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books too. I used to think that all those rooms connected by little doorways were like something a giant rat would build, and I enjoyed that thought once, before Norman let me down.
     
    Sometimes the books were arranged under signs, but sometimes they were just anywhere and everywhere. After I understood people better, I realized that this incredible disorder was one of the things that they loved about Pembroke Books. They did not come there just to buy a book, plunk down some cash and scram. They hung around. They called it browsing, but it was more like excavation or mining. I was surprised they didn’t come in with shovels. They dug for treasures with bare hands, up to their armpits sometimes, and when they hauled some literary nugget from a mound of dross, they were much happier than if they had just walked in and bought it. In that way shopping at Pembroke was like reading: you never knew what you might encounter on the next page - the next shelf, stack, or box - and that was part of the pleasure of it. And that was part of the pleasure of the tunnels too - you could never be sure what was around the next turn, at the bottom of the next shaft.
     
    Even during those first heady weeks of exploration, I did not neglect my education. I never went into the tunnels without first spending a few hours with my books. And I made tremendous progress. I was soon able to comprehend even so-called difficult novels, mostly Russian and French, and was making headway in simple works of philosophy and business administration. It is clear to me now, from my subsequent researches, that such accomplishments were possible, organically speaking, only on the basis of a steady growth in my frontal and temporal lobes, accompanied, I surmise, by a tremendous swelling of the angular gyrus. Reasoning backward from effect to cause, I feel justified in assuming that my cranium also conceals beneath its humdrum exterior an exceptional lateral elongation of Wernicke’s area, a deformation that is normally associated with precocious verbal skills, though it is also, I concede, present in certain rare forms of idiocy. I attribute this unusual growth to a stimulating environment, though no doubt diet was a factor as well. It had, however, an unfortunate side effect in that my head grew so heavy I had difficulty holding it up. The cerebral muscularity, you see, was not accompanied by a corresponding corporal robustness. I was still distressingly runty. I was a pip-squeak, a shrimp.
     
    It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits - avarice, delusions of grandeur, and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few. And indeed it is because certain so-called experts possess, via the most rudimentary handbooks, such a ready-made insight into the very depths of my character that all my life I have taken pains to avoid them - I am referring to psychiatrists. This aversion is only natural, I think, when you consider that among other lamentable effects occasioned by my condition one invariably finds a near-pathological need to hide or, that failing, to wear masks.
     
    The combination of a heavy head and weak limbs forced me to adopt a ponderous gait, and while later in life I fancied that this lent me a methodical and dignified air, at the time it only made me seem all the more freakish. I could not help wagging my enormous head from side to side as I walked, or lumbered, which gave me a rather bovine appearance. And front-loaded as I was, I had a strong tendency to pitch forward onto my face, to the great amusement of others.
     
    Such ponderousness, so grotesque in a creature of my stature, was particularly unfortunate at this period, when I had reached a stage of life that called for maximum alacrity. While nothing in the behavior of my siblings suggested that their brains were expanding, their masticatory apparatuses had undergone considerable development,