Chapter 5

Early in the afternoon of his third day in the library, Jeremy's internal alarms went off.

When he had arrived that morning, he found his usual carrel occupied by a mother and child. Not wanting to be disturbed by nearby patrons, he had chosen a screen in a corner that looked out over the room and the corridor. From that vantage point, he became aware of the increased activity around him.

He was racing to finish off another textbook when he felt himself under observation. Having pushed off lunch to read the last chapters, his stomach was complaining. The empty feeling, along with an internal sense of disquiet, kept breaking his concentration. The librarians kept walking past. Several times he caught them pausing to stare at him out of the corner of his eye.

At first he was curious and then he became concerned. When one of security guards in uniform slowly strolled by with a sheet of paper in her hand, he started to panic. They — whoever "they" were — had found him. Jeremy dumped his reading program and wiped down the keys and shelf with his shirttail. His hands were shaking.

He considered the shortest path to the front door and decided that there were too many ways to detour a man. To buy himself time he made for the centrally located bathrooms on the back side of the barrel vaulted lobby. At the men's room door Jeremy saw an opportunity. He pushed the bathroom door open but stepped to the maintenance room next to the Men's Room and ducked inside. Listening at the closet door, he heard the bathroom door open only seconds later.

Maybe he was paranoid, but Jeremy felt certain that the library people were hunting him. Maybe the false alarm from the first few minutes of his first visit wasn't false anymore.

With only seconds to act before they discovered he wasn't taking a dump, Jeremy grabbed the cleaner's cap and long, dirty white coat. Mop and rolling bucket in hand, he swung back out into the public space. Sliding along the wall, he pushed the bucket and kept his head down. Official people, people with nametags dangling from their necks were scurrying around the area.

Jeremy spotted a door that read "Private." Casually he stepped through the doorway. The door closed gently behind him on an internal spring. Still pushing the bucket, he walked as fast as he could down the corridor, past featureless offices with digital setups. At the end of the hallway, a sign hanging from the ceiling blinked "Exit >". He turned right into a short hallway with another maintenance door on one side and a rack of time cards on the other. He ditched the bucket and mop inside. Grabbing the knob to the back door he pushed, wondering if the alarm was going to sound.

All was quiet. Closing the door carefully, Jeremy walked straight down the alley between two tall buildings and emerged onto a busy street that he didn't recognize. He jumped on the first bus that seemed to be heading towards the bus depot and took a seat among the scattered pensioners on the bus. Jeremy looked around and realized that he probably was the youngest person on the bus, including the driver.

The bus stopped outside of the terminal rather than inside, which Jeremy took as good fortune. He walked around the entire terminal rather than cutting through even though it was a long hike. With all of the police inside, he didn't want to take any chances. Hopping on the bus back to Amalia's house, Jeremy thought feverishly about what he needed to do, of where he needed to go.

Having no answers, Jeremy knew he needed to sit somewhere quiet and think out his next steps. He needed his clothes from Amalia's house and maybe he needed her help. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out what he had done wrong, other than to lie about going to work. He was fairly sure that he hadn't stolen money from the bank.

Feeling a bit more secure on familiar ground, Jeremy ducked into the neighborhood café where he and Amalia had stopped for coffee and dessert the previous evening. His appetite was over the top and he couldn't understand why. He ate. His belly full, he walked the sunny neighborhood streets to Amalia's house, keeping an eye out for anyone following him or paying extra attention. All the people he saw were doing normal house chores. Some smiled and gave a short wave.

He released a sigh of relief when he walked in the door.

"Yes?" Rosa called out from the back room of the house. Jeremy had never been back there.

"It's me, Manuel," Jeremy called out and he walked to the back.

Rosa was sitting behind a large worktable with framing on top. Inside the frame were pieces of broken tile and wet clumps of cement. Rosa was constructing a tabletop, like the one in the kitchen. Around the room were boxes upon boxes of different tiles, whole and broken.

"You didn't work today," she said. "Feeling lazy after a few days of work?"

Jeremy already had a truth and a lie ready to go. "Nobody wanted me today so I decided to go to the library downtown."

Immediately Jeremy worried that he had said something wrong, something out of character for Manuel. As the silence stretched out, he was more and more convinced that he had slipped up again, going from deep shit to deeper shit. Panic was beginning to set in again.

Rosa looked up from her work with narrowed eyes. She put aside her glasses and gave him a hard look. "If you went to the library, why are you back so early?"

"Something happened at the library. The librarians became suspicious and sent their security to take me. I left before they found me. I swear on my mother's grave — may she sleep peacefully — I was reading in a corner by myself on a digital reader. I was using their adult reader program and that's it. I have no idea what I did wrong."

"Maybe you did wrong where you came from and the police bulletin has finally caught up with you."

Rosa might be right for all that Jeremy knew. Manuel was a fiction, but Manuel understood better than Jeremy what he had done, or didn't do. He ate, shit, and picked crops. Vaguely he remembered drinking or fucking ugly, fat women. He remembered being dirty all the time.

Rosa's beady eyes and her pinched face gave him the heebie-jeebies. He was on the defensive and against his better judgment, he kept talking.

"No," Jeremy said, "I cut sugarcane. I went to town last the weekend and decided not to return to the fields. Maybe they filed a missing person's report but I doubt it. Men left the fields every weekend and never returned. No one ever gave a shit. I wouldn't be any different."

Rosa seemed to be considering an idea in her head. She was silent for a moment before she asked a question. "You can read? How well can you read?"

Jeremy thought to lie and decided that he was a lousy liar. Besides he really did need help. "Eighth level," he said.

Rosa popped her lips. "Men who harvest sugarcane for a living don't usually know how to read, and certainly not at an eighth level. Where are you from, Manuel?"

"I don't know."

"Who are your parents? What are their names?" she asked.

"I don't know. There is a complete blank in my head except for one memory of old man with a white head of hair," Jeremy said.

"You have amnesia," Rosa said. "Do you believe you have amnesia?"

The idea didn't sit right with Jeremy though he wasn't clear why. He had to think for a minute before mustering a reply.

"No. I'm pretty sure that I used to know how to read. At the library, I had to teach myself how to read again. I had to look up words in the dictionary, simple words and places too."

"Have you been knocked on the head? You know, brain injuries?"

Jeremy shook his head. "Do you want to examine my head for dents and holes?"

"Hmm," Rosa said, considering his argument but bypassing the opening for an insult. "Go put on coffee. When it's done, bring me back a mug, black."