Boarding Instructions, page 14
The office reminded him of a cell. The walls were gray concrete. There were no windows. The metal desk was bolted to the floor.
“Sit down,” Delia said. She took a seat herself behind the desk.
Gabe put his suitcase on the floor and sat down in the metal folding chair in front of the desk.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Sorry. I’m okay. I’m okay.”
She moved stuff around on top of the desk a little desperately, he thought, but then she found the legal pad she’d apparently been looking for and put it in front of herself.
But then she had nothing to write with, and her frantic shuffling and rooting around on the desk began again. She opened and closed drawers. Her pale face was flushed now. He worried she might flip out and start screaming. Maybe she’d throw things, pull out her hair, tackle him and try to scratch out his eyes.
Well, he could have offered her the pen in his shirt pocket. But who knew if that was the right thing to do? People are always telling you about the things you’re supposed to do when you first meet a prospective employer, and the things you’re not supposed to do, like salt your food before you taste it. He couldn’t remember any specific rules about offering the interviewer a pen when she couldn’t find one of her own, but it might be a little dangerous. If the look on your face was not just right, she might think you were laughing at her or being condescending or sucking up. No, it was probably better to let her find her own pen.
She did find her own pen in the end. She came back up with it from somewhere behind the desk, and he was pretty sure her eyebrows had gone up a little and her eyes had lingered for just a moment on the pen in his pocket as she straightened up.
“So, you’re from Arizona,” she said.
Okay, they would start with small talk, he thought. But she was looking at him in a way that might mean the small talk was more than just small talk. Maybe that was some kind of code phrase. So, you’re from Arizona? Yes, the sunsets are very nice in Arizona. And then they would exchange briefcases.
“That’s right,” he said. “Arizona.”
“It must be a lot warmer there.” She picked up some papers in both hands and tapped the ends on the desk to square the edges. Then she put them down and couldn’t find her pen again.
“In the seventies when I left.”
“That sounds wonderful,” she said.
Was she trying to tell him it would not be so bad if she turned him down and he had to go back to Arizona? At least the weather would be nice?
“Does it always rain here?”
“People who live here like it,” she said. “In fact, I have a PI friend who always says, ‘A day without rain is like a day without sunshine.’”
She tried a small smile out on him. Was she talking about a Private Investigator? But the heads of university research projects were sometimes called Primary Investigators. Was she talking about Emily herself? That strange sentence seemed a perfect thing for the mysterious Librarian of Pi to be saying. Or did Delia mean pi? Maybe it was a pun, and he was supposed to pick up on it and groan or roll his eyes or something.
She found her pen and looked back up at him. He didn’t know what to say next. She was waiting for something. What was it?
“I came for pi,” he said.
She stopped smiling. Maybe he should have let her bring up the subject first. Maybe he should have said more about Arizona, the palm trees, the Gila Monsters and scorpions, the Saguaro cacti standing around with their arms up like this was some kind of bank robbery. Maybe she wanted him to ask her out for dinner or coffee. In other circumstances, he would have chosen to interpret it like that. He would have taken a chance. Hadn’t he been in love with her a moment ago?
She burst into tears.
He stood up. He had intended to walk around the desk and put a hand on her shoulder, maybe say, “there there,” but she heard him move and held her hand up in an obvious command that he should not approach. He sat back down.
She lifted her head and dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt.
“So you want to be emily?” she said.
He could hear the word as she meant it. She did not mean the legendary Emily Lupin, head Librarian of Pi. She meant “emily.” Everyone who worked at the library who was not Emily was “emily.” He would never have gotten even this far if he had not known that.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “Very much.”
“Tell me why.” She slapped around on the desk looking for her damn pen. “Hold on a minute.”
Had it fallen to the floor? He hadn’t heard it hit. No, there, she’d found it. “Okay,” she said. “Shoot.”
Shoot.
He should have been ready for a general question like that, but he had spent so much time on his tables and languages and theories that he had not rehearsed an answer about why he wanted to do this in the first place.
He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t talk about the pay because the pay was nothing to speak of. He couldn’t talk about the benefits, because there weren’t any benefits. Advancement? Well, who knew how that worked? There was only one Emily, and no one could ever move up and take her place.
Gabe could talk about his fascination with the idea of the library. Why hadn’t she asked about that? Maybe he could turn the interview in that direction. Maybe he should talk about his love of numbers. But then she might ask, “So, why didn’t you study mathematics in college?” And once again he would have no good answer. The clock was ticking.
“Maybe that question was too hard?” she said. “So, try this one. Why do you think you can be emily?”
Once more she’d asked something right on the edge of what he could answer. He could have told her why he thought he was qualified to try to be emily. He could have told her about all the thinking he had done about pi. He might have mentioned how much he wanted to learn why he’d failed to find anything in the digits he had so far examined. He might have said how he so very much wanted to understand how it all worked. Hey, wait a minute. That was a pretty good answer to her first question!
He wanted to be emily to learn how pi actually functioned as a library!
Too late.
Now she wanted to know why he thought he could do it not why he wanted to do it. The question implied that he must have some idea of what emilies did on a day-to-day basis. Otherwise, how could he tell her why he thought he could actually do it?
Wasn’t it some kind of job getting tip that you were supposed to say you could do whatever they asked if you could do?
“I can do it,” he said.
She waited.
“Because I’m willing to do whatever it takes to do it!”
“Tell me about your interpretation of the first thirty-three digits in the decimal expansion,” she said.
And he jumped right into it. This was more like it.
But she didn’t seem to be listening. He took out his multiplication table in base 26.
She glanced at it, did a double take, and said, “What is this? Oh, wait, you started with one is A?”
“Yes,” he said. “And zero as Z.”
“Why?”
“Well, the word ‘zero’ starts with the letter Z,” he said. “Not to mention that the middle number, that is, the thirteenth letter is ‘M.’”
She just looked blank, waiting for him to go on.
“You know, M,” he said. “For ‘middle’? Not to mention the fact that it makes it easy to sing the AZ BZs.”
He sang, “AZ, BZ, CZ, DZ, EZ!”
“People have always started with A for zero and Z for twenty-five,” she said.
“Does this mean I’ve found something new?”
“Hardly,” she said.
Maybe he was trying too hard, but realizing that didn’t slow him down. He was desperate to impress her. “I like to imagine Emily as a little girl with her twenty-six fingers. Thirteen on each hand, and she’s learning her Asies, Bsies, and Csies. She’s got a big blue bow in her hair, and her shoes are both black and white.”
“You think Emily has twenty-six fingers?”
“When she was a little girl,” he said. “She’s so cute.”
“Look,” she said, “Speaking of Emily, the real reason I’m seeing you today is that you’re going to help break her out of jail.”
5
Good News and Bad News in Pi
She loves me.
She loves me not.
6
In Out of the Rain
Delia tossed her pen down and stood up. “Come on.”
“Does this mean I get to be emily?” Gabe remained seated.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “What are you waiting for? The secret handshake?”
“There’s a secret handshake?”
“No, of course, there isn’t,” she said. “Will you stand up and come on?”
He got up expecting her to push past him to the door. Instead she turned to the wall and put her right palm flat against the concrete and muttered something he couldn’t make out. She moved her hand around in circles like she was washing a window, and the blocks rumbled and slid inwardly and then to one side revealing a dark passageway. She stepped through the opening.
Gabe came around the desk and looked through the hole into a dim six-sided alcove with a spiral staircase disappearing into the gloom above. He heard the rustling rumbling moaning of air moving in ventilation shafts.
Delia glanced back at him then started up the stairs. He hesitated a moment and then stepped forward. As soon as he passed through the hole in the wall, it closed behind him and everything went totally dark.
“Delia?”
“Here,” she called.
Her voice bounced around in the hexagonal chamber, and he could not tell which was her real voice and which were echoes. He reached out hoping to touch a wall. He felt nothing but empty air. He turned slowly and groped for the secret door that had just closed behind him, but he felt nothing in that direction either.
“Follow me.” Delia’s voice sounded far away now.
He put his arms straight out to his sides at shoulder height and turned in a circle, but he traversed all 360 degrees and still felt nothing. His arms were the diameter of the circle, and the relationship of his arms to the circumference of his circle was pi.
He was both in the dark and in the library of pi.
He made a couple more rotations, and then he stopped. He could not say why he stopped at that moment and not a moment before or a moment later. It just felt like the right time to stop. Maybe it was an emily thing. He put his arms out in front of himself and walked into the darkness like a sleepwalker until he came to the stairs.
“Up here,” Delia called.
Sometimes it was the sound of her feet on the stairs above, and sometimes it was a faint wave of heat and sometimes a smell and very infrequently the sound of her voice that told him he was climbing in the right direction.
He wanted to catch up to her. He wanted to count the ways she startled and delighted him and hear her laugh over her shoulder as she slipped out of her clothes and let them fall to the cold hardwood floor and walked to the mirror to push at her hair first on the left and then on the right, leaning all the time a little forward in a posture calculated to make him feel like his tent would soon be obscuring his view of her from the bed and he would have to lean way over to one side to see her. It seemed like they were never out of bed for long in these early days which in a way were all one day, even one moment, this moment which as it turned out did not last forever.
She poured the tea and sat down at the kitchen table with him. She was wearing a ragged terrycloth robe, and her feet were bare. She put them in his lap, and they were very cold. He reached down and rubbed them, and she sighed.
Oh, and then the bickering, and the hard feelings, and the long walks in the rain, and the tears. And as they walked, they woke up, and broke up, and made up, and broke up again.
Things were getting a little lighter, but because it was a spiral staircase, he could still not see her.
And by the time he came to the top of the stairs and the long hallway, they had loved and lost. They had damaged one another, left scars, gone into therapy, finished up with therapy and moved on. They had come out the other side and were old friends. He felt so warm and relaxed to see her standing there waiting for him. She took his hand. He squeezed, and she squeezed back.
“This way,” Delia said. “She’s expecting you.”
8
Girl With Raccoon and Harpsichord
They had come into a long hallway with evenly spaced glowing green Exit signs. In the distance a lighted door looked small enough for Alice. Hand in hand, they walked toward it.
And on the way, he tried a few doors, and all of them, even the ones under the Exit signs, were locked. Each had a number painted on it in a color just a little lighter than the door itself. This one, for example, was numbered 127, and the next one was 2224, and the one after that was 39, and the one after that was 107.
“Part of pi?” he asked.
“What else?” Delia said.
But what part of pi? He had no idea, and he knew her well enough to know he should keep any fruitcake theories that might pop into his head on the subject to himself.
The open door with the light probably had a number, too. When they got to it, he thought he should close the door and see what the number was since surely it would be important to his life, but Delia pulled him into the room, and what he saw there made him forget about the number.
A small girl dressed in clothes from very early in the last century stood holding a stuffed raccoon upside down in her arms. To her left was a harpsichord. There was a painting of jumping dolphins, blue seas, and bright sunlight on the open lid of the instrument. Gabe knew it was a harpsichord, because before he became obsessed with pi, he had been obsessed with early keyboard instruments. He had sold his clavichord to eat and pay the rent while studying pi so he could come to Oregon and be emily.
He knew the raccoon was stuffed, because the girl was holding it upside down by one of its back legs now, and because it did not blink even if it did seem to follow him with its black eyes.
“This is Emily,” Delia said. “She needs your help, Gabe.”
The girl was nine or ten and had very blonde hair in ringlets. There was a huge blue bow in her hair. Gabe came down on one knee in front of her.
“You’ve come to save me,” she said.
“I suppose I have,” Gabe said. “But what can I do?”
“You can hold my raccoon,” she said.
“Is that important?”
“It’s essential,” she said. “I cannot put my Rocky down. I cannot play my harpsichord while holding a raccoon. You do want to help me, don’t you?”
“But I don’t see how any of this will help.” Gabe looked up at Delia. “How come you haven’t held her raccoon before now yourself?”
“I could take the raccoon,” Delia said, “but what good would that do?”
“Trust me,” Emily said. “When you tell them about this, they will think they have nothing to worry about. They’ll let me go.”
“Won’t that make me look foolish and hurt my career?”
“Yes,” she said. “It will. You have to choose.”
Well, he really had come for pi.
He held out his hands, and she gave him the raccoon and stepped away from him. She walked to the harpsichord and climbed up onto the bench. She arranged her long skirt carefully over her knees. Her feet did not touch the floor. She spent some time flexing her twenty-six fingers, and then she played them all deeper and deeper into pi and into the sunlight where they would be both hidden and right out there in the open.
And he might even get back together with his old pal, Delia.
Everything was possible.
Love Leans In From the Left
By the time I got back to Jolean, she was down to maybe her last marble. Black Walkman earphones, wet red eyes, and one shoulder coming out of her shirt. It took me a couple of cheek-to-cheeks around the dance floor through the painful orange jazz, twitchy and desperate rat music, and the smoke so thick I kept touching the back of my head to make sure my hair wasn’t on fire, before I realized she was channeling William S. Burroughs, whispering in my ear the old dead guy’s gravelly voice as heard in the author’s classic audio tape reading of his novel Junky. (Penguin Audiobooks, 1977)
“Let’s cut out for Mexico, Bill,” she said.
I ran my hand up her back, counting every sad rib, and slipped around in front and followed her earphone wire down to where it ended in thin air. There was no Walkman. I slipped my hand around her again and let it settle sweetly, and she reached down and tugged it up to the small of her back.
I lifted one of her earphones. “Come on out of there, Jolean,” I said. “Come out and have some eggnog.”
We were a Picasso in a bad mood dancing.
She shrugged my hand away. “I have no interest in proving anything to anybody.” Her voice was his tongue in my ear. “You’d better get with it, Bill.”
“My name isn’t Bill,” I said.
“We could get right in Mexico,” she said. “Reduction cure for the junk sickness.”
I lifted her earphone again. “You’ve never done junk in your life, Jolean! Come on, let’s sit down and drink our eggnog.”
