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By Root 647 0

the bottom floors were a wall of light—slashes of yellow, orange, and blue—a record shop, an organic pizza joint, a beer garden and Chinese takeout, an underground dance club called Rathskeller’s, an Irish pub and Italian eatery, its doors and windows open, round tables set up with candles burning in glass lanterns, Italian stringed instruments colliding with the bass thump of the dance club, the perpetual river of cars and their engines, the talk and drunken yelps and falling and rising laughter of hundreds of college kids back in town just before Labor Day. The girls were in shorts or skirts and spaghetti-strap tops, their hair pulled up or cut short or flapping down their backs as they walked or ran across the square from one buzzing spot to another. Many of the boys were in shorts and sandals and the short-sleeve polo shirts they were all wearing now, blue or pink, the collars pulled up, this street gang of investment bankers’ kids. There were musicians playing guitars and fiddles and saxophones. In the recessed doorway of a dry cleaning shop, a black kid with drumsticks was tapping out a rhythm on an upside-down joint compound bucket, a coffee can in front of him overflowing with dollar bills. Five punk rockers stood under a streetlamp in tight black leathers and chains. The sides of their heads were shaved clean, and their Mohawks rose from the tops of their skulls red and purple and white, these outfits they could barely move in, this hair that was their art.

I smelled pot smoke, gum on concrete, and the warm granite of curbstones. Up in the hills, the ruling class was putting their white kids to bed, and all the world was doing what all the world did, taking care of their own desires and needs, and right now I needed air and quiet. I walked by a bearded man wedged into a sandwich board. He said something to me and held out a pamphlet, a bright portrait of Jesus Christ in robes looking mournfully at the viewer. I shook my head and stepped past him into a well-lit bookstore.

The air was cool in here, the carpet absorbing my footsteps. Something classical was playing, something with violins that sounded sweetly melancholic, like a sick lover has finally died and the one left behind is on the cusp of knowing she’s relieved.

Older people browsed from aisle to aisle, and I did too. All these books. Thousands and thousands of them. On everything. You could live a dozen long lives just reading what’s in this one store and still not be finished. Meanwhile, more were being written. Every day men and women across the earth were stealing time to find a quiet place to write. And some had to hide what they wrote. They could be shoved into a cell or put up against a wall and shot for these words coming out of them. And I’d written that morning. Sat at the desk in the borrowed room of Pop’s small campus house. I’d been imagining the life of a girl who did not love her family the way she thought she should. Who would read this? And why? What good was this doing for anyone but me, the feeling it gave me every time, that somehow by escaping to the dream on the page I became more fully here.

So what.

I moved away from books with words in them to books of photographs. They were big and glossy and the largest ones were laid out on a table. On the cover of one was the black-and-white portrait of a bodybuilder standing in the same pose as the statue of David, except this man had so much more muscle, his skin oiled and shining. He’d probably spent his entire adult life achieving that. I thumbed through the pages, saw pictures of massively muscled men whose names I still knew. I had worked so hard to be one of them so no one would even think of trying to hurt me or anyone I loved.

I closed the book and slid it back into place. I hadn’t been in a fight since Devin Wallace. I picked up the next book without really looking at the cover, opened it to the images of famous war photographers, some in color, others in black and white, all of human bodies shot or stabbed or burned or blown-up. The first one I had seen in a magazine on our kitchen