Dust Mites

Whatever unnatural tonal quality it is that causes car alarms to inspire violence within me also inhabited the librarian’s voice over the loudspeaker. “Attention library patrons. The library closes in 10 minutes, I repeeeeat, the li-ba-rary closes in 10 minutes. Collect your trash and your belongings, library patronnnns. We’re closing in 10 minutes.” If that woman were my mother, I would have double-Van Gogh-ed myself at an early age. Maybe the university hired a librarian with a nasal problem and a discontentment for existence for the sole purpose of annoying and depressing everyone out of the library. No one ever seemed as bothered as me though. Then again, no one was at the library as much as me.

I was a fixture of my college library, not to study, read or talk with other students; even though I did study and read a lot. I stayed until close every night for the sole purpose of avoiding my assigned roommate, Katie Clark. It’s as if God took everything that bothered me about a person, put all those characteristics in her, with some creative flourishes, and then unleashed her on me as punishment for something I’d done in a previous life. I must have been a serial killer or something. Katie viewed me, out of accessibility, as both her mother and therapist, to listen to her life’s catastrophes, all of which weren’t remotely catastrophic and all of which involved frat boys. If I ever talked about myself, I could get an average of ten words out before she’d interrupt me again with a barrage of her woes. Seriously, I often counted. It was a game I played with myself when she talked.

It was 1:50AM on a Saturday, and unfortunately, I had to leave the library. A janitor walked past me, with his coat on, glancing at me, as he always did, with a combination of pity and curiosity. Probably because I was there, every night, in the same spot, alone, and my resting face makes it look like I’m depressed, I’ve been told. There was really nothing to pity. I had the best spot in the library. It was on the third floor, in a corner behind a beautiful, towering bookcase containing old architecture and art books no one ever looked at. I had a comfortable, cushioned chair, a footrest, and a little window that only showed the sky. Most importantly, it was the only place you couldn’t hear other college kids “whispering,” playing “music,” and crunching potato chips constantly. They really can’t go an hour without snacking, grazing like stoned animals.

If I ever saw someone else sitting in my spot, I thought of them as squatters and hated them very much. But, it was pretty much an unspoken rule that it was my place and the usual cast of characters on the floor knew the correct order of things. I knew them and they knew me, not that any of us ever talked. We just kind of looked at each other sometimes, out of boredom. If we were feeling especially friendly, we’d give a toothless half-smile or a more intimate eyebrow raise to each other. There were only a few other sad sack regulars on the floor besides me. There were a few Chinese students who walked with an air of national superiority and left often to smoke their cigarettes outside. There was a Chemistry student who drew letters and numbers on a white board at all hours and cried a lot on the phone to her mom. There was a homeless woman who washed her knotty hair in the bathroom sink and a goth couple who always had heated arguments at a whisper. It was like watching a silent soap-opera with unkempt actors.

I began to shove all of my books and loose papers into my backpack when I got a text. My brief excitement was snuffed out instantly when I saw that it was my roommate, patient, and unwanted child: Katie. Her text read: I’m so sorry, but Jacob is going to stay over tonight!! Hope that’s okay! This meant I’d have to hear her and her newest frat guy have sex about three feet from my bed. I did hear one time. Oh, and how it turned me on… to hard drugs. She met him at a frat party and slept with him that night. Naturally, she’s in love with him, he wants nothing to do with her and she hasn’t realized it yet. She takes hours prettying herself up to send one photo to him on Snapchat and he takes hours to respond. But, she believes every excuse because he’s just ‘so ca-yute.’ Ah, romance…

Out of some strange spite against her, but in a way that was just harmful to myself, I decided I wouldn’t go back to the dorm at all. I thought about wandering the streets of Boston all night, reveling in my patheticness, and then getting to tell people that I wandered the streets of Boston all night. They’d look at me in disbelief and horror, which would make me feel all warm inside, like I was a vagabond or something. But then I figured I’d get bored a couple hours into living in that fantasy. I considered maybe reaching out to a ‘friend of mine,’ the only one that I had met so far, but I really didn’t feel like talking about my classes and my life or listening to her talk about her classes and her life. But then, at last, I thought: “what if I just sleep in one of the aisles in the library, maybe on the fifth floor? No one ever goes up there. If someone finds me, I can play innocent and say, ‘Oh, sorry! I fell asleep and didn’t realize the library had closed. Gosh, I’m so embarrassed!’” I even had a half-eaten sandwich to hold me over. I’d go up by the south staircase. I knew that the cameras were broken in there because a friend of Katie’s performed a sex act on a convenience store worker behind the stairs. I think ‘South Stairwell’ was even a sort of code word among sluts or something.

There was something so romantic about my idea that everything within me buzzed with nervous excitement and everything around me possessed the glow of adventure. I looked around at the library knowingly, as if the library itself was in on my scheme with me. I walked up the stairs, imagining I was both a secret agent and a lawless rebel.

On the fifth floor, the light that emanated from the stairwell behind me faded into grey between the narrow corridors of a dozen or so bookshelves. The shelves stretched into the distant dark. Between them, dust particles were suspended in the hazy light like stagnant snow. A heater hummed a low note somewhere. The room was somehow more alive than all of the other rooms with crowds of students. I walked down the rows of books, carefully, in a sort of reverential trance, thinking about how I was surrounded by the ghosts of dreams of people long dead. My eyes passed anthologies in which remarkable people imbued all of their passion into about types of lizards, ship design, Victorian children’s fashion, only for the internet to have rendered it all unnecessary and unwanted. The shelves held souls immortalized, only for dust to touch them more than hands ever will.

I made my way to the end of the room, the last shelf, labeled by a flimsy piece of paper with the letters: A-D. In the middle of the aisle, I took off my backpack, placed it sideways like a pillow and laid my coat down in front of it. I just sat there, in whatever new shade of feeling I inhabited, in the grey when you combine too many. The darkness reminded me of being a kid and the strange magic of being alone and scared. It was the same sort of dark as the forest when I went to camp, the local theater before a show; the allure of the shadows before suspense is dispelled, when you inhabit mystery and your mind creates wonders without you having to even try. I looked to the shelf in front of me for a random book to read. I never read random books anymore. My eyes caressed the spines, feeling like I was an explorer or philosopher, someone other than who I was.

My trance was interrupted suddenly by the sounds of someone’s feet, shuffling a few aisles over. The darkness was transformed at once by my fear. I laid down, reflexively, to hide my body below the lowest shelf. I could feel my heartbeat in places my heart’s never beat before.

Then the footsteps stopped. I held my breath and was still, aside from my heart. I imagined the nasally librarian popping out, taking me down a basement corridor, torturing me, causing blood to flow out of my ears with just the sheer sound of her voice. The shuffling picked up again. Carefully, I brought my head up just enough to see over the bottom row of books. A few aisles over, a shadowed figure hunched over something, occupied in some object on the floor. Then the person disappeared again behind a shelf. I felt my heartbeat in my fingers. The footsteps began again, getting louder and louder, closer and closer. I sat up to confront my fate.

“Who are you?” A hurried, scratchy voice said. Peeking out from behind the shelf was a very dirty, older woman with wild eyes and gaunt cheeks. It was the homeless woman I'd seen washing her hair in the third floor sink. Her hair was like one of those witch wigs you see at Halloween stores. She hunched over like a wounded animal, but her eyes were very much alert.

“I’m a student,” I suppose I’d said.

“Why are you here?” It sounded painful for her to speak. Saliva crackled in her voice like static.

“My roommate is having sex,” I smiled slightly, thinking maybe she’d find it funny. But I had the sense she hadn’t found anything funny in a long time.

“Food?”

“Food? Oh, yeah, I do. It’s half-eaten. Well, I guess, that’s okay...”

The idea activated her limbs; she began to bounce slightly, like a giddy child. Her hands brought themselves to her mouth, like she was envisioning eating the food and miming it.

I went to my bag, and noticed my hands were shaking. I could feel her right behind me. I could smell her right behind me. As I unzipped my bag, I remembered with a sinking feeling that I had left the sandwich on the third floor. I felt like I had a rabid animal behind me, ready to pounce.

“I’m sorry. I don’t have it.”

She grabbed my bag from me, pushed me away, and rummaged through. She smelled very bad, unlike anything I’d ever smelled. Whatever unique combination of ancient city gunk and bodily excretions all calcified to form whatever the smell was. Her body created originality in its horror. I tried not to breathe.

She threw the bag to the ground and remained still. I felt my heartbeat in my neck.

“It’s on the third floor, I think. But maybe a janitor threw it out. I don’t know. I’m sorry I shouldn’t have told you...”

She turned her face towards me. Some horrible thought slowly made its way over her features. She reached her arm out to me. Her cold fingers wrapped around the top of my arm like a steel trap.

“Wallet.” It was a command, not a question. Dried saliva and food framed her cracked lips.

“You want my wallet?” Why did I say that? Yes, she wants to know where I got my wallet from so she can buy one herself. What am I, stupid?

“Just— I need to get to my jacket. It’s in there. I’ll get it!” I stammered on, her arm around me, her face close. Her eyes previewed a world of horror that made me feel like a lost child, confronted with oblivion for the first time. It was a very bad darkness, one that shrouded terrible mysteries, not to be explored but avoided. Whatever it was that possessed her gaze, impressed upon me the idea that I’d never seen anything real before. She knew things that I couldn’t even try to understand.

She released her fingers from my arm and let me scurry to my jacket. I unearthed my wallet from my coat pocket and held it out for her. She yanked it from me and then she looked at me, as if resigned to an idea. That idea was taking my coat and my phone, as I stood there. And she knew I would just stand there.

With my belongings tucked under her arms, she shuffled away, fading into the dark she emerged from. Silence again. I wished I felt pity for her, but I only felt fear and disgust. I couldn’t tell if I was disgusted by her or by myself. The darkness of the fifth floor had changed. All I could think of was how sad it all was, the desperation of the woman, the books forgotten, the college kids who never talked to each other, and myself, alone at the library, every night, and why, really?

Without care of being seen by the cameras or anything, I floated down the five flights of stairs, thinking only of the woman’s eyes and whatever feeling, or lack of it, made me feel so horribly empty and naive.

“You need to go home,” a voice said. It was the librarian, Ms. Nasal herself, standing at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for me. I’d never seen her so close up. I’d never heard her so close up. Her lips were tight, her hair was tight, and her eyes were tired. She was in the process of putting on a bright patterned scarf.

“I fell asleep. I’m sorry.” I didn’t even care if it was believable.

“Uh huh. Did you not hear my announcement?”

“I guess I missed it.” I said. She looked at me deeply, and I felt emotion well up in my throat. I continued, “I figured someone should know. There’s this… homeless woman on the fifth floor. Maybe she needs help. She stole my things.”

“Yeah, she does that.” She wasn’t surprised at all.

“So you know about her? She just stays here?”

“Do you know what a beneficial insect is?”

“No.”

“Hm. Are you going to stay at the library past 2am again?”

“No.”

“Exactly.”

“So you’re not going to kick her out?”

“You don’t think I’ve tried? I’ve tried to get college students to collect all their belongings, to get out of the library by 2, to stop eating their snacks over the books, to stop ‘vaping,’ to stop playing on their phones. Does it work?” Her voice became faster and faster and more and more nasally.

“I guess not. I’m sorry.” I said. She regained composure. She zipped up her coat up to her chin as if in emphasis of a point.

“There’s a lost and found coat just over there. You should wear that at home.” She gestured towards the lost-and-found pile behind the concierge desk.

“Thank you.”

She looked at me, suddenly, with something resembling consideration,“I see you here a lot. Are you a reader?”

“I am. I’m an English major. But, mostly I just want to escape my roommate. She’s having sex in our dorm room right now with some guy who doesn’t even like her.”

She smiled slightly, her face suddenly becoming very youthful,“I’m escaping my husband,” she sighed.“Just don’t stay in the library past 2am.”

I nodded and she nodded in acceptance to my nod. I watched her walk out of the library, she was very small but her walk was determined.

The loudspeaker made her voice sound a lot worse than it was. It really wasn’t that bad.

When I got to the dorm, wearing the lost and found coat, Katie was awake and tearful. Her "suitor" wasn’t there. Heavy makeup was in the process of sliding down her face altogether, like a Sephora avalanche.

“Jacob didn’t come! I don’t know why he told me that he’s going to come over when he doesn’t. He texted me two hours and… four minutes ago - ‘I’ll be over later.’ Why would he say that if he didn’t mean it? Maybe his phone died. Maybe he had a family emergency. I hope! What do you think? But that was three hours ago! Why does he do this? I can’t understand it.”

“I’m sorry, Katie… A homeless woman who lives in the library stole my wallet, my coat and—”

She interrupted, impassioned,“I’m done with him! I’m totally done!”

I didn’t really mind, actually; I almost laughed. I got seventeen words in that time. Maybe she’s evolving.