Beneath the trees, inside their shallow shade, was my only constant reminder that nature was marking time, that trees at least were routine and predictable. Even though, for me, the cycle was reversed and more defined than it ever was at home, the trees in my park were committed to seasons, as I must become as well.
When I returned from walking, Lillian would ask what I’d been looking at, what I had found. Our tentative friendship grew as she used me as her emissary to the larger city. She did not want to go anywhere, except (on certain days) back to Argentina.
“Where my Spanish books, Rosemary? You said you’d find.”
“I’m sorry, Lillian, I’m still looking.”
“Pah, my brother say you can’t find nothing there in that place where you work.”
“I’m sure there’s something there for you, Lillian, I just have to find it. What did you read when you lived in Argentina?”
“I read Borges. Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him,” she said. “He was a blind man who see better than anyone.”
“I’ll look,” I promised. “Write his name down for me.”
“You never heard of him?” she scoffed. “What do they read there in Tasmania?”
“They read lots of things, Lillian. But everyone has gaps.”
She laughed out loud. Lillian had a warm, deep laugh, velvety with intimacy, with experience.
“Then you find Borges for me, but mostly for yourself. For your gaps. He will fill them, I promise!”
That Walter Geist was an albino was a distinction he could neither hide nor help. And he could be difficult. He was consistently unpleasant to both staff and all but a few select customers. He was even unpleasantly obsequious on the few occasions that called for mild pleasantness, mostly in his dealings with collectors whose large libraries Pike was trying to acquire.
But toward me he behaved differently.
I am ashamed now, when I remember how I shrank from him, and from his whiteness. Ashamed, too, of my fascination. Or perhaps just guilty that I longed to stare at him.
At first, Geist would not meet my eyes and spoke to me with such particularity that I became fixed upon his strange speech patterns and upon his lips with their sibilant consonants. He spoke to me very little in the beginning, addressing me only when he was called upon to give directions for the removal of Pike’s priced pile, to instruct me to wait at the rear door to help unload a delivery, or to tell me where to place the “new” books I’d brought down to him in the basement. I suppose a fascination with his appearance was not unusual; he seemed to almost have a dry expectation of it. He was sadly practiced at subjection to close inspection.
Walter Geist’s parents had been refugees from Germany; this much Oscar had told me, but he hadn’t gathered much more of Geist’s personal details, at least that he ever shared. Geist had not, as my imagination initially proposed, been born in the basement of the Arcade, but in Berlin, in the old Kreuzberg section of the city. He’d grown up in Pennsylvania after immigrating with his parents when very young. Walter Geist had never married, and lived a largely solitary life outside of the Arcade.
Geist’s slight lisp was not the result of any actual speech impediment but suggested the palimpsest of languages he had mastered, a hint of them all compressed and vaguely present in his whispered English. It wasn’t an accent like mine, broad and flat and, I feared, ignorant. His diction was subtle, exquisite in its way. According to Oscar, Geist spoke five languages fluently, his father having been a linguist at the university. What Oscar didn’t know of Walter Geist’s personal history, he supplemented with research on albinism. Oscar had his preoccupations and, briefly, Geist had been one, as he would become mine.
Inside the Arcade, Geist affected the use of a thick pair of pince-nez glasses that sat in his shirtfront pocket, attached to a silver chain around his neck. More often, though, they were miraculously affixed to the bridge of his nose, held in place by the folds of skin that his squint made about his eyes and forehead. Geist’s eyes were of an undetermined color, but in some lights, particularly bright sunlight, they appeared violet.
“Actually, Rosemary,” Oscar told me when I mentioned this odd fact to him, “Walter’s eyes are colorless. I looked it up. The violet color is caused by blood vessels in the retina. You can see the blood because his retina is without the color of an iris. I suppose you could say Walter’s eyes are transparent.”
“Transparent,” I repeated, fascinated. Oscar’s golden eyes were beautiful but opaque; the idea that Geist’s eyes were transparent was too whimsical, too curious, not to captivate me.
And yet, the wobbling movement of his eyes confused me as to where exactly to look—how to meet him. His eyes swam. Weak muscles caused this vacillation, and the constant motion gave the impression that his eyes were perpetually averted in a kind of deflection. I wanted to follow his shifting gaze into some other, quieter space—to see what he saw. He appeared particularly sensitive to light and shadow, and to scent.
“Yes, transparent. Interesting, isn’t it?” Oscar smiled, and took out his notebook to write down something that had occurred to him. “I have quite a bit of information about Walter’s condition.”
“Do you?” I asked, curious. “It seems as if Mr. Geist doesn’t want me to look at his eyes. They always move away. I want to look, though. It’s as if I’ll be able to stare right into his brain.”
“Really? How odd,” Oscar said, momentarily considering me.
“I imagine his thoughts might have color, even if his eyes don’t.” I could have added that he was entirely without color, but that would have sounded cruel. I did picture Geist’s thoughts, however, as bright and secret things, moving just behind the transparent plane of his retina like exotic fish.
“I saw him looking at my hair outside yesterday,” I told Oscar. “While we were waiting for that library. When I asked him if something was wrong, he cleared his throat and pretended he hadn’t been looking.”
“Well, Rosemary,” Oscar said matter-of-factly, “perhaps Walter thinks your hair is beautiful.”
Then, seeming to lose interest as quickly as he had found it, he continued to write in his notebook.
“Oscar,” I ventured, my heart hot in my chest. “Do you think so?”
But he didn’t answer or even acknowledge my question, absorbed as he was in his own note taking. I watched him, writing away, and felt ill with longing. His sculpted head bent over his task, his face expressionless.
Occasionally, I would come upon Geist in the stacks of Oscar’s section, holding books close to his face, his white fingers splayed against their covers like spread wings. The volumes he held at the tip of his nose had the compressed heft of textbooks, and their weight made him stoop with effort. Walter Geist was a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade, and as Pike’s designated other, he remained on the fringes of staff camaraderie. He was management, after all: George Pike’s pale avatar, some variation of a shadow. But he also held himself separate, certain that he would always be distinct and removed from that which defined the lives of others. In this respect, he knew better than any of us the condition of his life, and I suppose, like everyone else, I assumed he was reconciled to that condition. It wasn’t compassion on my part that made him so interesting to me. It was curiosity. My imagination was always overactive, and I made him a figure of significance in the fairy tale I was inventing, in the one I was living. Perhaps, as well, I just couldn’t reckon with his humanity.
The staff at the Arcade played a game to pass the time, a game prompted unwittingly when customers asked a question that was exceedingly difficult to answer. The game was called Who Knows? and it did make a long day pass more quickly, but it also served the practical purpose of sharpening the skills