Sons from Afar (17 page)

James sat on the stone steps, his feelings as gray as the sky, and as heavy. He should have known. He should have guessed. He would have, if he'd stopped to think, and he knew that was why he hadn't stopped to think. He hadn't wanted to know. It was about ten thirty and he had to kill hours before he could get back on the bus. It was a waste of time, just another one of his bright ideas. It was a waste of money. He'd been so sure, too, not ten minutes ago. Well, maybe that was the way to tell how things would go: If you were sure they'd go well then they'd go badly. But if you were sure they'd go badly, then they went badly too. They just went wrong, things. One thing after another.

James wondered if he wasn't even good at what he was supposed to be good at. Like, having ideas and being able to find things out. Then, he thought, sitting there with his shoulders heavy, he got depressed when things didn't go his way. That was the kind of person he was. The kind of person who would run out on somebody, looking for the easy way, rather than sticking around to help with responsibilities that were of his making. Like four children.

Maybe, James wondered, he didn't want to find his father after all. Who needed more bad news? In any case—he stood up—he was going to have to think of something to do with all this time. He pulled the map out of his pocket.

Looking at the map, James was struck with memory, struck
down by a memory so clear he wasn't sure for a minute it wasn't happening all over again. Of course—they'd been here before, right here walking in front of this college campus, six summers ago, the three of them following Dicey. He guessed, things had sure been worse for him then. He felt like he was occupying two time zones at the same time. There was the present, where he was standing with the sidewalk under his feet, facing down the line of trees that edged the front of the campus. At the same time, he was in the past, walking along toward himself, on the sidewalk by the street, beside the hedge of tall boxwood that marked the end of the campus, following Dicey, not knowing where they were going. Hunger he remembered, feeling hungry. He was hungry now.

James explored the campus, partly to be doing something, and partly to see if he could find something to eat. He went back up the hill to a kind of patio area behind that main building. The patio looked down over broad flat fields, with a squat modern cement building on the left and a heavy brick building on the right. James turned back and went down the steps into the cellar where he had seen students going. There, he found a coffee shop. Inside it students, sometimes alone, sometimes with other students, sometimes with professors, sat around talking or reading. James got himself a couple of tuna sandwiches at the counter and sat alone at a thick wooden table while he ate. The ceiling of the room hung low and the voices were kept pretty low, too. Nobody stared at him. They didn't think it was odd for him to be there; they didn't think he looked odd.

When James went back outside, he drifted down the front lawn to a flat-faced three-story building opposite the Hall of Records, at the opposite end of the campus lawn. Broad steps led up to glass doors. It seemed to be a place you could go into.

It was a library, the college library. James pushed open the
heavy door; he always liked libraries. In the foyer, a croquet set stood against the wall, mallets, wickets, and balls all held in a special rack. That was pretty strange for a library. Well, James didn't mind strangeness. He entered the building proper and was stopped by a girl sitting at a little table. “Are you just looking around?” she asked him, marking her place in the book she was reading with her finger. The page was filled with diagrams of conic sections; she had been making notes on it with her pencil.

“Just looking around,” James echoed, glad she had asked him and given him his answer.

“Are you visiting the college?” she asked.

“Yes,” he agreed. He knew that what she meant wasn't what he meant, but she didn't need to know. “I like libraries.”

“The reading room's over there.” She pointed toward a room filled with sofas and chairs, where magazines and newspapers hung on racks, all visible through glass doors. “The card catalog is right behind me. The stacks are all in the lower levels. What would you like to see?”

“The stacks,” James decided. That would kill the most time.

She told him how to get there. “You can enter at any level, they all look alike. If you're not out by four, I'll come rescue you.” Her smile told him she was joking.

James went through more doors and down stairways. He didn't want her to think he'd been lying, so he had to. He hadn't been lying, anyway. He entered the stacks at the first level below the ground floor.

The stacks were rows and rows and more rows of books, narrow hallways of books, books from floor to ceiling of the room. Along the outside wall were desks, each one separated off by a shallow wood partition, each with its own lamp and straight chair. Some of them were occupied by students, reading or writing. Halfway along the length of that wall the pattern was
broken by a low round table surrounded by four comfortable chairs, a place where you could sit and talk, or slouch, and read with your feet propped up.

When he had walked down the length of the room, James stepped into the stacks. Books in tiers stretched out before him, towered up above him, went down to within an inch of the floor. He had known there were so many books, but he'd never actually seen them gathered together. They were all hard-bound. He ran his hand along some of them, touching their stiff spines. A heavy quietude filled the air, more than quiet but not silence.

James didn't know most of the authors' names. He didn't see many familiar titles in the books he was moving slowly past. He came to the end of one row and turned back along the next, just killing time. All of those books . . . it was like all the stars in the sky: The books seemed to pour their thinking out into the air of the library, like stars poured out their light. Every one of the books had been written by somebody, and every title was different, and every somebody was different.

The books seemed to be bound only in dark colors, and they seemed old. Row after silent row, they waited to be noticed. Some of them, he guessed, would never be taken down and read. He walked on, back and forth along the rows, not skipping any. Sometimes he ran his hand along the spines as he walked by. The books lined the narrow passageways like walls holding up the whole building.

You'd think, James thought, with all those books, there would be an answer. You'd think, with all those words and all that thinking, somebody would have figured things out and written down the clear truth. It didn't have to be in English; it could be in any language. But nobody had, in any language. Even James's simple question they couldn't answer, about who his father was. Not the
man's name, but the man he was. But the real question was why—why was that a question James wanted to know the answer to? Because then he'd have some idea of how to be a man, what you did when you were a man—not a dork. He'd know how to change himself, or at least do a better job of hiding himself so people wouldn't know what he was like.

But James didn't have a father and the father he'd had wasn't much of a man, unless running off on responsibilities and looking for the quick easy way was what men did. Which James doubted. So he was better off without a father maybe. He looked around at the tiers of books. They couldn't tell him even that. They all argued with and contradicted each other and didn't agree on anything. There should be only one book, and that one true for sure: that was what James thought.

He went slowly back up the stairs from the stacks. It was all pretty depressing. He said thank you to the girl behind the table. Everything sort of hung down off of him: the waste of hope, the waste of money, all the time left to waste before he got back home; shame hung like a cloak from his shoulders, hung heavy: shame for who he had been and the things he'd done, or shame for who he would be and the things he'd do, and it wasn't even as if he had done or was going to do anything much.

Once outside, James stood at the foot of the library steps. He couldn't breathe in. He felt like his heart was being pushed in and he couldn't breathe. He wondered if he was having a heart attack, and he didn't think that would be too bad. At least, he wouldn't have to live his life then. He just sat down on the bottom step and waited.

Two young men, college students, wearing no shirts, their chests and backs and faces and arms tanned, were throwing a Frisbee back and forth. Throwing and catching, catching and throwing. The round disk soared through the air in long arcs.
They ran to catch it, leaping up, stretching low. They didn't notice James. Their bare feet moved over the grass.

There were hundreds of thousands of blades of grass, maybe millions. There were thousands and thousands of books boxed into the building behind him. James let his mind go back to wander along the stacks. He guessed the books didn't mind not being brightly colored, or being ignored. He guessed he wouldn't mind being a book. Books just did what they were made to do, like stars just shining out in case anyone cared to look. In a way, James felt sorry for those books, individually.

He sat there for a minute, feeling sorry for the books, and all the thousands of people who had written them, and the stars, and the grass—and himself. What had Sammy said to him, Just be yourself? Sammy didn't know what he was saying.

Unless Sammy was miles smarter than James and knew something. Because even if your self was James Tillerman, and that was pretty depressing, you couldn't be anything else. It was pretty lucky, in a cruel way, that it didn't matter much who you were.

James felt the cruelty of that on him; he forced air into his lungs to prove he could still breathe. With his lungs filled, he felt the luck of it. Because if it didn't make any difference, then it really didn't matter. Really didn't. And if it didn't matter—

If it didn't matter, then it wasn't a big thing to be a dork. It wasn't anything at all, because he was so small and unimportant—like any individual star, or any individual book or blade of grass, he was just any individual human being. It was like “The Myth of Sisyphus,” James thought and he wished—he wished he hadn't turned those notes over to Andy. He would have liked, he thought—standing up, wishing he was alone to spread out his arms and stretch, stretch out until his fingertips touched the sky—he felt like they could—he would have liked to think Camus's ideas out for himself, think them out completely. He
would have liked to try to explain them to the class, even in French; to himself, too. Camus understood what the voiceless books knew: All that James had to do for himself, all he could possibly do, was just be himself.

Whether the young men playing Frisbee saw him, and thought he was weird, or not, James did stretch out his arms and touch at the sky with his fingertips. But maybe they knew it too, that because you weren't important it wasn't important who you weren't. They weren't keeping score in their game. The only reason the game took place was for the catching and throwing, the running. Nobody was out to beat anybody else or worried about being beaten. Because both of those young men, and James, too, and everybody, could only live for the short time a life took. That was a terrible thing, that brevity—terrible but not frightening.

At least, it didn't frighten James. It couldn't frighten him because he felt, like night lifting off of the sky, the shame and depression lifting off of his shoulders at the thought that he really didn't matter, whoever he was.

Without looking back—he didn't need to look back—James left the campus. He took the map out of his pocket and just wandered, keeping an eye on any clock he passed, keeping his eye on where he was in relation to where he had to be at two. Sometimes he recognized a street, or a store—he'd been here before. He wondered how Dicey had done it, had gotten them down to Gram's and kept them safe. She was something, his sister. He couldn't have done it, even if he'd been the oldest. He wondered if he had ever thanked her, and he didn't think so, and he thought he wanted to. If all you had was the one brief life, then someone who, like Dicey, had pushed and pulled you along through a bad and dangerous part of it, had done something for you you could never pay back.

The last time they were in Annapolis, he thought, as he waited
for the school group on the steps of the statehouse, they were looking for their grandmother, even though they didn't know at the time that was what they were looking for. This time, he'd come to find his father. He hadn't found him, but they didn't have a father, and they couldn't, and maybe it didn't matter. Maybe it wasn't anything important after all. Maybe it would have been good, maybe not—probably not, if what they knew about the man was half true. But it didn't matter because it wasn't what had happened.

Sammy, he thought, maybe already knew that, which was why he'd just been going along with James. Sammy saw things more clearly than James did. Sammy, he realized—seeing the three familiar teachers come around the curved sidewalk followed by the long mass of kids, slipping in beside Toby, who pretended not to notice—Sammy was pretty smart. But if he was so smart, why weren't his grades better? There
was
something not right about that.

James and Toby sat down in their same seat. Toby got the window for the return trip. James wondered about his brother. It wasn't as if good grades meant anything, necessarily; it was just that, someone smart got good grades, almost without trying, in elementary school. Which meant that, if he didn't, there should be some reason.

“Well?” Toby asked him.

“Thanks,” James said. “It was okay.”

“I can't believe you got away with it.”

“It wasn't anything much to get away with,” James pointed out. “So tell me, what are your conclusions about Venus? Remember?” he said to Toby's puzzled expression. “You were telling me when I interrupted you.”