The Poet : Chapters 8 & 9

 

EIGHT

 

You look like shit,” Jill said, the minute I stepped into the library. She went back to cleaning up whatever mess had been made from another in a long line of structural calamities befalling our old building. Today, with the wet vac front and center, it looked like flood waters from the public restroom.

I felt like shit. I had a headache and my asshole felt like someone had stuck a flame thrower up it. My cock hurt from Larissa playing tug of war. I felt terrible for the way we’d left things. I’d been hungover and hung-up on Carolina. I was embarrassed by what I’d done with Millicent and what I’d left in their shitter. Larissa didn’t deserve any of that.

“She’s late,” Hazel said, from her seat at the reference desk, catching me looking conspicuously around the library. By some miracle Willy Ableman was actually sitting next to her. And he was awake. He was kicked back with his hands behind his head; a gray, stained hoodie and his yellowing caterpillar moustache to boot. No one looked more relaxed than Willy. How could you not with the amount of time he took off. I was sure he’d gotten high before he came in. That or it was alimony day, and his gilded ex-wife had to pony up.

“Hazel, I thought you and I talked about your overuse of pronouns,” I said. I was not in the mood.

“Fine…then I meant your little Mexican honey.” That got a snicker from Willy.

“If you’re referring to Lena, her family is from Peru. Buy a globe.”

I started for the office. “And you’re late too,” Hazel shouted. “And late supervisors set bad examples to staff.” I turned and Willy nodded at me.

            “My ISIS meeting ran late,” I said. “But in the future, I’ll try to set a better example for you infidels.”

            Willy leaned in and whispered something to her. The fucking conspirators. If I was going down it wasn’t going to be at the hands of those two assholes. I went into the office. If I was lucky no more poems had been printed. Thankfully Sheldon hadn’t arrived. I went to my Gmail just to make sure my bloodshot eyes hadn’t been deceiving me at Larissa’s. There was Carolina’s email along with a brand new one. It had one line, umm…maybe not?

            Maybe not? Maybe not should’ve been the title of my autobiography.

“Rand.” A voice behind my back. Thick. Dull. Russian.

            “Oleg,” I said. By way of simply not giving a fuck about him. What in the hell did she mean, umm...maybe not? I saw that Carolina was online on her Gmail, so that’s exactly what I wrote her in a chat. Que pasa this…maybe not?

            Rand,” Oleg said again. “I must share this information.”

            “State secrets again?”

            Oleg shook his head. He was our building’s security guard; a short stocky Cossack with a bowl-cut of red hair that matched his equally red face and two remaining red teeth. Back in Moscow he was the head of the secret police, or so he said. But here in the good ol’ U.S. of A, Oleg worked security at a low-risk branch of the public library. He treated the little Chinese kids who came in here like gulag prisoners. I had to stop him from once trying to gaffle a seventy-year-old epileptic who went into shock. Oleg couldn’t drive or sign-in to his time clock properly. We fielded dozens of complaints from scared parents and battered vagrants who wanted only to use our bathroom. On lunches he spent the hour shouting in Russian on his cell phone, all the while eating some pulpy kind of oniony goulash for lunch. Oleg raised Hazel’s ire to new and unseen levels by leaving shit streaks in the toilet. That was the only thing I truly liked about him.

“Oleg I’m too hungover for you today,” I said. I rubbed my aching member. Carolina was in the midst of writing me back.

            “Rand, I go on eBay,” Oleg said. When he wasn’t terrorizing children or studying for his driver’s test, Oleg lived his life on eBay. “I buy movies. Russian movies.”

            “You got to be careful with that in these times,” I said. “They’re monitoring us. You buy one too many Kremlin gems and they’ll deport you back to Siberia, and you’ll be pounding rocks before you know it.”

“I buy no Kremlin. I buy secret movies. Bootlegs.”

I’m having second thoughts, Carolina finally wrote.

About a drink? I wrote. Then I waited.

“Rand,” Oleg said. Of all the women who couldn’t remember my name this man had it practically tattooed on his tongue.

“Bootlegs are a gateway drug, Oleg,” I said. Then I rubbed my crotch again because my dick really was killing me. I’d have to check that shit out in the bathroom if Scott hadn’t barricaded himself in there by now. Scott, shit, I still hadn’t talked to him about that Post-it note art. “You keep bootlegging it’ll lead to other things. One day you’ll kill some old pawn broker for her money and....” Oleg stood there with a clueless stare. I turned back to my PC.

You know what a drink means between the two of us, Carolina wrote.

It used to mean fun, I wrote.

I wouldn’t call that time at Rooney’s fun.

It was good enough to write a novel about.

“I buy fifty movies,” Oleg said.

“When does an intellectually diverse guy like you find the time to watch that many movies and still whip up a cure for cancer?” I said. “I’m not half a busy as you and I can’t even find the time to take a proper shit in some poet’s apartment.”

“I bid against man in Sheepshead Bay. I put in bid. He put in bid. I don’t make another bid, so man thinks he has movies. But what happens?”

“Anastasia reappears and, in the end, it was all Rasputin’s fault?” I said.

“No. I wait until last minute. Then Oleg swoops in and buy fifty Russian movies.” He laughed. Oleg had a loud, throaty, coughing laugh that sounded as if he had a piece of dumpling wedged down his throat. Hazel was most likely at her desk twitching from the sound, while Willy checked out her tits and figured out new ways to not come to work once the sick time ran out. “Fifty movies. Man in Sheepshead Bay have no clue what hit him.”

“I’m sure he was crying into his vodka,” I said. I wanted the guy out of the office. The room wasn’t big enough for me, Carolina on chat, and this inbred nephew of Boris Yeltsin. Then Larissa’s green Gmail light came on and I went incognito.

Did you log-off on me, Rand? Carolina wrote

Hiding from someone, I wrote

Typical

So why can’t we meet?

I just told you, she wrote.

You sure it’s not because of your rock star BF, I wrote. You thought I didn’t notice Godfrey Whitt siting at your table.

You refused to shake his hand, Rand. And gee, I guess maybe I don’t want to see you because I don’t feel like being harassed for writing a book, Carolina wrote. A book I had every right to…um…write.

You’re the one who initially wanted to get together, I wrote.

“There was preview on movie,” Oleg said.

“Oh Christ,” I said. “We’re going to keep doing this?”

There was a calamity of noise from the library; a rustling of what sounded like old newspapers and plastic. Then yelling. Jill and Sheldon. Her gruff commands. His lisping, whiney sing-songy tenor. The man sounded like a big, gay ostrich, but Sheldon had been married for twenty years. He had one semi-literate college-aged son and a daughter who flew the coup with the ink still wet on her diploma. There was more shouting. There was always noise at this place. You wouldn’t think the library was a refuge for quiet or serious study with the racket. It wasn’t. Those days of the library ended with the dawn of the internet era; silence’s death knell sounded with the era of chat rooms, online gaming, shitty ringtones and the smartphone.

“I just need them for some thiiiings,” Sheldon said, as he stormed into the office. He had about four huge fast-food bags with him. Sheldon, forever clad in khakis that were flooded, a plaid shirt, and one of those square, knit ties from the 1980s, proved that attaining higher education made one none the wiser when making wise food and clothing choices. I swear the man’s glasses were always crooked and the nest of wild curls on the top of his head gave him a mad genius look, even though Sheldon was a notorious idiot, known system-wide, for his inane questions at meetings that did nothing but suck up people’s time and their will to live. Unions existed for people like Sheldon.

“What things?” Jill said. “What things require fast food bags for storage?”

“Um.” Sheldon looked around the room for something, anything. “Good morning, Rand. Um…Oleg.”

“Top o’the morning Mayor McCheese,” I said. Oleg just looked at his watch. He was a notorious time keeper and had no qualms about reporting any of us late. I feared for what would happen to Lena when/if she arrived. There was still nothing from Carolina.

Jill crossed her arms. “You still haven’t given me an answer.”

Sheldon sighed. “I don’t know. Just stuuuuff.”

“You work in a library! You have access to boxes galore!”

He put the fast-food bags on his desk and stood there with his hands on his hips. “Rand, did you skip a management training meeting last week?”

“Would you consider simply not going as skipping something?” I said.

“Uh…” Sheldon thought for a good while. “I think so, yes.”

“Agree to disagree on that one, my man.”

It was a lapse in judgement, Carolina wrote

Kid, I got years I can make that excuse for, I wrote. Come on, just one drink.

“There is new Rocky movie coming out,” Oleg said to me.

“My rod is hard with anticipation,” I told him. Then I rubbed my aching crotch again.

“Rocky is fighting blond Russian.”

“Yeah, that was called Rocky IV, dude.”

“That meeting was required,” Sheldon said. “HR emailed me and said you missed the other two as well.”

“I’ll catch them on YouTube,” I said. “I’ll figure out how to stream them on Netflix. Maybe someone from HR could do a TED talk.”

Sheldon put the fast-food bags on the floor. “Do not do that,” Jill shouted. “I told you I’m not dealing with ants again.”

Sheldon picked up the bags as commanded. With the way Jill treated him you’d never be able to tell he technically ran this joint. At the words ants you could hear the loud horse clopping of Hazel’s boots, as she made her way toward the office. “I’m not cleaning up ants again,” she shouted, before she was even in my doorway. Then there she was. That helmet of black hair and another low-cut black shirt with the gleaming symbol of Italy resting between her tits. If you looked hard enough you could see where Willy’s eyes had burned two rosy imprints into her cleavage.

“I don’t understand why there were even ants,” Sheldon said. “It’s November.”

“It’s sixty-five degrees out, you moron,” Jill said. “Of course, there’s ants.”

“I heard it’s going to get colder,” Hazel said.

“Is no Rocky IV,” Oleg said to me. “Is new Rocky movie.”

I turned to the guy. He looked like a lump of spicy shit in a black rent-a-cop outfit. “Look, I don’t know what kind of bootlegs you’re buying, or how new, but Rocky Balboa fought a big Russian dude in Rocky IV, which came out in the year of our lord, 1985, right smack dab in the middle of my miserable, obese childhood.”

I’ll do coffee, Carolina finally wrote.

Coffee is for Republicans, I wrote. Coffee is too strong for Republicans.

No deal.

I need to talk to you about something anyway. Radio Silence again.

“All the same, Rand,” Sheldon said. He put the bags back on the floor. “HR wants to me to email them back a specific reason why you missed those meetings.”

“Tell them I’m a forty-two-year-old, functioning alcoholic” I said, “and didn’t want to spend one of my few remaining healthy mornings and early afternoons play acting out bullshit scenarios about five-dollar fines with a bunch of caffeine-hopped, philistine dipshits that I’m forced to refer to as my colleagues…or tell them that I had to stay at my job and cover the reference desk for a stoned, union-protected sexagenarian.”

“You play act?” Hazel said. “At meetings?”

“That’s what I mumbled to myself the last time I wrote out my student loan check,” I said.

“Pick those bags up,” Jill said to Sheldon.

“But…” he whined.

“Is no Rocky IV,” Oleg said to me. The angry, argumentative Russian was seeping out of him. “Is new Rocky movie.”

“I couldn’t give a crap less,” I said. An email showed up. I checked my inbox while waiting on Carolina to respond. The message was from Larissa.

So…Millicent may never want to speak to you again, Rand Wyndham. But I want to see you. Sorry for the awkwardness this morning. I didn’t mean to be curt or whatever. But…you know. I wanted to ask you if you wanted to do this reading with me, but I heard you hate doing them. And Gigi texted me and told me why it’s important you get in touch with Carolina. Getting Godfrey Whitt could really help Killian out. At least for a while. I thought there was something good and decent about you, despite what you say and what you left in my bathroom. Anyway, I’ll email you about the reading and you can decide. Or you can text me. Do you even have a phone? Also, we’re totally not courting, despite what Fidel says. Off to yoga.

L

“You’re always going on about your student loan people, Rand,” Hazel said. “Like you’re the only one with debt.”

“Leave him alone,” Jill said. “Go out there and do some work.” That caused Hazel to storm out of the office complaining to herself in her pigeon Italian. Jill turned to me. “That women and the Guido she’s married to got like a hundred thousand dollars stashed away, so I don’t know who she’s talking to. By the way Willy is sleeping at the desk again.”

Sheldon sighed. “Rand, I can’t tell them that you didn’t want to play act with philistines.”

“Then tell them I had the shits.”

“For all three meetings?”

What could you possibly need to talk to me about? Carolina wrote.

I need a favor, I wrote.

I’m not giving you money.

I don’t need your money. I need your talent.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell them,” Sheldon said. He fondled his fast-food bags for good measure.

 “Throw those goddamned bags away,” Jill said.

“But…” Sheldon started. Then he picked the bags up. Jill grabbed them out of his hands, crumpled them, and left the office with the withered bags looking like origami accordions.

“Wake up, you moron!” she shouted at Willy.

“I tell you is new Rocky movie,” Oleg said, angrily.

“Jesus Christ.” I turned away from the PC. I couldn’t believe that there I was having this conversation, these conversations actually, when, beer shits aside, I could’ve called in sick and spent the day potentially licking Larissa Haven-St. Claire’s tattooed body. “It’s Rocky IV. It’s Rocky versus Ivan fucking Drago. Apollo Creed dies. The movie is basically 90-minutes of Glasnost-bashing montages and Survivor songs.”

“Is new Rocky movie!” Oleg shouted. “Is new! Is new! Is new!” He started pounding on my desk like he was fucking Khrushchev.

“But I can’t write the HR department and tell them you had the…the…that you had bowel problems,” Sheldon said, practically whispering the word bowel.

My Talent? Carolina finally wrote. Now I’m intrigued.

She was as egomaniacal as every other artist on this planet. One drink and I’ll explain it all.

Okay, she wrote. Where?

Rooney’s, I wrote. Or rather the hipster abomination that was once Rooney’s.

No way, Carolina wrote.

Scene of the crime, baby, I wrote. Aren’t you at least curious?

No.

Yes, you are.

I guess I could say you were feeling just under-the-weather,” Sheldon said.

“The shits,” I said. “You can’t go wrong with the shits. Believe me I know.”

“I can’t write that.” Sheldon stood there with his finger on his mouth. He opened a desk drawer and stared inside. “Gee, I really wish that Jill hadn’t taken those bags from me.”

Okay, Carolina wrote. One drink. One drink ONLY. At Rooney’s.

And all will be revealed, I wrote.

Tomorrow Night. And then the little green light that signified Carolina’s online presence was gone. I went back to my inbox and started re-reading Larissa’s little note. I pictured her sitting in those black hot pants, thumbing away on her tablet. I’d probably do the reading.

“There is new Rambo movie too,” Oleg finally said to me.

It was going to be a liquid lunch for yours truly.

 

                                                             NINE

 

“By the way,” Sheldon said. “Have you spoken to Scott yet?”

“We’ve had one or two conversations in our lifetime,” I said. “To be truthful I didn’t find them very memorable. And I’m a people person, so read what you want to into that.” He held up the Post-it note with my chicken scratch drawing on it. “Oh, I’d forgotten all about that priceless gem.”

“Well, Scott hasn’t. He was mumbling something to himself about it in the stacks the other day. And then Willy started complaining about it too.” Sheldon looked at the drawing. “It really is uncanny.”

“Is spitting image,” Oleg added

“Yeah, I’m the next Ilya Repin.”

“I think I’ll tell HR that you had severe stomach pains,” Sheldon said. “Or maybe since you missed three meetings, I’ll tell them that you have a chronic condition.”

I got up from my seat to go and find Scott. “That’s cool,” I said, in the doorway. “Stomach pains could be anything. They could mean something severe. Maybe the branch could take up a proxy monetary collection for me, get the whole system involved. Alert the media. Do one of those 5ks or special walks for yours truly. Get a Kickstarter going to help with the medical bills. What I’m saying is I can work with stomach pains. They’re almost as good as the shits.”

“But you can’t miss another meeting,” Sheldon called to me.

“I’ll even spring for the doughnuts next time.”

Willy really did look like he was asleep at the Reference Desk. He wasn’t because every time the patron standing in front of him spoke, he responded with apathetic shrugs and I don’t know. He truly was a gift to the profession. It astounded me that he never won the annual librarian of the year award. Willy was one of those who needed to be taken out to pasture and shot. Or maybe just dropped on an island and hunted for sport. Instead, he was my beast of burden. And I didn’t even want to deal with my own lack of ambition.

I’d inherited Willy Abelman and his malaise upon my return to the library. Back then the man was so destroyed by his divorce he wouldn’t even speak, unless it was to Hazel. Willy mechanically did his work, and little else. He stared at walls and he smelt like weed. But at least back then he showed up for work. He reminded me of this kid Liam that I supervised; another sensitive soul devastated by divorce and the inability to reckon with the fact that people become tired of one another. Except Liam smelled like piss instead of pot. Back then staff complaints had forced me to sit the man down in my office and explain the company’s grooming and dress code to him. Having my own piss stains on pants, I hadn’t even read the thing myself. I determined I’d never belittle another human being or myself again. With Willy I chose simply to ignore him and his plight. I didn’t speak to him, not even to say good morning or ask him how he was doing. I went to work not a social club. I think my apathy sowed the seeds of Willy’s hatred for me. When he started breaking out of his funk, our mutual silence turned slowly into complete, abject animosity. It always amazed me how easy it was to hate.

“Could you at least pretend like you work here?” I said to Willy.

“Sure thing, boss,” he said. He lifted a pencil and set it back down. Hazel snorted. He closed his eyes again.

The library patron breathed through his nose and turned to me. “Can you at least help me?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “This here is a dead letter office.”

“Boy, I really heard Sheldon giving it to you about missing another meeting,” Willy said without opening his eyes. “Bowel problems? Ha!”

“Someone already took the alimony excuse.”

 “And what’s this about a new Rocky movie? You supervisors sure do the heavy lifting around here. What a brain trust.”

“Is this how you people run this place every day?” the patron asked.

Of course not,” I said. “We can’t be this well-oiled of a machine all the time.”

“I want to file a complaint.”

“How patriotic of you.”

“If Jill thinks she can talk to me like that I….” Hazel started. But I wasn’t having any of it.

“Look, do either of you dedicated public servants know where Scott is?” I scanned the library again. Still no Lena. Oleg was now pleading with some drunk to get off the ground. The old booze hound had knocked over one of Scott’s picture book displays and might’ve shit on the floor a bit. The room certainly stunk of it. Jill was standing there with her arms crossed shaking her head at the two of them. She still had those crumpled fast-food bags in her hands. Milquetoasts, she shouted. Milquetoasts! In the distance another ceiling tile was hanging from the roof as water slowly dripped from it. If only the American Library Association were here to document this new low.

“Why do you want to know where he is?” Hazel said. “Planning to put the final nail in the coffin?”

“I thought he could spend this lunch hour sitting for me while I did his portrait,” I said. Then I remembered my audience and the fast trigger to HR. “That drawing wasn’t Scott.”

“It suuuuuuuuuure looked like him,” Willy said, waking up from another nod-off, and casually handing the patron a customer service form. The patron left in disgust. Well, we had fifty other branch libraries one could go to. “I didn’t know you drew too.”

“In regards to doing what else?” I asked. Hazel’s face had turned red.

“Oh, you know how the library talks,” Willy said. He was a sly one. The man’s eyes were bloodshot, courtesy of spending his morning break burning one in his car to Credence. “I mean all I have to do is mention you and the word head-butt and…”

“I don’t think I want to tell you where Scott is,” Hazel broke in.

“I finally want to apologize to him,” I said.

“So, you admit what you did.”

“Sure. And then after that I’m going to go on TV and admit to the Black Dahlia and the Jack the Ripper murders. I might’ve even been involved with 9/11. Who knows?”

“It really looked like him” Willy said. “Skipping meetings and insulting employees. They’ll hire anyone to supervise here.”

“And don’t you ever joke about 9/11,” Hazel said.

“You’re lucky someone didn’t report you to HR,” Willy added. “What, with your reputation here.”

Hazel snorted a second time. “Cartooning that poor man, Rand? Really?”

“You’re a devout Catholic, Hazel,” I said. “Is there no redemption?”

“Don’t you mock my religion either.” She clutched the cleavage cornicello as if it were a crucifix. Willy gave her breasts the old side eye. “Jesus would never heat-butt anyone.”

“Put him on a rush hour bus packed with people shouting on their phones, and I bet he might.”

“You can be reported to HR if you insult someone’s religion,” Willy said.

            “Aren’t you old, dope-smoking hippies supposed to play fast and loose with the law?” I said.

            “I…”

            “Scott’s in the staff room,” Hazel said. I started walking away as she and Willy got into a silent, heated debate. It was well-known but never discussed that Hazel’s brother-in-law sold Willy his weed. It was an exchange that started in order to ease his cuckold pain. Still, she lifted her head and shouted, “Tell Scott that he needs to start using the public restrooms if he’s going to be so long in there.”

            “And I’m not coming to work tomorrow,” Willy added. “Dentist appointment…or something…I’ll figure it out later.”

            There was no one in the staff room, just one long empty table where I spent lonely lunch hours trying to read books as Oleg shouted into his phone and Hazel and Willy said racially and ethnically insensitive things under the guise that they were actually being socially conscious. Someone was in the bathroom, though. Scott. I could hear the noises that he made: his shuffling while on the commode, the slight grunts, the coughing; the courtesy flush. All of Scott’s subtle nuances; the things that drove Hazel crazy. Good thing she didn’t write poems.

On the table were two boxes of doughnuts and a bowl of fruit. The doughnuts had been there for almost two weeks. Hazel brought them in during a rare fit of goodwill and then got angry because we didn’t kiss her ass over them. I found my poems in a drawer at the reference desk the next day. The few times someone tried to throw the stale confections away Willy protested. Yesterday I watched him eat one that had pink frosting on it. The frosting had begun to recede due to age. Sadly, it didn’t kill him. I had no idea when the fruit arrived.

The door to the staff room opened suddenly. Lena. Tight stone-washed jeans with pre-made holes across the thighs and knees, like she’s been attacked by a tiger on the way to work. A red scoop-necked long sleeve t-shirt that clung to her beneath a leather coat. That long, black hair pulled back in a ponytail. That glistening, youthful brown skin she had; it was the kind that kept Republican politicians awake at night in holy terror. “Hey,” she said, and then went to the walk-in closet where the part-timers kept their stuff.

“Hey,” I said. I wanted it to sound casual, but my hey probably came out like the lovesick sigh of a teenaged boy. How long did mid-life crises last? Scott shuffled in the shitter and gave another flush.

“It’s like soooooooo nice outside,” Lena said, after she came out of the closet.

“It’s going to get colder,” I said.

“I’m late.” She crinkled her face. “Rand, what exactly is a fascist?”

“Any white male above the age of twelve.”

“Is that why I heard Willy call you that just now?”

“No,” I said. “He’s just an asshole.”

That elicited a smile and an eye roll. “Is Jill mad at me?”

“Not unless you’re a ceiling tile or a fast-food bag…but Hazel’s all hot and bothered and Oleg is ready to strike.”

“I had to talk to my teacher,” Lena said.

“Ah, college problems,” I said. “I remember them well. Anything good old Rand can help with?”

“How good are you with calculus?”

“About as good as I am with sobriety.”

“Ugh…why are you always drinking, Rand?”

“See, there’s this little thing called life,” I said. Lena smirked. “And while I don’t specifically remember asking for it, the nefarious behavior of my parents…

The staff room door flung open. Hazel. The buzzkiller of all buzzkillers. She pointed at Lena. “You were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago.”

She made a frightened face. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Well, they need you out there,” she said. “Some drunk knocked over a book display.”

Lena smiled. “Was it you, Rand?”

“Not this time,” I said.

“Well, see you later.” Lena waved and left. There was a small pre-made rip right below her right ass cheek. Hazel would see that for sure, and it would be the last time Lena would ever wear those jeans here.

“And you,” Hazel said. “The library doesn’t pay you to flirt with women half your age.”

“We were discussing calculus,” I said. “And she’s more than half my age.” Hazel glared at me like I’d killed her dog for sport. Then she left too.

            I took a seat and waited. The toilet flushed again and then came the running water of the sink. Scott was a thorough hand washer. Despite her lunacy Hazel did have a small point about his bathroom habits. I’d once almost shit myself sitting in wait for the man to be done.

I started thinking about all of my failures and I got pissed off. I got up and grabbed both greasy doughnut boxes and threw them away. Fuck you Willy and your weeks old confection binge eating. Then the bathroom door opened and Scott came out; all two hundred and fifty pounds of cherubic, ruddy faced Scott. You could see burning red flesh in between the hairs of his coal-black goatee. The man wore sweater vests almost year-round. “Hi,” he said, his eyes cast away from mine as if he were some beaten underling.  “D…did you need the bathroom?”

            “No,” I said. “I was just sitting here thinking about that time Schopenhauer strangled his neighbor…and I got rid of those doughnuts.”

            “Oh. Willy said he was going to finish them off for lunch.”

            “Willy can eat pot seeds today.” I tried to look calm and pleasant. You needed kid gloves with Scott. And he hadn’t made a move from just outside the bathroom doorway. Plus, we’d both been burned by art. “It’ll actually be the healthier choice, if you can believe that.”

            Scott just stared at me, his eyes blinking.  He blinked a lot.

            “Anyway, man,” I said, trying to sound hip and with it. “Have a seat.”

            “Am I in trouble?” he asked. “Because I heard that crash outside and it wasn’t me.”

I laughed. I felt bad for doing so, but am I in trouble was the same reaction I always had when anyone told me to sit down with them. Of course, I usually was in trouble. “I just want to talk.”

            “Okay.” Scott cautiously moved away from the doorway and took the seat across from me. “What about?”

            “I was thinking about starting a librarian-only fight club,” I said. “What say you? I take on Willy and you get the winner?” Nothing. Just more blinking. “All right then I’ll cut to the chase…I’m sorry about that picture.” Again nothing.  More blinking from Scott. “And it wasn’t a picture of you.”

            “Oh,” he finally said.

            “See, I like to doodle while sitting at the reference desk.” Usually while Hazel bitched about minorities and liberals, but I left that part out. “It was really just a guy with a goatee and glasses.”

            “I have a goatee and glasses,” Scott said.

            “So do I…and millions of other sinister men have one too.”

            More blinking. “Yeah, I guess.”

            “Well, I just wanted you to know,” I said. Scott kept blinking at me. He was beginning to make me nervous. When I was nervous, I tended to babble. With Scott I had no clue what to babble about. Over the years I’d tried sports, politics, library business and dog grooming, all to no avail. Christ, I needed this to end soon. I grabbed an orange from the fruit bowl, and began peeling off the leathery rind.

            “I’m not in trouble?” Scott asked.

            “Why would you be in trouble?”

            “Well, I don’t know. Maybe if I did something.”

            “Did you?” I felt for the guy. Some people floated through their work day in absolute terror of losing their station in life. Scott was one of those. I never saw him relax. I never saw him fucking around on the internet. He walked around the library all day, sweating in that sweater vest, looking for work to do, thinking the rug would be pulled out from under him at any moment. When he wasn’t in the bathroom, that is.

            “No,” he said. 

“No worries then, eh?” I said, as I finished peeling the orange. There was a stack of napkins on the table. I took a couple and separated the pieces of orange onto them. I took a slice of orange and bit into it, squirting juice all over. It was sweet. It could’ve been sweeter.  “Do you want?”

            Scott looked down at the napkin full of orange slices, blinking wildly.  “If you want me to have some, sure.”

            “I asked if you wanted one, Scott.  Do you want a slice of orange?”

            “Okay,” he said, carefully taking a slice. He examined it for a second and then took a small bite. Then he took another. Soon the slice was gone. I pushed the napkin of orange in between the two of us. I grabbed another slice and so did Scott. Then I took another orange out of the bowl and began to peal that one as well.

            “You know, I used to draw,” Scott finally said. “I wanted to make cartoons or comic books.”

            “Me too,” I said. “When I was a kid.”

            “Bu…but I actually went to college for it.” Scott looked around the staff room, before taking another slice of the orange. The last slice before I had the new one ready. He didn’t even defer to me on that one. It was an improvement “Being a librarian is all right,” he said. “But I miss doing it…the drawing…I mean.”

            “So do I,” I said, finishing off another orange.

            “I like making things.”

            “It’s better than tearing things apart,” I said. “Maybe you should find some time to draw.”

            “Yeah,” Scott said.

Then I had nothing. I broke the new orange into slices, and the two of us ate it until there was nothing left but a soaking napkin, half orange-colored from the fruit, half-gray colored from the faded wood of the table.

“So…are we cool?” I finally asked.

Scott nodded. He got up and went back into the bathroom. Guess the orange didn’t agree with him. I went out into the library and hid in the non-fiction stacks, as Hazel and Willy shouted out like they were talking in a Klan-friendly bar. The Black this. The Muslims that. God bless the Orange-faced billionaire. I thought maybe I should say something, like about decorum or using your inside voice. But what could I really say? Half the people in the library were shouting into their cell phones or playing loud video games on them. I thought about having to do this job for another twenty-five years. I thought the American work force was akin to death. Really, I didn’t think about anything, except that I needed a drink. I thought maybe I’d email Larissa back; see if she wanted to get drinks too.