Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  “After the second death,” she said, “I started seeing the first one go over the side again.”

  Looking for something to say, I told her, “Julie sounds like she must be a wonderful friend.”

  “She is,” Marie Rose nodded

  “You have that, you’re solid,” I said.

  In the strange weeks following, crews worked twelve to eighteen hours six or seven days a week. Slowly metal frames and plastic baffles grew along the balconies.

  On the seventh floor, the elevator doors would open and a guard would step out. Patrons would be herded off the elevator and into and the stacks where library staff would direct them.

  Staff would also line up the patrons who wanted to go downstairs, and when an empty elevator was ready they were herded aboard. None of them got to walk unescorted out onto the balcony.

  Because people weren’t asking reference questions, I signed up for this duty and stood on the seventh floor for hours each day. Often, late in the evenings, it would be just one security guard and me. The trickle of patrons mostly looked unhappy and wanted to know why we were doing this.

  Once in a while that autumn, in no pattern or rhythm I could discover, I would fall from an immense height and jerk myself awake as I smashed into the floor. The breathing exercises the counselor taught me helped. I refused the offer of sedatives.

  Finally one day in my office, I talked to Alex on the phone. “What made you think of the King of the Big Night Hours?” I asked. “You were talking about him just moments before the first kid jumped.”

  “You brought it up out of nowhere as I recall,” said Alex. “Suddenly asked me if I remembered him. I hadn’t thought about the guy since, maybe, the last time I saw him. And that must be twenty years ago.”

  When he said this, I remembered sitting at this desk a couple of months before and feeling hands on my back. It had been so real I’d looked around and found no one else in my office. I was reminded of a time the King had done that and I had asked Alex if he remembered him.

  Realizing all this brought back a memory of standing on a high balcony one night not long after the building had first opened. Everything had felt black. I was broke and strung out and saw no place for myself in the world.

  I had fallen silent on the phone. Alex said, “Are you okay? Listen, I’m going to come into the city and we’ll get together this weekend.”

  I didn’t tell him not to bother. But I did think of myself as having survived for a long time and to no real purpose.

  When I was young I read Graham Greene’s account of playing Russian roulette as a kid. When he was in a black depression, he’d get the revolver out of his father’s desk. Each time he spun the barrel and pulled the trigger and lived, the depression cleared.

  It had seemed such a distinct and reasonable thing to do back then that I never even thought to wonder why.

  The guard on duty with me for my stint on the seventh floor that night was young and seemed uncomfortable in his uniform. He told me he wasn’t used to it. He took classes at the university and looked so much like one of the students that they mostly had him in plainclothes.

  I was getting old and wasn’t used to standing for hours on end. It had begun to catch up with me, and my legs ached. While he talked, I looked around the atrium at the places where they still didn’t have the baffles up.

  After work, I considered going to the gym. Instead I sat on a park bench in the big night hours and thought about the time I’d stood with my hands grasping the rails.

  Then I went back to the library. It was after closing time and Guard Robins was on the front desk. I told him I had lost my keys and had a spare set in my office.

  I know he watched me cross the atrium and go to the fire stairs. The climb up all the flights was brutal, but I didn’t care. I went out onto the seventh floor balcony and then went up the stairs. Earlier, I’d spotted a place on the eighth floor where the railings were still exposed.

  Work had halted for the night. No one even noticed me step out on the balcony. This might be the last time I could do this.

  Once, thirty years before I had stood with my hands on the brass spikes just as I did now. Back then my life was a hopeless and humiliating shambles. At work they were tired of my absences and tardiness. I’d alienated anyone who’d ever taken up my cause.

  Earlier in the day I’d given a tour and someone had asked whether anyone had jumped. I’d said no. That night I grasped two of the brass spikes and pulled my weight up. My palms would get slashed as I vaulted over the side but that wouldn’t matter when the marble floor rushed up.

  Right then I felt a tap on my back. Two huge hands grasped my shoulders and turned me a hundred and eighty degrees. When I focused my eyes, I saw the King step over to an open elevator door and beckon me.

  Decades later, remembering all this, I heard the elevator behind me, and felt as if my ritual had evoked the King. When the door flew open I turned and saw the familiar uniform.

  “Get in here, you stupid bastard,” said Guard Robins. “You know the kind of trouble you would get me in?” he said as the elevator descended. “You have no thought of that? What is it in you people that you all want to become dead?” I knew he meant the King and the jumpers and me and wanted to tell him I hadn’t been going to jump, couldn’t even have scrambled over the side.

  I wondered if the ones who jumped had been enacting their own ritual. Had they tried to see how far they could go before hands reached out to hold them?

  “At your age,” Robins said, “You should know that it will happen soon enough that we don’t need to hurry it.”

  He saw me out the door. I knew he wouldn’t report this since it would implicate him. Walking home, I felt alive, revived. My legs didn’t hurt.

  I thought about when the King of the Big Night Hours had found me. Ben was right that the King always looked pleased with himself. But I felt he had reason.

  He moved so quickly for a big man, kept his hand on my back guiding me along to a little empty office in the subcellar. The “throne room” he called it. He had a key. The place, I remember, smelled like spice. As did the King himself. He laughed once when I asked what cologne he used. “It is my essence,” he said.

  Without the uniform, he looked even larger than with it. There was a silver scimitar of a scar along his ribcage. “A mean old man did that when I was young,” he told me once when I asked.

  If I got naked now and screwed on an old wooden desk I’d be in traction for the rest of my life. But I was young and the seventies were a bacchanalia. Death avoided, or at least postponed, made everything vivid and exhilarating. When we were finished he stood over me and said, “If you do anything like this again, I will keep you locked bare ass in my throne room for good.”

  We got together other times but it lacked the intensity of that first encounter. In an era of abundant opportunity we faded out of each other’s lives. Possibly neither of us wanted to drain all the magic from that moment.

  When I noticed he was never around it was in the plague time. The ones I asked only said he was back in Jamaica and I followed it no further.

  Maybe the King had come back to the university after death. Or some part of him had never left. Had he tried to reach me in time to save the jumper?

  If so, he failed or I did. But enough of him got through that I had known to tap those shoulders and turn those kids around when they stared agape. Minor good deeds like those may have helped his soul and mine.

  That weekend Alex came into the city and stayed with me. I was happy to see him but my crisis had passed. Later, Kenneth—the poet I’d known from the gym—called and we got together.

  When the grief therapist contacted me, I said I felt fine and thanked her. I was glad to see them erect the baffles and seal off the atrium.

  The job got finished early. One afternoon in late fall it was suddenly over. The elevators started to work again and we could walk safely on the balconies and stairs.

  The sun now reflecte
d off the plastic panels. This changed the light in the atrium, made it seem far duller. It felt as if the building had been tamed.

  Remembering the King had reminded me that there was no need to hurry death. Kenneth and I were having a minor affair. By January when the new semester began I had decided I didn’t need to die in this place. I set a date for early retirement.

  It was a bright winter morning when I reached my decision. I was walking to work when I saw Marie Rose with a plump dark young lady.

  Seeing my surprise, Marie said, “Julie and I decided it made no sense to run away.”

  “You’re going to stay and I’m going to leave,” I said and told her about my plans.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said. “I’ll remember you.” And that’s all one can hope for.

  Guard Robins was on duty that day. Our eyes never met now and we hadn’t spoken since the night he ordered me off the balcony. Each time he ignored me I felt bad about what had happened.

  I think about the King a lot and I miss him, but I haven’t felt his presence since that September afternoon. Maybe nothing has happened that would bring him back.

  Those Who Watch

  Ruthanna Emrys

  On my third full day, the library marked me. I should have been holding down the desk—I’d been hired for reference—but instead I was shelving. After a year with an MLIS and no prospects, you don’t whine. Deep in the narrow aisles of the back stacks, the air conditioning struggled against the sticky Louisiana heat outside. I gave up on my itchy suit jacket, draped it over the cart, and tucked Cults and Sects of Eastern Bavaria under my arm while I hooked a rolling stool with my ankle. And felt a piercing sting against the inside of my elbow.

  I screamed, almost dropped the book, caught it but lost my balance. My ass is pretty well padded, but now I felt a nasty bruise start up to go along with whatever mutant mosquito had snuck in from the swamps to assault me. I set Cults and Sects gently on floor and examined my arm. The skin swelled, red and inflamed, around a tiny spiral galaxy of indigo and scarlet flame.

  I’ve never so much as pierced my ears. I hate pain. A lot of days I hate my body too, but it’s mine and I don’t expect it’d improve anything to ink it up or poke extra holes in it. But I’ve got braver friends, so I could tell this was unmistakably a tattoo, right about the point some people take off the Band-Aid—a little too early—and send you close-up selfies to make you wince in sympathy. I touched it and shrieked again, a little muffled because I expected the pain this time.

  I prodded the book, turned it carefully with the tip of my finger. No needles hidden between pages by urban legend psychopaths, or protruding from the spine like some literary assassin’s poison ring. An ordinary book, cloth bound and stamped along the page ends with “Crique Foudre Community College.”

  “Elaine! Are you all right?” My boss hurried around the end of the row. I scrambled to my feet, nearly tripping again, left hand clapped over the evidence of whatever screw-up I’d managed.

  “Sorry, Sherise,” I managed. Sherise, she’d made clear when I started, not Sherry or Miss Nichols or any of the other variants people had tried—she liked her name and she used it.

  “Let me see,” she said. When I didn’t move, she pried my fingers away from the offending spot. She hummed as she traced the swollen area. “Better get the first aid kit to be safe. Come on.”

  She strode confidently through the stacks, a maze I’d already gotten lost in twice that morning. Florescent light gleamed off her brown skin and the darker maps winding around her arms—hers were probably from an actual tattoo parlor. Her hair puffed over her ears; big gold rings strung with lapis beads dangled underneath. I struggled to keep up.

  A few more turns, and we’d come all the way around the shelf-lined halls that surrounded the library’s central reading room, back to the staff office with its institutional carpet and laminate desks. Sherise’s, in the corner, stood out by being bigger and uglier than the others, and topped by sort of an old style wooden card catalog, dozens of tiny drawers with brass pulls. She opened one, pulled out a box of what looked like alcohol wipes. She tore open a sealed pack, labeled in an alphabet I didn’t recognize. It smelled of wintergreen and ashes. She rubbed the cool pad over my arm, and stinging gave way to a softer tingle.

  “There, that should keep it from spreading. Be careful with the religion books. Powers want respect, and so do the words around them.”

  “Okay.” My last semester at Rutgers I’d applied to jobs all around the country—and the same for a year afterward. It was August now, and plenty of hungry new graduates would be glad to move to rural Louisiana if I didn’t work out.

  CFCC had been a miracle of double-scheduling, tacked onto a disastrous interview at the smallest and most obscure branch of Louisiana State University. The LSU staff started by asking whether I had any family in the area and what church I liked. Their library was a disaster too: a modern brick monstrosity that turned off the climate control at night to keep under budget, and never mind if mold ate away their skimpy collection. After that, just about anywhere would have been an easy sell. The CFCC library, endowed by an alumnus-made-good with distinctly non-modern architectural tastes, about made me cry with gratitude.

  At CFCC, they didn’t ask about my family. They threw a dozen weird-ass reference queries at me in rapid succession, and seemed pleased by my sample class on databases. They did ask my religion, but “sort of an agnostic Neopagan”—I was through being coy after LSU—seemed like an acceptable answer. By the time they brought out an old leather-bound tome from their rare books collection and wanted to know if the font gave me a headache, I didn’t much care. I was past wanting a job, any job—I wanted to work somewhere that actually cared about being a good library for their visitors. I wanted a space that cared, and never mind if outside the doors waited mosquitoes and killing humidity and drive-through liquor stores.

  Sherise didn’t send me home, which I kind of thought might have been justified. On the other hand she didn’t yell at me, which would probably have been justified too. I’d been disrespectful to Sects and Cults, after all, whatever that meant. I retreated to the reading room.

  The circular, high-domed room at the library’s heart was a legacy of the generous alumnus. According to Sherise, this benefactor had traveled the world collecting antiquities, and decided that American education neglected the values that had made the ancient world great. “By ancient he meant Greece,” she’d said. “Maybe Baghdad if he was feeling really broad-minded. But still, you won’t find another building this pretty closer than New Orleans.” And she was right: in the middle of a campus of shoebox buildings, the library stood out like a dandelion breaking through a sidewalk.

  Each door to the reading room was crowned by cherubim bearing a motto on a banner—in this case: “The temple of knowledge shapes the mind within.” Actual cherubim, not putti; I had to look up the original descriptions before I believed it. Inside, the room went up three stories. The center held the shelves and work stations and computers you’d expect, but allegorical sculptures of Cosmology and Determination and Wisdom, Agriculture and Epiphany and Curiosity, gazed down from over the doors. Above them a bas relief ribbon detailed stories related to these virtues. Some I recognized: Oedipus and the sphinx, Archimedes in his bath. In others, humans and fabulous monsters played out less familiar myths. A tromp l’oeil thunderstorm stood over all, making the room feel dim and cool even with the lamps turned up bright. A few professors bent over oak desks, and I felt self-conscious as I craned my neck.

  The sculptures had been a definite selling point for the school, one that helped me work up the guts to come out as Neopagan—though it’s not always a trustworthy sign; a guy screamed at me one time for pointing out Minerva’s owls atop the Chicago Public Library. People don’t like admitting they’re taking advantage of other people’s temples, maybe even worshiping just by walking through.

  It was Determination I wanted—to get through the day, to do my wor
k right so I’d still have a job and an apartment and insurance when David’s visiting professorship in Chicago ended. There was a little spot between two shelves where I could get near her with no one watching. I sat heavily on a stool, looked up. She wore armor, and aimed her spear down at my seat. In her other arm, she clasped a book protectively, and she gazed with narrowed eyes, daring anyone to come up and try something. But someone had: carven blood spilled from a wound in her side, the only spot of color on the white marble.

  When I first saw her, I assumed she got that wound from some enemy’s weapon. But it was awfully close to the book. I opened my mouth to whisper a prayer, and couldn’t get anything out.

  The advantage of being agnostic is that you can pray to whatever you like. A stream, a statue, an abstract concept, a fictional character—if it feels like it ought to be a god, if it does you some good to think about how it might see your problems, you can just go ahead and babble. But I couldn’t doubt the muddy multichromatic swirl pressed into my skin. Some power, aware or otherwise, had decided that was a good idea.

  I knew enough stories. Gods, if they actually exist and don’t mind letting you see the evidence, are scary fucks. No damn way was I praying to one. My arms slipped up to wrap around my chest and I scooted to the side. I felt ridiculous, but I also felt like at any moment Determination might shift her spear. Maybe she wanted to make sure I didn’t misuse another precious book. My heart sped, and I started to feel dizzy. I pushed the stool farther back, checked the aisle behind me and saw Epiphany, globe upheld in one hand and wings spread, other hand on her robe. But her eyes—like Determination’s—focused on me, mocking. I scrambled up, kicking the stool against the shelf, flinching as it banged into the wood. Backed away, then fled through Wisdom’s door to the staff room, not daring to look either at her or at the professors who might’ve noticed my outburst.

  I shouldn’t have taken the prayer break in any case. I should’ve gone to work the reference desk—in the middle of the reading room—or back to the pre-semester re-shelving. But I still didn’t know what I’d done wrong, and after a few minutes trying to swallow a growing lump of nausea, knew that I couldn’t face either today. Sherise had left the staff room and I’d only get lost looking for her. I scribbled a note: “I’m feeling sick and need to go home early—I’ll make it up later in the week. Sorry for the short notice.”