Rumrill said: On my back, in my bed, in the incongruous maritime light, listening to the river running down my street, perhaps it occurred to me that, if the woman with whom I’d gone into the stacks were indeed the sort of person to seek out encounters with strangers such as she had initiated with me at the library, then she might have left the part of the big world containing our stacks and library and my train station and grocery with the goal of engaging in further liaisons now in a timbre better suited to her tastes. That is, I assume: dangerous and dramatic, precarious and perilous, in diverse languages. He added: Far more anonymous than a Rumrill—as her fellow countryman—could provide. Rumrill said: In actuality, thanks to the sun and the abundance of stimuli susurrating at the corners of my eyes on the morning I constructed my mirror corridor, I was distracted from my thoughts of the likelihood of catching my neighbor and a local woman “pleasing to the eye” engaged in the selfsame acts that I and the woman with whom I went into the stacks had in those bygone days pioneered by the unfortunate coincidence of spotting my own quarterreflection several yards away, across an intersection, blackened and transparent in a shop window, mitigated by clouds, cars, and the criminal silhouettes of neighborhood passersby. A pitfall I should have anticipated. He added: Giving myself, at the least desirable moment, accidental confirmation of my own substantiality via the practical and palpable simultaneity of this shop-window reflection: caught in the process of anticipating and even visualizing—at the other end of my mirror corridor, in the quarter-bedroom of my neighbor—myself with my cock, for instance, in the mouth of the woman with whom I had gone into the stacks. Rumrill said: I could have turned my head back again to avoid seeing myself if not leering grotesquely then in any case guiltily receptive to the hoped-for sight of a man better able than I to persuade a comely young woman to accompany him back to his bedroom for the purpose of reenacting for no audience what had once gone on in the stacks of a nearby public library, but the knowledge that the reflection was there, visible, invariable, accessible to my eye, accomplished for myself the perfect, confirmable stability I so hoped, in those days, to achieve for my home. While my home—which, at that moment, for all I knew, was nothing more than a single window suspended at second-story height in who-knows-what sort of viscous and uninhabitable ontological material—remained elusive, despite its relative size, its lack of mobility, indeed its thus-far invariable persistence at the same address and circumstances in which I had first found it. He added: I myself had become a certainty when I least wanted to be certain of myself. Rumrill said: Curious to say, though I have substantial evidence as to the changes Rumrill himself has undergone over the course of his life—typed and stored under a variety of headings in my many filing cabinets, for example: Shame, Illnesses, Dreams, Routes Through the Neighborhood, Thefts (Suffered) and Thefts (Perpetrated), Women Encountered, Conversations (Overheard) and Conversations (Imagined), Cats (Deceased), Things I No
Tarpaulin Sky #17 / Summer 2011
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