It is 2008 and he, sometimes Adagio and sometimes Nathaniel or various nicknames, still doesn't even have a consistent label for himself. Not even a consistent name has stuck on him all these 18 years; and the half hour that he has sat in the library there is that same mental numbness of all other previous half hours. It is numbness as empty as a pit in the mouth from an extracted tooth. He knows that most men wander around the world untouched, unknown, not touching, and not known or knowing. He knows that such men use girlfriends to prop themselves up in order to feel fortified outwardly in 6 billion mostly "nobodies" within a universe of continual flux. He knows the selfish jaundice of both men and women in a relationship and how with any length of time it inflicts the relationship with the disease that is an extension of the two. He has been there and done that. He had one steady girlfriend but the relationship was hard to maintain when swirling colorful treats in many edible shapes, smells, and voices of varying feminine nectar fell through the orifices of his senses. It does not bother him to be no one special. It does not bother him to be the same as "regular guys" although most of them have consistent names, nicknames, or aliases they do not cower from. They make up the masses; and the masses are a brute force to which he is one of the billions. When a thing or a way of being exists in large numbers, he supposes, it is bound to be right. At a large table in front of an open book, with fingertips he grazes an area of skin above his upper lip. The facial stubble, when he rubs it, gives him extra reinforcement in his vain embellishment of masculinity. It is a vain reinforcement that the litter of pornography he perused like a philomath in his car a few minutes before entering the library did not do. Even the insouciance that he artificially concocted there with the puff of a cigarette while waiting for the rain to soften enough to drive did not make him more conscious of his male vigor than a brief feel of facial stubble. There is little beyond sexual energy to define him. No fields, no disciplines, have awakened an internal voice. Not yet, not ever, he thinks. He is a man without a voice and such a man is most conscious of the primordial emotions of hating those who bar his pleasure and love toward those who facilitate it. Adagio-it was a somewhat forgotten word, which once popped into his head for the creation of an email address. The word has inadvertently been a perfect epitome of his slow mental activity for books. Slow in that respect, academics with their words and numbers in infinity have stood out like the awkward anachronisms of hieroglyphs chiseled into stone. It would seem ironic that someone who perceives books to be as lifeless as stones should be in a library watching the pages of a book occasionally turn under the draft of the ceiling fan when not under the directive of his own will.