“Well, what about you? What’s your smallest thing?”
But he’d stopped walking, gesturing with his hand holding his tea toward a large stone building with a line of people snaked around it.
“That’s the Old Library,” he said. “With the Book of Kells in it. You need tickets for it, and probably booked in advance, so I’m sorry we can’t see it. There’s the Long Room, which is basically as it sounds—an incredibly long, large room withhigh ceilings, lined with row after row of old books. You’d know it, it’s been featured in loads of films.”
We came upon a sign, and Eamonn stepped back a little to read what it said. “Under renovation,” he mused. “So the books aren’t even there. The room itself is still impressive, it just wouldn’t be the full experience.”
I didn’t know why this seemed significant to me somehow. That I would arrive to a closed garage, try to go to a closed embassy, only to stumble upon one of the biggest tourist destinations in Ireland that happened to be undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime renovation project. Did that reinforce the idea that this was a dream, where unusual things could happen, or that it was real life, where your best-laid plans didn’t always go the way you wanted them to? Or did it just mean that sometimes things were closed?
There was a trash can not far away, and Eamonn tossed his cup. “I can take you to one of my favorite bookshops, though,” he said. “If you want to walk across the river.”
I tossed my cup, too, even though I technically had a few sips left in there. The coffee had gone a bit cold, anyway. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Seventeen
It was called the WindingStair, with a charming facade painted an olive green and the wordsBook Shopon one window formed with what looked like cutout pages from a newspaper.
“I don’t come into town very much,” Eamonn said as he held the door open. “But when I do, I try to come here.”
“Howya,” the clerk said when we walked in. “Anything I can help you with, let me know.”
The shop was cozy, with curated shelves of books in various categories, including an entire display on Irish literature, another of beautiful special editions of public domain classics. There was a wine-colored wingback armchair that I could imagine a writer sitting in for an event, reading aloud from their latest work, even though the space was small. There was also an old typewriter on one of the tables next to stacks ofbooks, like it was part of a writer’s cluttered office. I touched a finger to one of the typewriter keys.
“You could still take a literature class just for fun,” I said to Eamonn, who I’d felt coming up behind me. “Do a seminar on, I don’t know,Ulysses. Although I’m realizing you never told me if you liked that book or not, so maybe it would be a bad choice.”
“It’s probably a perfect choice,” Eamonn said, skimming his hand over the stacks of books until he landed on a hardcover ofUlysses, which he flipped open to the first page. They sure did celebrate their homegrown writers here; it was really something. “I don’t know if I can say Ilikeit. It’s not what I’d pick up for a good time necessarily. But it rewards a close read, and I respect that about it. There’s so much in it, more than enough for a class—allusions to theOdysseyandHamlet, Irish history, Catholicism, a very Dublin sense of humor, it’s such amusicalbook if you can hear the dialogue read aloud the right way. The first time I read it I definitely thought, what the fuck is this book even talking about. I couldn’t keep track.”
“And yet you kept going.”
“It was the part where he wipes his dried snot on a rock.”
That surprised a laugh out of me. “What?”
“It’s toward the beginning here somewhere,” Eamonn said, flipping through the pages. “He’s on the beach, looking out over the water, thinking about various stuff—the writing is all stream of consciousness and distorted, it’s hard to follow, and then he just reaches up into his nose, extracts a crusty bit of snot, and wipes it on a rock.”
“Ew,” I said, but gently. At least it was out in nature, I supposed.
“It was such a human thing to do,” Eamonn said. “It made me think, let me hang with this book a bit longer, see what else it’s got up its sleeve.”
“Probably another booger,” I said.
“That’s what makes it so famous. Joyce works in mucus the way other writers might work in metaphors. Like you work in watercolors.”
“Please,” I said, laughing. “I’m begging you, stop. I guess now I have to read this book, huh?”
“Snot a bad idea.”
I swatted him in the stomach, and he gave a smilingoof. I’d done it more to touch him than anything else, even though it was only glancing contact, just the softness of his sweater against the back of my knuckles.
“At least I got you with that one,” he said. “You left me hanging on my Obama joke.”
I was surprised to hear him reference that, as if it was something he’d been thinking about. He seemed surprised by it, too, or maybe a little abashed. He closed the book and placed it back at the top of its stack, pushing the corners of the books together so they all lined up.
“I don’t think you need to read it if you don’t want to,” he said. “Life’s short, you should read whatever books you want. I only felt like it, and had the time.”
I liked watching him handle the books, the veins on the back of his hand, the way his long fingers could stretch arounda whole stack as he slid them into place. When he asked me a question, I completely blanked and had to get him to repeat it.
“What do you normally read,” Eamonn said, “when you take a book to a restaurant to eat by yourself?”
