"*Fear and Loathing* again, right?" "It's *the* road-trip novel," she said. "What about *On the Road*?" "Oh, *that*," she said. "Pfft. Kerouac was a Martian on crank. Dope fiend prose isn't fit for human consumption." "Thompson isn't a dope fiend?" "No. That was just a put-on. He wrote *about* drugs, not *on* drugs." "Have you *read* Kerouac?" "I couldn't get into it," she said. He pulled sharply off the road and into a parking lot. "What's this?" she said. "The library," he said. "Come on." It smelled just as it had when he was 17, standing among the aisles of the biggest collection of books he'd ever seen. Sweet, dusty. "Here," he said, crossing to the fiction section. The fiction section at the library in town had fit into three spinner racks. Here, it occupied its own corner of overstuffed bookcases. "Here," he said, running his finger down the plastic Brodart wraps on the spines of the books, the faded Dewey labels. H, I, J, K... There it was, the edition he'd remembered from all those years ago. *On the Road.* "Come on," he said. "We've got it." "You can't check that out," she said. He pulled out his wallet as they drew up closer to the checkout counter. He slid out the plastic ID holder, flipping past the health card and the driver's license -- not a very good likeness of his face or his name on either, and then produced a library card so tattered that it looked like a pirate's map on parchment. He slid it delicately out of the plastic sleeve, unbending the frayed corner, smoothing the feltlike surface of the card, the furry type. He slid the card and the book across the counter. Mimi and the librarian -- a boy of possibly Mimi's age, who wore a mesh-back cap just like his patrons, but at a certain angle that suggested urbane irony -- goggled at it, as though Alan had slapped down a museum piece. The boy picked it up with such roughness that Alan flinched on behalf of his card. "This isn't --" the boy began. "It's a library card," Alan said. "They used to let me use it here." The boy set it down on the counter again. Mimi peered at it. "There's no name on that card," she said. "Never needed one," he said. He'd gotten the card from the sour-faced librarian back home, tricked her out of it by dragging along Bradley and encouraging him to waddle off into the shelves and start pulling down books. She'd rolled it into her typewriter and then they'd both gone chasing after Brad, then she'd asked him again for his name and they'd gone chasing after Brad, then for his address, and then Brad again. Eventually, he was able to simply snitch it out of the platen of the humming Selectric and walk out. No one ever looked closely at it again -- not even the thoroughly professional staffers at the Kapuskasing branch who'd let him take out a stack of books to read in the bus station overnight while he waited for the morning bus to Toronto.