The Huron's Bend

Part 5

From my experience, few things bothered an arts major more than questions about her technical proficiency, and I was right. As soon as I said it, she shuffled over to the cluster of terminals, looking sullen. No challenge should go unmet when the opponent sheds light on your deepest insecurity.

She sat down and, to my surprise, started to touch type into the keyboard with the level of fluidity that a stenographer would envy. Clickety clack, clickety clack, carriage return, mouse click, and boom, the answers flashed on the fingerprint-smudged screen. I craned for a look. Some items were checked out just as I'd found, but several were still in the library.

She swiveled the monitor toward me. "Um. It looks like you missed something." Her mouth curled up in a display of churlish contempt. In my haste to get rid of her, compounded by my tepid familiarity with the library system, I'd neglected searching the special collections and dissertation section. "Right?" she said, imitating my testy tone of voice.

"If you knew how to work this, why did you bother to ask me in the first place?" I protested.

Again, the devilish smile. I'd avoided staring at her, but now I couldn't help noticing the pair of amber eyes so devoid of hues that, save for the coal-black limbal rings, it was almost impossible to tell where the irises ended and the whites of the eye began. The sight sent an odd flutter through my chest.

"Well, you can go back to your little siesta now. I don't need your help anymore." She picked up her backpack and strutted away, humming some hard-to-place tune.

I returned to the help desk. Though I tried, the fuss from the brief encounter kept me from going back to sleep, and I spent the next hour fidgeting about. Finally, Mrs. Malone showed up, saw that I had nothing to do, and dispatched me to shelving books in the stacks.

Shelving is as hermetic a job as you can possibly get anywhere. There are few human interactions, no boss looking over your shoulder, and most of the time during the day no time pressure to complete the task at hand. In the stacks there is no one to bother you, to question your worth or to judge the correlation between your ambitions and your successes. In the stacks, you can choose to meditate, or to let your imagination run wild, or even to deliver a grand soliloquy—to yourself—of compiled Java vs. interpreted Python as the computing language of choice, and there would be no one there to disparage you as a loopy nerd. All I needed was to turn on the playlist on my cell, plug in the earbuds, walk the aisles, scan the Dewey decimals on books' spine tags, locate the insertion points, and shelve. The bar was so low that even a flunkie could do it without mistakes.

I chose to pick a book to read. On one of the shelves, I chanced upon a translated biography of Franz Liszt. No sooner had I set eyes on Chapter Two than I sensed other people's presence at the far end of the long aisle. I looked up and saw Smirk Girl talking to Mrs. Malone. As they chatted, they kept glancing in my direction. The attention made me nervous, not so much from the fear that her lodging a complaint with Mrs. Malone would lead to my dismissal as having my earlier incompetence revealed for the world to see. I grabbed hold of the book cart and ducked into an aisle far away on the other side of the large stack room. And for a while, everything was peaceful again. Thinking I was safe from scrutiny, I sat, hidden behind the cart, on the cold linoleum floor, and resumed reading Liszt.

The book turned out to be rather dry reading. The author devoted dozens of pages debating Liszt's ethnic origin. Born in the Kingdom of Hungary and often referring to himself as a Magyar, Liszt spoke fluent French and German. In his early days in Paris, he ran into resistance because he was thought of as a Hungarian, even though he did not speak the language and his ancestry was purely Austrian. It was something I could readily identify with. While over the first several years after my family immigrated my English fluency had improved leaps and bounds, my Mandarin had steadily declined, to the point where these days I mostly conversed with my parents in Fukienese, a southeastern Chinese dialect. As time wore on, Jay Z, Marvel comics, and my undying love for the field of Babbage, Turing, and Dijkstra gradually whittled away at my pre-American self until what was left of my adolescent memory was nothing more than the equivalent of Swiss cheese with holes that could only be partially filled by albums of yellowing old photographs from my childhood. From time to time, like right now, I felt grateful to be reminded that there were people out there like me: uprooted, drifting from culture to culture, language to language, oblivious to what had been lost, surviving and yet not altogether unhappy.

Or was I really happy? Did I feel a tinge of guilt when a foreign student spoke to me in Mandarin and I readily replied in English? Was my callous disregard for my mother tongue the price of assimilation or a sign of deeper malaise? What if I never reached the mountain top, never realized the doctorate? What would I be left with, after voluntarily hacking from myself the metaphorical pound of flesh? These matters never rose to the forefront before, but they now seemed fully worthwhile—albeit troublesome—subjects for contemplation. Suddenly and without warning, they blew away the little bit of serenity I was enjoying, and left in its wake bubbling doubts. Desperate to keep the thriving migraine at bay, I decided to put away the self-criticism for later when soju was within easy reach.

A pair of Skechers snow boots came into my field of vision. They were early for this time of the year. Curiosity moved my eyes upwards, from the heels to the form-fitting slim jeans, the Tuscan red printed smock, a small jade pendant hanging around a long, pale neck, up to their owner, who was staring down at me intently. I froze, dismayed that Smirk Girl had come back for another chiding, another round of questions to which she already had the answers.

She cleared her throat. "Pardon me. I've got to go through."

It took me a second to realize that the shelving cart and I had monopolized the width of the aisle. I stood up and reached for the cart handle the same time she pushed it aside with both hands. The cart wobbled and then tumbled over, hitting the floor with a loud thud and tossing books up and down the aisle. The commotion drew disgusted aughh from people studying in nearby carrels.

I got down on my knees to salvage the mess. "Shit. Now they're all out of—" I started to grumble but was able to hold it in check. There was no point in antagonizing her further, knowing the fallout would be more evil eyes from the boss.

Surprisingly, she kneeled and began to help collect the scattered books. "Leave 'em. I'll do this myself," I said, still annoyed by her uninvited presence.

She stopped. Even without looking up, I could sense she was staring at me again. When I did shoot her a furtive glance, I saw two faint patches of crow's feet nipping at the tails of her smoky eye creases. Was this second run-in her awkward attempt at making peace where none was necessary? As if to validate my hunch, she said quietly after a moment, "I'm sorry to steal your thunder back there."

"You're sorry?"

"Yeah. I shouldn't have roused you and then dumped my problems on you."

The more she apologized, the less sincere the mea culpa sounded. And the more I stared back, as if we were engaging in a staring contest where the first one to blink would lose, the more irritated I became with the way she was looking at me. Truth be told, there was nothing wrong with her looks; she had fine features, high cheekbones, and an agreeable oval face, but the disconnect that started when she woke me continued unabated. And as the afternoon dragged on, I'd grown so petulant that anybody would have registered in my eyes as a either a pesky diva or harebrained brute.

When it appeared that I wasn't going to accept her apology, a touch of discontent crept into her voice. "You like to be in control, don't you?"

"Who doesn't?" I said. "Wasn't that what you were doing at the help desk? To show off? To see who was more in control?" Admitting defeat had never been my forte, and it made me miserable having to say it out loud. Inexplicably, I felt an urge to explain that this hadn't been my day, that I hadn't been myself and that the world had conspired to hurl wholesale disrespect at someone that craved the very respect a rolled-up, red-ribbon sheepskin could deliver. And just as inexplicably, I swallowed the words.

"No big deal. I just think you and my mom would get along fabulously." She flashed a white-teeth smile. For the first time since we'd met, I thought the smile had a grain of truth behind it.

I didn't see her for the rest of my shift, and by the time I left work and got back to my dorm, I was too exhausted to think. Two cups of ramen and a big glass of milk later, the world felt much kinder and whatever storms brewing over the horizon now seemed amendable enough that they could wait until I'd had a real good night sleep.