Horace Afoot (17 page)

The telephone has been out, and this has added to my sense of seclusion. I haven’t missed it. The image of toppled poles and tangled wires, of civilization interrupted by a broken flow of electrons (and no one bothering to report it) is amusing. Mohr is the only person who ever calls anyway. As far as spontaneous dialogue, I haven’t felt much of an urge.

I haven’t seen Tom Schroeder since the summer. I never recovered my notebook, and none of my complaints to the police seem to have resulted in anything. I walk to the police station. The desk sergeant
recognizes me. “How about this storm?” he asks. “Holding up against it?”

“So far,” I answer. “The reason I stopped by …”

“You mean you didn’t come by just to say hello?”

“I was wondering what happened with that kid I complained about last summer. Tom Schroeder.”

The sergeant taps his pen on the desk, squints into the distance to summon his memory. He picks up the phone. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

While he talks on the phone I wander over to browse the Wanted posters, a gallery of black-and-white pictures hanging on a corkboard just inside the main entrance. Murderers, rapists, bank robbers, kidnappers, pedophiles. A wall of faces tied to specific acts, blotched and blemished and wearing the sullen look of imprecation that turns each into the hero of his own crime and so poorly masks the secret joy of it.

The sergeant puts down the phone. “The kid left town last August, he says. Hasn’t been back since.”

“Who told you?”

“The detective.”

“Ross?”

“No. Blucher. Ross is in Florida on vacation.” The sergeant taps his pen on the desk. “Ross the Boss. Wish I was in Florida.”

“What about Schroeder?”

“Kid’s in college. Got a scholarship to Notre Dame.”

“College?”

“Maybe it’ll straighten him out. He’s a smart kid. Anyway, if he comes back we’ll be keeping an eye on him.”

“Were other people complaining?”

“No complaints. Just hanging around a bad crowd. Notre Dame’ll straighten him out. I’ve seen worse,” the sergeant says with a lilt, points his pen at me with a flick of his wrist, then resumes tapping it on the desk.

Mrs. Entwhistle nods at me as I pass by the reading room and head for the staircase that leads to the second floor. I’ve been more or less asked to force myself on the place, and by obliging I seem to be perpetuating a fantasy of mutual need. Mohr, it seems, likes having me around, and I enjoy the welcome feeling.

I find Mohr upstairs hunched over his paper-strewn desk, talking on the telephone. He looks up as I enter and nods at me. He has a furtive, conspiratorial style on the telephone, head dropped, voice lowered, receiver pressed against the side of his head. I peel out of my snow gear and seat myself in an old wooden office chair that squeaks and squeals and tilts back at an awkward angle.

The room has undergone several stages of transformation since my first visit. There are boxes and boxes and stacks and piles of photocopied documents. The originals are piled on a table in the center of the room. The fluorescent hood still hangs over the long table, and the new Xerox machine stands along the wall. Boxes of documents that had been stored in other parts of the building are now stacked against the rear wall of the office. They contain the paper legacies of other families of the town who thought enough of themselves to have left to posterity their yellowing papers and secret diaries and photo albums and letters and genealogies scrawled on grease-stained napkins. The town seems to have been inhabited for a time by a variety of impulsives and obsessives, egotists, graphomaniacs, and collectors. Many boxes are marked Private. One, donated by an anonymous gentleman, contains a collection of erotic postcards from French West Africa depicting native men and women cavorting in their newly colonized Eden. Pith-helmet porn, Mohr calls it. Another box is labeled The Geographical and Geological History of the Region Reconstructed from the Fossil Evidence Collected and Cataloged by Mr. Joseph Goldsborough.

Mohr seems to have been inspired by the offer to purchase the Wilkington material. Some dormant vision for the library has been rekindled, his ambition stoked. He has convinced himself that the entire archive of local history must be duplicated in order to preserve it, so
every document is first being Xeroxed onto acid-free paper and the originals packed away. The copying machine I donated has stimulated his appetite for more machinery, and now he has undertaken a campaign to raise money for the library. He seems so contented lately that I don’t think it matters if he raises any or not. His efforts are sincere, although I tend to see them as a last stand against his own moribund condition. He is happy with the illusion, call it progress—the perpetual approach to some forever receding goal. The difference between Mohr and me is that having defined for himself a goal he believes to be worth pursuing, his contentment comes from the act of pursuit, whereas I think it is futile to state goals or pursue “progress,” unless it be defined simply as peace of mind—and in that case I would say the only worthy pursuit is the avoidance of goals. To see Mohr on the telephone conferring in breathless sentences and behaving as if he were some busy politician garnering votes makes me see how terrified he really is of the end he is facing.

“How are you?” he asks, hanging up the telephone.

“How are you?”

He shrugs meekly, then launches into an explanation of his most recent efforts. I drag my chair up to the corner of the long table in the center of the room and glance casually at a letter from Major Wilkington dated October 2, 1861 …
raising an army for the defense of the Union
…

“It’s a marvelous opportunity. A coalition of businesses in the area is going to donate money and equipment to digitize the entire archive,” he says.

I am distracted by Wilkington’s letter, in which he describes his efforts to raise a force of volunteers to go off and fight the Civil War. I read the entire text while Mohr talks. “Digitize?”

“It means every document will be scanned into a computer that will convert the image so it can be stored electronically.”

“And what happens after that?”

Mohr looks at me as though I haven’t understood and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Well, most importantly, the material will be preserved. And of course, anyone who wants to look at a document or a photograph can look at it on a computer.”

“An image of it.”

“Exactly. The originals can be locked away. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. The documents will only rarely ever need to be handled. And searching through the archive will be a matter of keystrokes.”

“So all this photocopying has been a waste of time?”

Mohr shrugs. “Not entirely. We will have a duplicate paper archive to fall back on.”

“How convenient.”

“The technology is very accessible now. Everyone is digitizing their collections. The opportunities are marvelous. Eventually we can make the archive—the history of the whole town—available on the Internet!”

“Internet?”

“The information superhighway. The World Wide Web. It’s transforming the way we go about our lives. Don’t tell me you never heard of it.”

I shrug, not wanting to provoke him further and only mildly shocked at his newfound technological positivism. He picks up the telephone. “Do you have time today?”

“I think I’ll go downstairs and read for a little while.”

“Come back up before you go.”

I go downstairs and retrieve my books from their shelf behind the circulation desk. Mrs. Entwhistle is chatting with an elderly lady about a book the woman is checking out. There are a few people scattered in chairs around the reading room. I go directly to an empty table and sit down, placing the books so the titles on the spines are facing toward me.

As far as progress goes, I suppose the digitization of documents is a step toward the perfect archive—if the perfect archive is simply a place where papers are locked away and preserved over time. The technology that has Mohr so excited permits the separation of the physical document from its contents while preserving the original holograph. I suppose that it is progress of a sort. I browse the spines of the books on the table. They too are an archive. The volume of Horace lying before me, one in a series of regressing shadows, manuscripts labeled
Milan, Ambros. O.136 sup (olim Avennionensis), s. IX/X
. Or
Berne 363, s. IX2
—which was written in a continental Irish scriptorium in northern Italy sometime in the ninth or tenth
century. All are shadows of some ancient codex, iterated and reiterated through a warp of time and changing language into the bilingual Latin/Modern English edition lying before me now.
Everything mortal dies. And language has yet a briefer span of pleasing life
. It is a truth that Mohr’s digitized archive cannot negate. His holographs, paper and electronic, will be as remote a thousand years from now as the text of Horace’s satires copied out in monastic scriptoria are to us today.

In an hour I go back upstairs. Mohr is waiting for me. “It looks good,” he says without any preamble.

“What does?”

A sepulchral grin distorts his face. He stands up and walks around his desk. “The money.” He leans against the edge of his desk and crosses his thin arms over his chest. “I wouldn’t have guessed there were so many people interested in the history of the town. They’re practically falling over each other to contribute to the project.”

I listen while he spells it all out and then concludes by saying, “It’s the technology. That’s what has them interested. They think it will make them want to come in and use it. If I were asking for funds to rebind damaged books—forget it. Nobody would give me a dime. But mention technology and everybody says, ‘Oh, how educational! It’s about time we got up to speed with the technology.”’

“And the archive that has been quietly resting here for the better part of the century will suddenly become all the rage?”

Mohr shrugs and drops his chin to his chest as though in contemplation, then lifts his head back up. “There will be a dedication ceremony,” he says.

I pick up his thread. “And people will come for a while to use the new machines. Look up the names of their relatives, show their kids. Then it will collect dust. Just like the books on the shelves do.”

“I plan to scan the photograph collections first. The photographs will make a bigger initial impression.”

“And after that, Major Wilkington’s accounting statements and shopping lists?”

“Say what you like. It’s for the good. As long as the collections are preserved.” He sits down in his chair behind the desk.

“But by preserving the stuff in a format based in an esoteric technology, all you’re doing is making the material
less
available to the future!”

“As long as the information is preserved … that’s all that counts.” He pauses to shuffle some papers on the desk. “You’re too pessimistic, Horace. If I listened to you I would do nothing.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

He waves me away with a disgruntled flap of the wrist. “You tire me out, Horace. Really, you do. I don’t understand why you say half of what you say.” He looks at his watch, a large old thing that dangles on the bones of his wrist like a heavy bracelet. “The library closes in ten minutes. Would you like to join me for dinner?”

“Where?” I ask, surprised by the invitation. Mohr and I have kept our acquaintance to the library since that night of drinking and confession.

“Across the street. The food isn’t bad.”

“I’m not hungry. But I’ll keep you company.”

“Great.” He hauls himself out of the chair. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

I go outside and wait for him. The air is crisp and very cold. The lights at the front entrance cast a warm, incandescent glow across the snow. Traffic is moving steadily along Main Street, the rush-hour exodus of people and cars almost over. I lean against the brick wall beside the entrance, saturated by a sense of well-being. The cold air, the steps of the library, the snow; a sense of being completely in the present, of fitness and proportion and charm that I can’t sum up but which has descended on me like a momentary state of grace. I take long drafts of cold air into my lungs and exhale large clouds of steam that dissolve in a yellow glow of light.

Mohr emerges from the front door and locks it behind him. We stand together at the top step for a moment, looking at the thin stream of traffic passing slowly up Main Street. “Come on,” he says and carefully descends the icy steps, one at a time.