A little clique in front seemed to wake up. Three came forward and positioned themselves around Maxwell. Following the doctor’s instructions—“It doesn’t appear that anything is broken. I want to try to get him turned over. Milton, put your hand under Max’s knees. Siegfried, watch his arms. Christopher, you hold his feet. I’ve got the head. Okay, we’re going to lift and roll, gently, on three. To the right. Careful. One, two, three”—they grunted and shifted the prone man from his stomach to his back.

In other parts of the library, other things were taking place. It is easily possible, in a room such as this, for many activities to take place simultaneously, without significant disturbance to the informal reader or browser paging through baroque musical scores or the occasional dated literary, scientific, or heraldic tract pried from the heart of an uncataloged loose stack. I mention our vast heraldic holdings because they are of special interest, lately, to me. Genealogy—and by genealogy I mean more than mere sketching and labeling of “family tree” diagrams; rather, the deep investigation into bloodline and blood’s congenital inheritances, particularly in connection with insane monarchs—has become a primary avocation of mine. I’m not crazy. But I do have the blood of an insane monarch running through my veins. We all do. I wanted to know what, if anything, this might portend. So I’ve been spending nights doing layman research into intrafamilial sociobiological matters, spreading decomposing documents on the oak table beneath the rose window that would look down—if you could only see through those darkly stained indigo panes—onto cobbled footpaths and stone bridges here and there traversing grassy plots, onto the several interconnected, smelly, evaporating ponds encircled with old trees that were lush once though never tall, bowed lower still by their years and all but leafless on their way to dying, our former topiary garden. So much here suffers decline. The red library everywhere shows the years since anybody bothered picking up a putty knife. Browning paint and yellow plaster molts like a skin from the cross-vaulted ceiling. Of twenty chandeliers pendent from twenty golden ropes, only a few manage any real light. The effect, when looking up, late on a winter day as evening wanes to black, is unsettling: a Piranesian study of listless candelabra tethered beneath obscurely lit, cracked domes that, depending on illumination’s intensity and the various reaches of shadows flung every direction by the intersecting lattices of the vaults, appear alternately higher or lower, more ruinously beautiful or hideously spectral than they actually, probably, are—an entire grim structure in want of some kind of repair before it simply breaks apart and descends, faulty light fixtures and all raining down on our heads. Or so it would seem to the anxious reader obsessed with death. And on the subject of heads! From where I sat, squeezed into the love seat beside disconsolate Virgil, I was able to gaze more or less eye to eye at no fewer than one dozen lifeless mammals, wall-mounted, across the way, on plaques (the lone exception in this grouping, a reindeer that has had eyes gouged out, leaving wounds)—each among them wearing humiliation in one guise or another: lacerated ears poking through matted gray mane, chipped antlers or horns and the teeth either missing by the mouthful or cracked off blackly at their roots, general depilation under coatings of dust. Poor squandered animals. My heart goes out to them. Their faces seem to scream out final terror. What a crummy way to spend the afterlife, tacked up in a room full of men falling down or shouting obscenities at each other while getting their rocks off to eighteenth-century French and English pornographic works on paper—a main particular of interest among our special collections here, especially (Predictably?