Chapter 5
What if I pick a book and don’t like living in it?”
“Don’t stay. It’s not a jail.”
“Can I try another book? How many—”
“You may try up to three books.”
“Why three?”
“Ask Collection Development.”
“Who are they?”
“New committee put together by the Library Board.”
We were trekking back through the Library in the other direction now, back toward the staircase and the huge clock and the bronze globe. The Librarian clickety-clacked along like an exasperated bird, and I still felt like a duckling waddling in her wake.
“Will the people in the book know I’m not from their world? Will I have to pass as an insider or else get arrested or—”
“No. They’ll automatically accept you as one of them.”
“Why?”
“Ask the Ethical Resources Committee.”
“Who are they?”
“New committee put together by—”
“Right. What if I go to a book world where the language isn’t English?”
“You’ll be able to speak it too.”
“Why?”
“Accelerated linguistic osmosis. Works much better than Duolingo.”
“What if I get injured in the book world? Can I come out and go to a doctor here, or—”
“You have a lot of questions, Miss Watson.”
“How does anyone not have a million questions?” I exploded, not out of anger but because there was still so much I wanted to know. “There are all these rules and it’s a whole new system and isn’t there a manual?”
“If there was a manual, nobody would read it. Nobody ever reads the manual.”
“I would read the manual if—” I paused. “Okay, I have to ask, what are those?” It was the fourth time I’d passed a book floating open in midair all by itself next to the shelves, a page periodically turning.
“Those are the ghosts,” the Librarian said, checking something on her green tablet.
“The what now?”
“People who die with too many books on their To Be Read stack sometimes end up here. The ones who don’t feel they can pass over until they catch up on their reading.
After a few decades you get to know them.
Dennis, really,” the Librarian called to the nearest floating book, making me squint—in the sunlight coming through the emerald windows, was that the faintest outline of a plumpish man in spectacles?
Or was I just going crazy? “Dennis,” the Librarian repeated, sounding stern, “you’ve been reading War and Peace for a decade now.
Just acknowledge the fact that you are never going to finish and pick something new. ”
The ghost turned a page, stubbornly.
“Fifty years on Tolstoy alone,” the Librarian muttered, marching on. “He’s still going to be here when I’m finally tipped into my coffin. Dear gods, but I miss the Middle Ages when there were only so many books out there for anyone’s Tbr.”
“Just how old are you?” I couldn’t help asking. “If time doesn’t pass in here, are you immortal? Where are you from?”
“Qom.”
“What world is that?” My imagination was already conjuring up porcelain cities and jade rivers, djinns in brass lamps, possibly flying carpets. “I suppose it makes sense the Library touches on other worlds entirely. Is Qom a kingdom, a continent, an empire, or—”
“It’s a city in Iran, you moron.” The Librarian stopped to glare. “Are you an utter ignoramus outside the complete works of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis?”
“More or less,” I had no problem admitting. “I got shuttled between nine schools in ten years, all of them abysmal and mostly designed to funnel us foster kids straight toward prison or the army.”
“At least you can correctly use words like abysmal,” the Librarian muttered, and started walking again.
“How did you come to work here, anyway?” I persisted. “I mean, how exactly does the interview process go for ‘semi-ageless guardian of astral-plane book sanctuary’? I tell you, if I’d ever seen that on LinkedIn when I was job hunting—”
“Ask Bibliographics. They’re a new committee formed by—”
“Don’t tell me: the Library Board.” I broke into a jog to keep up with her as she veered toward the huge oak counter near the foot of that sumptuous swirling staircase. “I think you just make up new Board committees every time I ask a question you don’t feel like answering.”
The green tablet in her hand let out a rude blat as if it was laughing. The Librarian slapped it into its frame on the counter, warning, “Don’t make me shush you.”
“Me? Or the tablet?”
“Both.” Ominously. “You do not want me to shush you.”
I swear the windows darkened for an instant, and the book under my arm gave a little shiver. “Or what?” I couldn’t stop myself asking. “Should I just ask the Library Board?”
The Librarian sorted through a stack of mail, squinted over her rectangular glasses at a notification marked ANNUAL BOARD MEETING: FOUR DAYS! and sent it sailing into the trash can. “Now you’re getting it.”
What book would you choose? Because you’ve thought about it, right?
Everyone with a library card has daydreamed along those lines at some point.
Except when it becomes real, something you can do and not just daydream about, you realize the catch: most of the books you love aren’t peaceful places.
You love them because of the drama, the gore, the heartbreak .
. . But how many of us want to live with that kind of drama, gore, and heartbreak?
I thought about that, sitting at one of the long library tables beside an emerald-green lamp, tracing the cover of the new George R.
R. Martin book. Did I really want to go live in Westeros, even if it had been in the public domain? With all that rape and famine and war?
No. But I didn’t want to go live in Horton Hears a Who! either.
Science nerds talk about Goldilocks worlds: planets that are just the right distance from their suns to potentially nurture life, not too far away to freeze water and not too close to boil it. What was my Goldilocks book? One peaceful enough to live in but exciting enough for adventure?
The Librarian seemed to understand my dilemma.
Why wouldn’t she; she’d been here at least five hundred years or something.
“Take your time,” she said, wrestling with one of those ancient paper cutters with a huge arm that crunches down like a guillotine.
“You won’t exactly run out of it here.” Crunch.
That relieved me, because I was half convinced someone was going to turn over an hourglass and tell me that whence the sands run out your choices end or something like that, and back on my ass in the BPL I’d be. But I had time.
The only thing is, others didn’t seem to need time.
A little while later—a few hours? Impossible to tell in this huge space where time didn’t move—the mellow chime of the clock announced an arrival, and I looked up from my browsing to see a girl of maybe eleven come stumbling huge-eyed through the door at the top of the stairs.
“Pleased to offer you sanctuary,” the Librarian said, looking up from where she was still wrestling with the paper cutter.
“Welcome to the Astral Library—” and she launched into her welcome spiel, but the girl barely seemed to need more than a third of it.
“Anne of Green Gables,” she gasped in a West Virginia twang, starting to cry. “I want to go to A-Avonlea and drink r-raspberry cordial—” Skinny chest hiccuping with sobs now. “And find a b-b-bosom friend and have a dress with puffed sl-sleeves—”
“Of course we can send you to Anne of Green Gables,” the Librarian said, not reaching out with hugs and pats, not telling her to stop crying, just matter-of-fact.
L. M. Montgomery’s Avonlea; what a good choice, her tone said.
Of course we can do that. A librarian’s voice, the good kind of librarian—not the type who harangued kids for refusing to join story hour or for making any sound over a peep, but the type who knew all a bookworm kid really wanted was someone to point the way and let them head off into this afternoon’s adventure between the pages.
“Here’s your library card, child; try not to lose it.
Follow me, and let’s get you kitted out . . .”
That skinny West Virginia girl with bruises on her arms, she knew.
She knew her book instantly, right away, and I wondered if something was wrong with me that I didn’t.
You get a door that opens into a magic world, you aren’t supposed to be sitting around on your hands vacillating.
Make a choice, Alix, I thought as I watched the Librarian bring the girl back dressed in a gingham frock and pinafore, her hair now in two plaits and her face one huge beam, and walk her up the steps to the door. Just make a choice.
“Is she really off to Avonlea just like that?” I asked, as the girl darted through the door and it closed behind her with its undramatic click. “Who’s going to meet her on the other side?”
“The Library makes that decision. She’ll have a place waiting for her, people—she’ll be pulled right in and probably find herself sitting down to fruitcake and cherry preserves within the hour.
I imagine the Library will insert her as one of the little girls Anne and Diana play with; lots of cake baking and games by the Lake of Shining Waters.
” The Librarian made a satisfied-looking double tap on her tablet. “I have a feeling it’ll be a good fit.”
The books around us rustled agreement. But— “What about her family?” I couldn’t help asking. “She’s just a kid. If her parents go crazy searching for her—”
The Librarian gave me a cool look. “If the Library offers a child a door, it’s because that child has nowhere else to go. Or because whoever might come looking for them is not someone who should be trusted with a child.”
I swallowed a wave of unexpected bitterness.
Sweet Jesus, what would it have meant to me to come to this place at eight, instead of heading off to that series of foster homes with my clothes in a trash bag?
Why couldn’t the door have opened then? I’d have picked some nice kid-lit world like Oz, grown up among Dorothy and the Munchkins . . .