Colors looked actually, physically brighter, more vibrant. For the first day she thought it was something that had happened to her retina, from the sun. Except of course Mexico City had been cloudy and not all that warm, so that couldn’t be it. Maybe it was all those orange butterflies.
She also found she was noticing little things she never had before, like the little green vintage “Wash Your Sins Away” towelette dispenser to the left of the sink in the ladies’ room at the bar. It had a tiny graphic of a housewife in a 1950s apron, with happy suds coming up all around her. Had it really been there all along?
“So listen, you guys,” Tess said to Richie and Ginny. “Don’t you think there’s something weird about the fact that there are these missing plans for a deadly computer virus hidden inside a book about beetles, and a man who is planning for the end of the world just happens to collect beetles?” She had filled them in on Wayne Orbus beetle-mania. They both already knew about the alleged blueprints hidden inside the book. “Or am I crazy?”
“You’re crazy,” they answered in unison, and then gave each other a high-five.
Tess ignored them. “I don’t know … there is something … I just can’t put my finger on it … .”
“Maybe you should ask that Mayan elder spirit person you met,” said Ginny. “Do you have his email address? Oh, wait, you don’t need that, you can just tune him in … . Richie, are any of those glasses crystal? Get one down here for Tess.”
Really, Ginny should never drink gin, Tess thought. But then again she should never have said anything about the skulls to Ginny. There are some things that just don’t translate, things that are made more absurd when taken out of context.
“Listen, I know you guys think I’m loco,” Tess said, shrugging. “And maybe I am, but I can still add two and four, as my mother used to say. Number one, WOOSH is preparing for the end of the world, and then I find out from Will Ball in Mexico”—here Ginny started snickering, but Tess just ignored her—“that Wayne Orbus used to have some kind of world-domination fantasy. Number two, some NSA plans that supposedly—I know, I know, it’s all hearsay, but wait—plans that would, if not end the world, cause massive destruction, go missing. Number three, they are hidden in a book about beetles, and Orbus is obsessed with beetles. You do the math.”
“It’s fuzzy at best,” said Ginny.
“Oh please, you’re fuzzy,” said Tess, putting her arm around Ginny fondly.
Richie filled Tess’s water glass, “I don’t think it’s all that fuzzy. I can see how you would connect these things. There are suddenly a heck of a lot of beetles suddenly appearing in your life. But, Tess, it is a little far-fetched, since Orbus is all the way over in England, and he doesn’t seem like the kind of person Betty Phoenix would confide in.”
“Thank you, Richie!” Tess said triumphantly, ignoring the fact that he had basically just gently poured water on her suspicions.
Richie smiled at her affectionately. “Tess, are you saying that the Universe is trying to send you a message, with all this synchronicity? Or are you saying that WOOSH somehow actually has these plans?”
“I’m not really sure. Actually, I don’t know what I am saying.” She frowned. “But it was like I got a flash of something, there at the museum. Like someone was trying to tell me something. I just have a feeling about it,” Tess insisted stubbornly. Ginny rolled her eyes and groaned.
Richie went to the other side of the bar to wait on customers, but came back to them in a matter of minutes.
“Ready to try the White Wash?” He poured the frothy milk drink into chilled lowball glasses.
“Thanks, Richie, but we”—she pointed frantically at Ginny’s head—“need to go get some dinner.”
Ginny excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. “Okay, you guys, I’m off to ladies’ lingerie!” (Tess had always thought the pub’s restroom names a little too cutesy—the ladies’ room was designated “Lingerie” and the men’s room was “Boxers.”)
“Should I be worried about you?” asked Richie, leaning in close to Tess. “You actually seem happier than I have seen you in a while. But you’re talking kind of crazy. What does Peter say?” He straightened up abruptly and took his phone out of his back pocket. “Are you and Ginny meeting up with him?” He looked at his phone while he was speaking. Suddenly he seemed distracted.
“Oh, no, Peter’s out of town … somewhere bilking the rich out of their money.” Tess wasn’t ready to revisit the humiliation of Peter Barrett’s vanishing act.
Without a word Richie turned away to attend to a drink order. He must have gotten a bad text or something, Tess thought.
“So, what are you going to do about this hunch of yours?” Richie asked when he returned from delivering a tray of cosmos to a group of women who, from the sound of the whooping up they were doing at the corner table, were having a major celebration of some kind.
“Oh, well, I’m not going to do anything, particularly … except … I dunno, I may just poke around a little at the library, just to satisfy my own curiosity. Try to find out what really happened to that book.”
“Okay, Sherlock,” said Ginny, who had just returned. She was a little unsteady as she pulled her coat from where it had been hanging on the back of her stool. ”But before you go off to try to solve the world’s insect mysteries, can we please go get some dinner? I’m so hungry I could eat beetles.”
***
Shuffling along slowly in her place in line behind an elegant white-haired couple, Tess kept her eyes on the guide, and kept a polite, anticipatory smile on her face. She was trying as hard as she could to look as if she belonged in this group of wealthy library benefactors, who were being given a rare tour of the underground stacks of the Main Research Library . For the occasion she had actually gotten out the little diamond locket Matt had given her so long ago and put it on with a simple black cocktail dress, in order to effect a more conservative look. There was, in fact, a cocktail party scheduled after the tour, though Tess was not planning to make that part of the evening.
“This way, ladies and gentlemen … ,” the willowy guide was saying in her incongruous Vanna White manner, ushering them into the North Hall of the Rose Reading Room. As the forty or fifty people filed in, the guide walked backward up at the front; she had perfect, shoulder-length blonde hair (complete with a perfect, bouncy up-flip at the ends), a shiny form-fitting pink silk suit, and pink spiked heels. How un-librarian-like, Tess thought. She could not help thinking that Betty Phoenix would not approve.
“The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, as it has been called since 2008, houses approximately fifteen million items.” The guide’s perfectly modulated, colorless voice echoed through the huge hall. “Among these items are priceless medieval manuscripts, ancient Japanese scrolls, contemporary novels and poetry, as well as baseball cards, dime novels, and comic books. We also have the largest collection of menus in the world. So if anyone wants to add one that we may have missed—perhaps your favorite restaurant from your hometown … .” There were a few titters here, as people looked at one another with smiles that seemed to say, “Ah, so beautiful, and charming as well.” But Tess was thinking, So beautiful, and I hope for my sake, dumb as well.
For several weeks Tess had tried to find out what might have happened to Fix Your Silk Stockings with a Wyoming Walking Beetle. She had begun by looking up the title on the CATNYP site from home, so that she would have the author’s name and the publishing information, and then she went to the library and simply tried to request it. The nice young male librarian at the information desk looked at the computer screen and frowned.
“This book is marked ‘unavailable.’ Not sure why.”
This did not surprise Tess. What did surprise her was how long it took, and how many different people she needed to see, before someone would admit to her that the book was missing from its place on the shelf in the stacks.
“What could be the reason for that?” Tess nonchalantly asked another librarian,
a short, sixty-year-old woman who reminded her of a Pekinese.
“Well, it’s not allowed to leave the building,” said the woman sternly, “but someone could have signed it out for in-library use and then misplaced it somewhere among the many thousands of reference books in the reading room. That happens occasionally. We have so many volumes, and there are people who are thoughtless enough to be that inconsiderate of others. But it’s hard to believe it would not be found.”
“And how do I determine if it was signed out?”
“Ma’am, I can’t see that that matters, as the book is unavailable. Perhaps I can help you with something else? Another book on the same subject?”
Tess was on the brink of replying that she would love to see the librarian come up with another book on the same subject, but she stifled the urge.
She had almost given up after that, but she could not dispel the nagging feeling that she needed to continue to pursue the matter. So the next week she went back, after having made an appointment with a research specialist.
“This book is important to my PhD thesis,” Tess lied, trying to sound very determined, and very scholarly, “and I need to ascertain whether it is permanently lost, or if someone signed it out, so I can decide how to proceed. If someone signed it out, there is still a chance it will turn up again.” She held her breath, waiting for Mr. Albreith, a man with perpetually angry eyebrows, to ask her what kind of PhD she could possibly be working on that necessitated her reading a book called Fix Your Silk Stockings with a Wyoming Walking Beetle. But luckily he didn’t. After a brief pursing of his lips, he made a phone call down to the stacks. When he hung up the phone he announced to Tess that there was indeed a paper record of the fact that the book had been signed out by someone, and while it was not supposed to have left the building, the volume had never been returned. It was presumed stolen.
Finally, thought Tess, progress. “Oh, dear. Well, I know you have to provide a photo ID. Can you please tell me who signed it out?”
But at that, the man puffed up just like the blowfish she and her brother used to catch in Rehoboth Bay did, after they tossed them in the bottom of the boat. “Certainly not,” he sniffed, “That is privileged information. We would never reveal that.”
“But … ,” protested Tess, “if the person stole it then why would you protect them?”
“Oh, rest assured, all our librarians have a list of suspected book thieves at their stations and the name is in our system. That person will never be able to borrow a book from this library again. But give you the name? Certainly not.”
It seemed bizarre to Tess, considering the completely public nature of modern life, when you can keep neither your birthday nor your photographic image from being made available to millions of people at a single stroke of a computer key, that she could not persuade anyone to tell her a simple thing like who had signed out this one ridiculous, obscure book. But after that she was even more intent on finding out.
And so, having come across an article on the library’s web site that mentioned there would be a private tour of the stacks on April 30, Tess had persuaded her friend John Penniman to have her put her on the list for the exclusive, donor-only, after-hours event. She was not exactly sure how she was going to locate the information she wanted but she was going to try. She knew one thing: She was going to have to break some rules. “Just don’t call me when you get arrested,” Ginny had said. “Bill is a tenant lawyer, not a criminal one.” Tess had not dared to tell Harriet what she was planning. She would have had a conniption.
Vanna stopped in front of the information desk in the center of the football-field-size room. She stepped up on a small wooden stool (which, Tess felt, considering the height and pointiness of her heels, was an unparalleled act of bravery) so that she could be seen by everyone in the group. “When a librarian is handed a paper call slip requesting a book,” the guide began, “that librarian inserts it into a pneumatic capsule—like this one”—she was handed the plastic cylinder by somebody Tess could not see—“and sends it through the pneumatic tube system, down past seven floors of books below us, where I will be taking you shortly.” There were murmurs of excitement here. “The request is received, the book located, and it is sent up on an ever-turning Ferris wheel. Oversize books are sent up on dumbwaiters.”
“By the way, the pneumatic tube system, also known as the Zip Tube—” Here she swiveled both her arms in one motion, even though one hand was holding the cylinder, to indicate the machine, which looked vaguely to Tess like the top of an old-fashioned jukebox. Really, Tess thought, the way Vanna was over-gesturing it was like one of those car shows. All the woman needed was a turning platform and a microphone. “—works by air pressure, and was once an essential part of New York City life. It was used by the post office until the fifties. In fact, there were tubes that ran at about thirty-five miles per hour from Harlem to the Lower East Side, and even to Brooklyn.” Tess knew that many of the tubes still existed underground, that they had never been dug up. Were they now like horizontal test tubes, teaming with algae and fungi generated from the germs leftover from pieces of mail from decades ago? Maybe there were lost bills, birthday cards, and love letters stuck in junctions of the dark labyrinth.
“At that time they called it the Underground Mail Road,” Vanna smiled, receiving the obligatory laughter from her audience. “While most library services are now computerized, we find pneumatic tubes actually quicker and more efficient than computers for requesting books from the underground stacks. Now I’m going to show you how this works. I am going to request a book. What shall it be? Anyone?”
A man toward the front immediately spoke up in a loud voice, “How about The History of Gold Snuff Boxes by Richard Norton?” He was obviously a plant. They are running this like a carnie show, Tess thought.
Vanna dismounted (with the assistance of a nearby male patron, who more than willingly gave her a hand) and then held up a five-by-seven piece of paper. “This is the call slip, on which I have written the number for The History of Gold Snuff Boxes.” With her long fingernails, she placed the paper inside the cylinder, and with a great flourish, inserted it into the end of the machine. It disappeared with a loud rattling sound.
Tess suddenly had an image of herself, crammed inside a large capsule, careening luge-like through tubes on her way down to the stacks underneath Bryant Park.
“Now, ladies and gentleman, if you will follow me … ,” Vanna was opening an old wooden door behind the information desk. “People with claustrophobia or a fear of enclosed spaces may not want to go on this part of the tour. You are welcome to stay up here with Jim, one of our wonderful security guards, if you like.” No one appeared to want to stay with Jim. “We are going to enter a very narrow staircase, we will reconvene on the fourth level down. Any questions before we go?”
The gray-haired man who was part of the couple that had been in front of Tess raised his hand. “What happens to the call number slips, after the book is delivered to the person requesting it? Do you keep them?”
“Good question. The call slips are still stored in an old-fashioned, real, live wooden filing cabinet”—she uttered this phrase as if no one had ever seen such a quaint thing as a filing cabinet made out of wood— “in the basement—the very bottom level of the stacks—until the books are returned and reshelved.”
What luck! Thank god someone else asked that, thought Tess. She had been thinking she was going to just have to wing it, to try to find where the records were kept. She hadn’t wanted to be the one to ask.
It took a long time for the entire group to descend the narrow metal staircase. They seemed to be clomping down the steps forever. The sound of shoes on the steps reverberated loudly.
At last a door was opened and they all filed into one of the underground stack rooms. In order to fit, they had to snake around through the aisles of a few of the endless rows of bookshelves. It was a very long room; how far back it went was hard to tell.
“We are
now on the fourth level,” said Vanna. “And here”—she pulled a book from the shelf near her—“as you can see, is The History of Gold Snuff Boxes!” Some people actually applauded, as if she had done a magic trick. “The books are not stored by subject, but by size, in order to fit the most books into the shelves as possible. Now, if you dare, take a close look at the bottom of the shelves. You can see through all the way down to several floors below … . It may give your stomach quite a jolt!” Here the guide gave a conspiratorial smile. “These shelves not only hold the books, they actually serve as beams to hold up the huge reading room we just came from. They are made in part from Carnegie steel, which …”
Tess backed away slowly, glancing down the large room for another exit. Finally, she spotted one at the opposite end, at least fifty feet away. It looked as though it might lead to another stairway. Little by little she inched her way toward it, keeping her eyes on the spines of the endless rows of books, as if she were merely obsessively engrossed in browsing.
Why was she doing this anyway? Was this the act of a rational person? Maybe she had become one of those forty-year-old women you sometimes heard about, whose hormones misfired and made them do crazy things.
She had now edged away from the rest of the group far enough that it would be difficult, if she was seen, to claim it was unintentional. She wondered whether what she was planning to do—snooping into privileged library information, without permission—was against the law, and if so, how illegal was it? Could she go to jail for this? It wasn’t as though she were stealing first editions or anything. After all, she had not broken into the library. But could she really get away with pretending she were merely lost, should she be found three floors down from where she was supposed to be?
Etiquette for the End of the World Page 17