The Librarianist

AFTER BOB LEARNED THAT CHIP AND CONNIE WERE THE SAME PERSON he hung up the phone and sat in the nook and looked out the window asking himself what he should do. What could he do? There was nothing to do. He took an antihistamine and slept until noon. The sun was out and the snow was melting and he rang Maria at the center, expecting her to take him to task for calling so late the night before but she either didn’t remember or hadn’t made the connection it was him. She spoke of the significance of her fatigue, and mentioned without prompting that Chip was back from her stay at the hospital; also that she and Chip’s son were working together to relocate Chip to more suitable accommodations. “He’s nicer, now that he’s calmed down. He brought me a soggy muffin this morning as a peace offering.” She asked Bob why he was calling and he improvised a story, which was that he had a piece of personal business to attend to which would keep him from visiting the center for a while. Maria was surprised by this. She said, “Personal business is what a volunteer tells me when he wants to quit but doesn’t have the guts to say it.”

“I’m not quitting.”

“What’s the matter, then? Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Okay, but are you?”

“I’m not sick and I’m not quitting,” Bob promised. And he wasn’t quitting, but he couldn’t face Chip knowing she was Connie, and had made the decision to avoid the center until she had gone. Perhaps it was a failure of mettle, some fundamental human test he was not rugged enough to master; and yet the task was so outsize to what he felt he was capable of that he experienced not a twinge of remorse at his turning away from it. Bob didn’t believe that Connie would understand who he was — that his presence would bring her comfort; and so to sit with her now would introduce nothing on her side but a significant pain on his, and he decided he’d had quite enough of it, and that was that. Maria told Bob it was his right as a free citizen to engage in mysteriousnesses but that she hoped he would soon get over whatever it was that was distracting him and return to the fold.

“You’ll save me my seat, then?” Bob asked.

“Well, yes, I will. Just be good and let us know when you want it back.”

And so came the period where Bob had no access to the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, and his days were dreary and lusterless. He disliked being separated from his friends, and the news of Connie brought on a pervasive sorrow which, while neither acute nor dangerous, slowed the clock by half and drained the world of its sounds and colors. He had for some years been experiencing the slow dimming of his capacities, but it was during this time away from the center that the dimming achieved prominence. He was forgetting things, he was burning things on the stove top, and he did occasionally become unsure about where he was going and why. His body, also, was uncooperative; he felt weaker in his limbs, he was falling asleep without knowing he was tired, then waking up confused and unrefreshed. He had increasingly been relying on the rope to climb the stairs to his room, pulling himself up hand over hand in the style of the mountaineer. One evening he fell asleep on the couch in the living room and didn’t wake up until four o’clock in the morning. He lay in the darkness for a time, looking, breathing. He stood and crossed the room and started hauling himself up the steps; when he reached the top step, the brass eyelet came away from the wall. There was a sickening instant where he hung in the air, teetering, rope in hand, then gravity seized him and threw him down the stairs like a stone into a pit. When he came to he was lying flat on his back and the pain in his midbody region made his mind pulse white, and his heart felt brutalized with its thuds and poundings. In a while the pain was lessened and replaced by a numbness and he found he could think of other things besides his discomfort. He thought, I believe I’ve broken my hip, and he had broken it. He thought, How am I going to be helped? A gauziness came over him, and now he felt bouncy and glad, and he giggled, but this hurt, so he stopped. He was becoming sleepy, and then very sleepy, and he was afraid of this sleep because he thought it could be sneaky death masquerading as an innocent tiredness. But there was no fighting it, and he dropped into slumber and did not die. He awoke at half-past nine in the morning to the sound of someone knocking on the door. “Come in,” he called. A young man wearing a safety vest entered, speaking as he stepped deeper into the house, “Hello? Hello?”

“Here I am.”

The young man hurried over and knelt beside Bob. “Sir, are you okay?” he said.

“I’m not, no. How are you?” Bob suggested the young man call him an ambulance and the young man took out his cell phone and did this, explaining the situation to the emergency operator so far as he understood it. “I don’t know what happened but I can tell you he’s definitely injured.”

“I fell down the stairs,” Bob said, pointing.

“He fell down the stairs,” the young man said. He asked Bob for his name and address and Bob told him these things and the young man relayed them to the operator. Now he was listening; soon he told Bob, “They want to know about your pain, Mr. Comet.”

“What about it?”

“How is it?”

“It’s coming in and out, but when it’s in, it’s large.”

The young man said, “I think he’s in a lot of pain.”

Bob still was clutching the rope that had come away from the wall. The young man noticed this and became shy. Lowering his voice, he told the operator, “Yeah, he’s holding a rope in his hand?” He left the room for the kitchen, speaking softly into his phone; Bob tried to hear what the young man was saying but couldn’t make out the words. He noticed the ceiling above the stairwell was cracking and he told himself to remember to address this later. In a while, the young man returned. “Five minutes, they say.”

Bob said, “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

“Glad to be of service.”

Bob said, “You don’t have to stay, if you’ve got work to do.”

“What’s five minutes?”

“I’m not suicidal,” Bob told the young man.

“Me neither,” the young man replied. He pulled up a chair and they waited together. Bob asked him what the purpose of his visit had been and the young man said, “I sell windows. Or I try to sell them. Actually, I don’t sell very many at all. When you sign up with this company, management names past employees, all-stars who’ve brought in such-and-such an amount through commission. But none of these famous past employees are still with the company, and I’m starting to think they didn’t exist in the first place.”

“Are the windows nice windows?”

“Between you and me? They’re defects. Shipment-damaged, mostly, or else banged-up display models. We buy them cheap and sell them cheap — which is how we get our foot in the door. It’s our installation of the windows where we make our profit. Or where the company does.”

Bob forgot he was injured and shifted his body. This occasioned a pain like an icicle in his stomach; he squinted hard and produced a low growling noise at the base of his throat and the young man asked, “Are you all right?” Bob shook his head: no. “Pain,” he said. When the pain passed, he told the young man, “I’d like to hear your patter.”

“You don’t want to hear that,” said the young man, smiling.

“It could be good for passing time,” Bob said.

“Okay, then. Only we don’t do patter anymore. Now it’s all about engagement.”

“What’s that mean?”

“In the old days, no offense, to sell was to utilize the monologue. But now, people want an active experience. The updated version is to ask questions that, coincidentally, lead the potential client where we want them.”

“Where’s that?”

“Where they’re talking themselves into buying our product.” The young man paused. “You really want me to do my thing for you? It’s a little gross. Phony-friendly, you know what I mean?”

Bob said, “I’m ready,” and the young man reconfigured himself into the shape of a salesman. He sat up straight, and his face became earnest, his voice jumped an octave: “Mr. Comet, you have a beautiful house. May I ask you how long you’ve been living here?”

“All my life, actually. It was my mother’s house before it was mine.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s wonderful. What a thing that is!” He was surveying the house interior, nodding, impressed. “And you know what? I can see at a glance that this is a well made house. Well made but also well cared for — which is critical. Because there’s a responsibility which comes along with owning a house like this, am I right? With a house like this, you’re not just the owner, you’re the custodian, would you agree with me on that, Mr. Comet?”

“Yes,” said Bob; but he wasn’t listening very closely. There was a moving or shifting inside him — something slipping into something else, something about to happen, and he was afraid as the something made its approach.

The young man asked, “Mr. Comet, have you ever heard that the windows are the eyes of a house?”

Bob said, “I’ve heard that eyes are the window to the soul.”

“Yes, and that’s a lovely turn of phrase — and true too. But, that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about, now.” He shook his head. “What I’m here to talk to you about is, I’m here to talk to you about the eyes of your house. And Mr. Comet?”

“Ah,” said Bob.

“Are you happy… with the eyes of your house?”

The something Bob had been waiting for arrived: it was a surging sensation, as if his every globule of blood was suddenly moving not in any one direction, but away. He was quite sure he was dying now, and he called out, “Oh! Oh!” and the young man pulled a silver crucifix necklace from under his safety vest, knelt at Bob’s side, and began silently, reverently praying. But still and Bob wasn’t dying; he’d had a spell and the spell was passing. He apologized to the young man, who, returning to his chair, said, “No apology necessary.” The ambulance arrived and a paramedic came in without knocking, a lean man eating a sandwich. He set this delicately on the banister at the bottom of the stairwell and leaned over Bob. Bob looked up at the paramedic’s chewing face. He asked, “You’re not going to touch me and ask me if it hurts, are you?”

The paramedic swallowed. “I was going to do that.”

“Please don’t. It hurts. I think my hip’s broken.”

The paramedic pointed. “Move your toes for me?”

“But that’ll hurt.”

“Pain is good, though; it means your person is intact. An injury like this, it’s the nonfeeling you’ve got to worry about.”

“Well, I’ll move my toes some other time.”

“Unless you can’t,” said the paramedic. He stood and picked up his sandwich and left the house. He returned without the sandwich but with another paramedic, a stern man pushing a gurney. The gurney was lowered to the ground just beside Bob. The stern paramedic said, “Okay, sir? We’re going to get you to a hospital to be x-rayed and tended to, but first we have to transfer you to the gurney, okay? I need you to bear with us.”

“Wait,” said Bob.

They did not wait, lifting him by the legs and shoulders onto the gurney. They were gentle in their movements but the shift hurt terrifically, and Bob made a noise he didn’t know he was capable of making, a prelanguage, animal-mind noise, and the young man in the safety vest stood by, covering his face.

“Can’t you give him something for the pain?” he asked the stern paramedic.

“They’ll give him something at the hospital.”

“But he needs it now, can’t you see that?”

The stern paramedic paused to look the young man up and down. “What is your relation to this person?”

“My relation is that I’m the one who found him lying there.”

“But why are you here?”

“I’m here because I sell windows.”

“Sell windows to who?”

“To whoever has need of them.”

The stern paramedic decided to ignore the young man in the safety vest and occupied himself strapping Bob — panting, now, pain fading — onto the gurney. The gurney was raised up and Bob was wheeled from the house and to the ambulance waiting at the curb. The paramedics readied the rear of the ambulance to receive Bob’s person; the young man in the safety vest, meanwhile, had reappeared and was proffering a business card. Bob, arms bound, said, “Put it in my mouth.” He was embarrassed by the noise he’d made, and now was trying to reclaim a lighthearted attitude; but the young man didn’t understand that Bob was joking. “How about I tuck it into your shirt pocket?” he said, and he did this. Bob was loaded into the ambulance. “Good luck, Mr. Comet,” said the young man in the safety vest, and he waved as the ambulance pulled away from the curb.

BOB WAS TAKEN TO THE HOSPITAL AND GIVEN A LARGE INJECTION of Demerol, his first of many. The break in his hip was complete, the bone cleanly halved, and it x-rayed beautifully and doctors and nurses and orderlies came from all around to look at it and whistle and shiver. No one could say it wasn’t a nasty injury, and yet there was no damage to his spine, and a full recovery was expected. His middle was set in plaster, like an enormous stone diaper, with one tube coming out the front and another out the back. He was installed in a sunlit room with two remotes, one for his bed, and another for the television. A nurse came in and explained about the drip. “See this button? Whenever you feel pain, or if you’re bored, press it.”

“And then what?”

“And then blastoff. You want a hot chocolate?”

With the button his constant companion, Bob settled into his temporary hospital existence. After decades of rejecting the television medium he experienced a period of not just watching TV, but watching with enthusiastic interest. All his life he had believed the real world was the world of books; it was here that mankind’s finest inclinations were represented. And this must have been true at some point in history, but now he understood the species had devolved and that this shrill, base, banal potpourri of humanity’s worst and weakest and laziest desires and behaviors was the document of the time. It was about volume and visual overload and it pinned Bob to his bed like a cat before a strobe light. One woozy morning he found the business card the young man in the safety vest had given him. At the bottom of the card it read: Questions? Comments? Complaints? These words were followed by an 800 number, and he had his nurse dial for him. A female voice answered and Bob launched into a muddled speech celebrating the character of the young man who had been so helpful and empathetic. After a while the woman cut him off.

“Sir? What is your complaint?”

“I have no complaint. I’m calling to praise your outfit. Because you hired a winner in this person. I wish I could remember his name. Actually, no, I don’t think he ever told me. What if I were to describe him?”

“Are you a customer of ours?”

“Potentially I am.”

“Well, I’m not in sales. Do you want me to transfer you?”

“Not really.”

“Then I’ll wish you a good day, sir.”

“Oh, good day to you,” said Bob, and he handed the phone back to the nurse, flush with the belief he’d done the young man a good turn. Later that same day, Bob woke up from a nap to find Linus Webster pacing at the foot of the bed in his electronic wheelchair. The bed was on its tallest setting and so Bob could only see the beret and the bloodshot eyes. Linus wheeled around to Bob’s side. “How do you feel, buddy?”

“How do I look?”

“You look pretty fucked-up, Bob. But then, so do I, and I feel great. So: How do you feel?”

“Sometimes good, sometimes less good. How’s the gang?”

“Oh, you know. Old, weird. Maria wrote you a letter.” He held this up and set it on the table beside the bed. He spied the drip button and his eyes became wide. “They’ve got you on a drip? What are they giving you?”

“Demerol.”

“Demerol? That’s cute.” He was unimpressed.

Bob told him, “I have nothing bad to say about Demerol.”

“Sure. I mean, you know. It’ll do. Want me to hit your button for you?” Before Bob could answer that he didn’t want him to, Linus was hitting the button insistently with his huge red thumb. “Every day with an opioid drip is a gift, Bob, and you’ve got to take full advantage of it. You’ll be out in the shitty cold of the shitty world soon enough, trust me, I know.”

Bob was pleased to see Linus, and it wasn’t just the drugs. They chatted blithely for forty-five minutes, when Linus became agitated at the realization his favorite television show, a soap opera called The Southern Californians, was about to start. “Okay if I watch it here, buddy? I’ll never make it home in time.” Again, Linus did not wait for an answer, but began removing snacks from his canvas satchel and laying these on a small table he’d unfolded from a hollow of his chair’s armrest. The show began, as did Linus’s commentary: “See that guy, Bob? Bob? That’s the Duke. He’s actually a bricklayer from the old country of Italy but he concocted this big story about his royal lineage and everyone believed it at first, but now they’re starting to wonder a little, and his wife’s starting to wonder a lot, and anyway she’s — there she is, see her? Squinty eye? — she’s falling in love with another bricklayer, this real proud bastard who’s working on their pocket villa and who, daringly, is played by the same actor as the Duke, only he’s got a spray tan and a ponytail wig and a truly bad Italian accent. I can’t wait to find out how they tie the two bricklayers together. But yeah, the Duke’s luck is about to go south, for sure, for sure.”

Bob followed the images but was half-submerged in the narcotics. He dozed awhile; when he woke up, the nurse was standing over Linus with her arms crossed. “You are not a patient here, sir. You looked me in the eye and lied right to me.”

“That’s true, I did.”

“Well I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go.”

“Okay but give me fifteen more minutes. Look, Judge Hartman is finally going to admit he murdered his never-gave-a-damn, blackmail-first-ask-questions-later half-brother.”

“Do I need to call security?”

“Lady, look at me. What’s a security guard going to do to me I haven’t already done to myself? I’m asking you for fifteen merciful minutes.”

The nurse relented and allowed Linus to finish out his show. She stood by, watching the final scenes, and each time a new character came on-screen, she asked, “Is that a good guy or a bad guy?” After, Linus folded up his tray and stowed it away and wheeled toward the door. Pinching the brim of his beret, he said, “Read the letter, Bob. Let us know what you think.”

“What I think what?” Bob asked. But Linus had gone.

He opened and read the letter. Maria expressed her sadness in hearing of his injury, but also a relief of happiness that his prognosis was a positive one. He was very much missed, she said, and not just by her but by most everyone at the center.

Actually, Bob, there’s been something on my mind since I heard about your accident. I brought it up to the residents, and their enthusiasm prompts me to say that if you ever wanted to join us here, join us as a full-timer, you’d be most welcome. Will you think on it? I’ve found another living situation for Chip, but her new room won’t be ready for a couple of months, so you’ve got time to consider my proposal. One way or the other, I’ll wait to hear your answer before I let the room get away, okay? I hope this offer can be received in the simple manner in which it’s meant.

Love, Maria

BOB CAME HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL AND SPENT THREE MONTHS IN bed waiting for his hip bone to fuse back together. He was visited daily by a nurse, or more accurately was visited daily by one in a long string of nurses. He found the lot of them to be both cheerful and efficient, but none came around frequently enough to occasion a friendship. Bob felt bored, then very bored, then patently broody. One day Maria called on him, and he wished to jump up at the sight of her. She bore flowers and gossip and made unsubtle inquiries about Bob’s plans. Had he given any more thought to her proposition? He had, actually; and soon after Maria’s visit, once he was freed from his cast, he put his house on the market, sold his car and the bulk of his possessions through an estate liquidation company, and moved into Connie’s old room at the Gambell-Reed Senior Center.

It was a poky, drafty space that beheld no leftover element of Connie whatever. Bob lined the walls with the choicest books from his collection, installed a dresser and bedside table, set up his favored reading chair and lamp at the foot of the bed, and christened his quarters furnished and complete. Linus was just across the hall, and Jill beside Linus, and they visited Bob often, possibly too often, to complain, or to ask advice, or tell stories, or to borrow small sums of money that Bob eventually understood would not be paid back. The hospital-television-watching era had long since passed, and Bob had resumed his reading; he found he could read for stretches of three hours, four hours, pausing only to eat, or to fall in and out of a shallow sleep, or to watch the world out the window, people walking past on the sidewalk, unaware of the pale, wondering face perched above them behind the glass. He turned seventy-two and the residents threw a party; they sang to him and doted on him and Maria had a book-shaped cake made, its title centered on its face: The Book of Bob. His hip had healed beautifully, the doctors told him; and yet, a tiredness clung to Bob that was new, and impressive in its depth and weight. He continued to dream of the Hotel Elba, that he was living in the tilted tower, or standing out front on the blue steps, scanning a blurred crowd for June and Ida; and still, always the same chemical flooding his brain, the feeling of falling in love, and he would wake up in a state of besotted reverence, but impersonally, with never a face to connect to the feeling. He was alone in his dreams of the Hotel Elba; there was no one there with him, the halls empty but resonant with the sense of someone only just departed.

Less frequent, but no less vivid, were Bob’s dreams of the library. There had been whole eras of Bob’s working life where he knew a lamentation at the smallness of his existence, but now he understood how lucky he had been to have inhabited his position. Across the span of nearly fifty years he had done a service in his community and also been a part of it; he had seen the people of the neighborhood coming and going, growing up, growing old and dying. He had known some of them too, hadn’t he? It was a comfort to him, to dream of the place. His favorite dream was that he was alone and it was early in the morning, and he was setting up for the day, and all was peaceful and still and his shoes made no sound as he walked across the carpeting, an empty bus shushing past on the damp street.

Maria sometimes came to see Bob in his room, sitting in the reclining chair at the foot of the bed while he patted his hands exploratorily across his blanket in search of his reading glasses. Other times, when she felt he was becoming resigned, she sent word by nurse or by Linus that she wanted to speak with Bob in her office, and he liked to pretend such summonings were inconvenient, but soon he would be up and dressed and washing his face, and he’d take the ramshackle two-man elevator down through the spine of the old house and cross the Great Room to knock on Maria’s office door. She wished to check in on him, and to hear the upstairs gossip, and to engage in it, even perpetuate it. She once confided to Bob that she liked to plant stories within the center and monitor the effect over a period of days. These tales were not vicious or libelous, just enough to awaken the recipient and provoke some return. Her pet theory was that a portion of indignation was much the same as exercise.

“Jill says she’s worried you’re depressed.”

“I’m not depressed at all.”

“You don’t seem depressed. I think Jill is depressed.”

“I think Jill is depression.” When Bob made Maria laugh, he felt proud. Maria couldn’t speak to the others like this, and Bob understood and appreciated he was one apart.

All in all, he was happy at the center, except that he still found himself harassed by thoughts of Connie. His desire was to learn where she was, and how she was faring, the hopeful idea being that to flesh out her narrative might bring him solace by way of closure. But none of the residents or nurses knew the first thing about it, and Bob felt it would be conspicuous to ask Maria. Eventually, though, his curiosity bettered his modesty and he requested a formal audience with her, presenting her with the story of his marriage, more or less in full. Maria was floored. By this time her trust and affection for Bob was total; at the completion of the tale, and in answer to Bob’s questions, she gave him Connie’s transcripts. This was not just against the rules, but illegal; Maria asked that he take it to his room, to uncover its cold informations in private.

These are the things Bob learned:

In the years following Ethan’s death she worked as a substitute teacher, and then a full-time elementary school arts teacher, and eventually as a public school administrator. At the age of fifty she quit and took a job at a nursery in the southeast quadrant of town, where she worked for fifteen years, all the way up until her retirement.

Bob learned that her catatonia was not symptomatic of dementia, as he had assumed, but was a result of brain trauma suffered after a slip-and-fall accident on the walk out front of her house. She had been perfectly healthy before the injury, apparently; but the blow to her head had led to clotting, which led to stroke, which led to the diminishment of her capacities. She had been a resident at the Gambell-Reed Center for two years before transferring to a facility on the Washington coast.

Bob learned Connie’s Portland home had been less than five miles from his own. This prompted Bob to think of the years after Ethan’s death, the years of wondering when he would see her again. There were some mornings, as he was shaving or making his bed, when he would intuit Connie’s approach, that that would be the day she would walk through the door of the library to see him, and he recalled how distracted he would be, all through his shift, looking up at each person coming in. After he understood she was not going to visit the library, then came a period of ten or more years where he believed fate would intervene on their behalf. He would see her in the market, in the park, somewhere. He would pick out her set, cold expression in a crowd and she would sense his attentions and turn to meet him, and when she saw him the coldness would come away from her face and she would change back to the way she was before, a sort of lighting up, the way she used to look at him when she came through the doors of the library, and she loved him.

Bob was grateful to have accessed Connie’s transcripts, but he also was wounded by the collective information. No matter that the notion of fairness was a child’s; what had happened to them wasn’t fair, and there was nothing that could make it so. He gave the transcripts back to Maria and thanked her. She could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t wish to speak of what he’d learned. Most of her patients had areas of their lives that were too painful to be discussed, and she never pried, respectful of the boundary. Maria understood that part of aging, at least for many of us, was to see how misshapen and imperfect our stories had to be. The passage of time bends us, it folds us up, and eventually, it tucks us right into the ground.

BOB WOKE UP FROM AN AFTERNOON NAP TO FIND MARIA SITTING ON THE edge of his bed, and she had a look on her face as if something was the matter. “What,” he said. “Chip’s son is downstairs, Bob,” she answered. “Connie’s son. I hope you don’t mind my telling you but I figured you’d want to know.”

Bob sat up. “What’s he doing here?”

“He came by out of the blue asking for his mother’s transcripts. I told him they were in storage off-site and now he’s waiting around for them to be brought over.” She was proud of this subterfuge, but Bob didn’t understand her motivations, and asked her why she would tell him such a thing. “I thought you might want to come down and say hello,” she explained.

“Why would I? He doesn’t even know who I am.”

“You can tell him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to know?”

“Then he can tell you. He’s really a very sweet man, Bob. And I know I’m being a busybody, but there’s always the chance your meeting him will be a helpful thing. Look, if you don’t come down, I’ll know you’re not interested. But I’ll stall him as long as I can, okay?”

She patted Bob’s arm and exited and Bob stood up from his bed and paced and considered the situation. He did not want to go downstairs, but that wasn’t the same as deciding it was the wrong thing to do. When it occurred to him that this was almost certainly the only time in what remained of his life that he would know any direct connection with Connie, then did he find himself reaching for his shoes, and he pulled on a suit coat and combed his hair and brushed his teeth. As an afterthought, he sought out the short sheaf of snapshots from the Connie days, slipping the envelope into his coat pocket before striking out for the elevator.

He entered the Great Room to find Connie’s son sitting alone at the long table and looking at his phone. He wore the same work-worn canvas coat he’d had on before, a bandage on one of his fingers, and gave the impression of a laborer or tradesman on his lunch break. Bob stood on the opposite side of the table; when Connie’s son looked up, Bob gave a small bow and asked if he might sit. Connie’s son nodded vaguely and went back to his phone. Bob sat down. “You favor your father,” he said. Connie’s son had no reaction; he was texting. Bob continued, a little louder: “Your father and I were friends, you see. Ethan. If I may, and in my way, I was responsible for your mother and father coming to know one another.”

Connie’s son again looked up. “My parents met on a bus.”

“Yes, but they were both coming to visit with me at the library. In a way, then, they met under my auspices.” At the naming of the word library, Connie’s son’s gaze sharpened. Actually, he looked somewhat frightened, and he set his phone on the table, sat up straight, and said, “Oh my God, you’re Bob Comet.”

CONNIE’S SON’S NAME WAS SAM, AND HE WAS SURPRISED, IMPRESSED, and a little upset that Bob should suddenly present himself, at this late date and in this particular location. Bob also was surprised, also impressed, but not upset, or only very slightly. Sam wanted to know what Bob was doing there; Bob wanted to know how it was that Sam knew his name and history. They were just beginning to formulate these questions for one another when Maria came by with Connie’s transcripts, lingering as long as she might, to bear witness and generally take the temperature of the summit. But her nearness was an inhibitor, and Sam proposed that he and Bob take a walk. Bob made a counter proposal, which was that they should walk to the diner, and they did this, settling into a booth and each of them ordering coffee and pie. The waitress knew Bob on sight, as he and Linus and Jill had taken to visiting the diner two to three times each week.

“What are you all spiffed up for?” she asked. “You going to a cotillion ball?”

“I am. And I thought you might like to come along with me.”

“Let’s see how you tip first. But I’ll say this: you clean up nicely.” Turning to Sam, the waitress stared. “You could use a little help, sweetie,” she said, and she reached down to smooth his hair. Bob found this uncanny; but he saw that Sam was less aware of the power of his physicality than his father had been — probably a good thing when one considered the misery Ethan had doled out.

The waitress brought them their coffee and pie and left them alone to discuss — what, exactly? Neither knew where they might begin, or what the ultimate purpose of their conversation should be. After a couple of false starts, Bob offered up the photographs, antique visuals that proved a fruitful point of contact. Sam had never seen the images of the era before and he fell to studying them with a keen fascination, while Bob studied Sam’s profile, which was Ethan’s profile, and precisely.

Sam spun a picture around on the tabletop and pushed it closer to Bob. The image was of Connie and Bob, and they were standing in front of the mint-colored house. Bob was bland in the face, his body held at a tilt, hands at his sides, while Connie rested her fists on her hips, elbows out, and she was winking exaggeratedly, a comical, cheesecake pose. Sam was tapping his finger on the facade of the house. “Is this the place with the rope hand railing?”

“That’s right. That’s where your mother and I lived when we were married.” Bob cleared his throat. “For some reason I’m surprised you’d know such a thing as that. Or anything about me at all, really.”

Sam drew the photo back toward himself and shuffled it to the bottom of the stack. He spoke to Bob while still looking through pictures. “I think that if you knew my mother before her accident, then you knew she had a story hidden away in the background. She told me about my dad’s death at whatever suitable age, twelve or thirteen, and that was a piece of the puzzle, but for a long time I’d had the sense of something else, you know, lurking. Then one year at Christmas, I must have been sixteen by then, and Mom’d had some wine and she said, ‘Sam, I want you to know I was married to another man before I married your father.’” He looked up from the photographs, made a face of horror, looked back down. “Not the best news for a young person to hear. And at first I didn’t want to know anything more about it. But then later, when I grew up a bit and got used to the idea, I started asking questions, and the story came together in dribs and drabs.” He pushed over another photograph. It was a picture of Ethan and Bob; they were wearing ornate ladies’ hats, but both were making their faces solemn, dignified.

Bob was squinting at the image. “Yes, this. The house was in a cul-de-sac, and once a year the neighbors and I would haul out our castaways for a rummage sale.” There was a bent shadow creeping up Bob’s leg. “Your mother took that one. See her there?”

“Wow,” Sam said, shaking his head. It made him happy to see these images, and Bob was pleased by this happiness. Now Sam held up a picture taken just after Bob and Connie had been married. Ethan stood a step apart from the newlyweds, his face blurred. Bob looked at the picture, nodded, and looked away.

“Did you ever remarry, Bob?” Sam asked.

“I never did, no. Did your mother ever?”

“No, no. That would have been out of character, to my understanding of what she wanted. I know there were a few friendships which must have had romantic bents to them. Men bringing Mom presents she didn’t really want, men with mustaches and wide ties, tinted Coke bottle glasses. The ’70s, right? The ’80s? But I always got the impression she could take it or leave it.”

They drank their coffee and ate their pie and Sam passed Bob this and that picture and Bob looked at each one and passed each one back, but he was distracted by an uneasiness rising up in him, an impatience to get at something. He was curious about Connie’s life after she’d left him, and after Ethan had died; but when he composed the question in his mind it sounded unfriendly to him. His intentions weren’t unfriendly, and so he wasn’t sure how to proceed. Finally he simply said, “You know someone, and then you don’t know them, and in their absence you wonder what their life was made up of.” Sam shrugged, unsure if it had been a question or statement or what. Bob told him, “I’m trying to get an idea of your and your mother’s life in the daily way. What was it like for her?”

“Well, she was busy,” said Sam. “She had me to deal with, and she had to go to work and keep the house together. That’s a lot for one person, you know? But we had our little universe, our street. We were lucky in that we had nice neighbors, a lot of them with kids, and so there were BBQs and birthday parties and Christmas parties, Easter egg hunts. I knew the insides of every house on the block.”

“And these people were her friends.”

“They were all crazy about her. But they also felt, I think, protective of her, because of Dad’s story, and that she was on her own. But it wasn’t some sad situation or anything. I mean, my mother was wonderful. Life was life, up and down, but we had so much fun together, you know?”

“Yes,” said Bob.

“She was fun.”

“She really was.”

Sam pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “Back then she was?”

“Always.”

Sam stacked the photographs and set them at Bob’s elbow. The top image was of Ethan sitting lowly in his car, mischievous eyes peering over the driver’s-side door. Bob said, “A police detective came to my house after your father passed away. He wanted to know where I’d been at the time of his death. I always wondered if your mother was aware of that.”

“I’m not sure if she was. She didn’t think you had anything to do with it, if that’s what you mean. Actually, she had an idea it was some rich woman who’d done it. Some old flame of his or something.”

“Eileen,” said Bob.

“Yes, right. And she told the police about it, but then the woman wasn’t even in the country at the time Dad was killed. She never did find out who’d done it. The detectives just told her, it was an accident. And maybe it was, but I know it always bothered her, not knowing for sure.” Sam sat thinking. He said, “You know, she didn’t speak so much about my dad. Maybe it was because of the way he died, and she didn’t like to be reminded. And I understand that he was a smoothie, and somewhat of a shit disturber, but I could never really get an idea of what sort of man he was.” He gave a small shrug and sat watching Bob.

“Are you asking me what your father was like?” asked Bob, and Sam said that he guessed so. Bob held up the picture of Ethan and gave himself time to formulate the true words. He said, “Your father had no guile. He wasn’t crass or avaricious. He was never dull. He was physically graceful, and fun to look at. He was funny, and he encouraged and abetted funniness in others. He was a little bit seduced by himself, a little reckless in the wielding of his powers, but maybe that’s understandable, and so we forgive him for it. I don’t know how I should put it to you, Sam, except to say that some people, when they enter a room, the room changes. And your father was a natural-born room-changer.”

Sam was concentrating intently on what Bob was saying, and he sat very still after, as if sculpting the words together to formulate the composite of the man in his mind. He told Bob, “That’s good. Thank you.”

“Yes,” said Bob.

Sam picked at the crust of his pie with his fork. He was smiling the smile of secret knowledge. “A couple times over the years it’d happen where Mom’d say, ‘I wonder what old Bob Comet’s doing?’ Or, I can remember her peering out the window one morning in winter, holding back the curtain and saying, ‘You think Monsieur Bob’s going to work in this snow? With that old bald-tired car of his? I don’t know, I don’t think so.’”

Bob sat watching the coffee cup in his hand. In a sense this was just what he had hoped to hear, but he wasn’t prepared for it, and for him to learn of these tiny moments was at once the most merciful evidence, but there was also a second sense, which was a quick or flashing outrage. That Connie should invoke an old pet name when they were separated by mere city blocks was outrageous to him, and he sat for a half minute choking against this clash of feelings. Sam didn’t notice that his words had had any effect; he was signaling to the waitress that they were ready for the check. Sam paid, and he and Bob headed back in the direction of the center. Bob was quiet for much of the walk, so that Sam wondered if something had been spoiled in their meeting; but then when they arrived at the center Bob was again himself, and he volunteered to copy the snapshots and send them along if Sam wished it, and Sam said he did, and he wrote out his address and gave this to Bob. The two men shook hands and Bob watched as Sam drove away in an old pickup truck. He turned to look up at the center and saw Maria standing in the window of her office. She held her hands out, palms up: How had it gone? Bob made the half-and-half gesture, and then walking fingers, and she nodded, and Bob struck out to lap the block and think and wonder about all the things that had and had not happened.

LIFE AT THE GAMBELL-REED SENIOR CENTER CARRIED ON. THE TREE outside Bob’s window grew to fullness, obscuring the view completely. It was hot that summer, often uncomfortably hot, as there was no central air conditioning in the building. Bob added his voice to the chorus of complaints; Maria told him, “We’re all suffering here, Bob.” Bob pointed out that she was getting paid to suffer, and Maria named the figure of her salary, which effectively ended the conversation. Bob went around in a T-shirt and slept with the window open. In the night, a cool wind rustled the leaves of Bob’s tree and poured over him as he slept. In the morning, the heat returned. Linus switched out his big beret for a mesh-back baseball hat with an electric fan built into its bill. Jill was the only one in favor of the heat. “I should have been a lizard on a rock,” she said. “In a way, though, you are,” Linus told her. The rains arrived, the autumn, and the leaves of Bob’s tree turned impossible colors and dropped away, his sidewalk view returned to him.

It was incredible to think that only one year had passed since he’d made his failed attempt to connect the people of the center with Poe’s “The Black Cat,” but here and it was Halloween again, and there was a Halloween party, and Bob was a subtle vampire. Maria said he would look very dashing if only he would move a little more quickly, that the cape would fly out behind him; but he was moving as fast as he could or cared to, he said. He had a pair of plastic vampire teeth but he wore these only briefly because they hurt his gums. Maria was dressed up as a convict with a plastic ball-and-chain that she twirled above her head to good comic effect. Linus was dressed as a graduate, in a cap and silky black gown, and he had rolled up a piece of paper in his hand with a blue ribbon tied around. Jill sat at her distant table wearing no costume and staring at her slippered feet. She’d not had the money or ingenuity to procure or fabricate a costume for herself and felt bitter about being left out. Maria found some cat ears for her, and Jill put these on, and allowed that Maria could draw whiskers on her face with a mascara pen. Maria was solemn as she held a ruler against Jill’s cheek to ensure a straightness of line. Afterward, Jill was shy in her thankfulness. “Can you tell what I am?” she asked Bob. “I’m a cat.”

At eleven o’clock a bus pulled up outside the center and a stream of costumed children poured in. Maria had organized the visit through a contact at a nearby elementary school; the day before she had described it to Bob as a meeting between two groups at opposite ends of the life spectrum. “There is the youth, their stories unwritten before them, and you all, with your accumulated wisdom, looking back. Isn’t it possible that you’ll all meet in the middle and establish a connection?” Her optimism was true, and sincerely felt; and yet, Bob wasn’t so sure the experiment would yield favorable results.

The seniors were asked to sit side by side in chairs set up in a long row in the center of the Great Room. Each had been supplied with a bag of candy to dole out to the children, who stood in a line and approached the seated seniors one after another, saying “Trick or treat,” and holding out their plastic jack-o’-lanterns. There was very little discourse. The children were frightened by the seniors, the seniors indignant at the fear of the children. Maria stood by anxiously. “Feel free to take time and get to know one another,” she instructed. Linus and Bob and Jill sat together in the middle of the pack. A boy in a colorful plastic costume was standing before Linus. There was a shallowness to his gaze which presented him as one unburdened by intelligence.

“What kind of living nightmare are you supposed to be?” Linus asked.

“Pokémon.”

“What?”

“Pokémon.” He pointed at the rolled-up paper in Linus’s hand and asked, “What’s that?”

“Yes,” Linus said, “you’ll probably never see one of these again. It’s called a diploma. Which is a certificate marking one’s graduation. Because I shall soon matriculate right out of this mortal coil.”

Another child approached, and he wore no costume, just his street clothes, which were not very clean. He looked tired. In a croaking voice, he said, “Trick or treat.”

“Where’s your costume?” asked Linus.

“Don’t have one.”

“Why not?”

“Because my mom ran away with my uncle.”

Linus made a face of impressiveness at Bob. He told the costumeless boy, “That’s unique, if nothing else. And it’s due to that uniqueness that I’m going to give you two candies instead of one.” Linus bowed his head to fish out the candies from his sack. The boy, sensing a potential weakness, asked calmly, “Can I get more than two?”

“Don’t let’s ruin the moment, kid,” Linus said. He dropped the two candies in the jack-o’-lantern and waved the boy on. The boy moved to stand before Bob. “What are you?” he asked.

“Dracula.”

“You suck blood?”

“Sometimes.”

“You going to suck my blood?”

“It depends,” said Bob. “It depends on how I’m feeling.”

The boy stepped down the line to meet Jill.

“Trick or treat,” he said.

“Can you tell what I am?” she asked. “I’m a cat.”

“Trick or treat,” said the costumeless boy.

After the candy was distributed, the children went away into a huddle to discuss and trade and ingest their bounty. Only the costumeless boy lingered; he and Linus had made friends. At one point he asked, “Can I touch your mask?” and Linus said that he could. The boy’s hand was small and fine in contrast to the broad pitted redness of Linus’s immense head. The hand reached up and gently touched Linus’s cheek — the boy gasped and yanked his hand back. He looked confused, amused, frightened. “Go on, kid,” said Linus, “give it a good pull.” The boy again reached up, and now took hold of the flesh of Linus’s cheek and twisted it around. “That’s your face!” the costumeless boy said. He told the other children, “That’s really his face!” Bob winced for Linus, but Linus found it hilarious, and he roared with laughter, and the children all were awestruck. From this point in time and until they left the center, they all watched Linus closely, marveling at his every word and action. He was a potentially magical monster, and they couldn’t get enough of him. Linus wore the adulation naturally: he came alive and made everything into a comedic performance. At one point he pretended to swallow a pencil. “Oh no! I swallowed a pencil!” he announced. Stunned silence, then Linus, patting his stomach, said, “Tastes pretty good, actually.” Shrieks of laughter from the children. And then, he kept “accidentally” knocking his own graduation cap off, six times, seven times, and each time, he’d pretend to get more and more angry, which made for more shrieks, more laughter.

The children’s candy intake had not been monitored or policed, and they now were achieving crisis-level sugar highs. A boy in a cowboy costume was wheezing raggedly and dragging his nails down the front of his face, only the whites of his eyes visible. Some children had collapsed and were rolling around on the linoleum floor. Where were the teachers, the chaperones? When it was announced the time for games had arrived the children cried out in what may have been an expression of joy but which sounded much the same as torment.

Two nurses’ aides, large men in pale green scrubs, entered the center from the back door, awkwardly hefting a large metal washtub filled with water. They were facing each other and walking crabways, legs bent but with straight backs, panting under their shared burden. Without meaning to, the men had created a spectacle, and the seniors and children paused their business to witness the completion of the task, or else the failure of its completion. The water was rocking broadly back and forth in the tub, and an expectation of spillage gripped the onlookers. When the tub was finally set in its place on a pallet in the center of the room, and without a drop of water on the floor, there came a round of polite applause. Linus loudly asked, “What’s the tub for? Are the children going to wash me?” He raised his hand and “washed” his underarm area and the children wailed out their disgust. He turned to Bob. “I keep forgetting to tell you, buddy. Remember the bricklayers? From my TV show? They teased the story line out this whole goddamned time but yesterday they finally let us have it, and guess what? They’re twin brothers. Arch enemies from birth, bad blood going back to the cradle apparently — back to the womb.”

“Was there a showdown?” Bob asked.

“Capital S Showdown, you bet there was.”

“And how did they film that with one actor in both roles?”

“Good question, Bob,” Linus said earnestly. “I’d be glad to answer that one for you. The effect was achieved by rapid cuts and edits. To their credit they did not use the never-effective dummy double, and neither did they succumb to our newest dishonest computer-generated technologies.”

“Was it believable?”

“Not really. But, you know, it’s a wonder any committee-run artworks even achieve completion, much less pass muster. I was rapt, and that’s that.”

Maria came to stand beside the tub, holding up a plastic bag filled with apples and grinning enigmatically. When she dumped the apples into the water, the room grew quiet. She explained about the tradition of bobbing to the children, and said that anyone who could come up with an apple in their mouth would receive a mystery prize from the mystery prize box, which was a shoebox decorated with question marks and sparkles. The children were obviously interested in what Maria was saying but when she asked who would be first, none of them came forward. An edgy paranoia had gripped the group, a sort of herd shyness, and they formed into a cluster, peering warily over their shoulders. Maria had imagined a mad rush to take part but there was nothing, no movement at all, and for the first time that Bob could recall, she was embarrassed. He felt he couldn’t stand to see her suffer; cutting through the room’s psychic agony he came to a quiet place in himself and understood in a sudden and complete way that he would do it — that he would be the first to play this game, the one who broke the ice, with all his peers and all the children watching. He stood and made for the tub; Maria looked confused. “What’s the matter?” she asked. When Bob lowered himself to his knees, then she understood, and she draped a towel over his shoulders and quietly told him, “Thank you, Bob. Whenever you’re ready.” Bob looked down at the cluster of floating red apples. Plunging his head into the water, the children resumed shrieking. The water, Bob discovered, was shockingly, painfully cold.

Bob was alone with his task, half-submerged, thrashing about, thinking the violence of it would land him with an apple in his mouth. When he recognized he was only pushing the apples away, then did he fine-tune his method, approaching the fruit from a slow-moving sideways angle.

Those who knew Bob were impressed by his behavior, but also worried; was it not late in the game to make a change to one’s own personality? To suddenly begin acting in a totally new way? Some among the seniors found Bob’s actions off-putting, and were hopeful he wasn’t having a final-hour identity crisis, which was not unheard of in the assisted-living landscape.

Linus was not among the naysayers; after his initial bafflement wore off he became swept up in the unusualness of the situation and began to root for his friend, first in his mind, and then aloud, chanting Bob’s name with such gusto and fervor that it soon was taken up by Maria, then Jill, then by the more charitable seniors, along with a good many of the children. Finally, most everyone in the room was calling out in one strong and unified voice: Bob! Bob! Bob! Bob was distracted by his task and had only just managed to sink his teeth into an apple when the chant landed in his mind. The punning aspect of it instantly made him laugh, and he took in a great gulp of water, which in turn sent him lurching upward in the style of the breaching whale. He drew his head back to cough; water shot from his mouth like confetti and the apple launched clear across the room in a long, lovely arc before bouncing off the linoleum, rolling through the legs of Jill’s chair, and disappearing under a table. The costumed children scrambled after the apple as if it were a totem or treasure which to possess even briefly was worthy of enormous personal sacrifice.