I could smell books. Old books, like the ones on the storage shelves behind the Micromedia desk that are too old to be trusted to the public. Musty, yellow, smell.
Peeking one eye open I follow a pile of books up up up, reaching like a tree toward the dim yellow of the grime covered lights on the ceiling. Like Jack’s beanstalk. My mind cannot comprehend what I am seeing.
Am I in heaven? With both eyes now I scan around me and see the neglect with which these books have been treated. The lie around me like casualties in the war on literacy. They are piled in high precarious haphazard piles, Plato with the Outhouses of the North mixed with Italian cooking mixed with the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Am I in hell?
I am on a very hard bulgy couch. I am a little cold. And surrounded by books. It doesn’t feel like hell.
My head begins to swim and I lay back down and the bulges of the couch remind me of a dream. In the dream I see a shape above me, with wild hair and big round eyes. It’s saying, what is your name? Joseph needs your name!
I hear myself say, hoarsely, “Le – Lena…”
The shape says “Leda? Like the girl with the swan?” Suddenly it seems to grow bigger, it’s eyes closer. I feel my arms wrapping around myself like a shell.
“No.” I say. “Not like her. Lena. With an N”.
I remember now that before that I had been at work. It had been a very slow night, as most Mondays are, unless it was school project time or Oprah had just mentioned a book on her show. I remember watching a group of kids playing games at a computer, clustered around saying “Get him, no get the green one and you’ll get seven stars” Or some such in louder and louder voices. I remember trying forever to find the right book on the theory of relativity for a patron who ended up wanting a novel called the Theory of Relativity. Kind of an off night for me. But I got lots of shifting done, reorganized the graphic novels and put the Christmas books out of the display shelves and back to their regular spot at the back of the library.
And I remember a wild haired man seeming oddly interested in Christmas books for mid January.
“Just want to get a jump on things” he says with an odd high-pitched laugh. He asks me how long I’ve worked there and what my job is like. I assume he’s homeless or crazy or both and in the library for a break from the world, and so I humour him, cause that’s what we do here.
He asks me if we have any Proust books in and show him where they are, but he just goes through them one by one, laying each down on top the previous one in a pile on the shelf instead of putting them back in their row standing them up in a row. Apparently he’s read them all, so he thanks me and walks away. Sighing, I scoop them up and have them in order and tidy by the time I’ve done exhaling. Not that I’m bragging, but I have been doing this for a long time. As I turn I see his wild hair duck back around the corner of the shelves.
No comments:
Post a Comment