From there we detoured through the Financial District, a square of blocks hemmed between the Kennedy Plaza bus terminal, Johnson & Wales University and Weybosset Street, the dilapidated Civic Center, and the library on Washington and Empire Streets. An unsettlingly vacant cityscape, almost no one lived downtown, and the denizens generally fled the area once regular work hours ended.

At the sight of the expansive library’s ornate main entrance of three arches held up by towering columns, I despaired, thinking we’d never find the sources I needed for my paper on the other Mercy Brown, a New England Vampire (I was still working out a title). We navigated the library interior and found the microfiche machine on which we would search almost a century of Providence Journal newspapers.

Mercy left me to scroll through the early 1890s, not quite sure what I was looking for, other than Mercy’s name. The days and weeks blurred, the greenish tint of the microphotographed newspapers blended text and photos. After the initial rush of potential discovery, I got distracted reading headlines about horsecar accidents, the first electric streetcars, and odd personal histories detailed in death notices, all those forgotten struggles and lives summed up in a quirky paragraph. Would anyone ever go looking for Julia Walton, who, at age seventy, died after a six-month illness, no occupation listed, but devoted her life to acts of charity that were described as “spontaneous acts of a kindly heart”? Perhaps, like I did, someone might stumble upon her paragraph hidden within thousands of images imprinted upon a roll of microfiche, which was housed within the haystack of one library, or another hypothetical someone might find themselves walking through one of the hundreds of disused graveyards, marked by crumbling stone or rusted fences, that pocked the New England landscape and amble by her weathered gravestone (if it was indeed still intact) melting into the dirt. In either scenario there would be no recognition of who Julia was, which was our fate. The erasure of familial and cultural memory of any one individual was simply a function of time. My being so starkly reminded of the yawning void awaiting me was unmooring and left me feeling detached from what had been to that point a fun afternoon. If I’d said any of this to Mercy, she’d rightly accuse me of leaving punk for goth and tell me to go listen to Bauhaus.

I kept scrolling and found no vampires. The machine was getting hot and smelled of burnt licorice, so I shut it off to give it a break.