Two years ago, the San Francisco Main Library moved from its original location on Polk Street. In the move, the following manuscript, tattered and coffee-stained, was found stuffed behind some books on one of the lower shelves of the cartography room. No one knows how long it had been there, and the manuscript was found covered in a layer of dust that speaks of an indefinite period. The first two pages had been torn from the manuscript, and so the author will have to remain anonymous.

nor was I able, outside of my own muddled memories, to find any sign that he had ever even existed.

At all.

Ever.

The room that was his was there, and it was not bare, not as if he had simply moved out, but looked, rather, thoroughly lived in. A bed, similar to Father's but not Father's, crouched fearfully in one corner, its red bedsheets lolling to the floor on one side like a great tongue. A mound of detritus piled nearly as high as myself pushed up from the opposite corner and I had to step through broken dishes and several large slabs of stringy meat to get to it.

In the pile were several suits, similar to suits Father might have worn (and yet not Father's), a pair of broken spectacles, three watches (their hands missing), a smashed typewriter whose keyboard was missing the 'e', and a dozen or so identical pairs of shoes, all flat, black oxfords of the sort favored by Father, and yet not Father's, this was sure. The smell of putrid meat was nearly overwhelming.

A dresser stood beside the bed, its drawers open and empty. Several daguerreotypes were propped up on top, Father conspicuously absent from all of them. I felt slightly gaseous then, like a balloon, and my skin seemed almost translucent in the dim light. Whose room was this? Who was I if not of Father?

Mother was of no help. She just looked up at me quizzically when I asked of Father and pointed to her belly, round and full, the eye of her navel staring up at me helplessly. "They get different, slighter, every year," she said, and it was true. My brothers and sisters, of whom there were many, seemed to be changing with each birth, as if something new were transpiring, as though we simply marked the transition of some new form slowly emerging from the dark cave of Mother's womb.

"Is Father dead?" I asked again, but Mother was no longer paying attention. I was not there for her, her eyes were wide and gaping down at the round shapelessness that moved beneath her, like forms beneath a white sheet.

Outside the midday sun was obscured by a thick, grey haze, and the streets were still muddy from the last rain. The houses that rose up on either side of me with their pointed thatched roofs were like rows of teeth, colored a yellowing white, with bits of mud and manure splashed across their facades by passing carriage wheels.

Blue-clad soldiers rode past me to my left and I was reminded of Father's hatred of the military, of the time he once refused a soldier water, telling him our well was contaminated by the bodies that had been buried above it. I tipped my hat to them as they passed and some of them returned the gesture.

Mack Flann, our town's butcher and Father's best friend in life, was not of much help either. He was a tiny man, with hands like pale flies that floated and hummed above an enormous slab of beef, flaying bits of fat from the carcass with a surgeon's scalpel. "Joseph was a large man," he said. "Enormous. With a broad, flat face like his shoes and the hooked beak of a bird of prey. Your father had beautiful hair." He popped the bits of fat into his mouth, chewing as he spoke. "But despite his size, his suits were always several sizes too big. They hung about him like gunnysacks, as if he refused to admit to his true stature. As if he wanted to look smaller than something around him. I never knew where he got those suits. He talked a lot."

This was not how I remembered Father at all. He was a tall man, yes, but thin and balding, and his clothes, as I remember, always stopped a few inches short of his extremities. His fingers, fat and white and near translucent like sausages, were what I remember most about Father. That and his reticence.

"You and Father were close," I said, "And I --"

"No. I barely knew your father. He was close to no one," Flann said.

I thought of the many hours Father and Mack Flann would spend in the back of the shop, drinking and playing cards. We kids would come there and Flann would give us bones for the dogs. Or so I seem to remember.

When I left the shop the dark shadows of dusk were seeping into the cracks of the town, and I could not help but feel that Father's shadow was there among them. Father's tailor was on the other side of the town, his shop a tiny derelict shack on the outskirts, but our town is a small one, and I was there before the full dark of evening. I passed a scarecrow on the way, a few hundred yards out in a field of green corn. It hung in the air, one limp glove flapping at me in the wind, and it wore what appeared to be Father's favorite hat, a brown beaver-fur Stetson with a distinctive hole in the crown from a near hunting accident. It was too far away for me to tell whether this was indeed Father's hat, or if what I took for a hole was not an insect. But I had not time to go and see for certain, as Mr. Kovacs, the tailor, would surely be closing up shop soon and I was determined to see him that day.

A chime sounded as I closed the door behind myself. I could hear from beyond a heavy black curtain behind the counter the rustling of fabrics, and the steady vibration of a sewing machine ran through my feet, as if a tiny locomotive was running underground. The room was small, and piled with fabrics of different materials and patterns. I walked to one corner and lifted the hat from a mannequin that sat, crumpled in a twisted mass of appendages, far too many for a single body, in one corner, its cracked flesh the color of an egg. The hat was a brown Stetson, made from beaver-fur, and I poked my finger through the hole in the crown and wiggled it, like a pink worm, imagining the bullet that nearly pierced Father's skull. The smell of mink oil suddenly permeated the room and I turned to see Mr. Kovacs emerge from behind the curtain.

Kovacs was a stout bear of a man, not tall but robust, with the rubicund cheeks and wide inquisitive eyes of a child. His beard was so full and so black that the bottom half of his face disappeared entirely. He walked at an odd forward tilt, as if he simply leaned forward and took steps to keep himself from falling. Kovacs took the hat from my hands and placed it atop my head, tilted himself back and shook his head. "Too large," he said. "You have the head of your father." He placed the hat back on top of the mannequin's head.

"My father's hat?" I asked, knowing that it was.

Kovacs frowned jovially and shook his massive head. "No. That hat is far too big for your father. Mr. Quay was a small man," he said, "with long white fingers and the hooked beak of a bird of prey. He had a tiny head. This hat would not fit your father. It would not look right on your father."

This was not the answer that I knew. "Have you seen him?"

Kovacs ran a hand through his beard, the hand disappeared. "Of course I've seen him. I made suits for him. Mr. Quay was a good customer, one of my best."

"I mean lately. Within the past week."

"He had strange tastes. An attitude to his suits I cannot understand. Perhaps he wanted them cut for the man he saw himself to be. You look nothing like your father."

Were we talking about the same man? Was Father perhaps shrinking? The resemblance between Father and myself was striking, or so I've been told. I never could see it myself, but to others it was as if I were only a younger version.

Kovacs squatted and opened a small icebox. He pushed aside several red hocks of meat, and pulled out a grey bundle. He handed it to me. "This is Mr. Quay's. He was supposed to pick it up a week ago. Perhaps you could give it to him for me."

I thanked him and once outside the door stooped beneath the sallow light of an oil lamp to examine the package. I cut the string that held it together with my pocket knife, then unfolded the square of thick grey wool. It was a suit. Very much akin to the kind of suit Father wore, except that it was tiny, barely large enough to fit a child of eight or nine. I turned to open the door, to insist that there was some mistake, but the door was locked, and through the window was now only blackness. I left the tiny suit on the doorstep, hoping that Mr. Kovacs might realize his mistake and give the suit to the child for whom it was so obviously intended.

I decided that my first course of action would be to determine when and where Father was last seen. I myself had last seen Father about two weeks prior, I think, in the morning, before he left for work. We were alone in the kitchen, just the two of us, unusual for our house, which is usually teeming with my brothers and sisters. Because my siblings were beginning to resemble him less and less with each successive birth, I suspect that Father was not entirely secure in his paternity, and sometimes I thought I saw, in the wan light of his eyes, a cuckold's self-doubt. I made him coffee that morning, thick and black the way he liked it, and he sat silently across from me, his fingers long and bone thin, like instruments of surgery, folded around his coffee cup. He was writing something, something at which he'd been at work for some weeks, as I'd hear the sharp clickety-clack of his typewriter late into the night, transcribing what scrawled words he'd made during the day. He stared hard at me as he wrote, as if fixing my image in his head, or as if he were painting my portrait. I never read anything Father wrote. I had not been forbidden, but nor had I asked. I saw it as sort of a silent agreement between the two of us, one which I regret now, in the light of Father's absence.

He folded his papers that morning and rose from his chair, handing me his empty cup. Then he left, presumably for work. It wasn't until a week later that I noticed Father was missing.

Mr. Makaryk, head of the insurance firm for which father worked as an underwriter, shook his head slowly when I asked him of Father. He put down the sandwich he had been eating, which seemed to consist only of two thin slices of bread around a rather large hunk of red-brown meat. "Quay," he said, wiping at his lips with a napkin. "Can't say that rings any bells. But then I do have a large staff. Perhaps if you described him." He had a light on his desk that was turned toward me, its glare in my eyes, making it impossible to look Mr. Makaryk directly in the face for too long.

I looked past the slats of his office window and into a huge room, where dozens of balding heads shined above notebooks open atop desks. The sound of typewriters was pervasive, though I could not see a single machine. No images of Father would come to me, I found that I could no more describe how he looked than I could have described Makaryk before I met him. "I visited Father here from time to time," I said. "Perhaps you would allow me to see his desk."

"Certainly," said Mr. Makaryk, rising from his chair. He was a round gentleman, with small round glasses and a round head that was as a smaller version of his large round belly. His mouth was puckered and round. He moved with surprising agility and verve. He opened the door to the room beyond his office and stood aside to let me pass. It was an act of gracious intent, but rather awkward, as I had some difficulty squeezing past the flesh of his belly. I thought I felt something kick at me from inside the great ball, but I was not sure, and did not think it wise to try and find out.

The room was as big as a warehouse, with rows of identical desks, and the smell of sperm whale oil pervasive from the huge oil lamps that hung low from the ceiling. Men in dark suits hunched over the desks, pencils scratching away, black balls of carbon paper littering the floor around their feet. I walked past several rows, Mr. Makaryk behind me, and no one looked up from his work as we passed. Though I had visited Father on numerous occasions in the past, I had always found him by his person, and to be perfectly honest had never committed to memory the location of his desk, which was exactly as all the others. I walked up and own several rows, hoping to at least find a vacant chair, but there were none. I circled back to the approximate location that I remembered Father's desk to be and asked a man who was furiously erasing a column of numbers from his book. "Excuse me," I said, and he finished erasing before looking up at me, then back down to his desk. "My father. A Mr. Quay. He works here. I'm looking for him."

He was a tired looking man with wan skin like an uncooked chicken. "I'm very busy," he said, and I watched his eyes dart nervously to Mr. Makaryk's shoes, which were just beside my own. "I don't know anyone by that name." He said this more to the papers than to me. The back of his neck looked sticky and pink where it emerged from his shirt collar, which was starched and very white.

I looked at Mr. Makaryk, who smiled and shrugged. A telephone rang in his office and he turned to leave. I felt a tug at my jacket and looked down to see a note held up to me in one shaking hand. "You're looking for your father?" The face that spoke these words was turned down to his desk. "Here. take it."

I took the note and put it in my pocket. I turned to him and was about to speak but the man was shaking his head, hissing at me to leave. On the way out of the office I tripped over an electrical cord.

The note, which I was careful to examine on the street, outside of Mr. Makaryk's sight, was a hastily scrawled address, a pub I knew vaguely, located in the center of town. Below the address was written '8 o'clock,' though the eight could well have been a six.

The streetlamps flickered above the telephone lines, casting a shadowed grid across the sidewalk and I made a boyish attempt to follow these lines, as if they were tightropes beneath my feet. This path took me into the streets at times and I had occasionally to leap from one line to the other to avoid passing automobiles.

The pub was unassuming at best, its sign obscured by years of accumulated exhaust. I suppose the pub catered to a regular clientele, and saw no reason to advertise. A wall of hot moist air hit me as I entered, the place was like a greenhouse. About a dozen faces turned to look up at me. I stood in the doorway for several moments, taking in the room, which was oblong, with roughly the dimensions of a coffin. They were all men. The place smelled strongly of lilac and roasted meat. A row of polished wood tables lined one side, a bar and fireplace took up the opposite side. Several large ferns flourished from pots in the corners. A huge spit of meat sputtered and popped in the fireplace. All but one of the faces turned back away from me and I looked to the one for some sign of recognition, for I had not seen the face of Father's coworker. The man rose and walked toward me. I smiled and extended my hand but he walked past and my smile hung in the air like a painting. He put a coin in a juke box and a Marlene Dietrich song came on and then he turned and grabbed me around the waist and we were dancing.

"Did you know my father?" I said this into his ear, as it happened to be where my mouth was.

"Why don't we get you a drink." He took my hand and led me to the bar.

I removed my hand and put it deep into my pocket. I did feel like a drink. I ordered a vodka martini.

"Another scotch for me," said my new friend.

The bartender nodded and fixed the two drinks. I removed my wallet to pay but the man shook his head. "We'll just put it on my tab," he said, and winked.

Later, we were back in his apartment. The three martinis had gotten to my head, and I was not entirely sure why I was there, but I seemed to remember something about something of Father's here in the apartment. Lenny led me down a parquet hall, lined on either side by framed photographs of men on horses, with polo mallets. The living room was small, but fastidiously arranged, giving it an illusion of space. The walls were papered in dark forest green and bordered in stained oak wainscoting. The upholstery matched the walls. He left through a small red door and I stood alone in the middle of this room shifting from one foot to the other on a rug like thick moss.

Music came into the room from hidden speakers, a waltz. Lenny returned with a green feather duster clutched in both hands like something fragile and precious. "Why don't we start with a little dusting." He handed the thing to me like it was a medal or a trophy and I took it and looked around the room again and could not see a mote of dust, anywhere.

I began despite this, confused and beginning to regret my presence there, swiping randomly at things in the room -- a potted fern, the mantel, a painting of a young boy in blue jodhpurs carrying a riding crop, a lamp -- like it was a flyswatter and the place infested. Lenny stood watching me with his arms crossed, smiling. "Oh, you are a sight. Here, let me help you with that." He came up behind me and stretched his arm along my own, laying his hand over my hand over the feather duster. He moved my arm with his own, to the tempo of the music, as a conductor's baton. He reached with his left hand around my waist, placing it across his abdomen, where the sweater rode up above his pants. We waltzed about the room like this, his hot breath in my ear. He smelled of onion and lilac. Lenny's thin white fingers played at the buttons of my shirt like they were piano keys and he opened them one by one.

"I came here because I thought you could tell me something about my father." My voice cracked. For some reason I could not move.

"You look very much like your father," he said. "Though larger. Your father was such a small man, tiny really, like a boy. You are like a larger, younger version." He closed his eyes and sucked air through his teeth and his hand traveled just inside my pants. We swayed like that in one place on the soft rug like something in the wind, the feathered thing waving mutely in the air, a forgotten object. Though I could by this time remember little of what Father looked like, I was fairly sure he looked nothing like me. Or did he? I could no longer remember.

I stepped forward, away from him, and refastened the clasp of my pants. I picked up from the mantel a photograph of Lenny laying naked on a beach, looking back coquettishly over his shoulder. "How did you know my father?" I said.

"Your father took that photograph." The song ended and was replaced by a sultry cha-cha. He extended his arms out and moved his shoulders back and forth to the music, stepping toward me, then back, shaking his hips. "Your father and I were..." he licked his lips and smiled at me, maneuvering me against a bookshelf with several quick thrusts of his hips. "...very close."

I ducked out from under his arm on the pretense of picking up another photo, this one in color, of my host holding a large red chow by a taut leash. They stood before the wall of a cathedral and the dog's hanging blue-black tongue mirrored that of a gargoyle smiling above them. "Do you have any photographs of him?"

Lenny took the photograph, caressing my hand as he did so. "Your father took this. It was during our trip to Prague, last year. Our last hurrah. No, your father was always behind the camera, he would never allow me to photograph him. God, he loved that dog."

I moved across the room to examine a shelf of books. "When was the last time you saw him?"

Lenny went to a small bar and poured a jigger each of brandy from a crystal snifter. "Intimately? That would have been a month ago, just before I broke off with him. Of course I saw him every day at work until two weeks ago, when he stopped coming." He handed me the glass.

"Do you have anything of my father's I might be able to see?"

He clinked his glass against mine then tipped the amber liquid back past his lips. "Really, you are such a bore. Is that all you can think about?"

"I came here because you told me you had something of Father's you wanted to show me." I set the glass down on the bookshelf, untouched. "I will leave now, if you don't."

"Very well," he said. He left the room and came back a minute later holding a large pocket watch. The music had stopped. The watch had large roman numerals and no hands. He dropped the watch into my upturned palm and let the long silver chain coil around on top of it until it covered the face entirely. At its end was a small silver key.

"What's this to?" I asked, picking up the key.

He shrugged, uninterested. "You have your father's eyes," he said, pressing himself against my thigh. "Kiss me."

I pushed past him to what I thought was the hallway but turned out to be the kitchen. An enormous roast sat, pale red and uncooked, on the kitchen counter, a sticky red pool congealing around it, a long and gleaming kitchen knife protruding out from it at an angle. I turned to find him blocking the hallway. Thrusting the watch into my pocket I strode past him again, knocking his arm out of my way.

"Won't you stay for dinner?" he asked. "Your father was a man of large appetites. Perhaps I could tell you about them over this roast. Perhaps you share some of them."

I found the front door and closed it behind myself, shutting out his voice completely.

The bus was nearly empty and I sat alone in the back, on orange fiberglass bucket seats covered in graffiti. The bus hissed and wheezed and lurched forward and I rode it to the end of the line, then back again. For much of the ride the only other passenger was a young man with stringy blond hair pulled back beneath a backturned baseball cap. He balanced on his knees a sheet of cardboard as a makeshift table, three cards lying face down across its top. He was still, except for his hands, which hovered and darted above the table like two pale hummingbirds, shifting and flipping the cards across its surface.

"Twenty dollars to see the lady who got twenty dollars pick the lady you get forty dollars Simple Where's the lady? Here? That's not the lady's right here Twenty dollars All you got to do is spot the lady Here? Here's the lady Yes sir I owe you twenty dollars Twenty dollars How about you? You got twenty dollars to bet on the lady?"

It was a constant monologue, unvarying in tone, and his lips did not seem to be moving at all. It was apparently directed at no one, for even when there were passengers on the bus, not one paid him the slightest bit of attention, nor he them.

I stepped off the bus at the downtown terminal, which also served as the terminal for interstate buses. The automated glass doors slid open for me with the sound of wind. The station seemed to me the hub of the world's sad passengers. Gaunt, tired old men pulling their lives behind them like something yoked; fleshy and moribund families of four who seemed to hate one another, or to be completely indifferent; pallid, single mothers hanging to their children like suitcases; the men in cheap suits and abundant cologne who preyed upon them; men and women covering the sick waste of their bodies in clothing not up to the job. I looked at my hands and turned them over in the gaunt light and placed them in my pockets. All these people going somewhere, all with destinations other than here, and yet they seemed never to leave. They milled and sat and watched the walls and the small tragedies around them and reflected upon the lives of others.

The wall was yellow and bumpy, a braille of static and fuzz, against which, about three feet below the red line, leaned a man in a thick black suit, with thick black glasses and a thick black cane. He swayed lightly back and forth, the way blind men do, as though trying to catch all the sounds of the bus station in the cracked brown mitts of his ears. The man held in the thin fingers of one hand a tin can with the label peeled away, a dozen sharpened pencils sticking out the top like little yellow soldiers. A low murmur permeated the room as if it was the air, thick and viscous as fluid with the weighted thoughts of so many strangers; I had a difficult time maneuvering through it, as if it were the people themselves, and not just their words, through which I had to wade. I took pity on the blind man and I gave the man a dollar and took one of his pencils, then sat down at a bank of coin-operated television sets, the buzz of three separate televisions around me, and absent-mindedly watched him sell his wares as I tried to determine my next move.

I sat for a long time, though it was difficult to know how long, for there were no visible clocks. I watched the blind man sell his last pencil, then walk with easy, fluid strides to a wall of battered grey lockers. He took a key from his pocket and opened one of the lockers. Removing his glasses he rubbed at his eyes with one hand, pinching toward his nose with his thumb and forefinger, then he turned to me and winked. The man took a bottle from the darkness of the locker, swigged from it, and replaced it, closing the locker door and removing the key as he did so.

That's when I recognized it. I removed Father's watch from my pocket and inspected it the key. A number, 397, was etched in at the top. I walked to the wall of lockers and along it until I found number 397. I inserted the key and turned it. There was a click and the locker opened. An insect scurried out, large and brown and lopsided in its movements, and fell to the floor. I crushed it with one foot.

A rank smell assaulted me and I peered into the darkness of the locker to see a small brown paper lunch bag, folded at the top and soaked through at the bottom by some viscous red fluid that had pooled against the door of the locker and now ran in a slow stream to the floor. I picked up the bag gingerly from the top and the paper tore at the bottom, revealing a large red-brown lump, roughly the size and shape of a mango. I reached toward it, then thought better of it and took the pencil from my pocket. I jabbed the thing and brought it forth into the light of the station. Impaled on the end of my yellow pencil was a heart, large, but from what animal I could not tell. The smell was horrendous. It slipped from the pencil and fell with a dull wet thud to the linoleum floor. I looked back into the locker. Something that looked vaguely like a cufflink lay near the back of the locker and behind that a sheaf of white paper, folded in half. The object turned out to be the 'e' from a typewriter and I put that in my pocket. The papers were two dozen or so typewritten pages.

I walked out of the station meeting a wall of fresh air that came as a shock, almost unpleasant. The main library was several blocks away. It was late morning already and men in business suits, with briefcases and dull, obstinate expressions scurried past.

The library loomed grey and massive, solid, as if hewn from a single colossal slab. I sat down on its steps and took the paper from my pocket and opened it and did not so much read it as stare at it. People were sitting on the steps, others standing, waiting, talking. I watched a man on a unicycle, wearing a pink bodysuit, wind his way back and forth through the people on the sidewalk, like a hummingbird among lilies. He was skinny, with a belly like a pink balloon, and at intervals he shouted in a high-pitched squeal, as if to let out some enormous pressure building up inside him. Most tried their best to ignore him, which was difficult. An old man whose face was all puffy white folds, with a red nose like a cracked plum, lay supine on the sidewalk, his head resting against the angle of the building. With some difficulty he undid his pants, then turned on his side and peed, in a stream that reached past his swollen feet. A smile appeared within the folds of his face and he turned upright, and fell asleep in the dry heat of that afternoon.

A man crossed the street, through the crowd on the sidewalk, and up the steps, making a B-line for me. He was perhaps my age, with stained chinos and thinning brown hair that came in tangled wisps around his ears, one of which was swollen to nearly twice the size of the other. I watched the man's knee poking through a hole in his pants as he passed, then turned abruptly and sat beside me. The man smelled of some animal long dead and I turned back to my paper.

"Hey."

I nodded, once, and looked off to some imaginary point in the distance.

"What do you think of this library?" he said, his voice gravel. "I mean thermodynamically. Do you think this library is beautiful?" The man had few teeth left in his head and his breath killed the air around us.

I did not bother even to nod now and I stared intently at my point, as if to lose sight of it was to go the way of this man.

"D'ya think these people designed this library with thermodynamics in mind? You know how many people freeze to death in libraries every year? Do you think the Librarians are sadists?" The man reached over and grabbed the paper and my first thought was that the man intended to rob me of it, but instead he took out a pen and wrote, in cryptic jagged scrawl, something between a child's and a doctor's:

If GoD iS DeAD, iS it nEcESSaRy to kEEp wRitinG HiM into tHE ScRipt?

He handed the papers back. I shrugged.

The man said, "I asked a hundred people this question. Six people gave me the same answer."

I looked from the papers to the man to the distant point. The man took the papers again and on the second page wrote another question:

wHo writES tHE ScRipt?

I shrugged again and again he took the manuscript from me, then below the question wrote something else, his shoulders hunching against me so that I could not make it out. He tore away several pages of the manuscript and thrust them into his pocket. "That is The Answer," he said. "It is not yours." He handed the rest of the manuscript back, then walked into the library, leaving his redolence and this message between us. It took me a moment to collect myself before I realized that this man now had the first pages of the manuscript in his pocket and that if I did not find him they would be lost forever.