That Night in the Library

Chapter 7 Soraya

Soraya Abbasi had a blister. It was a swampy sort of Vermont summer day, the kind that usually waited for August, and her sweaty right heel had formed the blister against her stiff leather oxford on the walk to work that morning.

“We should have insisted on September,” Kip said, crouched on the floor by Soraya’s desk.

“Babe, there’s graduation,” she said. “He’s not going to have access to the library basement in September.”

“The whole idea that he’s inviting us,” Kip said. They were the only two in the reading room, but he still stayed close to her, still whispered as if the walls of the place wouldn’t let him speak at a normal register. “Wasn’t he hired here to work on the Ethiopic materials? Christian stuff? Leave antiquity to the classicists, you know?”

“His undergraduate thesis was about the Eleusinian Mysteries,” Soraya said. “He’s hardly entering this as a neophyte. He’s inviting us because it was his idea. Are you done with the Virginia?”

Kip had approached the desk, clutching the 1781 edition of Notes on the State of Virginia that he’d been using at his reading table. The library’s edition was bound in a contemporary speckled calfskin, and the way he was twisting it, she worried his palms would stain the leather.

“No, I need to keep it,” he said. “I need to really live with the words if I’m going to hear the echoes of Aristotle. You know Davey should have asked me before he ran around inviting anyone who smiled right at him. The Greeks were precise about their rituals. I don’t see respect for that precision in what he’s doing.”

“Then don’t come,” Soraya said. “If you find it distasteful, tell him you don’t want to be involved. You’ve got to stop twisting the cover on that volume. We use it for teaching. Someone will notice if the condition has changed.” She eased her right heel out of her shoe for a moment of relief. “I’m serious. Tell Davey you don’t want to come tonight. Go get yourself a sandwich. Both will make you feel better.”

“If we both pulled out at the last minute like this? There’s no way he could find two replacements before the doors closed.” He finally got up and put the Jefferson volume back on his reading desk. “It’s brilliant. Babe, you’re brilliant.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Soraya said. “I said that you should pull out. I’m not going to. Davey got acid. I killed myself during finals, I’ve had five job interviews in the last two weeks, I haven’t eaten since last night. I’m opening my mind tonight.”

“I’m the one who got acid!”

“Baby,” Soraya stretched her arms overhead. Her foot hurt and she didn’t want to argue. It was 6:45 in the evening. Only an hour and fifteen minutes until the doors closed.

“I mean it!” Kip was whining now. “The Greeks used kykeon to break their fast. Was Davey going to brew up a batch of that? I’m the one who invited the undergrad, and she’s the one who got drugs from her sketchy friend.”

“Okay, baby. You got the acid,” Soraya said.

“You fucking bet I did.”

Through the doors of the reading room, they had a view of the elevator, and they paused speaking when the door pinged and opened to release a gaggle of graduate students, followed by Davey.

“Look at him,” Kip said. “He’s sure he’s going to get that job.”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Soraya said. “Don’t pull out of tonight.” Davey and his students had fallen out of view. She knew the beats of his student tour. He was finally off to show them the Ethiopic materials, the place he should have started. She came out from around the desk and stood on her toes to kiss her boyfriend. He was a head and a half taller than her. It was a nice thing about him, how big he was. Sometimes it was useful for her to recite a list of nice things about him in her head. “We’ll have a great time: we’ll get high with the undergrad and her sketchy friend, and if you play your cards right, we’ll complete the ritual hidden behind the backlog boxes.”

Soraya didn’t especially want to have sex in the library basement, but she wanted to have real experiences. She knew if she did it, she’d remember it forever.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kip said, walking over to the door to try and see Davey through it. “Completing the ritual requires a rape. Are you volunteering for that? That’s probably why he invited you.”

Soraya put her foot back in the shoe. It helped sometimes, when you could really feel the pain.

“How can you even joke about that?”

It took his attention off the door, but only a little.

“Of course I don’t actually think Davey wants to rape you. Holy shit, Soraya, don’t be so dramatic. You’re the one who brought up hooking up downstairs in the first place, but all of a sudden, I’ve crossed a line? Mixed signals, babe.”

He went back to his seat and collapsed into the chair. He couldn’t work. He couldn’t focus. He was too hungry.

Soraya wasn’t being much more productive than Kip. Her computer screen had gone to black, and she had no books to move to her “completed” pile. She was supposed to be cataloging while she oversaw the reading room. The materials had been donated by Kip’s grandfather; it felt like half the place had been donated by his grandfather. She started to write the accession number on the university bookplate that had been pasted in but wound up grinding her pencil into the original owner’s bookplate with the family crest. From the Collection of Percy T. Pickens III. She hated that name.

“I’m sorry, okay?” Kip finally broke the silence.

“You are?” she said.

“Of course I’m sorry. It’s just weird to me, you know? That he would have invited you before he invited me? ‘Because you’re graduating.’” Kip made air quotes at that part. “Okay, Davey. So where’s the rest of the graduating class of student assistants? You’re only inviting Soraya and Mary? I wonder what they have in common?”

Soraya let herself think for a second that it was going to be a real apology. Dumb, but she had believed it. There had to be a first time for everything.