Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [53]
Fit them back together
And take the pain away
But I don’t have the iron
And I don’t have the steel
To wrap around your broken heart
And teach it how to heal
Somewhere in the fire
Somewhere in the pain
I’d find the magic that I need
To make you whole again
I’d make the iron band so strong
I’d make it gleam so bright
I’d fix the things I’ve broken
I’d turn my wrongs to right
But I don’t have the iron
And I don’t have the steel
To wrap around your broken heart
Wish I could make it heal
Wish I could make it heal”
I finish. My eyes are closed. I’m braced. Against what I’m feeling. Against what he’s thinking. Maybe he doesn’t like the song anymore. Maybe he didn’t like my voice. I wait for him to say something, anything, hating that it matters to me. Hating that for some reason I suddenly seem to care what he thinks.
But he doesn’t say anything.
“Virgil?” I say. “Hey, Virgil?”
I press the phone closer to my ear, thinking maybe the connection’s gone bad, and then I hear it—the sound of him breathing. He’s out.
I’m not sure how to feel about this. Embarrassed? Pissed off? I mean, I just sang him a song I wrote myself, a song that’s really important to me, and he fell asleep.
I’m about to hang up, but the sound of his breath, so steady and peaceful, stops me. I close my eyes and listen even though I’m not sure I should. And I realize I’m not angry. Worse yet, I realize I’d sing to him all day long if he wanted me to.
I imagine his hands as I listen—one still holding his phone. One maybe resting on his chest. I imagine his face, beautiful and still, and I wish I could see it. I wish I could touch his cheek with the back of my hand. Touch my fingers to his lips.
Who knew that listening to a guy sleep could be so much deeper than sleeping with a guy.
I listen for another few minutes, and then I whisper into the phone, “Hey there, Virgil … good night.”
28
I was confused at first. I didn’t know the drill. But I’ve got it figured out now.
My job, here at the Abelard Library, is to get information. And Yves Bonnard’s job is to stop me. Yves G. Bonnard, head archivist, aka the Great and Powerful Oz, aka the Grand Inquisitor, aka the Antichrist.
“What is your name?” Yves Bonnard asked me, only moments ago, his pen poised over my call slip.
“I am Arthur, King of the Britons,” I said. I thought it was funny. I thought it might make him smile and cut me a break. I thought he might even chuckle and say, “What is your quest? What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
But no. Yves Bonnard does not smile. He does not laugh. And he does not cut me a break.
“What are you searching for?” he asks.
“I seek the Holy Grail,” I say. Because I have a problem with authority. That, and I’m an idiot.
“Very well,” he says. Then he hands my call slip back to me and tells me to come back when I’ve filled it out properly.
“But I’ve filled it out two times already!” I protest.
“Then perhaps you will do it correctly the third time,” Yves Bonnard says. “The instructions are clearly posted on the wall above the card catalog.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve read them ten times,” I tell him, but he’s already talking to the woman behind me.
I’d waited in line for thirty minutes for my turn to hand over my call slips, watch Yves Bonnard put them in a little vacuum tube, and send them down to the bowels of the archives, where blinky-eyed molemen in blue lab coats fetch what’s written on them and bring it up on metal carts. Judging from the number of people in front of me, I will now be waiting another thirty minutes.
Yves Bonnard is really pissing me off. I got here at eleven o’clock and he made me spend the next two hours running all over Paris. He told me I could not possibly be let loose on the archives without an archives pass, and to get an archives pass I would have to produce proper ID. I showed him my Brooklyn Public Library card, but that didn’t cut it. So back I went, all the way to G’s, to get my passport. Then back to the archives. Then back out again to a photo shop to get pictures taken for