The Librarianist

And so came the period where Bob had no access to the Gambell-Reed Senior Center, and his days were dreary and lusterless. He disliked being separated from his friends, and the news of Connie brought on a pervasive sorrow which, while neither acute nor dangerous, slowed the clock by half and drained the world of its sounds and colors. He had for some years been experiencing the slow dimming of his capacities, but it was during this time away from the center that the dimming achieved prominence. He was forgetting things, he was burning things on the stove top, and he did occasionally become unsure about where he was going and why. His body, also, was uncooperative; he felt weaker in his limbs, he was falling asleep without knowing he was tired, then waking up confused and unrefreshed. He had increasingly been relying on the rope to climb the stairs to his room, pulling himself up hand over hand in the style of the mountaineer. One evening he fell asleep on the couch in the living room and didn’t wake up until four o’clock in the morning. He lay in the darkness for a time, looking, breathing. He stood and crossed the room and started hauling himself up the steps; when he reached the top step, the brass eyelet came away from the wall. There was a sickening instant where he hung in the air, teetering, rope in hand, then gravity seized him and threw him down the stairs like a stone into a pit. When he came to he was lying flat on his back and the pain in his midbody region made his mind pulse white, and his heart felt brutalized with its thuds and poundings. In a while the pain was lessened and replaced by a numbness and he found he could think of other things besides his discomfort. He thought, I believe I’ve broken my hip, and he had broken it. He thought, How am I going to be helped? A gauziness came over him, and now he felt bouncy and glad, and he giggled, but this hurt, so he stopped. He was becoming sleepy, and then very sleepy, and he was afraid of this sleep because he thought it could be sneaky death masquerading as an innocent tiredness. But there was no fighting it, and he dropped into slumber and did not die. He awoke at half-past nine in the morning to the sound of someone knocking on the door. “Come in,” he called. A young man wearing a safety vest entered, speaking as he stepped deeper into the house, “Hello? Hello?”

“Here I am.”

The young man hurried over and knelt beside Bob. “Sir, are you okay?” he said.

“I’m not, no. How are you?” Bob suggested the young man call him an ambulance and the young man took out his cell phone and did this, explaining the situation to the emergency operator so far as he understood it. “I don’t know what happened but I can tell you he’s definitely injured.”

“I fell down the stairs,” Bob said, pointing.

“He fell down the stairs,” the young man said. He asked Bob for his name and address and Bob told him these things and the young man relayed them to the operator. Now he was listening; soon he told Bob, “They want to know about your pain, Mr. Comet.”

“What about it?”

“How is it?”

“It’s coming in and out, but when it’s in, it’s large.”

The young man said, “I think he’s in a lot of pain.”

Bob still was clutching the rope that had come away from the wall. The young man noticed this and became shy. Lowering his voice, he told the operator, “Yeah, he’s holding a rope in his hand?” He left the room for the kitchen, speaking softly into his phone; Bob tried to hear what the young man was saying but couldn’t make out the words. He noticed the ceiling above the stairwell was cracking and he told himself to remember to address this later. In a while, the young man returned. “Five minutes, they say.”

Bob said, “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

“Glad to be of service.”

Bob said, “You don’t have to stay, if you’ve got work to do.”

“What’s five minutes?”

“I’m not suicidal,” Bob told the young man.

“Me neither,” the young man replied. He pulled up a chair and they waited together. Bob asked him what the purpose of his visit had been and the young man said, “I sell windows. Or I try to sell them. Actually, I don’t sell very many at all. When you sign up with this company, management names past employees, all-stars who’ve brought in such-and-such an amount through commission. But none of these famous past employees are still with the company, and I’m starting to think they didn’t exist in the first place.”

“Are the windows nice windows?”

“Between you and me? They’re defects. Shipment-damaged, mostly, or else banged-up display models. We buy them cheap and sell them cheap — which is how we get our foot in the door. It’s our installation of the windows where we make our profit. Or where the company does.”