long wooden tables and turned on the great electric globe. It lit up all soft and glowing with blue oceans and green, tan, and red countries. When I hit the button at the base, it spun slowly, slowly, so slowly you almost couldn’t tell it was moving at all. I sat there and watched it — the Canary Islands and Spain and the Mediterranean Sea and Egypt and the Red Sea and India, all of them inching by. “I’m very sorry, but we are closing early. Could I help you with anything else, then?” The librarian stood composed, suddenly beautiful with the stacks of books behind her. In the silence she brought, I could hear the overhead lights humming against the soft sound of the globe. I turned off the spin button and held the light switch in my hand. “Well, I’m doing this term project at school. And, uh, I need to know what countries border Kuwait.” “Oh, okay, hold on,” she said and left to return with her pad and pencil. “Here’s Kuwait,” she pointed to a tiny green spot I’d totally missed. She wrote down Saudi Arabia and Iraq on a piece of paper and told me to come back the next day, and she’d have some books if any were left. There was a sudden stillness in her green eyes: “Now, of course, everyone wants to know where everything is over there. But don’t worry, I’ll come up with something for you.” The rest of the way home, I kept stopping under the streetlights to unfold the piece of paper. The names of those places seemed strange and eerie as if they were telling me something or as if they had some mysterious power, glistening with the wet snow.
I I I : S t i ll S o m e C lo u d y S had e o f F ad ed P u rp l e o r F a int P in k When the Navy released Len’s name along with six other allied
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