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“Armpits?”
Henry took a deep breath and let it out.
“Armpits,” he said.
I nodded. “You know what to do.”
“I hear the meter running,” said Henry.
From the corners of my eyes, I saw him walking away, then stop and throw his hand up.
Shrank flinched. So did I. Henry’s cane sailed through the air to land with a sharp clatter on the planks.
“You might need that,” said Henry.
Shrank and I stood staring at the weapons on the pier.
The sound of the taxi driving off jerked me forward. I grabbed the cane and held it to my chest, as if it might really work against knives or guns.
Shrank looked at the vanishing lights of the taxi, far off.
“What in hell was that all about?” he said.
Behind him, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Spengler and Kafka all leaned on their mad elbows, sank in their dusts, and whispered, yes, what was that all about?
“Wait’ll I get my shoes.” He vanished.
“Don’t get anything else,” I cried.
That made him laugh a choking laugh.
“What would I get?” he called, unseen, rummaging around. In the door he showed me a shoe in each hand. “No guns. No knives.” He shoved them on, but didn’t lace them.
I couldn’t believe what happened next. The clouds, over Venice, decided to pull back, revealing a full moon.
Both of us looked up at it, trying to decide if it was bad or good, and for which of us?
Shrank’s gaze wandered to the shoreline and alone the pier.
“He wept like anything to see such quantities of sand,” he said. Then hearing himself he snorted softly. “Come oysters, said the carpenter, and took them close in hand. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the golden strand.”
He began to walk. I stayed. “Aren’t you going to lock your door?”
Shrank gave the merest nodding glance over his shoulder at the books clustered like vultures with their black feathers and dusty golden stares, waiting on shelves for the touch that gave life. In invisible choirs, they sang forth wild tunes I should have heard long days ago. My eye ran and reran the stacks.
My God, why hadn’t I truly seen?
That dreadful escarpment inhabited by dooms, that lineup of failures, that literary Apocalypse of wars, squalors, diseases, pestilences, depressions, that downfall of nightmares, that pit of deliriums and mazes from which mad mice and insane rats never found light or made exit. That police lineup of degenerates and epileptics dancing the rims of shelved library cliffs with teams replacing teams of nausea and revulsion waiting in the higher darkness.
Single authors, single books—fine. A Poe here or a Sade there is a spice. But this was no library, it was an abattoir, a dungeon, a tower where ten dozen men in iron masks were penned, silently raving, forever.
Why hadn’t I seriousl
y seen and known?
Because Rumpelstiltskin was in charge.
Staring at Shrank even now I thought, at any moment he’ll grab his foot and rip himself straight up in half and fall in two pieces!
