Speaker 1: I retired from the forty three bus line last November,
Speaker 1: forty two years of working city streets, looping the bayfront,
Speaker 1: and working terminals that still smelled faintly of diesel, And
Speaker 1: suddenly nobody needed me to keep to a timetable. No
Speaker 1: one expected a daily rhythm from me at all. My
Speaker 1: wife had passed on a decade before, my children were
Speaker 1: grown and scattered, successful in the ambiguous way kids are. Now.
Speaker 1: In retirement, I realized I missed schedules more than I
Speaker 1: missed the job. With day's loose as unspooled thread, I
Speaker 1: devised my own roots. Most afternoons found me meandering toward
Speaker 1: the old Harbour, down the graffited alleys and stone cut
Speaker 1: sidewalks of the fires Point District, slowly learning how sunlight
Speaker 1: hit each corner at different hours, how rain water traced
Speaker 1: new cracks in the pavement, how shops changed their window
Speaker 1: displays between pay days. On the edge of this circuit,
Speaker 1: a narrow e each Hawk Street, running parallel to the
Speaker 1: Fish Market, I found the building. Although building always seemed
Speaker 1: too grand, the ground floor was hunched under the wheezy
Speaker 1: weight of apartments above, bricks weathered and windows perpetually fogged.
Speaker 1: The battered green door of the library was little more
Speaker 1: than a service entrance, half hidden behind a crooked boxwood
Speaker 1: and the bikes of tenants who, by the look of
Speaker 1: the locks, didn't expect their property to stay put. There
Speaker 1: were two shallow steps, the top, one wearing through at
Speaker 1: the center, and a small bronze sign that simply read
Speaker 1: public Library, no hours, no logo, Nothing to distinguish it
Speaker 1: from a utility closet, except for once you noticed a
Speaker 1: single bookcase visible through the glass, the way you might
Speaker 1: spot a flash of color in a hedge and realize,
Speaker 1: impossibly it's an escapee parrot. I became a regular almost
Speaker 1: without noticing. Sometimes I told myself I go in for
Speaker 1: a few minutes to get out of the wind. Sometimes
Speaker 1: that I was only checking the day's headlines. Behind those
Speaker 1: two battered rooms, something coaxed me further. That Thursday I
Speaker 1: walked in after my customary loop. The sea had kicked
Speaker 1: up a little grit running the gulls inland, and there
Speaker 1: by the radiator, where an old heater burbled, was a
Speaker 1: shelf I had never seen before, not just new, unsettling
Speaker 1: in its density, thin as a breakfast tray built of
Speaker 1: birch that seemed paler and sharper than the library's other
Speaker 1: mismatched shelving wedged directly into the back corner, so the
Speaker 1: wall itself bent delicately to accommodate it. At first I
Speaker 1: assumed the librarian, Miss Haskell, had moved things around. But
Speaker 1: this shelf extended the room as if it had always
Speaker 1: belonged to a space I hadn't noticed. A cluster of
Speaker 1: book ends kept the contents upright, though some slouched as
Speaker 1: if tired from waiting. The real puzzle was the books themselves.
Speaker 1: None of the usual best sellers, no doggyard classics, no
Speaker 1: cook books or glossy volumes about whales or regional history.
Speaker 1: The titles, in fine embossed print were nothing I recognized.
Speaker 1: Mirrored Gardens of Nowhere, theoretical cartography of impossible cities, Reminiscences
Speaker 1: of a Living clockmaker. I was certain, absolutely timetables in
Speaker 1: my blood, certain that these books hadn't existed here a
Speaker 1: week ago. The spine of each was tagged discreetly with
Speaker 1: a faded label. Unread. His Haskill was behind her desk,
Speaker 1: her hair lately more silver than white. Reading glasses perched
Speaker 1: half way down her nose. She entered returns in a ledger.
Speaker 1: She hummed something almost jazzy, fingers brushing delicately over the
Speaker 1: pages on her desk, and a pot of violets sat
Speaker 1: a neat, little pile of new arrivals, each one bearing
Speaker 1: the same unread tag. I never saw her with a
Speaker 1: cardboard box or a delivery slip. The books just seemed
Speaker 1: to appear by her side, like they had grown from
Speaker 1: the library itself. I scanned for a title that called
Speaker 1: out theoretical cartography of Impossible Cities. Especially felt like the
Speaker 1: sort of thing that would have amused my old friend Eli,
Speaker 1: a geographer in her working days. Its cover showed a
Speaker 1: city mapped in looping, mobious bands, the district swirling in
Speaker 1: ways that made my eyes ache and my sense of
Speaker 1: direction bristle. I tried to pull it off the shelf,
Speaker 1: odd the closer my hand got, the narrower that section
Speaker 1: seemed to become. What had looked slim enough for a
Speaker 1: paperback became as I leaned in inexplicably tight, a gap
Speaker 1: only a child's hand could squeeze into. And even then
Speaker 1: the rose receded into shadow. When I tried to grip
Speaker 1: the spine. The book itself seemed to lose substance, so
Speaker 1: that my finger tips brushed only empty air. It was gone,
Speaker 1: and the shelf, thin as ever, was fixed tight to
Speaker 1: the wall. I straightened, glanced around, feeling both faintly foolish
Speaker 1: and oddly invigorated. Miss Haskell merely looked up, polite and brisk,
Speaker 1: as if nothing strange had happened. I adjusted my cap
Speaker 1: and wandered outside, the sense of something having shifted in
Speaker 1: my afternoon, refusing to settle on my walk home, I
Speaker 1: made a mental note next time i'd return to that
Speaker 1: new shelf and see if my memory was as faulty
Speaker 1: as it seemed. The city in retirement feels both bigger
Speaker 1: and smaller. I've lived here for almost fifty years and
Speaker 1: thought I knew every short cut, every post war alley. Now,
Speaker 1: walking without hurry, I'm aware of how much I missed.
Speaker 1: Cracked paving stones worn by generations of feet, the pungent
Speaker 1: back draft from Paulo's Market in the late afternoon, the
Speaker 1: subtle change in air when sea fog invades after dark.
Speaker 1: Most mornings start with coffee and a crossword at the
Speaker 1: same little cafe overlooking the wharf. Elina, my closest friend,
Speaker 1: now thin as driftwood, as delighted by puzzles as she
Speaker 1: ever was by maps, often waves me over. Her own
Speaker 1: retirement routine has become as strict as ever. She times
Speaker 1: her walks by the rising and falling tide. But if
Speaker 1: I catch her in a talkative mood, we reminisce about
Speaker 1: bust deetours, city zoning, absurdities, and books we meant to
Speaker 1: read but never did. She laughs when I admit that
Speaker 1: I am obsessed with useless schedules, still waking up at
Speaker 1: the exact minute my old morning shift began. My apartment
Speaker 1: is a two room space with a view of the harbor, filled,
Speaker 1: perhaps overfilled, with things collected over the years, shelves of
Speaker 1: tattered transit maps, a framed black and white of my
Speaker 1: first bus on opening day, paperbacks stacked wherever a surface allows.
Speaker 1: The only quiet in my daily life now is voluntary,
Speaker 1: so the little library became my anchor. Something not so
Speaker 1: much discovered as revealed once the daily fog of routine
Speaker 1: lifted from the street. It's barely the width of two
Speaker 1: parking spots, yet step inside and the space folds oddly
Speaker 1: into itself. The front area fits a battered circulation desk
Speaker 1: and two low reading tables, but behind a hinged partition
Speaker 1: and a short flight of three misaligned steps, the room elongates.
Speaker 1: The ceiling, dips in places, rises in others, like an
Speaker 1: old mattress bearing the tension of unseen weights. It would
Speaker 1: be impossible for the exterior to contain it all unless
Speaker 1: the building had a Tardis like talent for elastic geometry. Inside,
Speaker 1: the temperature was always agreeable, never stuffy, never drafty. It
Speaker 1: smelled of paper, a trace of brine from the sea,
Speaker 1: and some elusive note of cardaman or clove that made
Speaker 1: me think of lost childhood kitchens. Sunlight found its way
Speaker 1: in obliquely, splintered by frosted panes and dust moats. Now
Speaker 1: and then echoes rose from upstairs, muffled like distant radiostatic
Speaker 1: tenants going about their day. But the library itself always
Speaker 1: felt set apart, quiet without ever being somber. It was
Speaker 1: Miss Haskell's domain. She had a manner both gentle and firm,
Speaker 1: always greeting visitors with the same courteous nod. Her clothes
Speaker 1: were neat cardigan sleeves, rolled sturdy skirts, sensible shoes. She
Speaker 1: moved between desk and stacks with the exact precise of
Speaker 1: someone who has surrendered entirely to the order of her work.
Speaker 1: Any attempt at conversation about the collection, where the books
Speaker 1: came from, who donated them, whether old favourites could be requested,
Speaker 1: was quickly deflected, though never in a way that seemed rude.
Speaker 1: The collection is what it is, she once said to
Speaker 1: a regular who pressed too hard, and it's always growing
Speaker 1: in its own way. Other patrons drifted in and out
Speaker 1: through the week. There was mister Borg, a retired priest
Speaker 1: who always paused at the biography section but rarely checked
Speaker 1: out a book. A college student I thought of as Meyer,
Speaker 1: black curls and oversized headphones sat in a corner most evenings,
Speaker 1: buried in sketch bads. Missus Obarsi from the Arts Supply
Speaker 1: store leafed through visual anthologies as though seeking permission to paint.
Speaker 1: Conversation when it happened at all, was low and fleeting.
Speaker 1: It was as if we all felt a mutual, unspoken
Speaker 1: agreement the library existed not to be used so much
Speaker 1: as witness every other branch in the city sprawled with activity,
Speaker 1: beeping scanners, children, story times, echoing laughter among the stacks.
Speaker 1: A library, by contrast, seemed both open to the public
Speaker 1: and delicately walled off from the outside world, as if
Speaker 1: it occupied not just a different street, but a side
Speaker 1: channel of reality. When I returned two days after my
Speaker 1: last visit, determined to satisfy myself about the new shelf
Speaker 1: in the back, I paused outside to measure the length
Speaker 1: of the building. Three windows, one faulty security light, the
Speaker 1: same perimeter. I remembered my own steps had mapped these
Speaker 1: walls a hundred times when the forty three ran this
Speaker 1: street daily. Inside, though something had shifted. The shelf in
Speaker 1: the rear corner now had a second row, stacked at
Speaker 1: a slight diagonal. The wall behind cantid, so it formed
Speaker 1: a subtle parallelogram with the floor. How could it fit
Speaker 1: It shouldn't unless the masonry itself had flexed. I ran
Speaker 1: my eyes along, no trace of new joinery, no mark
Speaker 1: to suggest a wall had been pried open or dry
Speaker 1: walled at night. Yet here it was a corner that
Speaker 1: simply hadn't existed last week. Miss Haskell was adjusting a
Speaker 1: stack of returns, her reading glasses flashing briefly in a
Speaker 1: sunbeam I cleared my throat, hoping to mask my embarrassment
Speaker 1: at sounding silly getting a lot of new books in lately.
Speaker 1: She glanced up, unhurried, as if she'd been expecting the question. No,
Speaker 1: nothing new since I arrived some decades ago. Now. Her
Speaker 1: smile revealed no extra information, but her tone was patient,
Speaker 1: a teacher fielding a question she'd answered a thousand times.
Speaker 1: Sometimes books appear unfamiliar until we're ready for them, I frowned,
Speaker 1: glancing down at the shelf. Every book, new and old
Speaker 1: alike wore the same tiny, unread mark at the spine.
Speaker 1: These weren't battered donations nor treasures from estate sales. Some
Speaker 1: were immaculate, as though just printed. Others had foxed pages
Speaker 1: and edges, dull with age, but no dust, no sign
Speaker 1: they'd been handled. Do you happen to have anything on
Speaker 1: the city's old transit systems, I asked, trying a different tack,
Speaker 1: a safe topic. I'd shelved every book the library carried
Speaker 1: on local history, and I'd certainly never seen a section
Speaker 1: on transportation before. To my surprise, Miss Haskell gestured toward
Speaker 1: what looked like a new alcove half way down the
Speaker 1: far wall. The space seemed to have grown, stretching the
Speaker 1: room so that a previously blank expanse now bristled with
Speaker 1: unfamiliar spines. The books here were an eccentric mishmash, unlined
Speaker 1: maps for night drivers, a gazetteer of stations that never existed,
Speaker 1: the hidden itineraries of dreamers. I blinked, sure I was
Speaker 1: misremembering the layout. Certain I'd never passed through a door
Speaker 1: or archway into this section before. Before I could delve further,
Speaker 1: I ran into a leaner at the corner. She was
Speaker 1: returning from the bakery, a crusty loaf poking out of
Speaker 1: her bag, Cheeks ruddy and smile immediate. Elina, do you
Speaker 1: remember the layout of that little library, I asked, as
Speaker 1: we crossed the street toward the headland. Feels different every time,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. She scrunched her lips, considering it's always been
Speaker 1: that weird space that never looks quite the same. Twice
Speaker 1: I could swear I was there for story hour with
Speaker 1: my daughter. Must be thirty years ago, and I remember
Speaker 1: a whole room with a skylight, but last time, not
Speaker 1: a hint of it. Maybe they shrink and expand depending
Speaker 1: on whose inside. Ah we laughed, but I couldn't shake
Speaker 1: the feeling of a contradiction. Spaces that shouldn't fit, books
Speaker 1: that couldn't be shelved, a record of the unread proliferating
Speaker 1: just out of reach. I found myself increasingly obsessed, not
Speaker 1: quite worried, but unable to let go of the puzzle.
Speaker 1: The following week, I left my apartment with a tape
Speaker 1: measure note book and a battered copy of the city's
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight planning map tucked under my arm. Outside,
Speaker 1: I walked the library's perimeter, marking paces from the curb
Speaker 1: and counting windows on paper. The structure should allow for
Speaker 1: one rectangle, squeezed tight between lobby and mail room, with
Speaker 1: no room none at all for the odd ball corners
Speaker 1: and gentle bowing I'd seen inside. Inside, I mapped what
Speaker 1: I could every visit, the interior dimensions shifted by a
Speaker 1: few inches, an extra half step here, a shelf leaning
Speaker 1: at a new angle there, Books migrated or multiplied when
Speaker 1: I looked away. I sketched a crude floor plan with
Speaker 1: each visit, and compared them in the evenings, seeing now
Speaker 1: that the lines never quite matched. When I presented my
Speaker 1: pile of wobbly diagrams to Miss Haskell one morning. She
Speaker 1: merely laughed. A sound light and dry as old paper.
Speaker 1: Every mind makes a different library, she said, cheerfully, taking
Speaker 1: my latest sketch and tucking it into her drawer. Don't fret.
Speaker 1: Most places change more than we realize. This time I
Speaker 1: tried something new. Instead of asking for the books I
Speaker 1: thought the library might house, I asked about ones I'd
Speaker 1: almost read, novels I'd nearly checked out in high school,
Speaker 1: a biography I remembered seeing on my father's bedside table,
Speaker 1: a science fiction story my friend was always recommending, but
Speaker 1: that I'd never quite started. Each time, the shelves seemed
Speaker 1: to part, and the book would sit waiting, its cover
Speaker 1: as familiar as the memory of its absence. But none
Speaker 1: looked brand new, and none were authored by any one
Speaker 1: whose name matched any living writer in the city or beyond.
Speaker 1: Near the poetry section, I spotted mister Borg for the
Speaker 1: first time in ages. His brow was furrowed in familiar
Speaker 1: concentration as he hovered over three hand bound books, the
Speaker 1: titles superimposed in gold leaf prayer in the afterbus psalms
Speaker 1: for departures and stone doorways. He picked up the last
Speaker 1: and turned it over, muttering, that's odd. I never published these,
Speaker 1: did I. When I asked gently if he recalled writing them,
Speaker 1: he looked up, startled. I don't remember these at all.
Speaker 1: Maybe something dreamed odd though I don't remember coming over here.
Speaker 1: I nodded to let the moment pass, but something inside
Speaker 1: me clicked. Curiosity mounting, I drifted toward the index at
Speaker 1: the main desk, one of those old fashioned card catalogs,
Speaker 1: housed in honey colored wood. I slid open a drawer
Speaker 1: and found hundreds of cards, each neatly typed and stamped
Speaker 1: unread in one corner. Glancing through, I noticed several listed
Speaker 1: works whose publication dates seemed off the future or suspiciously
Speaker 1: close to now, or credited to authors whose names brought
Speaker 1: up no search results on my phone. Many described genres
Speaker 1: in odd hybrids, memoir correspondents, unknown, address y anthology, fragments
Speaker 1: from interrupted projects. On a private dare, I tried to
Speaker 1: check out two of the more interesting books, one a
Speaker 1: slim volume titled The Undefeated Map, and another called The
Speaker 1: Practice of Gentle Regret. The checkout process unfolded as always,
Speaker 1: Miss Haskell, rubber stamping my card, smiling the same cryptic smile,
Speaker 1: slipping the books into my canvas bag. It was only
Speaker 1: when I arrived home, eager to thumb through my fines,
Speaker 1: that I discovered the bag was empty, light as sea breeze,
Speaker 1: no receipt, no books, no trace they'd existed at all.
Speaker 1: Next visit, the unread shelf in the back corner was
Speaker 1: entirely different. Where there had been impossible city maps, now
Speaker 1: there was a clutch of chap books and a jumble
Speaker 1: of musical scores. Julie, the teen who worked at the
Speaker 1: nearby ice cream stand, browsed the shelves with the taut
Speaker 1: focus of someone keeping a secret. Every time I inquired
Speaker 1: about my chosen titles, they were missing, replaced by entirely
Speaker 1: different books, none of which matched any catalog in the city,
Speaker 1: nor any list I could piece together from visiting patrons.
Speaker 1: I depended on Elena and Meyer, quietly compiling our experiences
Speaker 1: over lunchtime coffees. We compared notes. Elena said she'd never
Speaker 1: spotted any one walking out with a book, though she
Speaker 1: sat by the exit for an hour last Sunday pretending
Speaker 1: to read the paper. Maya confessed that despite many afternoons
Speaker 1: at the back table, she'd never once seen a patron
Speaker 1: finish reading a book in those rooms, nor ever mentioned
Speaker 1: what she'd read in detail. Maybe there's some rule we
Speaker 1: don't know about. My amused like a non circulation policy,
Speaker 1: only subtler psychological. Elena half joked that the place was
Speaker 1: like a nest for unread intentions. I started to wonder
Speaker 1: if the libraries insides adapted to whoever walked in a
Speaker 1: different shelf or book or hidden alcove for every patron,
Speaker 1: each one reflecting something quietly unwritten in their lives. While
Speaker 1: the books weren't exactly illusions, they hovered between possibility and fact,
Speaker 1: at once present but untouchable. Still, every person who emerged
Speaker 1: into the side street came away with a look of
Speaker 1: private its satisfaction, as if they'd glimpsed something precious but
Speaker 1: couldn't or wouldn't say what. One afternoon, with the overcast
Speaker 1: sky silvering the world, I resolved to break this pattern.
Speaker 1: I set aside the compulsion to find or check out
Speaker 1: a book and instead determined to read one all the
Speaker 1: way through right there. If the library's peculiarities lay in
Speaker 1: the act of asterisk borrowing, perhaps simply finishing a book
Speaker 1: would shift the equation. I returned to the slender shelf
Speaker 1: and selected a novel titled The Last Bus of Morning.
Speaker 1: The title tugged at me, promising a story lodged somewhere
Speaker 1: between nostalgia and recognition. Its cover, a stylized image of
Speaker 1: a city bus silhouetted against dawn, prickled something in my memory.
Speaker 1: Gray streets just before shift change, when even the pigeons
Speaker 1: seemed sleepy. I chose a table near the heating pipe,
Speaker 1: angled the book just so, and began. The prose. At
Speaker 1: first felt ordinary, but quickly bled into the skewed contour
Speaker 1: of my last work day, the strange silence of the
Speaker 1: bus before passengers board, the quick exchange with my supervisor,
Speaker 1: even the way sunlight knife through the windshield on my
Speaker 1: final run. Details arose in the narrative that no one,
Speaker 1: not even Elena, knew, private thoughts and unfinished feelings. There
Speaker 1: was the odd sense that the book's words reconfigured as
Speaker 1: I read, rewriting sentences just before my eyes, as if
Speaker 1: responding to my reactions, never quite letting me reach the
Speaker 1: end of a chapter. Even when my eyes returned to
Speaker 1: a paragraph, the phrasing felt different each time, determined I
Speaker 1: pulled out my note book and began to jot down lines,
Speaker 1: memorable phrases, plot twists, quotations I thought would anchor the
Speaker 1: story after I left. But as soon as I stepped
Speaker 1: outside into the bright, humid light, my notes faded into
Speaker 1: the blankness of the page. The ink not erased so
Speaker 1: much as evaporated. I returned inside to ask miss Haskell,
Speaker 1: quietly desperate, if she had ever succeeded in reading a
Speaker 1: book from her own shelves, or if she knew any
Speaker 1: one who had managed to recount its story outside the building,
Speaker 1: She watched me with an expression of indulgent sympathy, as
Speaker 1: one might anew reat hery struggling to adjust to interrupted time.
Speaker 1: Perhaps there are books that exist only while they are unread,
Speaker 1: or stories that vanish when fully understood, she said, her voice,
Speaker 1: equal parts kindness and mischief. The act of reading is
Speaker 1: a kind of promise, isn't it language wandering between one
Speaker 1: possibility and the next. I stared at her, not frustrated exactly,
Speaker 1: but held in a state of perpetual anticipation. Was it
Speaker 1: the content that mattered or the looming potential behind it?
Speaker 1: Was the library nothing but a monument to the unfulfilled
Speaker 1: act of reading, the vital, endless invitation of a book
Speaker 1: still waiting to be opened. I raised the question aloud,
Speaker 1: asking if perhaps each regular found their own never quite
Speaker 1: read collection, unique to their hopes or regrets. Miss Haskell
Speaker 1: just smiled, her attention already drifting back to the returns ledger.
Speaker 1: It soon became clear that observation alone was insufficient. I
Speaker 1: wanted proof, not just quiet speculation. If every reader wandered
Speaker 1: their own constellation of unread, maybe a group effort would
Speaker 1: test the boundaries of the place. On my next walk,
Speaker 1: I invited Elina and Meyer to meet me at the
Speaker 1: library at exactly two o'clock. We arrived together, exchanging grins
Speaker 1: at the absurdity of our experiment, But almost as soon
Speaker 1: as we stepped inside, the three of us drifted apart,
Speaker 1: as if the air itself nudged each of us toward
Speaker 1: a different shelf or a private orbit. I lost sight
Speaker 1: of the others among the carved arches and makeshift nooks,
Speaker 1: despite the library being nearly empty save for Miss Haskell
Speaker 1: and a solitary pensioner dozing near the window. Half an
Speaker 1: hour later, we reunited at the cafe across the Street.
Speaker 1: Elena over Tea told us that she'd spent what felt
Speaker 1: like hours among memoirs and travelogs from her old country.
Speaker 1: Some she remembered searching for years ago, others that alluded
Speaker 1: to people she knew only distantly, but written as if
Speaker 1: the histories were her own. Meyer described a set of
Speaker 1: design books and urban art anthologies whose authors sounded eerily
Speaker 1: like the list of monikers. She considered publishing her work,
Speaker 1: under blending both unknown and familiar forms, and even referencing
Speaker 1: imagined murals that she'd never painted, but once dreamed of creating.
Speaker 1: I told them about my visit to the bus alcove,
Speaker 1: how the stories there oscillated between fact and phantasy, present
Speaker 1: and future, and always ended just before I thought they would.
Speaker 1: When I pressed Elena on what the library's shape was
Speaker 1: that day, she shrugged, certainty, gone, four rooms, no stairwell,
Speaker 1: a stained glass window over the reference desk. Meyer shook
Speaker 1: her head. She swa, there was an upstairs loft, a
Speaker 1: spiral stair twisting behind the magazine rack, yet neither I
Speaker 1: nor a Lena had seen it. Even the windows, we realized,
Speaker 1: seemed to relocate according to the visitor. The more we
Speaker 1: compared the more our experiences diverged. No two people described
Speaker 1: the same collection, or even the same physical arrangement. Our
Speaker 1: phones used to jot down notes returned only partial lists.
Speaker 1: Some entries appeared as strings of gibberish. Others erased themselves
Speaker 1: Overnight that evening, I dared to voice my hunch. Maybe
Speaker 1: the library wasn't physically mutable in the way a building is,
Speaker 1: but instead was constructed or revealed through each person's unread memory.
Speaker 1: Perhaps every book we almost read, every story passed over,
Speaker 1: every project unfinished, left a kind of imprint, and the
Speaker 1: library organized itself from these latent reservoirs, a communal, inexhaustible collection,
Speaker 1: invisible until approached through the prism of personal absence. They nodded,
Speaker 1: not dismissively, but with the alert stillness of co conspirators.
Speaker 1: Meyer confessed to dreaming of books the night before, one
Speaker 1: she wanted to read but had never even seen in
Speaker 1: real life. Elina mused that she saw herself young again,
Speaker 1: wandering a shelf where half the books had blank spines,
Speaker 1: whispering with possibility. We resolved then to test whether any
Speaker 1: of the titles we had found match known catalogs. We
Speaker 1: scoured city databases online libraries, even the National Archive's digital
Speaker 1: card Index. Most hits, especially the ones most personally resonant,
Speaker 1: returned nothing, no record, no trace. Some books manifested only
Speaker 1: in recollection. Others blended fragments of memory with outright invention.
Speaker 1: By the time the sun dipped behind the fish market
Speaker 1: and I walked home under the sodium vapor street lights,
Speaker 1: I was certain of only one thing. The collection was
Speaker 1: not just physical. This library was a living record of intention,
Speaker 1: an archive of possibility, only ever, half glimpsed and half remembered.
Speaker 1: Not merely a place of unread books, but a crucible
Speaker 1: for the unread and the not yet imagined. I hardly
Speaker 1: slept that night. It wasn't worry more, the fizz of
Speaker 1: electric possibility, the way a word sits on the tip
Speaker 1: of your tongue. After a long conversation, my mind wandered
Speaker 1: back over every misplaced shelf, every vanishing title, every nearly
Speaker 1: remembered book. In the tiny hours, when the gulls began
Speaker 1: to sound and a trace of old salt seeped through
Speaker 1: the cracked sash of my window, I realized something simple
Speaker 1: but unsettling. The library might be a reflection of more
Speaker 1: than my own unread shelf. What if this odd little
Speaker 1: space tucked between fishmongers and bus stops was a kind
Speaker 1: of local commons, a cross roads not for stories, but
Speaker 1: for all the unread intentions our neighborhood had ever mustered.
Speaker 1: Once I started thinking this way, the questions multiplied. Every
Speaker 1: stroll to the grocer became a connaissance. At the bakery,
Speaker 1: I caught myself glancing at the faces in line and wondering,
Speaker 1: what unwritten recipes hum in your kitchens? What stories do
Speaker 1: you almost pick up before the loaf is boxed, before
Speaker 1: the day closes around you. The next afternoon, I loitered
Speaker 1: just inside the battered green door, watching people come and go.
Speaker 1: I tried to interview them casually, nothing intrusive, just a
Speaker 1: friendly word as they lingered on the steps or tucked
Speaker 1: a scarf tighter against the wind. A white bearded man
Speaker 1: lingered at the threshold, lost in a daze. He recognized
Speaker 1: me from my bus route, smiled thinly, as if embarrassed
Speaker 1: by his distraction. I asked, lightly, find what you were
Speaker 1: looking for? He hesitated, patting his jacket as though hoping
Speaker 1: for evidence. I think I found something. I never wrote
Speaker 1: a memoir or the outline for one. I don't remember
Speaker 1: starting it, but there it was. The chapters were. He
Speaker 1: trailed off, looking troubled, then managed a laugh. I suppose
Speaker 1: I am old enough to have written a dozen lives.
Speaker 1: Maybe I dreamed it. Later came a school teacher hurrying
Speaker 1: out just before closing time. I offered to walk her
Speaker 1: to the bus stop. Asked what she read. She squinted,
Speaker 1: sheepish and half defensive, then said there were children's books,
Speaker 1: but with different endings. Kids from my class, their names,
Speaker 1: but with futures I never imagined for them. Some left
Speaker 1: the city, some came back. It was comforting, strange, though
Speaker 1: I don't think the books were ever on any list before.
Speaker 1: My curiosity, once casual, swelled to near obsession. I found
Speaker 1: myself reading half a paragraph at a time, deliberately pausing
Speaker 1: at the cusp of a revelation or plot twist, afraid
Speaker 1: that finishing anything here or at home might cause the book,
Speaker 1: or the very possibility of it, to vanish from the
Speaker 1: library's shelves. My tote bag stayed mostly empty. Now, even
Speaker 1: the idea of borrowing a finished story gave me pause.
Speaker 1: If the unread books lived only in the gasp between
Speaker 1: intention and action. Completing them felt almost sacrilegious. I poured
Speaker 1: through what city records I could find. There was the
Speaker 1: building's blueprint, two rectangles ground floor, no back rooms, no stairwells,
Speaker 1: no alcoves. When I tracked down the mail carrier, he shrugged,
Speaker 1: reminding me no two deliveries ever came to the same
Speaker 1: door twice. Once I delivered three letters to Unit one
Speaker 1: B and the next week there was only a ground
Speaker 1: floor slot. He laughed it off, but the details gnawed
Speaker 1: at me. Residents upstairs offered only a little more. They
Speaker 1: remembered the occasional rattle of boxes, never seeing who brought
Speaker 1: them in, and the uncanny fact that the library never
Speaker 1: seemed to run heating or air conditioning, yet the room
Speaker 1: was always pleasant. An online search returned bare results, one
Speaker 1: cryptic municipal listing outdated, no social media review or photo.
Speaker 1: It was as if the library existed in administrative limbo,
Speaker 1: two small and two constant for the world to bother updating.
Speaker 1: The public listings described it as niche special collection with
Speaker 1: a last known librarian at least three names before miss Haskell. Nobody,
Speaker 1: least of all City Hall wanted to mess with it.
Speaker 1: I realized, with muted horror and growing wonder just how
Speaker 1: perfectly invisible an anomaly could be if it never demanded
Speaker 1: noise or explanation. I found myself reconsidering every ordinary routine.
Speaker 1: Each unfinished crossword next to my coffee grew more precious,
Speaker 1: a link to that infinite reservoir of possibility. The act
Speaker 1: of not quite arriving, not quite completing, charged every book,
Speaker 1: every conversation, every intention with a weight I'd never recognized before.
Speaker 1: Yet patterns are not enough. My idea needed testing against
Speaker 1: more minds. I began to gather a group, half from
Speaker 1: the library's regulars, half from friends who had brushed up
Speaker 1: against its strangeness. In passing my pitch at the community
Speaker 1: center drew a motley crowd. Elina, of course, eager and lively,
Speaker 1: mister Borg, the former priest, Meyer's sketch book always under
Speaker 1: her arm, and a couple newcomers, mister Phelps, the retired
Speaker 1: local historian, and Alex, a quiet, sharp eyed teenager from
Speaker 1: the art shop next door. A first meeting sputtered with
Speaker 1: cautious laughter and confession. Some like Meyer, immediately embraced the weirdness.
Speaker 1: It's a space for what could have been, she said,
Speaker 1: a kind of half lit attic for all our lost projects. Elena, ever,
Speaker 1: the scientist, pushed for more evidence. It could be a
Speaker 1: psychological trick, she argued, maybe collective procrastination coalesces into a
Speaker 1: sort of urban myth alyx usually mute behind a wall
Speaker 1: of sketches. Lifted her head. She described a shelf of
Speaker 1: comic books drawn in mash up styles, touches of every
Speaker 1: artist she'd admired but never dared to emulate. Their names
Speaker 1: blended with her own in imagined pseudonyms. It was like
Speaker 1: looking into the future or some one else's dream, using
Speaker 1: my hands, she whispered. Mister Phelps was more shaken. On
Speaker 1: his first visit after our invitation. He found a run
Speaker 1: of slim cloth bound histories, each one picking up a
Speaker 1: project he'd abandoned over forty years of research. Some chapters
Speaker 1: synthesized records he'd never seen, as if the archives themselves
Speaker 1: had offered alternate evidence. It was like seeing myself split
Speaker 1: in every direction. I never finished, he told us, voice
Speaker 1: trembling with awe and something like grief. He'd spent decades
Speaker 1: chronicling ferris Points official story. In the library, he saw
Speaker 1: side roads lost festivals, speculative histories, all attributed to his
Speaker 1: own hand, each stamped, unread. Debate flickered to life. Was
Speaker 1: the library a mirror, a ghost trap for forgotten projects?
Speaker 1: Lana posited that it was a psychogeographical junction, a term
Speaker 1: she translated as a place that blurs the map on purpose,
Speaker 1: forcing every visit to redraw it as they move. Others
Speaker 1: offered up more personal theories, a cosmic recycling system for
Speaker 1: lost potential, a monument to neighborhood longing, an accidental museum
Speaker 1: of missed moments. A pattern formed. Nobody, no matter how
Speaker 1: mundane or outlandished their background, experienced exactly the same library.
Speaker 1: Not only did the books shift, the rooms themselves seem
Speaker 1: to respin around each visitor. Some saw spiral stairs, mezzanines,
Speaker 1: or reading gardens beyond its footprint. Others, like mister Phelps,
Speaker 1: found only study carols, as empty as the archive's closing hour.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the books referenced possible futures. A Commuter's Diary from
Speaker 1: twenty thirty four, a novel credited to a would be
Speaker 1: granddaughter just now applying to art school. Over coffee and biscuits,
Speaker 1: our group began to suspect something larger. If the shelves
Speaker 1: bent toward possible futures as much as lost pasts, perhaps
Speaker 1: the library did not merely refer fleck, regret or memory
Speaker 1: or literary ambition, but functioned as an engine for possibility,
Speaker 1: a pressure valve for local dreams, collecting all the quiet
Speaker 1: watifs that made up a life. Nobody could agree if
Speaker 1: this effect was cause or consequence, whether the library generated
Speaker 1: those options or simply gave them a place to land.
Speaker 1: The city, after all, was full of places that seemed
Speaker 1: spatially impossible or simply odd. Staircases that ended mid flight,
Speaker 1: courtyards visible only from certain windows, shops that seemed to
Speaker 1: move overnight. But this kind of oddity had never pressed
Speaker 1: so directly on the shape of choice or hope. I
Speaker 1: was left with a feeling not of dread, but of kinship.
Speaker 1: We were all living in the library, whether or not
Speaker 1: we recognized it. Every unfinished conversation, every half freed newspaper,
Speaker 1: every route skipped in favor of another. It was both
Speaker 1: humbling and energizing, as if my retirement had opened not
Speaker 1: an emptiness but a well spring. Still, I wanted more.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see the phenomenon occur not just as
Speaker 1: a parade of new titles or altered rooms, but at
Speaker 1: its source. So one damp evening, after most patrons had left,
Speaker 1: I resolved to stay late and watch Miss Haskell work.
Speaker 1: Maybe i'd catch the generation of an unread book. Maybe
Speaker 1: I could shift the system by observing it squarely. I
Speaker 1: perched in a low arm chair, legs crossed, eyes ostensibly
Speaker 1: buried in a collection of essays called The Silence Between Stops.
Speaker 1: Twenty minutes passed, the radiator rattled, dusk thickened against the
Speaker 1: frosted window, and Miss Haskell went about her business, sorting returns,
Speaker 1: a lining stacks, even restocking the new shelves, with a
Speaker 1: motion so repetitive it nearly lulled me to sleep. But
Speaker 1: then I saw it, with remarkable delicacy. She lifted a small,
Speaker 1: unmarked box onto the counter. She opened it, her hands gentle,
Speaker 1: as if unspooling silkworm threads. From the box, she withdrew
Speaker 1: a stack of slim volumes, some hard back, some paper,
Speaker 1: some stitch together from loose gatherings of card stock and parchment.
Speaker 1: Each book, regardless of material, wore a single stamp on
Speaker 1: its spine. Unread. She took up her cataloging stamp, without hesitation,
Speaker 1: marked each one again, and began to note their titles
Speaker 1: in what looked like an old fashioned ledger. I realized,
Speaker 1: startled that the books bore no apparent publisher's emblem I
Speaker 1: s b N, not even a date, no hint of
Speaker 1: origin at all. Miss Haskell, I called across the stacks,
Speaker 1: feeling my question before I even knew its shape. Where
Speaker 1: do these really come from? She looked at me, neither
Speaker 1: startled nor impatient. Her gaze was gentle and a little rye.
Speaker 1: People are always more creative in their intentions than their actions,
Speaker 1: you know, she said, Intent distraction, hope, it all spreads
Speaker 1: through our days. Sometimes these things pool together, and well,
Speaker 1: sometimes the world finds a shell in which to collect them.
Speaker 1: Are you saying the books are made from us? I asked,
Speaker 1: realizing even before the words left my mouth that it
Speaker 1: sounded both grandiose and silly in a manner of speaking,
Speaker 1: she replied, returning to her work. There was a librarian
Speaker 1: here before me who kept a note book, always jotting
Speaker 1: in pencil. When she retired, the notebook's pages were all erased,
Speaker 1: Yet the note book itself appeared on the shelf, stamped unread.
Speaker 1: The next day I let this sink in a quiet unease,
Speaker 1: giving way to something close to delight. If not finishing,
Speaker 1: not knowing was a form of creativity, what a marvel
Speaker 1: it would be to live within a world powered by
Speaker 1: communal unspoken longing. I turned my attention then to the catalog,
Speaker 1: drawn by the possibility that the design of the library
Speaker 1: itself might be discoverable, not just in architecture or in
Speaker 1: the physical books, but in the logic or emotion of
Speaker 1: its records. The card index, more intricate than the public database,
Speaker 1: shifted every time I rifled through it, sometimes arranged by subject,
Speaker 1: unfinished projects, alternate endings, impossible geographies, other times by author
Speaker 1: or even by date, as if trying to synchronize with
Speaker 1: the fixations most present in my mind. That day, out
Speaker 1: of curiosity, I jotted down half a dozen titles I
Speaker 1: still hoped to find some day books about local bus
Speaker 1: routes that never got the funding, a memoir I meant
Speaker 1: to write for my children, stories I d once imagined telling,
Speaker 1: but never began. The day after I found new entries
Speaker 1: in the catalog, listings of books I dreamed or half
Speaker 1: way invented attributed to versions of myself with middle initials
Speaker 1: to pen names I toyed with as a joke to
Speaker 1: birth dates near my own, but slightly wrong. I checked
Speaker 1: the shelf, and there, tucked among the urban planning manuals
Speaker 1: sat the Ferris Loop, tales from a city route, and
Speaker 1: reminders of the unscheduled life unread, shimmering with the same peculiar,
Speaker 1: not quite substance. I confided my new experiment to Elena,
Speaker 1: and soon Meyer and Alyx tried something similar, quietly scribbling
Speaker 1: wish lists or not yet read titles in their own journals.
Speaker 1: In each case, the next visit presented new books, each
Speaker 1: tailored down to genre and imagined author to their private anticipations.
Speaker 1: Mister Borg shook his head half, joking, the problem with
Speaker 1: infinity is it never gets a second edition. Naturally, no
Speaker 1: matter how much we pushed, no book could be borrowed.
Speaker 1: Attempts to check out a favored volume resulted in empty
Speaker 1: book bags, replaced titles, or the very sense that the
Speaker 1: book had slipped through the cracks between anticipation and memory.
Speaker 1: Half the group tried to trick the system with digital notes,
Speaker 1: but phone photographs turned up as blank rectangles and files
Speaker 1: deleted themselves with ruthless efficiency. Nothing, it seemed, could survive
Speaker 1: translation from that liminal state. As soon soon as a
Speaker 1: book became read, it entered a dissolving silence. Even notes
Speaker 1: made in the moment blurred or erased themselves, as if
Speaker 1: the library was poorous only to potential, not to completion.
Speaker 1: I began to understand the catalog was bottomless, not simply unfinishable,
Speaker 1: but perpetually reshaping, its boundaries, aligned with the shifting frequencies
Speaker 1: of intention, curiosity and regret. Our possibilities vast and varied,
Speaker 1: hovered at the edge of reality, never less real for
Speaker 1: being unformed. It was then that the question changed. If
Speaker 1: the library wasn't about books in the ordinary sense or architecture,
Speaker 1: you could measure what was asterisk it? What was its
Speaker 1: central act or meaning, its reason for standing so quietly
Speaker 1: among the other brick boxes of Ferris Point. The answer
Speaker 1: came not as a revelation given by one person, but
Speaker 1: in the gathering of our group old friends, new acquaintances,
Speaker 1: tentative explorers, round an unremarkable table at Elena's apartment, sunlight
Speaker 1: leaking through the lace curtains, we began not with debate,
Speaker 1: but with memory. Mayer spoke first, smiling with a kind
Speaker 1: of nervous anticipation. All my life, I've felt guilt around
Speaker 1: the books. I give up on stories, I shelve after
Speaker 1: a few pages. But every time I visit the library,
Speaker 1: I find not scoldings but invitations. It feels like every
Speaker 1: project I'll never finish is welcome there, still waiting. Alex nodded,
Speaker 1: her hands twisting at her sleeve. The comics I see,
Speaker 1: It's all possible futures. Some are signed by me, but
Speaker 1: with life stories that haven't happened yet. Mister phelps, his
Speaker 1: voice more even now, added for a historian, only the
Speaker 1: final version of the past seems to count. Yet this library,
Speaker 1: it catalogs the drafts, the hesitations, the letters never sent.
Speaker 1: It's as though all the roads not taken in the
Speaker 1: city's story live there. Sighed by I sighed endless. Elena,
Speaker 1: always searching for the test at the heart of things,
Speaker 1: finally exhaled. Maybe the library isn't about unfinished business at all,
Speaker 1: but about how we hold the possibility of change, collective
Speaker 1: or personal. Over and over. Miss Haskell, who had joined us,
Speaker 1: almost silently, took a seat and poured tea. She smiled
Speaker 1: that now familiar, enigmatic smile. There are libraries all across
Speaker 1: the world, some that gather only what is completed, catalogued, tracked,
Speaker 1: but some, like ours, serve another purpose. They hold all
Speaker 1: that has not yet occurred or might never. They're not
Speaker 1: museums but crucibles, vessels for what is possible, what is hoped, for,
Speaker 1: what is left open. At that silence fell among us, long,
Speaker 1: rich and comfortable. Finally it landed for me. I realized, quietly,
Speaker 1: but with a feeling of arrival, that the library's irreducible
Speaker 1: purpose was not to preserve, or to finish, or even
Speaker 1: to delight, but to house, tenderly and with no judgment,
Speaker 1: the scene between what is and what might be. Its
Speaker 1: architecture was not built from brick and mortar, but from
Speaker 1: the collective longing of every patron who has passed its threshold,
Speaker 1: Reluctant to choose or to close a page. I thought
Speaker 1: of the days spent looping city streets, on the forty
Speaker 1: three of time tables not quite kept, of passengers left
Speaker 1: behind by a minute or two. Each choice, each unfinished book,
Speaker 1: each interruption, generated a branching world, a world perfectly suited
Speaker 1: for a place like ours. For once, no one argued. Instead,
Speaker 1: we each described, quietly, tentatively, the feeling of belonging not
Speaker 1: to a finished archive, but to a web of intention
Speaker 1: and hope. Patrons, in this sense, weren't really readers at all,
Speaker 1: but walkers through possibility, lending their presence to the shifting
Speaker 1: shelf space of potential. A library is not always a
Speaker 1: place of completion. It can be a garden of watifs,
Speaker 1: green and ever budding, always growing at the edge of
Speaker 1: what's imaginable. And in this un standing I felt not closure,
Speaker 1: but a peculiar gratitude. I could see the city anew,
Speaker 1: not as a fixed network of streets and timetables, but
Speaker 1: as a living archive of stories, unfinished conversations, paused dreams,
Speaker 1: waiting for a turn. Leaving Elena's flat that evening, the
Speaker 1: quiet pressed clothes a gentler hush than usual, as if
Speaker 1: the city's unread library moved with me, a low hum
Speaker 1: beneath the footsteps of every passer by. On my way home,
Speaker 1: I kept seeing traces of the same dynamic. The elderly
Speaker 1: couple gazing at real estate ads for apartments they'd never buy,
Speaker 1: the street artist spraying a mural only half finished, stepping
Speaker 1: back and smiling at what remained unseen. Even the bus
Speaker 1: schedule at the stop was rumored to change with the wind,
Speaker 1: another unwritten story waiting for its own reader. After that,
Speaker 1: I found myself living a little differently. My morning crosswords
Speaker 1: stretched long, each possible answer a new avenue. I read
Speaker 1: books more slowly, not to savor the language or avoid
Speaker 1: the ending, but to linger in the countless choices of
Speaker 1: direction each sentence still held. The act of not finishing,
Speaker 1: of remaining inside potential became a quietly joyous part of
Speaker 1: daily life and the library itself. The next time I
Speaker 1: sought it out, the entrance had shifted, not by much,
Speaker 1: just a dozen steps further down the bokhas shadowed hallway
Speaker 1: door tucked behind a crate of borrowed flower pots. As
Speaker 1: I reached for the handle, I could already sense, without
Speaker 1: needing to be sure, that the inside would be reconfigured,
Speaker 1: its dimensions tuned to the angle of the day. The
Speaker 1: thoughts I carried on my walk home. Later, I ran
Speaker 1: into Elena, sitting atop the sea wall, note book in hand.
Speaker 1: She smiled, gestured for me to settle beside her. I
Speaker 1: had a dream last night, she confided, about a shelf
Speaker 1: of folk tales. I had never heard my mother's handwriting
Speaker 1: on the cover. Stories she used to begin but never
Speaker 1: finished for me. Isn't that lovely that they're still there somewhere?
Speaker 1: I nodded, more than agreeing. I sense the presence of
Speaker 1: our unread library, not just along that salt thickened street,
Speaker 1: but everywhere, a muted pulse in the life of every
Speaker 1: passer by. Maybe that's all any place, ever, is a
Speaker 1: living sheath for what's not yet done, what's still in reach,
Speaker 1: even if never completed. Walking away from the library, I
Speaker 1: felt no urge for answers, only the sense that I
Speaker 1: was part of something larger, something quietly hopeful. It struck
Speaker 1: me in a way both ordinary and light as bird song,
Speaker 1: that perhaps every street, every life is quietly shadowed by
Speaker 1: a companion library, a space not of what is, but
Speaker 1: what might have been. And I wondered for the first time,
Speaker 1: if the library of unread books is always growing possibility,
Speaker 1: multiplying gently endlessly wherever Longing lives. Maybe it's not a
Speaker 1: question of infinity or of erasure, but of the particular
Speaker 1: shape our hopes take in the moment before we reach
Speaker 1: for them. That moment, the possibility that remains still unread,
Speaker 1: is what I walk beside all the way home, and
Speaker 1: that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I
Speaker 1: will see you in the next one.