, too, but how to explain? The simple truth was that we’d almost never been physical with each other, and even if we’d wanted to be, the overgrown bramble-hedge of scabs and scarring up both of Ezzie’s thighs would have been a serious turn-off for me. I hate pain. The funny thing about Ezzie—it took years of our friendship for me to learn this—was that she did, too.
My visitor hesitates a moment longer. Then he tries again. “At the moment she…vanished…”
Again, he waits for me to chime in. I can’t, and don’t.
“I just need to know,” says Will. “Did you see anyone?”
Careful, now. Careful. How is this supposed to work? How does the story they all tell themselves go? “How do you mean?” I say eventually. “Are you asking were there others with us in the Depository that night? There were.” That was true enough, although they’d all been on the ground floor. None of them had even heard Ezzie scream.
My visitor stares at me, and I realize I’ve played too dumb. And this is no journalist, no private investigator. He’s a fellow Crawler. Maybe even fellow ex-Crawler. And he’s paid for the privilege, same as me.
Or, not quite the same.
“Sorry,” I say. “Habit.”
“So,” says Will. “Did you?”
I blow out a long breath. My heart bangs, and my skin prickles in the cold. Ghost-touch of Ezzie’s hair across my forearms. “The thing is, I don’t really know when it happened. I mean, not the exact moment. Do you?”
Abruptly, Will begins to weep. He wipes the tears away once with the heel of one huge hand, but otherwise he remains motionless. His voice comes out hoarse, as though ice has lodged in it. “Now I do.”
In spite of myself—in spite of everything—I lean forward, clutching the rye bottle. “How?”
He tells me.
“It was going to be our last one, at least for a long time. The St. Paul. Have you heard about that one? It’s massive. It’s in six abandoned warehouses right on the Mississippi. It stinks. Some local told us the river itself catches fire a couple times a year near there. And there aren’t any windows, so the wind blows all the filth from the barges and all the snow and ice in the winter right into the depot. So the books are in awful shape, even by depot standards.
“But God, there are so many. So, so many.
“And they’re not even textbooks, mostly. Not shit stuff. This one started just like Dallas. The last used shop owners in the Twin Cities all closed on the same date, in the middle of a snowstorm in the middle of January in the middle of the night. They brought everything they had left to the warehouses. I’ve heard Crawlers say that for that first year or so, there were even sections. Local History. True Crime. Classics.
“Sections. Can you imagine?
“Anyway. This was our honeymoon. It was Bri’s idea, even though I’m the Crawler. I don’t even think she’d been to a depot before she met me. But she loved the adventure. Dressing up in black, going to those neighborhoods, getting dirty. Hiking between twenty-foot mounds of books with our flashlight beams on each other’s faces and all that moldy paper whispering all over the place. Bri used to say it was like sneaking into an old-age home and finding all the residents sitting up in their beds gossiping all night.
“You know how it is, I guess. I don’t know why I’m telling you.
“This was summer before last. Our St. Paul night. It was so humid. The river wasn’t on fire, but it smelled oily. There’s a park on the Minneapolis side where I guess people with no sense of smell can picnic and watch barges, but on the St. Paul side, there’s just warehouses and landfills and five hundred million mosquitoes. That whining never leaves your ears. I swear, it’s like the world has sprung a leak, and everything is just spilling out of it somewhere.
“For our honeymoon, we’d hit five depots in four cities in four days. St. Louis, Topeka, Lincoln, Wall. You been to Wall? South Dakota? It’s right on the prairie, maybe a hundred yards from that famous drug store. It’s just a big barn. There’s almost nothing in it but maps and dried-out pens and thousands of copies of some old biology textbook about evolution. But we saw a buffalo. It strolled right past the doors while we were inside. One buffalo. Bri loved it.”
He stops, and I think he’s going to weep again. He seems to think so, too, and keeps one hand hovering near his eyes. But then he drops the hand and goes on.
“At the first four depots—every night until the last night—Bri covered herself completely before we went. Black tights, long black skirt, black sweater, black wool hat. She said it was for germs, and I teased her so hard. My little suburban rich girl. Hardly held a book in her life. Not a real one, and definitely not one anyone else had read first. She always said she’d be sure to send the ambulance when I got diphtheria and collapsed, and I told her I wasn’t planning on drinking the books, just touching them, maybe taking a few, and she’d say, ‘Diphtheria. Don’t say I never told you so.’ She had this way of saying things like that. And this laugh. She could make ‘Hello’ into a running joke. She had so many fucking friends…”
Will is weeping again, and this time he takes the bottle when I offer it. If he sees my hand shaking, he’s polite enough not to say so or smart enough not to ask.
Diphtheria. Bri might have had many friends, but Ezzie wouldn’t have been one of them. Diphtheria—virulent and fatal disease causing permanent and irreversible dippiness. No known cure. That’s what Ezzie would have said.
But Will’s story has brought it all back. Our first depot night, at the very first depot. The Roosevelt, Michigan warehouse, where the books sprout mushrooms from their ruined pages and the hills of still-shrinkwrapped texts and composition notebooks rise shoulder high and higher, a mountain range of waste paper complete with alpine meadows of pink and green binders and waterfalls of paperclips and liquid paper bottles. Miles and miles of them. There’s even weather; the rot and damp create a haze that rises from the ground on warmer nights and drifts about the giant, echoing space, as though the words themselves have lifted right off the pages like little Loraxes and floated toward the window sockets to dissipate over the abandoned thoroughfares of the Motor City.
We were there for hours, sifting things, picking toadstools, staring at the giant graffiti phoenix on the second story wall, massive and orange and angry, rising out of the mural of a broken hardback. I didn’t find anything worth having, and Ezzie brought home just one book. The Scott Michelin 4th Grade Guide to Native America, Eighth Edition.
That very night, though we got back to our loft after four
in the morning, Ezzie began to work. For weeks, night after night, all night long, she kept at it, barely speaking, rarely even retreating into the bathroom for her razor blades. Finally, I came home from work one evening to find the table bedecked with roses, a plate of the Hungarian goulash she never made any more steaming on the table, and Ezzie’s first real masterpiece laid beside the vase for my perusal.
What she’d done was so simple, really. So quiet. At first, I wasn’t even sure she’d done anything. Then, as I flipped the pages, past sketches of Sacajawea and photographs of wigwams, I began to notice little smudges that might have been accidental fingerprints from tiny nine year-old hands, except there were too many, and sometimes they were strewn across the page in unlikely or impossible patterns: half a forefinger here, a thumb all the way down next to the number, a red pen splash in the middle of a chart. As though a spider had stepped in an inkwell and then danced over the text. Then I started noticing the words missing. Some whited away, some stitched closed. Then there were the blotches, bug-shaped, pressed between lines. Some of them, I think, really were bugs. And then the little razor cuts. Thousands of them. If I removed the binding, I half-suspected, and unfolded the whole, I’d find a snowflake pattern in the pages. Or something else entirely.
There was more. I can’t explain the effect. It wasn’t any one thing, but the cumulative impact. An invented history of a history book no one had read, or would ever read.
That night, while I was asleep, Ezzie went back to the Roosevelt Depot without me. I couldn’t believe it when I woke, told her how crazy that had been and how dangerous that place was, as if she needed me to tell her. But she was already back at her work table, hunched over her next project.
I close my eyes, and just like every time I close my eyes, now, I see her there. Crouched in her chair in the middle of the night, cross-hatched thighs drawn up under her nightshirt, unbound hair hooding her, blocking the light of her face from my sight like a blackout shade.
“I don’t know why Bri didn’t take her gloves to St. Paul,” Will says. “Other than that it was crazy hot. Just putting on my hat felt like dumping a bucket of sweat on my head. We caught a bus across the river. There weren’t any stops near the depot, and the guy didn’t want to let us off, but Bri chatted him up and got him whistling Janet Jackson songs, and finally he agreed to drop us. He even said he’d come back in three hours, and that we’d better be there, for our own sakes.
“We walked the warehouses, and the sun went down. At first, we were trying everything we could think of to fend off mosquitoes, but eventually we gave up and let the little fuckers feast. We watched the trash barges floating in the middle of the big, brown river. They weren’t even moving. They could have been swim rafts, except no one in their right mind would stick a toe in that water, let alone swim it. In that park I told you about—the one on the Minneapolis side?—there was some kind of military band. We could barely hear it. Not the tune or anything, just that there was one.
“The St. Paul side was completely empty, though. There were a couple abandoned cars, one working streetlight, some pigeons hopping around, and that’s about it. But there wasn’t anything threatening. Not like St. Louis or Detroit or anything. It was just empty.
“We weren’t even the only ones at the depot. Not even close. We came around the corner of this huge ship-container building, and there was this old woman sitting in what I guess must have been the parking lot on a little pile of tires. She had a parasol over her head and everything, and a thermos full of lemonade. She gave us some. She had this whole stack of tatty Dickens novels with her. I have no idea whether she brought them or found them. They were just crappy school editions, nothing valuable, but intact. Totally readable. Nice.
“‘It’s like summer camp in there tonight,’” she told us.
“It was more like a library, though. Isn’t it weird how books do that? I mean, who established the whispering rule for depots?
“There were certainly plenty of other Crawlers in the warehouse. Probably fifteen, maybe even twenty. It seemed like most of them knew each other. We figured they came in a group, maybe some community college urban archaeology class or something. We kept seeing them in little bunches, picking apart a book pile or kneeling near some torn-up notepads or just standing in one of the makeshift rows, taking it all in. It almost felt like we were wandering in a downtown Japanese garden, not a depot, with all those flashlights everywhere and the moonlight outside and the snatches of music from over the river.
“For the first hour or so, Bri stayed by me. I think the place had been a canning factory, once; there were these little curls of rusty metal all over the place. I picked Bri a bouquet of toadstools, and she slid one through the top buttonhole of her sweater. That’s when I noticed she wasn’t wearing her gloves, and I almost said something. For a while afterwards, I thought maybe that’s what had happened, or why it had happened then. Until I started hearing about all the others.
“Do you think there’s some reason it’s mostly happening to women?”
He stops again, as though he actually thinks I can enlighten him. As though he and I have anything whatsoever in common, except loss. As if anyone does. There’s a bleak joke here, somewhere. Something about there always having been more women readers. Instead of making it, I jam the rye bottle in my mouth. In the draft, in the Lake Superior wind, I hear Ezzie’s laughter.
“Well,” he says. “What happened is, I found a book. Adventures For the Young and Adventurous. I only picked it up because it was still sealed in a wrinkly plastic baggy. The spine almost fell apart when I eased the covers open. But the first story was “The Man with the Cream Tarts.” You know it? I didn’t. I didn’t even know it was Stevenson until…until months later. When everything was over. The title page had so much mold, even I wished I had Bri’s gloves. I used my sleeve to turn it. But the inside pages were relatively clean. And right off, I hit one of those sentences: ‘He was a remarkable man even by what was known of him; and that was but a small part of what he actually did.’ God.”
Will makes a whistling sound. Then he shudders.
“There was a little window way up the wall behind where we were, and I just sat down right there. I started to read aloud to Bri, but it was too echoey. Every ‘s’ sounded like a rattlesnake.
“Bri finally grinned and pointed at the mold on my book. She mouthed, ‘Diphtheria’ at me. Then she wandered off around a mound of staplers with their tops pried up. As soon as she was out of sight, I went back to reading.
“I read the whole story. By then, the moon had risen past the window, and most of the light was gone. But my eyes had adjusted. At some point, I realized it had been a long time since I’d heard any music from across the river or muffled conversations from our companions in the depot. I closed the book, and the cover came away in my hands like an old scab.
“As soon as I stood up, I finally started to understand how vast this place was. It might be the biggest one of all. When we came in, there’d been shadows, at least, and most of them were moving. But now nothing was distinct, everything was just dark, and I couldn’t hear a thing. I felt like I’d fallen asleep in school and gotten locked in overnight. I opened my mouth to call for Bri, then thought better of it and moved off in the direction she’d gone.
“I wasn’t going to shout. Not in there. Not yet. But looking for someone in a depot is kind of like looking for land in the middle of the ocean, you know? There aren’t any aisles. There’s no reason for anybody to have gone one way or another. There’s no food court. There’s only deeper into the depot, or out the doors.
“My first thought was that Bri had gone out. That old woman with the lemonade would have drawn her. She liked people the same way you and I like books.
“So I went what I thought was back the way we’d come. Only there weren’t flashlight beams around anymore, and it’s not as though we’d dropped a breadcrumb trail or paid any attention to where we were or anything. I walked what felt like a qua
rter mile in as straight a line as I could judge, and all I saw were huge piles of paperbacks and towers of old cardboard boxes. I didn’t hear anything except my own feet. There was a little light, and it didn’t seem far away, just indirect. I couldn’t get a fix on the source. Twice, I thought I heard the river to my right and turned down the first passage I came to, only to find another endless depot row.
“By now, I was calling Bri’s name. Not too loud. But I was definitely making myself heard. Even to myself, I sounded strange, like some croaking bird in the eaves. I had a flashlight, but I wasn’t using it. I kept hoping I’d spot hers. Or anyone’s.
‘In my mind—I know this can’t be true, but I swear I remember every step I took—I walked for an hour. Either it had gotten darker or I’d gone deeper into the depot or my eyes had stopped adjusting, because I could barely even see my hands. A couple times, I put my foot down on a shifting pile of papers and slipped. The first time, I cut my hand bad on a little semi-circular metal scrap. The next, the paper I fell into was all wet, and it stank. It was like lying on lilies in a dead pond. I’d had enough. I opened my mouth to start yelling Bri’s name, and then…
“Then…”
For a second, I think Will has stopped because my face has given me away. Of course it must have. I can’t seem to get my mouth to close, and the goddamn draft has cemented me where I am, crystallized me like an icicle. He probably thinks it’s because I’m anticipating what comes next. Really, I’m just fixating on the scrap of metal, the cut it must have opened in his hand. Little razor cut.
All at once, he’s on his feet, looming. I still can’t make myself move, but the survival instincts that got me out of Detroit three years ago, that have kept me moving to new places ever since, that launch me out of bed and to the grocery store for rye but also carrots and cereal and winter gloves, has awoken at last. I’m trying to remember where I left the snow-shovel, just in case I need to murder my way out of this room.
The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Page 21
