the place . . . well, not home. I’m sure no one there viewed it as home. If you were staying at the efficiencies, home was somewhere you’d left or somewhere you were going in the indeterminate future. It was little more than a neglected, shabby motel with long-term guests, and everyone there was just making do until they got to something better. Some of the tenants had been making do for years.
I saw him—the late return—as I swung in: a guy in a red flannel coat and a checked hat with earflaps framing cheeks chapped pink from the cold. He raised a gloved hand, and I waved reflexively back and didn’t give him another thought. It was cold and wet, and the lot was hazed over with a filthy mist. It was ten in the morning and looked like twilight.
I pressed and held the red button on the dash until the generator chunked noisily to life, then got out and went around back to unlock the rear door. The man in the earflaps met me at the steps. He had a quizzical smile on his face.
“Where’s the other guy? Sick?” he asked, his breath puffing from his lips in clouds.
“Mr. Hennessy? He had a little bang-up. He’s off the road.”
“I wondered what was up,” he said. “Feels like I haven’t seen the Bookmobile in half a century.” I thought that was funny, that he hadn’t noticed the difference between the old Bookmobile and the other one, the one Hennessy had driven into a McDonald’s. I didn’t say anything about it, though, just opened the rear door and led him in.
The heaters roared. The lights buzzed. Earflaps shuffled in past me while I held the door and stared back toward the efficiencies. There was usually a herd of sinewy, haunted-looking mothers waiting with their children to stampede the Bookmobile. But today no one emerged. The cold, grimy mist billowed along the concrete walkways facing the building. It looked like a set in a movie about the apocalypse. I climbed up the steps and closed the door behind me.
“I hope I’m not in too much trouble.” He slipped a sun-faded, cranberry-colored hardback out of one pocket: Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein. “I’m way overdue. But hey, it’s not my fault! If I could get to the library, I wouldn’t need you!”
“If you and everyone like you could get to the library, I wouldn’t have a job. I think that makes us even,” I said. “Don’t worry about the late fees. We’re forgiving penalties for all Bookmobile patrons, since we were off the road for a while.”
“Hot-diggity,” he said, like a freckled farm boy in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. “Not that I’d mind if I did have to cough up a few pennies for the late return. This one was worth it. I wish I had another just like it.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “I love those old Heinleins, too.”
He turned and let his gaze drift across the shelves, smiling to himself. “That one did just what I want a story to do. I like a story that doesn’t mess around too much. That starts right away, sticks the hero in a good, rotten, messed-up fix from the first paragraph, and then lets him wriggle awhile. I spend all week behind the counter in the hardware store. When I sit down with a book, I want to try someone else’s life on for a bit, some other life I’m never going to have myself. That’s why I like to read about trolls and cops and celebrities. Also, I want ’em to say clever things, because in my mind I’m the one saying it.”
“But not too clever. Or it breaks the illusion.”
“That’s right. Find a guy with an interesting life and then deal him a bad hand so I can see how he snaps back. And while we’re at it, I want to head somewhere I’m never going to go myself, like Moscow or Mars or the twenty-first century. NASA isn’t hiring, and I can’t afford transatlantic tickets. I’m so strapped these days, it’s just as well for me the library card is free.”
“You’re never going to go to the twenty-first century?” I asked. I didn’t think he knew what he’d just said, but he took the question straight.
“Well, I’m sixty-six now, so you do the math,” he said. “I guess it’s technically possible, but I’d be a hundred and two! If you told me in 1944 that I