Free What We Are by Peter Nathaniel Malae Page A

perceptiveness. “I have to get back to the studio and check on the dog.”
    â€œYou have a dog?” she asked.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou should walk us ladies out of the building,” she said, smiling.
    I looked into her plain and pleading eyes, then down into the insane cross-eyed dots of Cookie Monster. “I think you’ll be safe.”
    â€œWhat do you mean by that?”
    â€œI mean what I say, that’s what.”
    There was one coworker who kept me curious about the living people in the library, an old Persian man named Cyrus Rohan who patrolled the nonfiction section. Though he was always polite and overtly humble, you could see from a distance that he was immensely proud. He had the upright posture of a high school football coach, an old-school disciplinarian in some agrarian midwest borough, and his dress, while simple, was orderly, refined. If he wore a sweater, he pulled it down just above his belt; if he wore a collared shirt, it was tucked; every thread of clothing was ironed, and his shoes, a pair of Mervyn’s penny loafers, were spit-shined. And his eyes: always watery, often leaking, the moon-gray iris afloat in a dead yellow pond, the top of the cheekbones marked by two deeply ridged frown lines.
    I knew he had a story, a big one, and I tend to leave people like that alone. Though that’s not totally true; I’ll talk to a paraplegic as if I’ve known him all my life. As if we’d just finished elbowing each other in a pickup hoop game at the YMCA. All to swing against those good-hearted but ultimately lame people who use conversational tongs with the ambulatory challenged. They pull the same deal with the paisa at a Burger King drive-in, talking superslow, like, “That’s ... right. One... Whopper...and...one ...onion...ring,
por... fa ... vor
.”
    So it took me three months before I introduced myself. He was the only employee quieter than me, and I finally couldn’t take it anymore. My opportunity came when I saw the old man stretching dangerously for a top shelf. I myself had slipped once, so I rushed over. He said no, he didn’t need my help, thank you very much, walked past me and down the aisle of fat dripping fictive memoirsand other items of high-art bellybutton-gazing. He reshelved a coffee-table history book that was practically blocking the aisle and came back with a steel footstool. Passing me, he said, “Excuse me, thank you very much,” and climbed upon it.
    I said, “My name’s Paul.”
    He fingered each poetry book—Lowell, Maio, Mehigan, his face inches from the texts—until he found the book, Millay’s
Collected Sonnets
, its proper place. Then he stepped down, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket with his left hand, snapped it like a football player with a wet towel on a teammate’s ass, dabbed his dripping eye and nose, repocketed the handkerchief, and shook my hand surprisingly firmly with his right unsoiled hand. He swallowed to liquidate his mouth with saliva, the right eye flickered like a dying lightbulb and the whole right side of his face winced in pain. He bowed in that kind of Middle Eastern consummate affirmation where the shoulders dip with the head.
    â€œI am Cyrus. Thank you very much.”
    In the next twenty minutes, Cyrus went on to explain that he had been in the United States for over twenty years. He spoke a poor version of broken English and so I didn’t say a word until I was sure I had his story right. I listened, made easily interpreted gestures. It pained him to speak, not figuratively but literally: he had to fight some kind of facial paralysis to talk, palsy maybe, I don’t know. I sure as hell wasn’t going to ask.
    I decided to offer up a yes or no question so he could at least know I was interested in his life while not forcing him to articulate a response. I asked him if he’d read
The House of Sand and Fog
, and when he shook his head no,