Chapter 4 #3
“The Library is generally quite good about matching our Patrons to the kind of lives they’ve been aching to have.
” The way the Librarian said Patrons, it was clearly a noun with a capital P and a great deal of weight.
“To a point,” she added, pouring herself some Darjeeling.
“Just because you’re a side character in Elizabeth Bennet’s life does not mean you can bump her out of the way and marry Mr. Darcy yourself.
You don’t get to change the course of the story as it’s been written.
And for gods’ sake, don’t assume the book will mirror the movie,” the Librarian added.
“Head off to Pride and Prejudice all you want but do not come crying to me when Mr. Darcy looks nothing like Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen.”
“Got it.” I took another gulp of hot sugary tea to wash down my perfectly buttered, piping-hot scone.
“No non-public-domain books, no movie versions, you don’t get to be the heroine, and you don’t get to change the story.
” That made me think of something else. “What happens when the story ends, though? There I am in the church crowd with everyone else, Aunt Gardiner’s neighbor or whoever, watching Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr. Darcy—what happens to me after that? After The End?”
“You can return your book to the Library and either try a new book or rejoin your old life,” said the Librarian.
“Or you can keep living in that world . . . Only the Library can’t guarantee what happens, once you’ve lived past the last page.
Stories take on a life of their own after the author sets down the pen. ”
“They—they do?”
She smiled, and I saw it was a smile with an edge to it.
A smile that had teeth, and not the pearly whites kind.
“Think of a map, Miss Watson. Once you leave charted waters, there’s only the warning: Here There Be Dragons.
It’s the same with a book, if you continue to live in it.
The story will take its own direction, because just by living there you’ve brought change.
You can stay . . . but be aware of the dragons. ”
“Bring it on. I want dragons!”
“I was being,” she said in exasperated tones, “metaphorical.”
“Right.” I made a mental note to choose a book with a reasonably long time span—no sense heading off into uncharted waters sooner than I had to, picking a story that got told in three days.
Which made me think of another potential snag.
“Being literal instead of metaphorical, can you die in a book world? Get hurt?”
“You can die or get hurt in this world, can’t you?
Of course you can die or get hurt in a book world.
But you have to take into account when you choose, just how dangerous is the world you’ve chosen?
” she added. “How many people in a Jane Austen novel get stabbed, as opposed to an Agatha Christie? How likely is death by tuberculosis in Mark Twain as opposed to Victor Hugo? Choose carefully,” she advised.
I nodded. So this world I’d stepped into had its dangers; that seemed fair to me. What world doesn’t, including the real one I’d just left? “How many, um, Patrons stay in their books for good?” I asked, hearing the capital P in my own voice now that I was about to become one. “In your experience.”
“I’d say about one-quarter,” the Librarian answered without hesitation.
“It’s quite a thing, walking away from your whole life and building another in a completely new world, isn’t it?
Some get tired of living in a book and hop out when the story’s over.
Some know from the start that all they want is a respite—I’ve got a woman living in The Great Gatsby with her two children; they’re all slotted in as West Egg neighbors of Gatsby’s, and she said from the start they’d stay till her children hit eighteen, when she could take them home without losing custody to the husband, who was threatening to take them in the divorce. ”
“Won’t she be in a hell of a lot of hot water as soon as she reappears?” I couldn’t help asking. I’d known more than one foster kid embroiled in the middle of a nasty custody battle.
“She’s desperate enough to risk it. You have to be willing to accept the consequences,” the Librarian said, “when you let magic into your life. It’s not a cure-all, Miss Watson.”
I absorbed that for a moment before thinking of something else. “Wait, if she brings her kids back into the real world at eighteen, do they walk back home into the same moment they’d left? Just suddenly looking years older?” Time travel logistics. Man, did they get complicated quickly.
“Mmm.” The Librarian raised her blue teacup, and a massive ring on one finger caught my eye—an emerald, big as a chunk of broken glass.
“Time here inside the Astral Library stands still—no one ages inside these walls no matter how much time they spend here, and the Library clock doesn’t tell time; it tells me when someone’s coming.
If you stepped out of the Astral Library back to the real world without any intervening stops, then yes, you’d step right back into whatever moment you left. ”
A little after 5 p.m. on a wet April evening in Boston, in my case. A bank account frozen by Libby Bibb, a near-empty BPL Reading Room, a concerned Elizabeth hovering at my elbow. I nodded.
“But if you go from here into a book,” the Librarian continued, “time moves forward as usual—in the book, and in the world you left behind. Go from here to a book, spend a year in the book, then come back to the Astral Library, you’re about a year older.
Not to the minute, perhaps, but close enough.
And if you go back to your original life in what you call the real world, that time will have advanced just a year as well. No Rip van Winkle effect.”
That seemed like a double-edged sword. On one hand, I wouldn’t be walking back to the world I knew and finding out time had sped on a hundred years without me, or that I’d sped on a hundred years without it.
On the other hand, if I went to a book and stayed there five years, I’d walk back to a Boston where everyone who knew me assumed I’d gone missing for half a decade .
. . But since when was magic not a double-edged sword?
Consequences, as the Librarian said. I rubbed my jaw, realizing that I hadn’t ground my teeth in over an hour. “So maybe three-quarters of your Patrons leave their books eventually. What about the others?”
“Some prefer the life they build inside.” The Librarian nodded back in the direction of the staircase where I’d talked to the Japanese poet with her copy of The Tale of Genji.
“Masako, for example—she renews her book every year on the dot, and heads straight back to the Imperial court. I’ve got a fourteen-year-old boy in Neverland, ran from an abusive mother straight to Peter Pan and the Lost Boys; he says he’s staying for good.
One of my Pride and Prejudice ladies married Colonel Fitzwilliam a few years back and now has a baby—naturally she’s staying.
” The Librarian smiled, and this smile had less of an edge.
“You never know who’s going to be a lifer. ”
I already knew. What the hell did I have to come back for? Thirty-six dollars and eighty-two cents, if I ever got it out of the clutches of Libby Bibb?
No. When Alix Watson headed into her book, she wasn’t ever coming back.