Are You Here For What I'm Here For? by Brian Booker

Author:Brian Booker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942658139
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I AM NO LONGER CONVINCED THAT IT IS, IN FACT, the holiday season. Holiday is a time of cheerful and restful celebration with one’s family—and this is decidedly not that. There is no turkey here, and no pillow. There is no gravy here, unless by gravy you mean howling wind. It has been a long, long night.

Where is here? I am not, as yet, in a position to investigate that. Shortly after the train left, I found that my motor coordination was poor. Bells rang in my ears unremittingly. There were certain ocular difficulties. . . . It would require too much energy to describe them. Or I could put it this way: I felt as though I’d been hit in the head by a train, so to speak, and forgotten to take my medicine. (Ha!—is that an old saying?)

I staggered over a hill and through a wood, not to grandmother’s house, but to this structure in which I am currently—temporarily!—housed. I have no reason not to expect a prompt rescue and deliverance. Perhaps in the morning another train will pass through.

It now occurs to me that, in some sense (and despite the mess of papers scattered on the ground beside me), I believe I may have achieved the means to advance my research even further. True, I no longer have access to a library, and I may have to forgo, for some time, the beneficence of a Krupp-Nudenheim. But I have attained a power of mind that comes only when most of the senses have gone. I never expected the project to be easy. I like to think that today’s scholar, plunging boldly into our collective dream of history, revivifying the dormant past, is the stolid pioneer of a new era: an era of reembodied knowledge.

There . . . I believe I have felt a sensation in my toe. Perhaps my limbs, after a brief winter’s nap, are starting to reawaken to new life. Soon, indeed, the quickening will spread through me, as swiftly and surely as a fever, all the way up to my brain! Then—if I can only muster the verve to grab a pen—I will retrace my steps, stare down the evidence with a colder eye, and think my way to a new, uncharted place.

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