Coin-Operated History E-Book

Francis Nenik

• Herausgeber: Fiktion
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 331

Beschreibung

Amanda Susan Marie Hollis has been given the task of archiving the life of a work-shy librarian who worked at Harvard shortly after it was founded. The entanglements of history and life prove extremely hazardous and full of criminal misdeeds. What have the conquest of America, the Vinland Map, Mongolian hordes, Spanish monks, and the disappearance of a chandelier got to do with one another? Is Hollis a brilliant researcher or is she going nuts? Is there a truth beyond what can be archived? Nenik’s novel reads as a phantasmagoric prehistory of Google. Coin-Operated History has been translated from the German by Amanda DeMarco.

Leseprobe

Credits

First published by

Fiktion, Berlin, 2016

www.fiktion.cc

ISBN 978 3 95988 032 9

Project Directors

Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann (Publishing Program)

Henriette Gallus (Communications)

Julia Stoff (Management)

Original Title

Münzgesteuerte Geschichte

Translator from German

Amanda DeMarco

Editor

Alexander Scrimgeour

Proofreader

Sam Frank

Editor of the original text

Mathias Gatza

Design Identity

Vela Arbutina

Web Development

Maxwell Simmer (Version House)

This book is released under the Creative Commons Zero license. You can copy, modify, distribute, and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Francis Nenik COIN-OPERATED HISTORY

translated by Amanda DeMarco

This is for you.

Utopia isn’t just a question of time,but also a question of space.

I

On October 31, 1963, William Croswell entered Amanda Hollis’s life. In a cardboard box. In 234 pieces.

He was a gift of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and Amanda Hollis had been selected to put him back together again, to make a man of him. The fact that William Croswell had already been dead for 129 years was unproblematic. To the contrary, it was practically a precondition for falling into Amanda Hollis’s ever-sweaty hands.

Amanda Susan Marie Hollis had studied library science at Drexel University in Philadelphia, receiving her diploma at precisely 6 p.m. on March 28, 1956 — and that’s really all there is to be said about her studies, and basically about the entirety of her youth. Two hours after receiving the diploma, a granary directly next to the university exploded. The fireball that raced down Market Street damaged the dorm, and the attendant shock wave shattered all of the glass within a radius of an eighth of a mile. Amanda Hollis had stepped into adult life with a bang, and there was no going back.

And so she went to Harvard, even before summer had begun, and laid her diploma on the desk of the head of personnel at the university library. She didn’t do it to start a career or to serve a renowned institution, it wasn’t a qualitative question at all, but rather a quantitative one; a simple calculation in which she, Amanda Hollis, was the single unknown quantity.

The university library at Harvard, she was aware, was the largest research library in the country, in the world, even. Therefore, Amanda Hollis thought, it would be the most likely to have a position available for her. Besides — thanks to a course on peripheral library history with Professor Orscube — she knew she bore the name of an English eccentric who had donated thousands of books to Harvard two hundred years earlier, and had bequeathed a nice little sum on top of it after the library there had burned to the ground. And who knows, maybe the head of personnel would link it to her name and think to continue a great tradition as discreet as it was impressive. He would nod silently in reverent recognition, and — precisely because of this reverence — abstain from those inquiries that would make it clear she was not only unrelated to Thomas Hollis V but also the exact opposite of an English eccentric.

And so Amanda Hollis drove to Harvard on a rainy May day in 1956, laid her diploma on the head of personnel’s desk, and waited for something to happen. But the head of personnel didn’t say a word. He simply looked at her as if something were missing.

But there was nothing more to Amanda Hollis’s life than her diploma and her person. And both were here, present in the room, as one can only be present in a room, though in Amanda Hollis’s case, she would have preferred her presence take on a less voluminous form.

“My diploma is lying lonely and forlorn on the head of personnel’s desk while I sit here on a chair that’s far too narrow for my rear,” she thought, as the silence on the other side took on the dimensions of the entire Harvard library. But the library was not under discussion. Nothing was under discussion, and therefore there must be a third element besides her and her diploma. But what?

Amanda Hollis considered. She was about to recount how it was back then when Thomas Hollis selected the books for the Harvard library in England, adorned their exteriors with expensive bindings and obscure insignia, furnished the interiors with markings and commentary, and then packed the books into enormous wooden boxes that he sent across the ocean by the shipload, gaining the title of Harvard’s greatest book donor ever. He suddenly died on New Year’s Day, 1774, and was buried in a meadow on his estate, ten feet deep and without a single book down in his tomb but with a horse up above in the field, which the creature was made to plow almost immediately after Thomas Hollis V was buried, simply because he was an English eccentric and that’s what he wanted, and besides, he had neither a wife nor children who might have visited his grave. This admittedly severed any possibility of a connection to her, which is why Amanda Hollis — whose head was in the endless annals of library science and whose rear was in a chair that was too narrow for it — changed course and told the head of personnel at the Harvard library about the diploma that Professor Orscube had placed in her hand on March 28, and about what had happened afterward.

She did it because she hoped it would connect the past that lay behind her with the man who sat in front of her. Besides, it seemed to her to be the only way to strike this unknown from her ledger.

And so she began to tell of the people who kneeled and prayed in the streets of Philadelphia on the evening of March 28, 1956, while she stood at her bed in the dorm, holding her diploma in her hands and looking out the window whose pane lay before her on the floor like a puzzle waiting to finally be put together.

But outside everything was in disarray. All of Philadelphia was bathed in a deep orange light; the office building opposite had lost its shell and was bent out of shape, and wherever you looked were blazing fires, the cries of sirens, screaming mouths, and gaping walls. She was in the middle of it and yet separate from it, up on the fifth floor of the dorm, at whose feet people on the street were kneeling and praying between the bent steel girders and the sagging buildings, on that off-kilter Wednesday, this unhappy day on which the Lord was sold and betrayed. She stood at her bed, its cover drawn back as if the shock wave had tunneled underneath it, though she knew that she was the one who had drawn it back, simply to go to sleep because she was tired and had to go to church early in the morning to celebrate the Tenebrae.

But now, with the world around her exploding, any celebration was unthinkable, and as Amanda Hollis asked herself what was left to her in view of the catastrophe, her gaze fell on the diploma in her hands. And so she got into bed, buried her still-clothed body under the blanket, laid the diploma on top of herself, and waited for someone to come get the both of them.

And when they did, she let everything wash over her, allowed herself to be led out of the dorm and into the gymnasium, and in the days that followed she was told the entire story again and again. She had to produce everything again two months later, her self, the diploma, and the story behind it, along with all those numbers she’d learned by heart in Philadelphia: three dead, eighty wounded, and the explosive force of 1,100 pounds of dynamite, the result of a heavy accumulation of dust in the granary.

When Amanda Hollis had finished her story, she looked expectantly at the head of personnel, but he returned her gaze with utter dispassion, if it could really be called returning, because in actuality he was simply staring through her, as if the right candidate had just appeared in the doorway behind her. So Amanda Hollis turned around, saw that the door was closed and no one else was in the room — and turned back, to be stared through and ignored once again.

“He must see me, but he’s looking through me as if I weren’t even in the room,” Amanda Hollis thought. “On the other hand, maybe I’m just imagining it, maybe he’s not looking through me at all, maybe his gaze can’t reach me. Because it collides with something on the way from his side of the desk to mine. Something I can’t see.” But what could it be? The spirit of Harvard? A dense concentration of thoughts in the air? The fiction of a horse standing on the desk instead of in a field?

Amanda Hollis didn’t have a clue, and yet the idea of a collision didn’t seem wrong to her, for as soon as she thought it, the head of personnel’s gaze slammed into something that evaded Amanda Hollis’s eyes even as it hovered above the tabletop. His gaze fell precipitously downward — and crashed down onto the diploma.

Unfortunately, the inspection of the paper that followed wasn’t what Amanda Hollis had imagined. Instead of considering her qualifications, it looked as if the head of personnel were examining the diploma for evidence of the explosion, as if he believed he would find traces of its debris there.

But there was nothing there, nothing besides a seal, two signatures, and three lines of text, and Amanda Hollis knew that that was the greatest possible distillation of a life whose largest conceivable dimensions she had just described.

That was the moment she realized that it didn’t make any sense to keep trying here. The Harvard library was way out of her league. In any case, they probably didn’t have a position available anyway.

And so she stood up and extended her hand to the head of personnel. That meant that she actually extended both hands — she wanted to say good-bye with the one and take her diploma back with the other. But her intention and its effects were a little at odds, as it had the appearance of a clumsy gesture toward intimacy rather than a confident one of farewell, an impression doubtlessly heightened by the fact that not only had Amanda Hollis stood up but her chair had stood up along with her, like an outsize milking stool stuck to her rear.

So it was that Amanda Hollis retracted her hands, laid them on the armrests of the chair, pushed the chair to the ground, and let her rear follow it, which is to say pushing it — squeak, squeak — back down between the armrests onto the seat, at which point the head of personnel — perhaps alarmed, perhaps astonished, or perhaps just running late — broke his silence.

“Amanda Susan Marie Hollis,” he said, and it sounded as if he were reading the names from the diploma, a result of the fact that this is what he was actually doing. Then he lifted his gaze and looked at her as if he had just noticed that she was sitting in front of him, in the flesh and not just on paper, and asked, “Are you ready to smell Henry the Admonisher’s undershirt?”

Amanda Hollis believed she had heard wrong.

Amanda Hollis believed she’d lost her mind.

But the head of personnel repeated his question.

“Amanda Susan Marie Hollis, are you ready to smell Henry the Admonisher’s undershirt?”

How was she supposed to answer to that? She’d never heard of any Henry the Admonisher, and the entire proposal seemed to have a rather dubious character. Which didn’t keep the head of personnel from asking another question of the same genre.

“Any interest in President Chauncey’s cane?”

“This man isn’t the head of personnel, he’s a pervert,” it occurred to Amanda Hollis. But she didn’t say it aloud because in the meantime, the polymorphous pervert was posing the third and evidently all-decisive question, for he stood up and leaned over the desk and Amanda Hollis’s diploma, as she tried to scoot back and forth in her chair but didn’t manage, cursing the width of her rear. A thought popped into her head “The way my ass is acting toward this chair is how Harvard is being to me,” but the man who was nearly nose-to-nose with her had other thoughts.

“Want to work underground?”

Now, that sounded suspiciously like a job offer, but it was probably just one in a string of depravities, more cryptic than the previous two but otherwise cut from the same cloth and garnished with the eager face of a middle-aged personnel-office pencil pusher, which was reason enough to call the whole thing off right here. But Amanda Hollis didn’t know how to do that, how to say no . And so she said “Yes,” and then “Of course,” and there weren’t any more questions after that.

Shortly thereafter, the diploma on the desk was traded for a new piece of paper. After Amanda Hollis watched the head of personnel silently record her name on it, stamp it with his official seal, and sign the sheet, he gave it to her. At this point she stood up, as was proper, and tried to shake a hand that wasn’t offered to her. So she sat back down, surprised that the chair hadn’t stood up with her, looked at her sweaty fingers because she didn’t know what else to do, and waited for a granary to explode somewhere nearby.

But nothing happened, for the head of personnel had gone back to staring silently again, and it seemed as if she, Amanda Susan Marie Hollis, had already left the room and only existed on paper. So she inspected the sheet in her hands, read her name, did no harm, saw “Pussy Library” written as her future job location, looked aghast at the head of personnel, got neither a reaction nor a word in response, looked again at the sheet, read “Pusey Library,” and left the office in great haste.

The path she took was not the result of following an inner voice, but rather a map. It was stapled to the piece of paper she had received, and it piloted Amanda Hollis across a rain-soaked meadow, under dripping magnolia trees, and into Nathan Pusey’s subterranean library, a forty-foot-deep hole in the ground clad in concrete on the outside and crammed full of books and files on the inside. It was a place where no ray of sunlight fell on the departed and no fireball burned the living. And there she remained. And lost her innocence. On top of a pile of the dead, whose stature was measured in feet of shelf.

That was seven and a half years ago, and when Amanda Hollis unpacked William Croswell’s life on October 31, 1963, she sensed more than ever that her own was slipping away — without a trace and past her. The fact that she would be thirty years old in twenty days, having spent a quarter of her life at a depth of thirty feet under the Harvard campus in the university archive, was just a way of expressing the dilemma numerically.

“The days are like grains of sand in an hourglass,” thought Amanda Hollis as she disrobed the newly arrived William Croswell sheet by sheet. “Nothing can hold them back, and they trickle away without a sound. If you turn the hourglass over, it doesn’t change a thing. You’d have to turn it sideways and catch a grain of sand in the neck, just as it was about to fall.”

A grain of sand caught in the neck of an hourglass — that was the freedom Amanda Hollis dreamed of.

II

All the evidence that could be gleaned from the genealogists’ box suggested that William Croswell entered this world in 1760 and left it in 1834. Amanda Hollis rifled through the letters, diary entries, certifications, recommendations, leases, and receipts that composed the life in between.

It seemed to have been an extremely boring seventy-four years. At least at first glance. A second glance, however, made matters worse, for once Amanda Hollis had taken William Croswell from the box and spread him across the table, she was confronted with the story of his student life at Harvard, by another person whose dreams were silently trickling away in another part of the archive. Classifying exam results, course schedules, sick notes, more letters, more bills, more certificates. But in any case, on April 21, 1780, William Croswell tried his hand at an ode to astronomy in Latin.

The rest of the day was nothing but vile unpacking and tedious sorting, and when Amanda Hollis finished the task in late afternoon, William Croswell lay before her in what were now 526 pieces on her desk. He reminded her of the windowpane lying on the floor of her dorm room all those years ago. With one major difference: this time the goal was actually to put the puzzle together again — and it was her job to do it.

And what else was she supposed to do? The room she’d been assigned didn’t have any windows, and the world around her was made of paper. Those were her prospects, and had been for seven and a half years. And in all likelihood, nothing about her situation would change in the next thirty.

When Amanda Hollis clambered up out of the hole in the ground and onto the meadow that formed the roof of the subterranean library just after 6 p.m., for a moment she hoped for a catastrophe; for fire, people praying, screams. But all she saw were two students arguing about something incomprehensible in the rain, and a bus that she boarded to head back to her apartment, where she was welcomed by a fat, fleshy pumpkin grinning at her from the doorstep, as if he wanted to show her that there was just one thing glowing a deep orange here today.

Just before eight on the following day — it was a Friday, and it had rained the whole night through — Amanda Hollis crept back into the concrete bunker, which was the keystone of all of the ambitions she’d never had, and when she opened the door to her office, she discovered another box on her desk.

It didn’t look any different from the two that she’d received yesterday, except that there was a label stuck to this one with the words “William Croswell, book-title cataloger, Harvard College Library.”

He must really have had a frightfully boring life.

But that didn’t change anything, in fact it confirmed things, since that’s what she, Amanda Susan Marie Hollis, was there for: to furnish even the most boring life with grandiose keywords, to write them neatly on the notecards known as catalog cards here in Pusey, which were always exactly three by five inches in size.

That was the space that Amanda Hollis had to fill. The space where she could run riot. The keywords themselves helped to ensure that she didn’t get carried away — and the fact that the goal was to generate an index not only with which the glorious history of Harvard and its library could be researched and recounted but with which the advances in book-title cataloging could be commemorated, together with the corresponding heroic acts achieved with the pen.

But even if no one cared and William Croswell was just an insignificant building block in the hallowed halls of Harvard, it was her duty to expand the university’s registry, and to index any life that had served Harvard’s greatness. Even if it was 129 years ago, utterly devoid of interest, and pulled from the paper crypt of some genealogical society in the form of a cardboard urn.

Furthermore, the head of the archive — a short, parchment-colored man who answered to the name Heath Cover Evil and never slept and rustled like crêpe paper as he roamed through his empire at night — had gotten access to her office in her absence and placed a challenge in the form of box number three on her desk. And he didn’t leave it at that but also took the opportunity to put a note on the genealogical society box that read: “Re. WC IA ur ur ur!” which undoubtedly meant “Require William Croswell index for an article, urgent, urgent, urgent!”

Amanda Hollis took the sticky note, put it on her forehead — whether out of protest or as a sign of resignation, she herself didn’t know — and turned her attention to the newly arrived box number three. Besides the label, it was identical to the others, a 10 by 15 by 4.5 – inch cardboard box in mouse gray with a flap at the front, absolutely rectangular, and according to the inscription: acid-free and alkaline-buffered.

Amanda Hollis opened the flap and brought the remains of William Croswell, book-title cataloger, to light. Then she counted how much of his librarian existence had been preserved. There were 388 files amounting to a life’s work of 914 sheets of paper. All the way at the bottom of the box, Amanda Hollis found a banknote in the sum of one hundred British pounds, issued by the Bank of England.

Maybe, she thought, just maybe William Croswell didn’t have such a boring life after all.

When she was finished sorting and had paginated all of the sheets — that is, counted them through and written the number in pencil in the upper right corner — Amanda Hollis remembered the note that was still stuck to her forehead.

For a moment she considered leaving it there so that later at home she could stand in front of the mirror with it to show herself what she really did down here, how she was spending her life. But then she thought that that wasn’t a good idea, pulled the note off, crumpled it together, opened the lids of the two other boxes in front of her on the desk, closed her eyes, made a waving motion with her hand — and threw. Then she closed the lids and opened her eyes. The note had disappeared.

And so Heath Cover Evil’s instructions to write keywords and create an index met their end; deciphered, crumpled, and transformed into the invisible lucky charm in a shell game without shells. While Amanda Hollis sat on her stool, staring at the world map above her desk instead of focusing on the paper before her, it became clear to her that Heath Cover Evil not only had no desire to personally sail the shallows of William Croswell’s paper life; he also had no reason to. After all, he had her, Amanda Susan Marie Hollis — which was also the reason he could pressure her.

“I’m the perfect justification for Heath Cover Evil,” thought Amanda Hollis, “a catalog crone who functions as a stooge.”

Since she was criticizing herself through the eyes of others anyway, she added: “With William Croswell, my fate is complete. Because what is a trained library scientist with experience in keyword-writing good for in an underground archive, if not to outline the works of a man whose mission in life apparently consisted in providing a complete index of books in the Harvard library?!”

And since that still wasn’t enough (and Amanda Hollis believed she could hear the rain running down the outside of the bunker walls):

“Heath Cover Evil doesn’t just want me to set down William Croswell’s life in writing, I’m also supposed to help him find the two or three documents in the entire heap of banalities that reveal the special achievements in the life of this book-title cataloger. However, these special achievements didn’t actually exist, and if they did, then as nothing more than the highlights to be found in every librarian’s existence, just as depressing as they are dry.

“But that doesn’t matter to Heath Cover Evil. He’ll use the documents to turn the life of a paper tiger into an exciting epic, to show everyone that even people whose life’s purpose is catalog-card inscription can be vitalized by the spirit of Harvard.”

Amanda Hollis considered this trick to be as surreptitious as it was clearly destined for her, and — do what she would — she collided with it head-on. Maybe, she thought, doing nothing at all was the best thing she could do. That is, to nurture her ignorance while making the most of her own special talent (which is to say, her own irrelevance).

In any case, Heath Cover Evil’s intentions were clear, and even his petty insults couldn’t elude Amanda Hollis’s decryption skills. The one thing that remained undisclosed was the planned publication venue, but Amanda Hollis would soon figure that out too, because she remembered that the note she threw into the box had “The Register” printed on it — a title that she recognized as an abbreviation and a presumption at once. It stood for a journal whose full name was The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, and it could only be concluded that Heath Cover Evil’s article would be published in that very journal, as a sort of payback for the gift from the genealogical society, the quid pro quo of ancestry researchers, which completed the circuit and gave Amanda Hollis the sneaking sense of being part of a story that arrived in cardboard boxes, and consisted of nothing more than a pile of paper bound by nothing more than a coterie of old men.

III

The path to the archive’s archive, or, as Amanda Hollis referred to it, “the basement,” led from her office to the left, down a long hallway behind whose thin walls a host of archivists sat in windowless rooms before mountains of paper, through a squat lead-gray door behind which a spiral staircase drilled down into the depths.

When Amanda Hollis opened the door, a spotlight ignited above her. It was located directly above the lintel and cast its circle of light down into the depths, as if it weren’t merely illuminating the way but commanding her to follow.

The staircase that twisted down into the basement before her consisted of coarse mesh steps that fanned before her feet, turning her step for step around their axis. At their center, the steps were welded to a thick beam, and they grew wider toward their exterior edge. Instead of the usual zinc gray, they glowed a deep honey yellow, and had Amanda Hollis taken a closer look, she would have noticed that the steps looked like the wings of a species of insect from far in the future.

But Amanda Hollis didn’t have an eye for the futuristic features of ferrous fabrications, she only had eyes for the three sloppy joes that she carried down into the basement day for day wrapped in aluminum foil, as if they were prisoners in the catacombs of some secret prison, delinquents on their final journey back into the dust, condemned, biding out their final day. Here the executioner awaited them, eager to do his work, far from any official version of history, illuminated only by the glittering light of a noonday sun in the rear courtyard of the order-and-obedience-steeped School of the Americas.

And yet, as little as Amanda Hollis had an eye for what lay at her feet did she have any thoughts in her head, at least none that didn’t concern food, which is why, day for day when she arrived at the bottom, she sat on the second-to-last step, and began, without further ado, to unwrap sloppy joe number one.

What followed was usually a full-throated “Mmm!” accompanied by one last glimpse at the denuded sloppy joe in her hands, a mouth opening wide in anticipation, and two eyes closing in readiness.

Then Amanda Hollis took a bite. And another and another, until it was over. She had twenty minutes. She needed only nine. Three for each sloppy joe she gobbled down. With her mouth. In the basement. In the underground library. A hole in a hole in a hole.

Yet this was the only space that kept her grounded, the place she had retreated for her breakfast each day now for nearly seven years, and, moreover, the only place in Nathan Pusey’s entire damned subterranean library where she didn’t have to deal with files. They were all safely locked in big iron cabinets lined up on the wall like gigantic, silent watchmen whose task was to gather all of the files for the purpose of their ultimate destruction.

But while she was eating breakfast, Amanda Hollis wasn’t interested in the cabinets and what was inside them. Instead, she concentrated wholly on her sloppy joes, and in such a moment of anticipation and rapture, she would never have thought, never could have thought that the thing laying warm and soft in her hands was perfectly analogous to the prisoners of the cabinets. Her sloppy joes weren’t made of paper, after all, but ground beef, tomatoes, and onions, with watchmen made of white bread instead of iron.

In other words, for Amanda Hollis, the basement was home to her stomach, not her head, which belonged in the room above her, in the room of cardboard boxes, paper, and ink. That was the room of keywords, this was the room where she could stuff herself unimpeded. Which was another reason why she came here every day. She simply didn’t want anyone to watch how she gobbled down one sloppy joe after the next. Not even the woman she was fifteen feet overhead could see her. So she had to become someone else down here. In the basement. And be that person for at least twenty minutes.

And why not? The basement was Amanda Hollis’s alternate universe, her fleeting empire, and even if she had bitten into an apple instead of a sloppy joe, she still wouldn’t have gone outside like the other archivists up above to eat her breakfast on the benches that stood on the roof of the subterranean library. Not least because the hurried scrambling out of the concrete bunker for the purpose of food intake always seemed so depressing to her, even more so the subsequent return to their windowless rooms.

So Amanda Hollis went down to the basement to be alone with her three sloppy joes. The fact that she ate them all immediately and at the end of her feast, that is, after nine minutes, was not only alone but also lonely; well, that’s also part of the story. She always had eleven minutes left during which she could collect the discarded foil wrappers and listen to her stomach digesting — then take the spiral staircase upward, which had something liberating to it after her binge.

Rather than anything out of the ordinary, then, it was a part of a nearly seven-year-old tradition that on November 1, 1963, Amanda Hollis descended the staircase to sit on the second-to-last step, stretch out her legs, and set about biting the head off the first of her three sloppy joes. Or the tail, you really couldn’t tell. It also didn’t matter, because right at the moment in which sloppy joe number one was supposed to be beheaded (or betailed), someone said “Hello” and asked if she knew that America was in great danger.

“No,” said Amanda Hollis with her mouth wide-open, her teeth about to sink deeply into the bun and tomato – onion – ground beef mush in front of them.

But she didn’t make it that far. At least not at that moment, for Amanda Hollis pulled the trembling sloppy joe from her mouth and looked around to see who was speaking to her.

All alone, no one was to be seen, just the pipe that traversed the room at hip height from the opposite wall, as big around as a tire. It didn't look like there was anyone sitting on it or crouching on it today, either. All Amanda Hollis could do was stare at the fiberglass insulation wrapped around the pipe and its thin quilted coat of aluminum foil. The texture was only interrupted at one point on the underside of the pipe, where a little ventilation grate had been installed.

Luckily the voice was so polite as to pause without asking any more questions, and only when Amanda Hollis stood up and pressed her ear to the pipe to make sure that she was hallucinating did she learn that America was endangered by a horde of Mongolian worms who threatened to rob it of its history in order to write it anew.

“Oh,” said Amanda Hollis, listening to the fiberglass-aluminum surface begin to crackle under her ear. “I’m hallucinating.”

“No,” said the voice in the pipe.

“Oh,” said Amanda Hollis for the second time. And then: “I have to get to William Croswell, it’s urgent.”

IV

“Nine hundred fourteen sheets of paper and a hundred British pounds — that’ll get me back to normal again,” Amanda Hollis swore as she sat down at her desk and tried to get a grip on a clear thought. But all she could get a grip on was sloppy joe number one, which had already imagined itself pardoned, and whose left flank Amanda Hollis now bit away with a grunt. And then the right — and then it was all over.

Chewing calmed Amanda Hollis, and soon she was sure what had happened in the basement was a hallucination, and the voice’s “No” was a hallucination within the hallucination.

And if that’s not what it was, then it was just an unhappy coincidence, and someone had crept into the neighboring basement room and shouted into the pipe. Which of course brought up the question of who would do something like that and why.

Amanda Hollis thought about it. She knew that the only access to the other basement rooms was via the door at the other end of the hallway, which was just as squat and lead gray as the one she marched through day after day to have her breakfast. But there was a difference: the other door was locked, and besides Heath Cover Evil and the janitor, no one had a key. On the other hand, even if someone had gotten access in some way or another to the other basement rooms of the subterranean library, there was still the question of why he would take advantage of the space to shout into a pipe.

Of course, the basement wasn’t exactly the most intuitive choice for breakfast either, but the more obvious course of action is to open your mouth in order to fill it, rather than to spout strange communiqués about Mongolian worms without warning. Aside from the question of how the person who crept inside knew that the pipe was down there, and that it was available and technically capable of transmitting such nonsense — by means of an open end or some other mechanism. Amanda Hollis wanted to eat her three sloppy joes in peace, she wasn’t in the mood to grapple with any Mongolian hordes, whether they posed a threat to America or not.

Though that business about a threat must have been a joke. Or better said: a joke within a joke, which was rather close to the notion that this was all actually a hallucination that wouldn’t disappear from her head for some reason, and so it had said “No.”

Anyway, even if the whole thing wasn’t a delusion, that meant someone had actually made their way into the basement rooms on the other side and found the pipe — but why in the world would you speak into it? And then say such complete nonsense? Why? Because he wanted to play a joke? Then it could only be a student. The subterranean library’s reading room two floors above was swarming with them, and even in William Croswell’s days, they’d already amused themselves driving the librarians to distraction. For example, by taking a skeleton from the Prehistoric Institute into the reading room, and putting it on a chair during one of their many breaks. And at the end of the day, no studying accomplished, they hung it from the ceiling, certain that during his nightly forays through the library William Croswell would stumble across it, gleaming and glistening in the light of his lantern …

Even if now, 129 years later, the Prehistoric Institute no longer existed at Harvard, history determined the course of things in the university archive. The basement door on the other side may have been locked, but new and entirely different doors were open to the students’ shenanigans. In fact, Nathan Pusey’s subterranean library was directly connected to three adjacent libraries — Widener, Houghton, and Lamont — via a series of tunnels, which, especially for freshmen, their snub noses stuck in thick introductory textbooks in the neighboring Lamont Library, must have seemed like an invitation to set their reading aside and wander over to Pusey to scare some of the “mole people” there.

And even if they didn’t make it that far, there was still the possibility that the little idiots could shout into the pipe directly from Lamont, in the well-founded hope that someone would hear them.

In fact, no library was required to deliver such ridiculous messages and conjure up America’s downfall. Nearly all of the university buildings at Harvard were connected by a branching three-mile-long system of tunnels and hubs, traversed not only by heat ducts, telephone cables, and electrical wires but once also by a Nazi spy.

At least that was the story heard sooner or later by everyone who worked underground at Harvard. And its ending wasn’t exactly heartening, because even the FBI agents who pursued the spy back in 1939 didn’t manage to catch him.Aware that they were at his heels, he simply ran into one of the university buildings on the Charles River, climbed into one of the subterranean tunnels, and never appeared again. All attempts to locate him were fruitless.

A quarter century had elapsed in the meantime and the war had been won despite the escaped spy, but the story preyed on Amanda Hollis’s mind. It showed her that for someone who was neither a Nazi spy nor pursued by the FBI, but simply a little idiot driven by preposterous ideas, it would be easy to cause trouble and confusion underground. All the more because the libraries at Harvard weren’t just connected by a series of tunnels but also by a clandestine tangle of tubes, some for the purpose of heating, others for delivering books, to say nothing of those that were intended (or at least used) for talking to each other, or sending pneumatic letter deliveries, though many of these possibilities were irrelevant to Amanda Hollis’s basement and elsewhere in Pusey due to a lack of egress options. Really, the customary functions of a pipe were not germane here: only the rain mattered, which had to be transported away. Not into someone’s mouth, but into the sewer system.