Books Behaving Like Ants, uno

Trust Vs. Mistrust

The human who opens the wooden wall looks at the pizzas I’m delivering like something doesn’t pencil out.

“Is this evidence of the product I’m going to get?” he says to the ground in a very nebulous charge and eyebrows redder than woodpecker feathers. The number of watches on his left arm match the amount of pizzas I’m carrying. Nine, give or take zero. Their ticks aren’t synchronized and he doesn’t wait for me to reply.

“Geez, man. These pizzas don’t know whether they’re on foot or horseback, now do they. Ha, just what I needed, though. Right this way, Mr. Pizzaman. There's no time to explain what you and I and you won't even understand.”

He talks like he’s reading a book and asks me to leave a box of pizza on the doorstep. I think about the specifics of the librarian’s order in my head: Ten pizzas topped with only pepperonis that you assume can learn sign language, place them in the oven as far back as I can believe, discard the one that’s most inert and passive, cut them at noon, and deliver them to the local library. Another delivery driver had told me the library threw the craziest events but they also told me they’d met someone with a bias against toes named Tobias so I didn’t believe them.

The librarian wears his résumé as a suit and says, “My name was Montgomery. Actually, my name is still Montgomery,” and laughs at his own confusion.

A wide, crimson carpet bisects the first floor of the library and leads to a grandiose staircase with polished wooden hand railings. To the left of the carpet, ideas caged in glass boxes are on display, a couple tables hibernate, and bookshelves stacked on bookshelves blur the difference between functionality and beauty. To the right of the carpet, x-ray style art paintings of animals hang on the wall and rows of bookshelves squeeze together with solemn expressions on their faces, somehow aware of being born into a preexisting state of meaning.

“The future will not be kind to control freaks, Mr. Pizzaman,” says Montgomery as he reaches behind my ear. “Ha, a couple of topic sentences trying to hitch a ride. Well, I’ll be it.”

He holds the lines of literature up by their collars and brings them close to his squinting eyes. The string of words wriggle like an electrocuted worm and read, One of the first modern theorists to propose a life span approach to psychological development was psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. He wrote that all individuals go through eight stages in their lives and each stage is characterized by a particular psychological challenge that ideally should be resolved before the individual moves on. Montgomery looks borderline upset and plops the hitchhikers into a mason jar full of acidic cactus juice.

“Most people believe they’re following their own will,” he says with a grin. “Now, omit that sentence and follow me up the stairs.”

My elbows remain tucked in as I carry the eight pizza boxes up the marble staircase. Montgomery’s habit of taking three steps and jumping down two prolongs our visit on the broken escalator and a sun-burnt woman observes us from the second floor like a scarecrow watching a crow.

“Montgomery. Hey, Montgomery. Do you know you’re shoe’s untied, Montgomery?” she says in a voice I envision a sleep-deprived neuron would have.

“My shoe is not untied, ha. It’s your brain that’s untied, Carbon-14a.” he replies. Montgomery winks at his right shoe, then turns his body and attention toward me. “Her real name (whatever that means) is Loca Ukatina but she’s just as unstable as Carbon-14.”

From the top of the stairs, the first floor creates a mental representation of an ant farm. With deliberate intent to mimic ants, books bump into each other and scavenge for words on the ground that weren’t there before. The bones of an x-rayed monkey jump up and down in the confines of a painting and the idea of Trust vs. Mistrust pantomimes artificial sentences from the glass box caging it. They read, The challenge that occurs during the baby’s first year, when the baby depends on others to provide food, comfort, cuddling, and warmth. If these needs are not met, the child may never develop the essential trust of others necessary to get along in the world. The books bite at words like “empanada,” “cake,” and “vodka” which vary in font sizes and give off profound smelling pheromones. The paper insects crawl on one of the hibernating tables with gestures and mannerisms that allude to a birthday celebration as the pages of a book with a beard age another year. The x-rayed monkey howls and laughs so loud that I worry the hibernating table will wake up.

“Distracted by tangential things, ha. There’s an awful lot of them,” says Montgomery with his striking eyebrows raised an inch. “That doesn’t make sense.”

He starts to walk down the staircase, taking three steps and jumping back up two. The part of the résumé on his back is written in lightning and I distinguish three of his past career titles. Psychological sleuth. Architect of the mind. Syntactical coincidence specialist. Prerequisites for librarians, I suppose.

“Leave a box of pizza at the top of the staircase for me, Mr. Pizzaman. I need to call a word exterminator. You’re in good hands with Carbon-14a,” he says.

Carbon-14a squats down and whispers something to my kneecaps. Her eyes move left and right as if following her internal progression of thought and then she shoots up like a high school rocket experiment. We make eye contact and her gaze looks like a setup lecture.

“Good hands?” she says. “Good hands? I like to think I puzzle the hell out of people.”

I set a box of pizza on the ground and exhale my logical reasoning. Did I walk into an event or an idea?

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© 2017 Gaston Villanueva

Author's Note

The first of eight "lectures" with regard to Erik Erikson's eight stages of psychological development. I hope to improve the note-taking component of it but as of now, it's just the writing in bold.
Thanks for reading!

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Reviews

Rana

Awesomesauce Gaston, got handsomely bizarrer as it flowed, that highbrow librarian sure has something up his resumey sleeves. I like how the notes are delivered with the pizzas and love the amazing description of the place and when the tangential things switched to gala mode and these lines,
"rows of bookshelves squeeze together with solemn expressions on their faces, somehow aware of being born into a preexisting state of meaning."
His theory's interesting perhaps a tad overgeneralized.
There's always so much that lights up the eyes, haha, the puns, the career titles, his comeback to Luca, the hitchhikers, everything exquisite Mr. Pizzaman :)