HomeOur tale begins on the previous Sunday evening with a play written by Robert Sherwood (supposedly, anyway) in 1935 called The Petrified Forest. I was going through the syllabus of each of my classes to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to do anything in the way of homework. I came to my syllabus for my senior capstone class–MAR 498C–and saw that I had to read The Petrified Forest by that Tuesday. I had finished everything else due for Monday so I decide to get a head start on it.
Normally I’m pretty good about buying books for classes ahead of time. I usually have all of them by the first week of the semester. I even remembered picking this book out at the University of Arizona bookstore and wondering what it was about. I remember what kind of book it was too: 8 in. x 5 in. in size, a little under a quarter of an inch thick, with a dull blue cover and a picture on the front, set in about an inch and a half from the edges.
I started looking through my bookshelf in my closet. Then through the stack of books I had on my desk. Then through the stack I had on my side table by the closet. Then through the stack of papers on the spare futon. (My room isn’t in the best of shape lately.) No dice. I checked again, adding a few other locations to my search. Nothing. Befuddled, I looked at my receipt from the UofA bookstore to make sure I had purchased it. It wasn’t listed there.
That’s when things first started getting weird. I could have sworn I purchased it from the UofA bookstore. I was almost positive I had. I logged on to my account with Amazon to check my recent purchases. If I hadn’t gotten it from the UofA bookstore that’s probably the first place I would’ve gone to to get it, and indeed I had gotten several other books from there recently for other classes. But they had no record of me buying The Petrified Forest.
This also struck me as strange. I had never completely overlooked getting a book for a class before. “Oh well,” I thought, “I don’t have to have it read until Tuesday. I’ll pick it up from the bookstore tomorrow.”
The way the SunTran bus schedule and my class schedule work, the only way I can be on time is to always be half an hour early. Monday was no exception, so I walked over to the UofA bookstore before my first class of the day and waited for an attendant. They close off the shelves to browsers after the first couple weeks of school and you have to get an escort if you need anything. Why they do this is beyond me, but I assume it’s for security reasons.
“What can I do for you?” a man approaching the counter from somewhere asked.
“How’s it goin’? I’m looking to pick up a book for class.”
“What’s the class?” he asked.
“MAR 498C.”
He typed it into the computer and stared at the screen. “Poetics of Space?”
“No, actually. It’s called The Petrified Forest.”
He shook his head. “Poetics of Space is the only book that’s listed for this class.”
Huh. “Any way you can search for just the book title without entering the class?” Sometimes books are cross-listed if they’re required reading for more than one class.
A few seconds later he told me, “No, I’m sorry. We have it in here but it looks like it was never ordered for this semester.”
Now the gears in my head began to whirl. If the bookstore never even ordered it, then why did I remember buying it? Why did I have a memory of what it looked like? Memory is a tricky thing, and it’s not unheard of for people to have memories of experiences that they never experienced. I’ve read about psychological studies of such things. But honestly, this freaked me out a little. I had gone from definitely thinking I had this book to finding out that there never was and never had been any basis for thinking that. If the bookstore hadn’t ordered it, this was a major oversight on someone’s part–and probably not the professor’s, since she had told them to order the other required book for the class.
I thanked the bookstore employee and headed toward my first class of the day. It was an English class, but several of my classmates were also in my capstone class. I asked them about The Petrified Forest.
Now here it gets really crazy because it turns out none of them had this book. One said he had been haggling with the UofA bookstore for weeks to order it without success. Another said he had phoned two different Barnes & Noble stores and a Bookman’s, and none of them carried it either. I talked to half a dozen students from my capstone class in the course of the day. None of them had read it. None of them had it. None of them had any luck getting it.
I decided that the only way to get it and have it read by the next day would be to download it from somewhere online. I was perfectly willing to pay for it, but if it came up on RapidShare or one of those other file hosting sites in pdf, so be it. Amazon had a listing for the book (with a cover completely different from my memory of what it looked like), but they didn’t have it available as an e-book download. Neither did Google Books. Outside of them I couldn’t find it anywhere. I went through twenty pages of search results with some combination of “petrified forest,” “robert sherwood,” “play,” “read,” “online,” and “pdf.” Nothing.
I thought about asking someone in my Burton class that also happened to be in my capstone class if I could borrow it. I have an hour and a half break in-between the two, and if it was a short play I could borrow it at the start of the first and have it read by the start of the second. Given the track record of the students I had talked to so far though it seemed like a long shot. My last resort would be the UofA library. Of course I had thought of this before and of course the only copy had been checked out (with a due back date of March 7th, which meant it had been checked out a while ago). They had another copy that was marked “Library Use Only,” however. If I got there early on Tuesday I could read it before my first class of the day.
My sleep cycle has been all over the place for the better part of the last decade, and Monday night I continued that trend by sleeping from 7pm to 11:30pm before getting up working for the remainder of the evening. My roommate was headed to campus early the next morning to study for a test and offered me a ride.
Campus at dawn is an eerie place. There are few people up and about, all of the drifting like ghosts as the first beams of sunlight break over the mountains and spill out onto the Mall. Places that are normally crowded always feel strange when they’re empty. The quest for The Petrified Forest and the circumstances surrounding it made this early morning journey all the more uncanny.
I arrived at the UofA library by 7:25am and started looking. According to the call number it should have been on the third floor, section C. I searched for twenty minutes before going back downstairs to ask for help. The woman there called up an assistant from the lower level by phone.
The kid that arrived on the scene to help me was kitted out like some kind of urban Sherpa in shorts, heavy windbreaker jacket, and baseball cap. On his back was a sturdy hiker’s backpack that looked like it was stuffed with what I could only assume were books, library blueprints, rope, grappling hooks, and trail rations. In a near Kafka-esque bit of irony his name was “Stefan,” only pronounced differently than my name, with the “a” pronounced like an “i.” He didn’t look anything like me, which was just as well, because if I was met by a “Stefan” who was a thin, tall kid with spiky hair I would’ve probably fainted at that point.
He was experienced all right, if I hadn’t gathered that from the get-up he was wearing. He merely glanced at the six figure call number and had it memorized. He lead me to the third floor again but to a set of shelves I hadn’t delved through yet. It was a series of those shifting space-saver shelves you see in cluttered libraries and vaults of one kind or another. In a cinematic moment of truth he punched some buttons at the ends of each of the shelves that commanded them to part where we wanted them to. He started looking at the spot on the shelf where it should be.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out something wasn’t right. “It should be in here,” I told him. “When I looked it up it was marked ‘Library Use Only.’”
A spark of recognition lit up his face. “Special Collections?”
I remembered seeing that term on the web page listing. “Yeah.”
“Oh, then it’s not here,” he said. “You have to go to…” and here he gave a series of instructions about some other part of the library that I didn’t follow, but I nodded like I did. “…You have to go in there, they’ll bring it out for you, and they’ll only let you read it in there.”
With everything I had gone through with this book, that had the ring of a set-up to it. Then came the kicker: “They don’t open until 9.” That meant it was no good to me. I had to walk the breadth of campus to get to my first class of the day at 9:30, which left me no time at all to read it if I waited until the Special Collections Department opened.
“Thanks anyway,” I told my doppelganger, easy on the ‘doppel.’
“Is it old?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess”–by which I meant it would be old, if it did in fact exist at all.
“Then that’s why it would be in Special Collections,” he said as he turned to leave.
“That’s certainly one theory,” I told myself when he was out of earshot. “Another is that there’s a vast conspiracy behind this book and its contents. One that’s gone to great lengths to make sure it disappears from Tucson.”
Y’know, it’s funny. I didn’t have a real interest in reading it a week ago, but all this mystery surrounding it made me eager to find out what it was all about.
I killed another hour before walking to McClelland for my Burton class. I knew something was up when ten minutes before class started we were still at half capacity. It was unusual. I hadn’t thought to check my school e-mail that morning so I asked Andrew, who had shown up and was sitting next to me, to look into it. He text someone and a few minutes later got a response: class had been canceled. The professor was sick.
You wonder what the significance is? Just this: the professor who teaches Burton is the same professor who teaches the capstone class. After all this trouble to track down The Petrified Forest the one professor who made it required reading turns up sick on the exact day we’re supposed to be discussing it.
The whole thing made my head spin. I thought about going back to the library to check back in with the Special Collections people but after the vanishment of my professor I didn’t trust what I would actually find there. I took lunch at Silvermine early, then found a park bench to pass out on for a few hours. Having the class canceled meant I was off the hook for reading it in the short term. We were supposed to watch the 1936 film that the play was based on for Thursday, so I decided I would do that much and call it even.
You can guess how this ends, can’t you?
All the films for media arts classes are posted in an online student database known as d2L (a cutesy acronym for “desire to learn”). When I logged in that night and checked MAR 498C all the films for that class were there.
All of them except for The Petrified Forest.