Understories. Tim Horvath

in the pocket, just to be sure. Those cards had been discarded with the advent of the computerized system. For a period of time, those records had been recorded and archived electronically, but after the Patriot Act, many librarians, myself included, were wary about this government—I am tempted to use the word regime—meddling in the privacy of our patrons. We’ve felt tested by this possibility: we’ve become versed in the Privacy Act to an unprecedented degree, and I know many of us who have responded by destroying checkout records with a newfound urgency. There is no way to tell who has checked out many of our books and when, and there was no way to know for sure that this book had never left the library.

      More likely, it had sat on the shelf next to its companions, growing old, peering out at the movements of patrons, sizing them up perhaps just as readily as they were sized up. Yes, I know it sounds strange—you might conclude that I, and not my father, was the one suffering from delirium, but I have occasionally tried to take the perspective of the books on my shelves, imagining that they choose their recipients as much as they are chosen. Like animals in the wild, they can, I suppose, camouflage themselves such that at times they blend in with their surroundings as readily as tree frogs, hugging the walls of the shelves around them, appearing less palatable than the plump bestsellers they lean against. Or like abandoned puppies in pet stores—I was going to say prostitutes, but fear it could single-handedly shatter your impression of me, and perhaps I, like these books, can only hope to make an impression—they can poke themselves out just a bit farther than the nearest competitor, jutting forth an irresistible moist black nose between pouting eyes.

      These are fanciful notions, of course, and who is to say which is the stranger phenomenon in the grand view—Man Seeking Book, or Book Seeking Man? And why not a mutual wooing?

      I glanced down into the pocket anyway, indeed empty. My father was a man who would have cared deeply about the Patriot Act and its implications for American citizens, privacy, and freedom. But instead of going into that, I told a half-truth, a truth that five years earlier would have been intact. I said, “We have that information on the computer now, Dad.”

      He nodded. Désirée took the book, thanked me. Said the last book she read was months ago. These hospital shifts are killing her.

      One of the most striking stories I read when I was in college was Borges’s “Library of Babel,” and on occasion I have thought myself the proprietor of that very library. Borges envisions a metaphysical marvel, a library that essentially comprises the whole of the universe—the universe as library. Its volumes are random and contain every possible permutation of text, from gibberish to the complete works of Shakespeare. Within the library that Borges conjures, not only is every book ever written shelved somewhere but every possible book, every conceivable configuration of the alphabet. The conceit is too dizzying to think about for very long, but it serves as a good antidote to certain fundamental realities: funds are limited, books go unread, tumble out of print, serve as doorstops—all too effectively, I might add; the greatest libraries of civilizations burn down, suns collapse, abandon planets without child support. And each life is limited—there is only so much reading that one can consume in the course of a lifetime, and the guests are waiting for the ham. No, that’s my brother Aidan’s life, and his line, too—once we were speaking in his bedroom, and he was expressing concern for me, my solitude, the dearth of female companionship in my life. I had just broken off an apparently blossoming relationship shortly before coming for Thanksgiving. At some point, despite my brother’s better intentions, it became apparent that there was nothing more to be said—we could both hear the mirth below, the hubbub of Aidan’s kids and those of the neighbors who were over, the clatter of dishes being hoisted from the kitchen to prime spots on the table, sloshing sauce. And Aidan, at last, smiling at the futility of his words: “Well, the guests are waiting for the ham.”

      Désirée had called me and warned me my dad wasn’t doing well, that he seemed less cognizant of his surroundings. He was talking about Lake Superior and hunting lodges and a mother bear. She said that, by the way, she had read the book, and while she wasn’t sure she had understood most of it, and it was unlike any other book that she had ever read, she’d found it to be “powerful and very, very emotional.” I thanked her without quite knowing why, and added, “I bet he’d be glad to know that.”

      She said, “Oh, I told him. I told him I particularly liked the part about bats.”

      “Oh, yes,” I shot right back, perhaps a bit too eagerly. “Where he goes into the whole thing about insideness and outsideness, and how we are becoming more batlike as we spend more and more of our lives indoors.”

      “Yes.” I could hear her smiling over the phone as she noted that I had read it, perhaps concurrently with her. “I could identify with that. I never seem to get outside these days.” She paused for a moment. “Some of that stuff was strange, though.”

      “About the proportions of the bat’s head to its body?”

      “That’s it,” she said, and I could sense her nodding and even laughing.

      “My dad’s a strange guy,” I said. “He has some strange notions about the world.”

      Later, when I arrived at the hospital, and Désirée had left the book behind with a note, he came awake. He couldn’t really gesture, lacking the facial control to do so, but I could sense that inwardly he was motioning to it as he said, “She liked it.”

      “So I hear.”

      Then, a few minutes later: “Who’ll have it next?”

      I said, “I’ll bring it back to the library.”

      “Hmm. Then?”

      “It will go back on the shelf.”

      “Then?”

      At what point does one recognize that the truth is precisely the wrong instrument for a task? I was in charge of circulation. A slowness, a quasi-geological time governs the circulation of books: the punctuation of frantic movements as a book takes on a buzz, gets reviewed, followed by years of stillness, silence, neglect. Perhaps a motion picture is commissioned, produced, released; the book stirs, reenters the commerce of the world, mingles and becomes inebriated in the gala of its success, and eventually tapers off, only somewhat reluctantly, into a second retirement. Envision a remake thirty years later—it happens. There is always hope, you see.

      But imagine if one could speed up time, fast-forward and rewind over longer intervals, see at once all the permutations of a book’s lifetime. From this vantage point, the Director of Circulation might appear the ringleader of a circus—coordinating acrobats, elephants, fire-breathing ladies, third-rate clowns, contract renegotiations. Books would fly off the shelves in a blur, leaving gaps like children’s debut teeth, making their forays out into the world, and swooping back to their perches eventually like osprey. Indeed, sideways and spines up, with their covers spread out, would they look like anything other than birds? I paused, though, as I realized that what was missing from this vision were the temporary habitations of the book outside, its journeys through the neighborhood. Or, as I knew all too well from the day-to-day job, throughout the world. How laughably common is it to hear “I returned that—I’m absolutely positive!” only to receive a sheepish note from a return address far away—New Mexico?—that reads, “This turned up while unpacking. Sorry!” One would have hoped for a jar of salsa, at least.

      I thought, inevitably, of that Other Book. The Atlas. Unwritten, perhaps unwritable. I pictured the ideal version of that book; once one has admitted the impossible, one might as well usher in its unruly companions. Picture a tracer placed in the book that would record its travels to and fro. No, too much of a concession to the regime. Rather, render a version of the book itself that includes a sheaf of blank pages and empty maps. These would be pages reserved for the recording of the book’s own journey, not merely where it went but what went on in the lives of those around it while it was in their abodes.