sometimes wishes choose-your-own-adventure novels would come back into fashion.)
He has been reading (or rereading) a great many children’s books as well, because the stories seem more story-like, though he is mildly concerned this might be a symptom of an impending quarter-life crisis. (He half expects this quarter-life crisis to show up like clockwork on his twenty-fifth birthday, which is only two months away.)
The librarians took him to be a literature major until one of them struck up a conversation and he felt obliged to confess he was actually one of those Emerging Media Studies people. He missed the secret identity as soon as it was gone, a guise he hadn’t even realized he enjoyed wearing. He supposes he looks like a lit major, with his square-framed glasses and cable-knit sweaters. Zachary still has not entirely adjusted to New England winters, especially not one like this with its never-ceasing snow. He shields his southern-raised body with heavy layers of wool, wrapped in scarves and warmed with thermoses full of hot cocoa that he sometimes spikes with bourbon.
There are two weeks left in January and Zachary has exhausted most of his to-read list of childhood classics, at least the ones in this library’s collection, so he has moved on to books he has been meaning to read and others chosen at random after testing the first few pages.
It has become his morning ritual, making his choices in the book-dampened library quiet of the stacks and then returning to his dorm to read the day away. In the skylighted atrium, he shakes the snow from his boots on the rug by the entrance and drops The Catcher in the Rye and The Shadow of the Wind into the returns box, wondering if halfway through the second year of a master’s degree program is too late to be unsure about one’s major. Then he reminds himself that he likes Emerging Media and if he’d spent five and a half years studying literature he would probably be growing weary of it by now, too. A reading major, that’s what he wants. No response papers, no exams, no analysis, just the reading.
The fiction section, two floors below and down a hallway lined with framed lithographs of the campus in its youth, is, unsurprisingly, empty. Zachary’s footsteps echo as he walks through the stacks. This section of the building is older, a contrast to the bright atrium at the entrance, the ceilings lower and the books stacked all the way up, the light falling in dim confined rectangles from bulbs that have a tendency to burn out no matter how often they are changed. If he ever has the money after graduating Zachary thinks he might make a very specific donation to fix the electrical wiring in this part of the library. Light enough to read by brought to you by Z. Rawlins, Class of 2015. You’re welcome.
He seeks out the W section, having recently become enamored of Sarah Waters, and though the catalogue listed several titles, The Little Stranger is the only one on the shelf so he is saved decision-making. Zachary then searches for what he thinks of as mystery books, titles he does not recognize or authors he has never heard of. He starts by looking for books with blank spines.
Reaching to a higher shelf that a shorter student might have needed a stepladder to access, he pulls down a cloth-covered, wine-colored volume. Both spine and cover are blank, so Zachary opens the book to the title page.
Sweet Sorrows
He turns the page to see if there is another that lists the author but it moves directly into the text. He flips to the back and there are no acknowledgments or author’s notes, just a barcode sticker attached to the inside of the back cover. He returns to the beginning and finds no , no dates, no information about printing numbers.
It is clearly quite old and Zachary does not know much about the history of publishing or bookbinding, if such information is possibly not included in books of a certain age. He finds the lack of author perplexing. Perhaps a page has gone missing, or it was misprinted. He flips through the text and notices that there are pages missing, vacancies and torn edges scattered throughout though none where the front matter should be.
Zachary reads the first page, and then another and another.
Then the lightbulb above his head that has been illuminating the U–Z section blinks and darkens.