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  In some ways, Harry seemed to be disengaging from the case. He was slow to respond to requests from the city attorney and made few motions of his own. His claim included medical expenses he said he’d incurred after being injured in jail, but he never responded when Victoria Chaney asked him to produce the names of the doctors who treated him and receipts for the bills he paid. Chaney asked Harry’s lawyer to follow up on the request, and he said he would check on it. Months passed, and Chaney never received either a reply or a request for more time to get the information.

  Perhaps Harry was distracted. He had a new boyfriend—“a nice man named Alan,” according to Debra Peak. She said she couldn’t remember his last name, but she knew he was well-off and that Harry wouldn’t be hurting for money anymore. Keeping it a secret from his parents, Harry moved to Alan’s house near Palm Springs. What a relief it must have been for Harry to find someone who loved him, and to get out of his tatty West Hollywood apartment and away from the passel of roommates. Maybe this was why his interest in the lawsuit flagged; he might not have wanted to think about the fire anymore. In his nice house, with his nice man, in the sunny languor of Palm Springs, he must have lost his appetite for the clawing and grabbing of Hollywood. He was a flawed, self-destructive person who blundered through life, but perhaps he had begun to feel something close to contentment.

  He told friends that he wanted a job that was more reliable than acting. After considering his options, he decided to become a medical assistant. The choice seems like a significant departure, but it offered a lot of what he yearned for. He could make people happy doing that job; he could feel heroic. He started the training program at a local school—Debra couldn’t remember what it was called. She said Harry really liked it, although he had one complaint. When the students were learning how to draw blood, he said, they practiced on each other, using the same needles over and over.

  In July 1991, the parties involved in the civil suit gathered for a status conference. Victoria Chaney hadn’t seen Harry in months, and when he arrived at her office, she was stunned. Compared to the previous time she had seen him, he looked shrunken, dried out; his strong, sunny good looks were worn away. Even his glorious head of hair was thinned, and his skin had the sallow tinge of jaundice. His lawyer announced that he’d called the conference to request that the trial be expedited. He presented an affidavit from Harry’s doctor that stated Harry was suffering from severe hepatitis and an enlarged liver and spleen, and “there is a substantial medical doubt that he will survive beyond six months.”

  Ten years earlier, in 1981, an immunologist at UCLA named Michael Gottlieb published an account describing a phenomenon he called acquired immune deficiency syndrome; Gottlieb’s study is considered among the first documentations of AIDS. The disease’s ascent in Los Angeles was explosive, brutal, and extensive. Its presence in the city was especially public. In 1985, actor Rock Hudson acknowledged that he was infected with the disease; that same year, Hollywood held its first AIDS walk, which drew thousands of marchers. Just a few months after Harry requested an expedited trial, Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive and retired from the Los Angeles Lakers.

  Harry’s family had never been comfortable with the idea that he was gay, and they would have been uncomfortable with the possibility that he’d acquired a disease through a homosexual encounter. The medical technician class was a convenient opportunity to explain away his illness. Debra told me that everyone in Harry’s class ended up with HIV/AIDS because of the shared dirty needles. First, she told me that Harry was the only one in the class who died; another time she said that everyone in the class passed away. It is possible for health care workers to acquire HIV accidentally, but it’s rare. According to an article published in a medical journal in 2007, the worldwide count was 98 confirmed instances and 194 possible cases of health care personnel being infected accidentally. If five or ten students in a medical assistant program in Los Angeles all became infected with HIV/AIDS—especially if they became infected because of unhygienic practices in the program—the media surely would have covered it. But I never found any mention anywhere of such an incident, and to this day, I can’t find anything to suggest that the story was true. When I asked Demitri Hioteles, he chuckled and said, “That needle story? I always knew that was bullshit.” The irony is that when Hioteles and Harry were still a couple, Harry came home one day and asked Hioteles if he had heard about a new illness—some kind of gay cancer. Hioteles didn’t believe him. “It sounded crazy,” Hioteles told me. “And Harry was such a liar. I just thought it was another one of his stupid stories.”

  Harry grew weaker, smaller, sicker. After the conference with Victoria Chaney, Leonard Martinet petitioned the court to move up the date of the trial. The judge agreed, scheduling the trial for September 12, 1991. Martinet hoped there wouldn’t be a trial at all and that the city would drop its suit and settle. He was correct in guessing that the city attorneys didn’t savor the prospect of pitting the City of Los Angeles against a man dying of AIDS. The city’s suit was mostly symbolic. Harry had no money and never would have been able to pay any portion of the damages. Chaney—and the firefighters—pursued the case to make a statement about responsibility, especially after the frustration of never having a trial on the criminal charges. But even in civil court, where the standards of proof are more lenient, there was no guarantee that the city would win its case. There simply wasn’t any irrefutable evidence placing Harry at the library that day, and nothing connecting him directly to the fire. Considering how sick Harry was, the city could look vindictive and cruel.

  At a conference a few days before the trial was to begin, the city made a surprise proposal, offering Harry thirty-five thousand dollars to settle the case. The amount was a pittance compared to the $15 million Harry had asked for, and a pittance compared to the kinds of settlements the city usually makes. Nevertheless, Harry accepted it. For the city, it was a great bargain. Trying the case, with its uncertain outcome, would have cost the city thousands more. The city’s Budget Department drafted the check for thirty-five thousand, settling the case of the Los Angeles library fire—at least with regard to Harry’s culpability—on October 2, 1991.

  Harry spent his last days in Palm Springs. After that last meeting with Victoria Chaney, he never really left his house again, relying on Alan’s attentions and finances for comfort. The settlement money must have felt like a windfall at first, but his medical costs gobbled it up in no time; the most basic medications for HIV/AIDS cost close to five thousand dollars a month. He had liver failure, hepatitis, and an enlarged spleen, followed by even more dismal consequences of the disease. “We were so close, we were like twins,” his sister Debra told me recently. “The day before he died, I was incoherent. I just knew. I told my kid that we wouldn’t see Uncle Harry alive again. I just had a premonition.” On April 13, 1993, Harry Peak died in Palm Springs, California, of complications from HIV/AIDS. There was a private funeral service at Hope Country Church, a lovely little steepled building on a quiet street in Baldwin Park, about fourteen miles north of Santa Fe Springs, where Harry was raised.

  32.

  The End of the Story: A Play in One Act (1954)

  By Thomas, Richard

  822 T461

  The End of the Story (2004)

  By Davis, Lydia

  E-book

  The End of the Story (2012)

  By Heker, Liliana

  Series: Biblioasis International Translation Series

  This Is the End of the Story (2017)

  By Fortune, Jan

  E-book

  January 1 is the day of the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena. The Los Angeles Public Library always has a float in the parade. Every year, the parade has a theme. In 1993, the theme was “Entertainment on Parade,” and the library float featured a giant bookworm reading a newspaper. One of the people riding beside the bookworm was City Librarian Elizabeth Martinez, who was appointed to the job after Wyman Jones retired in 1990. The news
paper that the bookworm was reading displayed a headline that said CENTRAL LIBRARY REOPENS OCTOBER 3, 1993. Robert Reagan, who was the public information director of the library from 1980 to 1998, said that publicizing that date at the Rose Bowl might have been tempting fate, but he believed they would really make it.

  There was a lot still to do. As the date approached, the library held book-shelving parties, and hundreds of volunteers helped unpack two million books and place them on the new shelves. The parties were a little like the volunteer turnout after the fire, but in terms of mood, it was the mirror opposite, an occasion for optimism and renewal. “I like to work with books,” one of the volunteers told a reporter who asked why she was giving her time. Then she added by way of complaint, “Today there were a lot of very young children getting underfoot and doing nothing. They slowed down the shelving.” She paused and added, “But working to help open the library is personally very satisfying.” Library administration, with help from ARCO, planned a spectacular opening celebration, featuring Brazilian folk dancers, Japanese drummers, flamenco performers, West African singers, Korean musicians, demonstrations by the cast of American Gladiators, and appearances by Spider-Man, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny.

  No one was sure how many people might come to see the library reopen after six and a half years. Maybe the city had grown used to the library being in its diminished state, stuck in its temporary out-of-the-way place; maybe the wonder of the Goodhue Building, the “magic castle in fairyland” that caused people to swoon when it opened in 1926, was gone for good. But the day of the opening celebration, it was clear that the whole city wanted to see the library. At least fifty thousand people danced with Barney the Dinosaur and walked through the rotunda and rode the cascading escalators to the bottom of the new Tom Bradley Wing, and more than ten thousand people signed up for library cards for the first time. Everyone enjoyed the spectacle of the entertainers. But as Robert Reagan put it to me recently, on that day in 1993, “the library was the hero.”

  The end of Harry Peak’s case came with no clarity; in effect, it was more of an erasure than a conclusion. It didn’t resolve the question of who had started the fire, or whether anyone had started the fire. Nor did it ever provide a final immutable version of how Harry Peak spent the day of April 29, 1986. It didn’t answer whether he was or wasn’t the human hand holding an open flame. I seesawed countless times in what I believed really happened, in particular whether Harry was involved. Every time I thought I’d settled on the version of the story I trusted, something arose to punch a hole in it, and I was back at the beginning. In the end, I had no idea what was true or even what I decided to believe. I finally accepted the ambiguity. I knew for sure that once upon a time, the Los Angeles Central Library suffered a terrible fire, and a fumbling young man was caught up in it. Beyond that was all uncertainty, the way life almost always is. It would remain a story without end, like a suspended chord in the last measure of a song—that singular, dissonant, open sound that makes you ache to hear something more.

  I went to the library late one day, just before closing time, when the light outside was already dusky and the place was sleepy and slow. Central Library and the Bradley Wing are so big that when the crowds thin out, the library can feel very private, almost like a secret place, and the space is so enveloping that you have no sense of the world outside. I went down to History to see Glen Creason and find out how the indexing of the Feathers map collection was progressing. Then I roamed from department to department, just strolling through, and crossed the beautiful hollow rotunda, a gorgeous surprise every time I entered it, and then went up the wide lap of the back staircase, where the Statue of Civilization stared at me as I made my way. The silence was more soothing than solemn. A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage—the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that all these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come. I realized that this entire time, learning about the library, I had been convincing myself that my hope to tell a long-lasting story, to create something that endured, to be alive somehow as long as someone would read my books, was what drove me on, story after story; it was my lifeline, my passion, my way to understand who I was. I thought about my mother, who died when I was halfway done with this book, and I knew how pleased she would have been to see me in the library, and I was able to use that thought to transport myself for a split second to a time when I was young and she was in the moment, alert and tender, with years ahead of her, and she was beaming at me as I toddled to the checkout counter with an armload of books. I knew that if we had come here together, to this enchanted place of stucco and statuary and all the stories in the world for us to have, she would have reminded me just about now that if she could have chosen any profession in the world, she would have been a librarian.

  I looked around the room at the few people scattered here and there. Some were leaning into books, and a few were just resting, having a private moment in a public place, and I felt buoyed by being here. This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

  The security guards began arranging chairs and straightening tables while calling out, “Four minutes! Four minutes to closing!” The few of us here snapped our books shut and swept our belongings together and headed upstairs. In the checkout line, a heavyset man with three books under his arm began a jiggling, hip-wagging dance, and people stepped around him carefully on their way out the door.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book relied on the patience and generosity of dozens of people who gave me their time and their stories. My greatest thanks go to the staff at Central Library who were so welcoming and helpful throughout the many years I spent wandering the halls; a special tip of the hat to Glen Creason, John Szabo, Eva Mitnick, and Peter Persic, who never flinched when I returned with one more question. Thank you, Emma Roberts, for dragging out all those boxes of material. I’m also grateful to many former staff members who spoke with me, among them Helene Mochedlover, Elizabeth Teoman, Susan Kent, Fontaine Holmes, JoAnna and Robert Reagan, and the late Wyman Jones. The Library Foundation of Los Angeles, and in particular Ken Brecher and Louise Steinman, championed the project from the beginning, for which I am very grateful. I was helped by past and present members of the Los Angeles Fire Department, and in particular one very long-suffering woman named Jessica in the records department who humored my pleas to dig a little deeper and found material I had been told was long gone.

  I owe a special thanks to the family of Harry Peak, and in particular his sisters, Debra and Brenda. Thanks, too, to Demitri Hioteles, who shared many memories of Harry and provided the portrait included in the book.

  The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity helped make this project possible. I feel very fortunate for their support.

  Huge thanks to Ashley Van Buren for her smart, insightful reads; for cheerleading along the way; for rounding up the photos; and for being a great friend. Julie Tate did the crackerjack fact-checking on a craz
y deadline; thank you, Julie!

  All my friends refrained from asking too often if the book was done yet, for which they have my undying gratitude. For hand-holding and carefully calibrated distraction, I am particularly indebted to, among others, Erica Steinberg, Christy Callahan, Sally Sampson, Janet Tashjian, Jeff Conti, Debra Orlean, Laurie Sandell, Karen Brooks, Sarah Thyre, and all my merry crew of friends; I love you.

  Thank you, Kimberly Burns, for your wisdom and enthusiasm.

  Richard Pine, my forever agent: You’re the greatest.

  Chip McGrath, best boss, thanks for reading when this was a raw mess and giving me perfect advice and the greatest encouragement.

  Thank you, David Remnick and Virginia Cannon, for giving me leave from The New Yorker to work on this. No one could ask for a better professional home or for better editors; when I realize I work with you, I keep pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.

  I work with the most wonderful group of people at Simon & Schuster. A huge thank-you to Carolyn Reidy, who made this all possible; Richard Rhorer, the associate publisher; Dana Trocker, the marketing whiz; Julianna Haubner, who knows how to get everything done; Kristen Lemire and Lisa Erwin and Beth Thomas and Patricia Callahan, who work magic behind the scenes; Tamara Arellano, who tweaked all the important tweaks; Jackie Seow and Lauren Peters-Collaer and Carly Loman, who made this book so beautiful.

  And thank you, Anne Pearce! I’m so happy to do another book with you! Jofie Ferrari-Adler—editor extraordinaire, voice of wisdom, and sharpest pencil around—there are no words . . . ! Jon Karp, here we are on book number five! I am so lucky to work with you. Thank you, thank you for these many years of friendship, support, and inspiration.