Understories. Tim Horvath

of Circulation. I said, “It is checked out by a boy.”

      He seemed pleased with this answer. But not satisfied. Perhaps he, too, at that moment was thinking of The Atlas; perhaps he never ceased thinking of it; perhaps it was error to think that it was a book at all, that it was anything other than the very medium of thought itself. “And then?” The machines pulsed and bleeped; the room waited for more. The Hula-hoop froze, though it did not tumble; it hovered around the waist of the girl—did I neglect to mention that she was there?

      I continued: “He needs it for school.” It was all I could think of. The hoop was still poised. “For earth science class.”

      He laughed. “Required text?” he said.

      My father didn’t mind imaginative leaps, but he was no Panglossian. “Nope,” I said. “For extra credit.” The story pushed on. With these minimal legs, it somehow staggered to its feet, however awkwardly. “They’re . . . not covered in the regular curriculum. The teacher . . . gave them a list. ‘Topics Not Covered,’ it read. Passed it around the room.” Somehow with the contrivance of that list, the story started to plod forward in my mind, then to lumber forth with increased momentum as the sheet worked its way around the room. I didn’t know where any of these images, which had the materiality and authority of memories, were coming from, except in the vaguest sense. I could see my father was transfixed. “The kid, he signed up first . . . for avalanches. He wanted avalanches, desperately. Who wouldn’t? He was overjoyed when the list came around . . . and the four people ahead of him hadn’t signed up for avalanches. What were the odds?

      “So he signs his name. But when the list comes around and the teacher wants to double-check . . . she reads off Billy Fletcher’s name for avalanches. He wants to protest; he can see from where he’s sitting that Billy has crossed off his name—it’s Heath, and he—gets mocked for it sometimes, especially next year when they’re doing Macbeth. Anyway, it’s crossed, blatantly, off, but Billy’s bigger, more developed, works out, football player. So Heath keeps his mouth shut. Caves is left, still. Anybody want caves? He shoots up his hand. He needs the extra credit way more than he needs avalanches. He’s fallen behind, barely passing the class. He doesn’t mind earth science, rather enjoys it, actually, but it’s . . . a lot of memorization. Doesn’t have time. Most of his free time is spent over in . . . the hunting store where he works, helps out his dad, exhausting.

      “So he gets one day off, the start of actual hunting season. Everything’s closed, but . . . for some reason the library’s open. Let’s say . . . the librarian there is antihunting. Heath heads for the library and finds your book on caves. Takes it out. Takes out a couple of other books. But he knows the project has to be good. He doesn’t have a lot of time, though—next day it’s back to the store. He’s strapped in math class, too, where Mrs. Clayman is going over the Cartesian graphs. He doesn’t get functions. So . . . he copies a bit, more than a bit, in truth, three pages.”

      As I related this, a part of me was observing myself, and that part wanted to discern where the details were coming from. They seemed conjured from anywhere and nowhere at once, at first trickling, then gushing forth as though from some reservoir of necessity. A thought that I had vaguely had before crystallized in my mind: nonfiction could be pinned down, assigned its plot of shelf real estate, where it could reliably be located in the continuum of knowledge, in any library in any country in the world. But fictions were like transient, shifty renters—all we could do with them was alphabetize them by the arbitrary condition of the authors’ last names and hope they stayed put.

      “So,” my father murmured. “He get away with it?”

      The tip of my tongue rooted around between my lip and the top of my gums as I pondered, as though the answer were wedged there like food caught in teeth. It was a good question, and it felt like any answer was irrevocable; somehow, too, it needed to be dictated by the book. “He gets caught . . . when his teacher asks him about the part about ‘uterine walls.’ The class snickers . . . so she knows it is her professional duty to do something, and when she confronts him, Heath is stymied, tongue-tied.” I paused for a moment here. My dad was not Pollyannaish, but why I had been lured into such a cynical cavern of possibility, a seeming dead end? Somehow, glancing over at his sallow cheeks, I felt I needed to push around this.

      It came to me all at once, and I said it as quickly as though I was on a fading phone connection. “But he will read the book later for a literature class and understand it much more and look back in disgust and pathos on his younger ways. And he will write his college essay on the book and the whole experience, and it will get him into his second choice.”

      I looked over at my father; he appeared to be in something akin to a trance. As for me, I’d gotten so caught up in the story that I hadn’t even seen Désirée come into the room.

      “This is what happens next to the book,” I explained, as if this explanation would make sense to her. But if it didn’t—I shrugged—so be it; I’d realized something that my father, perhaps, had already known: that delirium is a form of understanding.

      As Désirée crouched over him to give him his medication, he said, “We are cave people,” perhaps by way of his own explanation. Somehow, the words were comedic and weighty at once. Neither of us responded, except by smiling, which seemed about right.

      Afterward, as I drove home, I retraced my story as though I had just surfaced from a particularly vivid dream, trying to figure out from whence its ingredients had grown, by what recipe it had been put together. I had dated a woman once who was a high school teacher, and she had told me a couple of stories about plagiarists she had caught; I hadn’t thought about her recently. The other details—avalanches, buff football players—seemed like miracles.

      The next evening, I told him about the couple who had checked the book out next. Somehow, a fragment set me off—something I heard about once on NPR? “They’re a couple who are getting married in a cave. She’s an archaeologist; he’s a dean at the school where she works. She has a vision of a splendid wedding that actually will be set in a cave—hundreds of candles illuminating the lush walls, dripping sounds in the background, chains of flowers lining the mantel that happens to run along the cave’s contours, a photographer who must crane his neck around stalactites.

      “The groom, the dean, he’s a little stiff, but he decides to go along with it. She’s brought out so many wonderful aspects of him—spontaneity, adventure—that he can’t complain. They get out books about caves, look for ‘Cave Readings.’ Spelos looks promising, looks like it was written for that target audience of brides and grooms looking for pithy cave quotes. Doing his part, dutifully, he reads the passage on bats, somehow panics. It’s not about the bats; it’s about something deeper that she represents, someplace she’s leading him. Too much. Soon, for consecutive nights, he’s having dreams, nightmares, bats swarming.

      “They split up. She marries a local chef, who is delighted to get married in a cave. They have a cave-aged cheese spread at the wedding that rivals anything anyone’s ever seen.

      “He neglects to return the book. Pining for her, he clings to it, a remnant of that relationship, what once was, even though it is too painful to actually read it.

      “Then one day, he meets a new girl. Everything’s great—she loves the symphony and the opera. It’s what he’s always imagined. A couple of years go by. They are moving . . . to New Mexico, of all places. He’s a little bit wary but hears the Santa Fe Symphony is fantastic. As they are packing up, she turns up the book, which is absurdly overdue at this point. She can’t believe he hasn’t returned it. Not only that, but she knows that he was previously all but married in a cave, and she’s savvy—she actually puts two and two together; she interprets the reasons for the book’s continued presence there and continued absence from the library all too accurately. They fight—about other last-minute scrambles, the need to return the cable box, et cetera—she never lets on that she sees the significance of it, besides its being long overdue. He doesn’t quite understand why she wants him to return it immediately—they are in the middle of rolling lamps in bubble wrap—but he does. Dutiful. At first, they want to charge him at