by Paula Guran
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 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 worshipping just by walking through.
It was Determination I wanted – to get through the day, to do my work 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.”
As I gathered up my things, I imagined her reading the note. I had no idea what rare sequelae might result from book tattoos – would she call an ambulance? I went back and added: “It’s a problem with the dose on my medication; I’ll get it fixed.” She knew I was on meds; I’d deliberately let her see the sertraline when I took my morning pills. Another thing I didn’t feel like being coy about. And it was true about the dosage problem. After a year with no insurance, my new doctor wanted to start slowly; the amount I was taking now might work for an anxious supermodel, but for a big girl like me it barely made a dent.
Outside, heat slammed my lungs. I squinted against the blinding afternoon sun, trying to catch my breath. Halfway to the parking lot, sweat soaked my shirt; just walking felt disgusting. Skin and cloth stuck to each other and peeled away, again and again. By the time I got to the car, my legs were shaking and my heart still hadn’t slowed. I felt short of breath, and couldn’t tell whether I was hyperventilating or
just having trouble with the humidity.
The first blast of AC cleared my head enough for me to realize that no way in hell should I drive like this. After a minute of circling the need-to-get-home/can’t-go-home paradox, I gave in and called David. Skyped, actually – still just in range of the campus Wi-Fi, I needed to see him more desperately than I needed him not to see me in sweat-stained dishabille.
The phone sang its reassuring trying-to-connect melody, less reassuring as it went on and I wondered if I’d misremembered his class schedule. Or he could be with a student, or in a meeting, or just too busy. But finally, with a satisfied plink, the video came through.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Hey, pretty boy.” It was ritual exchange, but at least my end of it was true. My fiancé was a beautiful red-haired Nordic type who could rock a Viking helmet or a slinky dress with equal aplomb. What he saw in me was still a mystery. I tried to explain what was going on, managed only: “I hate Louisiana.”
“I don’t blame you.” He leaned closer. “Are you having a panic attack?”
I shook my head, then nodded, then shook it again.
“Okay. Take a deep breath. I’m right here, I’m holding you. Let it out. Breathe in.”
I imagined his arms around me, imagined lying together in the shitty little apartment we’d shared near Rutgers. It made me feel lonely, but it gave me something to think about besides the heat and the tattoo and my boss and the job that might be too weird for me to handle. The breathing helped. My head cleared further, and keeping the car on the right side of the road no longer seemed like an overwhelming prospect.
“Thanks, that helps.” I wanted to show him the tattoo – but the thought made my mouth feel dry again. What if he demanded I quit my job and come to Chicago right away? Or worse, what if he couldn’t see it at all? Hallucination isn’t supposed to be a symptom of generalized anxiety disorder, but it was actually the most rational explanation I could think of. “What do you do when your job gets weird?” I asked instead.
He leaned back, obviously pleased to have been of use. “Research, mostly. Or diagnose my colleagues’ personality disorders on insufficient evidence, depending on the brand of weirdness. Is someone being nasty?”
“No. Just, um, trying to figure out campus culture.”
“Lots of alcohol and not enough drugs, probably.”
We chatted a little longer, and then he had to get back to course prep. I let him go, and didn’t tell him I’d called in sick. Nothing bad happened on my drive home.
Outside my apartment complex, I found the heat still intense, but now that I was calmer (and before I hit the barricade of smokers by the door) I took a moment to breathe. I can’t stand the way Louisiana looks or feels, but the smell is amazing. Silt and decay like endless autumn, overlain with orchids and citrus and cypress and a million other trees and vines and roots bursting from every available surface. I can’t face the swamp in person. Giant bugs to bite you or leap in your face, mud to slip on, alligators just lying around hoping you’re weak enough to be worth a sprint. But I love the smell.
I drowned my sorrows in chocolate and a Criminal Minds marathon, and it helped. Sherise sent an email to say she hoped I’d feel better, and I stared at it for five minutes trying to figure out whether she believed me before giving up and going back to the TV.
But calling out sick only works for so long, and I’ve learned the hard way that if I let myself do it two days in a row it’s easy to get inertia and stretch it for a week. So the next morning, lying in bed, I tried to put my thoughts in order.
The tattoo remained, stubbornly, on my arm. It still felt tender, but the dim light filtering through the blinds showed that the swelling had gone down. So I would go with the assumption that I wasn’t hallucinating, if nothing else because I wasn’t checking into any hospital without David there to look respectable for the doctors.
If the tattoo was real . . . then I still wasn’t sure about the statues. I’d been spiraling, and I couldn’t even trust my judgment of live people when that happened. How the hell was I supposed to predict allegorical virtues? But the tattoo, all by itself, meant I didn’t understand how books worked. Probably it meant I didn’t understand how the world worked at all, but I’d always known that. Books, though, I thought I had down.
When his job got weird, David did research. For him that meant digging through sociology databases and endless stacks of journal articles. I didn’t know what database covered this situation – but if the library had untrustworthy books, it ought to have resources to tell you about them.
“Imagine it’s someone else’s reference question,” I said aloud. Talking to myself feels stupid, but never speaking aloud at home feels a lot worse. “Miss, I’ve got a report about book attacks due in three hours. Can you find everything for me? Yes, damn straight I can.”
* * *
Sherise nodded when I dropped my lunch in the staff room, and asked casually after my health. I told her I was fine today, tried to parse what she was thinking. Probably I ought to have gone ahead and asked about the book. But she hadn’t told me when she cleaned the tattoo, and maybe there was a reason for that. Either it wasn’t the sort of thing she could explain properly, or she assumed I already knew.
One of David’s psych grad friends, a year ahead of him, figured out – halfway through his post doc – that they’d hired him thinking he’d studied under a different professor from the same department. They’d never asked, he’d never told them, and he’d struggled to keep up the whole year. But it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could come out and say. Suppose one of the Rutgers library science professors was secretly a Predatory Books specialist? Or more plausibly, suppose Sherise assumed this was something Neopagans just knew about? Either way, I didn’t want to make her feel stupid – or like hiring me had been a mistake. I’d just have to paw through the databases myself until I found what I needed.
Walking into the reading room was hard. My body believed, even if I wasn’t sure, that I’d faced a threat here. Bodies like to preserve themselves; mine wanted me to go back to my cave where it was safe. I told my body that it was stupid, and went in. I couldn’t help glancing at Determination. She didn’t seem about to spear me, but I still sensed something watching. The sense of attention seemed to pervade the room, all the allegories judging our choices of study. I shivered, tried to ignore what was probably just my neurotic imagination, and turned on the ancient reference computer.
The library’s generous funder wasn’t nearly as fond of technology as of architecture or hard copy, so I had far too long to sit in the crossfire of allegorical gazes without the screen to distract me. When I finally got the browser running, I looked over the library’s scant list of databases. Medline? Likely to support the hallucination hypothesis. PsycInfo? Worse. Maybe JSTOR or the always over-general Academic Search Premier? Eventually I decided to start with databases I’d never heard of – if a community college with a lousy budget for online services subscribed to something really obscure, there was probably a reason.
I found a few, in fact. Mostly the weird ones claimed space in world mythology and folklore, though there was one in biology and another in physics. MythINFO turned out to be perfectly pedestrian, though kind of awesome: it let you search by a drop-down menu of Stith Thompson Motif Index entries. Several looked relevant – various “transformation” archetypes, magical books – but turned up only articles on fairy tales, drowned in the deep jargon of literary analysis.
PYTHIAS, though, seemed more promising. Various combinations of “book” and “tattoo,” suitably modified by “AND” one thing and “–” another, got me nowhere. But an exasperated “bibliogenic illness” turned up a long list of books in the Zs. I scribbled down call numbers for those available locally, took a deep breath, and fled the reading room for whatever lurked in the stacks.
My first few days in the library, I could get lost by blinking. The stacks wound back in all direc
tions, and I could never quite figure out how straight rows added up to a circular building – except that the rows seemed to curve subtly, sometimes, and the turns weren’t always right angles. Today for the first time, a map stretched out in my mind; I couldn’t see the edges, but could feel the shape and logic of how the rows spread from where I stood. Beneath my skin, the tattoo pulsed with soft heat. I touched it, gingerly, but felt nothing from outside.
I hadn’t been back to the Zs – the “index” section whose self-referential topic is books and libraries – since the whirlwind tour during my interview. But the warmth in my arm seemed to increase along what I vaguely recalled was the right path. I gave in and followed it, trying not to think too hard about what I was doing.
The AC was managing better today, at least as far as temperature. The stacks felt cool and shadowy. But in the corner of my eye fog seeped from below the shelves, never there when I turned to look though I felt it against my skin. It sometimes seemed about to coalesce into more solid form and draw me to a particular shelf, a particular volume – but it never did.
My map grew as I walked; at last I saw that the stacks were not so much neat rows as a galactic spiral, linear only to the cursory glance. And at the far end of the western arm, I found an alcove lit by buzzing fluorescents and lined with tightly packed mahogany bookshelves. Tiny paperbacks pressed against oversized leather-bound tomes, and the half-imagined fog cleared in favor of archival dryness. A circular stained-glass window, wider than the span of my hands, filtered light through an abstract pattern of magenta and midnight blue. The colors shifted as shadows moved beyond – probably leaves from the grand row of hollies and live oaks between library and parking lot. My arm burned, pain flaring as I stepped into the coruscating illumination. I whimpered and bit my lip.
I wanted to move away from the window and get my books. Instead, unwilled, I knelt. As in the reading room, I felt again the attention of some presence. This one seemed less judgmental, more curious. Not friendly curiosity: a biologist examining a noisy DNA sequence, perhaps, or me with a particularly recalcitrant new database. The attention sharpened, and I felt uncomfortably aware of my body: not only fat ass and weak ankles, but heart thudding and guts clenching and nerves struggling to keep up. All pus and blood and static, acid and slime and brittle bone.