The Reading List

Gotham University's library was three floors of brown brick and old carpet and a heating system that ran hot on the south side and cold on the north, and somebody on the planning committee had decided the study tables should be wooden and heavy and spaced just far enough apart that conversations happened in whispers. He'd read four of the twelve books on her list. Two had been useful. Two had been angry in ways that reminded him of mountain air and silver cutlery.

He found her on the second floor, north side, at a table near the stacks where the philosophy section turned into comparative religion. She had three books open and a fourth closed under her elbow and a red pen and a cup of coffee that had stopped steaming. No laptop today. The pen was doing the work.

She didn't look up.

He sat across from her. Put his bag down. The chair scraped on the floor and a girl two tables over glanced at them and went back to highlighting. The library had the mid-afternoon hush of a building where people came to pretend they were working. Most of them were. Alexis always was.

He'd been watching her read for ten minutes before she spoke.

"You're staring at my hands."

He was. The red pen moved through margins like a scalpel. She was circling passages, drawing lines between sections, writing in handwriting tight enough that it fit between the printed lines. Exclamation points. Underlines. A question mark next to a paragraph she'd boxed in red. The page looked like a crime scene.

"You write in your books."

"It's a conversation." She still hadn't looked up.

"Aggressive conversation."

"Some ideas deserve aggression." She turned a page. The pen kept moving. He could see the title from here, spine-up on the table: Beyond Good and Evil. The cover was a used-bookstore edition, creased and soft at the corners, and she'd put a rubber band around the middle to hold it open.

The reading list she'd given him two weeks ago had been political theory. Schmitt, Sorel, Fanon, Luxemburg. Justified violence as a structural question. This was different. She'd moved past structures. She wasn't asking whether breaking things was justified anymore. She was asking whether justification itself was the wrong framework. Whether the people who needed reasons were weaker than the people who didn't.

Nietzsche didn't tell dangerous people they were right. He told them that right and wrong were inventions of the weak, and the strong had never needed them. Every twenty-year-old who found him thought they'd found a life jacket. The drowning came later.

"What are you looking for?" he asked.

"I'm reading."

"You were reading Luxemburg last week. Now you're reading Nietzsche. That's not the same shelf."

The pen stopped. She looked up. Brown eyes, flat composure, the same expression she'd used in the lecture hall the first time.

"Luxemburg was about systems," she said. "Nietzsche is about the people inside them."

"Nietzsche is about what happens when a smart person decides the rules don't apply to them."

"Or when the rules were never real to begin with." She tapped the pen once on the open page. "You read him."

"In a room above a tea shop in Hong Kong, while a man poured tea and asked me questions I didn't have answers to."

She processed that. The pen rotated between her fingers. He watched the rhythm of it. Two rotations, pause, two more. She did this when she was recalibrating, the same way she tapped the strap of her laptop bag or the tabletop in the café.

"You keep mentioning places," she said. "Training years, you called them."

"I did."

"What were you training for?"

"I wasn't sure. That was the problem."

She slid the book across the table. Open to a page near the middle, dense with her annotations. One passage circled twice in red with a single line in the margin: The only honest philosophy.

He read the passage. The will to power, the sovereignty of instinct, the rejection of slave morality. Nietzsche died insane and the version of his philosophy that survived him was edited by his sister for political purposes, but that kind of correction only mattered to someone who still trusted history. Alexis didn't.

He picked up her pen. She watched him do it without moving.

He wrote in the margin beneath her annotation, in his handwriting that was larger and sloppier than hers: Honest isn't the same as right.

She pulled the book back. Read it. Left corner of her mouth pulled up. Right side held flat.

She wrote beneath his line. Turned the book around.

Prove it.

He sat with that for a second. The library was quiet. The heating vent above them was clicking, irregular, and a shelf cart rolled past at the end of the row with a wheel that needed oiling.

"I trained with a man in Hong Kong," he said. "Richard Dragon. He sat above a tea shop and poured tea and he was the most dangerous person I've ever met who didn't want anything from me."

She was listening. The pen was still.

"Every other teacher I'd had wanted to use what I was. Dragon asked a question instead. First session, first cup of tea. He said, 'Why do you fight?'"

"What did you tell him?"

"The truth. That things were coming and I needed to be ready."

"And?"

"And he poured more tea. He didn't care about the things that were coming. He cared about why I'd decided to be the person who stood in front of them."

Alexis was very still. She wasn't assessing him now.

"Nobody asks that," she said.

"Dragon did."

"Nobody asks me that." She looked at the book between them. The passage and her annotation and his annotation and her challenge. "People tell me I'm angry. People tell me I'm smart. Nobody asks why."

The library was doing its library thing around them. A guy at the end of their row was flipping pages too fast to be reading, probably looking for a specific citation. The fluorescent light two fixtures down was buzzing at a frequency that sat right on the edge of audible. Her coffee was cold and she hadn't touched it in the twenty minutes he'd been here.

"Why are you angry?" he asked.

She looked at him. Flat eyes, steady. The pen was on the table and her hands were in her lap and she wasn't reaching for any of her tells. Not the tapping, not the hair behind the ear. She was just looking at him.

"Because the world runs on systems that let people die while following their own rules," she said. "Because my mother filed every form and made every call and did everything right and died anyway because the timeline was eleven weeks and she had nine. Because I filed a complaint afterward and the system adjusted its paperwork and nobody went to prison and nobody got fired and nothing changed except the font on the denial letter."

He knew this. She'd told him at the café, flat voice, flat eyes, delivering it like a data point. She'd told him the facts then. The system killed her mother. The complaint changed nothing.

"And Nietzsche says the anger is honest," he said.

"He says the anger is the only thing that is."

"He also says the strong don't need reasons. But you're building reasons, Alexis. You've been building them for five years. Reading lists and manifestos and annotated margins. If you were the Nietzschean you think you want to be, you wouldn't need any of that. You'd just act."

Her jaw tightened.

"The fact that you're building the argument first is the proof," he said. "You're not looking for permission to break things. You're looking for a reason not to. And you're pissed off because nobody's given you one good enough."

She stared at him for long enough that the guy at the end of the row stopped pretending to flip pages and glanced over and then went back to pretending.

"That's a very confident reading of a person you've had three conversations with."

"Four, counting the email at 2 AM."

"The manifesto doesn't count as conversation."

"You sent seventeen pages to my inbox unsolicited. That counts."

Her mouth twitched. Left side up. Right side holding.

"You still haven't proved it," she said. She tapped the book. Honest isn't the same as right. "Dragon asked you why you fight. You haven't told me why he mattered."

Under the table, his knee bumped hers. The geometry of two people and a table that was wide on top and narrower underneath. She didn't move. He didn't move. The contact was there, warm through denim, and neither of them acknowledged it.

"He mattered because he was the first person who cared about the driver, not the car," he said. "Every other teacher wanted the body to be faster or the instincts to be sharper or the technique to be cleaner. Dragon wanted to know who was making the decisions and whether they'd made the decision to be here or just ended up here."

"And you. Which was it?"

"Both. I ended up in a situation I didn't choose and then I chose what to do with it."

"That's everyone."

"No. Most people end up in a situation and then let the situation make the choices for them. You're not doing that. You're choosing. But the direction you're choosing matters, and right now you're aimed at a wall."

"And you're the one telling me the wall is there." Her voice was quiet. Lower than the composure. "Everyone else just lets me run."

"Everyone else hasn't read Sorel in a room full of people who meant it."

She looked at the book between them. The red annotations, his handwriting next to hers. She picked up the pen and wrote one more line in the margin. Turned the page so he could see.

Then keep arguing.

Under the table, her knee was warm against his. She hadn't moved.

They sat in the library for another two hours. He read while she annotated and the light outside went grey and then amber and the students around them changed over twice. She didn't talk about Nietzsche again. She asked about Hong Kong. He told her about the tea shop and the harbor and the narrow staircase and the pop music through the floor, and she asked how long he'd been there and he said three months and she said that was a long time to drink tea and he said Dragon was a patient teacher.

He didn't tell her about Shiva or Ra's or the League. He told her about the tea.

At some point she got up and came back with two cups of coffee from the machine in the lobby and both of them were bad and she sat down and the distance between them was smaller when she came back. Her elbow was near his elbow on the table. Their books were mixed together. Hers with the red pen damage, his clean because he didn't write in books and she'd already judged him for it.

"You don't annotate."

"I remember."

"That's not the same thing. Writing in the margins is talking back. You just absorb."

"I'm talking back right now."

"To me. Not to the book."

He picked up the pen. Opened one of her books to a random page. Wrote in the margin: The author is wrong about this too. She pulled it across the table, read it, and laughed.

Short. Surprised. Gone almost before it arrived. She pressed her lips together and looked away and the corners of her eyes were still holding it when the rest of her face tried to close back up.

"That doesn't count," she said.

"Why not?"

"You didn't even read the page."

"The author was wrong. I can tell from the font."

She looked at him with the lopsided mouth and her knee pressed a little harder against his under the table and she said, "Same time Thursday," and it wasn't a question and she picked up the book with his handwriting in it and put it in her bag instead of leaving it on the table.

She left with his pen too. He didn't mention it.

He walked back across campus in the dark. The fountain was still broken. A campus security guard was sitting on a bench near the parking structure eating a sandwich and not watching anything. The air smelled like damp concrete and the last of the grass clippings from whatever the grounds crew had done that afternoon.

Alexis's reading list was still in his jacket pocket. He'd read eight of the twelve now. The four he hadn't gotten to were the worst ones. He was going to read them this week because she'd ask and she'd know if he hadn't.

His phone had three messages. Pamela, about the EPA disclosure paperwork. Alfred, about a delivery from the Wayne Foundation that needed signing. Zatanna, a rabbit emoji and nothing else, sent forty minutes ago.

He texted Zatanna back: How was the show?

Three dots. Then: I made a man's watch disappear and he cried. Not the fun kind of crying. The my-wife-gave-me-that-watch kind.

Did you give it back?

Eventually. I let him sweat. He was rude to the waitstaff.

He smiled at his phone in the dark and put it in his pocket and walked to his car. Her pen was in her bag. Her book had his handwriting in it. He had to keep showing up on Thursdays before somebody else showed up with a crowbar and a different reading list.

He started the car. Drove home. Read Sorel until two in the morning and fell asleep with the book open on his chest and the light on.