"Eeeexcuse me?"

"It's not a personal insult, you seem very nice, but your world is a catastrophe and I don't know how to fix it yet."

"It's all the Communists' fault, you know."

"No, see, I didn't even know that. That's the kind of thing I'll need to know to fix everything."

"Communists." She nods.

"Okay. If work isn't the best place to go to learn things, what is?"

"There's libraries." She obligingly thinks of the concept of a library.

"That is the best idea I have ever heard of. Where's the nearest one -"

"Prob'ly one of the university libraries?"

"Which direction -"

She points.

"Thank you!" And off he goes, listening less to peoples' minds now that he knows they probably don't bother keeping anything private but still paying enough attention to notice anyone who might lock him up.

People think his clothes are weird and that he's pretty. They can't tell how old he is; he looks young but he's so tall.

That doesn't especially sound like a precursor to torturing him to death. He asks a few more people which way to the university library.

That way.

He walks. He runs. He looks at the signs and listens to the people and echoes what they say and bounces gleefully whenever he catches what has to be yet another language. He asks for directions in different registers - "hey, man, where's the library", "excuse me, sir, I'm looking for the library" - and notes the differences in reactions. 

He finds the library. 

He walks in .

"Oh," he breathes. "Oh."

He starts crying. He blinks and tries to calculate how many words - books and books of words - he could be here twenty Years just reading them all - in fact, he thinks he will do exactly that - 

- he heads over to the shelf and takes one down and begins.

After a few hours the floor is cleared for a wedding party but the guests are not allowed in the stacks.

He barely even notices them. He is reading, and this language is a strange and ridiculous mashup of half a dozen others and its spelling is even worse and he doesn't know how to pronounce most of the words even if he has guesses at their meaning but in 20 Years he'll know everything and there is so much to know - 

- what a good world -

- maybe you can't have something this lovely without also having the murder and starvation and if that's so he doesn't know which one he'd choose - 

- but maybe you can have it all and a library is the place where you figure out how -

The janitor finds him after hours. "Hey, what're you doing here?"

"I'm reading all the books!"

"Are... you a student?"

"I'm ....studying the books?"

"Are you a Johns Hopkins student."

"No."

"You're not really supposed to be in here."