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We were there for hours, sifting things, picking toadstools, staring at the giant graffiti phoenix on the second story wall, massive and orange and angry, rising out of the mural of a broken hardback. I didn't find anything worth having, and Ezzie brought home just one book.
The Scott Michelin 4th Grade Guide to Native America, Eighth Edition.
That very night, though we got back to our loft after four in the morning, Ezzie began to work. For weeks, night after night, all night long, she kept at it, barely speaking, rarely even retreating into the bathroom for her razor blades. Finally, I came home from work one evening to find the table bedecked with roses, a plate of the Hungarian goulash she never made anymore steaming on the table, and Ezzie's first real masterpiece laid beside the vase for my perusal.
What she'd done was so simple, really. So quiet. At first, I wasn't even sure she'd done anything. Then, as I flipped the pages, past sketches of Sacajawea and photographs of wigwams, I began to notice little smudges that might have been accidental fingerprints from tiny nine-year-old hands, except there were too many, and sometimes they were strewn across the page in unlikely or impossible patterns: half a forefinger here, a thumb all the way down next to the number, a red pen splash in the middle of a chart. As though a spider had stepped in an inkwell and then danced over the text. Then I started noticing the words missing. Some whited away, some stitched closed. Then there were the blotches, bug-shaped, pressed between lines. Some of them, I think, really were bugs. And then the little razor cuts. Thousands of them. If I removed the binding, I half-suspected, and unfolded the whole, I'd find a snowflake pattern in the pages. Or something else entirely.
There was more. I can't explain the effect. It wasn't any one thing, but the cumulative impact. An invented history of a history book no one had read, or would ever read.
That night, while I was asleep, Ezzie went back to the Roosevelt Depot without me. I couldn't believe it when I woke, told her how crazy that had been and how dangerous that place was, as if she needed me to tell her. But she was already back at her work table, hunched over her next project.
I close my eyes, and just like every time I close my eyes, now, I see her there. Crouched in her chair in the middle of the night, cross-hatched thighs drawn up under her nightshirt, unbound hair hooding her, blocking the light of her face from my sight like a blackout shade.
"I don't know why Bri didn't take her gloves to St. Paul," Will says. "Other than that it was crazy hot. Just putting on my hat felt like dumping a bucket of sweat on my head. We caught a bus across the river. There weren't any stops near the depot, and the guy didn't want to let us off, but Bri chatted him up and got him whistling Janet Jackson songs, and finally he agreed to drop us. He even said he'd come back in three hours, and that we'd better be there, for our own sakes.
"We walked the warehouses, and the sun went down. At first, we were trying everything we could think of to fend off mosquitoes, but eventually we gave up and let the little fuckers feast. We watched the trash barges floating in the middle of the big, brown river. They weren't even moving. They could have been swim rafts, except no one in their right mind would stick a toe in that water, let alone swim it. In that park I told you about-the one on the Mi
"The St. Paul side was completely empty, though. There were a couple abandoned cars, one working streetlight, some pigeons hopping around, and that's about it. But there wasn't anything threatening. Not like St. Louis or Detroit or anything. It was just empty.
"We weren't even the only ones at the depot. Not even close. We came around the corner of this huge ship-container building, and there was this old woman sitting in what I guess must have been the parking lot on a little pile of tires. She had a parasol over her head and everything, and a thermos full of lemonade. She gave us some. She had this whole stack of tatty Dickens novels with her. I have no idea whether she brought them or found them. They were just crappy school editions, nothing valuable, but intact. Totally readable. Nice.
"'It's like summer camp in there tonight,' she told us.
"It was more like a library, though. Isn't it weird how books do that? I mean, who established the whispering rule for depots?
"There were certainly plenty of other Crawlers in the warehouse. Probably fifteen, maybe even twenty. It seemed like most of them knew each other. We figured they came in a group, maybe some community college urban archaeology class or something. We kept seeing them in little bunches, picking apart a book pile or kneeling near some torn-up notepads or just standing in one of the makeshift rows, taking it all in. It almost felt like we were wandering in a downtown Japanese garden, not a depot, with all those flashlights everywhere and the moonlight outside and the snatches of music from over the river.
"For the first hour or so, Bri stayed by me. I think the place had been a ca
"Do you think there's some reason it's mostly happening to women?"
He stops again, as though he actually thinks I can enlighten him. As though he and I have anything whatsoever in common, except loss. As if anyone does. There's a bleak joke here, somewhere. Something about there always having been more women readers. Instead of making it, I jam the rye bottle in my mouth. In the draft, in the Lake Superior wind, I hear Ezzie's laughter.
"Well," he says. "What happened is, I found a book.
Adventures for the Young and Adventurous. I only picked it up because it was still sealed in a wrinkly plastic baggy. The spine almost fell apart when I eased the covers open. But the first story was "The Man with the Cream Tarts." You know it? I didn't. I didn't even know it was Stevenson until… until months later. When everything was over. The title page had so much mold, even I wished I had Bri's gloves. I used my sleeve to turn it. But the inside pages were relatively clean. And right off, I hit one of those sentences: 'He was a remarkable man even by what was known of him; and that was but a small part of what he actually did.' God."
Will makes a whistling sound. Then he shudders.
"There was a little window way up the wall behind where we were, and I just sat down right there. I started to read aloud to Bri, but it was too echoey. Every 's' sounded like a rattlesnake.
"Bri finally gri
"I read the whole story. By then, the moon had risen past the window, and most of the light was gone. But my eyes had adjusted. At some point, I realized it had been a long time since I'd heard any music from across the river or muffled conversations from our companions in the depot. I closed the book, and the cover came away in my hands like an old scab.
"As soon as I stood up, I finally started to understand how vast this place was. It might be the biggest one of all. When we came in, there'd been shadows, at least, and most of them were moving. But now nothing was distinct, everything was just dark, and I couldn't hear a thing. I felt like I'd fallen asleep in school and gotten locked in overnight. I opened my mouth to call for Bri, then thought better of it and moved off in the direction she'd gone.