Gabe

Song watched the lift as it raised itself, lowered itself, then raised itself again. There was no one standing on the platform. The machine, about three feet directly in front of her, was moving by itself, slowly, steadily, in a simple, repetitive motion, up, and down, each time accompanied by the sound of an electric motor as it moved.

It was as if Song had been hypnotized by this repetitive movement and rhythmic whirling—there was something comforting, and familiar, to the mechanics, like the inhale-exhale of the lungs, or the lull of a beating heart. She put her pen down. It reminded her also of something else.

Sometime the air conditioning had stopped, and the library became hollowly silent, except for the soft motor of the lift,

which became more distinct, like a thread, thin, transparent, vibrating through light and air, traversing stacks upon stacks, page after page. ’Sorry.’

A loud and pronounced whisper from behind startled her, and pulled Song out of her lull.

She looked back, and saw a picture. Dangling, a miniature photograph, of a head on a sky blue background. A shorthaired, miniature man’s head, swaying left and right. Underneath it was printed GABE A.

The tip of Song’s nose was only a few inches from the hanging, undulating mini-head. She pulled back almost instantly, and with her eyes followed two light purple braided lanyards attached to the plastic sleeve around the photograph up to a man’s face. A bigger version of the face in the picture, magnified 50 times—brown, cropped hair, thick eyebrows, big, fawnlike brown eyes, a wide nose and slightly crooked, pale, almost bordering on steel-blue, lips—all on a translucent, almost gleamingly white, large square face. It was an adolescent face, perhaps mid- to late teens. It had a blankness and openness about it, like a new canvas, or simply a piece of white paper, without a stain, smudge, or shadow.

Song looked into his eyes, which were plainly and directly looking back into hers, and instinctively lowered her head again, to the photograph, and smiled slightly, as her eyes caught the letters on the nametag again. GABE. A.

The boy walked over to the lift as it was ascending, reached his arm up and over the side railing, and fumbled his hand around for the switch, his arm stretching higher and higher as the machine took it along more and more upward. Finally he flicked the switch, and the motor stopped. For a second, it was silent, and nothing moved. ’Awwww, man…’ the boy whined loudly, piercing through the solidified moment, and flicked on the switch again. The platform began to descend in a mechanical whirl, the air conditioner started humming, and everything was liquid once more.

Song watched him from behind, and smiled.

This would be the third time she had smiled at him in the library in the past month.

She had been coming to the library ever since she was go

ing to school here. It became a habit, after she graduated and found work in the city as a translator.

The first time she saw Gabe was a month ago. She saw only the back of him: his thin, wiry arms flexed, sleeves folded up neatly to the elbows, his back stretching and wiggling the worm-like creases in his white shirt. Unfortunately vandalism was common in the area, and someone had spray-painted in bright neon pink ’FAG’ on one of the three side windows facing the street. Song could see it from afar as she was walking toward the building from the nearby train shelter. The letters shone brilliantly under the morning sun, and the irradiated color itself emanated a feeling of insuppressible joy and merriment.

Next to his feet was a rectangular bucket filled with orange, old-yolk-colored water. As he bent down each time and reached a gray, tatty-looking terrycloth towel that’s balled up in his hand into the bucket, the back of his clean white shirt became more and more untucked from his pants. For some reason Song found this sight to be incongruously humorous, and smiled, pitying the guy. She walked toward the front entrance, deciding to think nothing more of it, passing him. It was then that she heard a voice, a loud and pronounced whisper, spoken from right next to her, with regularity. Like a mantra, repeating a word:

Fag, fag, fag, fag, fag, fag,… The voice was coming from him.

It piqued her curiosity. Or rather, he did.

A week and a half later, she went back to the library, and looked for him.

Song didn’t know his name, or even what he looked like. She only caught a vague glimpse of his profile as she passed by him last time through the glass door into the building. She turned around once she was inside. His face and the upper half of his body were obstructed by the large and lurid painted letters, inverted and now looking more like aestheticized, abstract ciphers, some kind of gang code, secretly subversive, behind the other side of the glass. She couldn’t make out his face.

When she came back out later, he was gone. Since then, for some reason, she couldn’t get the man, and

his voice, the word, out of her head, like the sound of marching boots, to a drill order. Over and over.

When she was still in school, she had a crush on a boy in her English class. She never talked to him. There was always a chorus of girls surrounding him. The boy had very delicate features, with a pair of big, clear, moss green eyes, and a floating, melodious voice that made every sentence he spoke sound like at once a long sigh and a peal of laughter. Song always sat two rows behind him. There were hundreds of people in the class; she never thought he noticed her.

Song remembered once at night after one of her classes when she cut through the school parking lot in a hurry to catch the last bus, at the stop across the main street, of all people, she ran into the boy. ’Hello.’ She waved as she quickly walked by him.

The boy turned. His face was ghostly ashen under the fluorescent glow of the street lamps. Her first thought was he looked like someone who had just drowned. He turned, saw her, then simply turned back. Saying nothing. Song automatically followed the line of his sight: he was looking at a dark navy blue car. The driver’s side mirror was on the ground, and the car window was completely shattered, onto the seat, the floor and the dashboard, inside, like a shower of star shimmer, twinkling under the white aquarium-like light. On the car hood, was sprayed the word FAG in white. She noticed, he was trembling. A year later, she heard, while he was visiting his parents back home for the summer, they found him in the guest bath, having locked himself in, and drowned himself in the double tub.

Seeing the graffiti reminded her of that boy.

The second time she saw Gabe was in the checkout line. A man was changing the bottle on a water cooler next to the line. At first Song didn’t recognize him; then she saw and remembered the clean white shirt with the sleeves folded up neatly to the elbows, his arms and back wiggling and stretching the creases across the fabric, becoming more and more wrinkly and untucked from his light-colored khaki pants.

His backside, again.

For one reason or another Song really, truly wanted to see what he looked like, again, this time clearly, face-on. It was hard to say exactly what she was curious about. Perhaps she