Ex Libris Read online

  University grief counselors appeared just as they had on 9/11. The day of the suicide was, in fact, September 11, 2003. We mulled this over, stood in clusters around our information desks, and gathered in corners of the atrium. I made sure Marie Rose got to see the counselors, but I didn’t go to them myself.

  The one who died, as we learned more about him, as a photo was found in the computer system, turned out to have been someone I half remembered, a silent guy who sometimes used the computers on my floor. Just before the reference desks shut down for the evening, a big, goofy kid who was a regular in this part of the library rushed in and asked, “Did anyone see my backpack?”

  When I asked what was in it, he said, “My notebooks, a calculus text. And books for a twentieth century American poetry class I’m taking.” I told him the police had it.

  The suicide’s personal effects, when we found them at closing time, were in a basement study area. They were piled neatly and clearly identifiable as his, as if he was making things easier for us before he went up to the tenth floor and jumped.

  Then work was over and there was nothing more to be done. Usually, when I left for the day, I left work behind. That evening walking through the atrium I felt like threads still connected me to the building.

  I was supposed to attend a friend’s reading in the East Village, but I didn’t go. I went home and first sat down, then lay down, aware that I was in a kind of minor shock from the blood and the body.

  Sometime later that marble floor came up and hit me in the face with a dull smack and I jerked myself awake in my bed. It was after nine o’clock, too early and too late at the same time.

  My last lover and I had broken up the year before. I thought of calling an old friend then thought of something better. I grabbed my bag and got to the university gym just before 10:00 p.m. in the very heart of the Big Night Hours.

  The place is often half deserted at that time on Fridays. Passing through the lobby I could look down on a few swimmers doing laps in the pool. A couple of three-on-three basketball games were almost lost on the vast gym floor. From somewhere in the distance I heard a racquetball ricochet and, for a moment, I almost expected to see the King leaning against a wall taking everything in with a little smile on his face.

  The spell was broken in the locker room. Students were pulling on their clothes. Their talk was all chatter about missed shots, a girl someone knew from high school and just met again today, an accounting exam, the frat party on Saturday night.

  These straight kids are very modest. They rarely take off their garish, shapeless boxer shorts and wrap towels around themselves before they do. Mostly they go back to their rooms to shower.

  Some of my friends complain that these boys are puritanical. I think they’re just polite and trying to ignore certain activity taking place around them. At times I feel like I’m part of an alternate world, semi-invisible but occupying the same space.

  In this other world some of us are older and some are still students. It is a world of fleeting encounters in stairwells or steaming shower rooms, appointments to meet again outside.

  Here men walk to the showers wearing nothing but the towels around their necks, whistle Sondheim, check each other out. In this other world when one catches a glimpse of a bare ass, one turns casually to see more, meets a gaze with eyes wide open.

  I was looking for some other guys who had been around for a while. I found Ben and walked the treadmill next to his. Kenny was there too. The last time I’d noticed, they were an item. Now, I seemed it wasn’t so.

  Just after eleven, we were drying off from the shower. Ben is about my age, a tenured professor in the School of the Arts. Kenneth is much younger, a poet, working on a doctorate and teaching freshman composition.

  In the distance someone yelled, “Closing time.”

  “Today on the phone, a friend mentioned the King of the Big Night Hours,” I said.

  “Oh my,” said Ben. “Your friend must be so old. I barely remember the King.”

  “Who?” Kenneth asked.

  “Once upon a time when this was a sweeter scene and everyone was hot and available, there was this incredible guy,” I said.

  “Some security guard who managed to get himself assigned here on the evening shift,” Ben said in a bored tone. He pulled on white briefs and black trousers, ducked his shaven head into a Hermes sweater. “He was the one who cleared out the men’s locker rooms and the showers at closing time and he did it slowly and very . . . selectively. He had this smug little smile like this was his game preserve.”

  It bothered me that Ben was so dismissive. I remembered the King holding me and how comforting he was.

  “You called him the King of the Big Night Hours,” Kenneth said. Why?”

  “It was his joke. One to four were the wee small hours in Sinatra territory. Around here, when the King ran things, nine to twelve were the big night hours.” As I said this, I realized that nothing about this scene now evoked the King.

  Just then a youngish man, a Russian experimental film director with piercing eyes and several days’ worth of facial stubble glanced our way.

  Ben who lives right around the corner said, “Excuse me, I see my ride.” He stepped into Gucci loafers and followed the Russian.

  Kenneth looked a little lost but not surprised. “I heard what happened in the library today,” he said. “I taught the kid who jumped.”

  We sat for some time in an all-night coffeehouse on MacDougal Street. Two years before Kenneth had taught the suicide freshman English. He said the boy was straight, a little withdrawn, and quite smart.

  “I suppose I should have been able to spot something,” he said.

  “His friends, people who saw him earlier this afternoon, had no idea,” I said. But I was getting tired of being reassuring. I wanted someone to try to make me feel better. When I got home, the caffeine meant I couldn’t sleep much. But considering my dreams, it was also a bit of a plus.

  Saturday was a work day for me and I was mildly stupefied as I crossed the atrium the next morning. The whole floor had been cleaned. I couldn’t pick out the exact spot where the kid had landed.

  The place was quite empty. The students were staying away. Various administrators were on hand to greet the staff as we arrived and ask us if we were okay. I told them Hector was very upset about having to mop up the blood and that they needed to be nice to him.

  When I got up to the ninth floor, I went over to the balcony and looked down. Great long windows cover the front side of the building. The light that morning was soft. The patterned floor stayed where it was.

  I remembered an old European woman, a Jungian psychiatrist whom I’d gone to back even before I started working for the university. When I talked about suicide, which I sometimes did back then, she said, “My dear, there’s no future in it.”

  When the library was being built in the early seventies, the university was still poor. Construction went on for years: funding problems interfered; the quarry that provided the sandstone exterior went bankrupt and had to be purchased by the university.

  I could remember being sent over to the building to measure out spaces for offices. I was young and adrift, one of those bad companions parents warned their kids about. Kind of expendable.

  In the building I wore a hardhat. The stairs weren’t finished; the passenger elevators hadn’t been installed. Work elevators open on all four sides, rose and descended in the atrium, carried me up to balconies without railings where I’d hop off.

  The building had no electricity. Sunlight came through the long windows, turned silver in the brass and marble atrium. Once I came into the building when a broken pipe on the sixth floor had created a sheet of water that poured down like a miniature Niagara Falls. The construction workers paused to admire the sight.

  When the place first opened, I gave tours. Most of it was by rote: “The pattern on the ten thousand square foot floor is based on the design of the floor of a Renaissance church.”

 
; More often than not, when we were up on one of the top floors looking down, someone would ask if there had been any suicides. And I would say no and there had been no reported attempts. I’d point out the bronze horizontal railings all along the balconies. I’d mention the security guards on patrol on the upper floors and the fact that in the week, the month, the semester, the year since we had opened, there had been no trouble.

  I wouldn’t mention the university employees who were unable to work on the upper floors when we moved into the building. There were people who had vertigo each time they got off the elevators. They had to sidle along near the walls, careful not to look over the edge and see how the glass and brass interior swept down to the marble floor. Some got used to it. Some were unable to continue in their old jobs.

  Among the tour groups, some thought the geometric marble patterns made the floor appear to come toward them. Others thought it seemed to retreat as they stared. I would retell the university approved legend of how the geometric patterns were intended to appear like spikes and pyramids and how this was supposed to dissuade anyone from wanting to jump.

  I would not mention the campus folk tale, the one in which those same shapes would draw you in if you looked at them too long.

  Giving tours was a task they could find for a long-haired young man with no academic background and a bad attendance record. It was known that I lead a tumultuous private life and packed a switchblade. I was granted many second chances.

  Around me, things were changing. The dozens of little libraries and departments stuck in various spots around the campus had been consolidated into the main building when it opened. All of us who had worked in those small and idiosyncratic situations had to find new places for ourselves in this huge building.

  After a false start or two I got my life into some kind of order and was sent up to the science library on the ninth floor. The staff was a librarian who stayed in her office, and me out at the information desk. Thirty years later the department had grown and I had an office, but my job was much the same.

  By then I was a kind of anomaly, a clerical who had written books which were in the collection, someone who was said to have institutional memory. One use they had found for me over the years was as the token non-professional, the union member at the table of faculty and administrators.

  The week after the suicide there were email memos reminding us of the grief counseling services the university offered and announcing the formation of various committees. I didn’t go for counseling, but I was appointed to a panel examining what the library could do to improve student life.

  On the committee were a serials cataloger and a programmer, an assistant administrator, a brand new paraprofessional from electronic resources, and a woman from the personnel office. We sat around and conjectured about student alienation and loneliness. I think I was the only one in the room who actually dealt with the patrons. I had even spoken to the one who killed himself, though I never guessed his intent.

  A week or two after the suicide, Marie Rose came to see us at the reference desk. Marie Rose’s last name was Italian. She was a pleasant young lady who told us how the Saturday after the suicide she had to go to the wedding of a cousin in New Jersey and be happy and cheerful when all the while she was seeing the guy hit the floor. She thanked us and said she thought she was okay now.

  Exactly four weeks after the suicide, I was on my way back from lunch when I met library staff and patrons walking away from the building quickly, looking straight ahead, never glancing back. They told me someone else had jumped a few minutes before.

  This time it went almost by rote, like everyone knew their part. The EMS and police were already rolling him through the front door on a gurney when I arrived. His face, what I could see of it behind the oxygen mask, had a dark flush like the skin was full of blood.

  He, too, had jumped from the tenth floor. Just as with the first suicide, he was still alive when they took him out and died in the emergency room.

  This time there was very little blood. And this time Hector’s supervisor came along and helped him clean it up. Then the dean thanked them. An etiquette was being worked out.

  Later in the day I saw the jumper’s picture and stared at the face. He was very young. He had only been at the university for a few weeks and I doubted we’d met. But he looked like dozens of other students past and present whom I had known.

  That night, the kid fell past me in my dreams, looked up with large doomed eyes as I stared over the balcony and he fell onto the marble patterns.

  Saturday I went to a grief counseling group session held right in the library. Everyone said where they were and what they saw when the boy jumped. A very serious young woman from the Legal Council Office on the eleventh floor spoke in tears about hearing him scream as he fell. I told about my dreams of the floor coming up to smash him. The therapist led us in breathing exercises, tried to get us to let go of memories and images like the young woman’s and mine.

  The next week at the committee meeting, we read reports and safety protocols for suicide prevention at large universities around the country. It seemed to us that each jumper marked a failure on the part of our community.

  Privately though, I began to wonder about the building itself. The architect, an American, had been a Nazi sympathizer and had lived in Germany in the thirties. Speaking about his past at the time the library opened, he said he had been young and foolish and had been fascinated by the uniforms.

  The benefactor who had donated millions for the construction of the library bearing his name was a pharmaceutical tycoon, a self-made man. He had helped Nixon into the White House. The president himself was supposed to dedicate the building. But by the time of the official opening, he faced impeachment and was not making public appearances.

  Many years later, one of the benefactor’s granddaughters picketed in front of the library claiming he had molested her. Back and forth in all weather she went, carrying a sign. It was something everyone got used to. Then she was gone. Some said he had settled money on her, others that she had been hospitalized.

  Recollecting things like these made it easy to spin stories of a building that killed kids. But the unease fueling my dreams involved personal and more elusive memories, ones on which I wasn’t willing to dwell.

  The students certainly stayed away as if they knew the place was accursed. It was half deserted in the middle of the day. Staff working the reference and circulation desks, hauling book trucks in the stacks, editing the computer records, cataloguing books, all listened for the screams and the muffled thump.

  All the available security guards were in the building. They patrolled the upper floors, stood on the flying staircases warned students away from the rails and discouraged anyone from hanging around on the balconies.

  Some of them were normally on duty in other parts of the university and I’d not seen them before. Others I’d gotten to know over the years. Guard Robins was up on my floor one day and I found a chance to talk to him.

  He had been in the army and in hotel security in Jamaica. His youngest kids had worked on my floor as shelvers when they were in high school some years before and I had liked them a lot.

  “Lots of overtime, but it all goes in taxes,” said Robins. “I will not die rich, I am saddened to say.”

  Robins and the King of the Big Night Hours had been friendly. I’d seen them talking long ago.

  He was older and liked a bit of formality so I still addressed him as we’d been told to do when I first started work.

  “Guard Robins you knew someone from a while back. Fortnum was his name.”

  Campus Security in its own small way is a police unit and as such is closed and secretive. There was a distance between us now that I’d asked this. “Charles Fortnum?”

  “Yes. Someone was asking what happened to him.”

  “We came from the same town in Jamaica, Fortnum and I. He was younger and I didn’t much know him there. But his mother knew my family and when he
came here, they asked me to recommend him for a job.

  “When he got sick, he went home to his mother. My old aunt was a nurse and she told me when Fortnum died. It must be fifteen or twenty years ago.”

  So now I knew what had happened to the King and it wasn’t unexpected. He was very much a part of my reaction to the young jumpers. But I was poking around the periphery of my memories, reluctant to think about the two of us and what had brought us close.

  Something in my expression made Robins add, “Unless it’s in my job, I do not meddle in what others do.”

  In the days after the second death, men and women in suits and with blueprints stood in the atrium and on the upper floors and talked to men in work clothes. Then it was announced that tall, clear plastic baffles were going to be put up on all the balconies and stairs. No one would ever again have access to railings.

  While this work was happening, all the balconies were closed except for seven. The elevators operated by the guards went directly there. Patrons would then be escorted into the stacks by staff. From there they could go to the cement fire stairs buried inside the walls of the building and get to whatever floors they wanted.

  The first Saturday this construction was underway, I sat almost alone in the science reference center. The doors out to the balconies were all locked. Muffled drilling and workers’ shouts could be heard from the atrium. An occasional student would climb the fire stairs and emerge onto my floor.

  Marie Rose was one. She made her way upstairs to tell me, “I wanted to say goodbye. I’m not coming into this place ever again. My friend Julie has agreed to come here and take out any books I need. I’m transferring out next semester.”

  It seemed to me Marie Rose might well have been one who had looked down from these balconies and thought of death.

  What I said, though, was, “I’d be sorry to see you leave.” And I realized how bound I was to this place and how it seemed that when I was gone nothing would remain but one or two people asking, “What happened to the white-haired guy who used to sit at this desk?”