Erika Swyler - The Book of Speculation

“Simon?” she says.

“What?”

“There’s water coming through the doors.”

Underneath the rubber edge of the glass doors a dark puddle has formed, a black creeping stain on the green carpet. “Shit. Doyle, were there any more coats?”

“Sure.”

“Get them. Coats, sweaters, shirts, whatever’s there.”

There are four exits to Grainger, the main doors, two fire exits, and a service door. Two of the exits are on the basement floor. The lost and found has only an armful of jackets and clothing, barely enough for one door. Doyle carries them all around his shoulders, a human coat rack.

“The rest’s all bags and stuff. Umbrellas.”

Downstairs is filled with children’s books and newspapers, older local documents, and books in storage that no one uses except those writing theses, or me. Downstairs will flood quickly; there isn’t a practical point in trying to save it if water from upstairs is going to rush down. Still. Ruined. Everything on the lower shelves, all those files. I can still feel the edges of each page.

“Simon?”

“Front door. We’ll stop the bottom with coats and figure something else out from there.”

A little boy’s red winter jacket, a dark blue vest, a wool coat covered with cat hair, a stained sweater, a brilliant pink cardigan — I can picture it on Mrs. Wallace. They fill with water, soaking through. Doyle drags two chairs over to hold things in place.

Then comes the painful part.

Reference is sacrificed to the fire exit. A bottom shelf. An encyclopedia is opened and jammed into each crack in the door, volumes stacked upon volumes to make as close as we can to a seal. We tear out pages to fill in the gaps. Push back the water, don’t think about the books. They would have gotten ruined anyway. Don’t think about how tall the stacks felt when I first discovered Grainger. Don’t think about how these shelves held the answers for me, to everything, to what I would be, how they were my own decimal code.

I feel Enola looking at me. “You’re already fired,” she says. “And you’re probably saving books.”

Doyle tears out a page covered in scrawl. “Somebody drew dicks all over it anyway.”

That doesn’t make it better.

When we can push no more paper, when there is no more to do, we climb the stairs to the second floor.

The whaling collection is cold, pristine. Plexiglas cases display scrimshaw, harpoon heads, and a blubber spade. The shelves have worn captain’s logs, ship manifests, drawings, and letters in archival boxes. Sterile. A portrait of a young Philip Grainger hangs by the door; his round wire glasses and close-clipped brown beard convey both wealth and academia. There isn’t a corner of the room that doesn’t fall under his gaze. Alice likes to genuflect when she walks past him. The chairs here are softer than the ones in periodicals; this is where the money comes from and where it goes. If we’re going to stay dry we’ll do it here. Enola curls up in a chair. Doyle slides another chair beside her. She lays her head on his shoulder and tattooed arms snake around her. Somewhere between the car, the coats, and the water, he’s been forgiven.

“Ever think,” she says, “ever feel like the water is coming for you? The house, for sure. Your books.”

“We’re safe here.” I watch her. Doyle’s head begins tipping into the easy sleep of a child. Enola’s eyes dart, eyeing the ceiling for leaks, I presume. “When I first started walking the buoys out, Frank told me that when we were born there were high tides each time, waves so big they washed over the bulkheads, right over the pilings. Everyone thought the docks would break, but they held. Good things can come with the tide.”

She pulls her hood up and tucks her chin to her knees. “Frank is a liar.”

She’s right. I walk out to the stair rail and look over. A black circle has spread beneath the encyclopedias holding the back door.

She falls asleep against Doyle, his tentacles around her, skin embracing, ink embracing. I am out of places to go. Water has taken everything. The storm has even erased the pleasure of the fire. All I’ve done is burn our history and destroy a beautiful book. Then came the rain. Something’s gone wrong.

I get up. The books downstairs may already be ruined but it’s not right to let them go without a witness, and it’s time to check on what Liz Reed found.

Doyle cracks an eyelid. “Where’re you going?”

“Downstairs. I need to watch it go.”

He nods slightly. Enola tosses in his arms, one hand darting out in a spastic thrust. “She’s worried about you,” he says. “That’s why she came here.”

“She didn’t have to.”

He looks around, lights sputter and blink — whether from him or the storm, it’s difficult to say. “I don’t know, man. Bad things have a way of happening around you. Just keep it together at Rose’s, yeah? It’s a good job and I don’t want to have to find another.” In his voice lurks the vaguest hint of a threat. His face remains calm, one eye half-open, nearly asleep. It should have been Dad’s job to keep dangerous men away from her; now she’s surrounded herself with an electric fence.

“I’m just going to the lower level. I won’t be long.”

The floor is wet, a thin layer of water gives the dark green carpet an enticing gloss, and a sucking sound follows each hobble. A deep ache sits in my ankle. I move books, put them on tables, but it isn’t enough. It’s hard to breathe; the room is thick with the stench of wet paper. I move everything I can from the children’s books and lift them to higher ground — save the Thornton Burgess, the fairy tales, the Potter, empty the lower cabinets of any papers, everything I loved. I can’t stomach watching books drown. A light hisses and pops, darkening the bank of microfiche machines. The tables fill too quickly and it becomes impossible to choose.

I wind through the rows of file cabinets — newspapers and journals stored on microfilm, microfiche, and paper yet to be digitized — unaware of what I’m looking for until I find it. The Beacon, for the week of my birth, then for Enola’s. The Boater’s Companion section with the tide tables and weather reports. High tides brought us, swells without the storm. The blame was laid on full moons. After the water rushed the land, the tide pulled the Sound back, emptying it nearly to Connecticut both times. For Enola there is a picture of a man standing out in the middle of a sand field where the harbor had gone dry. Boats ran aground. Fish died. Hundreds of bluefish and fluke drowned in the air. High tides brought us, and brought death. Under flickering blue fluorescents I look for my mother and find her storm. The week she died passed in a blur, leaving only the memory of being fed eggs and watching her leave, but there had been an event — a squall that came in fast, a red tide, and a beach filled with horseshoe crabs.

I go to my desk, what was my desk down here until a few weeks ago, it’s still here, though it has changed. The book repair tools have been cleared away, the banker’s lamp replaced with a fluorescent, the traces of me erased. All that remains is the computer.

It turns on with an alarming flash, but survives logging into my email. While it can’t be safe to use electronics in a storm like this, time is of the essence. It’s the twenty-third, and the relief that came from the bonfire vanished with the storm.

Liz’s email is perfect, detailing an accident during the New Orleans flood of 1825, an entire showboat swallowed by the Mississippi River after days of rain. She found it in the Louisiana State Gazette. Most of the performers and animals perished with the boat’s sinking. Among the five named survivors are Katerina Ryzhkova and her daughter, Greta. The child’s father perished in the flood. The show’s owner, Zachary Peabody, was taken to a hospital to recover. He later embarked on a long and disreputable career as a dance hall proprietor. As I suspected. Liz finishes her email with a small token: “Sanders-Beecher Archive is trying to get in touch with you. Your phone’s out. Fix it. I think you might have a job.”