One evening, she was locking up the Hilton Branch of the Maplewood Memorial Library when she decided to have a few drinks from the bottle of rum that she kept hidden in her bottom drawer. She called up a friend she had met at a disco club on the Bowery and invited him over to the library. They dropped four tabs of Popeye blotter paper and proceeded to spend the rest of the night pulling down books. It was the most fun she had had in years. Running up and down the aisles destroying the system, one volume at a time. The books fell with great drama, splaying open on the ground like slaughtered animals. Then they screwed in the children’s section with their socks on, and afterwards it seemed like a good idea to purge the library of its most unworthy members. A small offering to the pagan gods — her own private me¯nis session. The Wrath of Charlene. She started a small fire in a waste bin. She was high, but she knew exactly what she was doing. In went a shelf-ful of mystery novels. An instruction manual on computers. Norman Mailer’s An American Dream. The volume H from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“The books aren’t burning,” she said, staring at her smoldering creation. “They’re resisting!”
“You’re one wild chick,” her companion said to her. He was naked, save for his socks. He resembled a kind of prehistoric hunter.
The books might not have burned in quite the manner she had hoped, but they created plenty of smoke. The fire alarm was soon triggered, flushing them out into the night.
A lone dog walker found them struggling into their clothes on the lawn outside as a yellow alarm beacon beat open the darkness.
“What’s happening?” he asked, his terrier standing at attention. “Is there a fire?”
“Don’t worry sir,” said Charlene. “We are professionals.”
Three thousand volumes suffered irreparable smoke damage. Thanks largely to her mother’s behind-the-scenes negotiation, Town of Maplewood v. Charlene Volmer was settled out of court; Charlene was placed on probation and sentenced to fifty hours of community service. Needless to say, she was also fired. It was an ignominious end to her career as a librarian.
She fulfilled her obligation to the community at the Legion Hall in Elizabeth. On Veteran Career Finder Day, she sat beneath a sagging magenta banner that declared WELCOME BACK BOYS! blindly distributing self-help literature to the hollow-eyed men fresh from the bunkers of Vietnam. In a distinct violation of her probation terms, she was nursing her second flask of schnapps and Kool-Aid beneath the table.
When she looked up again, he was standing at the head of the line. He, back only two weeks from the war in Vietnam. He, standing with hands folded to keep down the shaking, which had started since his return, or at least this was when he had started noticing it. The day he had left, Staff Sergeant Emerson, never known for saying a nice thing about another human being in his life, had squeezed his shoulder and called him the best damn radio operator he had ever worked with.
“What kind of job are you looking for?” she asked, only half registering the darkened eyebrows and the sculpted Slavic rumba-dimple of his chin.
“Radio operations. Repair. This kind of thing,” he said. Something in his voice.
She looked through her books for the first time that day. “I’m not sure I have that in my pile right here.” A slight slur to her speech. Ready to hand him whatever was on top.
“I know how to do this,” he said. “I do not need your book. I know what I want.”
“You do?” she said. Her eyes focusing.
“I always know this,” he said.
“You do?” she said. Lingering, wondering what was happening to the weight of her body.
“What is your name?” Kermin asked. “I want to know this.”
“You do?” she said again, and the thrice-uttered question sealed their fate. It was the kind of collision where there was no time for courtship, where two wounded planets lock into orbit and can never quite free themselves from the insistence of their gravitational pull. Charlene and Kermin. Kermin and Charlene. Each would come to understand, in very different ways, that what had come before was only the tuning of the instruments before the real movement began.
5
What are you writing?”
Kermin was standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She had risen early and was working away at the typewriter.
“Not really anything,” she said, flushing. She closed the novel and maneuvered the typewriter slightly, so that its page was less visible to the room. “It’s just something for Dr. Fitzgerald.”
Kermin nodded. She watched as he began his morning routine. Since Charlene had known him, his breakfast had never varied: white toast, Marmite, slice of cheese, slice of ham, glass of orange juice. He always ate everything until there was only half a bite left, and then he was finished. His consistency was maddening, but then such consistency had also saved her. After so many years of instability, she had come to depend upon that last half-moon of toast remaining on the plate.
“So this doctor,” Kermin said, uncapping the Marmite jar. “He is good?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course he’s good.”
Kermin sat down across from her.
“He’s good,” she said again, edging the typewriter away.
He took a loud bite of toast.
“So what did he tell you?” he said. Crumbs.
“About?”
“About Radar.”
“Oh, plenty of things. I mean, they’re still doing tests,” she said. “But we’re very lucky that he agreed to take on Radar in the first place. I mean, he’s the best there is. He’s. .”
She tapped at a key on the typewriter, and a faint F thwacked onto the page. She could feel herself blushing again.
Kermin studied her. After a moment, he let his hand drift over to a shortwave radio sitting on the table. A flick of the wrist and the radio came to life. A loud sea of static enveloped them. He slowly turned the dial, stroking the rib cage of the morning’s frequencies.
“Kermin,” she said. “You’ll wake up Radar. He didn’t sleep last night.”
“This doctor,” he said over the noise. “He is the last.”
“What?”
“After this, no more.”
“Kermin, he’s the best there is,” she said. “We’re so lucky that he even—”
“What did he learn from my blood?” he said without looking up from the radio.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask. They’re looking into various genetical possibilities. Something in our DNA. He said it was very advanced science.”
The radio hung briefly on two stations at once, both voices vying for supremacy through a canopy of static.
“Kerm!” she hissed. “Please. Turn it off.”
He snapped the dial. A click. A sudden silence.
• • •
IN TRUTH, HER VISITS to Boston were not going as well as she had initially hoped. Although she could not say exactly what it was she was hoping for. The less frequent their appointments, the more fervently she typed. Her Anna Karenina was taking shape, page by page, and at certain moments, when the beat of the typewriter became like a second pulse, she was blessed with the fleeting sensation that she was the writer of this book, that she, Charlene Radmanovic, was conceiving of Vronsky’s torrid pursuit, of Levin’s fervent idealism. Or, more precisely: that the real Anna Karenina had not truly existed until now, until it had flowed through Tolstoy and then through her and come out the other side. But these moments of transcendent begetting were rare. More often than not, she was aware of herself as nothing more than a scribe, a clumsy regurgitator of words. A book was a dead thing; no manner of resuscitation could change that.