Paper Towns

I left the office, ducking through a Troll Hole into the room with the labyrinthine shelves. I walked up and down the aisles for a while. At the end of the room I crawled through the next Troll Hole into the empty room. I sat down on the carpet rolled against the far wall. The cracked white paint crunched against my back. I stayed there for a while, long enough that the jagged beam of light coming through a hole in the ceiling crept an inch along the floor as I let myself become accustomed to the sounds.

After a while, I got bored and crawled through the last Troll Hole into the souvenir shop. I rifled through the T-shirts. I pulled the box of tourist brochures out from under the display case and looked through them, looking for some hand-scrawled message from Margo, but I found nothing.

I returned to the room I now found myself calling the library. I thumbed through the Reader’s Digests and found a stack of National Geographics from the 1960s, but the box was covered in so much dust that I knew Margo had never been inside it.

I began to find evidence of human habitation only when I got back to the empty room. On the wall with the rolled-up carpet, I discovered nine thumbtack holes in the cracked and paint-peeled wall. Four of the holes made an approximate square, and then there were five holes inside the square. I thought perhaps Margo had stayed here long enough to hang up some posters, although there were none obviously missing from her room when we searched it.

I unrolled the carpet partway and immediately found something else: a flattened, empty box that had once contained twenty-four nutrition bars. I found myself able to imagine Margo here, leaning against the wall with musty rolled-up carpet for a seat, eating a nutrition bar. She is all alone, with only this to eat. Maybe she drives once a day to a convenience store to buy a sandwich and some Mountain Dew, but most of every day is spent here, on or near this carpet. This image seemed too sad to be true — it all struck me as so lonely and so very unMargo. But all the evidence of the past ten days accumulated toward a surprising conclusion: Margo herself was — at least part of the time — very unMargo.

I rolled out the carpet farther and found a blue knit blanket, almost newspaper thin. I grabbed it and held it to my face and there, God, yes. Her smell. The lilac shampoo and the almond in her skin lotion and beneath all of that the faint sweetness of the skin itself.

And I could picture her again: she unravels the carpet halfway each night so her hip isn’t against bare concrete as she lies on her side. She crawls beneath the blanket, uses the rest of the carpet as a pillow, and sleeps. But why here? How is this better than home? And if it’s so great, why leave? These are the things I ca

And maybe this was what I needed to do above all. I needed to discover what Margo was like when she wasn’t being Margo.

I lay there with the her-scented blanket for a while, staring up at the ceiling. I could see a sliver of late-afternoon sky through a crack in the roof, like a jagged canvas painted a bright blue. This would be the perfect place to sleep: one could see stars at night without getting rained on.

I called my parents to check in. My dad answered, and I said we were in the car on the way to meet Radar and Angela, and that I was staying with Ben overnight. He told me not to drink, and I told him I wouldn’t, and he said he was proud of me for going to prom, and I wondered if he would be proud of me for doing what I was actually doing.

This place was boring. I mean, once you got past the rodents and the mysterious the-building-is-falling-apart groans in the walls, there wasn’t anything to do. No Internet, no TV, no music. Iwas bored, so it again confused me that she would pick this place, since Margo always struck me as a person with a very limited tolerance for boredom. Maybe she liked the idea of slumming it? Unlikely. Margo wore designer jeans to break into SeaWorld.

It was the lack of alternative stimuli that led me back to “Song of Myself,” the only certain gift I had from her. I moved to a water-stained patch of concrete floor directly beneath the hole in the ceiling, sat down cross-legged, and angled my body so the light shone upon the book. And for some reason, finally, I could read it.

The thing is that the poem starts out really slowly — it’s just sort of a long introduction, but around the ninetieth line, Whitman finally starts to tell a bit of a story, and that’s where it picked up for me. So Whitman is sitting around (which he calls loafing) on the grass, and then:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full

hands;

How could I answer the child?. . . I do not know what

it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful

green stuff woven.

There was the hope Dr. Holden had talked about — the grass was a metaphor for his hope. But that’s not all. He continues,

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Like grass is a metaphor for God’s greatness or something. .

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. .

And then soon after that,

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow

zones,

Growing among black folks as among white.

So maybe the grass is a metaphor for our equality and our essential co

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

So grass is death, too — it grows out of our buried bodies. The grass was so many different things at once, it was bewildering. So grass is a metaphor for life, and for death, and for equality, and for co

I couldn’t figure out which of these ideas, if any, was at the core of the poem. But thinking about the grass and all the different ways you can see it made me think about all the ways I’d seen and mis-seen Margo. There was no shortage of ways to see her. I’d been focused on what had become of her, but now with my head trying to understand the multiplicity of grass and her smell from the blanket still in my throat, I realized that the most important question was whoI was looking for. If “What is the grass?” has such a complicated answer, I thought, so, too, must “Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman?” Like a metaphor rendered incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos.

I had to narrow her down, and I figured there had to be things here that I was seeing wrong or not seeing. I wanted to tear off the roof and light up the whole place so that I could see it all at once, instead of one flashlight beam at a time. I put aside Margo’s blanket and shouted, loud enough for all the rats to hear, “I Am Going To Find Something Here!”