The Facades: A Novel (12 page)

“You’re not still looking for your wife, by any chance?” asked McCready.

I nodded curtly, annoyed.

“There are certain limits on what we should be interested in,” the Oracle said. He dropped his ice scraper on the hood of
the car. “These past few months may not have been my finest hours in law enforcement.”

“No kidding,” McCready muttered.

“But I would advise you,” the Oracle continued, “to abandon this. And I say that in a friendly way, not in a veiled-threat
sort of way. I would call this case cold. An endeavor of futility and embarrassment. Look what has happened to Detective McCready
and myself. If we had never been involved with your wife’s so-called case, we would never have been forced to employ the unorthodox
methods that angered our superiors. We would not have been tabbed for the bête noire of all assignments, library security.”

“Two words,” McCready explained. “Internal audit.” He scowled. “This is gas station coffee, Norberg.”

It took me a few moments to get it. “How much?”

“I’m thinking whatever’s in your pockets,” McCready said. “And that’s just for the request. No refunds if she doesn’t want
to see you.”

$27.66 got me to the service door. As I waited in the snow, McCready called out: “See if you can get us something to read!
And something with some action.”

“Maybe even a corpse,” the Oracle added.

A
FTER A FEW
minutes the door opened and a thin man in a red ski mask pulled me into the library. He pushed a handgun into my back, frisked
me with masseur’s fingers, and affixed my blindfold. The air was stale. The blindfold reeked of the last inductee’s sweat.
He pushed me through corridors, gently nudging me with his gun muzzle. He led me up a flight of stairs and restored my sight.
I looked to him, the former reference assistant or circulation clerk, for some acknowledgment of the intimacies we’d just
shared. The red ski mask covered everything except two coldly intelligent eyes, refracted through bifocals.

I found myself in the main foyer in front of the request counter. Central’s collection had long ago outgrown its facilities,
and the vast majority of its material was held in subterranean stacks. Patrons left their requests at the long oak counter,
then sat to wait like travelers at a bus station while the slips were conveyed to the pages below via pneumatic tubing. Here
I was at midnight in a room that couldn’t have been much warmer than fifty degrees thanks to our mayor, yet in many ways things
were just as they had been—the humming elementary school clock, the high ecclesiastical windows, the clerk at the counter
looking
overeducated. Bulked up by at least three sweaters, she was reading
Opera as Drama
by flashlight.

“You’re Molly’s husband,” she said matter-of-factly. She paused before saying: “You were a fortunate man.”

“Yes,” I said. “The past tense is key there.”

“Extremely lucky,” she repeated. “I hope you realized it.”

She climbed the stairs, the taps of her flats echoing through the cavernous corridors. I slumped back against one of the wooden
pew-like benches, suddenly tired. I clutched Cassandra Clark’s book to my chest as if to warm it. Half an hour or more passed—the
shadows shifting against the archways, the moonlight glazing the ceiling’s chiseled paeans to knowledge and culture. I could
not have felt more medieval, more in the dark. The high beams of a freight truck outside streaked across the mosaic image
of a scholar: he peered down at my shivering body through his monocle. The vast rooms with their rows of gray reference books
had the dark immensity of graveyards.

At last the librarian returned, her circle of flashlight preceding her across the marble floor. She brought the masked sentry
who went through the motions, with less gentleness this time. He pushed me up a stairway and down a long hall. A door creaked
open and I landed in a surprisingly comfortable chair.

The sentry then retreated to his post. That left only Cassandra Clark and I, by firelight, in matching high-backed chairs.
She’d held up well: her graying bangs and horn-rims framed the same dusky face that I remembered from the college circ desk.
Cassandra cracked the knuckles of hands that had passed me weathered editions of Keats and Byron twenty years ago, for the
Dead Ends of the Romantic Poets seminar.
The wrinkles around her eyes must have been recent. She somehow looked dignified in leg warmers and blue rabbit slippers.

“You must be disappointed in my outfit,” she said. “Molly told me you’re a fan of librarian movies. Have you seen
Indecent Reference
?”

“Um—” So she had known about the drawer, after all.

“I was actually a consultant on that … film,” Cassandra said. “The director, fellow by the name of Van Voyage, felt that a
scrupulous realism would enhance the … effect.” She looked for confirmation, crossing her thin bundled legs.

“Realism is important in these matters,” I murmured.

“I provided some uncredited script doctoring for the notorious overdue fines scene,” she said. “Ah well. A sad man really,
Mr. Voyage. High hopes for himself.”

The room had a darkened elegance—I could only just make out the brass lamps, the portraits of Trudian patriarchs in heavy
frames. The patriarchs’ memoirs had been pulled from the shelves and lay stacked on the mantle. Cassandra took one down, did
a cursory flip-through, and tossed it on the fire, the ribbon bookmark going up in a brief tail of flame.

“You hate to do it,” Cassandra said. “However unnecessary a book may be, it’s a harsh form of withdrawal.”

“The mayor must be laughing somewhere.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope it is amusing
someone
.”

We sat quietly for a long moment. Tall, complicated shadows swirled from the flames in the grate. Finally I told her, in a
mock-casual tone, as if I were just some library patron chatting her up, about my reading of “The Defect” earlier in the day
and the fact that Molly had been reading it the night before she disappeared.
Either from hearing me mention her work or Molly’s name, Cassandra contracted.

“I don’t think I could reread that story,” Cassandra said at last. “I mean it was so amateur, so transparent, so …”

“Autobiographical?” I asked.

She sighed. “Look, Sven, what happened between your wife and me happened twenty years ago. It meant very little to her and
very much to me. Or maybe I should say for her it ended, for me it went on.”

“I thought the story held up pretty well,” I said. “I guess Molly did too. Have you seen her recently by any chance?”

The librarian nodded and removed her glasses, which had fogged from her proximity to the fire. “She called a month before
… in April. It was April Fool’s Day, in fact. I thought she was kidding. I met her a couple of times for lunch, but it was
only in the capacity of an old friend giving advice.”

“Perhaps you advised her to hide out here with you?”

Cassandra shook her head, still wiping her glasses.

“Or to abandon her family without a word?”

“Of course not,” Cassandra said, in a conclusive tone that would have subdued the patrons. Then, more softly, she continued:
“There was a time when I despised you, Sven. That was only because I kept asking myself how she could ever have chosen you.
I must have been an idiot. The answer was simple: you were a man, she thought she could change you. You were an interesting
problem case, this shy withdrawn paranoiac nobody understood. ‘I’m his only human connection,’ she told me once.”

She must have caught my skeptical look in the darkness. “The idea that librarians are more knowledgeable than ordinary people—well,
that’s just a myth, I’m afraid,” she said.

“What about Martin Breeze’s column?”

There was a dense silence. “I saw it,” she said at last. “Our government documents guy is a puzzle freak.”

“And what do you make of it?”

Cassandra swept her glasses through the air. “I took it to mean that she is alive,” she offered cautiously. She closed her
eyes, lay back against the chair. “To be honest I was reluctant to meet Molly when she called,” she said. When Cassandra spoke
again it was half to herself. “I’d worked so hard to erase her. What else could I have done? I censored her, banned her from
my mind. I had made her disappear already, years before she physically … Do you see? I am a strong-willed person and I like
to believe I have some control over what comes in and out of my life, but making Molly disappear was probably the hardest
thing I ever did. When she called me last spring it was like, what? You’re doing
what
to me, barging into my life again? But then I saw how unhappy she was.”

I swallowed. “Did she say anything about …”

“She sounded
restless
to me,” Cassandra said. “There were people who wanted her out of the opera, as I’m sure you know. But there was also this,
I don’t know, a kind of existential restlessness if that makes any sense. She kept saying she didn’t want to die here. But
we all feel like that sometimes, right? Who wants to consider dying in Trude? Nobody. That doesn’t mean she could just leave
you and Kyle.”

“Exactly,” I said, the word coming out in a cloud of breath. “Those are my thoughts exactly. That would be impossible.”

“Then again, I was never an especially good judge of her character.” The fire was out. Cassandra lit a candle and pulled a
wool afghan over her shoulders.

Our breaths mingled, exhalations from two mouths that had kissed Molly’s.

“Sorry it’s gotten so cold,” Cassandra said.

I told her it was all right, explaining about my January birthday, the frigid childhood ski outings my father had taken me
on, my low body temperature. I told her how Molly used to call me Iceberg.

“She used to call me Four-Eyes,” the head librarian replied wistfully, restoring her horn-rims to their perch and blinking
behind the icy lenses.

T
HE
R
INGSTRASSE STILL MADE QUITE AN IMPRESSION AS YOU
approached on I-99, the whitewashed spirals of concrete looming under the night sky. Bernhard had envisioned it as the locus
of a second city, a new downtown for an ideal Trude to replace the declining original. He wanted the mall to look Greek, noting
wryly that the Oracle at Delphi was once surrounded by junk dealers and souvenir sellers. The exterior of the mall was blinding
in its early years. It gave off an almost holy radiance. Later in the seventies, it became a haven for drug abusers and its
white walls were gradually covered with slogans, oblique verse, taunts, vows, band names, tags, secret codes. Mall security
began letting the graffiti slide, and the densely scripted exterior wall became another of the mall’s attractions, even opening
itself to prayers in time. The orchestral pavilion was abandoned, the hanging gardens converted to parking.

“My buildings,” Bernhard wrote in his
Memoirs
, “are like rebellious children who have grown up to disappoint and betray me.”

I had lost my sense of agency during the past months. I no longer “made plans,” it seemed, but instead found myself conscripted
into events. This could be the only explanation of why I found myself in Lilly’s van, en route to a benefit show given by
the young bard Sebastian, staged at the mall’s labyrinthine heart. The Christian rocker had been closing in on me, starting
as unpleasant murmurings in Kyle’s room, then appearing shirtless on his wall, and now blaring from Lilly’s excellent stereo.
The concert was a coup for the cross project and for Lilly, who was friends with Sebastian’s agent back in his preterite pot
smoking days. Rolling into the Ariadne lot, Lilly reminisced about defiling the mall’s concrete exterior, the acrid blast
of fresh spray paint.

As we walked in the west entrance, I had to admit that Bernhard’s detractors had a point. It wasn’t very successful as a mall.
The vast echoing chambers, the blank concrete, exposed the ultimate hollowness of the retail urge. This was especially the
case in the mall’s outer rings, where the large department stores were housed. One tiled path might lead you directly to a
perfume counter, while another curved around to a copper statue of Hermes presiding over a dried-up fountain full of rusty
pennies. We tried to stay on course, but the inner rings of the mall were closed off for the show. As we approached the cordon,
the crowd thickened with sullen loiterers, parents with raised fingers trying to strike a deal, weirdly overage and overweight
male lurkers. “Three tickets, please, please,
please
,” a group of scantily clad twelve-year-olds shouted in our direction, their voices hormonally coiled. We handed our tickets
to a mall cop and were frisked by a security guard in an unflattering yellow T-shirt. As I watched Bob Lilly move through
the crowd of his making, slapping palms, clapping shoulders and backs, whispering into
upturned ears, I realized I had underestimated the man upon first meeting him. Lilly crept up on you. Everything the guy said
sounded a note sharp to me, but there was no question he was an operator, out there fighting for souls, using whatever tools
the culture had to offer him. Lilly was decked out for the concert in a gray hoodie, a frayed jean jacket, and a pair of vintage
bell-bottom cords. As Lilly worked the crowd I wondered why someone so high up the F.C.O.D.P. totem would make so much fuss
over Kyle. There was no purely practical reason for it, but you couldn’t doubt, watching the two of them together, that they
had a personal bond. A stranger looking on would have taken Lilly for the father, and me for the interloper. The crowd was
making me dizzy, like it always did, as we walked toward the mall’s center. This couldn’t have been the kind of cultural event
Bernhard envisioned.

T
HE STORES BECAME
more eccentric as you went in. There was a shop that sold soap shaped like celebrity torsos, a mapmaker peddling joke globes
and plots of cities that didn’t exist, one that sold defective merchandise, and another that offered only models or reproductions
of other commodities. Many owners stood outside their stalls pitching to the passing throngs of Sebastian fans. We passed
Perlmutter’s, where I’d purchased the Bernhard autobiography and most of Kyle’s Christmas presents—some of the old modernist
and existentialist classics I’d stooped and scowled over in high school. Perlmutter’s offered them in used scholarly editions.
At Clara’s desk was an angry bespectacled man with a widow’s peak. The bookstore had a dimming aura of obsolescence.

The hedge labyrinth, usually tranquil relative to the rush of the mall, was crammed. People had lined up ten deep against
the walls, packed so tightly together that I was sure that some fire code was being violated. Sebastian fans had filtered
into the labyrinth itself, from which the view was not good, but boyfriends were hoisting girlfriends on their shoulders,
and others were clambering onto the hedges, their hair wet from the mist that poured down in clouds every fifteen minutes.
There were two levels of balcony on either side, but these areas had been long filled by Sebastian fans who’d been waiting
for hours. He could easily have filled a stadium, but had insisted on playing this space, which he hoped would enhance his
“mythos.” Or so I had read in a
Trumpet
column by Martin Breeze, whose distinctive battered brown leather jacket I recognized from far away.

Breeze looked nervous, his longish lock of gray hair combed to the side. His paunchy body was easy to pick out amid the svelte
teens. He wore thick-framed bifocals that gave his eyes an aquatic look. Breeze hitched up his leather sleeve and checked
his watch. He was a man out of place, always, wanting to get back to his computer, where he could transmute his displacement
into scathing verbs. I wove through the young believers. Wielding their pocket electronica, they took pictures and conferred
by phone. Breeze didn’t recognize me right away, or maybe he was just shocked to meet me on the scene.

“Norberg.” He looked me over wearily. “You chaperoning tonight?”

“In a way.”

“I wish this little divo would get it over with,” Breeze said. He eyed me again. “I saw you on the news the other day. Some
sort of ceremonial book burning. I was pretty surprised to see you’d gone fundie, but it makes sense, considering what you’ve
been through.”

“Actually,” I said, leaning close to Breeze’s ear, “it was Kyle, my son, who was behind all that. I was …”

“Chaperoning.”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t returned my calls,” Breeze said.

“You called?”

He nodded. “You seemed to be getting into it,” he said. “I mean the book burning, on the news. I sympathize. At some point
it is just easier to accept someone else’s metaphysics. It’s too tiring to forge a personal theology. And if everyone did
… well, imagine the chaos.” He watched a couple of young girls jostle for position on a hedgerow. Breeze mused, “Is a personal
theology even possible? Or does it amount to the same terminal paradox as a private language?”

I frowned. “You called?”

“Yes, you should check your messages.” Breeze scanned the auditorium, as if he was about to mention something confidential.
The crowd was about 75 percent teenage girls. “It was something Molly said during our interview. Something that got edited
out.”

At that moment I was blinded from behind by two small hands.

“Guess who.”

Plea wrapped her arms around my neck and exhaled a mist of liquory breath that enveloped us. She wore Molly’s Rotting Kisses
T-shirt and the black sweatpants I’d lent her two months ago. The shirt had lost its shape, the sweatpants stretched to
their limit by Plea’s hips. The outfit was so unsettling that I lost my place in the conversation.

“I … perhaps we could talk later,” Breeze stuttered.

“Introduce me to your friend, Norberg.”

I did and the two shook hands. I felt certain that Breeze could read it all, the sex, the infatuation, the broken code in
my being. His expression seemed quizzical and congratulatory all at once. “Plea is our local baker’s apprentice,” I told Breeze,
feeling a slight buzz from this irrelevant detail, as if I’d just lifted some meaningless trinket from one of the department
stores. Plea squeezed my hand out of Breeze’s view. “Martin’s the music critic for the
Trumpet
, an old friend,” I added, lying again. As Plea pulled at my sleeve, Breeze handed me his business card. He wrote down a date
and time under his name. “Come see me after the holiday,” Breeze said, as Plea pulled me away from him. We flashed our wristbands
to security and went out of the auditorium, through a door and down the hall. I followed her thoughtlessly. Her boot heels
clacked and echoed off the walls. She was taking me toward the bathrooms, I realized. They weren’t easy for just anyone to
find. In fact, in all of Bernhard’s buildings the bathrooms were tucked away as reluctant concessions to human weakness. The
Traumhaus residents all had their own bathrooms but it had taken me months to discover the public restroom in the place, set
off at the back like an outhouse. The Opera House hid theirs up by the second tier balcony, an architectural quirk not much
appreciated by its elderly and hobbled patrons, and you can imagine the line during a Wagnerian intermission.

The women’s lounge was halfway down the hall. Plea took me through the door, her grip almost painful now. The room was brightly
lit: it featured pink furniture and a vanity lined with
bare lightbulbs. The sink was stocked with various exfoliating soaps and small glass bottles of scent. This was not a kingdom
I had ever been meant to enter. Molly had not appreciated it, that time I’d gone into her dressing room.

I didn’t resist as she pushed me into the stall. Plea kissed and groped me and I responded in kind. I told her I’d missed
her, and it was the truth. My wife’s workout clothes rippled from her heaving body, giving my arousal an undercurrent of dread.
It was only when she knelt on the tile and unzipped my pants that I felt the scene skipping out of control, like a strip of
celluloid running off the reels. In the interests of completeness, I should say that it felt too fast. In fantasy these motions
are languorous and relaxed, but Plea was handling me with a sort of brisk violence. It wasn’t bringing pleasure. I felt like
a boss. She was at work, going through a set of motions mechanically. Soon after this realization filtered through my body
and everything went dry, I heard sounds from the stall next to us.

“It’s okay,” I said. “You can stop.”

Her head fell on my thigh and rested there. She still held me in her right hand, while her left hand wrapped around my leg,
and I stroked her hair. The Rotting Kisses T-shirt had torn at the shoulder, exposing a frayed and grandmotherly bra strap.

“I’m sorry,” I said, lifting Plea into my arms.

Back in the labyrinth-auditorium, the crowd was growing impatient for the arrival of Sebastian and they clapped out a steady
4/4. I numbly read the message on the inside of the stall door:
PLEASE DISPOSE OF SANITARY NAPKINS IN THE CORRECT RECEPTACLE
(
THEY STOP UP THE PLUMBING!
). Beneath that someone else had scrawled, in the same accusatory capitals,
THERE IS NO USE IN KILLING ONESELF; ONE ALWAYS DOES IT
TOO LATE
.
We were not alone in there. There was a woman in the neighboring stall crying. Someone had deceived her and left her flailing
and unsure, perhaps. Or she was feeling old and flabby and formless. Who was to say? There were two rhythms, the rhythm of
the claps and the sound of her sobs, and they were slightly staggered, or syncopated, as Molly would have put it. And I wished
I had not thought of the word
syncopated
just then, because I was reminded of precisely how far I had drifted from the context in which that word had meaning. It
was a floating signifier adrift in the perfumed air. There were scrapes, noises. The women were filing in now, forming a line.
I heard their whispered complaints. I saw their white tapered ankles beneath the stall door. Someone, the sobber or us, would
have to go on. I unlatched the door just as the auditorium broke into riotous applause.