The Gray Man

He came frequently to the library. The gray man. He was of average height but above average weight. His hair had gone missing except around the edges. It was lighter than his skin, whose gray color looked bad. I thought him constantly on the verge of heart failure. But he never stopped coming.

When I first arrived at the university library, people spoke of the gray man with intense irritation. He was retired. An ex-professor. But he seemed not to have recognized the “ex.” I heard that he would pontificate and exasperate. He demanded services loudly. Staff members were sent scurrying after articles and tomes. And he never said, “thank you.” Always, as he made his slow way through the doors, the library folk watched with hooded eyes. No one liked him. Some said they wished he’d retired, “to Hell.”

But the gray man’s “loud” days were behind him by my time. I rarely saw him speak, and then only in a stale, asthmatic whisper. He came in, removed papers and volumes from the black satchel he habitually carried, and spread them on a table, rising ponderously on occasion to fetch more books and journals from the shelves. He scribbled notes on legal pads and transferred snippets from one to another. I never heard that he published an article from it, or even that he submitted anything. Perhaps he was working on a book, but his research materials were too eclectic to reveal a subject. The only demand I ever saw him make was to be left alone.

Slowly, the looks the staff gave the man changed: from irritation, to resignation, to tolerance, to pity. Eventually, they seemed not to see him at all. But I still saw him. He became as gray and ephemeral as a passing rain and I knew I could finally approach him. For the dead do not fear the dead.

∼ Charles Gramlich