“I’m learning so much about smelting,” says the ancient man who cheerfully tip-tapped down the stairs in front of me, like a sailor on the shiny deck of a doomed ocean liner, and I wonder if he is the same doleful fellow who moaned to me earlier about his inability to ask for help from the librarians and was that all an act for my benefit or for his? “Am I interrupting your thoughts?” he asked.
“What?” I said, coming to suddenly and discovering that he might have been seeing me writing in my head. I had been remembering the babysitter who scrubbed floors at the Historical Society who Mother took pity on, though I couldn’t remember what she looked like and only remembered her image reflected in the kitchen window when she opened the oven. Mother employed her as our babysitter and I remembered how she once wanted to hear “any of our rock and roll records,” which we didn’t own, and her disappointment with us had caused her to scare us with a stagey story about a stagecoach with a maniac clown inside it.
“You seem to be composing something. I wonder if I’m bothering you.” The ancient asked this with a solicitous voice and a tilt to his head. He still went down the marble steps ahead of me, but glanced back.
“Well, no. But yes, I am composing something. That’s nice that you’re learning about smelting,” I say, hoping vaguely to shut him off, not because I don’t care but only because I’m too busy at this moment thinking of what I want to be doing in a future moment on a future piece of paper.
“Furnaces of molten life force,” he says, waiting at the landing for me to catch up and peering down a hall toward a bright yellow window and the red eye of the sun streaming around the shaggy fronds of a palm and over a carpet in a librarian’s lovely, cool lair. The librarian, seeing us peeking in at his oasis, slides across the rug in the wheeled luxury of his desk chair, stretching the phone cord, and slams the door closed.
“What?”
“Smelting. Burning through to beauty. The beauty of the earth, finally revealed.”
“I want to reveal that, the beauty of the earth, stuff like that, by writing a novel about my life in the desert, like you said,” I say, floundering in the act of revealing to a perfectly strange old man the deepest aspirations of my life in such a casual fashion in a hall, passing open doors and other patrons, passing homeward and filled with deepest despair at the failure of my great projects, the failure to capture beauty for anything more than a temporary, desperate moment. We take the worn marble steps slowly together; how can any library be more pathetic than this dirty, shabby Arizona place?
“Then you’ll like furnaces,” he says, reminding me of my cheerful self when I told him he could research in the library.
“I think I’ve been living in one here all my life.”
“Hah! Good joke. Sure, we do. Live in one.” His eyes are gleeful, burning bright and happy. Perhaps he is melted by the sun, perhaps he is one of those guys who have simply had too many of the photons from the sun pounding on the eggshell of his delicate head.