Chapter 38

38

January 30th, 1970. Birthdays are motherfuckers.

I've been celebrating a new year in this way for years. Coffee. Cigarette. Breakfast including a glass of orange juice and an omelet filled with ham, cheese, chives and bacon. I top it with a dollop of sour cream, finishing the poor man's delicacy my grandfather passed down to me when I was nine. I complete this ritual every year in honor of the only man who ever understood my need to write.

Following breakfast, I take a morning walk through the woods, snapping branches from trees and picking the leaves, absentmindedly, like grapes. I pick until I reach my age, 35 this year. Once the last leaf falls to the ground, I sink down into the dirt, calming my mind, engaging in the melodies of nature. So far, it's been a pretty good day.

A ten-pound squirrel comes down from the tree directly across the trail from me. Pulling a handful of sunflower seeds I didn't know I had out of my pocket, I toss one of them in his direction. To my surprise, he doesn't scurry away. Cautiously he approaches the seed, picks it up, sniffs it, and then tosses it into his mouth. Chewing, he comes a bit closer to me.

I toss another. He eats it and approaches.

I toss another. He sits at my shoelace.

Picking one into his mouth he tugs at the string until the laces come undone. Then the squirrel hops ten yards away and looks back at me.

"What?" I ask aloud.

He returns and repeats the process, tugging my lace, and hopping away again.

"So I should just get up and follow you, huh?"

He chirps in agreement.

This is surreal.

Yet I comply and begin following the ten-pound creature further into the forest through a patch of densely packed trees that I would never have entered alone. We travel this way, he stopping every so often to see if I'm still behind him, for half and hour or so until the trees thin into a small gulch.

Walking to the base of the gulch I notice the squirrel is no longer with me. He's climbed back into the trees somewhere, pleased with our journey's end. This must be where he was leading me. But why this gulch?
And I begin to look around. And I notice that lining the faces of the rocks that rise up on both walls surrounding me are shelves that have been built into the rock itself. These shelves contain books, varying in size, shape and age. Some are covered in dust while others seem to have just been placed here. Spread throughout the gulch are several writing desks, some made of wood, others in stone. A few of the desks are occupied with people, men and women scribbling quickly into hardback books. None of them look up or notice my arrival.

A shelf to my left is packed with atlases and travel guides from every city in every country in the world. Those to my right are stuffed with enough literature to occupy every person in those cities around the world for the rest of their existence. Some of these novels are by authors I've never heard of before. I select one from the shelf, slightly a bit above my reach.

The book is by a man named Melton. His biography printed on an insert says he won't be born until 1979, nine years from now. This is his third novel that will be published in 2017.

I start grabbing the newer books from the shelves, frantically flipping through pages, counting off the years of publication. 2213, 1997, 1983; Located here in this gulch is a library containing every book that has been and ever will be written. I rush around and find the section with my novels and realize that the last seven volumes are completely blank No titles, no chapters, no ink to speak of. I pull one of them down from the shelf and head to an empty desk near a small pool of water further down into the gulch.

Spread across the desk are dozens of different colored pens and pencils. Grabbing a green one, I place the pen to paper. Ink spills onto the page in the form of a sentence.

"This is a beautiful library, timed perfectly, lush and American."

A man sitting a few yards away from me at an oak writing table looks up from his manuscript. "Welcome home, Richard. We've been waiting for you."

His voice echoes through the shelves nestled into the gulch.