The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
The bedroom apparently had been caught in a storm of old man’s
clothes: variations on the themes of “drab” and “shapeless” were strewn several
inches deep across the bed and floor. The dresser drawers had been
pulled out and overturned; the mattress lay propped against the wall, and
someone had taken a razor blade to the bed frame: strips of fabric hung from
it in every direction, like hair from a drowned head. Joe moved some clothes
around with his toe; I picked up an ash-stained brown sweater, and Joe
immediately told me to put it down. “Shouldn’t do that. Jeez, I should have
thought . . .” His sentence trailed off in an exasperated sigh.
“What? What’s wrong? What did I do?”
Joe raised his hands and spread his fingers like he had just counted to ten:
he wore thin latex gloves. “You’ve been contaminating a crime scene.
Should’ve given you these before.”
I dropped the sweater as though it were electrified. “So what do we do?”
Jokes about picking up the soap in the shower started whirring and raining
inside my head.
Joe gave a twisted-lip grin and raised his eyebrows. “Hope, I guess. Look,
don’t go worrying about anything now, all right? You did what you did—now
let’s just look around a little more and leave.” He reached into his jacket
pocket and tossed me a similar pair of gloves, which I quickly put on.
I still wasn’t moving. I couldn’t go to jail.
“Hey!” barked Joe. “You hear me? It’s late, I want to go home, I shouldn’t
even be here. Quit standing there. You don’t want to help, fine. Just sit there
on that bench, out of the way.”
I walked over to the piano bench and sat down while Joe walked slowly
around the living room, which looked exactly as it did when I first saw it. He
lifted up a couple of plates and peered at their undersides; he ran his finger
along bookshelves, occasionally flipping through a book and releasing a
cloud of dust into the stagnant air; he riffled through some papers on the low
table and pronounced them “history stuff, stuff Abe would understand a lot
better than I would.”
Finally he slumped heavily onto the couch. He puffed out his cheeks and
exhaled, allowing fatigue to drag his facial features downward and make him
look slightly melted. He sat absolutely still. It was the first time I had ever
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