WHEN I WORKED AT THE LIBRARY for a summer there was a guy who came in a half dozen times over two of the hottest weeks of July, on vacation from somewhere in America, maybe Connecticut but probably New Hampshire, and that first day he came to the circulation desk and asked if I could help him send an email on one of the computers. I told him sure once I finish this thing I’m in the middle of and he said fine I’m going to go smoke a cigar. When he came back in he smelled more like a cigar than anyone I had ever met. He looked like Dom Deluise with chicken legs, he was probably 6 foot 6 with bushy hair and trimmed beard, both white, breathing extremely heavily. We grabbed seats at one of the Community Access Project computers and I helped with navigation and sat with him while he plunked out a couple hundred keystrokes one by one. He thanked me. His name was Bob.

Bob came back two days later to send another email and asked me to help him again. While we were at the computer he told me he fancied himself a bit of a writer. I asked him what kind of things he wrote, and he pulled up some New England news blog and showed me a letter to the editor, something about the invasion of Iraq, but mostly safe jabs at George W. Bush’s IQ, credited to No Te Importa. “No Te Importa,” he told me, “That’s my pen name. Means ‘None of your business.’ Why should it matter who wrote something? All that matters is the words on the page.”  I was too young to know if that was stupid or not, so I just nodded.

I helped Bob send a third email a couple days later. Afterwards he went into a rambling soliloquy about humanity and science and progress where he lamented how people become set in their ways and refuse to change, even when presented with superior modes of operation. To illustrate his point, he dug back into the depths of his email inbox and produced a document containing a line drawing of a standard dreadnought guitar design and some arrows and numbered bullet points. “You play guitar?” Bob asked. I told him I played a little, and he continued, “Doesn’t it drive you completely nuts when your D string gets out of tune before the rest of the strings? Makes chords sound terrible. So this is a new method of tuning your guitar I came up with. You tune up your D string first, and then you do the G, B and high E, and only then do you go back and do your low E and A.” I was exactly the right age to think this was pretty smart, so I nodded enthusiastically. “I’ve told this to so many people and they still just start by tuning their low E strings.” He exhaled heavily. “I’m going to have a cigar and then get back out to the shore,” Bob said and left the library for the day.

The next time I saw Bob, he didn’t send any emails. He said Hey when he came in and then sat down by the periodicals and dove into some magazines. Eventually, in a stage whisper that showed he was conscious of his library setting but not really that conscious, he asked to speak with me over by the magazines. And to bring a piece of paper and a pen. “I have to show you something about how the world works,” he said in an actual whisper. He took the pen and paper and drew a Christian cross. Next to that he drew a swastika. To the right of the swastika he added a Star of David. Finally he scribbled a hammer and sickle. Then he looked at me and smiled, like a magician putting his sawed in half assistant back together, and began drawing equals signs between all of his symbols, until on the sheet of paper in front of us Jews and Christians became Communist Nazis. “You see?” Bob said. “Symbols. This is what Carlos Castaneda told us in his books.”

“Patrick.” My boss jolted me out of the knowledge session, and moved one finger to indicate my summoning to his location. “Help the guy with the computer or show him where books are, but that’s it.” I don’t know if he had seen the Christian Swastika paper or not. “There’s other stuff that needs to be done.”

When I looked up who Carlos Castaneda was at the desk after my boss went back upstairs to his office, I couldn’t find anything similar to what Bob had shown me. But who cares? I was getting paid. The library is a place for books and computers but it’s also a place with big windows that let in the sunlight of the end of July. It’s a place where a young man on the clock can give an ear and the benefit of the doubt, at least for a little while.