The used book store beckoned. The door when he opened it to the cool dark air welcomed with the old-fashioned jangle of a metal bell; the tattooed clerk looked up over squarish glasses and smiled. Classical music, of course, on the radio. He wandered the aisles, ran his finger rippling along the spines, the titles a blur, the smell of dust and mold enfolding. So many books. A ludicrous number of books, unimaginably many. There were people who thought that if you got a Ph.D. in English you must have read them all and were disappointed to learn that you hadn’t read this or that obscure novel or weren’t familiar with their favorite long-dead author, and they took your ignorance as a slight on all of academia. Six million volumes in the campus library and continual complaints about slashed budgets: not enough, never enough, yet most with white circulation slips unmarred by the librarian’s stamp. And here, once read or not at all, waiting in literary limbo for a second chance. Foolish metaphors of forgotten poets; cardboard characters and two-dimensional plots; atrophied truths that outlived their replacements. Nuggets of beauty and wisdom buried in an excess of words. Visible clouds of accumulated time released when he slipped a volume from the shelf, particles of dust like stale ideas swirling in a rare shaft of light. So many books. He chose one almost at random — its torn blue paper cover somehow alluring, the author’s name perhaps familiar — gave the clerk a crumpled bill and hunkered down in the corner of the stained squishy couch that divided cookbooks from do-it-yourself. There he crawled into the bosom of his purchased prose and remained until it was time to start drinking.