Between the Stacks by Nikki Johnson

The librarians would not appreciate me smoking in the library, but I need a cigarette. They already get nervous when they see me lying on the floor between the stacks. They ask if I’m okay. I say yes. When I’m moving the stacks, no one knows what I am doing and no one cares. I’m just another college kid getting a book. But once I lie on the floor, people have opinions. The librarians lack the imaginative capacity to understand me, to see that when I touch the hardcover bindings and connect the stacks, I enter a book’s world. When they interrupt me, I pretend normality, that I’m looking for a book or swooning from dehydration induced by college sucking away one’s soul. I can’t deal with their disapproval tonight. I am in a state of suffering.

My legs spread to touch the stacks on either side of me. The library’s brillo pad carpet rubs the backs of my knees, but the books’ covers are smooth against my hands. I get up and push the right red arrow button at the row’s end. The stack travels along metal rails and the space narrows to about five feet wide. I lie back down, reach and the books are closer to my fingertips. I close my eyes. Relax, think relax. And then open my eyes.

The pack of American Spirits and a lighter are next to me on the brillo. I bought my first pack tonight. I go outside, sit on the bench in front of the library and light my cigarette. My dress covers the little sign that says “no smoking” – even this bench is forsaken to the librarians’ temperance movement. I feel solidarity with smokers. This bench should be a curb in New York. With cigarette in hand, knees up to my ears, dress drooped around my knees, and messy hair framing my defeated face, I belong in a place with lights, traffic and pollution, not in a college town with a population of 17,000 where nothing of interest happens at 10pm on a Saturday night.

A boy walks past me toward the library. He’s fat in an intense way. He stares, judging me for smoking on the bench.

“Hey.”

“Hello.” I exhale with force so that the smoke will hit the back of his shirt, but his mass disappears through the doors first.

I wallow and inhale, inhale and wallow and think of class today, my first workshop meeting of the term. Before it, my short story was quietly brilliant. I’d put it in an envelope to send off to The New Yorker. Now, apparently, it’s shit, and the envelope is in pieces. They mauled it – there’s no motivation, the story lacks a conflict, the beginning’s too generic, nothing is clear, we don’t know why we should give a fuck, and so they continued on to ruin me.

I am doomed if my writing can’t even make it in this podunk Ohio town. I light another cigarette. Each flippant comment in that forty minute critique pierced my everything, showing I have no talent at the only thing I want to be good at. My cigarette’s not done, but I squish it under my sandal. I like that action. A year from now I’ll be able to buy alcohol and nurse pain like Hemingway. Now I can only smoke and think of my inability to create anything meaningful.

I reenter my haven, go down to the second floor and push the red arrow button. The stack moves. I lie down and stretch toward the books. The carpet rubs extra stiff tonight, and the florescent light glares at my eyes. I see The Sound and the Fury on the shelf and try to enter that world. The grass is green, so green and lush we are obviously in the south, where the rain comes and the sun gleams. A white fence stretches, wrapping around the property and claiming what belongs to my family. But the picture keeps fading out. The carpet’s just so goddamn itchy and the light so blinding that my eyes keep opening and instead of the shining south, dull book covers are everywhere. Tonight I find no comfort in the gray faded lettering reading William Faulkner. I can’t enter his world where a house’s shape and a character’s reason for living are clear, available and beautiful. Now Faulkner mocks me. This book will grow old here. My class would have gushed over “A Rose for Emily.”

I’m just not that brilliant. The shelves tilt on their tracks and the books are probably about to fall out all over me. I reach for the cigarettes but put them back down. I must accept my inferior status and settle for enjoying others’ brilliance. I don’t want to be incapable of writing, reading and imagining. I breathe, close my eyes and see the southern grass of the 1920s. A cypress happens to be a few feet behind me, and so I climb it. The yellow cotton sticks with sweat to my Caddy body. I hike up my skirt, climb, and don’t care who sees my undies, muddied from a wrestle by the river. I grab a branch and raise my nose in the air.

“Excuse me?” My hands let go of the branch. I pull at my dress for a hold, something to grab. I’ve fallen from the tree and now I feel the brillo carpet. My eyes shut too long. The boy I watched walk into the library stares at me like a specimen. He examines my eyes with a pad of paper and a pen in his hands, no doubt ready to write down my name and share my antics with the librarians. His button up shirt constricts me, limits the space that is mine. His shirt also constricts him, an oval shaped belly pushing against the fabric.

“Excuse me?” He stands there. His eyes move from mine to take in the entire setting. Reflected in his eyes I see my white dress, my spread legs. My underwear’s all dirty so I didn’t wear any. I cross my legs.

“I’m not masturbating if that’s what you think.”

He writes something down and then glances up at me. “I just need a book.”

“Get it later.”

“I need it now.” He’s staring at me.

“If you’d back off for a minute, I’d get out of your way.”

“Fine.” He turns away. His khakis are too tight on his butt, the fabric going up his crack and making giant teacups of his butt cheeks. This makes me feel better.

I reach out both arms and legs, connect the stacks and take a deep breath. One, two, three, four, five. No wonder I can’t write. I can’t even manage sentences to give true or false reasons for lying between books.

“Ahhehemmm.” He’s coughing. I can’t tell if it’s accidental or intentional. I stand up and push my eyebrow hairs into proper angles and shapes.

I walk past him. “The books and the brillo carpet are all yours.”

“Brillo carpet?”

“Never mind.”

I pass the comment card box and write that the library needs a smoking lounge. I do down a floor and take long cold sips at the drinking fountain in the bathroom. I doubt that boy knows the women’s third floor bathroom is the library’s masturbation hotspot. I should have written a story about that, even Faulkner hasn’t done that.

Pushing the arrows, I set up the stacks about three feet apart. I will not let that boy with the tight pants ruin my dealing with my already ruined night. I touch the books, push against the stacks, tighten my elbows, strain my muscles and push. Then relax. My body melts. I keep my eyes open and breathe.

My fingers trace the bindings, and I hear a train in the far distance, see mountains, or hills rather, taking the shape of white elephants. So my mind’s choosing Hemingway. His sentences run in front of my eyes and are so sharp, so visceral, so intelligent, so a reminder of whom I can’t be. Our previous solidarity fades as his words knife me with a ridged blade. I breathe, I am strong, and I stop the knifing sensation.

I can deal. Other stories will have to be my stories. The hills and a train station are there, filling the image space of my mind and replacing other thoughts. I see the girl and boy at a table. Condensation forms on their glasses. I hear their conversation. I am the beer that the girl is not drinking. He’s telling her it’s okay, no big deal, professing that he cares about her, that they can do whatever she wants. If what she wants is what he wants. I wouldn’t have written her that passive. The liquid ripples in her glass and that’s me – “Don’t listen.” He won’t love her afterwards. I don’t want to watch this story. I want a story where the woman stands up, but Hemingway doesn’t write that and so his story keeps playing.

She smiles, tucks a loose hair behind her ear and smoothes a linen skirt across her thighs. She’s wearing clean, white, cotton panties. He takes big drinks and instead of looking at her, turns his gaze to the hills. She’ll do what he wants and then he won’t touch her again. As he looks at the white elephants, he knows he won’t love her. I splash in the glass. I rumble deep at the bottom and swirl, a whirlpool to suck her in and tell her what will happen. I can’t affect this story. I’m foaming, screaming “Drink me down! Listen to me! You’ll never be perfect enough for him anymore.” But I know she doesn’t listen, can’t, and won’t hear me until long after the moment to get on a different train passes.

“Excuse me.” I raise my lids and see my reflection in his eyes, and how under and around my white dress, my skin turns red, redder, reddest. My hands and feet are still touching the books.

“Hi. I need another book and again this requires walking between the stacks.” He’s doing something normal. I need to say something normal. I sit up and stare at his belly. It calms me to see the buttons working so hard to hold everything in.

“Why didn’t Hemingway ever write a female Nick Adams?” I say.

The belly starts to move, and he sits down next to me. “I don’t think he was capable of it.”

“Because he was a misogynist pig who could construct good sentences?”

“I think because he liked the idea of women.”

I say nothing and look at a row of titles.

He looks at me. “I have to ask, what are you doing here – since you aren’t masturbating.”

“Looking at books.”

“Spread out like a beached starfish?”

“I do not look like a beached starfish. You look like a beached whale.” I focus real hard on the cover of In Our Time.

“Why beached?”

“It seemed like an appropriate word choice.” I reach for the American Spirits. “Do you want a cigarette?”

“I don’t think smoking in the library would be the best choice of your evening.”

“I don’t think being an asshole would be the best choice of your evening.” We both sit cross-legged and stare at the bookshelves.

“Fine then Miss. With all proper civility, may I inquire as to why you, a college student, presumably, were spread eagled in a dress, without underwear, on the library floor, touching books?”

“This isn’t a fucking CLUE game.”

“I’m not being offensive, just curious.”

“I can’t explain it to you.” Now we look at one another. He has a little hair peeking out of his left nostril.

“I’m intrigued.” The hair moves up and down.

“I don’t care. I’m not explaining.”

“It’s your prerogative not to share.” He moves to his knees, to a foot and then to another foot in the laborious process of his rising. I’m glad I weigh at least 100lbs less than him.

“I hope it all works out how you want,” he says. As all of him turns away, I want him to ask me again why I’m here.

“Are you really here to research?” I say.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“A senior seminar paper on Turkish national identity in the 1930s.” He’s standing in the stackway, I’m sitting and a diagonal line forms between our eyes.

“Oh.”

“Not as interesting as thinking about Nick Adams and Hemingway.”

“Definitely not.”

“Well, I leave you to the books.” He walks away.

“Thanks.”

I get up and check around the row’s edge to make sure he’s gone and that no librarian is wandering around. I push the right red arrow button and watch the stacks move closer. I squeeze in on my side, the books next to my body. Their stories press against me. I wish they could be me mine. They close tighter and I feel them against my skin, closing in and breathing the breath I’m not capable of taking for myself. I close my eyes, push against the books and think of Fitzgerald, try to make it to Gatsby, but my mind won’t take me there. The sharp carpet turns my skin raw and the books close in tighter. I try to exhale and as the air comes out, the support against my back disappears. The books pull away, and the row begins moving, tracking away from my body. I flop down. The boy stands at the row’s end, pushing the left red arrow button and opening up space between the stacks.

“Hello again.”

I know he can see my chest rising, falling, and searching for breath. “What book do you want now?”

He doesn’t have his pad of paper or any books in his hands. “No book. I heard the stacks moving in and thought you might crunch yourself to death.”

“I didn’t.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to go into other worlds but instead fighting with Faulkner, Hemingway and now Fitzgerald.” I hit my head against the carpet for telling him.

“Fighting with Faulkner and Hemingway?”

“I hate them for their sentences.” The ceiling is lined with fluorescent lights. If I look only at them, I don’t see him filling the space between the stacks.

“Well that’s odd, most people love them for their sentences,” he says.

“I did, until they oppressed me.”

“So you want to be the great female novelist of the 21^st century.”

“You want to be the great misogynistic bastard of the 21^st century.”

“So you want to be the great novelist of the 21^st century.”

“Did.”

“With the cigarettes and weird pseudo sexual oddities, you seem right for the part.”

I stare at the button about to pop off his shirt. “Except that my writing’s shit.”

“Your writing being shit doesn’t explain you lying on the floor. The world has yet to end because one day an aspiring artist felt depressed.”

“Thank you for that helpful insight.”

“I get the impression that no matter what I say to try and make you feel better, it will be called bullshit.” He squats down so that his eyes are now in place of the button.

“Thank you for that useful commentary.”

“Two things. One, you aren’t Hemingway or Faulkner – ”

“Two things – you are fat and a stalker.”

“And as I was saying, accepting this doesn’t mean your work is ‘shit.’ Two, a day is only twenty-four hours long.”

I go back to looking at the lights. I hear the stacks traveling on their metal paths away from me. He’s moving them apart. Then he’s standing beside my head, looking down at me. He blocks the light and I can only see his face and that nostril hair. I stand up to get him out of my face. The space between the stacks is now very wide.

“What are you doing?”

He walks over to one stack and touches several books with his hand. “Faulkner’s winning the fight so end it before you lose.” He nods his head over to the other stack. I stand there, with the fluorescent illuminating our skin in a sickly way, the stacks so far apart and this boy looking at me. He reaches out his left hand. I’m raw skinned and panty-less in the middle of the stacks. I look at the American Spirits on the carpet, but walk over and touch a book. He leans his hand closer, and I take it. The warm flesh surrounds my hand, and we stand staring at one another. We sway, trying to balance, his big body and my little one touching hands and books.

He closes his eyes. “Now do we say a chant to take us into another world?”

“No. Now do I say you should lose some of that fat?”

“So I say you’re a library masturbating sex-pot. Great.”

“I appreciate the compliment.”

“Good. Any chance you’ll tell me your name?” he says.

“No,” I say.

“Then I’ll just call you Story: The Weirdo,” he says.

I squeeze his hand extra hard so his blubber will feel my small and fine hand. I drop my other hand from the books and close my eyes. His hand’s so warm, and softer than the brillo carpet against my skin.