bounced off the librarian’s glasses so his eyes were difficult to see, and he winked at me. I couldn’t wink in return. Dust motes floated in the air above his black and gray hair.
“Jack Kews.” I repeated his name. No one was watching us. Awkwardly, I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and slid it across the worn wooden counter.
“A fine,” he turned to a woman behind the counter who suddenly turned to look at a computer screen. After consulting an index card, the librarian wrote Jack Kews’s address and telephone number on a piece of paper. So I entered a silent deal or bargain with a man who hated his job, who wanted to sabotage the head librarian, who mis-shelved books.
A frieze ran around the hall, a leftover from when the shelves were organized differently and the images on the wall directed the reader to the area he or she searched. Egyptian figures, Greek gods, elm trees, elephants, whales, knights, birds in flight were markers of a now obsolete and long-abandoned visual lexicon. There was no place in the frieze for a symbol for books on microchips or superconductors.
The librarian, used to the complicated tenses and acrobatics of Russian, might find the expansiveness of English — the way it absorbs words and sentence constructions from all over, New York English with all its accents, dialects, and to say nothing of all the pidgins — chaotic, impossible to take seriously beyond what’s required for the job. Why not subvert the hard-to-pin-down order should the opportunity present itself. When asked about the disorder he created he looks at the frieze circling the hall and states the obvious. At night all the illustrated creatures come down from their respective perches and mix things up.
“Whatever you want, babechik. Books disappear every day.”
I tried to fix a noncommittal or businesslike expression on my face while in fact I was nervous, as if I’d been caught defacing a book and stood captive at the librarian’s mercy.
“Remember he can’t just hand them to you. He has to return them to us first.” He looked into the distance at a woman who was putting books in her bag until it was quite weighted down. “Mr. Kews always looked like he was stealing books from the reading room. We noticed he put books in his jacket as if he was thinking about stealing, but he did check them out.”
“Is there any particular day he comes in regularly?”
“No.”
The librarian walked over to a cart, pulled a book out, and handed it to me.
“He returned this one a few days ago. It hasn’t been re-shelved yet. You know, at first I thought Kews was one of these, because others come and ask questions about him, then I don’t see him anymore. Now if you will excuse me.”
Trying to look as if I didn’t understand what he meant I took Captain Dreyfus the Story of a Mass Hysteria from him and found a seat at a table. The room was nearly empty. The stacks and carrels were without any sign of industry; no sounds of writing or pages being turned were audible. A man sitting a few chairs to my left snored over a paper, arm stretched out across the table, glasses abandoned a few inches from his hand. Before beginning the book read so recently by Jack Kews I turned it over and over, finally opening it to the acknowledgments then thumbing through the first fifty pages. About a third through Captain Dreyfus the Story of Mass Hysteria, one line was marked.
While the rigidly restricted investigation by General Pellieux went droning on, the legal blinders making it [the trial] like the study of a book whose pages could not be opened. . . .
There the marking ended, but in the margins someone had written: I would like to open this book.
Méliès was taunting me, saying look at me, choose me, you’ll be seduced, entertained as you never have been before, and you won’t regret it either, not for a minute.
I picked up other cans and read the titles written on their labels, one after another: Pharmaceutical Hallucinations, Dreams of an Opium Fiend, Delirium in a Studio (Julius had said it was based on a Delacroix painting), Scheming Gambler’s Paradise, Melomaniac, Dislocation Extraordinary, A Terrible Night, Every Man His Own Cigar Lighter, Four Troublesome Heads. Not all the hockey pucks would unspool. You can easily give up or try to soften them, then make copies as quickly as possible. It’s like Russian roulette. Once unsealed they disintegrate rapidly because the base is breaking down. Unrolling film is like following a map that might break diagonally any minute. The strips are so brittle they snap if you so much as look at them. You put the pieces back together again with mylar. Dreyfus, the American invasion of Cuba, and dismembered body parts are all mixed together. Where is the real Méliès? Does Méliès ever turn to the audience or to his workers as they hammer and paint, does he ever turn to them and say, Sorry, I don’t feel like myself. Threatened by bankruptcy and violent family members, I can no longer make sound decisions, but keep the camera rolling anyway. The mixture of despondency with bursts of gallows humor reminded me of the moments when my mother used to quote Max Lieberman’s remark on the subject of the Nazis marching through the Brandenburg gate: “You can’t eat as much as you would like to throw up.”
The next note to come in the mail was a series of cartoons, unfolding like an accordion as I slit the tape that bound them.
They were drawn on the backs of postcards, one attached to the next. The postcards were tourist attractions from Paris: the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, Les Deux Magots, the Champs d’Elysees, the Musée d’Orsay, the pyramid in front of the Louvre. The cartoons on the back were drawings of Emile Zola in New York done in ballpoint pen. He went to the top of the Empire State Building, visited the Lower East Side and the Fulton Fish Market. I wouldn’t have recognized the figure and buildings; they were drawn with very simple lines, but each tableau was labeled.
Jack lived in Brooklyn. Not in my neighborhood but in a building much closer to the river. There was a parking garage on one side of it and a laundromat on the other. Above the laundromat were the offices and classrooms of a technical school, and Antonya pointed out Styrofoam heads looking down at us, wigs pinned to their scalps. To the left of the laundromat was a Mail Boxes Etc. A man strolled out of it, walked to the front of Jack Kews’s building and positioned a milkcrate with his foot so he could sit on it as he looked through his mail. I wondered if the man was Kews, but he had white hair, was clean shaven and wore a pork-pie hat. He looked our way but didn’t speak to us as we stepped into the entrance. The hall was painted half-red, half-yellow, and its mailboxes were battered, the little doors swung off their hinges. Tenants probably rented the boxes next door in order to receive mail. We pressed a buzzer labeled Kews. No one answered, but Antonya pushed the front door. It was open. We walked up five flights of stairs and knocked on number 5B.
“There isn’t going to be anyone home if he didn’t answer the front door bell.”
“It might be broken.”
I knocked softly. Antonya knocked loudly. We heard nothing, standing in silence for a few minutes until a voice from behind a door across the hall called out to us.
“Hey girlies, girlies, come over here. You looking for Jack?” Antonya jumped.
From a crack in the door we could see a face pressed against the door chain. He smiled like the Coney Island laughing boy, aggressive and intimidating, an attempt to entice and threaten at the same time.
“Jack’s not in,” he told us.
“We
