these cases.
“They send it to the Greenvale in the next state over, because there are two Greenvales within thirty miles of each other and this happens all the time.
“Well, at this point the book is a little bit tattered, a little bit scruffy. When it arrives at the Greenvale, Indiana Public Library, they roll their eyes a bit, relabel it, figuring that at some fundamental level all the libraries of the world are united—head librarian there fancies herself a bit of a socialist, anyhow. So they treat it like a new book; it spends a week at the bindery.
“When it hits the shelves again, they put it on display as a new book—really an understandable error, because it is shimmering in its new packaging. It happens that a man who has recently been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder has recently had a major breakthrough after years of therapy and failed remedies. His therapist has recommended that rather than attempting to beat his obsessions by avoiding them, he needs to find an outward focus for his obsessive energy, an object worthy of affection. He cites Freud; the patient is game.
“He heads to the library immediately and hits the ‘New Nonfiction’ shelves, then plunges into the older books. He pulls down four or five, each of which seems to promise a lifetime, or at least many months, of promising obsessional material. He clutches a stack and heaves it on the circulation desk up front: a book on kites and kite making, one on mutual funds, one on the Civil War, one on stargazing, and all of them balancing on the slenderest of the bunch, the afterthought he has grabbed on spelunking.”
At this point, I’d taken to actually plotting and writing up the scenarios the night before. Having never composed fiction before, I’d grown restless in the evening hours, thinking about where the book would go next. At first, I wrote simply in order to sleep, but it also seemed as though the stories would be more meaningful for him, since he’d been such a reader himself throughout his life but didn’t have the fine motor control needed to operate a book at this point. As for the oral tradition, I could always embellish in the moment of performance, too. I could not quite discern pride in his minimal responses; his gestural repertoire was confined to the eyes and the muscles around the orbits at this point, but I felt that he couldn’t be disappointed at my stabs at writing. I wrote about my OCD patient:
“When he reads it, though, he reads with fervor. He’s a Dostoyevskian reader, and though that could mean many things, in his case, it means that he reads in the manner in which he imagines that Dostoyevsky wrote—ravenous, staggering through his dimly lit apartment clutching the book, luminous with something teetering between ecstasy and epilepsy, ingesting swathes of prose in desperate gulps, like an infant born undersized, suckling harder. When once he misplaces the book and locates it at last, after a forty-minute search, concealed under an errant cushion, he collars it like a treacherous friend; he is at once too furious and too attached to reprimand for long. It goes without saying that he takes it into the bathroom, and sometimes loses himself on the porcelain seat, as though this was the most natural reading position, as if reading was only one part of that. His bathroom, anyway, overlooks an alley fraught with the stink and presence of people, and when he is reading the book, it is summer; thus windows are wide open and the whole building seems to be singing, a chorus of vague suggestions and clashing soloists. He devours it like a novel, fastening on the dramas of the explorers, their obsessions with going farther and with firsts—the first to conquer a particular cave or to prove, slithering on their stomachs, that two caves were ultimately connected in some remote channel inaccessible to all but those willing to die for an idea, the idea that all things must be connected.
“At some point in the bathroom, a slight but terrible thing happens; he drops the book onto the toilet seat. He grabs as though it is his only pair of glasses tumbling over the railing of an ocean liner, and manages to prevent the book from falling in, but for a brief moment it lands unmistakably on the toilet seat. Disgusting, to him. More than that, it sends him spiraling into thoughts, thoughts that only an obsessive would have—how many other times might this book have landed near toilets, been handled by germ-laden people, people with no regard for hygiene whatsoever, and no regard for the fact that this book will be read by the purer and more innocent, oblivious to its former depravities? Reason returns momentarily—he recalls that it is a New Book, glistening, can only have been checked out once or twice, but then what to think of these other books? Now the thought has taken up lodging—it is too late to unthink it, and he can’t shake it. He cannot even bring himself to handle the other books, not even to take them back. He tells his friend, who knows about his condition. His friend, ever loyal, aware and sympathetic, will return them—he makes a joke: put the kite book on a string and read it at arm’s length. As his friend departs with the books, the obsessive actually considers this as a possibility for future library excursions.
“The friend returns most of the books. But the cave book seems special, somehow. He decides to recheck it out under his own name. Is so provoked by its magnificent descriptions and reflections that he decides to try spelunking. He takes it along—pocket-sized, it isn’t exactly going to do any lasting damage to his back.”
Have you forgotten, for even an instant, as I must admit I had, that these stories were meant for my father, that he was listening all along? Indeed, he had passed away at some point during my reading of this last story, which thus never was told. Little in his features distinguished this latest placidity from that sleep that had become our ritual, our agreement. I found it hard to believe that there wouldn’t be another story tomorrow.
With some trepidation, that evening I phoned my mother to inform her of the news. I was almost relieved when her voice betrayed sorrow, perhaps a mourning for some ineradicable part of herself, though her words were no more than “Well, I’m deeply glad you could be there for him.”
The funeral was later that week. Aidan and his wife and the kids flew in, Gerry, and even Désirée made an appearance with her son—it was oddest to see her in black instead of her nurse’s attire. A chilly, rainy day, flood warnings. The flash storms were made more dramatic by the flatness all around; Aidan’s children would remember the Midwest as strung up by lightning throughout their lives. Afterward, everyone came over to my place, the profusion of voices and bodies like armor against the cataclysm without.
But afterward, left alone in my apartment, I felt as though something was still unresolved. It was selfish, I knew; my story had been prematurely cut off. I knew, at least by reputation, of a set of caves, nearly a day’s drive away, but I was the Director of Circulation, after all, and my father had just passed away, and so I could take some time off. Into the mouth of one of the caves I plunged, the copy of the book borne in one hand, flashlight in the other illuminating the walls. I was mindful of my father’s own words in Spelos—at the spot you needed light most in a cave, you could never quite get it: right where your head would eventually, no matter how careful and experienced you were, smack into an expected lintel of rock. I didn’t have a helmet, but the book made a good temporary stand-in.
The immediate sensation was coldness, a roaming cold that shook free of the walls and crept around, the kind you get standing shoulder-deep in a lake under passing clouds. There was a cave smell, too, like wet pavement, only slightly metallic. Once I had my bearings, I could understand “mouth” more viscerally; the interior was like the ominous pictures of periodontal disease that hang on dentists’ walls. Rock spears oozed like fleshy icicles, and the glazed walls glittered with what looked like sugar residue in a downed mug of coffee—what an onslaught of detail in those walls, and what a staggering thought that without illumination, they would remain forever invisible, inaccessible.
After several false leads, I found a crevice in an overhang. It seemed as though the likelihood of its being disturbed back here was slim. I wedged myself upward and thrust my body in the direction that my light revealed this slight opening. My shoulders found themselves between two walls, as though I were being held by the cave. This was mildly comforting, and I paused to savor it, but at once felt a twinge of danger—a few
