The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
contact mostly because of my laziness—I forgot to respond to a letter, never
thought of picking up the telephone, and here it was almost a year since I had
heard from him.
I don’t know if I missed him personally as much as I missed the feeling of
a benevolent approver, something that had disappeared once I graduated and
found myself on my own, making decisions that actually mattered. And I
missed the city, too, its cozy strangeness and, compared to Lincoln, its liveliness.
As I looked up and down Roderick Street—the main student drag—
hundreds of site-specific stories popped into my head, and the stories’
ghosts became clearer to me than the people wandering around. After two
minutes of this, my enthusiasm for staying here poured out of me as if I had
been stabbed. Wherever I would go, I would be trailed by so much past, so
little present, and no future. I decided to get in my car and drive back to my
real life.
A bit more than an hour into Connecticut, I noticed the sign for the
Clougham turnoff up ahead and remembered the bar that Crowley mentioned.
It wasn’t even 2:00 p.m.; if I stopped for a single beer, I could still
make it back to the office with time to spare before close of business. Besides,
maybe Pühapäev had drinking buddies. Maybe he was the type who confided
in his bartender. Maybe I was the type who rationalized shamelessly to
justify a beer during working hours.
Clougham was one of those innumerable little one-road towns in western
Connecticut, one of an ever-dwindling number that had not yet become an
extension of New York’s Upper East Side. It had a two-pump gas station, a
white clapboard general store (instead of a Ye Olde General Store), and next
to it a combination post office and package store. When I first arrived in Lincoln,
I had spent my weekends exploring the surrounding area, which is how
I had discovered Clougham. In the past few months, though, I had stopped
exploring and started freelancing for a couple of midsize Connecticut papers
and for a magazine or two (mostly regional, historical, and garden-related).
Art had tossed me a few assignments that some editors had thrown to him,
saying I needed the clips more than he did. He also told me that if I ever
found another working journalist who handed well-paid freelance assignments
to a colleague just for the hell of it, he’d buy me my own magazine.
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