“Ah,” he said as he raised an eyebrow, “that was before the database.” The man set down my passport and shifted to a row of brown hardbound books on a shelf beside him, pulled one out, and shifted back toward me as he glanced down at my passport and thumbed through the pages.

“You’ll find me under ‘Marc,’” I said. “I was a boy in college, but I became a girl.”

“Fair enough,” he replied without taking his eye off the book. He found my name, wrote down my information on a bright yellow card, and then handed it to me. “Show this to the guard.”

I proceeded to the circulation desk, pleased with myself that I still knew where it was. I showed the monitor my pass and saw the gray door before me like it was a portal. I turned the spherical metal knob and went in.

Sudden silence, the smell of old paper, the same low ceiling I could reach with a decent jump, the same feeling of comfort, of something like home. Even the mute echo of footsteps felt the same as I wandered down the gray marble floors, one remnant of opulence from the other side of the door, the other that this building housed the largest university collection in the world. I spied a set of narrow stairs that led down and took those all the way to the Dante section on level D, which the university kept, maybe because it was such a good joke, even after it switched from its in-house system to the Library of Congress classifications. From there I found the tunnel to the library annex and section HQ, where all the LGBT books were—it figured the university would consign them to another building—and laughed to myself over the undergrad joke that HQ meant Harvard Queer.

Eventually, I found myself back on the first floor, whose stacks were most familiar because they housed the English literature section. Like I often did when I felt agitated in college, I picked a row randomly from among the few hundred on that floor, turned on the light switch, and meandered among the shelves to find a book I might like. On this particular afternoon, I found myself in the R section and turned my head sideways to peruse the titles, brushing the books I scanned with a finger. When I reached Salman Rushdie, I was surprised to find Joseph Anton: A Memoir among the books there. I had no idea he’d written a memoir. And not just any memoir, but one about being exiled from his own country. I sat on the cold marble, my back against the gray metal shelf, and started to read. That too was like college, and even before that; no matter how upset I was, or how scared, I somehow always managed to find the right book.

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