Short Stories

He called himself Mars because he claimed to be from there. He loved the public library, his oasis amid San Francisco’s Civic Center grunge. Each morning, he waited patiently outside the entrance for the gates to open along with the horde of others who had no place to go.

     Paul, a twenty-something who worked at the library, felt bad for Mars, who was always getting himself into some kind of jam. Yesterday, he was reading a book over the shoulder of a man sitting at a table as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do. This wasn’t the first time Paul saw him do this.

     After only a few seconds, the sitting man turned around, exchanged some words with Mars, stood up, and headed to the librarian’s desk to tell her about the incident. Paul was shelving oversized art books right near the desk so he could hear every word.

     “I was reading a book at the table over there, and I turned around to see some nut reading my book over my shoulder. I told him to get lost, and he said we should take it outside.” He tapped his long nails on the granite countertop as he spoke.

     The librarian, who had heard one too many of these sorts of stories, was stone-faced and remained that way when Mars came to the desk a minute later to tell her his version of the story.
“I was standing at that table trying to read a book over some guy’s shoulder, and he turned around and said we should take it outside.” He moved like his bones were held together with loose threads. “What should I do? Should I go tell security?”

     “Yes, you should,” the librarian humored him.

     Mars ran toward the elevator with great urgency. He had holes in his clothes and scraggly hair that stuck out of his baseball cap like weeds growing through the cement. As Paul watched him, he contemplated going after him, maybe lecturing him on how to be more civil, so he wouldn’t one day get himself killed picking a fight with the wrong person. But he knew his words would be wasted on Mars, who had more than a couple screws loose.

     So, he continued shelving the few books left on his cart. When he finished, he went into the staff area to get another cart of books. He leaned backwards as he walked as if there was no rush to get anywhere. He wore a black cap that matched his eyes and melded with his hair which hung long and straight to the middle of his back. He kept meaning to get it cut but kept forgetting.

     In the staff area, a bunch of Paul’s co-workers were talking about the pregnant pigeon that had been nesting in the pot of a plant on the terrace. Someone said she’d laid two eggs this morning. Paul was happy for the new mother who he’d been visiting almost every day for the past week. He planned to go out to see her before his workday ended.

     There were several carts of books that needed to be shelved, and he was glad to see one of them contained books of musical scores. There was even a book of cello music he hadn’t seen before. It must have been new. He put it aside, so he could check it out later.

     On his way out, he ran into his coworker, Pancho.

     “Mars was at it again,” Paul told Pancho. “Reading over some dude’s shoulder. This time, he threatened to start a fight with the guy.”

     “Hey, guess what? I found out the reason he does that,” Pancho said. “Stacia told me he used to come into the old Main library years and years ago. He was normal then, had a kid and everything. Used to sit his little boy down in front of a book, kneel beside him, and watch from over his shoulder to make sure he was getting the words right.”

     “What happened to the boy?”

     “So sad. Stacia says she heard he died. Got hit on his bike or something.”

     Paul’s spirits dropped like a pebble falling from a skyscraper. He rolled out his cart that now felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. He went to shelve in the photography section where a couple weeks ago he had heard Mars and a woman both talking to themselves. They sat in the carrels near the windows. Their voices grew progressively louder to block out the other. Finally, the woman turned to Mars and said, “Can you keep it down please? I can’t hear myself talk.” Of course, Mars said he couldn’t, a fight ensued, and ended in the woman letting out a loud, tortured scream that echoed throughout the library.

     The design of the building was conducive to echoes with six floors winding around a hollow center. This was unfortunate as screams were plentiful here. The library was stunning, but easy to find fault with. Paul’s biggest complaint was that there were no windows which could be opened. Everything bad that ever happened here stayed here, trapped, suffocated, almost visible. His girlfriend, who was into everything occult, told him the only thing that might fix the problem would be burning sage in the building, but fire codes prohibited such a thing. He was quite sure the architect cared more about making a big splash in the architecture world than creating something which worked. Chaos flourished here and grew exponentially with each passing day, a sad manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics, espousing that disorder increases in closed systems over time.

      The skylight in the center of the towering ceiling made up for the building’s shortcomings. It allowed huge slices of sunshine to fill the place all day long. It was shaped like the logo for the library, a seashell, but it reminded Paul of a pie cut into slices. A giant pie made of sky.

     Another one of his favorite things was the reading room in the art and music department where he worked, a circular space made of teak wood with built-in shelves full of some of the library’s most beautiful books. Old books with crumbling pages, faded covers, hand-drawn illustrations, antiquated language, and the smell of aged paper.

     Harps from around the globe were currently on display there, including one from Africa with only four strings. The room was a small bit of peace in the clamorous building.
^  ^  ^

Paul sat at the page desk in his coat watching the clock on the computer, anxious for his shift to end. He was starving and set on getting a burrito at the taqueria near his apartment. As soon as the clock turned five, he split. He almost took the public elevator, which was quicker than running down four flights of steps. But then he remembered how he’d regretted taking it in the past. A thick, unrelenting stench lived inside the elevator cars like an entity unto itself. On his way out of the building, he passed a tattooed woman with an iguana on her shoulder. She was a regular, always on the hunt for crochet books. Companion pets of many sorts were allowed at the library. One man had a pet chicken he kept on a leash. Paul would see him walking it as if it were a dog. Once, Paul saw the man lying on the ground in front of the building in the middle of the day, his loyal pet standing over him as if guarding its owner.

     Outside, it was all sun and wind. The air screamed with sirens and car horns and stank of piss and bleach. Across the street, a bunch of CDs and DVDs were being sold. They were scattered on a dirty blanket, most with library barcodes still stuck on them. Next to the sale, an old Asian woman hovered over a trash can and pulled something out of it as if it were a prize.

     Paul turned onto Market Street where he passed a fast-food joint, an X-rated movie house, and a bunch of fly-by-night shops with half-empty shelves and desperate salesclerks, selling everything from electronics to jewelry. The sidewalk was littered with everything from used needles to dirty condoms. An upscale eatery sat in the middle of all this like a palace in a slum. There, a bunch of young people were gathered, sitting at tables full of half-eaten plates of food, drinking pints of beer and cocktails. Some spoke so loudly it was easy for Paul to catch choppy fragments of their conversations. Someone said something about third party software, another about taking an option off the table. Another bragged he could do something from his desktop in two minutes.

     Right outside the restaurant, a legless woman sat in a dirty, old wheelchair. Paul recognized her. He’d helped her get a library card once. He took the escalator down to the Muni station where a scraggly man wearing a pink tutu, stood on top of an orange crate, singing the theme song from “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Paul smiled at him and decided that this was his new favorite street performer.

     He rushed down the stairs and to his delight, his train had just arrived. He boarded and rode for five stops, just less than ten minutes. He got off and began walking uphill to his apartment. He hadn’t walked long when he came upon a group of people gathered on the sidewalk. They were taking videos of something with their phones. When he looked in the direction of where their phones were pointed, he saw the aftermath of a car accident with three cars piled up, and a waiting ambulance. Two men in yellow jumpsuits were strapping a man to a gurney.

     “I caught the whole thing!” someone shouted.

     Paul turned to see a young man, with a leather jacket and a face like a sponge smiling big and bright as he boasted to the crowd.

     “You got the guy getting hit?!” someone called out.

     “Yeah, I got the whole thing!” He held his phone in the air as if it were a trophy.

     “What’d he look like? The dude who got hit?” another voice said.

     “He was just some crazy, homeless guy,” the kid said. “You should have seen him babbling to himself as he crossed the street. Went right in front of the car like he was blind to it.”

     Paul heard one of the ambulance drivers say in a somber voice, “I think we lost him.” Close enough now to see the grim scene, he followed the voices of the drivers and looked towards the ground, just past their huddled figures to see that the dead man was Mars. A single tear slid down his cheek, the only tear that would be shed for the “crazy, homeless guy,” disposable in the eyes of the sane ones.

     In the crowd, Paul felt more alone than he ever had in his life. He was relieved when they began to leave, going on their own broken ways.

     Once they were all gone, a strange peace settled over him. He imagined Mars floating happily in a land of red rock mountains and purple skies. He was home now.