Harold Washington Public Library

There was something I didn’t tell you about my first semester during second year.

If you remember, I went on a trip to visit James and Nicole in Chicago. The plan was to arrive in the afternoon on October 10th for a concert later that evening and spend the rest of the weekend at James’ dormitory. Everything that happened over the weekend was just as I told you except for that first Friday.

I got off the megabus near Union Station and looked over the river toward Sears Tower, looming like a keep behind a moat and walls. The air was crisp and the sky rippled with thin wispy clouds at an altitude shared by cross-country jets. The sun was near the western horizon and it was getting colder. The people picking up their bags and leaving seemed like a dispersing band of pigeons, without the comforting reassurance that they would all meet again together at a different location. I forgot to pack my charger and my cell phone battery was running low. I risked texting and calling James, but he didn’t reply.

I asked one of the megabus attendants nearby who had just finished helping people get their luggage off the bus if there was a public library nearby — I figured that if my cell phone battery died, I could get on a computer and get into contact with someone on facebook. He told me that the city library was a few blocks down toward the lake on Van Buren street. I thanked him and I walked south on Canal and took a left on Van Buren and walked toward the ramparts of the city.

Coming out from behind a building that had been obscuring my view of the east side of the river, I saw Sears Tower wasn’t a singular keep as I had imagined, but that another building, very tall in its own right, was crouching alongside it. The skyline no longer presented itself as a fortress, but rather as an uneven, craggy cliff face.

I stopped along the bridge over the river, looked down, and seeing my dim reflection, noticed the water was oddly still. I won’t say outright that it was simply still; it was still in a confused, almost indecisive way. I read before that the Chicago River, having originally flown into Lake Michigan nearby, had been engineered to flow into the Mississippi River, hundreds of miles away.

There was an ATM on the other side and I went to get some money out of it, in case I needed a taxi later on. Here I got chastised by an electronic message saying: “unable to withdraw at current amount.” I remembered that my bank charges a small fee for printing out a receipt with your account balance, so I disgustedly ended the session on the screen rather than ascertain how little money I actually had in the bank at that moment.

With no money in my wallet, I walked past the staid-looking Chicago Board of Trade and approached the ludicrous Harold Washington Public Library. Walking under a rattling train running along an elevated set of rusted train tracks, I got to the entrance and went inside.

I followed a hallway with high ceilings as it turned right twice, leading into a spacious atrium. That space was graced with the chortling sound of water. No one was attending the desk there to tell me where to go, so I followed my instincts and took an escalator up two floors and entered what I realized was the main reading room.

There were several people here and all the computers were occupied. I found an unoccupied table in order to wait and I observed this small humanity’s bustle between the rays of fading sunlight filtering through windows at the back of the room and the white light from fluorescent panels above. As the night came on, the white light, white walls, and white floors put everything into sharp relief, like the focusing of a microscope on a slide.

There were slightly more women than men. It was racially and ethnically diverse. It did not appear as if anyone was reading books. People at the computers watched videos and the people at the tables watched videos on their smartphones. Occasional conversation tittered from one end of the room to the other. A man sat next to me and began coughing. I turned slightly toward him and noticed his appearance: bloodshot eyes, patchy hair, tattered tan coat, cracked, yet wet lips, coughing up a storm. I couldn’t look him in the eyes, because it seemed as if he was daring me to.

Turning away from him, the room suddenly seemed less sterile and became close and hot. I looked anxiously toward the row of computers trying to see if a spot was available. While looking, I spotted a balding, red-haired man with an unhealthy complexion at a computer with large headphones on. Enclosed in his personal space, he watched a pornographic video entitled “Stacie Jade Steals the Show.” In it, there was a smiling woman with a pretty face and purple eyeshadow.

While I was transfixed, a pre-teen girl with untied, lime-green shoelaces was walking by the computers and noticed me staring. She followed my gaze and saw what I was watching. Her jaw dropped and her head snapped forward in front of her and she increased her pace. She tripped on her shoelaces and fell forward. Before anyone could offer to help her up, she scrambled to her feet and continued on her way. The homeless-looking man beside me coughed.

I got up and made a circle around the room. Still no response from James and my battery was just about dead. Using the last of its power, I sent him a text telling him where I was at and how my phone was as good as dead. I decided there was nothing I could do and went to the librarian’s desk to get advice on where to find an interesting book. I decided to find a book on the city I now found myself stranded in.

The librarian was affable, fielding my questions warmly in reaction to the nervous hesitancy in which I addressed them.

“What is Chicago known for?”

“It’s called the ‘Hog Butcher to World,’ because of the large meat packing industry in the city after the Civil War.”

“Is Abraham Lincoln from here?”

“No, he’s from Springfield, the state’s capital.”

“Then were any Civil War battles fought here?”

“No, but the city’s industry was important in supplying the war effort and every war effort since then — but do you really want to know about that stuff? Most young men want to know about Al Capone and Eliot Ness. Haven’t you ever seen Kevin Costner and Robert DeNiro in The Untouchables?”

“Nah, I’m not into gangster stuff. When was Chicago founded?”

“Uh, 1836, I think, don’t quote me on that, but somewhere around that time.”

“Is that long after the American Revolution?”

“Oh yeah, sixty years.”

“So a guy like Washington never came here?”

“I’ve heard he’s slept in over a thousand places, but he’s never laid his head to rest anywhere around here.”

“What about Benjamin Franklin?”

“No, he’s from Philadelphia — you’ll find that all those Revolutionary War guys did things in Philadelphia. I mean, if Franklin discovered electricity in Philadelphia, we split the atom here in Chicago. The Manhattan Project got its start in the southside at a football stadium.”

“My grandfather was a POW in Japan when the bomb exploded in Nagasaki. He says he saw the flash through a window.”

I said this in a subdued and reflective murmur, which I think the librarian took to mean he had offended me somehow. But finally I asked him where I could find a book on Sun Yat-Sen and he gave me directions which I hardly paid attention to, because at that moment I was thinking of the arbitrary categorization of East and West. China is the east, but east beyond China was Japan and Taiwan, east beyond that was North America, the West. From there, you would have to go west to get back to the East.

I walked out of the room and went down the escalators and wandered down a few hallways but found myself lost. All the hallways looked the same and nothing was labeled. It just seemed labyrinthine. I felt as if I was on the verge of hyperventilating when I stumbled into a large dining room area. I went to a small table, sat down, and rested my head in my arms. Hearing the scraping of a chair against the floor, I looked up, hoping to see James, but instead it was the same homeless-looking man from the reading room. He sat down, glowered at me, and coughed. I was too tired to move away from him so I stayed in my place. Eventually, I fell asleep and dreamed.

I dreamed I was sitting in the aisle seat on the top floor of the megabus and that the bus itself was sinking into the morass of a bayou. As it got deeper, some of the windows imploded from the pressure, unleashing torrents of water and in these torrents swarmed small alligators. I jumped up and stood on top of my seat to get above the rising water and its predators, my heart beating fast. Then something touched my right hand, and turning to the side, toward the window seat, I saw a woman sitting there had taken my hand in one of hers. Very tan, radiating a tempting warmth, white teeth, slightly burnished cheeks, sensually arched eyebrows capping lime green eyeshadow. She smiled broadly, creasing caressing dimples and narrowing her eyes to the point where all I could see were their twinkling lights. Without changing her pose or gaze, the water rose up quickly and was up to her neck before she said:

“It won’t be long.”

The water quickly enveloped her, then me, and it was dark. And it was warm.