How odd, then, that someone was, in fact, running. Toward me. I could hear the footsteps and they were coming fast and getting louder, louder. I longed to have the Doberman with me. Where was that animal—oh, if only Gunner were my dog!—when I needed him? I had nothing but the blue pillow and Barry’s stethoscope and those disposable hypodermic syringes crowded among the medicine vials in my jacket pocket. It was imaginable, to me, alone in our awful stacks—consider, if you will, my desperate, exhausted, late-night state of mind—that if attacked, I could hold the pillow before me as a soft-sculpture shield, while waving, threateningly, a syringe. This made a ridiculous picture, but on the whole it seemed better to wave a needle than to do nothing. I put my hand in my pocket and, carefully, fished out a syringe. Getting a good grip on it was a problem because I was holding the pillow and shaking all over from fear. The runner splashed through water and I pressed myself against a bookcase and stuck out my foot, and his foot hit mine and he exhaled a sound like “Ah” as he tumbled forward in the darkness. I could not make out who the man was, but suspected it was probably Angus, who had gone out for a short pass during football practice and disappeared into Eighteenth-Century Novels. I did hear, at the finish of the man’s long, arcing fall, his body’s collision with a shelf. The closest I can come to describing this sound is to say that it was the crunch a head of crispy lettuce might make if squashed beneath a steel tray. The fallen man groaned in pain, and I said to him, “Don’t follow me or I’ll stick you! Beware of the Corn King! Ha ha!” then quickly retreated in search of the main aisle. I was, as far as I could tell, lost in a maze of Liberal Theologians, Antiquaries, and Bibliographers; and water streamed across the floor; and my shoes were sodden; and all the excitement was having an effect on my bladder. It is true, absolutely, that a desire to urinate is intensified by any feeling of water against the skin. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, European gentlemen enjoyed the privilege of relieving themselves in the public squares. I unzipped and tugged it out. There is nothing quite like the primitive ecstasy of pissing somewhere besides the bathroom. I rate the act very highly. Pissing in nature or in some dark corner, as I was, captures and brings into consciousness certain archaic versions of a man’s most secret Self—those aspects of character and identity that remain, in civilized daily life, veiled, disguised, sealed away: the messy, narcissistic, bodily Self of infancy; the wild, magnificent, feral Self of mankind’s prehistoric beginnings; that communal, loving Self expressed in each man’s deep bond with his fellow men; and of course the sovereign, assertive, fiercely territorial Self that announces, Get out of my way! I’m taking a leak!