The Secret Library

Brian Gibson || Fall 2024

THE BOOK CLUB was the first Thursday of the month at someone or other’s apartment, Wright had said. “Nobody really knows whose it is, as far as I know, and I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway. They’ve got free food, and that’s about all I need to know.” He said that the book club would be a good way for me—he always called me by my last name, Quayle, giving our conversations the air of two jocks barking encouragement at one another—to pick myself up, meet some people, maybe even find himself a literary girlfriend who would take my silence to indicate some deeper layer of mystery or at least an interesting bundle of trauma to unpack.

I, unfortunately, would have made a decidedly unliterary boyfriend, and thus was unsure as to my qualifications for the book club. Wright found me in college a pathetic freshman, with neither the academics nor the athletic prowess to make up for the absence of the other, and made me his personal charity case. He introduced me to his first employer, having interned with them the previous summer, told me which movies to watch, how to speak to others, how to feel and act as though I had some inherent worth that others ought not ignore. Wright nudged me along as gently as his gregarious nature allowed, with constant claps on the back and loud outbursts of enthusiasm that made him seem like he was always wrestling for control, expanding to occupy the dominant position. He loved to feel like he was helping others. I knew he would be a father one day, and probably a good one.

He had helped me. In fact, up until recently, my own job had paid a good bit more than even Wright’s. This fact had confounded the both of us. Wright would never admit it but it had bothered him. And then I was laid off. Ushered into a slick lacquered office, handed a thick packet of documents and a Bankers box, all of it pared down to perfect efficiency so as to get me out there as soon as possible to enjoy the beautiful weather. Wright sprung into action as soon as he heard through a mutual friend. Always energized by crisis, he attacked the problem as he always did, with relentless pushes toward self-improvement so that the same misfortune would not befall me twice. Carrot and unspoken stick.

Now here I was, chasing the carrot, walking to someone or other’s apartment. Neon-traced signs, offensive T-shirts and garishly dressed mannequins caught in my peripheral vision, blending into kitsch soup. Shop windows showed me my tinted reflection. I had worn my nice pair of jeans and a navy blue sweater, and I thought I looked nice.

The apartment was located above a nightclub, now deserted, up five flights of stairs. The door was answered by a blonde woman also dressed in a sweater, with a wide radiant smile right out of an orthodontist’s commercial. I began to introduce myself.

“Oh, no dear!” the woman laughed. “We don’t do names. We find it distracts from the discussions.”

I spotted Wright across the room, who caught my gaze and gave me a quick nod.

“Oh! Do you know each other?” the woman asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “We met in college.”

“How nice! You don’t see friends sticking together like that.”

While it was more that Wright had stuck to me than we had stuck together, all I said was, “Yeah, it is nice.”

More book club members filtered in, all greeted by the blonde woman who found something to compliment in every one. They each received their compliments graciously, if a bit uncomfortably, quickly removing themselves from conversation to find their place in the living room with Wright and me. None of us spoke and suddenly there was an atmosphere of anticipation, equally to be relieved of the awkwardness of being stuck without conversation as to begin the content of the meeting.

Once the woman was finally satisfied with the attendance, she sat down on the sofa and clapped her hands together. “I don’t know about you all, but I found this month’s selection particularly enlightening. But I’ll save my thoughts. Who would like to start our conversation?”

It was only at this moment that I stumbled on the retrospectively obvious realization that I had not read any of what they would be discussing. In fact, I did not remember having received any reading material at all, either from Wright or from the other members of the group. I would have to make like I used to in school and lie through my teeth. Maybe I could mention how evocative I found the writing style—a perennial favorite. A few other members of the group seemed to be in the same boat, trying their best to hide their sudden panic.

But it was Wright who began the conversation, seeming entirely calm and self-possessed as always. “I found the style haunting in how true-to-life and yet surreal it was. Especially in the passage near the end where the narrator is hiding from his father in the forest.”

“Yes!” exclaimed the woman. “That passage was a favorite of mine.” She pulled a slim novel from a coffee table beside her and flipped to a dog-eared page. “‘And now the sun was setting, plunging beneath the horizon and sending out its waves, and soon the mice and the hawks and the wolves would arrive to scavenge and devour whatever they could find, but not me. I knew if they saw me, they would realize that I was one of them, that I knew their secret language. My name echoed in the distance, growing further and further, and I imagined that as it grew more distant that I was simultaneously growing more and more distant from my name. Perhaps I was now growing a new name and would have no choice but to shed my old one like snakeskin.’ I think this passage represents a wish to return to one’s most primitive instincts, which seems to be a running theme.”

Another member of the group chimed in, “My interpretation was more the reverse. I viewed it as a wish not to become more like our most primitive selves but to escape the abuse by his family by the most convenient means available. A push, rather than a pull. The presence of nature helped form that wish to escape, but it was merely the vehicle rather than the desired end.”

The woman seemed slightly annoyed by the correction. “Well, yes, but don’t you think that kind of abuse limits the possibilities for self-expression? When you look at it like that, it makes perfect sense to long for an outlet for free expression. That was what I meant by a return to instinct. I meant that the narrator wants to express himself, and instinct is the metaphor for that expression.”

Now there was something strange urging me to speak, some spectral hand guiding me on, like Wright always would in these situations. “I have to say as a disclaimer, I didn’t read the book for this month. I don’t think anyone even told me what it was. But it sounds to me like what the narrator wanted more than anything was power. That includes the power to express himself, of course, but it’s broader than that. He fantasizes that he is akin to the hawks and the wolves, if not the same as them, and why is that? Because they have the power to inflict violence, while he doesn’t. That’s why the nature metaphor is crucial here. Rather than simply imagining himself escaping abuse, he imagines himself with the power to both protect himself from it and inflict it if he wishes by knowing the secret language of violence that the predators possess.”

Both the man and the woman who had spoken before looked displeased, probably because they knew my interpretation was more correct than either of theirs. “You said you haven’t even read the book?” the man interjected. “How could you know that?”

“You’re right, I can’t,” I said. “I’m just telling you what that passage by itself means to me. If you don’t agree with my interpretation, that’s perfectly fine by me.”

“Fine,” said the man. “We can agree to disagree.”

That would have to suffice as resolution, but I knew privately that he had the advantage of experience. I recognized something of myself in the passage, a younger me who had lived in Maine as a child. Our house had been surrounded by forest, situated in a clearing connected to the main road by a long dirt path, a small divot in the otherwise unblemished forest. I had been preternaturally good at hiding, always wedging myself into impossible crevices and scaling trees with a dexterity that amazed me in retrospect. I often hid in the forest when the rest of the family was kicking up a storm in that small house in the clearing, where it would have been impossible to escape the noise. I knew how the narrator must have felt, enveloped by pine leaves and branches reaching in every direction, making it impossible to sit comfortably in any position. But that was not me anymore. When I thought of my childhood, I thought of myself as an entirely different person then, an old friend who I had long since cut ties with. I did not hide anymore because why would I? That was why we could never possibly understand one another now.

I managed to gather that the novel was about an old man reflecting on his life, as seemed to be in vogue in literary fiction. I had never had much interest in these kinds of novels, mostly because they tended to end up becoming achingly, boringly self-aware. But the group seemed to have been entirely engaged by the novel. I learned that the narrator, like myself, had grown up in a New England small town and had attended college in the same area as I had. He had unexpectedly met the woman he would marry while visiting his mother at his childhood home and when his mother died six years later, he inherited the house and made a good life in the house he had grown up in. The novel ended when the man was on his deathbed, surrounded by his children, an idyllic end to an overall good life. In between, the novel skipped around in time, pairing scenes of the end of his life with scenes of the beginning, the timeline split in half and tied together in parallel, leading down to the point that would unite the halves.

“But we have to talk about that twist,” said the woman. “The murder. I never saw it coming.”

The murder?

“To be honest, I found the twist a bit cliché,” said another club member. “Of course you can’t have a novel with too much happiness, so you have to counterbalance it with something shocking. It felt like the coward’s way out.”

“But it made sense,” said yet another member. “I felt like there was a disconnect between how afraid the narrator was in the early scenes and how self-assured he was in the later ones. It would take something shocking to produce that big a change in personality. Perhaps killing his father was the only way he could make peace with his inner demons.”

I felt a sudden wave of nausea, so strong that it overwhelmed all rational thought, my vision swimming like a gold-hazed dream. It made no sense; it was nonsense. The book club was reading an anonymized version of my life, there was no mistaking it, not just my life up to now but my entire life, end to end, no, no, no, it was nonsense! I often felt that his life was punctuated with episodes of dissolving logic but now I knew it to be true, and only one other time, when I was a child back in that cabin in the clearing, had an episode been as strong as what I was experiencing now. And in such episodes, there was nothing to be done but to take them on their own terms and hope to emerge on the other side unscathed.

The conversation was unbearable and yet I managed to contribute with a voice that was not my own, dry and professorial.

“I didn’t get the sense the narrator was self-assured in the later scenes. To me, he seemed like he was keeping up an act. He was fleeing what he had done by seeking a life of complete normality, achieving the American Dream in hopes of absolution, or at least to make the act of murder worth the cost.”

None of the other members mentioned, or even seemed to remember, that I had not read the book I was now discussing with greater authority than any of them. Soon enough, I was leading the conversation. The group decided that although they found the patricide reprehensible, they understood the narrator’s motivations on an intellectual and even something of an empathetic level. The disagreement centered around whether the man ought to have confessed his sins on his deathbed. The more hard-nosed members argued that he should have, but I successfully introduced the argument that to do so would be to destroy the illusion the narrator spent decades weaving. Doing so, most agreed, would not have benefited anything but the narrator’s conscience and would have been cruel to his children, who would be left to live with the secret that their father was a murderer. The greater sacrifice was to do what the narrator did and carry the secret to the grave, allowing his loved ones the chance at a perfect life that he was denied.

Soon enough, the meeting adjourned. Before I could race out the door, I was stopped by the woman at the door.

“I won’t keep you too long,” she said, “but I just wanted to say I was impressed with your contributions today. It’s not often that we get a new member as enthusiastic as you right out of the gate.”

So many questions threatened to burst forth. If one came, then so would a thousand more, but all I said was, “Thanks. I enjoyed the book.”

“You know, we have something of a tradition. Whenever we get a new member, they can help pick the book for the next month. If you’re interested. Maybe you have a favorite!”

I nodded wordlessly. What was there to say to that? I would not take her up on her offer. When the dissolving logic tried to extend its hold over you, all you could do was say no. Once it was over, it could not have you again unless you let it.

The next time I saw Wright, he was ablaze with chatter about everything that crossed his mind: his new position, his new girlfriend, his new apartment, all the new, expensive things. He was typically an attentive listener but now it was an effort to redirect the conversation back to the book club. Now I thought of it as I did all my other episodes of dissolving logic: a few real details embellished by hallucinations and false memories like the twisted corridors of a dream. But I had to know which details were the real ones. I told him I had shown up to the book club drunk, that I had blacked out and was trying to piece together the night.

“Seriously, dude? You’re the smartest drunk I ever met then. Maybe you ought to do it more often.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “Tell me everything that happened that night.”

The details were all exactly as I remembered them. The novel had indeed contained all the same details of my life up to now, I had indeed led a very strange discussion on a book I had never read but seemed to completely understand, and I had indeed looked exactly as sick as I felt as I rushed out of the apartment that night.

“Thanks,” I said. “I guess I hadn’t actually forgotten as much as I thought I did. I sort of assumed I was misremembering, but it was actually just that weird.”

Wright looked puzzled, leaning forward on his fist. “I didn’t think it was weird? Aside from you, I guess. You were a wreck, but other than that.”

“You didn’t think the book we read was weird at all?”

“Not particularly,” said Wright. “I thought it was fairly tame, actually. You want weird, try something Eastern European. They all seem to have sworn off punctuation entirely.”

“I don’t mean the style!” I said, exasperated. “Don’t you think the details line up a little too closely with—” I hesitated. Wright knew almost none of my childhood in Maine. In fact, I told him I had grown up in New Mexico, in the middle of the desert, simply because I feared one day he would go looking for my family, that he would not like what he found. So far, he had never pried about my home life, and whether it was out of respect or obliviousness, I didn’t particularly care and was grateful regardless.

“Never mind,” I said. “I think I was just way out of it that night. Making a big deal out of nothing. Anyway, what did you think of the book?”

“I liked it well enough,” he said, and I could hear him gearing into book review mode. “I thought it was interesting, anyway, which I guess is about as much as you can ever ask for. Hated the main character though.”

I was surprised to hear such a definitive statement of rejection from him. “Why is that?” I asked.

“All throughout, he was so passive. Life just happened to him and then he died. The only decision he ever made in the whole book was to kill his father, and then he can’t even face up to what he’s done. He spends the rest of his life running from it. I suppose I understand why, but like God, have a little backbone. If nothing else, it would have made it a bit less boring.”

Despite myself, I felt affronted, which surprised me even further. Somewhere along the line, I must have begun to identify myself with the narrator, which was ridiculous. Perhaps this was the start of another episode, or perhaps the episode had not ended since that night. While our pasts were the same, our futures were not guaranteed to align. I could decide to become a different person, so why did I feel that that desperate old man was already a foregone conclusion? I took a long sip of my coffee, hoping it would help me to recenter, but I felt myself slipping further into the episode and the coffee turned flavorless and ashen in my mouth.

The reason I was destined to become that character was that I was just as passive as Wright derided the old man for being. I knew that and I knew it was unlikely to change. But I had not known how Wright hated it. All this time, I’d naively thought that he might have been helping me out of compassion or simply to bolster his conscience. Now I knew the reason he had involved himself so deeply in my life was that he hated my passivity. It was a part of me he wanted to uproot and starve out. Our relationship was based only in contempt and condescension. I saw this now. When he looked at me, there had always been a hint of pity in his expression that I convinced myself not to notice. But I saw it now; it was all I could see.

“Don’t you think that when we hate someone, we only hate what we recognize in ourselves?” I asked.

“That’s silly. I guess some people might think so but I don’t. I think it’s also possible to hate what’s fundamentally opposite to you. There’s no inherent connection there.”

Wright was uncompromising as always, entirely unwilling to spare my feelings. I listened to him talk about all his new things and congratulated him—“Well, isn’t that something!”—seething the entire time at the betrayal. No, it was not a betrayal. He had never been dishonest in his intentions; I had simply refused to see them. He had always seen me as peripheral to himself, an object to be acted upon. He had never been able to understand me as I could understand him. I have always known exactly who he was.

I did not leave my apartment for weeks. The episode stretched on and on, and by now I was beginning to forget how I had felt before the onset of the dissolving logic. There were a few voicemails from friends of mine as well as from Wright, which I admit gave me a masochistic pleasure. The only one I spoke to was the woman from the book club. I told her everything, every last secret I had stored up over the years, and she heard all of it with the same unsurprised, accepting smile. She assured me she had known almost all of it beforehand, and what she didn’t know was of no consequence at all. I asked her how she knew it all.

“It’s all in the library, honey!” she exclaimed. “Everyone’s got a book somewhere. I collect them, keep them safe from who knows who.”

“Are they all novels like mine?”

“Oh no, not at all! I’ve seen plays, songs, pamphlets, poems, self-help books, menus, you name it.”

“Does Wright have a book?”

“You mean your friend, the loud one? Yes, he does! It’s quite a good one, too.”

So we assigned the book. The voicemails kept coming in, first tentatively, then all in an onslaught, angrier and angrier. I listened to them and then deleted each one.

I was the first to arrive at the club meeting, greeted as always by the blonde woman. Next to arrive was the disagreeable man, who sat across from me so that it was a challenge to avoid accidentally making eye contact. The other members arrived one by one, snacking on tortilla chips and waiting for the woman to give us our go-ahead. Last to arrive was Wright, haggard and angry. I waited for him to look in my direction, to acknowledge that I had won but he refused, steadfastly avoiding my gaze.

It was a member I had never seen before who began the meeting today. “I enjoyed this month’s novel. I found the main character quite charming, actually.”

The main character was indeed charming, an all-American boy whose problems never seemed to outgrow him. That was, until he left for college and met a friend. A shy, unassuming boy, the hero sought to make him his personal project. They did everything together, always sneaking onto the roof of their dorm and sending beer bottles sailing in perfect arcs onto the grass below. But one day, many years later, he found that the old order had somehow fallen away when he hadn’t been looking. His old friend had somehow grown to hate him, and set about dispassionately uprooting everything in his life. His girlfriend accused him of cheating on her, he lost his job over a simple “mistake,” a simple shift of a few digits that cost his employer millions, he found all his friends were quick to cut ties where they sensed a sinking ship. In the end, that friend was the only one who remained.

“Really? My reaction was rather the opposite. To be honest, I didn’t care much for the main character,” I said. “I don’t think he deserved what he got, but you always like to see the perfect ones fail, right?”

The blonde woman picked up the book and dusted it off to be returned to a library full of the exact same book, uncountable blank pages in every possible combination.