The Last Library in the City

The city had to reallocate some resources and that meant closing all of the library branches except one. They sent notices to everybody in the city including information about the closures and a map to the one branch that would remain open — a branch nobody had even heard of.

Your first experience there was not a good one. It took an hour and 2 bus rides to get there and when you did, they hadn’t even opened yet. So you waited another 30 minutes until the librarian came.

“Hello,” you introduced yourself, “I’m new and I’m traveling to Big Sur in a couple weeks and I’m looking for a travel guide.”

“I don’t think I know what Big Sur is.”

“It’s a park in central California. Can you point me to the travel section?”

But there was no travel section, not really. There was a row of old, outdated travel guides with cookbooks peppered throughout at random. And nothing about Big Sur or even California — the most populous state in the country. In order to keep the trip from being a total bust, you got a library card for this new branch and picked up a trashy murder mystery from the ‘50s and left. That night, when you opened the book, you discovered that every 5th page had been torn out.

With each subsequent visit you grew to hate the library a little bit more. It was always something there. They had no system for tracking what was and wasn’t checked out, which seemed terribly bizarre for a library. Patrons scribbled in the books constantly or even blacked out whole passages with permanent marker. When you took another trip, this time to Banff in Canada, they actually did manage to have a travel guide on it, but half the information was simply incorrect, rendering the entire book useless. This was also an issue with atlases. At first glance, maps would appear to be right but upon closer inspection it became very clear that whoever had created the map had made most of it up, or blindly guessed where things were.

There was the ongoing ‘wet book’ problem. This one was inexplicable. Whatever the librarians were doing — and it didn’t seem to be much — they were failing to keep the books dry. It really seemed like a good quarter of the books there were wet, with pages sticking and ink running together. And there were no open windows, no leaks in the roof, no faulty sprinkler system, no explanation for how the books got so wet in the first place. They just always were.

You had sex with one of the librarians one stormy afternoon by the autobiographies. Well, he was technically a volunteer, not a librarian. At least, you’d seen him around a lot at the library so you thought he was a volunteer. He gave off that vibe. But he could’ve just been some guy. In any case, ‘sex at the library’ had been on your list for awhile, and, with few people around, this seemed like the opportunity. It was very quick and not as hot as you thought it would be. Every time you saw each other at the library after that day, he winked at you. Every single time. Except nobody ever told him he didn’t wink right so he kept closing both eyes when he did it. Essentially, he was blinking at you. This is the kind of person you have sex with at this library.

Fiction at the library was hard. Novels would just completely change halfway through. A romance would become dystopian science fiction. A thriller would become comedy. The characters would turn into other people for no reason. One day you were reading one of your favorite novels and noticed a sentence kept appearing that didn’t belong: “You are not a human being.” This was happening because when you were in college your boyfriend left you for one of your friends who he had been cheating with for quite some time and the night you found out you sent him an email that was just “You are not a human being” copied and pasted a few hundred times. It was years ago. And now the book was reminding you. Fiction at the library reminded you of everything. The DUI. The last family vacation before your parents separated. The summer you spent teaching kids how to build birdhouses. The late night conversations with your sister while her cancer was spreading. The smoking habit you kicked. They always came up in some form.

You only sort of remember your last visit to the library before you bought one of those tablets that shines words at your face. The idiot blinked at you. The librarian who maybe didn’t know what Big Sur was had somehow spilled a whole thing of nail polish remover on the one working computer. You found a book you’d never heard of before. You opened it and, without reading it, you tore a single page out. You folded it up and carried it with you everywhere. You carried it through storms. You carried it through avalanches. One day you opened it, and began reading.