The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
nals even though no other cars were on the road, headed south, away from
Lincoln.
it was too late, or too early, to go to sleep that night. I don’t mind
admitting that I still don’t sleep all that well. It’s getting better, though: most
things that grind can also mollify, and time is no exception.
Instead of sleeping, I showered, shaved, made and drank a pot of coffee—
my pot held not quite two full cups: like everything else in my apartment, it
was made for one and only one—and at seven-fifteen headed to work.
I felt like someone had hollowed me out and stuffed me full of cotton, like
I was lugging around deadweight, and the deadweight was me. This feeling
of trying to dance after the music has stopped, of realizing you’ve taken a
dead-end turn in a maze, of having outstayed your welcome, strikes everyone,
I imagine, everyone except the perpetually mobile and those with an
unerring sense of timing. It hit me in my last year of high school, again in my
last year of college, and now, like then, it was time to go. When it strikes, you
can either heed it and move or wait for it to pass and spend the rest of your
life sublimating the feeling of howling loss into low-level malaise. I chose
option one.
“there he is,” said Art, not even looking up as I walked into the
newsroom.
“What are you doing here so early?” I asked.
“Told you before, you get old, you don’t sleep so well.”
I remember Art best as I saw him that morning: leaning back in his chair
with his feet on the desk, a human hammock, flipping through the Times with
a thermos of coffee open and steaming on his desk and a burning cigarette in
the corner of his mouth.
With his right foot, he pushed an envelope across his desk toward me.
“Found it this morning under the door. Figured I’d wait to ask how the
never-ending obit’s going until after you read it.”
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