Thank you.
It's nice to be here.
It's nice to be invited.
It's nice to have a chance to read in such good company.
Like the rest of you, I'm really here
to see what David reads, talking about [INAUDIBLE]..
[LAUGHING] But hopefully it will be somewhat entertaining.
I've been traveling around a little bit.
I do have this new book that came out this spring,
and I've been reading from it all over the place.
It's a novel.
And it's hard to read from the novel for me,
because I do a lot of exposition.
So I'm going to take this chance to read something else.
This is a short story, which is a love
story set in Philadelphia.
And the name of the story is Blooms.
"I took a job no one else wanted.
And I learned many things I would never have believed.
Here's an easy one, to start with:
fungus can bloom inside books.
Different kinds of molds, mostly, in dark,
damp libraries where the air isn't too good.
Fungi cannot make their own food.
They take what they can from other organic matter.
They start on the fabric and cardboard of the books' cover,
then feed on the pulp wood in the pages, the vegetable
dyes in the ink.
Samples are taken and sent to a laboratory
to check if the bloom is virulent.
Usually, it's not, it's only penicillin or aspergillus.
And then they send in a team to clean it up.
This is no job for librarians.
They hire other people, whoever they can get.
It's not exactly skilled labor.
An injury had forced me from my previous occupation.
I'd been working down the shore, on the boardwalk.
I wore a suit with three inches of padding,
a hockey mask painted with a fanged smile.
I leapt around behind fake trees,
in front of a canvas backdrop.
And people shot paintball guns at me.
Ten shots for $3.
I have targets on my suit, my helmet,
a bull's eye on my crotch that everyone found hilarious.
I wore two cups, with padding between them.
Tough-talking boys couldn't touch
me, cursing with their cracked voices,
slapping their temporary tattoos.
It was their girlfriends-- bikini tops, slack expressions,
baby fat under their arms--
who had the deadly aim.
At the end of the day, in the shower,
I counted the round bruises on my skin.
One day I was recounting a story to a friend of mine,
holding the mask in my hand.
He had one of the guns, twirling it
around his finger like Jesse James.
When it went off, it caught me in the face, sideswiped me,
actually, not even as hard as a punch.
Dark red paint splattered across my temple, into my ear.
I was left with this detached retina, where
my vision's crooked, and everyone I talk to
thinks I'm trying to say something else.
It's still shadowy on that side, but some days I
believe it's clearing.
Some days I'm not so sure.
My boss said he couldn't be held accountable for a time
that I wasn't working.
Playing grab ass, those were his words.
And, of, course, with my vision wrecked, my depth perception
completely gone, I did not make a very challenging target.
I was sore all over.
We gave away half of the stuffed animals in one afternoon.
Fortunately, none of this impaired me for the new job--
the blooms did not move so fast.
I answered an ad and was hired over the phone, told
where to be the next morning.
They said I'd work on a team, what that meant
was one other guy, Marco.
He was forty, at least, from South Philly,
where he still lived.
Older than me, and heavier, with gray
flecks in his hair, which was thick on the sides,
but you could see through it on top, his scalp shining.
He had a heavy way of walking, almost sliding his feet.
His hands would hang down at his sides,
opening and closing with each step.
My first impression was that he would never surprise me.
Nothing he would do, nothing he would say.
We didn't shake hands when we first met,
he just started to show me how things worked.
Hair pushed out the collar of his t-shirt,
both front and back.
He'd done this kind of work before,
and he told me there were worse jobs.
I've had them, I said.
He told me he was only working long enough
to make enough money to get out of town,
and I nodded and said that sounded wise.
I have to get out, he said.
The reasons are personal.
We went through a side door on a kind of loading dock,
down a flight of stairs.
The books we were dealing with were on two floors--
a basement and then another basement beneath that.
There was not one window.
Marco had already isolated the area
with clear plastic sheeting, hung up the warning signs.
He helped me into my suit, that first day.
They were white, made of Tyvek, with a long zipper
up the front, and zippers on the sides of the legs.
We wore latex gloves, and baggy paper
booties we had to replace every time we went outside.
The hoods on our heads had clear plastic face panels.
We wore battery packs on our belts, a fan
with a tube that blew filtered air in front of our faces.
It took one morning of breathing my own breath in that hood
before I quit smoking.
[LAUGHING] That's one positive thing that came of that job.
The blooms, they were green fuzzy mold,
streaked with black.
Fibrous, like nothing you'd want in your lungs.
They rested atop books, forced the covers open
where they weren't tight in the shelves
and squeezing each other.
We started out with the vacuums, fitted with HEPA filters
that trapped spores.
Marco would work one aisle, and I'd do the next.
The shelves were tall, but sometimes I'd pull out a book
and see him there, on the other side, his face close
but his expression hidden.
We kept moving, slowly and methodically,
as if we were under water.
The days went fluid, each like the one before it,
progress marked only by the bookshelves left behind.
Sections of maps, then encyclopedias.
Novels, even poetry.
It was strange to spend so much time so close to a person
without being able to talk with them.
We went our separate ways at lunch, and the rest of the time
we were inside the suits and ventilators.
It was all white noise down there--
the fans, the rustle of Tyvek, the sound of pages
being flipped under our gloved thumbs."