The Author

All right, maybe my book fell a hair or two short of greatness. And, for sure, it hadn’t sold very well. Even my parents, I was quick to joke, waited until it was remaindered before buying their copy. Still, the book had made it onto a library shelf. A library shelf!

And now it wasn’t there anymore.

Of course, since this was a library — the main branch of the New York Public Library — I might reasonably have assumed the book had been borrowed. But as plausible as that may have been, I couldn’t give it any substance.

I’d been making visits to my achievement from my apartment in Queens for two years, this time on a sudden impulse in the middle of a relentlessly fierce winter that had otherwise discouraged such excursions — and, I think I should add, just weeks after my father’s death, and on a morning after a late-night party at which I’d had too much to drink and snort. But for all of this period the book had never been withdrawn, nor, as far as I could tell, even been opened. No, I knew with certainty that something was wrong. 

Still a little wasted, head hurting and sick to my stomach — and now with a developing panic to add to these disorders — I reached behind the books that had flanked the single copy of mine. Then I checked the entire shelf — and the shelves above and below it. After that I searched the full length of both sides of the aisle and rummaged through piles of books that were stacked on the floor.

Nothing. And no, no one was seated at the reading tables.

Fully distraught at this point, I looked for a librarian. Two middle-aged women — one short and dowdy with close-cropped gray hair, the other tall and lean — were standing behind the checkout desk. But, stationing myself directly in front of them, they paid no attention to me. They were having a personal moment.

“Helen,” the tall one was saying, “you told me it was ‘extraordinary.’”

Helen, clearly exasperated by the tall one’s remark, shut her eyes and turned her face to the floor. “Yes, Sylvia, I said that. I did say that. And actually, if you want to know the truth, I think it’s better than extraordinary. If you want to know the truth, I think it’s sublime.”

“Well?” Sylvia said. She seemed on the verge of tears. “Then I don’t understand. I don’t understand why…”

“Sylvia,” Helen looked up. “Why are we talking about your ass now? You know your ass isn’t the issue. You’re doing your spacing out thing again. I told you what it is. It’s your ankles. They’ve started to make me cross. I can’t help it.”

My own crisis notwithstanding, I was, of course compelled to see for myself what Helen was talking about. Sure enough, she had a point on both counts. Sylvia’s ass, though it was hyperbole to describe it as sublime, was quite exceptional — at another time I’d have undoubtedly taken notice of it on my own. And Sylvia’s ankles were, no question, a nettlesome sight. They had only the merest hint of definition. Indeed, when Sylvia, demonstrably piqued, abruptly turned and marched away, her calves appeared to descend directly into her shoes.

If it was obvious that Helen, who was pressing her palms against her temples and rolling her neck, was herself more than ready to leave, she could indulge in no such luxury. With Sylvia’s departure she was left to deal with me.

“May I help you?” she said in a surprisingly composed tone.

But before I could speak, Sylvia, coat in hand, was back.

“I’m taking my break, you fucking asshole.”

And then she was gone again.

“Have I come at a bad time?” I said.

Helen’s composure was less than solid now. “No,” she said. “Well…no — it’s all right.” She took a quick, and I thought wistful, glance at the elevator banks.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. I’m looking” — I felt sweat pooling in the hollows of my underarms — “for a missing book.” I gave her the title.

“Missing?” Helen brought her screen up.

“It’s not where it should be,” I said. “You haven’t maybe…discarded it, have you? Does that ever happen?”

“Discarded it? What do you mean? We don’t discard books. What a question.” Helen studied the screen. “There’s no record it’s been taken out.”

“Of course,” I rasped. “No record.” And it was at this juncture that the aggregate of my issues, compounded now by frustration, became too much and, licensed by Sylvia’s language to loosen constraints on my own, I blew what remained of my cool.

“Helen,” I blurted, “this is bullshit. This is beyond the fucking pale. It’s egregious enough that some books here go totally ignored for years and years. But what about posterity, Helen? Have you bothered to observe all the stone and marble when you come to work; the enormous ceilings and the Latin inscriptions and shit? This is supposed to be a sacred place. It’s supposed to promise permanence — an author’s immortality. And you know what? It’s just a fucking building now.”

With that, Helen’s manor shifted from the impersonal to the sympathetic, and I knew that she knew what my connection to the book was.

“I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I’m sure the book will turn up. When you think a book is lost it suddenly turns up. Why don’t you try again in a few weeks?”

But while the change in Helen’s attitude succeeded in softening my own, I wasn’t quite done.

“My father,” I said. “He never finished it, Helen. He never finished his book.”

I don’t mind telling you that after that I had a very bad time of it. I awoke on the following mornings with the kind of heartache I thought was reserved for breaking up with the love of your life. I turned off the phone and when I wasn’t pacing from room to room in my apartment, I slept a lot.

Although Helen had said to wait a few weeks I could wait no more than one. Despite a monster snowstorm, I braved the streets, and an erratic subway, and returned to the library.

Presumably owing to the weather, my book’s floor was empty of customers, but a stifling heat was nonetheless blasting from the radiators. Removing my coat, I looked around for Helen and Sylvia. A lone man was seated behind the desk and there was no sign of them.

Approaching the stacks then, and with my boots tracking a trail of sludge on the thinly carpeted floor, I recognized the spine from thirty feet away. And my heart jumped.

It was back!

And not only back, but, I discovered upon rushing to it and taking it in my hands, that while it bore no withdrawal stamp it had been opened as well — there were scribblings all over the inside of it! 

“All right,” was the judgment — was it a judgment? — next to one paragraph highlighted in orange on the first page I looked at.

And then, several pages later, and in a different color ink, I found three question marks.

This I didn’t like seeing at all because it maybe meant I hadn’t done my job.

And the marginalia on two subsequent pages was no less dispiriting — an apparent lottery number and what I had to allow was a not bad caricature of Michael Jackson.

A half-dozen pages later, however, and adjoining another highlighted passage — a special favorite of mine — was a single word: 

“WOW!”

In a rush of euphoria, I felt like weeping, and I looked at that word and the passage it accompanied for some time. But then it struck me, and I was right back in the depths, that it was Helen who’d done this; that, following a charitable impulse (the last thing I wanted), she had located the book and created this moment for me. But would a librarian deface a book? No, that was outrageous. No librarian, especially one at so august an institution as this, would do such a thing.

I felt like weeping again. Yes, there was, to be sure, still a mystery here, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to think about it, much less solve it. And it would be a while before I needed to return to the library.

After running my fingers across the breadth of the smooth jacket, and knocking my knuckles on the sturdy hard cover, I carefully placed the book on its shelf. Tapping it once, I turned and walked away from it. 

When I got outside, I realized that I hadn’t put my coat on yet. But I felt no call for it. Standing on the library’s top step in howling gusts of freezing snow, I felt no discomfort.

I felt imperishable.