The Librarianist

He looked in the trash but the string wasn’t there. He’d wanted it to be there; it was important to him that it was and he felt disappointed to learn that it wasn’t. But where was it? Connie kept an abalone shell in the medicine chest, which was where she put her rings and earrings; the string had been carefully looped and was resting in the shell atop the jewelry. Bob picked out the string and lowered the toilet seat and sat. He lay the string out on the countertop, then set his left hand, knuckles down, over the top of the string, breaking at the line of the wrist. Using his right hand, then, he tried to tie a double bow; but the string wasn’t uniform, its fibers were kinky and sticking out every which way, and he only made a mess. He untangled the string and tried again but found he couldn’t tie even a single bow. He made a third and fourth attempt, a fifth attempt, but he soon understood he could try a hundred times and would never be able to tie a tidy double bow with fat hanging loops the way the string had been on Connie’s wrist. He could never do it and she could never either, and he stood away from the string, watching it, sensing his person in the mirror on the periphery of his vision but feeling unable to look up and meet his reflection. He took the string and left the bathroom and sat on the edge of the mattress. Connie stirred and blinked and looked at him through half-shut eyes. When she saw the string in his hand she began to rise in the bed, as if some force was evenly elevating her, and her eyes were opening wider, and she was watching the string with a sick look on her face. Bob told her, “I don’t see how you could’ve tied that double bow all by yourself. Will you show me how you did it?” He was speaking quietly and not unkindly, and she was nodding agreeably, yes, all right, of course, and took the string away from Bob and set about attempting to tie it to her wrist. When the bow fell apart in her hands, then she tried again, and a third time. When the bow fell apart a fourth time she tilted her face upward, looking at Bob with a puzzlement, as though she didn’t know quite what they were doing, how they had come to find themselves at this obscure intersection. The very beginnings of the new morning were evident in the curtain covering the bedroom window; the room was growing by the first traces of daylight. Connie snapped the string to its full length and draped it across her wrist as if to try again, but now she’d begun to cry, and Bob watched this, watched as she balled the string in her fist and brought her fist up to cover her face, shuddering, crying harder, but silently.

Bob still didn’t fully understand, he was not allowing himself to completely understand what had happened to his life when his alarm clock sounded and the noise filled the room and terrified him, so that he lunged and snatched the clock from the bedside table to silence it. He began stepping backward and away from Connie, backward until he was clear of the room, pausing at the top of the stairs, the ticking of the clock in the flesh of his palms and now, yes, now he understood what had happened, the sound of the alarm had hopped into the center of him and told him what, and this was the way it had all gone so badly for Bob Comet; this was the thing with the string.

3 1945

AT ELEVEN AND A HALF YEARS OF AGE BOB COMET RAN AWAY FROM home. The actual decampment was not purely accidental; he had been playing at running away for months. But it’s unlikely he would have actually gone through with it had it not been for the incident with Mr. Baker-Bailey, which had repulsed him in his soul and furnished him with a specific something rather than a general anything to run away from.

His desire to leave was brought on by all the traditional things. In answer to the narratives of the adventure novels he’d been reading he had fabricated a narrative of his own, which was that he was unhappy, and that his mother didn’t love him, and that he hadn’t a friend in the world. This was what he told himself, and it was true, but only partly true. His mother did love him; it was just that she didn’t understand him. He could have had friends if he wished it but he knew a separation from his peers that made comradeship feel impossible. That he was unhappy, however, was a fact. The story of his wanting to run away was built in homage to what he then considered his tragical fate.