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the library, a visitor/2

As a matter of fact, Dr. Hausner had started talking again. The low drone of his voice brought me back from my existential self-doubt to the mundane world of the Summerville library. Or not so mundane as I had just recently discovered. I drifted off again as if lured away by my own obsessive thoughts.  What was real? What was dream? Where was I when I wasn’t aware of myself? Where was I when I was asleep in my bed? I pinched myself hard to make myself listen to the melodic voice of the blind man by my side.

“Normally they go about their own business, “ Dr. Hausner concluded at that moment.  “But of course they are bored.” He seemed to be thinking for a moment, folding his elegant white fingers in his lap. Then he added: “Even in the library.“ He sounded incredulous as if that was an incomprehensible idea.  “But what are they doing here?,” I ask. “Where do they come from?”

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the library, a visitor

Dr. Aaron Hausner cocked his head as if he was listening to the retreating sound of my voice slowly travelling into the distance of the library, finally getting caught in some shelves, its individual corresponding vibrations disintegrating and archiving themselves alphabetically in the juvenile fiction section somewhere between Susan Cooper, E.L. Königsburg and Madeleine L’Engle. “Dr. Hausner,” I whispered, “do you remember me?” He smiled. “You sound tired,” he observed instead of an answer, “I say, you don’t sound well at all.” I felt a brief wave of frustration and annoyance. No one ever answered my questions. But then the warmth of compassion in his voice reached me and to my surprise I felt my eyes filling with tears. I swallowed hard. It had been a while since someone had showed an interest in how I was feeling. We sat in silence for a while. Dr. Hausner didn’t press for an answer, and I sat back, not feeling the pressure to make any kind of conversation. There was a strange, comforting feeling that he kept me in his focus even though he didn’t inquire any further. We sat almost next to each other in silent company. I felt real and alive.

I don’t know whether I was crying. I might have been. There were a few moments when I felt peaceful. But after a while the questions came sneaking back to my mind. They were destructive and very smart about it. And I started feeling agitated again. Hell, I didn’t even know whether this grandfather, his reassuringly old fashioned, three piece suit clashing with his white skinned, bare feet in biblical sandals, who was providing me with his compassionate company, whether this man actually existed.  He immediately sensed my aggravation and shifted in his seat as if releasing me from his interest. Maybe my breathing pattern changed. Or maybe he was just a part of my mind, responding to me because he was me.  I briefly contemplated if I could ask some other visitor whether Dr. Hausner existed, but the problem was really, that everybody I would maybe choose to ask could equally be a fabrication of my mind. I couldn’t prove anybody’s existence. Not even my own. I just had to operate on the assumption that I existed and that people I talked to existed, too.

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lunacy

From that day on my world has been different. Even though I have lost some of the feverishness that I lived with back then, a feverishness that brought on a clarity about which I knew nothing as long as it lasted, I still hold it for possible that at any moment in our lives just about anything can happen. I still know that we are like divers in a deep ocean finding access to different currents and tides, each one of them distinctly different in temperature, clarity and speed. Accepting the reality of the girl in the window I acknowledged that I preferred to be raving mad to inhabiting a world without surprises. A suburban world where everything was designed to be stagnant or at least to create the never to be questioned illusion of stability. Even my free spirited artist mother surfed the tide of that illusion. That day I rejected the comforting hand of a reality created by others for needs I didn’t even knew I might have one day. Instead I allowed myself an unfiltered acknowledgement of the impulses that my brain felt inclined to produce. I did not know whether or not there was anything out there at all, I didn’t know if we possess any kind of objective reality but whereas before that had horribly worried me (along with the question how to prove to oneself that one exists at all outside the universe of our own brain), suddenly I was intrigued by the freedom of it. So what – if this girl in the mirror did not exist, I could still see her bright and clear, she looked like a normal kid.