Chapter Text
I woke up with a sensitive scalp and a churning stomach. I was completely naked, except for my socks, but that didn't really give me much surprise. I stumbled into my bathroom, to throw up, to lessen my hangover. I was careful to make sure I didn't get any vomit in my beard.
I was running late for my bus, so I took the quickest possible shower and sprinted to the elevator, as its doors closed. My neighbor, Gigi Buffon, smirked at me, having held the doors open for me, and started whistling “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus. We both worked at Columbia University, so we usually took the Subway together, but today, I thought I was going to miss him.
“Aren't you going to apologize?”
“For what?”
“I could hear your drunk karaoke through the floor. You should really find more age-appropriate songs.”
“If you could hear it, why didn't come downstairs and join me?”
“I don't like to enable.”
“You mean, you don't like your pictures showing up on Facebook,” I replied.
Gigi shrugged, as though he had no clue what I was talking about, even though he knew he was a dirty slut when he drank three bottles of wine and wasn't particularly responsible in front of a cell phone camera.
Gigi was a Classics professor, while I was the head acquisitions librarian. That mostly meant that Gigi wrote angry journal articles about the sad state of Marxist philosophy while interpreting Ancient Roman history, while I schedule years of weeding projects and field hate mail from angry professors who didn't realize that we couldn't physically maintain all of the books mankind created within our walls. I didn't understand what he did and he didn't really get why I had to do any of my stuff either.
“No one takes the Marxists seriously, but it's still a pathetically popular viewpoint in academics,” Gigi would tell me every single time he was drunk. He would say these things early on in the night, before he got smashed and joined me on my karaoke machine. His favorite song to sing was “I Got You, Babe” by Sonny and Cher.
“What was the occasion for your solo celebration last night?”
“I finished my weeding project of medical. I didn't have enough notice to send out my invites.”
“I'm sorry I forgot to congratulate on the destruction of modern society,” Gigi was one of those professors who had a lot of opinions of weeding projects, since he assumed that the librarians just held massive book burnings after we removed old books from the catalog, presumably so we could make evil old lady magic by firelight.
“Excuse you. The books I got rid of were not the seminal works of literature you appear to think they were. I don't think it is responsible to retain a copy of Asbestos: the Miracle Mineral.”
“This is a modern-day Library of Alexandria situation,” Gigi said, just as he said every other time I finished a weeding project.
“Except now we have e-books and weirdos who retype entire books entire books and post them onto their little OCD blogs.”
We had to transfer trains to go uptown.
“Just think about the value those books would have had for future generations?”
“Just think about the current college students who might use the medical advice in those books and kill themselves. One of the books that I decided to put in a closed collection was about maximizing your week, by giving you eight days in a work week, by shifting your sleep patterns significantly throughout any given period of time. That stuff's dangerous for idiots who are trying to give themselves an edge,” I replied. Gigi wasn't the one who had seen multiple nervous breakdowns in the library during finals week. Before I was promoted to having my own office, cossetted away from most of society, just as I liked it, I had the midnight shift in reference services, where I had seen quite a few students lose it, as they realized there was no way that they could fit all of the knowledge that ever existed into their normal, human brains. It wasn't cute.
I never got the whole stress thing that caused half of the student population of Columbia to go prematurely bald, but I went to CW Post for my second Master's degree, so what did I know?
I got to my office the same as usual, even if I still felt a little sick. I shut my office door and took a quick catnap under the desk. Everyone knew not to disturb me for the first hour of work, when I usually answered my e-mails and trolled Reddit for a little bit before actually getting productive. I woke up rather refreshed. At least my hair didn't hurt. No one had come in and my computer screen faced away from the door, so I felt fine checking Reddit, to see what I had done the night before, drunk off of complimentary wine from my parents' vineyard.
Half of the time my posts were incoherent thoughts on RuPaul's Drag Race and how All Stars was a disgrace. The other half, I fancied myself a real scholar, having done my first Master's on Classical Civilizations, specializing in Roman historiography of the Empire. Or that's what I would have specialized in, had I decided to go all in for the Ph.D. I had specialized just in Roman history, for my MA. It was part of the reason Gigi and I got along so famously. Sometimes I would sneak some of the rarer books out of the collection to read at home and translate the Latin myself, for a personal treat.
Last night, I had apparently regarded myself as an unsung genius for the ages, as I posted on one of the subreddits about the last book I had absconded with, with every intention of returning, I must add. The Chalice of St. Peter and Other Tales is was a weird fairy tale book that wasn't something I usually would have picked, since it was originally published in the Middle Ages and was just printed in Latin, for kicks, probably for scholars.
Some other users were very interested in the book and were asking for photos, which evidently I provided, by linking to my Facebook. I rubbed my face, in disgust with my stupidity and deleted all of my comments and and toyed with the idea of deactivating my Facebook page. I was worried about losing all of my contacts, since I enjoyed the events feature of Facebook, for my parties. Instead, I cracked down on my privacy settings and moved on with my day.
For lunch, I went to a Chinese place with a few of the other librarians. Usually, I'd call one of my friends, who lived nearby, but instead, I decided against that, since he was really annoying last time I talked to him. I did miss the dear old head librarian, Rino Gattuso, who used to love stabbing us with forks, but he had moved onto another university, in another state.
After work, I went home alone, since Gigi had to stay late for a lecture. I was going to take a long look at The Chalice of St. Peter with a nice big glass of wine and maybe I'd order in a pizza. Or, probably, I contemplated what I should do: go for a jog.
When I got back to my apartment, I noticed that the door was ajar slightly. Which was certainly not how I left it. I didn't live with anyone, so it wasn't like I could just have someone who stopped by and forgot. My parents had a key, but they rarely came by my apartment. And they would have called me. I tapped on the door, with my foot, so the door would open slightly. I poked my head in, to see if anyone was still around and to see if my apartment was trashed or anything. It didn't look like anything was disturbed. I went in and took a look around. Everything seemed to be in order. My computer was still in the main room, I still had my TV. Everything looked weirdly in its place, just how I liked it and just how I left it. I decided to forgo the wine, the jog, and The Chalice of St. Peter to go to the hardware store to buy a big ass deadbolt to put on the inside of my apartment door, security deposit be damned. I, sure as fuck, was not going to murdered in my own, depressing, divorced man apartment.