Part 4

The next morning he walked to the public library. It was rather dark and cold for nine in the morning. Clouds and fog and drizzle will do that. He could afford to miss work, well, he wasn’t really missing anything. The computers in the corner of his kitchen/living room didn’t know the difference between Thursday and Saturday. He had only a vague idea of what he meant to check out of the library. He knew it was three books, big books, but that was about all he could sum up as far as books went. What he was summing up was the square roots of every crack in the sidewalk, that on an average day there was over ten thousand dollars in the parking meters downtown alone, and a simple cure for color-blindness. His mind began to mesh, not race. As his fear and laziness melted away, every part of his mind turned and twisted and molded as pieces of a puzzle and slid together into a solid shiny block without a center or circumference. It all came back with the weight of a bus and the sound of pressurized air releasing. A young woman’s voice, he would later know as the voice of Eliza, came questioning from above, through mist or sewer steam a few feet away, “You dead?”