JD by Mark Merlis

could destroy it.
    I suppose I had better try to find out what it was.
    T he library at the School for Liberal Studies is a relic of that architectural movement of the sixties called Brutalism. Great slabs, deliberately left bearing the imprint of the wooden molds into which the concrete was poured, here and there a slit of a window, suitable for shooting an arrow through but admitting no light. People despise these buildings now, but I think they had a rather endearing honesty about them. Better than what they build today, still concrete slabs, but gussied up with a laser-cut veneer of granite. As if to say civilization is wafer-thin; under it the brute.
    The library has no books in it. Well, that isn’t so, but no more than adorn a living room in the home design magazines—just a scattering of coffee table books strewn here and there on the blond wood tablesthat hold a phalanx of computer terminals. I cross the industrial carpeting to the main desk. Above it is a gray canvas about the size of my living room, with a faint red line running vertically an inch or so from the left edge.
    Behind the desk is a boy with a shaved skull and five earrings in his left ear. Why not four, or six? I say, “Good morning,” and he looks at me expressionlessly: not hostile, just without any opinion at all, as if I were a television show he hasn’t watched before. “I’m here to look at the papers of Jonathan Ascher.”
    He looks away from me, into space, and says, “Papers?”
    â€œYes.” I say slowly, “His papers are stored here.”
    He turns back to me and repeats, with patient incredulity, “Papers.”
    I realize that he has no concept of what papers are. Am I looking for Jonathan Ascher’s term papers? For Jonathan Ascher’s bundle of last week’s Times , ready to be recycled? “Professor Ascher’s notebooks and letters and manuscripts were given to the library, and they’re kept somewhere here.”
    He gets up, with no show of enlightenment, and walks away, presumably to fetch an intergenerational interpreter. While I wait, I study the painting over the desk. It doesn’t reward scrutiny, but I am uncomfortably aware that it is by someone who was famous thirty years ago. This school came and went without my ever learning the artists’ names. I don’t feel old when I fail to recognize the latest rock group; I feel old when I go to the Modern and realize that I can’t identify a painter more recent than Jasper Johns without looking at the label.
    A woman of about fifty, wearing a drab librarian suit but also tennis shoes, approaches me. She murmurs, in the way of librarians, so as not to disturb the scholars playing games at the computer terminals, “You were interested in the Ascher papers.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’m sorry, but access to those papers is restricted.”
    â€œI’m Mrs. Ascher.”
    â€œMrs. Jonathan Ascher?”
    â€œYes. Do you need some identification?” I open my bag.
    â€œNo, I … They’re not here.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œMr. Ascher’s papers aren’t kept in this building.”
    â€œOh. Where …?”
    â€œThey’re in storage. In Elizabeth.”
    â€œElizabeth. In—what, a warehouse?”
    â€œNot exactly. It’s—we call it the Annex, it’s humidity-controlled and …” She cringes a little, then draws herself up. “We have very limited space here, we need it for material that is in active use by researchers. And, since you won’t give anyone access to the papers …”
    â€œI understand,” I say. And I do, of course; it isn’t their fault if I’ve been imagining, all these years, Jonathan’s random jottings enshrined in some coffered room like a chapel.
    â€œWe can … you don’t have to go to Elizabeth,” she says. Saving me the trouble of admitting the obvious: that a