Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(44)
From where I was standing I could see down a line of shelves to the front desk and the windows behind it. While we’d been talking, the sun had begun to rise, filling the library with a blueish early-morning light. Near the desk was a small round table surrounded by four plastic chairs. I saw the four of us sitting there that first week in Black River when we came with Mom and Dad to get our library cards.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know her. Thanks for the help, Freeman.”
My legs shook as I made my way through the stacks. But I didn’t go straight to the front door. I veered off into the dimmer sections of the library, wandering aimlessly until I decided to stop lying to myself. I knew where I was going.
I found all four volumes of Cardinal and the Brotherhood of Wings on a shelf toward the back. Their scarlet spines seemed to glow in the low light, standing out against all the others. I ran my finger down the length of them. A bell tolled in my chest as I read each title:
VOLUME 1.?THE RADIANT CITY AND THE EMERALD HORDE
VOLUME 2.?SALLY SPARROW DANCES AMONG THE STARS
VOLUME 3.?BEHOLD, ABADDON
VOLUME 4.?EXILE IN THE GARDENS OF NULL
I picked up the first volume and became lost in it immediately. The pain of my injuries faded as I breezed through the Brotherhood’s battles with Madame Night, Slim John, and Professor Hurricane. I was right there when Blue Jay learned what being a leader meant on the day the Brotherhood was trapped in the Gray Waste. When Black Eagle and Rex Raven survived the three trials of the King of the Molemen. When Sally Sparrow danced among the stars.
Before I knew it, I was at the end of the second volume and staring at that page, you know the one, the panel everybody said won Dad his Hugo. The one that made him famous.
The Rose Prison.
I’d seen it a thousand times, but it still stopped me cold. It was so simple. Cardinal and Sally Sparrow imprisoned at the heart of an immense rose of coral-colored steel. I’d looked at the panel a thousand times and still couldn’t understand how Dad had managed to make something that was so beautiful and so horrifying at the same time.
The sun was fully up by then and the room was bright and warm. The green curve of Lucy’s Promise showed in one of the south-facing windows, but I knew I couldn’t go back there, not yet. There was somewhere I needed to go first.
I took the Brotherhood comics off the shelf and tucked them under my arm as I walked out of the library.
Sun-bleached trash blew across the parking lot of the Seeger Museum. Trees that had once been trimmed into lollipop rounds like something out of Willy Wonka were overgrown and leaning.
I pushed aside the Guard’s yellow NO TRESPASSING tape and ducked through a gap in the chainlink fence that surrounded the property. The building’s glass front doors and the steel roll-down barrier had been smashed, maybe the night of the outbreak, maybe by people looking for shelter later on. I found an opening big enough and squeezed inside.
Sunlight filtered down through the skylights. Most of the artwork had been evacuated by the Guard long ago, so the walls were empty. Just ghostly rectangles where the paintings used to hang. I felt my way through the darker hallways until I came to a door set in a concrete wall. The metal sign riveted beside it read RICHARD SERRA: TORQUED ELLIPSES.
I stepped through the doorway into that immense room.
The first time I’d seen the sculptures, that day we came to Black River on a house-hunting trip, I didn’t even understand what I was looking at. Twenty-foot-high walls of rust-colored steel all lined up in a concrete room. So what? It wasn’t until we got closer to the first one that I saw that its walls were curved. The wall was actually a ring with an opening on one side that led into an empty space that was easily as big as our apartment in Brooklyn.
I ran to the second ellipse—two rings, one inside the other. I got to the third one before any of you and discovered a maze of rings within rings, three or four of them, the openings staggered around their circumference, making a kind of spiral. It was bright inside when I first entered, but the way the walls leaned into or away from each other as they curved sent me from day to twilight and back to day again. I staggered along like I was on the deck of a sailing ship. When I was finally let out into the heart of the ellipse, I was so dizzy I fell right on my butt. The walls soared over my head, bending up and away toward the skylights. The sun made their brown steel seem warm and alive. I felt sure that if I laid my hand against one, I’d feel a pulse moving just beneath the metal.
And then the three of you came in, you and Mom a little giddy, Dad quiet. I remember how we all ended up on our backs in the middle of the floor, taking turns describing the ellipse. You said it was a carnival funhouse. I said it was the hull of a ship we were sailing through a storm. Mom said the walls were like the petals of an immense rose. When Dad’s turn came, he was quiet for a long time before he said that it wasn’t a rose, it was a prison, and we were all trapped inside.
Now I made my way through the dusty room, passing the other ellipses and going straight to the third. I found the rift and walked inside, curving around the spiraling walls, the palm of my hand skimming along the rough steel. When I reached the center of it, I dropped the Brotherhood comics in a pile and sat on the scuffed concrete floor. The skylights overhead were frosted with dust and bird droppings, turning the light into a spoiled-milk haze.