“No,” Gavin said. “He wouldn’t know what to do with a horse.”
“Does he have dogs?”
“No. He wouldn’t trust himself to take care of one properly.”
“Does he have chickens?” Jessie asked mischievously, as if likewise possessed by the curiosity of a five-year-old. “Does he have pigs and sheep?”
Gavin pinched Jessie’s earlobe affectionately and said to Travis, “He lives here all by himself. No animals, no other people.”
“That’s sad,” the boy said.
“Not as far as Cornell’s concerned. This is exactly the way he wants things.”
Although Cornell had no one after his mother died, he’d made no effort to be taken into the fold of his family. Instead, years later, when he was wealthy, he quietly researched his relatives and chose one of them, Gavin, to whom he felt comfortable reaching out.
Even though the two of them lived but a couple hours from each other, and though Cornell had once suggested that he’d settled here for just that reason, Gavin was welcome to visit no more than once a month.
He didn’t know why Cornell favored him and no other. If he bluntly asked why, he wouldn’t get an answer. He might even be put on the not-welcome list for his temerity. The only way that Cornell talked about personal matters was at his election and indirectly.
Gavin put down the windows and switched off the engine and said, “I’ll go in alone and have a little chat with him, see if he wants to say hello.”
“Does he have cows?” Jessie asked.
From the backseat, Travis said, “Cows would be cool.”
Gavin sighed. “The depth of my patience amazes me.”
He got out of the Land Rover and went to the man-size door in the barn, which was adjacent to the larger double doors that would have admitted a tractor pulling a hay wagon if they had still functioned. He didn’t bother trying the door or knocking. Cornell was alerted electronically the moment any vehicle drove onto his property. And concealed in the knotholes of the weather-grayed siding were cameras by which he was even now studying his visitor, assuming he was here rather than in his bunker.
Although the door appeared flimsy, with corroded hinges and a simple gravity latch, it was solid and equipped with an electronic lock that Cornell could engage or release from a control panel in the main room. A buzz, a clunk, and the door swung open.
Gavin stepped into a five-foot-square unfurnished vestibule with white walls. Directly ahead, a metal door. Above the door, a camera.
The outer door closed. The inner one opened. He stepped into the main room, and the second door swung shut behind him.
The truth of the building was not the dilapidated barn that enclosed it like a shell. The one and only room, other than the vestibule and a small water closet, was this forty-foot-square space with a twelve-foot ceiling. The barn was anchored to this solidly constructed building that stood within it.
Here, Cornell passed most days, retreating at night to the bunker, which Gavin had never seen, and to which this place was connected by a hidden underground passageway.
Bookshelves entirely lined three walls and part of the fourth, almost thirteen hundred linear feet of shelving. There didn’t appear to be room left for a single new volume.
Along the portion of the fourth wall not devoted to books, there were the door through which Gavin had entered and the door to the water closet, as well as a kitchenette with cupboard, counter space, a double sink, two big refrigerators, two microwaves, and an oven.
On the concrete floor were four area carpets on which stood an amazing variety of chairs and recliners, no two pieces of the same style or period, in configurations that made sense only to Cornell. Each seating option was served by a matching footstool and a side table with either a lamp or a floor lamp. The light filtered through either stained glass or blown glass, or colored-and-cut crystal, or pleated silk, or treated parchment. Every lamp glowed, so Cornell was able to move, at any moment, from one chair to another and continue reading without interruption. The many lamps cast mostly soft pools of amber or rose light, but also two blue pools and two green, in a large room that remained shadowed in many places.
Although there was nothing in this windowless space that Gavin had not seen elsewhere and often, the effect was otherworldly, as if this were not a building, but instead a capsule untethered from the known world, adrift in time, where the readers of these books were hobbits or creatures equally quaint. For all its strangeness, the big room was cozy, welcoming, even as it was magical and richly bejeweled by the lamps.
The one and only reader who ever placed a bookmark between any two of these millions of pages looked entirely human, although his appearance had changed since Gavin’s most recent visit. Cornell Jasperson—six foot nine, more than half a foot taller than his cousin—stood beside a wingback armchair in a circle of four mismatched armchairs that faced one another.
Milk-chocolate brown rather than black, he was a long-boned knob-jointed scarecrow with enormous hands, whose body suggested menace and a knowledge of violence that qualified him for a role in movies that featured lonely places where the silence of the night was broken by the roar of a chainsaw. His face seemed misplaced on that body: round and smooth and sweet, with dark eyes that radiated intelligence and kindness, a countenance that might have gotten him cast to play Jesus. All of that was Cornell as Gavin had long known him; but never before had the man’s head been as smooth and hairless as an egg.
Gavin stopped three feet from his kin and neither attempted to hug him nor offered to shake hands. Cornell could tolerate being touched, but the experience always took a toll on him.
Years earlier, to avoid a lifelong need to see a dentist and be touched by one, Cornell had gone through two lengthy appointments with an understanding periodontist, in the first of which, under anesthesia, he had all his teeth pulled and titanium posts embedded in his jawbones. After a few months of healing, during a subsequent appointment, his new teeth were installed permanently over the titanium posts. Good-bye decay, good-bye gum disease, good-bye regular teeth cleaning.
“What happened to the dreadlocks?” Gavin asked now.
Cornell’s voice matched his face, not his body. “In a book I was reading, there was a mention of Mr. Bob Marley being dead.”
“He’s been dead a long time.”
“I didn’t know. Convey my condolences to the family, please and thank you. So I would wake up in the middle of the night and think of Mr. Bob Marley lying in a coffin, and it felt like I was wearing a dead man’s hair. So I shaved it off. Does that sound odd to you?”
“Yes, it does,” Gavin said.
Cornell nodded. “I thought it would.”
“You didn’t grow the dreadlocks because of Bob Marley.”
“No, that’s right, I didn’t.”
“So you could have kept them.”
“No, not once I knew he was dead.”
Cornell had heard only one Bob Marley song and had been badly affected by it. Reggae made him feel as if ants were crawling over every square inch of his body. He listened to orchestral pieces, preferably with a lot of strings, but mostly to “Mr. Paul Simon, whose voice sounds like it belongs to a friend I’ve always known.”
“Remember I told you the day might come when Jessie and I needed to stay for some time in the little blue house out there?”
“And I said okay, sure, no skin off my rose.”
“You did, and I’m grateful for that.”
Gavin never knew if his cousin’s occasional malapropisms were unintentional or for some reason amused him. Maybe he meant to say nose and it just came out rose. Though there was a twinkle in his eye that suggested he was playing some sly game. Whatever the case, Gavin never corrected him.
“Well, it’s that time, Cornell, and I need to explain a little, so you’ll have some idea what you’re getting into.”
“Can we sit down to talk, please and thank you?”