Our Missing Hearts (18)

A timer dings and the pizza guy turns to open the oven. The hot smoky air shrivels Bird’s throat.

Some people, the pizza guy says. I mean.

He slips the long wooden paddle into the scorching oven and extracts their slices, slips them into a waiting box. For a moment he stares through narrowed eyes at Bird, then at his father, as if trying to place their faces. Then he slides the pizza across the counter.

Have a good night, Bird’s father says, and he takes the box and guides Bird toward the door.



* * *



? ? ?

What did he say, Bird says, when they’re back on the sidewalk. That man. What did he say?

Let’s go, his father says. Come on, Noah. Let’s get home.

At the corner, a police car glides by, lights off, nearly silent, and they wait for it to pass before crossing. They reach the dorm just as the church tower across the way begins to strike nine.

It’s not until they’re back in the apartment that his father speaks again. He sets the pizza down on the counter and pries off his shoes and stands there, his eyes very far away.

Cantonese, his father says. He was speaking Cantonese.

But you understood him, Bird says. You don’t speak Cantonese.

Even as he says it, he realizes he does not know this is true.

No, I don’t, his father snaps. And neither do you. Noah, listen to me very carefully. Anything that has to do with China, Korea, Japan, anything like that—you stay away from it. You hear someone talking in those languages or talking about those things, you walk away. Understand?

He pulls a slice from the box and hands it to Bird, then takes one himself and settles wearily into a chair without even getting a plate. It is the second time, it occurs to Bird, that his father has climbed all those steps in the past hour.

Eat your dinner, his father says gently. Before it gets cold.

He knows then: even if he asks, his father won’t track down this book. He’ll have to find another way.



* * *



? ? ?

It is difficult to sneak into the university library; it always has been. There are old books in there, valuable books. A Gutenberg Bible and a first folio of Shakespeare, Bird’s father told him once, though Bird has only a hazy idea what this means. Countless irreplaceable old documents. Even—his father wriggled his fingers creepily in the air—an anatomy book bound in human skin. He had just transferred over—linguistics professor to book shelver—and Bird, age nine and newly cynical, had decided all of this was an attempt to make his job sound more impressive, and had ignored it.

What he does know is that he needs a keycard to enter the building, huge and impressive, a marble paperweight pinning down one end of the college yard—and even then, only staff are permitted to pass further into the warm labyrinth of shelves where all the books are kept. But when he was younger, on days off school, he’d trotted along after his father into the reshelving room, where carts of books sat waiting to be set back in place. You can help, his father had suggested, and once or twice Bird had, pushing the cart through the narrow aisles until they found the right one, pressing the antique switch in the corridor to flick on the lights. While his father scanned the shelves, sliding the books one by one into the gaps from which they’d come, Bird ran his fingertips over the embossed spines where gilt lettering had long been rubbed away, breathing in the peculiar smell of the library: a mix of dust and leather and melted vanilla ice cream. Warm, like the scent of someone’s skin.

It soothed him and unsettled him at the same time, the murky hush like a wool blanket thrown over everything. Underneath, something large lying in wait. It never ended, the stacks of books needing to be set back in place, the constant insistent reiteration of order, and the thought was dizzying: that just beyond this shelf there were hundreds more, thousands of books, millions of words. Sometimes after his father had nestled one book into its spot, lining up the spines, Bird had the impulse to sweep the whole rack clear with one arm, to send the whole shelf dominoing into the next and the next and the next, to shred the smothering silence. It frightened him, and he made excuses for not coming into the stacks. He was tired, he would rather sit in the staff room and have a snack, he would rather stay home and play.

He hasn’t come to the library in years; the last time, he was ten.

That evening, while his father is brushing his teeth, Bird rifles through his briefcase. His father is a creature of habit; after he comes back to the apartment he always stores his keycard in the outside pocket of his bag, ready for the next day. Bird slips the card into his back pocket and zips the bag shut again. His father never checks for it in the morning: for the past three years it’s been right there when he arrives at work, exactly where he put it the night before. Tomorrow, just this once, it won’t be. But the security guard knows him, has seen him every day for years, will let him in for the day, just this one time. Tomorrow evening, when Bird’s father arrives home and does a thorough search for the keycard, he’ll find it right there on the floor beneath the table, right where his briefcase always sits. Must have slipped it next to the bag rather than into it, he’ll think, and that will be that.



* * *



? ? ?

At first the plan works perfectly. After school, Bird heads to the college yard, climbs the huge mountain of stairs to the library’s front entrance. In the lobby, he copies the impatient and vaguely annoyed look the students always wear and swipes his father’s card quickly through the reader. The turnstile turns green and he passes through without stopping and without looking back. As if he has somewhere to be, on the trail of important knowledge. The security guard doesn’t even glance up from his monitor.