Chapter 2
My elementary schooling was, throughout its first year, uneventful. Each day I sat in a single chair in the rear left corner of the classroom, and the other pupils acted as though avoiding me was as instinctual to them as was drawing back from a flame. I departed from elementary school bearing the dubious distinction of being the only student upon whom Mr. Rees never, at least once, called; and, every time I submitted to him completed homework, he, without saying a word, would write his grade onto it, hand it back to me, and instruct me to return to my seat, where I would receive no further attention for the remainder of the session.
During recess, students congregated on the playing ground east of the schoolhouse, whereas I circled around to the building’s other side, propped myself up against the wall, and mused till Mr. Rees came out to call us back inside. At home there was a terrible lack of any activities with which I could occupy myself during the weekends, so I, in the first year after my enrollment, wasted them daydreaming in my bedroom. When I was seven, construction began on something called a library, which was to serve as the schoolhouse’s left wing. It was, I learned, a place that held books, which put an immediate pique to my curiosity; because my mother disliked reading, our house did not have even one bookshelf.
A library, a building inside which people (for the sake of enjoyment) read books and from which they brought them home, was foreign to me. The entertainment that people derived from staring at a stack of paper wrapped in cloth made no sense to me. But this made the concept of a library only more intriguing. At the end of every walk to the school, I waited a minute before I entered, so that I could look at the scaffold upon which the library was being built; every morning guaranteed that any one of the sides would have more planks of wood to it than there were the previous day. I imagine that pregnant women, watching their bellies swell and knowing their foetuses are growing inside them, feel similarly to how I felt watching the library grow gradually more tangible.
The day before the library opened, the only aspect that had not been completed was the roof; though it had the frame, the shingles themselves were missing. That issue was resolved tomorrow. During the classes that day, I thought of nothing but the library, and of how I was going to see it as soon as school was over. Mr. Rees’s dismissal at three raptured my heart, and after exiting the main building I entered the left wing. On each side of the inside stood a row of bookshelves, and between those shelves and at the end of the room was a desk with more bookshelves behind it.
That desk had a typewriter, a cup of pens and a stack of lined index cards on it, and at it sat a man of middle age whom I thought might be Mr. Rees’s uncle or father, because he looked vaguely similar and also wore round glasses. He was in possession of a jaw that, though square, tapered to be slightly narrower than his broad, angular forehead; light brown hair, with particles of grey, neatly parted at the right side; blue irises within round eyes, above which were eyebrows curved outward, like those of a woman; and a hawkish nose that I observed to, at a glance, resemble mine. I approached the desk and asked, “Good day. I’m John Smyth. How does this library work, sir?”
“You can use this library two ways, John. If you stay inside the library, you can read and look through all the books you want without having to check them out. If you want to bring books home, I have to issue you a school library card. After I issue you the library card, you bring whatever books you want to check out to the desk, so that I can keep record of them.”
“I would like a library card.” Bringing books to my bedroom, where I could enjoy them whenever I wanted, sounded better than did having to leave them at the library.
He put one of the blank cards into his typewriter and typed away for all of ten seconds, whereupon he gave me the card. The name field read “John Smith”, but I did not care enough to correct him, because I had little sentiment for my surname anyway.
“Thank you, sir,” said I. I stuck the card into my breast pocket and looked at the signs above the individual bookcases. One reading “HISTORY” caught my attention, as I wanted to know more about the world beyond the circle inside which I was bound. I removed from a shelf a thick volume, which had “The American Revolutionary War” lettered in faux-gold on the spine. The front cover bore the same text as the spine but in larger font. I brought it over to the librarian, and when I set it onto the desk he opened it, revealing that there was a lined sheet between the cover and the first page. He removed that paper, scrawled onto it, and put it back inside. I thanked him and returned home.
My mother answered the door, and she raised her brows when she saw me holding the book in the crook of my armpit. “Where did you get that from?”
“The school has a library now,” explained I.
“You stole it, didn’t you?”
“No, I promise you.”
“Let me see that.” She snatched it from me and opened it. “So you didn’t lie this time. Fine, you can keep it.”
I brought it with me to my bedroom, reclined onto the bed, and opened it to a random page, as I did not know how exactly to read a book. A proclamation from my mother startled me: “You’re just like your father, wasting time in all those damned books! As though to look like him were not a travesty enough!” I ignored her; the last time she had physically acted upon her vitriol was over a year ago, and when people spout hatred toward you frequently enough it ceases to have an effect.
After returning my attention to the book, I observed that the first word on the left page started with a dash and then a lowercase letter, whereas Rees had taught me that sentences always began with capitals; I must have been on the wrong page. I turned to the page the librarian had put the record in, and this one began with a capital letter, which meant that I was now on the correct page. In the upper right corner was the number 2, so I surmised that the next page would be number 3. Upon reading page 2 I flipped to the next one, proving myself correct. I have since forgotten most of the text’s contents, having read it so long ago and been so young, but I do recall that it claimed that the United States were not always states, but had once comprised thirteen colonies, which was the same fact that Mr. Rees had taught us.
I neglected to dine that night and, fearing my mother would confiscate the book despite the rightful means by which I had acquired it, hid it under my pillow before I set down my head and induced my eyes to fall shut. That dreams are, in general, easier to remember when the dreamer is a child than when he is an adult is both a piece of common knowledge and a fact that my own oneirological history attests; I could, if I so pleased, write to the most trivial detail every dream that visited me between the years of four and ten, and to summary detail dreams I had between ten and sixteen. Yet scarcely past that have I dreamt and been able to elucidate it after awakening. Slumber, having overtaken all of my senses, summoned me to an unending field, which surrounded me on all sides with grass unpunctuated by any sort of flower, fern or forest, and above which overlooked a sky of gray.
At a crack of thunder I cowered to the ground and, in anticipation of imminent injury, tucked my arms into my chest. White streaks, beginning within the clouds and crooking at various angles before tapering to a point at the grass, appeared, vanished and, in different locations, reappeared at rapid intervals, so that I could not predict where the next one would strike (or if it would strike me). A question I ask myself whenever I think back on this moment is how I, without having yet observed a thunderstorm, could have synthesised the image of one beneath my consciousness; given that not every place sees thunderstorms, I doubt that they are a memory inherent to the primordial brain.
The lightning did strike me, and I am glad that injuries that inflict agony in waking life do not in dreams; the only sensation that came down upon me was a strong tingling in every cubic inch of my body, and then my head was clear, I lay again in my bed, and the sun shone through the windows.