Page 14 of Love Immortal

Thirteen

“ A choo!” I cover my mouth quickly to avoid sneezing all over Fiona’s and my breakfasts. “Sorry,” I say.

“Did you catch a cold?” she asks.

“Hope not.” I pull a napkin out of the holder on our cafeteria table and wipe my nose. “I fell asleep with my window open. Woke up at three a.m., freezing and with a rain puddle on the floor. I could’ve sworn I’d closed it.”

“That sucks,” Fiona says sympathetically. “Wouldn’t have happened if you had a California roommate. Becky is always cold, even when the blasted radiator turns the place into a desert.” Fiona stuffs a piece of a waffle with chocolate chips and whipped cream into her mouth.

We have Waffle Saturday in the dining hall every other week, which is the only reason she is up this early. Unlike me, Fiona doesn’t have trouble sleeping, but we always try to make it here before the popular toppings run out.

An unexpected swell of nausea hits me. I haven’t told Fiona about the nightmare that woke me up, but vivid flashes of it suddenly burst into my mind, toppling my thoughts. The pile of mutilated limbs surrounding me in the snow, the wolves’ jaws dripping with gore. Given that she’s taking psych, Fiona would probably think I’ve lost it if I were to describe those images to her. I’m starting to wonder myself. In the dream, none of it bothered me. When the wolf attacked Clay, I didn’t try to stop it. But now that I’m awake, this realization makes me queasy. Why did I do nothing as the person I loved more than anyone in this world got torn apart by a wolf? I still remember his frozen blue eyes staring at me as his bitten-off head rolled away in the snow. What the hell is wrong with me?

“So, how’s the library gig? Everything you dreamed of?” Fiona asks with a grin.

I try to blink away the image of Clay’s bloodied remains. Get hold of yourself, Jonathan. It was just a nightmare.

“I love it,” I reply with an earnestness that is real—if a little forced at the moment—and spear a piece of syrupy strawberry with my fork, determined not to ruin my Waffle Saturday. “Yesterday, Mr. Bathory stopped by.”

Fiona perks up with interest. “Oh? What did he want?”

I almost tell her about “The Raven,” but I stop myself. What happened last night, the dreamlike moment Dacian and I shared…it feels too intimate to lay out in the open like that. “He was looking for a particular edition, and I helped him find it,” I say. Then, remembering the strange sense of guilt I had about not investigating the missing book, I decide to pick Fiona’s brain about it. “Hey, did you know someone stole a rare book from the library?”

Fiona’s eyes widen. “No way! More Camden campus crime? I’m seriously starting to second-guess my decision to come here instead of Cornell. What happened?” There’s a lilt of curiosity in her tone that I can only describe as professional interest.

“That’s the thing—no one knows when or how the book went missing. It was kept in the vault, and no one has requested it since it came to the library as part of a large donation. They only discovered it was gone at the start of the semester.”

“Hmm. What kind of book was it? Super valuable?”

I shake my head. “Apparently not. It was a diary of some guy from a century ago.”

That surprises Fiona. “Why would someone steal an old diary if it’s not worth a lot?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and take a sip of my coffee. “Maybe the culprit collects diaries of dead people?”

“Beats collecting chopped-up body parts,” Fiona replies.

I nearly choke on my coffee. “W-what?” For a moment I wonder if Fiona somehow read my mind and got a glimpse of the gnarly nightmare I had.

But she waves me off. “Don’t mind me. I’ve been reading some weird stuff for my psych class. Back to the missing diary—you said it was kept in the vault?”

It takes me a second to recover. “Yeah, it was,” I say. “And that’s the weird part—only librarians have access to it. You have to pass through the glass box first, and then there’s a separate keyed entry to the vault.”

“Sounds to me like it was an inside job, then,” Fiona pronounces confidently.

I feel an instant flare of indignation. “A librarian would never do such a thing. They care about those books,” I say. Besides, I’ve met everyone who works at that library. There are some odd ducks among the staff for sure, but they all seem like good enough people.

“Well, if no one checked it out and there’s no way to get into the vault without a special key, who else could’ve done it?” she parries.

I really dislike that reasoning, but I must admit it’s sound. That sours my mood. Fiona, still in full-on lawyer mode, presses her line of questioning even further. “To the best of your knowledge, is there anything in that diary that could shed light on the motive?” she asks.

“I only know that there’s some ‘controversial’ content in it. The owner of the diary supposedly had a secret gay affair.”

“Oh my! I didn’t know Camden kept such books in its collection,” Fiona says, her eyes sparking with interest before quickly dimming as she figures something out. “Wait…in that case, it was likely a hate crime. Someone probably didn’t like that the library had a gay book and removed it.”

My heart sinks. “You think so?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Fiona sighs. “Did you know that when the Third Reich started burning books, the first library they went after was in the Institute of Sexology in Berlin, which specifically advocated for homosexual and transgender rights?”

“I didn’t know that,” I say, feeling deeply uncomfortable. The thought of some brainwashed neo-Nazi stealing gay books here in Camden makes my stomach twist.

Fiona continues, “For its time, it was a pretty progressive establishment. The founder was Jewish, too, which made them want to set the place ablaze even more. Fascists and dictators often rise to power by vilifying minorities to rile up the general population. It’s a very effective tactic. And guess where the Nazis got their best ideas from?”

“Where?” I ask, but I think I already know the answer.

“Our very own land of the free,” Fiona replies with a bitter kind of detachment. “The Nazis basically copied the way our government denied citizenship to Native Americans even though they were all born here. They turned it into legislation that allowed them to round up the Jews and send them to concentration camps, which were modeled after Indian reservations. Our reputation as leaders of the free world is hardly as pristine as some would have you believe…” She trails off, and for a moment, our table turns quiet.

I hold my mug of lukewarm coffee in a futile attempt to chase the chill away. All this only gives me more reasons to pursue book conservation. I might be powerless to stop a group of raging fascists from burning down a library, but if I can save even a few queer books from destruction, I’ll feel my life has been a success.

Fiona returns to her waffle. “Anyway, aren’t all the books being digitized just in case someone tries to burn or steal one?”

“Yep. About fifteen percent of the titles have been scanned. But the diary that was stolen hadn’t been digitized yet, which means that if it’s not recovered, it’s most likely gone forever,” I say.

Fiona muses as she chews. “Wouldn’t it be so rad if someday we could just read stuff off a computer screen and say goodbye to hauling those heavy textbooks around?”

“That would be awful!” I protest with a frown.

“What? Why?”

“Because the two are not the same obviously. What about the smell of old paper? Or the cozy feeling you get from holding a real book? You’ll never get that from a screen.”

“Maybe not. But it’s convenient , Jonathan. Nothing beats that,” Fiona says.

That really riles me up. “We’re gonna have to agree to disagree. Besides, you’d have to carry a whole computer with you if you wanted to read anything. How is that convenient?”

“True. But one computer could potentially hold thousands of books, and my backpack can barely fit one psych textbook. Have you seen that seven-hundred-page monster? My arms are gonna be like Hulk Hogan’s after this semester. Besides, computers don’t take up a whole room anymore. They’ll probably invent smaller ones soon, like those hologram things in Blade Runner . Maybe they’ll even have a robot voice that can read the books aloud for you. And you can just sit back, close your eyes, and relax.” Fiona leans back in her chair, imitating her dream reading scenario.

“Right,” I say skeptically. “Just don’t forget that in that movie, the world had turned into a toxic wasteland because of all the technology.”

Fiona’s eyes open and narrow at me. “You just have to rain on my parade, don’t you? I don’t think our future has to be all apocalyptic like The Terminator . It could totally be more like Star Wars.”

I fold my arms. “Where the universe is ruled by a dark emperor who can blow up entire planets if anyone disobeys him? No thanks.”

“He does get defeated in the end,” Fiona points out.

“Tell that to the people from Alderaan.”

Fiona rolls her eyes. “You know what? I think you need another waffle, Jonathan. You’ve been all rainbows and butterflies this morning.”

“I’m just being realistic,” I say defensively.

“I’d say you’re being a grumpy curmudgeon. Go get your waffle.”

“I am so not that!” I object immediately, but it’s hard to hold back a smile. “I may take your suggestion about the waffle, though. And I’ll get another coffee. But not because I’m a curmudgeon. I just hardly slept.”

Later that afternoon, when I’m alone in my room, my thoughts return to my nightmare. I attempt to distract myself with my accounting assignment, but my mind keeps flashing back to the dead crowd, to Clay’s mauled corpse…and to the fact that I didn’t protect him.

I still think it’s shocking. But as I scour my mind for any modicum of shame or regret for my inaction, I’m unable to find any. Instead, what I feel deep inside is relief. For a long time after Clay’s death, if someone had opened me up, all they’d have found was grief, every shade of it. There were days when it got so overwhelming that I wanted to claw my own heart out and stomp on it just to stop it from feeling anything. But at some point, that began to change. I don’t know exactly when the sadness and despair ebbed and made space for anger. I will never know what Clay felt in those final moments before he took his life—if he blamed me or if he even thought of me at all. All I know is that, in the end, he left me alone .

What others thought of him was more important to Clay than even his own life. Maybe being torn to pieces by shadow wolves is the fate they all deserve for pushing him to feel that way. Maybe Clay who has been haunting my dreams wasn’t really Clay, but just my own misery and guilt, and this nightmare was my subconscious way of letting go. No wonder it was so violent.

If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul, you haven’t experienced poetry.

Dacian was certainly right about that. Except I’d read “The Raven” before, and it didn’t have that same soul-shattering effect on me. So maybe it wasn’t the poem that did it after all; maybe it was him.

I close my eyes and let my thoughts drift to last night—how close we were sitting to each other, how Dacian’s voice seemed to fill every inch of space around us until the world fell away completely. I sigh. He could probably hypnotize me with that melodious voice. Not that he’d need to—I’ve already spilled all my secrets to him willingly. His voice had even entered my dream. It was Dacian who warned me not to fear the wolves and who tried to calm me when the angry mob was ready to execute me.

He was also there for me when I broke down crying at the library, his hand hovering just inches from my face. Did he want to wipe away my tears? Did I want him to?

These are dangerous thoughts , I tell myself sternly. He’s a professor, and I’m a student. I shouldn’t think of touching him. Of wanting to be alone with him. Of hearing him in my dreams.

But knowing you shouldn’t do something and stopping yourself from doing it are two perilously different things.

I suddenly begin to wonder about the diary that went missing. Did Dacian inquire about it because he wanted to read it? Does he know that the owner had a gay love affair? The thought stirs something in me, something I don’t dare give shape to, not even in the privacy of my own thoughts. Maybe Dacian and I are more alike than I thought.

I close my eyes and picture Dacian’s hands again, the way his fingers flipped the pages, reverent and careful—just the way that book deserved to be handled, like the rare treasure it is. With a quiver in my heart, I finally let myself admit the indisputable truth.

I really want Dacian to touch me the way he touched the pages of “The Raven.”