The Dewey Decimal System Read Free Page B

implanted in the frontal lobe of my brain, ever-present, a cruel sequence of images, profoundly monstrous. It’s this: a figure materializes, fades in from black, in a concrete playground attached to a low-income housing project, moving into a metal elevator, moving into a hallway, moving through a door into a silent apartment, into a bedroom, a form beneath a worn sheet. And then the shots, two of them, impossibly loud, and I wake, the reverberation of the shots, and the lunge for the receding shapes. And cut.
    Always the same dream.
    Iveta triggers something buried in my chest. Do I know her? I can’t be sure. Perhaps she’s standing in for someone, or something iconic.
    Now, it’s important to understand that I believe I have had certain aspects of my memory erased while laid up in D.C. What’s more, I believe I had false memories implanted. I have no way to prove this, it just feels true. It’s a gut thing. As a result, I look at my recollections or dreams with suspicion.
    Regarding this dream. My therapist at Walter Reed, Dr. Rosita Lopez, framed it in this way: as I am unable to accept the loss of my wife and daughter while I was deployed, and as a manifestation of my then trendy Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I repeatedly visualize an imagined reenactment of the crime committed against my family.
    In the view of Dr. Lopez, with her frumpy nylons, her clipboard, and her surreptitious glances at her wristwatch, my acceptance of the realities I face will bring these visions to a close, and banish the imagined assailant from my apprehension, forever.
    What I failed to mention to Dr. Lopez is the fact that, should I force my gaze downward in the midst of this recurring brain-film, the imagined assailant is wearing my hands. And shoes.

D ue to the 2/14 Occurrence(s), all available written information on any given subject is frozen in midsentence, a portal into the era known simply as “Before.”
    It’s fascinating: all the signs of what was to come are right there in the details, this is a truth, despite the mind’s desire to revise history through the prism of what is currently known.
    Take this bit of trivia from 2011’s CIA World Factbook :
Latvia’s economy experienced GDP growth of more than 10 percent per year during 2006–07 but entered a severe recession in 2008 as a result of an unsustainable current account deficit and large debt exposure amid the softening world economy.
    Unsustainable. Softening. What mild, bureaucratically vanilla terms. Words a citizen can acknowledge, shake her head at, what a shame, a tragedy; and continue shopping, working, bench-pressing, consuming, wasting, using, poisoning.
    I shut the hardbound volume and return it carefully to my “active” stack, being sure to apply Purell TM afterward.
    This stack here? This is material that I keep on hand, relevant to my current situation. I find it informative, comforting, an aspect of my larger project: reorganizing the library’s stock in accordance with the antiquated but deeply logical Decimal system.
    Somebody’s got to do it, man. The internal computer network here having fritzed out, it’s nearly impossible to find what you’re looking for.
    But as I’ve said, dig: I have my own comprehensive System, the Decimal thing being a piece of the larger puzzle; and therefore I have structure. Otherwise: chaos.
    Since I’m doing this on my own, it’s slow going. A righteous chore. After four months I’m partway through 000, which is “computer science, information, and general works.”
    The founding fathers of the Decimal system couldn’t have know what a gargantuan amount of material would come to fall under this heading. Especially the subheading “computer science.” Jesus. And “general works”? Don’t get me friggin started.
    Reams of books, numbering in the thousands, stack Dr. Seuss style along the entire stretch of the left-hand wall of the Reading Room. This is my work to date. I reckon I have a year to go on