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yank back on his armbands and slingshoot him out past Otto and the lions into the street.

    “Has a little Negro boy passed the desk? With a thick accent? He’s been hiding in the art books all morning. You know what those boys
do
in there.”
    “I saw him come in, John.”
    “So did I. Has he gone
out
though.”
    “I haven’t noticed. I guess so.”
    “Those are
very
expensive books.”
    “Don’t be so nervous, John. People are supposed to touch them.”
    “There is touching,” John said sententiously, “and there is touching. Someone should check on him. I was afraid to leave the desk here. You know the way they treat the housing projects we give them.”
    “You give them?”
    “The city. Have you seen what they do at Seth Boyden? They threw
beer
bottles, those big ones, on the
lawn.
They’re taking over the city.”
    “Just the Negro sections.”
    “It’s easy to laugh, you don’t live near them. I’m going to call Mr. Scapello’s office to check the Art Section. Where did he ever find out about art?”
    “You’ll give Mr. Scapello an ulcer, so soon after his egg-and-pepper sandwich. I’ll check, I have to go upstairs anyway.”
    “You know what they do in there,” John warned me.
    “Don’t worry, Johnny,
they’re
the ones who’ll get warts on their dirty little hands.”
    “Ha ha. Those books happen to cost—”
    So that Mr. Scapello would not descend upon the boy with his chalky fingers, I walked up the three flights to Stack Three, past the receiving room where rheumy-eyed Jimmy Boylen, our fifty-one-year-old boy, unloaded books from a cart; past the reading room, where bums off Mulberry Street slept over
Popular Mechanics;
past the smoking corridor where damp-browed summer students from the law school relaxed, some smoking, others trying to rub the colored dye from their tort texts off their fingertips; and finally, past the periodical room, where a few ancient ladies who’d been motored down from Upper Montclair now huddled in their chairs, pince-nezing over yellowed, fraying society pages in old old copies of the Newark
News.
Up on Stack Three I found the boy. He was seated on the glass-brick floor holding an open book in his lap, a book, in fact, that was bigger than his lap and had to be propped up by his knees. By the light of the window behind him I could see the hundreds of spaces between the hundreds of tiny black corkscrews that were his hair. He was very black and shiny, and the flesh of his lips did not so much appear to be a different color as it looked to be unfinished and awaiting another coat The lips were parted, the eves wide, and even the ears seemed to have a heightened receptivity! He looked ecstatic—until he saw me, that is. For all he knew I was John McKee.

    “That’s okay,” I said before he could even move, “I’m just passing through. You read.”
    “Ain’t nothing
to
read. They’s pictures.”
    “Fine.” I fished around the lowest shelves a moment, playing at work.
    “Hey, mister,” the boy said after a minute, “where is this?”
    “Where is what?”
    “Where is these pictures? These people, man, they sure does look cool. They ain’t no yelling or shouting here, you could just see it.”

    He lifted the book so I could see. It was an expensive large-sized edition of Gauguin reproductions. The page he had been looking at showed an 8½12 × 11 print, in color, of three native women standing knee-high in a rose-colored stream. It
was
a silent picture, he was right.
    “That’s Tahiti. That’s an island in the Pacific Ocean.”
    “That ain’t no place you could go, is it? Like a ree-sort?”
    “You could go there, I suppose. It’s very far. People live there …”
    “Hey,
look,
look here at this one.” He flipped back to a page where a young brown-skinned maid was leaning forward on her knees, as though to dry her hair. “Man,” the boy said, “that’s the fuckin life.” The euphoria of his diction would have earned him eternal