Culture

Doing Nothing Isn’t Enough, by Miranda July


These two things happened when I was twenty-five, during a time when I would do free-associative book searches at the Multnomah County Library, in Oregon. The search always began when I entered the lobby, triggered by the first word I overheard. So, if someone was talking about having “branzino for dinner,” I’d search “branzino” on the clunky computers, and then scan the author names until I came upon someone who shared a first or last name with someone I knew, and then sometimes not even check out that book but open it at random, stab my finger at a page, and search for whatever word I hit, etc., etc., until I finally landed on something recommended by my great friend the universe. I wasn’t showy about my technique, but if anyone had been interested I’d have very willingly elaborated, maybe as the start of a longer conversation. It was right after I had checked out one of these conjured books that a security guard swooped up beside me. This had happened elsewhere, more than once, but one couldn’t steal from the library, so I was almost certain I was innocent this time. He scanned the area and then, in a low voice, told me that I was being followed.

“By you?” I whispered.

“No, by a man with a blue backpack. We’ve been watching on the cameras.”

“You were watching me?”

“Only once we noticed you were being followed. He’s gone now, but, since you’re leaving, too, we wanted you to be aware.”

I glanced around.

“Maybe you want to call a friend to pick you up, depending on how you were planning on getting home.”

It sounded to me like I already had a friend to pick me up; he was wearing a blue backpack. I mean, those weren’t my exact thoughts, but I had a hard time understanding that this was bad, not good, news. I had thought I was on a lonely, possibly pointless vision quest, so the news that someone had been faithfully following my serpentine path and that both of us had been watched over by multiple cameras? It was like those stories of models being discovered while shopping for jeans at the mall. Anything could happen! I was a person who hoped to have many followers someday—this guy was just early, ahead of his time. The guard waited with me until my bus came and then I got on it, a minor celebrity—well, not really, but happy.

The second thing happened a week later, same library, but this time as I was coming in. I was probably returning the book I had been followed finding and now my ears were poised, ready to receive a new first word. But instead this happened: a large man walking in front of me fell backward, such that I had to sit down very quickly and kind of catch his head in my lap before letting it slide to the floor in front of my knees. He was having a stroke or a heart attack. He wasn’t alone; there was another, very small man with him, whose first language wasn’t English. They seemed dislocated, homeless, or maybe just travellers, passing through. The small man and I both shouted, “Help!” and “Does anyone know CPR?” One lady said, “I do, but I don’t feel very confident about my skills,” and slunk away. Eventually, a security guard arrived—it wasn’t the same one—and then several more eons passed while we waited for an ambulance. In the meantime, this big man’s sweaty face turned a kind of gray-blue, and the small man began to lose it in the way you do when seconds might save the person you love most in the world. He was wringing his hands, like in the cartoons, and whimpering, and every so often he would turn to me and say, “What do we do? What do we do?”

I’m twenty-five, I’m still twenty-five, like the week before, so I have no idea what to do, but I know what he means—to do nothing, well, that isn’t enough. So I said, “Let’s pray.” He looked at me with a kind of insane hope, like maybe I had powers, maybe I knew God personally. I laid both my hands on his friend’s massive shoulders and bowed my head. The small man did the same. I’d only ever seen praying in movies, but it’s basically begging, right? That’s what I did—I begged with all my heart for the man to live, knowing that he was dying, right there against my knees, under my hands, on the library floor.

The E.M.T.s asked if we were both going in the ambulance, and I said no, of course, and the little man hurried off with the stretcher. I just stood there for a few minutes and very quickly there were all new people in the lobby and none of them knew what they had narrowly missed. A man walked past with a backpack. It wasn’t blue, but I got a bad feeling anyway. Yes, anything could happen, but also: anything could happen. So I left. What was I going to do? Random book search? No, I never did that again. Not that I grew up all at once right then, but some things punch you in the face and you fly through the air and land somewhere completely different. You walk on from there. ♦



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