The Museum of Literary Souls (A Short Story) by John Connolly Page A

properly his affection for
the girl in accounts and had quietly resigned himself to the possibility that a
life shared with another might not be in his stars. Slowly he was becoming a
kind of fixed object, and the books he read came to reflect his view of
himself. He was not a great lover and neither was he a tragic hero. Instead he
resembled those narrators in fiction who observe the lives of others, existing
as dowels upon which plots hang like coats until the time comes for the true
actors of the book to assume them. Great and voracious reader that he was, Mr.
Berger failed to realize that the life he was observing was his own.
    In the autumn of 1968, on Mr. Berger’s thirty-sixth
birthday, the council announced that it was moving offices. Its various
departments had until then been scattered like outposts throughout the city,
but it now made more sense to gather them all into one purpose-built
environment and sell the outlying buildings. Mr. Berger was saddened by
this development. The housing department occupied a set of ramshackle offices
in a redbrick edifice that had once been a private school, and there was a
pleasing oddness to the manner in which it had been imperfectly adapted to its
current role. The council’s new headquarters, meanwhile, was a brutalist block
designed by one of those acolytes of Le Corbusier whose vision consisted solely
of purging the individual and eccentric and replacing it with a uniformity of
steel, glass, and reinforced concrete. It squatted on the site of what had once
been the city’s glorious Victorian railway station, itself now replaced by a
squat bunker. In time, Mr. Berger knew, the rest of the city’s jewels would
also be turned to dust, and the ugliness of the built environment would poison
the population, for how could it be otherwise?
    Mr. Berger was informed that, under the new regimen, there
would be no more need for a Closed Accounts Register, and he would be
transferred to other duties. A new, more efficient system was to be put in
place, although, as with so many other such initiatives, it would later be
revealed that it was less efficient and more costly than the original. This
news coincided with the death of Mr. Berger’s elderly mother, his last surviving
close relative, and the discovery of a small but significant bequest to her
son: her house, some shares, and a sum of money that was not quite a fortune
but would, if invested carefully, enable Mr. Berger to live in a degree of
restrained comfort for the rest of his life. He had always had a hankering to
write, and he now had the perfect opportunity to test his literary mettle.
    So it was that Mr. Berger at last had a collection taken up
in his name, and a small crowd gathered to bid him farewell and good luck, and
he was forgotten almost as soon as he was gone.

CHAPTER
TWO
    Mr. Berger’s mother had spent her declining years in a cottage on the outskirts
of the small town of Glossom. It was one of those passingly pretty English
settlements best suited to those whose time on this earth was drawing slowly to
a close and who wanted to spend it in surroundings that were unlikely to unduly
excite them and thereby hasten the end. Its community was predominantly High
Anglican, with a corresponding focus on parish-centered activities: rarely an
evening went by without the church hall being occupied by amateur dramatists,
or local historians, or quietly concerned Fabians.
    It seemed, though, that Mr. Berger’s mother had rather kept
herself to herself, and few eyebrows were raised in Glossom when her son chose
to do the same. He spent his days outlining his proposed work of fiction, a
novel of frustrated love and muted social commentary set among the woolen mills
of Lancashire in the nineteenth century. It was, Mr. Berger quickly realized,
the kind of book of which the Fabians might have approved, which put something
of a dampener on his progress. He dallied with some short stories instead, and
when they proved