The Janus Tree: And Other Stories

by Glen Hirshberg

  After-words

  Aaron came back on a damp, foggy night in early June. I’d just shown Mrs. Morton out the clinic’s front door. She’d cursed my name, spit on the linoleum in the waiting room, and rebuffed my offer to walk her to the bus. I stood under the dripping overhang anyway and watched her edge down the block, through the swarms of homeless people already emerging out of the mist to perch against the shuttered windows of the shelter next door, even though dinner wasn’t for over an hour yet. She didn’t actually need the motorized wheelchair I’d offered to make Medicaid provide for her yet. And the drugs she’d begged me for, weeping, gripping my lab-coat in her clawed hands, might actually have helped, if only temporarily.

  But she wouldn’t have been able to take the drugs anyway. Her dealer-grandson would have ripped them from her hands the second she got back to her one-room apartment. Maybe he wouldn’t kill her for not coming home with them. Some of my patient’s grandsons let them live.

  Retreating inside, I locked the door, making straight for my sanctuary in the back. I did notice, as I turned the knob, that the lights were already on, reprimanded myself for the waste and in the same moment realized I hadn’t left them on, and the shadow separated from the shelves along the back wall and lurched toward me.

  Gasping, I stumbled back, tripping toward the nearest examination room so I could lock myself in. Hands grabbed me around both shoulders and spun me around.

  “Aunt A., it’s me,” he said.

  I recognized the voice instantly, of course. But he was backlit by the lamp in my sanctuary. And his presence was so unexpected, and I’d dreamed of it for so hopelessly long, that it still took me a moment to understand what was happening.

  “Aaron?”

  My hands flew up automatically to hug him, pull his face to my shoulder, but he flinched back. I stared at him, silhouetted against my bookcases. There were flakes of what looked like sawdust in his hair, and the grit on his hands and throat had thickened and coagulated into little black spider-shapes. I imagined them scurrying up his sleeves, down his collarbone into the drooping neck of his threadbare sweatshirt. Tears welled in my eyes.

  “You look filthy,” I said. “Happy birthday.”

  He flinched again, ran a shaky hand through his mess of dark curls.

  “Aaron, my god, are you alright?”

  “You still remember my birthday?”

  The fury that had also been massing these last four years, ever since he’d walked out of his father’s life and mine, erupted from me. “If you were dead a hundred years, I’d remember your birthday, you stupid, selfish—”

  “You’re not my mother, Aunt A.”

  “I’m not your aunt, either. So just A. Okay?”

  Squinting his eyes, he looked at me, in that wondrous way he’d had even when I’d first met him, when he was three years old. A gaze so quiet it could lure mice from their hiding places, baby oak trees from their acorns. That’s how I’d put in the bedtime stories I used to tell him when he was four and five, during the years I’d lived with and almost won the love of his recently widowed, lost, marvelous father. The saddest, best years of my life.

  “Go wash your face,” I said, and felt myself smile. “Your hands, too. No touching my books with those hands.”

  I got just a ghost of a smile. He moved off toward the bathroom, limping visibly, and twice he had to put his hands out to steady himself against the wall. What had they done to him in the goddamn Library? The home he’d traded his life and my love and his father’s love for.

  Out of habit, I went to the shelves, trailed my fingers along the spines. The sagas-and-wonders section, Norse gods and Kwaidan and Pu Songling. Because they’d always been Aaron’s favorites, back when he’d still stopped here on his way home from school and let me read to him. And because this was clearly a night for fox spirits and changelings: fog in summer; my patients spitting curses; Aaron coming back.

  Through a fresh swell of tears, I realized I’d better call Oliver, let him know his son was alive. I took a step toward my desk and Aaron reappeared in the doorway.

  “Well?” he said.

  In truth, he looked better than I’d worried he would. He was gaunt, alright, still grit-encrusted everywhere but his face and hands, pasty in that trademark Library way. But his hair, though filthy, shone its familiar, lustrous black, and his dark eyes still flashed with mischief-specks of hazel and green. Fox-spirit eyes, alright.

  “I’m calling your dad.”

  “What for?”

  “To tell him you’re alright, what do you think?”

  “What makes you think he gives a shit?”

  “Aaron, you can’t really think—”

  “More to the point, what makes you think he wants to hear it from you? God, I’ve never understood it. Why are you still friends with him. Why did you let him treat you like that?”

  “What? Aaron, you don’t know anything about it. And it was a long time ago. I still care—”

  “I need your help,” he said, and one of his legs quivered visibly, and he almost fell down.

  Dropping the phone, I moved fast around my desk, put my hand to his cheek, then pulled him against me. “You’ve got a fever.”

  He pushed me away, steadied himself. “Not me,” he murmured. Then he looked me up and down. “You’re looking pretty undernourished yourself, Aunt A.” Another ghost-smile.

  I couldn’t tell if he was concerned or teasing, and I didn’t care. “Then let’s go eat. Saigon Sandwich Shop. When’s the last time? I’ll get my coat.”

  “I need you to come to the Library,” he said, and the hope I’d almost allowed myself froze in my chest.

  “Aaron,” I started, after a few silent moments, “I can’t—”

  “Oh, don’t start, Aunt A. Christ, sometimes you really are like him.” The contempt in his voice hit me like spittle. “I’m not asking you to join. Or to do anything that might help the cause. It’s not like either you or my father understand about why saving books from extinction might be worth fighting for or anything, how could you?” He flung a single, ironic wave toward my shelves.

  “So why are we going there?” I said.

  “Because he’s sick.”

  “Who’s sick?”

  “Erick Kinney.”

  Whatever else I’d meant to say evaporated from my lips. “The Librarian, Erick Kinney?”

  “Yes, The Librarian Erick Kinney. He’s really sick. I mean, a lot of us are sick. Bad flu bug or something. But he’s all twisted up. I think he’s going to die.”

  For a long moment, I just looked at him. My long-ago almost-stepson. The closest I was ever likely to get, now, to an actual son. Once upon a time—not so long ago—when he’d still wanted me in his life, that had seemed very nearly enough.

  “I’ll get my coat and my keys,” I said.

  “You can’t take your car down there. To the Library. It’s not safe.”

  “My Saturn? Too yellow, you think?”

  “Jesus Christ, that’s still your car? What is it, twenty years old? Aren’t you a doctor?”

  “Probably still got the dirt from our Sequoia trip.”

  “The one we took when I was twelve?”

  “You’ll find it under the dirt from the decade since then.”

  “We can take that car,” Aaron said. This time, his smile was bright and unexpected and gentle. I was so grateful that I almost cried out, but controlled myself.

  He leaned his head back, rolled it very slowly around his shoulders, stopped halfway with a wince.

  “Are you alright, Aaron?”

  “Get your keys.”

  “I’m getting you antibiotics, too.”

  “Later.”

  The homeless had already gone in to dinner, and the smell of burnt tomatoes and chicken grease wafted from the doors of the shelter. From somewhere not far, metal clanged, but we were the only things moving on the entire block. All around us, forever leaning and tilting on its hills, San Francisco rode the w
aves of marine layer like a fishing trawler.

  “Isn’t it a little bright yet for Morlocks?” I teased. “Moon might still peek through.”

  “Funny, Aunt A.”

  He kept putting his hands in the small of his back, stretching. Once, stumbling on a raised square of sidewalk, he unleashed a violent, unintentional grunt.

  “Aaron, what’s wrong? Come on, seriously. Are you really sick? Let me help.” We’d reached my car, and I watched him ease in, tilting sideways to keep his back straight.

  Once settled, he glanced up. “It’s just from Crawling. You know, around the Book Depots. Occupational hazard.”

  And badge of distinction, apparently. “Bay Bridge Base, right? Somewhere down there?”

  Traffic proved predictably dismal. Wisps of fog drifted through the dead ducts of my Saturn’s fan, floating between and around us. I couldn’t decide whether I was warm or cold, and didn’t care. We didn’t speak. It felt as though we’d cast ourselves adrift, floated into the bay. I kept my eyes on the road and hoped we’d never arrive.

  But all too soon, as we reached the empty warehouses and glass-strewn lots of the wasteland under the Bay Bridge, Aaron began pointing me to the right. Then to the left. I saw the building before he told me to stop, recognizing it from newspaper photographs.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” I cut the engine, let the car drift to a stop against a curb that in classic Frisco fashion wasn’t long enough even for my Saturn. Somehow, I suspected the parking patrol wouldn’t be by. I pointed toward the mottled, rectangular gray and green warehouse, hunched between two much larger derelict structures on either side. “That’s the Library.”

  “There’s no place like home,” Aaron said quietly. Lovingly. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”

  “Stop it,” I told him. “You sound—”

  “Brainwashed? Isn’t that what you think I am? What we all are? SLA’d? Jonestowned?”

  “Well? Are you?”

  Aaron just pushed open his door, grimacing as he pulled himself from the car. “Come and see.”

  The fog felt warmer, here, almost fetid. It had been such a strange, damp summer. The street was devoid not only of people but other cars. A few blocks to the right, just visible through the mist, the glassy towers of the latest Rincon Hill revitalization project blazed like great, blue lighthouses. They were mostly empty, too, I knew. Prospective renters had vanished with the housing bust.

  “I’m going to have to blindfold you so you don’t see the secret knock,” Aaron said.

  “You try it, I’m gone,” I told him.

  “Kidding, Aunt A. Gullible as ever, I see.” He put an arm around my shoulder, squeezed me. “I’ve missed you,” he said.

  Through new tears, I watched him scoop a handful of pebbles off the curb and pitch them at the lowered, metal door of the Library. The clatter they made seemed farther away than it should have, like children’s footsteps racing around a corner.

  Nothing moved or changed. The fog had a stench, here, to go with its disconcerting warmth: cat urine, old tar, mold.

  “Maybe they didn’t teach you the secret knock,” I said.

  The Library door hoisted itself slowly open.

  It was like a cave. No overhead lights. Just a few glimmers floating in what appeared to be a single, cavernous room. No one moving. Fingers of fog began to walk up my back.

  “Aaron, why did you bring me here?”

  He looked genuinely surprised. “I told you why.”

  “I just want to make this clear. Whatever rejection you’re imagining, it was all on your side, at least as far as I’m concerned, I can’t speak for your dad. You hear me? I love you.

  “I know you love me, Aunt A. I love you, too.”

  “But I reject this.”

  “You don’t know anything about this.”

  “I reject brilliant young people living in rank poverty as some transcendent, subversive statement against the status-quo. I reject malnourishment-by-choice. I reject wasted time. I reject bombing.”

  “Not one person has been hurt. Not one, except that guard, and he wasn’t supposed to be there, and even he only lost a couple fingers.”

  I turned, mouth agape. He looked away.

  “Someone has to fight, Aunt A. Someone has to stand up and say, you can’t just take it all. We want it back. We’ll take it back.”

  He moved off, shoulders rigid, head rolling again around his neck. The shadows swallowed him. I hurried and caught up.

  As I soon as I was through the door, I realized it wasn’t actually dark in there. Every twenty feet or so, all the way to the back where some towering red curtains had been suspended from the ceiling, kerosene lanterns balanced precariously on old camera tripods. At the foot of each tripod, arrayed in a sort of daisy-petal shape, lay four or five blue tumbling mats, the kind one finds in elementary school gyms. Stuffing bulged from rents in their vinyl covering, and they seemed to be sagging into the cement. Most were unoccupied.

  But not all. As we continued forward, I saw occasional, curled shapes draped in shabby overcoats or humped up under some other improvised covering. I even glimpsed a few faces. Most of those were young. Late teens. Twenty-somethings. The great majority male, almost all of them prostrate. Some were sleeping or staring blank-eyed into the shadows spread like spider webs across the length of the ceiling, their heads sinking into moldy mounds of paperback books, their legs curled up underneath or folded over each other, as if they’d been frozen in the midst of a long-form yoga exercise.

  The ones who weren’t sleeping were reading, tilting books toward the nearest kerosene lantern. No one spoke. No one looked up at Aaron or accosted me. Shuddering, I realized the place really did feel like a library. Kind of. Certainly, it was nowhere to raise one’s voice or shout hello.

  “How many of you did you say there were?” I whispered.

  “I didn’t. I don’t even know for sure. People come and go.”

  I was relieved to hear that, anyway. Also glad that as yet, no one had hoisted himself off his or her mattress and pulled the door down behind us.

  “Not a single one of you knows how to dust? Wield a mop? You lie down in this? It’s not sanitary.”

  “Aunt A., have you seen your car?”

  Not quite like a library, I thought. All the way back to the curtains, I tried to place the sensation, and then I had it: it was like a Natural History Museum diorama. Something you’d see between the Cro-Magnon room and the Animals of North America hallway. The Reading Chamber. Look now, children. See those things in their hands? They called those ‘books.’ See how still they all are? This is what it was like…

  Glancing behind me, I was startled to find that the outside door had been drawn down after all. And yet, the only thing moving in the whole expanse was lantern-light dancing down wicks, spinning shadows through the dust. A few mats away from where I now stood, someone coughed. Someone else whimpered.

  The curtains hung in a circular ring suspended fully fifteen feet off the ground. Not until we were right in front of them did I hear the voice.

  There really was something goat-like about its quaver, its nagging, monotonous bleat. It wasn’t soothing, and it wasn’t friendly. And it almost yanked me through the curtains.

  “Then the butterfly stamped…”

  “Aaron, don’t,” I said suddenly, but too late. He’d already pulled back the curtain.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. A throne, maybe. A white orgy-couch straight out of Caligula. The Wizard, working levers.

  The first startling thing was how many of them there were. Twenty, at least, maybe more, all seated in a rude semi-circle, tilting against one another or else stretched lengthwise on the filthy floor mats. None of these people was sleeping, and not a one so much as glanced around. Except the Librarian.

  He was hunched almost double on top of a stool. The lantern at his feet cast a reddish glow up the side of his face, which made him look less Satanic th
an molten. His eyes were small, yellowish-brown, and after lingering on mine for an uncomfortable few seconds, they drifted to Aaron.

  “I told you, no doctors,” he said, in the same bleat he’d used for reading.

  “I brought one anyway,” said Aaron. “This is—”

  “Your not-Aunt Ariel. Yes.”

  “You’re going to like her, Erick. She’s not much for taking shit. Even from people she likes. And I doubt she’ll like you much.”

  There it was again. The ghost of Aaron’s smile. I grabbed for his hand, squeezed it, and felt him suck in a sharp breath.

  “Sorry,” I murmured.

  Erick Kinney stared me up and down. Everything about him, from the blades of his shoulders to his drawn-up knees to his hawk’s beak of a nose, looked pointy. If he’d had antennae, he could have passed for a grasshopper.

  “Aaron, maybe we should go,” I said.

  Abruptly, the Librarian smiled. Except for the lantern light in his teeth, it was just an ordinary smile. A lopsided and tired one.

  “You think you can help? Doctor? Solve the mystery?”

  “You mean, How the Morlocks got their limp?”

  The Librarian’s smile widened. Which made it look more lopsided, something sketched with a crayon by a six year-old. “Well. Alright, then. Make way, boys and girls. The doctor’s come to tell us a story.”

  I shook my head. “Not here.”

  That gave him pause, briefly, and I wondered when he’d last left the Library. Certainly, there hadn’t been any news footage of him recently. His bony fingers trailed over the pages of the chipped, cracked Kipling from which he’d been reading, probing into the crease of the binding and scratching softly at the words on the page, as though he were petting a cat.

  “Then Brother Aaron will finish tonight’s reading,” he said, and held up the book. “Make sure each of you gives it a goodnight kiss.”