Free What We Are by Peter Nathaniel Malae

either. One of the last descendants of Zoroaster,maybe, or an up-and-coming new-age recruit of Baha’i. He probably got out in ’79, or somewhere thereabouts.
    I say, “I’m glad y’all made it.”
    Officer Behbahari nods. “Thank you very much. Ring finger.”
    â€œI once had a friend who was Persian,” I say. “Name was Cyrus.”
    â€œVery popular name. Pinkie.”
    â€œI want to tell you about him.”
    â€œYou be careful with your wounds now.”
    â€œAmazing guy, good old Cyrus.”
    â€œYou have been beaten up very badly. You seem not to know this.”
    â€œWorked with him in a house of books. Wanna hear about him?”
    â€œNot today, my friend.” He snaps the fingerprinting kit shut, taps on my hand almost with compassion. “Okay. You are finished.”

7
I Needed to Stay Out of the Pit of Solitude
    I NEEDED TO STAY out of the pit of solitude after my girl left me in the spring of ’04, and so I’d gotten a job at the Santa Clara Public Library shelving books. If you took away the people who ran the place, it was the best job I’d ever had. I loved pushing the carts down the aisles, flipping through book flaps for leads to a great story, alphabetizing the F–Gr fiction section. I loved sharing a favorite book with a patron, guiding some random high school kid to his first encounter with Steinbeck.
    All the stuff that mattered in that place mattered most to me. I preferred the dead to the living in the library. The only thing redemptive I felt toward my pedantic, punctilious coworkers was sympathy for some kind of physical deformity they endured—
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?
—obesity, unthinkable acne, physics-defying limp, shocking facial tick, sanguine body odor. But I capped it there. I’ve never believed that an ailment of the body should necessarily lead to corruption of the soul.
    They usually had their noses in some digital monstrosity and would meet on Friday nights at Chili’s for amateur-hour karaokewith watered-down, umbrella-shaded, glistening drinks in big phallic glasses. They’d bring back laminated and framed photographs of their forgettable weekends—which were remarkable to them, of epic proportions, worthy of a novel. But I think they vexed my sensibilities mostly because they never read novels, or any books for that matter. They were ensuring that oddballs like themselves wouldn’t have jobs forty years from now in a future where libraries wouldn’t exist.
    It’s just that they were all so skilled in committing energy to events that didn’t matter. They got off on tech logic and star gates of Dewey Decimal systems. They equated violations of library protocol with crimes against humanity, which drove them to the brink of frenzy. They were minutiae fiends, petty. The month-late book (“That’ll be”—giddy-voiced—“let’s see, ninety cents, sir”), the absconded DVD, the indignant patron (“Did you see the veins on his forehead when he said, ‘I don’t care what that computer says I returned the goddamned book last week I made a point to I always do!’”), the pair of smooching teenagers in the juvenile fiction section (“What’s this world coming to? We were just getting into hopscotch, God!”). It required the tiniest phrenological literacy to read the text of my face: these people were wasting precious oxygen.
    One woman named Robin, an aspiring third-grade teacher, made a point to follow me around. She had a designated
Sesame Street
sweater for Dress Down Day. That wasn’t so significant in itself except that she was actually proud of it, proud of the sweater. As one would be of a child, one’s own child. I think she ironed it.
    Once she said, “Why don’t you wait for us after work? You run out of here like you can’t stand the place.”
    I was surprised by her