I was about to navigate back to my search results when I sensed someone’s gaze, and I turned to find the chess-playing man leaning over, reading the screen of my computer. He was tall and thin, perhaps sixty years old, and wore enormous square-framed eyeglasses with thick lenses. Mostly bald, he nevertheless had let his gray hair grow quite long, and it hung around his head in a fringe. He appeared quite mad.
“Hello,” I said.
He turned to me, squinting. His mouth hung open, and his eyes, magnified by the glasses, looked wounded, affronted, though not by me.
The man was certainly harmless; nevertheless, I found his gaze to be disturbing, and a strange unease spread over my body. I felt weak and slightly sick to my stomach. I asked the man if I could help him with something, and his only response was to turn abruptly back to his chess game.
Clearly there was nothing more to be said or done—this small incident was over. And yet I heard myself say, “I asked you a question.”
The man’s response was immediate. He froze, his hands poised over the keyboard, and began to tremble. I could see his eyes; they were darting spasmodically from side to side, as if he were receiving an electric shock. For some reason this reaction made me angry, and I dug in.
“When you’ve invaded someone’s privacy,” I said, “and then that person asks you a question about what you’re doing, you are obliged to answer that question.” My voice, I’m afraid, was quite strident; I was well aware that I was overreacting, but I felt powerless to stop. “I wanted to know if there was anything I could help you with. Is there?”
The man shook openly now; his aluminum-frame chair rattled beneath him and his head hung down over the keys. He was blinking, and his lips moved wordlessly.
“Answer me,” I said, between clenched teeth.
“Sir?” came a stern voice.
“Answer me.”
“Sir!”
I turned. It was the librarian. She was holding a small cardboard box in her hand, and her lips were pale and pressed tightly shut. She looked older than she had at the counter.
“Leave that man alone,” she said. “He is doing no harm.”
I stared at her.
“I found this for you,” she said. “The information you want might well be here.”
She held out her hand, and I accepted the box. She returned to the desk without waiting for thanks, and when she arrived there she glared up at me over the tops of her glasses.
The box contained a roll of microfilm. I closed the internet browser, stood up, and went to the back of the stacks, where the microfilm viewers were kept when I was young. They were still there, exactly as I remembered them, and both seemed to be in working order.
It took me several minutes to recall how the machines operated, but soon I had the roll of film installed, and pages of text and images were zooming across my field of vision. They belonged to the Milan Times newspaper, the only “local” paper Gerrysburg had ever had. This roll was from 1965, and after a few minutes of idly scanning the pages, I realized just how much there was to read, and how long it was going to take me. I heaved a deep sigh, and winced as the pain in my head flared up—I had a large bump, just above the hairline, from my fall into the pit two days before, not to mention my aching ribs—then I scrolled back to the beginning and began, methodically, to read every single headline.
1965 was a year of relative calm and prosperity in the area. There were, of course, war stories, but for the most part the paper focused on local news: businesses opening, a school renovation, a fire, a blood drive. As I read, I tried to remember what my own life was like then. A small child, I must have played outdoors, watched television, listened to adults talk. But nothing came to me. I could remember, vaguely, what my mother looked like—the chignon she wore in those days, and her tired beauty—but I could recall nothing specific. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the less I seemed able to remember. The earliest memory I could come up with was the one I have already mentioned, working in my father’s shed and wondering about the box that contained his gun. But I was very nearly a teenager then. Surely there was something more.
I had to catch myself from falling into reverie—it was easy to lose focus, doing such dull work. In the end, though, it was during such a reverie, when I was gazing blankly into my past, or lack of it, through the still image of a random newspaper page, that I realized I had happened upon the information I’d been looking for.
It was an obituary, its headline no more than a single name: Mary Killian Stiles.
Mary Killian Stiles, 37, passed away Monday, at her home in Town of Henford. Mrs. Stiles was born in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and has lived in the Milan-Gerrysburg area since 1958. She is survived by her husband, Dr. Avery Stiles, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at SUNY Milan. She is predeceased by a daughter, Rachel.
TEN
There was no mention in the obituary of how Rachel Stiles had died. But it seemed to me that Doctor Avery Stiles’s story was very sad indeed. I rewound the microfilm and turned off the reader, then went to the circulation desk to return the box to the librarian.
She accepted it and set it aside, then gazed at me with great seriousness over the top of her eyeglasses. “Don’t you remember me?” was her question.
“It was you who gave me the microfilm an hour ago,” I replied.
My answer seemed to take her by surprise. She smiled, and raised a single eyebrow.
“You’re Eric Loesch, aren’t you,” she said.
“Yes, I am.”
“I’ve been working here since you were a small boy,” the librarian went on. “Your mother used to bring you here. I’m Mrs. Hill.”
It was clear from her tone that she hoped this name would ring a bell. But it did not. I have never been comfortable with white lies, but the librarian had been helpful to me, and deserved my good will, so I smiled and took her hand. “Mrs. Hill!” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. It’s been a very long time.”
“You wanted to build a moon base,” she said. “I remember, all one summer, you couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old, all you wanted were books on engineering and space travel. I quickly ran out of books for you—I actually ordered more. Some of them are still here.”
“I never knew,” I said truthfully, “that you had gone to such lengths for me.”
“I would talk with your mother sometimes, as you worked. I recall she said she had no idea where your brains came from. She said you were the smartest person she had ever known.”
This came as a great surprise to me—my mother had never told me anything of the sort. I wondered, briefly, if this Mrs. Hill might actually be suffering from some kind of senile dementia, if perhaps she was confusing me with another patron. She asked me if I had been able to put my smarts to good use.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
Now the old librarian averted her eyes. Her fingers found the countertop and drummed idly there. “Eric,” she said. “I want to tell you how sorry I am for what happened to your poor parents.”
Quite suddenly I wished to leave. “That’s kind of you to say.”
“I… I wish there was something I might have done. I considered your mother a friend.”
“I’m sure she felt the same way about you, Mrs. Hill. But I really—”
“I knew that all was not right. But I didn’t realize how terribly, terribly desperate—”
I brought my hand down on the counter with what I’m afraid was excessive force. The sound made the librarian jump, and I spoke perhaps more loudly than I had intended. “That’s quite enough, Mrs. Hill!”
“I beg your pardon…”
“Thank you for your assistance with the microfilm,” I said, and turned toward the door.
It was, then, the sight of the door itself—large, oaken, and divided into fifteen glass panes—that brought back to me the memory of coming to the library with my mother that summer, the moon landing summer. We would come her
e, and Mrs. Hill would bring my books to me, and I would make my plans in a marbled notebook, my plans for the moon base which I intended to send to President Johnson. And my mother would talk to Mrs. Hill, or read magazines, or go outside and smoke, and when it was time to leave we would walk through that heavy door, summer sunlight blasting through the panes, and walk to Pernice’s and eat our ice cream cones in the park. We would sit side by side on a bench, and I would tell her about the work I was doing, about the science that I was trying to understand, and the wind would pick up her hair and blow it into my face, and she would laugh and tie it back behind her head. Or it was raining, and we would run from the library to Pernice’s, and my mother would drink coffee and the rain would stream down the window beside her. My sister was off somewhere with her friends, my father was at work, but neither of them ever came up in our conversations; they weren’t on our minds at all.
All of this I remembered as I strode toward that door, as I pushed it open and emerged into the cold wet April air. I crossed the parking lot in the rain, much as I had in memory, got into my car and started the engine and sat there, waiting for the heat to come on, to take the fog off the windows. It took a long time, and when I finally pulled out of the library parking lot, my face was still wet.
It was difficult to find anywhere to park at SUNY Milan. The buildings were low, and cracked cement was everywhere, and I struggled to find the visitor lot on the water-damaged campus map. Eventually I flagged down a passing university policeman and he told me where to go.
The department of sociology was housed in a long brick structure that resembled a passenger train, its wide windows tinted against the sun and sealed shut. The building directory hung just inside the double doors, and it led me to the far end, where the office I sought was located. PROFESSOR LYDIA BULGAKOV, a sign read, followed by a schedule. I read the schedule, glanced at my watch, and sat down in a nearby chair to wait.
An hour later, a figure appeared far down at the end of the hall and strode toward me on strong, compact legs. She was rather short, in her late forties, with broad hips, narrow shoulders, and a wide, round face surrounded by wild gray-black curls. A pile of books and papers was balanced in her arms. She appeared puzzled by my presence, and offered me an appraising glance as she drew a set of keys from a skirt pocket and unlocked the office door. I heard the thump of her schoolwork hitting a desk, and then her head appeared around the jamb. “You’re here to see me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then come in.”
The office was small but comfortable, with bookshelves concealing the cinderblock walls, and several table lamps filling the room with warm yellow light. Lydia Bulgakov sat down behind a large metal desk and gestured to a chair beside it.
“I thought you would be Russian,” I said, taking a seat.
“I am Russian.”
“Your English is unaccented.”
She nodded. “My family immigrated here when I was ten. I have been told that my accent returns when I have had a glass or two of wine, but I suspect this is wishful thinking on the part of my acquaintances. And you are?”
I told her my name. “I have come to ask you about a former colleague of yours, a man named Avery Stiles.”
She shook her head. “Not a former colleague. He was gone years before I came here. I was still a child, in fact.”
I told her about the article I had found, and the allusion to his “sad story.” I said that I had found his wife’s obituary and wanted to know what other information she had about him. I asked her these questions respectfully, deferentially, as I sensed a certain self-confidence in Professor Bulgakov, a haughtiness even, which my usual methods of questioning, it was clear, would do little to penetrate.
Professor Bulgakov nodded, leaning forward. She was very serious, though I gathered that this was her general manner, and not a reaction to the subject at hand. She said, “My understanding is that, in the wake of his family’s deaths, Doctor Stiles gradually withdrew from the university community, stopped publishing his research, and became difficult to understand. He had been working on operant conditioning, following some of the work of B. F. Skinner, but his research became strange and his funding evaporated. He was retired early after an incident with a student, and he left academia and apparently moved away.”
She was an excellent speaker, curling her lips around each word as if she were tasting it. Her enunciation was precise. Clearly her late adoption of English had prevented her from taking it for granted; her speaking skills were a source of considerable pride.
“What kind of incident with a student?” I asked, trying not to appear too eager.
“A young man. He was a volunteer for one of Doctor Stiles’s studies, and not long after his visits to Doctor Stiles’s lab, he entered into a paranoid, delusional state and tried to kill another student. The young man later admitted that he had been taking LSD. But reporters also learned that he had been one of Doctor Stiles’s test subjects, and they seized upon this detail, which subsequently captured the public’s imagination. Once reporters realized what an eccentric Doctor Stiles was, they played up this angle, and he became known as a violent madman.”
I asked if his studies were, in fact, violent or cruel. The question seemed to make Professor Bulgakov uncomfortable. She let out a small grunt and adjusted her position in her seat. “Perhaps,” she said at last. “You have to remember what life was like during that era. The Holocaust was still recent history. The Vietnam War was under way. Experimentation with mind-altering drugs was a strong cultural theme. As far as I can tell, Doctor Stiles was working on depriving and confusing his subjects, removing them from their social context. He wanted to see how quickly a person could be broken down—how strong his personality actually was. I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that many people can be broken down very quickly.”
There was a silence as I digested what she had said. She settled back into her chair. Finally I leaned forward, placing my fingers on the edge of her desk. “What do you mean by that, exactly?” I asked.
She arched an eyebrow. “Well, the human mind, in spite—”
“No—you said, ‘It will come as no surprise to you.’”
She stared at me.
“Why should that come as no surprise to me, Professor Bulgakov?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand.”
“I am wondering what you think you know about me that would make you believe that.”
She appeared puzzled for a moment, perhaps in earnest, perhaps not. I realized that I was testing her, to find out if she were testing me. Perhaps, on some level, every human interaction was a psychological experiment.
“All I meant,” she said slowly, “was that, in the wake of the sixties, and of our military adventures abroad, most intelligent people have absorbed the idea that none of us is ever very far from emotional collapse.” When I offered no reply, she went on. “Our personalities are complex, but the animal instincts they conceal are stronger, and not very far below the surface.” She met my stare and said, “Don’t you agree, Mr. Loesch?”
“Yes, I do,” I answered.
“You are dissatisfied with my explanation.”
“No, no,” I said. I must have appeared lost in thought, because I had been trying to figure out how Professor Bulgakov had learned my name. Had I introduced myself? Surely I had. But I couldn’t remember.
Suddenly it was I who felt uncomfortable. I pulled back from the desk, rubbed my hands together, and stood up to leave. “Well,” I said. “Thank you, Professor. You’ve been very helpful.”
Lydia Bulgakov appeared surprised at my sudden change in demeanor. “By all means,” she said, frowning.
I nodded once, then turned toward the door. As I was about to pass through it, she called out, “Mr. Loesch?”
“Yes?”
“Is everything all right? I hope I haven’t given you some wrong impression.”
“What kind of wrong impression?
” I demanded.
She appeared to be about to answer, then let out breath and sank back into her chair.
“Never mind,” she said.
I gazed at her for a long moment, by the end of which, if I was not mistaken, the faintest hint of disquiet had begun to creep into her face. It was then that I left, striding back down the hall the way I had come.
When I reached the exit, I turned for one last look. She was there, standing outside her office door, one hand on the jamb, watching me go.
Before I returned to the house, I stopped at the sporting goods and hardware stores, to replace the items I had lost on the rock. Luckily, the arrogant sporting goods clerk was not there, and I was able to buy a new pack and climbing supplies without another confrontation. But Randall was indeed working at the hardware store, and once again it was his checkout line I found myself in, with my new hatchet and folding saw.
“Well, how are you doing today, Mr. Loesch?”
“Very well, thank you, Randall.” After a moment’s consideration, I added, “You may call me Eric.”
“All right then,” he replied, placing my purchases in a plastic sack. He told me to swipe my credit card, and then he said, “Good thing we’re being so friendly with each other, because there’s something I want to ask you.”
“What’s that?” The cash register printed a receipt, which he added to my bag.
“Your name came up when I was talking to Heph the other day. He was wondering how you were doing out there on the hill. And it occurred to me, maybe you’d want to come down to the Amvets in Milan with us for a drink or three. We have a regular Tuesday-night thing.”
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