Paul Auster - Invisible

Unfortunately, such moments of happiness do not come often. It is not that you are particularly unhappy with your job at the library, but as time goes by and the hours you spend there accumulate, it becomes increasingly difficult for you to keep your mind on what you are supposed to be doing, mindless as those tasks might be. A sense of unreality invades you each time you set foot in the silent stacks, a feeling that you are not truly there, that you are trapped in a body that has ceased to belong to you. And so it happens that one afternoon, just two weeks after you earned your job with the only perfect test score in the annals of pagedom, as you find yourself on yet another shelving foray, working in an aisle of medieval German history, you are half startled out of your wits when someone taps you on the shoulder from behind. You instinctively wheel around to confront the person who touched you-no doubt someone who has slipped unnoticed into this restricted area to attack and/or rob the first victim he can find-and there, much to your relief, is Mr. Goines, looking at you with a sad expression on his face. Without saying a word, he lifts his right hand into the air, crooks his forefinger at you, and with an impatient, wiggling gesture beckons you to follow him. The little man waddles down the aisle, turns right when he comes to the corridor, walks past one row of shelves, then a second, and makes another right turn into an aisle of medieval French history. You and your cart were in this aisle just twenty minutes earlier, shelving several books on life in tenth-century Normandy, and sure enough, Mr. Goines goes straight to the spot where you were working. He points to the shelf and says, Look at this, and so you bend down and look. At first, you fail to notice anything out of the ordinary, but then Mr. Goines pulls two books off the shelf, two books separated by a distance of about twelve inches, with three or four books standing between them. Your supervisor shoves the two books close to your face, making it clear that he wants you to read the Dewey decimal numbers affixed to the spines, and it is only then that you become aware of your error. You have reversed the placement of the books, putting the first where the second should be and the second where the first should be. Please, Mr. Goines says, in a rather supercilious voice, don’t ever do it again. If a book is put in the wrong place, it can be lost for twenty years or more, maybe forever.

It is a small matter, perhaps, but you feel humiliated by your negligence. Not that the two books in question could have been lost (they were on the same shelf, after all, just inches away from each other), but you understand the point Mr. Goines is trying to make, and although you bristle at the condescending tone he adopts with you, you apologize and promise to be more vigilant in the future. You think: Twenty years! Forever! You are astounded by the idea. Put something in the wrong place, and even though it is still there-quite possibly smack under your nose-it can vanish for the rest of time.

You return to your cart and continue shelving books of medieval German history. Until now, you have not known you are being spied upon. It puts a sickening taste in your mouth, and you tell yourself to be careful, to keep on your toes, to take nothing for granted ever again, not even in the benign, soporific precincts of a university library.

Shelving expeditions eat up approximately half your day. The other half is spent sitting behind a small desk on one of the upper floors, waiting for a pneumatic tube to come flying up through the intestines of the building with a withdrawal slip commanding you to retrieve this or that book for the student or professor who has just asked for it below. The pneumatic tube makes a distinctive, clattering noise as it speeds upward toward its destination, and you can hear it from the moment it begins its ascent. The stacks are distributed among several floors, and since you are just one of several pages sitting at desks on those several floors, you don’t know if the pneumatic tube with the withdrawal slip rolled up inside it is headed for you or one of your colleagues. You don’t find out until the last second, but if it is indeed meant for you, the metallic cylinder comes bursting out of an opening in the wall behind you and lands in the box with a propulsive thud, which instantly triggers a mechanism that turns on the forty or fifty red lightbulbs that line the ceiling from one end of the floor to the other. These lights are essential, for it often happens that you are away from your desk when the tube arrives, in the process of searching for another book, and when you see the lights go on you are alerted to the fact that a new order has just come in. If you are not away from your desk, you pull the withdrawal slip out of the tube, go off to find the book or books that are wanted, return to your desk, tuck the withdrawal slips into the books (making sure that the top portion is sticking out by a couple of inches), load the books into the dumbwaiter in the wall behind your desk, and push the button for the second floor. To top off the operation, you return the empty tube by squeezing it into a little hole in the wall. You hear a pleasant whoosh as the cylinder is sucked into the vacuum, and more often than not you will go on standing there for a moment, following the sound of the clattering missile as it plunges through the pipe on its way downstairs. Then you return to your desk. You settle into your chair. You sit and wait for the next order.

On the surface, there is nothing to it. What could be simpler or less challenging than loading books into a dumbwaiter and pushing a button? After the drudgery of shelving, you would think your stints behind the desk would come as a welcome respite. As long as there are no books to retrieve (and there are many days when the pneumatic tube is sent to you just three or four times in as many hours), you can do whatever you want. You can read or write, for example, you can stroll around the floor and poke into arcane volumes, you can draw pictures, you can sneak an occasional nap. At one time or another, you manage to do all those things, or make an attempt to do them, but the atmosphere in the stacks is so oppressive, you find it difficult to focus your attention for any length of time on the book you are reading or the poem you are trying to write. You feel as if you are trapped inside an incubator, and little by little you come to understand that the library is good for one thing and one thing only: indulging in sexual fantasies. You don’t know why it happens to you, but the more time you spend in that un-breathable air, the more your head fills with images of naked women, beautiful naked women, and the only thing you can think about ( if thought is the appropriate word in this context) is fucking beautiful naked women. Not in some sensuously decked-out boudoir, not in some tranquil Arcadian meadow, but right here on the library floor, rolling around in sweaty abandon as the dust of a million books hovers in the air around you. You fuck Hedy Lamarr. You fuck Ingrid Bergman. You fuck Gene Tierney. You couple with blondes and brunettes, with black women and Chinese women, with all the women you have ever lusted after, one by one, two by two, three by three. The hours inch along, and as you sit at your desk on the fourth floor of Butler Library, you feel your cock grow hard. It is always hard now, always hard with the hardest of hard-ons, and there are times when the pressure becomes so great that you leave your desk, dash down the corridor to the men’s room, and wank into the toilet. You are disgusted with yourself. You are appalled by how quickly you give in to your desires. As you zip up you swear it will never happen again, which is exactly what you said to yourself twenty-four hours ago. Shame stalks you as you return to your desk, and you sit down wondering if there isn’t something seriously wrong with you. You decide that you have never been more lonely, that you are the loneliest person in the world. You think you might be headed for a crack-up.