Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"You turn into whoever you're supposed to turn into."

"I hope you're right," I said, thinking of him and not of myself.

"Why, what is your father, anyway? A Jewish neo-Nazi? A proctologist?"

"Let's get dressed," I said. "Let's take that walk."

"No, just a minute. What is your father, Art? Tell me. Come on, it's only fair. You're one up on me now."

"I love you," I said, getting up to pull my trousers on.

We walked a long way, leaving behind the fragrant, dark streets of Shadyside, where you had to push aside low and wild'growing branches and to pass through curtains of spiderweb that overhung the sidewalks and left ticklish strands across your lips and eyelashes. We came far into East Liberty, where the neighborhood began to deteriorate, the vegetation dwindled then finally disappeared, and we found ourselves on a commercial street corner, amid a loose cloud of unhappy black men laughing outside the corner saloon and along the closed, barred, steel-shuttered row of storefronts. As we stood poised on the edge of the shutdown neighborhood, and Arthur said that we should turn around, I heard a snarling dog. A pickup truck had stopped at the traffic light, and in its bed was an enraged Doberman pinscher, doing near backflips of fluid hate. Each burst of nervous laughter from the street-corner men sent the dog over again.

"Jesus," said Arthur.

"I know," I said. "That dog's gone mad."

"It's Cleveland."

"Oh, come on," I said, "not quite," thinking maybe he'd had an encounter with Cleveland, like my last one, that he hadn't told me about, but then I looked into the cab of the pickup and saw Cleveland, on the passenger's side, laughing, holding his cigarette out the window.

"What's he doing? Who's he with?" I said, trying to recognize the man sitting behind the wheel of the pickup. The dog continued to emit the same slavering snarl over and over again, without variation, like a machine specially designed to snarl at laughing black men.

"He doesn't see us," said Arthur. "Hey, Cleveland!"

Cleveland turned, his jaw dropped, and then he grinned, waving delightedly, and said something that I didn't catch. The light changed and the pickup truck squealed off, the Doberman clambering to put its forelegs on the lip of the truck bed and to thrust its head into the onrush of wind.

"What's he up to now?" said Arthur, laughing. "What a dog!"

"What a dog!" I said. "Who knows?"

We laughed, but on the way home, while Arthur continued to exclaim and narrate, I hardly spoke, and there was nothing he could do to cheer me-indeed, his chatter annoyed me, for forgetting everything I had felt only that afternoon, I was gripped by the fear that I would never see Cleveland again. Later we did make love, and it was hard and wordless as ever, but when we were through, and he reminded me that we had only three more days before the rich young couple came home, I tensed.

"Then what?" I said, the question occurring to me for the first time.

"Yes, then what?"

"Where will you go?"

"Well, I was thinking of that perfectly nice place you have on the Terrace, which has been so empty lately."

"I don't know," I said, beginning to feel, with an inward groan, the return of a familiar feeling of pressure, but he said only, "Fine," and rolled over.

So, on the following Sunday, very early and half-awake, we left the Weatherwoman House, and, because I did not know what I wanted, Arthur stayed with me for three strained, unerotic days before the house-sitting grapevine came through for him again, and he moved out.

One morning about a week into the strange new August, I was awakened by a telephone call from a woman at the Hillman Library, who told me, in a stunningly icy tone of voice, that I'd been sent several notices informing me of Sigmund Freud's Selected Letters to Wilhelm Fliess having fallen due on June I0, and that if I did not return the book immediately, my grade transcripts would be frozen, or something like that, endangering all my future employment opportunities, and that if this did not persuade me, the matter would be referred to a collection agency.

"I returned that book in July," I said, rubbing my eyes, remembering the day very clearly. I'd received no notices, but since I'd moved at the beginning of the summer, I supposed they hadn't been forwarded.

"Urn, well," she said, her voice melting for a moment. "If that's the case, you have to come down to the library, in person. Yes, to initiate a Search and Recovery."

Of course, I'd been carefully avoiding going anywhere near the Hillman Library. I walked into work along back streets, ate my lunch in the workroom of the bookstore, and I was constantly on the alert and ready to run at the first glimpse of a certain aqua ribbon. Arthur and I, through an unacknowledged and unspoken agreement, didn't discuss his days at work, and if he had any nasty encounters by the card catalogues or at the water fountain, or if vicious rumors about him began to circulate through Reference, Acquisitions, and Gifts and Exchanges, I never found out about them. I begged the righteous librarian to allow me to initiate a Search and Recovery over the telephone, but she would hear nothing of it. I was in midsentence when she hung up.

Arthur had the day off. I found the scrap of paper on which I'd written down his new number, and called him to find out what he knew about Searches and Recoveries, but I got only his sleepy voice on his latest answering machine. He was spending the day, I remembered, with the lovely Riri, at her cousin's out in Latrobe, something he'd been promising her for months.

"This is Art," I said, after the tone, "and I'm about to enter the jaws of death."

Thus I resigned myself, thinking that at least it would be simpler, somehow, if he was not at the library when I finally reentered it, which, half an hour later, I did. Fans of the unconscious will be interested to note that I'd taken care to dress well, in summer colors-pleated khaki pants, white shirt with salmon pinstripes, loosely knotted Hong Kong cotton tie. I hurried up to the tall, actorish fellow who worked behind the front desk, and I looked cautiously around me as I approached him.

"I'm here to initiate a Search and Recovery," I said.

He blinked his entire face.

"P-pardon?"

"I got a call today from someone here who said that I had to initiate a Search and Recovery." I glanced over my shoulder, toward the elevators, expecting at any minute to be spotted and seized.

"Uh huh," he said. "I see."

Libraries, I knew, are frequently the haunts of twitching, mumbling paranoid schizophrenics, researching their grandiose conspiracies, and so I was embarrassed by the look he gave me, which suggested that my insistence on Search and Recovery was probably due to my fervent belief that Richard Nixon, Stephen King, and Anita Loos were intimately connected to the sinking of the Titanic and the disappearance of Errol Flynn's son in Cambodia.

"It's some form I'm supposed to fill out," I said.

"Oh? I've never heard of it. Do you know who you spoke to? No? Maybe you'd better go back to Administration and ask."

"Um. I was afraid-I was hoping-do you think you could go back and ask for me? Ha ha. See, there's someone who works in the back offices that I'd rather not run into."

His eyes lit up and he wiggled his eyebrows. With very dramatic deliberation, he reached behind him for a stool and sat down. He picked up a pencil and tapped it against his temple.

"Be brave," he said.

It was perfect. I stopped dead at the entrance to the elevator corridor, and there she was, behind her bars, dressed to kill, pearls, blue sundress. Her locks were lighter than ever, nearly strawberry blond, pulled up and wrapped into a palm tree of hair that rose from her head and spilled its bright ends outward in a silly, fetching spray. She raised her face, which was suntanned and barely painted, the stalk of hair swayed, and whatever expression I expected to see- rage, embarrassment, unrecognition-was absent. She grinned. It was all I could do then, in the flash of her old, unlooked-for smile, to keep myself from running to press my face against the grille, into the window that I loved so much. But I kept a grip on myself and slowly came, self-conscious, suddenly stiff-legged, and holding out my hands, as though to catch a spinning beach ball. As I passed the elevators, their Up arrows lit and chimed, one, two. The doors slid open with the sound of murmured approval, and the corridor behind me filled with a little audience.