The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
From Thanksgiving until he left for England, Austell worked himself into a
babbling frenzy of excitement about his upcoming trip. His goal for each
visit was to re-create as precisely as possible the experience of the previous
year. Twelve months smoothed aberrations into traditions; if one year the
pub where they always went to dinner on December 27 was closed, then
the following year the new pub became a part of the family itinerary and the
old one was erased. His excitement, which began as pompously boyish—
“Nothing like an English Christmas, you know, though that part of the
country hasn’t seen snow in yonks, of course. All the same, Mum (that’s what
I call Laura’s mother) lays out a posh spread every year. ...”—dissolved after
several days into a jumble of references to mince pies, Christmas crackers,
and roast goose on the sideboard. Whether this was due to Austell’s increasing
inhabitance in his own Dylanesque reverie or his gradual passing into
background noise for the rest of us remains an open question.
He resembled a human pinwheel: tall and thin, with a perpetually surprised
expression, a loping, reeling gait, and a shock of clumpily wild red
hair. This particular morning he sat in front of a long window; when I walked
in the office door, his hair jumped to attention in the cross breeze, and he
turned his long scarecrow face with its large, round tortoiseshell glasses toward
me. “Ahoy there, young scribe! Invigorating morning, isn’t it, absolutely
invigorating. The trout running, hunting season’s on, there are chanterelles
for whoever can find them in the woods. Just explain to me exactly why anyone
would ever wish to live anywhere other than western Connecticut.” I
actually was about to throw caution to the wind and answer when he turned
away from me to open the window, take a deep, chest-puffing breath of
freezing-cold air, and slam the window shut. That habit of his grew more trying
over the course of the winter. “You’re not from New England, right?”
Answering Austell’s questions was like walking between huge, teetering
stacks of books: the slightest misstep and he’d bury you beneath cascading
mounds of words. I settled for direct, to the point, especially since he’d asked
me this question at least a dozen times before. “No, I grew up in Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn, eh? Big Apple and the Dodgers and all that. Why there?”
“My father worked in Manhattan and my mother grew up in Brooklyn.
Different part, though.”
22