Bin Laden's Bald Spot: & Other Stories

The Man Who Wanted to Live in the Library

106 the man who wanted to Live in the LiBrary He was sixty years old, slight, without the spectacles you would expect of the librarian. Amused, amusing. Gentle but intent. Married, generally happily, children grown. Fit no easy category. Employed by a large concern where he was generally admired. No particular obsessions or neuroses. Moderate drinker. Health good. Skier, bicyclist. Fiscal conservative, social moderate. Pension plan. A curiously small personal library, the result of what he called his annual urge to purge, a sort of bibliographic spring cleaning, conducted on the fourteenth of June every year, the day Jorge Luis Borges died. No known secrecies, manias, mistresses, ponzi schemes, medical worries, religious craziness, vendettas, enemies, or psycho-complexes. Small jaunty mustache, looked rather like David Niven. Scar on right shoulder from polio shot as child. Scars on hands from work in machine shop as teenager. Scar on left calf from misadventure with a parrot. Otherwise no distinguishing marks. Last seen in person Tuesday at five o’clock by security guard at corporate campus during shift change; they waved at each other with the half-wave men make to acknowledge acquaintance. Car found parked neatly in library lot. Personal effects in car undisturbed. All four windows open exactly one inch. Wallet, keys, cell phone nearly stacked on passenger seat, covered with baseball cap (Seattle Mariners). Brian Doyle | 107 Wife says that a stop at the library after work was normal for him; says on average he stopped there three times a week, and often he would stay in the library an hour or more, ostensibly researching various writing projects but really, she suspects, just poking around, her words. Says he swam to the library on rainy days like a trout to a fly. Says he could be found at the library pretty much any time you didn’t know where he was. Says he more than once asked her out on dates to the library. Says he made a point on their trips to other cities to pop into the library for research porpoises, the same damn joke every time, her words. Says their children used to complain that when dad took them to Saturday morning reading hour he was reluctant to leave after the scheduled hour and they had to fake tantrums to get him out. Says he knew not only each librarian by name but every janitor, groundskeeper, board member, and regular patron. Says he also appeared to know every storage closet, obscure corner, dim archival room, and square foot of wasted attic space in the library, and had pored over the original plans and designs, even unto the tenth set of blueprints, one page of which he had framed and hanging in the wine cellar. Says he once mentioned that he was second on the all-time list of patrons requesting books from other branch libraries in the county system and had ambitions to be first. Says she said to him at that juncture what kind of nutjob would set out to win the all-time book borrowing title and what sort of twisted soul would even contemplate such a ludicrous proposition to which he had no ready reply. Says he was not what you would think a man so absorbed in libraries would be vis-à-vis new technologies for libraries and indeed was riveted by ways they could elevate the library experience, his words. Says he dreamed and sketched all sorts of ways that you could eventually consume and digest books in all sorts of new electric ways having to do with holograms and energy transfer and digital resurrection, his words. Says he would go on and on babbling about seventh dimensions and librarial interstices and as yet undiscovered livable realities of story-centered structures in which so many stories were housed and shared that eventually the space was soaked and slathered by stories in ways perhaps inhabitable by readers who are in the end 108 | Bin Laden’s Bald Spot themselves composed of stories. Says despite being a library nut he was actually a sweet man and a good father and a good husband, all things considered, every marriage having its tide charts, her words. Says the only unusual thing she can remember in recent months was his repeated desire to live in the library, a desire always accompanied with a laugh as if it was a joke which it was clearly not, this...