He sat in his childhood closet after he found the door, he remembers that now. It was a better closet for sitting. A deeper one, with pillows he had dragged in to make it more comfortable. That one didn’t have a door to Narnia, either, he knows because he checked.
Only the singular section of Sweet Sorrows is about him, though there are pages missing. The text comes back to the pirate and the girl again but the rest is disjointed, it feels incomplete. Much of it revolves around an underground library. No, not a library, a book-centric fantasia that Zachary missed his invitation to because he d
idn’t open a painted door when he was eleven.
Apparently he went around looking for the wrong imaginary entryways.
The wine-colored book rests at the foot of the bed. Zachary will not admit to himself that he is hiding from it, in the closet where it cannot see him.
A whole book and he has no idea even after reading it three times how he should proceed.
The rest of the book doesn’t feel as tangible as those few pages near the beginning. Zachary has always had a complicated view of magic because of his mother, but while he can grasp herbalism and divination the things in the book are very much beyond his definition of real. Magic magic.
But if those few pages about him are real, the rest could be…
Zachary puts his head between his knees and tries to keep his breathing steady.
He keeps wondering who wrote it. Who saw him in that alleyway with the door and why they wrote it down. The opening pages imply that the first stories are nested: the pirate telling the story about the acolyte, the acolyte seeing the story about the boy. Him.
But if he’s in a story within a story who is telling it? Someone must have typeset it and bound it in a book.
Someone somewhere knows this story.
He wonders if someone somewhere knows he’s sitting on the floor of his closet.
Zachary crawls out into his room, his legs stiff. It is near dawn, the light outside his window a lighter shade of dark. He decides to take a walk. He leaves the book on the bed. His fingers start twitching immediately, wanting to take it with him so he can read it again. He wraps his scarf around his neck. Reading a book four times in one day is perfectly normal behavior. He buttons his wool coat. Having a physical response to a lack of book is not unusual. He tugs his knit hat down over his ears. Everyone spends nights on the floor of their closet during grad school. He pulls on his boots. Finding an incident from your childhood in an authorless mystery book is an everyday occurrence. He slips his hands into his gloves. Happens to everyone.
He puts the book in the pocket of his coat.
Zachary trudges through newly fallen snow without a destination in mind. He passes the library and continues toward a hilly stretch of campus near the undergraduate dorms. He could adjust his route to pass his old dorm but he does not, he always finds it strange to look at a window he used to look out from the other side. He works his way through the crisp unbroken snow, crushing the pristine surface under his boots.
He usually enjoys the winter and the snow and the cold even when he can’t feel his toes. There’s a wonder to it, left over from reading about snow in books before he got to experience it for himself. His first snow was a laughter-filled night spent in the field outside his mother’s farmhouse, making snowballs with his bare hands and constantly losing his footing in shoes he discovered after the fact were not waterproof. Inside their cashmere-lined gloves, his hands tingle thinking about it.
He is always surprised how quiet the snow is, until it melts.
“Rawlins!” a voice calls from behind him and Zachary turns. A bundled figure with a striped hat waves a brightly mittened hand at him and he watches the mismatched color move over a field of white as it trudges up the hill through the snow, sometimes hopping in the foot holes he has left. When the figure is a few yards away he recognizes Kat, one of the few undergrads from his department who has moved from acquaintance to almost-friend, mostly because she took it upon herself to get to know everyone and he has been Kat-approved. She runs a video-game-themed cooking blog and tends to try out her often delicious experiments on the rest of them. Skyrim-inspired sweet rolls and classic BioShock cream-filled cakes and maraschino truffle odes to Pac-Man cherries. Zachary suspects she doesn’t sleep and she has a tendency to appear out of thin air to suggest cocktails or dancing or some other excuse to coerce him out of his room, and while Zachary has never articulated the fact that he is grateful to have someone like her in his otherwise highly introverted lifestyle he is pretty sure she already knows.
“Hey, Kat,” Zachary says when she reaches him, hoping he won’t appear as off-kilter as he feels. “What brings you out so early?”
Kat sighs and rolls her eyes. The sigh drifts away as a cloud in the frigid air.
“God-awful early is the only hour I can get lab time for as-of-yet unofficial projects, how ’bout you?” Kat shifts her bag on her shoulder and nearly loses her balance, Zachary puts a hand out to steady her but she recovers on her own.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Zachary answers, which is true enough. “Are you still working on that scent-based project?”
“I am!” Kat’s cheeks betray the smile hidden by her scarf. “I think it’s the key to immersive experience, virtual reality isn’t all that real if it doesn’t smell like anything. I can’t figure out how to get it to work for in-home use yet but my site-specific stuff is going well. I’m probably going to need beta testers in the spring if you’d be willing.”
“If spring ever shows up, I’m game.” Kat’s projects are legendary throughout the department, elaborate interactive installations, and always memorable regardless of how successful she deems them. They make Zachary’s work feel overly cerebral and sedentary by comparison, especially since so much of his own work is analyzing work already done by others.
“Excellent!” Kat says. “I’ll put you on my list. And I’m glad I ran into you, are you busy tonight?”
“Not really,” Zachary says, having not thought about the fact that the day would go on, that the campus would continue in its routines and he is the only one who has had his universe turned askew.
“Could you help me run my J-term class?” Kat asks. “Seven to eight thirty or so?”
“Your Harry Potter knitting class? I’m not a very good knitter.”
“No, that’s on Tuesdays, this one is a salon-style discussion called Innovation in Storytelling and this week’s topic is gaming. I’m trying to have a guest co-moderator for each class and Noriko was supposed to do this one but she bailed on me to go skiing. It’ll be super chill, no lecturing or anything you need to prepare, just babbling about gaming in a relaxed yet intellectual setting. I know that’s your jam, Rawlins. Please?”