Chapter 16 6

6 "That's—underground?" "Technically, yes." This is a bit of a surprise.Royall stands at the downtown public library.He stood in the open space in front of the library's rotunda with its Doric columns and circulation desks.Underground, this statement is not appropriate.But Royall was looking for "old newspapers," deposited in the C-level of the journal appendix. The librarian eyed him suspiciously but politely.Royall probably had that air of a young man who rarely goes to a library. "What are you looking for?" muttered Royall, and went away.

When Royall left the brightly lit first floor of the library, he found himself alone.His boots clattered clumsily like horseshoes on the spiraling metal stairs, and a choking smell of sawdust mixed with sewer rose into his nostrils.For the first time he felt disquieted. What was he looking for? It has been raining since dawn.The soft, warm October had turned from warm and sunny to autumnally chilly and smelling of wet newspaper.In the distance, thunder rumbled ominously over Lake Ontario, like a large freight train gathering steam.Royall hoped the storm would hold out until he was done researching in the library.

It seems that his work can be done in half an hour or less. Royall hadn't been this angry with his brother before.In fact, he was mad at everyone, he was kicked out of the house, kicked out of the house!Maybe he could join the Navy, they're recruiting young lads like him.Maybe he could change his name: "Roy" would be a better fit than "Royol".Now that he's 19, he's all alone, and no one's son.If you were Roy, you wouldn't have to smile so kindly, and whistle and sing all the time with your thumbs hooked to your belt.Like a James Dean knockoff.You can look adults — other adults — honestly into their eyes and tell them what you want.

Maybe. On C-level, Royall felt as if he had descended into a submarine, with journal appendices in a completely dark, cave-like place.Visitors are to turn on the lights themselves.Royall worried that the library or the caretaker had turned off the lights on the stairs as well, which put him completely underground.God, no wonder he always wanted to avoid libraries. Royall groped for the switch, and a blur of flickering silver glowed from all sides.The smell of sewer is stronger here.It was a depressing smell that Royall had recognized from his boyhood as a delivery boy for the News, the smell of bad newsprint with wet ink.Royall had forgotten how repulsive the smell was, how helpless and deeply embedded in his soul.

"That's one of the reasons why I hate you. You left me to smell like this." He walked through cardboard boxes full of books and periodicals, piled high, some shoulder-high, others to the roof.They must all be discarded, because they can no longer be read after soaking in water. Floor C is concrete and dusty.Books and magazines are piled everywhere here, as if they have been kicked down.Royall thought of the cemetery on Portage Road.Most of the appendices rested on rows of unpainted iron shelves high enough to touch the ceiling.There are narrow aisles between shelves.The shelves are numbered alphabetically but are actually in disarray.A battered 1950s issue of Life magazine jumbled together with recent issues of the Buffalo Financial News in a waterstained corner. The Niagara Press was Royall's chief target, and was placed everywhere, along with the Chick and Lakewana.Newspapers from different periods are mixed together.Everything was in a mess, as if it had been hit by a strong wind.Royall wanted to find ones from earlier in 1962, but where to start?

It was the woman in black who had brought him here.She disgusted him violently.She had had skin-to-skin contact with him once. It might take Royall half an hour to find any 1962 issue of The Press.The issue he found, to his disappointment, was the December Sunday edition.There was nothing in the headlines about the case of his father or Canal of Love.Royall threw the newspaper back on the floor and sat down. "Damn, I'm thirsty." He didn't even drink a glass of beer that day.It's still early in the afternoon.He had to wait a little longer, and wait until he got something.

Royall knew that his father—Dirk Burnaby—was involved in the original Love Canal case, but he didn't know the details.That early case was lost, and the Canal of Love became a local joke.However, in the 1970s, when Royall started junior high school, a new lawsuit was started on the case. Maybe the specific person was different, with a new lawyer and a new litigant.There are many more lawsuits, some directed against chemical companies other than Swann.Royall knew these things only dimly.His friends, classmates sometimes talk about these things because their families are involved.But their understanding of it is also half-knowledgeable and sporadic.Royall, who rarely reads the newspaper, was sleepwalking and dozing off in social studies class, and didn't care or care.Chandler said they were doing okay living on Baltic Street; at least he hoped so.Alia never mentioned these things.If the wind blows from the east, she closes the windows.If the soot had blackened the panes of the windows, she could have wiped them dry with paper, too.Alia held the newspaper at arm's length, scanning the headlines with awe and contempt.She expects the worst things to happen to humans, but usually, the worst things don't happen, which always surprises her.

You, at least still alive. Perhaps Royall is catching on to this wisdom. Flipping through piles of the News, the Buffalo Evening News, the Buffalo Express, which must have had the canal in them too, Royall got his hands dirty.He saw rat droppings, black pellets the size of seeds, and the shed skins of insects, and sometimes small bugs that scurried away.The fate of death, but I am not dead. Looking through old newspapers from the past, 1973, 1971, 1968... He was so naive, thinking of stopping by the library, reading some news about his father, learning some interesting facts, and then leaving.But his task is not so easy to accomplish.For some reason, the history is not there.

There was a continuous sound of water droplets not far away, every four seconds, no, when Royall listened carefully, four seconds became five seconds, or even more.After a while, the water dripped faster.Royall cupped her fingers behind her ear. "Damn it, fuck it." Royall had been out of work for less than a week and was already missing Devil's Cave, wearing a waterproof suit and a big-brimmed hat, and the passengers relied on him as the captain's assistant, Royall.It's like a Disney cartoon, but the deafening water under the waterfall is real. At times, though, Royall also felt unreal.Splashing water, screaming tourists, rolling boats.His thoughts gradually drifted away, and he entered a weird dream unconsciously: his limbs were floating in the water, the glassy green water, and Royall's long hair was shaking in the water like water plants.He was naked, and his eyes were wide open, like a dead body staring.

Yes, Royall had seen corpses pulled from the Niagara River.He saw "floating corpses" for the first time when he was 12 years old.Mom never knew this.His family and neighbors told everyone they met that the floating corpse was a corpse soaked in water until it rotted, swelled like a meat ball, and floated on the water. However, Royall didn't think too much, and didn't expect his father to die in this river.Royall was never a morbidly blue kid. Royall rubbed his sore eyes.Take your eyes off the blurry newspaper columns and look up.The sound of tick-tock had melted into his blood.Someone moved quietly behind a row of steel mesh bookshelves.He smelled her!A wave of hopeful warmth rose to his groin, his arms were too heavy to lift, and Royall saw his hands, longingly reaching for the woman.

"Wake up, hurry up!" Royall shook his head from his stupor. He pushed himself hard, he was afraid of failure, of giving up, of going back to Baltic Street.He gasped and made up his mind.He went back to the bookshelf again, shuffling forward, checking every newspaper, every date on the bottom shelf.His thigh is hurting.Fortunately, however, he found several volumes of the "News" newspaper from 1961-1962.Individual pages are missing, but the main part of the newspaper is intact.Royall took a large stack and placed it on a long wooden table in the middle of the storey.He began to search by item. right here! – Headlines for the first Canal of Love, September 1961. "At that time, you were still alive." For two hours and 40 minutes, he read it eagerly, tirelessly.He couldn't tell whether he was excited or scared.There are too many things he doesn't know, too many things he can't imagine.He felt a heavenly door suddenly open where you didn't know there was a door: it opened wide and light came in.Light often shot through cracks in thunderclouds, as if for the elusive tease of a few minutes, over the Great Lakes.It was blinding, even stinging, bright light, and it didn't help.But it is light after all.