Understories. Tim Horvath

following among spelunkers, a cult if ever there was one, judging by the occasional fan mail that he received, sometimes bearing the name of a cave as its return address (“Funny guy, this one!”), which he would share with us boomingly over the dinner table. “This guy, I’ve got to get him to do a section of The Atlas,” he’d say on occasion if he got a particularly eccentric letter—let’s say one featuring a handwritten map of a set of caverns.

      It was written when I was an infant, and so from the time I was young it was sort of always around. But quickly I’d passed well beyond the point where it had been assumed that we had all read it—I know Aidan lapped me in this regard—and so as often as I urged myself to do so, it seemed that the other, more urgent reading material kept piling up. First there was high school, then college, where I studied literature, which certainly didn’t leave me a whole lot of time to catch up on such back reading. And then, on to a library science degree, where the reading was much more technical and technologically oriented than anything I’d encountered before, demanding a whole new way of reading. It was the beginning of the heyday of the Internet; suddenly, bibliophilia was just another trait among many that qualified one to be a top-notch librarian, and even those of us who put books first had to embrace “information management.”

      I was familiar enough with the book that I could carry on the small talk that usually circulated around the book—it wasn’t as though spelunkers were making pilgrimages to Esoch, Michigan, where I got my first library job, or anything of that nature. Mostly, friends and relatives would make reference to it, and occasionally a woman whom I was seeing. Somehow, none of them ever got past the first question, “What’s it about?” My stock answer—“It’s all about caves . . . it’s hard to describe, though, because it’s not just about the actual physical caves”—was more than sufficient for them. Part of me, perhaps the part that had always yearned to be a fiction writer instead of a librarian who nonetheless trafficked so often in fictions, would itch to say more, to make it up, to conjure a version of what I thought the book was about, based on my skimmings and perusals over the years. Another part of me, though, was relieved that I didn’t have to lie about something so fundamental to how I thought about my family. Not even the biggest wiseass I dated, Erica—six months—would press me: “Well, what’s the first sentence, at least?” No, come to think of it, Erica would have been more ruthless still, would have asked about the last sentence. Glad she never got around to it.

      At the Esoch Library, I put in an order for a copy right away. The head librarian was more than glad to oblige. “Well, of course, it’s your father’s book,” she said, positively tickled to have the son of a bona fide local author join the staff. Later, I moved to Biltchrist and ordered a copy there, too. There, Lucy, the reference librarian, ruled the nonfiction orders with an iron fist. She was less than enthusiastic about ordering a copy, less game to do so on a whim, suspicious that I was trying to slip something past her. A bulldog of a woman, she’d intimidated me from day one.

      “Are there any reviews of it I could read?” she inquired.

      I thought about the reviews I knew of. One in the local paper in Esoch, where I’d grown up, written by a guy who was posed in several fishing photos on my dad’s walls. I knew him as the shorter guy, in height somewhere between my father and the dangling fish. A couple of write-ups in spelunking magazines, which were, believe it or not, obscure. Not a whimper in Publishers Weekly or Library Journal or Book Trade, the sources that Lucy relied upon with an almost religious fervor, and that we were expected to swear by also. Not even a blurb in Outside or anywhere with journalistic cachet or popular standing.

      “I think I can get ahold of some fan mail from some readers,” I tried. She thought I was kidding. “Yes, well, bring in whatever reviews you have.” In that moment, I made a mental vow not to be so slavishly bound to the serendipities and stratagems of the marketplace when I had the opportunity, to seek out the obscure and the overlooked.

      The copy I brought in wound up on the shelf. That was okay—at that time, my dad didn’t need the $14.95, plus shipping and handling, that he was charging for it, but years later, sitting in his hospital room, I thought, Medicare and health insurance notwithstanding, we could both use it now.

      In that very hospital room, I was caught red-handed for never having read Spelos. One day I was confronted by, of all people, a nurse named Désirée, to whom my father had apparently talked about the book. She was making small talk with me, a better diversion than the paper, while he was asleep one day, and she was tending to him, cleaning, et cetera.

      “So, is it true he’s written a book?” She was wise to confirm, as the greatest, most jarring postoperative complication had been a form of delirium. His connection with reality came and went unpredictably, and of course there was no mechanism yet sensitive enough to detect it, unlike the more autonomic functions.

      “Indeed it is,” I said. “He’s not making that up.”

      “So how does it feel to be the son of a writer?”

      “Oh,” I said. “It’s an honor, I suppose.”

      She smiled. “Tell me about the book he’s written again?”

      I led with the standard line, but she wasn’t going anywhere. She scrubbed his arm.

      “Well, what about caves, then, if not the actual physical caves?”

      I stumbled. I think I stammered something about the deeper meaning in caves. Something about going deeper, the way you could venture into caves. I felt as though among the machines in the room there was a bullshit detector whose needle was flailing in the red zone.

      “Hmmm, sounds interesting,” she murmured, cocking an eyebrow. It was unmistakable—she knew that I was a cheat. That night, I yanked it almost angrily off the shelf where it had been gathering dust; people always expect a librarian’s home shelves will somehow be immune to residue, and speech immune to clichés, but neither is the case. Thus I began to plow through it. One hundred and thirty-seven pages in a matter of hours, and the sense that my father’s soul had once been, perhaps still was, magma, lit and surging.

      The next time I was there, another nurse was on call, but about a week later I overlapped with Désirée again. “Hello,” I said.

      My father was conscious now. He did not speak much, for he couldn’t, but his whisper still had a robustness to it.

      “Hey,” I said. “About my father’s book, you know, that we were talking about last time?”

      “Mmmmm.”

      “Since you expressed curiosity,” I said, “I brought a copy. In case you were interested in reading it.” It was checked out under my own name from the Biltchrist Public Library.

      My father spotted as much immediately. He said, “You check out library? Your?” He left out words that he felt he didn’t need.

      “I did, I did,” I said.

      “What if someone needs?” he said.

      I couldn’t quite gauge where he was vis-à-vis reality. I said, “That’s true, but it will be due back in three weeks.” I gestured to Désirée. “And I’m sure Désirée won’t hang on to it longer than that.” She nodded in affirmation. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that as far as I knew, the book had never left the library. Perhaps it had, but I certainly had never checked it out to anyone.

      A few minutes went by. Then he squinted at me. “What is it you do . . . library?”

      “I’m the Director of Circulation,” I said.

      He paused for a moment, stared out at the wall across from the bed, from where sometimes the Hula-Hoop girl emerged. She was nowhere near now. Then he asked a question I was not quite expecting, yet somehow dreading. “Who else checked it out? When?”

      It was indeed one of the older books, old enough that it still had the pocket in the back where a card had once designated the due dates of the book. Any book up until a certain point wore its history on its sleeve,