The Compactus

The Compactus

I remember very well where I was on the morning of December 15th. Yes, I was working in the library. No, I wasn’t in the special collections, not that day, anyway. On that morning, I was tired. I had stayed up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning revising my thesis. I knew from the schedule that Professor Fortunato - yes, Betros Fortunato was my advisor - had been scheduled that day to use the special collections reading room. Did I know he was a regular? No, I wouldn’t have said he was regular, but I would have said that I knew he reserved the room frequently.

But I did know that he wasn’t overly impressed by my own scholarly interests or the direction of my thesis. He didn’t say so directly. Once in class, he derided any and all attempts to discern hidden meanings in Shakespeare as fodder for fatuous minds, not an object of serious literary critique. When reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his tone shifted as his intonation lingered over the “rude mechanicals” and let his gaze rest in my direction. A delay in anything he requested through inter library loan prompted comments about the disparity in dedication between professors and staff, even if I had nothing to do with the order. He once also opined that women with children shouldn’t consider pursuing doctorates because it was a distraction - but granted, that may not have been a barb at me personally.

Really, I didn’t hate him, and his thinly veiled insults didn’t bother me. As long as he was equal parts fair and snide, then I was content to bear it all as a necessary evil. I was hardly unique in that. No one among the staff, students, or faculty thought of him in friendly terms, but as the department only had so many Shakespearians for each doctoral candidate, I thought of my mentorship to him as simple bad luck.

It wasn’t until several years into pursuing my degree that he became an actual threat to me. I was reshelving returned books, working my way through American to British fiction when I overheard him. “You don’t need to be so modest, Keaton,” he said. “Your last publication was a big deal. I think that academia needs more of conversation about the intersection between Shakespeare and Montaigne, especially through a Francophonic, bilingual lens. You don’t need to feel guilty about a little less funding to go around. It’s always been a selective, discriminatory market, and some of your cohort are better off leaving with a shorter, terminal degree than they would be staying on to finish a degree that would ultimately get them nowhere.”

“No, you don’t need to do anything now. I’ll make my decisions for allocating funds over the winter break. There’s no rush, and besides - the bad news will be more easily digested after the holidays, wouldn’t it?”

I pulled the cart back, thankful that the carpet muffled the noise of the wheels or my footsteps. I hid in an alcove until I thought they were either gone or wouldn’t think I had overheard anything. Insults were one thing, but the risk that I could be asked to leave with only an M.A. without having the chance to bring my thesis to fruition was too much. I knew the grim prospects for ever gaining a tenured position, but I was more fearful of leaving. I’d never get a chance for a job teaching college without the doctorate in the first place, and even the idea of a post-doc was more appealing than leaving the life of mind. I knew all too well who Fortunato had in mind.

Working in the library was a natural place for me, but it still broadened my horizons beyond decimal systems and caravels. The university was in a perpetual state of cost reduction, and the perk about asking the student workers to do more with less was that the student workers got to wear a lot of different hats. My library job opened the door to a rogue’s gallery of odd jobs. I spent one summer on the paint crew, another working in the adjacent cafe, another administering a research database, and even had to try my hand at amateur electrical engineering.

Long ago, the university leadership had thought they were investing in the future when they authorized a compactus for the library basement. The shelves, set on electrical tracks, could expand or contract based two controls set either side panel. Having an ambitious vision for the school, the presiding president at the time thought this was an effective way to double the library’s holdings, and if he built it then the prestigious volumes and facsimiles would flow in. Those never materialized, and the mobile shelves were left derelict as the years dragged on. The controllers grew less and less responsive, but the electrical track itself was still in excellent shape.

Fortunato was the only hold-out from the compactus’s initial roll-out. His enthusiasm outlasted the president who introduced it and a few more as well, and it was the also an object of his exercises in tenured privilege. He filled as much of its shelves as he could with rare books - they weren’t valuable monetarily, certainly less than the cost of the shelves, but he held them in high regard. He would separate them like Moses at the Red Sea, then stroll down the aisle, holding out his hand to let is brush along the spines of cloth or leather, then pluck them and carry them to read in one of the winged armchairs of the special collections room, which he made a point of reserving. He was known to monopolize the special collections room, which raised the hackles of faculty in all departments. Well-appointed with dark oak, heavy curtains, and William Morris wallpaper, it was the one room on all campus that conjured a sense of cloistered academia. Like something from an Oxford postcard.

As an aside, if you really cared about books, then you would store them flat horizontally, to take pressure off the spine. And you would wear cotton gloves to prevent any damage, however slight, the oils in your fingers might unintentionally wreak. But I digress.

The casings for the panel controllers could be displaced with relative ease - you could do so with a pocketknife, and flat-head screwdriver, even your fingernails if they were long enough. They had an old, 60s aesthetic, and underneath the wiring had fared no better. If you pulled one just right, you could open the circuit just enough to produce some leakage, such that some electrical current from previous command would carry over to the next adjacent shelf. The effect would be to mimic a command to open that next aisle by collapsing the one currently open. I took every opportunity I could to run errands down in the basement, playing with each panel to make sure that the wire was just loose enough, the current just sufficient, to send such a signal in just enough time to allow a lugubrious stroll to the middle of the isle. As fat as he was fatuous, Fortunato did not look like he could give an agile sprint on demand.

I set the wires on the last day before the winter break.

I arranged to work with painting crew over those weeks. Given how I’d worn on my sleeve how happy I was with the work, this was hardly questioned.

At night, I went back home, and read, reread, and read again John Hersey’s Hiroshima, especially the end of that first chapter: “There, in the tin factory, at the start of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.”

I didn’t begin to regret anything until I began to fret that I could have misjudged his habits or how infrequently the compactus was actually used. I had never seen anyone down there before, had overheard other librarians call it Betros’s personal storage, but was I really certain enough? Part of the allure of this was that there were no cameras and no logs, not the way there was a reservation system for special collections. I’d based my plan on cross-referencing the catalogue of what was kept there against check-out records at the main desk, but what if someone took volumes out to read without leaving the library, the same way Betros did?

I couldn’t bring myself to go back to library before returning for work, but I also braced myself, either for news of Betros Fortunato or someone else I’d inadvertently injured. Three weeks into January and I still heard nothing. That eased some of my trepidation about hurting someone less deserving, but only heightened my sense of foreboding around Fortunato himself. I kept on my schedule, went to his office to wait for him never to appear, and wrote e-mails about potential chapters in dissertations which I knew would never be answered.

It was February before someone finally reported him missing, but unless you were highly attenuated to gownie gossip you would never have known. There was no big, invasive police investigation, no squadrons of sharply dressed detectives roving around the library stacks looking for the delinquent academic. There was no galvanizing among the community, no histrionic shows of concern on his or his family’s behalf. As it turned out, he had no family. As it turned out, his general practitioner had disclosed to the police that he was ill - the kind of ill you don’t get better from. As it turned out, the last record he’d made was a reservation he’d made for the special collections that last day of the fall semester, an appointment which everyone just assumed he’d made because he always did. Turns out, the door at his nearby college was left wide open, which detectives interpreted to mean that he had walked out into the woods one day, maybe to ponder mortality, and then simply never returned.

I overhead what people said but never asked about it myself. I never went back into the compactus of the basement. For all the remaining years the university functioned, which were not many, no one else did either. For all his love for the books he kept there, there was no one else who knew or even cared enough to walk down that flight of steps.

I was placed with a new advisor - one who was more supportive, if not covertly hostile. I did finish my doctorate, but Fortunato had taken hold of my mind. There were times when I thought of him like some mythic dragon, jealously hoarding books instead of gold. And what were dragons good for except to be killed by some hero or heroine? Was that the truth, though? I also thought that, with only his love of the life of mind and surrounded by his precious books, his only friends, was entombed well before I arrived on the scene? Was he actually pitiful in his isolation, however self-induced it might have been? And if he was isolated, was his love of literature a symptom or the cause of it, or both at once?

I think about that often while I’m teaching, but in all honestly, I don’t really know what happened to him. For all I know he really could have gone to the special collections room that last time, then gone home and wandered off into the woods. All I do know is that my class was one of the school’s last. It wasn’t long until it was shut down and all but abandoned. The campus and its buildings still stand, but no one is interested in buying or developing the place. Even now, years later, I still go back there and see the library from beyond the fence. I never go beyond that, and I never see anything more, either.