You sit across from him and see something’s not quite right. Though stitched from a fine fabric, his pants are too long and they bunch up above his Zellers sneakers. His tan coat is well-cut but too old and it is stained black on the right sleeve. His face, you think, you’ve seen at the back of a lecture hall, but the eyes are all wrong. They are ransacked by terrible memories. Through them he stares not at the book he grips, but beyond, as if he’s standing in the cemetery at Montparnasse, smoking Gitanes in the rain. Yes, it’s Friday night on the stack floors in Robarts, and you are amongst the living dead.
Maybe you’re studying, maybe you’re flipping through pre-Perestroika erotic poetry looking for bad, bad words. Maybe you’re just watching other people breathe. All you know is that Robarts’ stack floors are like a flame in the night for this cult of languishing, haunted souls who sit around you. This is their lair.
Your friends call them “freaks,” or “eccentrics,” or “career students.” You smile and call them “lovely.” In your head you come up with stories about how they ended up this way. When your friends turn back to their Think-Pads, you secretly wish to smell these freaks. They fascinate you. It excites you that Toronto’s strangest people frequent U of T’s most hated building. You look at them in your peripheral vision because your mother told you not to stare. “They’re the sorts of people who go home to their cats and listen to mazurkas on vinyl,” you remember her saying.
You’ve made up theories to explain your obsession with these lost souls. You tell yourself it’s schadenfreude: pleasure in the freaks’ misfortune. You tell yourself it’s a form of voyeurism. But you know you’re deceiving yourself. Desperately, you stand up and scribble “Robarts is shit” on the big, black tables. You tighten the straps on your Invicta backpack. You check the messages on your Nokia. You’re just a regular U of T student, you tell yourself.
Deep down inside, you know the truth: you’re a freak, too. Secretly, late at night, you find horrible masochistic pleasure roaming Robarts. You are aroused by its concrete brutalism and its cold and austere aesthetic. And then when you’re all alone, you brush your smoldering body against its pallid concrete walls; you let it bruise and batter your buttocks. Robarts says “fuck you” better than any building west of Novosibirsk, and you submit.
You know this isn’t normal. You feel guilty. You desperately want to talk to your friends about your perversion, but you can’t bring yourself to admit that you have a library fetish. So you continue to exercise your guilty passions in silence. That’s why you need to be around the freaks that haunt the library. The more time you spend looking at them, the more normal you feel. You’re not alone, you tell yourself.
You leave the yellow zone of the thirteenth floor because the colour brings back bad memories. You move into the blue stacks and then you recognize him. You walk into the next aisle and stand on the other side of the books hoping he will smell you. You close your eyes and see him. He has a scraggly black beard and desperate eyes. He wears horn-rimmed glasses, a forest-green jacket and carries a cadaver-sized backpack. He smells like gunpowder and northern Ontario. You know, and he knows, your mutual little secret. You follow him.
You follow him through the rows of books until you find an alcove protected by a red cage, an alcove seemingly designed to house an industrial S&M complex. You check over the desks and chairs to find whip markings or handcuffs, but all you find is a stack of Varsity back issues and a few empty packages of Wet-Naps.
You can’t take it anymore. You race to a table and sit down. Across from you is a pale, androgynous person of indeterminate age who spends morning, day, and night on various stack floors. Robarts has stolen the person’s gender, memory and pigment, and maybe the person’s very soul. You shudder, and yet you envy this wasted victim: you want Robarts to ravish you as it has this person.
You watch this person turn a page. You fall asleep for a few minutes but wake up to another page being turned. You fall asleep again but the goddamn neck jerks keep you from sleepy time. Anxious to know what the person is reading, you walk up and peer over their shoulder. You make out a plate of Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 series, which looks like hanged Baader-Meinhof Gang members, or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man—you can’t tell. You’re tired. You go back to the stack aisles and lie down. You must think all this over.
You wake up to a screeching Spanish accent over the loud speakers. It’s 10:45 p.m. You realize that technically, you’ve slept with Robarts Library and all the people in it. But it’s unsatisfying somehow. You get up and walk the floor. It’s a necrophile’s paradise. Bodies are slung over desks and chairs, and it’s completely silent save for the hum from the vents. Down a dark aisle you see another freak. She has a ghostly white face with knotted black hair. She wears black mascara. Through the slits in her black cardigan you can see a large amorphous tattoo on her shoulder. She’s at her desk and she looks up at you.
You know that Joy Division disbanded in 1980. She knows you’re a slave just like her. You want to tell her your dreams and your desires, but you’re afraid. Your eyes fill with tears. You take the stack stairs down, deeper, and walk the back walls.
In Seminar Room 9002, narrow study carrels line the walls like vertical coffins pressed together in a mausoleum. You stop suddenly. You hear breathing. You realize that each carrel is holding a human. You smell the dusky odor of yellowing human flesh warmed over by fluorescent lights. You breathe deeply, pulling other people’s breath into your lungs, your veins, your heart. It’s here the spiritual connection is strongest. But you just can’t imagine sharing fetish stories with your T.A. You can’t. You leave.
You scream. Before you, a horrible man passionately kisses a bookshelf. The man is lost in his own pleasure and it takes him a minute to notice you. When he does, you see that his eyes are filled with fear and desperation. You began to laugh. It’s nervous laughter, but you have the upper hand. What a freak, you think, and run to the elevators, catching your reflection in the plastic over the floor map. So this is what you look like.
