LITMIR.BIZ

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be fashion at all, that it might be armor.

      When at last she spoke, she didn’t give me her surname, but instead said, “You saw me running from him, but I never saw you.”

      “I’m unusually discreet.”

      She looked at the set of Dickens novels on the shelves to her right. She slid her fingers along the leather bindings, the titles glowing in lamplight. “Are these valuable?”

      “Not really. They’re a matched set, published in the 1970s.”

      “They’re wonderfully made.”

      “The leather’s been hand-tooled. The lettering is gilded.”

      “People make so many beautiful things.”

      “Some people.”

      When she turned her attention to me again, she said, “How did you know where to find me, in there with the Lebow children?”

      “I saw you leaving the reading room when he was in the street looking for you. I figured you must have studied the blueprints in the basement archives. So did I.”

      “Why did you study them?” she asked.

      “I thought the bones of the structure might be as beautiful as the finished building. And they are. Why did you study them?”

      For maybe half a minute, she considered her reply, or perhaps she considered whether to answer or not. “I like to know places. All over the city. Better than anyone knows them. People have lost their history, the what and how and why of things. They know so little of the places where they live.”

      “You don’t stay here every night. I would have seen you before.”

      “I don’t stay here at all. I visit now and then.”

      “Where do you live?”

      “Here and there. All over. I like to move around.”

      Seeing through her bold makeup wasn’t easy, but I thought that underneath she might be very lovely. “Who is he, the one who chased you?”

      She said, “Ryan Telford. He’s the curator of the library’s rare-book and art collections.”

      “Did he think you were stealing stuff or vandalizing?”

      “No. He was surprised to discover me.”

      “They don’t know I come here, either.”

      “I mean he was surprised to discover me in particular. He knows me from … another place and time.”

      “Where, when?” I asked.

      “It’s not important. He wanted to rape me then, and he almost did. He wanted to rape me tonight. Though he used a cruder word than rape.”

      Sadness overcame me. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

      “Who does?”

      “How old are you?” I asked.

      “Does it matter?”

      “I guess not.”

      She said, “I’m eighteen.”

      “I thought no older than sixteen, maybe even thirteen now that I’ve seen you up close.”

      “I have a boyish body.”

      “Well, no.”

      “Well, yes,” she said. “Boyish the way that very young girls can seem boyish. Why do you hide your face?”

      I was intrigued that she had taken so long to ask the question. “I don’t want to scare you off.”

      “I don’t care about appearances.”

      “It’s not just appearances.”

      “Then what is it?”

      “When they see me, people are repulsed, afraid. Some of them hate me or think they do, and then … well, it goes badly.”

      “Were you burned or something?”

      “If it were only that,” I said. “A couple of them tried to set me on fire once, but I was already … already what I am before they tried.”

      “It’s not cold in here. So are the gloves part of it?”

      “Yes.”

      She shrugged. “They look like hands to me.”

      “They are. But they … suggest the rest of me.”

      “You’re like the Grim Reaper in that hood.”

      “Look like but am not.”

      “If you don’t want me to see you, I won’t try,” she said. “You can trust me.”

      “I think I can.”

      “You can. But I have a rule, too.”

      “What rule?”

      “You can’t touch me. Not even the slightest, most casual touch. Especially not skin to skin. Especially not that. But also not your glove to my jacket. No one can touch me. I won’t permit it.”

      “All right.”

      “That was quick enough to be a lie.”

      “But it wasn’t. If I touch you, you’ll pull the hood off my head. Or if instead you make the first move and pull the hood off my head, then I’ll touch you. We hold each other hostage to our eccentricities.” I smiled again, an unseen smile. “We’re made for each other.”

       Thirteen

      AT THE AGE OF EIGHT, WITH NO IDEA WHERE I was bound, I came to the city on a Sunday night, aboard an eighteen-wheeler with a flatbed trailer hauling large industrial machinery that I couldn’t identify. The machines were secured to the truck with chains and covered with tarps. Between the tarps and the machines were nooks where a boy of my size could conceal himself. I had gotten aboard when the driver had been having dinner, near twilight, in the coffee shop at a truck stop.

      Two days earlier, I had run out of things to eat. My mother had sent me away with a backpack full of food, which I supplemented with apples from an untended orchard that I chanced upon. Although I had raised myself more than I’d been raised, though I had grown up more in the wilds than in our small house, I possessed no knowledge of what safely edible smorgasbord, if any, forests and fields might offer.

      After a day of hunger, early on Sunday morning, I made my way through a sort of pine barrens, where the soil was peaty. The land spread out too flat and the underbrush grew too sparse to allow me to feel safe. For the most part, there was nothing to hide behind but trees, with the boughs far overhead and the trunks not all that thick. When I looked around, I seemed to be in a dream about a vast cloister where thousands of columns stood in no discernible pattern. Through the staggered trees, you couldn’t see far in a straight line. But as I passed through, horizontal movement in all that vertical architecture and stillness, I couldn’t possibly be missed by anyone who happened to be there.

      Voices raised in song should have sent me scurrying toward some distant silent place, but instead I found myself drawn to them. I ran in a crouch and then, nearing the last of the pines, crawled to the tree line. Cars and pickups were parked on a graveled area a hundred yards to my left. Half that distance to the right, a languid river flowed like molten silver in the early light.

      About forty people were gathered at the water’s edge, singing a hymn, and the preacher stood in the river with a woman of about thirty-five, engaged upon a full-immersion baptism. To one side of the choir stood a man and two children, who seemed to be waiting their turns for salvation.

      Directly ahead of me, across an expanse of grass, past

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