The Monster in the Library

She had come to the library in a rush of frustration. The intensity of the semester was pressing in on her. She had firmly planted her feet on Shakespeare and the course offered her a respite of familiarity, but to her left and right loomed Literary Criticism and Romantic Poets, hard and unyielding in their insistence. She had fallen behind in the required reading, and the tall stacks of critical articles leaned on her heavily while the Poets surrounded her, eyes ablaze with scalding scolding for neglecting her inner-self. The presence of these left her feeling boxed in and claustrophobic, the sensation of which she had before been able to force herself into ignorance, but now she found herself at a loss. Studies in Old English loomed above her, the heavy Germanic Epics sinking towards her, bloated with the enormity of the ancient language and threatening to suffocate her. For weeks a single essay had separated her from the sky. It was one too many for her, and she felt frantic against it. If she could only conquer it she could relax and the towering stacks of articles and scowling poets would fall to her feet, succumbing to the awesome power of her intellect. But Beowulf loomed above her, glowering at her, a thick miasmas oozing from the stump where his arm should be, goading her on. He knew that she was no Geat; she was only a graduate student, and she was outnumbered.

She had come to the library for comfort. The smell of the dusty texts infiltrated her sense, revitalizing her like smelling salts. Here she could breathe in intellect and academia. Here, suffused into the stuffed chairs and hanging heavy in the air, lingered a century of sighs—exhalations of epiphany. Innumerable scholars had sat in the building as they struggled towards enlightenment, they too feeling overwhelmed by the heaviness of intellect. They had rallied here to stand against the ignorance that threatened to undo them, and they had triumphed. Here, in this open space, she felt reinforced, her brain barricaded against the onslaught of thought that threatened to overwhelm her. If she were to defend her sanity against the crushing weight of work, this is where she must make her last stand.

Her eyes roved the room, resting briefly on the image of scattered students descended deep into thought, each of them searching the texts before them for that which was precious. Like Orpheus, they hoped to return to the world trailing that which had so recently been dead to them. They descended deep into the hellish realms of obscurity and coaxed from it Eurydice or epiphany or ecstasy. Yes, for some of them pleasure was the temptation. Their languid eyes meandered across the pages, stringing together poesy and prosody and wreathing their brow with Dionysian drama. They lounged in lyric. On them she could almost smell the Elysian fields, almost embrace the Asphodel . . . but first she must toss those confounded critical essays into the river. Her ferry must be built of theory and she loathed it. With a deep sigh she began her journey, weaving her way through the labyrinth of tables.

She settled down in a corner. Beside her stood a statue—a reproduction of Grecian granite all done up in plaster. Perhaps it was not Grecian, but Italian. She did not know. He reminded her of the David, but it could not be him for in his arms he held a small child, its proportions distorted. The infant was an imitation of him in the way that he was mimetic of man. His eyes gazed forward, empty and unseeing, and his lifelessness filled her with a mystical sadness. Yet, for all his crumbling impotency she found him enchanting. Let him stand above her with the child. For all his monstrous villainy even Grendel would not dare impugn on such alabaster innocence. Here in his shadow she would be safe.

Withdrawing from the bag at her side a long, slender laptop computer, she set it on the table before her and opened it, releasing a wave of ozone and pixels from the cold, plastic shell. As the cursor winked into life she was confronted once again by the essay that had resisted her thus far. She took in a deep breath of academia and art and attacked it, renewed.

For hours she worked, waging battle against the essay, wielding words, sharp and metallic. The fluorescent bulbs began to overtake daylight but, here, in her remote corner the fluorescence held no sway. Somewhere a switch had not been flipped, and sunset shadows crept across the rippled torso of her silent guardian, washing him in shades of red and grey. The light from her computer bathed her face in an eerie iridescence. But the fading day could not take the vibrancy from her. Here in the library she was strong. Here in the library she strode unshaken towards the paragraph that would end her torment and give her release.

It was the smell that she noticed first. A strong wave of incense swept across her, dizzying in its pungent power. It was a familiar smell to her. The spicy weight of it hung over the small shops that littered the main street of the artsy community in which the university had grown. Sandalwood and something else she could never wrap her brain around—perhaps spirituality. Normally the scent filled her up and left her open and receptive, but in this moment—when triumph was so close—at this moment it distracted and, thus, repulsed her. Try as she might, she could not ignore it, and quickly she found her fingers numb with it, the words falling clumsily from her grasp. It landed like dust on her tongue, but her brain drowned in the potency of it. It swirled around her in prehensile vapors that clawed at her, tearing away coherency, leaving her mind naked and defenseless. She stumbled in a fog, unable to continue.

A stack of books landed beside her, the impact of which was felt but not heard. She tensed at it, turning her eyes towards the motion. A man stood there, his grey jeans splattered with white paint. His tee-shirt was dark, but faded so that it appeared dingy. It hung from his slouched shoulders in awkward bunches. His face was haggard, his mouth dragged down by the weightiness of his flesh which pooled into nightmarish wrinkles. His grey eyes peered out over the bridge of his crooked nose, but his eyes did not seem to see. His hair was not greasy, but had a dusty quality to it, clinging to itself as it straggled across his brow and crawled down his sallow cheeks in grey and white creeping vines. He tossed a ragged canvas jacket and a garish purple sweater across the back of the chair at the end of the table—her table.

She glanced around. The scattering of tables nearby were still empty, and as her eyes roamed to the larger area of the library she realized that this, too, had become vacant as twilight had deepened. Yet this stranger had chosen to infiltrate the sanctity of her space—to usurp the divine presence of the plaster idol that faded into dusk beside her. A heat rose up inside of her. Audacity and presumptuousness emanated from him like shadow from a demon. She loathed him. She loathed his presence. Yet she railed in silence. He had descended upon her, pulling down Tartarus around her and casting her intellect into darkness. She was left groping blindly in the night, stripped of words and reason. Oh, how she loathed him! He shuffled behind her, moving passed her in a swirling fog of opiate sandalwood. Something deep down inside her cowered at his presence even he it moved away from her. She struggled for calm rationality, but her horror at having been so violated left her in a shuddering insanity.

Damn hippies. The village was rife with them.

Overhead fluorescence flickered to life, and she cringed beneath it. He had found the forgotten switch, and she blinked painfully in the glaring light. She cast pleading eyes at the ruler of the temple of her thoughts, but he still stared ahead lifelessly. As she was no Geat, he was no Galatea. He could not help her.

The wrinkled demon returned and sat down. He began rifling through papers, the sound of which drove her spirit into frenzy. She felt her skin crawling with it. Agitation ate away at her. She focused her eyes on her work, but her fingertips lingered lifelessly on the keys. She sat there, inert and infuriated. In her peripheral vision she could see him draw a long slender object from the pocket of coat. He studied it for a moment in the fluorescence. Then, with it, he traced long slices into the white skin of the paper before him. With sharp, tense strokes he darkened the face of the page, and each stroke grated on her nerves. He looked again and again at her . . . no past her. His eyes roved over the naked figure of the plaster god that stood beside me. He raped his divinity with his eyes and fondled his form with graphite on the page. And still the thick, heavy incense roiled around them.

Her thoughts turned to flight. She longed to grab up her things and flee from his infernal darkness. She reached out and caressed the plastic casing of her computer. The essay still flickered before her. It mocked her in its prematurity. It was still not finished. Again Grendel stood before her, that dark miasmas oozing from his shoulder. He grinned, a hissing laugh escaping through yellowed teeth. She slammed the case of her computer shut and stuffed it into her bag. She no longer cared to stare into his maw.

Slinging her bag on her shoulder she stomped through the clutter of chairs, banging her knee hard on the corner of a table as she passed. She stopped and looked around the library for a space that would suit her purposes. Nothing appealed to her. The library had lost its mystic power. The bookcases no longer stood proud and majestic. The air now tasted stale. She sank down at a table in the center of the room, all too aware of the eyes of the librarian as she slammed her computer far too hard down onto the surface of the table. The essay blinked at her. She tapped out two or three formulaic sentences. An abortive perversion of a conclusion, she knew, but an ending nonetheless. She opened an email and sent the monstrosity off to her professor. It was done.

Still, she stared at the abandoned essay before her. She waited for the wash of relief she had expected when she first entered the library, but it did not come. Her claustrophobia had not relented. Instead, she felt sullied. Her mind was capable of far more, but she had forsaken it. As she stared at the words before her she felt the villain. Grendel took up a seat in her soul, and she suddenly pitied him. He too knew the ignominy of defeat. She felt failure drip down onto her shoulders, dark and heavy and thick. She and Grendel were bloodied kin.