Free Visible City by Tova Mirvis

use. If he really were a tourist, he’d walk around the building, studying every detail. He’d ride by his office on the upper deck of a red sightseeing bus; the partners at his firm would spot him among the camera-wielding tourists, and for the moment before the bus turned the corner, they’d wonder,
Don’t we know him?
    In accordance with the library’s rules, Jeremy turned off his BlackBerry but wished they’d confiscate it at the door. In the main reading room, he searched for “City Hall Station.” He brought call numbers and titles to the librarian, who sent his request in a pneumatic tube to the miles of stacks underground, in what used to be the underground water system of the Croton Aqueduct, another relic Magellan claimed to have explored.
    In front of him, call numbers flashed across the screen like the ticker of the stock market. As he waited for his books, he glanced at the people around him, to see what they were so fervently studying. A man across from him took frantic notes in a tiny notebook as he read. Jeremy tried to meet his eye, but the man noticed nothing around him. The woman sitting next to him had a pile of books on her lap. On the spine of one of the books, he caught the name La Farge.
    She noticed him staring and looked up in surprise. “Are you studying La Farge?” she asked.
    “Actually, I’m interested in City Hall station,” he said.
    “Oh, then you’re interested in Christopher Grant La Farge. I thought you were interested in his father, John La Farge,” she said. “John La Farge was a brilliant stained-glass artist,” she explained, and described the artist’s use of imperfect glass in whose unpredictable lines and fractures he saw immense beauty. He embedded jewels along the borders, creating a dappled, rough texture that to her mind was superior to Tiffany’s smoother, more perfect surfaces.
    “La Farge was also a mural painter and textile designer, though he was a lawyer by training. His father was dead-set against it, but eventually he ran off to Paris to paint. John was notoriously difficult but he knew his own mind.” He listened as she told him how John had had tensions with his father but had helped his own son launch his career. “If you want to understand the work of Christopher Grant, you should begin by researching the influence his father had upon him.”
    He was lost in her words until, for a moment, his mind found its way back. He would get caught being away from the office. Richard would demand to know his whereabouts. The firm would send search parties.
    “I’m taking up your time,” she apologized.
    “Actually, I don’t have anywhere I need to be.”
    “I assume you’re a grad student?” she asked.
    “I’m at Columbia. I’m studying with Marc Shultz,” he said, pulling out a name he’d come across online.
    “I used to teach at Columbia. I do nineteenth-century American decorative arts. Marc is wonderful. I know him well. What’s your name? I’ve wanted to call Marc anyway. I’ll tell him I ran into you.”
    “Maurice,” he said quickly.
    Seeing the call numbers of the books he’d requested flash across the librarian’s screen, he stood up. Before he walked away, the woman grabbed his arm, though she seemed as startled by her gesture as he was.
    “I don’t know if you’d be interested, but this is something I wrote about John La Farge. It was just accepted by the
American Art Journal
for their fall issue,” she said, and handed him a manuscript copy of her article. He thanked her and put it in his bag for later, then took the pile of books from the librarian.
    He began to read. In the pages of a book called
New York Underground,
the city expanded. The Croton Aqueduct. The labyrinths beneath Grand Central. The steam pipes and atomic tunnels beneath Columbia. The unused Amtrak tunnels under Riverside Park.
    Not even in his mind could Jeremy stay away for long. The impetus to check his BlackBerry was instinctive. Outside the library