Excerpt: Something Vaguely About Melvil Dewey (working title)

He stands outside, a desolate field, upstate New York, long abandoned. Once farmed, tended, cared for, not unlike the man himself, the field now forgotten and barren, not unlike the man himself. The clouds above one solid mass of gray, unbroken for as far as he can see; the silence above and around one solid mass of gray, unbroken for as far as he can hear. It has been a long time since he has heard anything except for the never ending thoughts in his head, unceasing and merciless, a cycle of noise that he would pay a king's ransom to end. There is no peace in his mind, no peace for this old man, not what he expected in his old age. He has made it 60 years to this point, hoping to find some sort of solace in quiet and yet there is none to be found.
His eyes turn to the sky; the only sign of life for miles are black birds reeling and plummeting in the gray. Ravens? Crows? Sparrows. Each one no bigger than his fists clenched at his side, futile anger in his blood which causes tics and gasps when it reaches his heart, then pumping back out as unclean and impure as it was moments before. The birds swoop low and then careen back into the sky, dots swirling about his head, always dots, always dots.
And how did he get here? To this point? To this dot, he thinks. There is no ready answer amongst the voices, the thoughts, the words in his head, the dots in his head. His legacy lost, destroyed, and still just limited to simple dots. Is that all he will have left behind when he is gone? And that is not so far from now, he thinks. Not much time left on this planet, in this life. He has done some good, how could he not have? Dedicated his life to the idea of doing good, must have done some good. And yet, thinking about it, wondering aloud to the voices in his head, breaking the silence of the field, there are no answers still. Will he be remembered fondly, if at all? He has made some mistakes, but who in this world, in his life, as a human being, has not? No, undoubtedly the good outweighs the bad, must outweigh the bad, the good things heavier each considered on its own than all the bad things he has done considered together. He is not a bad man. He tells himself this. He was not a bad man. The voices, the thoughts, they are silent in this regard. If he has to lie to himself to find his peace, his silence, then so be it. He is not above lying to himself.