Chapter 6B

Thursday was overcast and chilly. Martha Jane and I made a long trip over two city bus lines to the campus of Memphis State, which was farther out than I had ever gone in my explorations. Martha Jane sat with her face buried in a textbook during the ride. At one point we had to get off the bus and transfer to another, with Martha Jane complaining as she got her books together, "Rats, I'll never get through this chapter, and I have to return this book today!" When we arrived at the campus stop I was both excited and apprehensive. There was so much to it! Surrounded by a well-to-do suburb that was built in the 1920's, the campus of big Georgian buildings and dorms spread over a rustic landscape that alternated between broad green pasture and heavily forested alcoves of pine, maple, oak and magnolia.

I'm certain I must have seemed like a spellbound infant. Tongue-tied, I stayed at her side like a puppy as Martha Jane, one arm carrying a paper shopping bag loaded with books and notebooks, led me down the long rambling drive toward the main library. I spent so much time looking up and stretching my neck to take in everything that I tripped over every curb and twig along the way. Martha Jane finally had to lead me by the hand. At the library's columned entrance I ran to the door and tried to yank it open for her. Surprised by its weight, I was jerked back against the door and had to lean far backward to open it again.

She laughed, "Don't be in such a hurry."

Inside, I was overcome by the solemnity and silence in the large and spacious building, which was far more imposing than the small branch library I knew in my neighborhood. Martha Jane walked ahead of me to the front reception desk. I followed, my neck craning and my eyes agape at the high walls solid with shelves and books. My tennis shoes squeaked softly on the tile floor and echoed into the ceiling. I was so flabbergasted that I walked right into her as she stopped to have the receptionist check her bag. I shifted to avoid standing on her feet, apologizing so loudly that my voice shot back at me several times over, startling me, and I had to lower my volume. Turning around and trying to take it all in, I took a step or two in each direction to try to see down the paths of shelves and oak tables to my left and right, only to stumble backward with a loud clunk into the face of the reception desk.

Martha Jane said quickly to the receptionist, "He's going to be with me. He's not a student or anything, he doesn't have an i.d.--"

The bespeckled, matronly woman smiled at Martha Jane and handed her back the shopping bag of notebooks. The lady looked exactly the way I had always imagined movie librarians would look.

"That's perfectly all right," the woman said warmly, and she peered down at me cheerfully through her bifocals. "Well, young man, this must be your first visit."

Martha Jane laughed and blushed. "Yes, it is. I'm afraid he doesn't have his bearings yet. Bumping into everything..."

"Oh, don't you worry, he'll find his way around. You enjoy yourself, young man. If you're interested, there is a child's section right over there in that far corner just past the card catalog cabinet."

I asked, "Where do you have the newspaper stacks? I guess I'll start with The New York Times Index? Do you have it back to the 1920's?"

She looked at me and then at Martha Jane, a little surprised.

Martha Jane grinned at her. "He likes newspapers."

"Oh, how interesting. He's your son, is he? Oh, I'm sorry, you certainly don't look that old. A relation?"

"No, he's my, uh..."

"Student," I interjected, somewhat formally. Behind me, out of the lady's sight, I felt Martha Jane poke a finger in my back.

"Oh, I see. How nice, bringing your students to the library in person, that's a wonderful idea. Well, now, you get settled and then come back here and I'll show you to the periodical stacks."

"Thank you," I said, and Martha Jane also whispered a thank you and led me by the hand into a small alcove with a large writing desk upon which she parked her shopping bag. She smiled wryly at me as she removed her sweater. "You're my what? My student?"

"It had a certain status."

She blushed. "I'm glad you spoke up. I had to stop myself because I almost said you were my boyfriend. I'm certain she would have got a rise out of that."

I smiled broadly.

"Now, you've been in libraries before, so you know what the general setup is. I'll be working right here if you need anything, or anybody at the big front desk can help you."

She left me on my own. A young woman at the front desk gave me a brochure with a map of the building and directed me to the card catalog filing cabinet. On first seeing it I was taken aback. So many drawers! And in each drawer were hundreds of index cards, some packed so tightly they had to be shoved back firmly to be read. I didn't know where to begin. There were so many choices. The problem was, I wanted to see everything at once. Going through them grew stultifying after a while; I wanted something more substantial, something I could hold in my hands.

Leaving the card catalog as a hopeless case of too much to absorb at once, I moved to the stacks themselves. Looking over the titles, I couldn't imagine how any book or index or subject might be missing from this building. Following the map, I took the elevator to the next floor and found myself confronted with hundreds of shelves, thousands of books. The musk of paper filled the room. And on the next floor I encountered the same odor, and the same endless maze of stacks and shelves and labels and volumes. On the elevator again, to yet another floor and more of the same. And from there, a curled iron stairway leading to still more, and then to another wing of more floors, more tiers of books. I grappled with one thick book that almost pulled me to the floor as it slid from its shelf. It was a weighty volume of nineteenth century photographs. Opening its large pages separated by translucent tissues which themselves had chipped and yellowed, I found myself in the grip of an eerie fascination with the faces of the people in the pictures. Starkly and stiffly posed, their eyes seemed alive and knowing--a strange and hair raising sensation, because these people had posed for the photographs in the 1870's. There were long shots of tailcoated, booted men in front of banks and post offices and on street corners. And there were pictures of the streets. New York City in 1876. An interior of a fancy restaurant, the shot taken so that hazy rays of sunlight from the tall windows lined up along the right drenched the floor and the tables, leaving the corners of the room in dense shadow. I could smell the wood frames of the massive windows, hear the photographer prompting carefully as he held the shutter open for the long exposures required in those days. The streets and the buildings and the rooms struck me as oddly familiar; I was not surprised at seeing them, and felt that I was seeing nothing new. Everything seemed to be exactly in its proper place. The surprise was my knowing that it was so, that I had seen these buildings and their arched windows and tall shadowed doorways before.

A rustle of clothing startled me. I looked up. Martha Jane was strolling toward me. I had been studying the book so closely that my eyes watered and the back of my neck was cramped.

"You've been gone for hours," she said. "I looked everywhere for you. Do you have any idea what time it is?"

"I'm sorry," I stuttered, finding my mouth dry.

"Find anything interesting?"

"This," I said, holding the book open with both hands. I touched my fingers to a full page photograph of 4th Avenue, in downtown Manhattan, taken in 1881.

She looked at it. "What about it?"

"I've..." I was startled as the words came out of my mouth, almost on their own accord. "I've been here."

"Here? You've been on this street before?"

I nodded.

"Speedy, this is... Hon, this street is in New York City. The picture was made sixty or seventy years ago. Maybe it reminds you of Adams Street in Memphis. It looks a lot like it."

I shook my head slowly, not believing it myself. "No," I muttered. "I mean it feels like... I was here, on this street. This street."

"You mean, like deja vu. You know about deja vu?"

"Yes. I remember looking it up. This is what deja vu is?"

Standing beside me, she gazed into the picture. I saw her eyelashes flutter as she scanned the page from corner to corner. I felt embarrassed. It was true: the photograph was from another century, from a place I'd never seen.

She looked into my eyes with her vivid green orbs floating in white. "You feel you were there? Really?"

I nodded.

"I've had feelings like that too, hon."

Her words both astounded and intrigued me. For a moment both of us stared at the photograph.

Then she said, "Come with me. I want to show you something."

She led me down the iron staircase and then down another, to a floor of magazine stacks and dozens of metal shelves piled with loose papers and brochures. She took me to a corner where her hand went straight to an enamel-backed issue of a National Geographic.