Speaker 1: After twenty nine years engineering in the bones and sinews
Speaker 1: of the city, I thought I understood how building kept
Speaker 1: its secrets. Retired six months now, I fell Tuesday mornings
Speaker 1: helping digitize dusty plans in the half forgotten corner of
Speaker 1: the Municipal Library's basement. It's not purely altruism, as in
Speaker 1: order to blueprints the stelsus my mind's need for clean
Speaker 1: lines and labeled spaces. The physicality of the sheets, yellowed
Speaker 1: and crackling, speaks to some stubborn instinct for reliability. A
Speaker 1: thing once drawn, a measured or to exist. It was
Speaker 1: a fog thick March morning when I lifted a roll
Speaker 1: plan from the un catalog pile, more for the weight
Speaker 1: of it than an I label. Most volunteers leave the
Speaker 1: blueprints for me, faded graphite and fountain pen with notations
Speaker 1: in at least three hands, signed off by a city
Speaker 1: engineer whose lost project predates my own apprenticeship. In the
Speaker 1: upper left a title block Municipal Library Eastern, an externeral
Speaker 1: arrangement dated nineteen fifty seven, with red penciled revisions trailing
Speaker 1: into nineteen sixty four. I raised the plant high level
Speaker 1: and let it fall open. Across the work table's green bays,
Speaker 1: the recognizably bold main body of the library span the
Speaker 1: left half grand stair, weeding, rotten at stacks, and side
Speaker 1: wings whose shadowed light remains familiar, but sprawling to the right.
Speaker 1: Labels for a eastern annex, main gallery, quiet roommate, a
Speaker 1: staff alcove archaz B three, even a southeast stair enough
Speaker 1: square footage to nearly double the size I have crisscross
Speaker 1: a measure in idle moments between shelf shifts, lines drawn
Speaker 1: with conviction, room numbers, rolling book carts, even the old
Speaker 1: electrical closet annotated with a cryptic twopy outlet for late fifty.
Speaker 1: You think, in all my hours of wandering mapping, digitizing
Speaker 1: a year is helping friends locate obscure homes, months of
Speaker 1: gentle argument, overflow, loading and shuring walls. Even that rain
Speaker 1: sook season, when the elevator grown back till life out
Speaker 1: of glimpse. Some sign of this vast annex, But there
Speaker 1: is nothing. The wall along the east end remains flushed brick,
Speaker 1: its tall windows almost definedly ordinary, no trace of asimo
Speaker 1: patched over arch, no odd angle or corridor. The only
Speaker 1: irregularity is a gentle bulge in the sidewalk, which I
Speaker 1: dismissed as sol to dens the earth shifting beneath too
Speaker 1: much coastal rain. I stared at the plan. If this
Speaker 1: annex was ever real, it should have left scars beans
Speaker 1: in the ceiling, break doorways, a little asymmetry in the
Speaker 1: lines of the roof. But the building, as I've known
Speaker 1: at leavest no hint according to these drawings, though it
Speaker 1: was in use by nineteen fifty nine. With Handriton's circulation
Speaker 1: less striffing into the late nineteen sixties gallery reserved for
Speaker 1: Poetry Club Autumn temp archives he transferred to Central nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: There's a penciled in corridor wrapping dog legged behind the
Speaker 1: boiler room, yet I have never noticed such a path
Speaker 1: in my dozens of crossings from the reference desk to
Speaker 1: the north stacks. I heised the plan back into my satchel,
Speaker 1: sweat prickling along my ribs. Even in a library famous
Speaker 1: for misplaced Victorian pamphlets and warp shelf labels, this was odd.
Speaker 1: By coffee break the usual conversations in the slow, agreeable
Speaker 1: pulse of catalog he might have overwhelmed my curiosity, but
Speaker 1: the contradiction had burned into a stubborn corner of my mind.
Speaker 1: A building so proud in its slow de case, so
Speaker 1: thoroughly traversed and talked over, how could it have hidden
Speaker 1: a win of itself in plain view. I pressed my
Speaker 1: hand against the rolled sheet, as if its weight could
Speaker 1: shift the answer closer. Things leave run ends. I said
Speaker 1: this to myself as the elevator grumbled up to the lobby.
Speaker 1: Yet this feastern annex lingered as an outline, without a
Speaker 1: shadow of blueprint, for something that both was and wasn't.
Speaker 1: Just at the edge of civic memory retirement, I told
Speaker 1: friends was supposed to be time for crossword puzzles and
Speaker 1: model trains, But I've always preferred and finished puzzles, the
Speaker 1: mysteries that demand quietly to be traced and measured, even
Speaker 1: if only in pencil. The library settles into its days
Speaker 1: with the kind of measure grandeur it stoned reading room
Speaker 1: and marble sayre renounced a time when the city's fortune
Speaker 1: still swung confident in the upward, long before the fog
Speaker 1: and the salt air began taking back what ambition built.
Speaker 1: My volunteer badge still bears my surname in block capitals
Speaker 1: and indirect relic of the way engineers and paper pushes
Speaker 1: once filled these halls. That morning I greeted a mess Cattery,
Speaker 1: the head librarian, at her post behind the mahogany desk.
Speaker 1: She scanned my satchel for evidence of frued old habit,
Speaker 1: never relinquished, and smiled around the ever prison tightness in
Speaker 1: her jaw. Early to day Peter, she said, already sorting
Speaker 1: aquisition slips with the speed of some one who does
Speaker 1: not slow for pleasantries. I give her the usual line habit, again,
Speaker 1: dictating the rhythms of greeting. Lewis, the security guard, nodded
Speaker 1: from his steel by the entry, checking his pocket radio.
Speaker 1: Neither of them is given to idle speculation. MS Coffee's
Speaker 1: capacity for recal borders on the religious, specially where library
Speaker 1: policies are concerned. Lewis tracks the comings and goings with
Speaker 1: the memory for faces, but little interest in paperwork. The
Speaker 1: other Tuesday volunteers drifted in sturdy Missess Ferrel, local historian
Speaker 1: emeritus and a retirement fixture for nearly as long as
Speaker 1: the linoleum in the children's wing. Alex the grad student
Speaker 1: whose urgent thesis on civic memory and the coastal imagination
Speaker 1: often conflicts with his taste for half digested Wikipedia trivia.
Speaker 1: Together we form a makeshift club, cross readed by decades
Speaker 1: and temperaments, united only by need, perhaps to be needed.
Speaker 1: If any place in the city survives on gentle routine,
Speaker 1: it is this library. There is the morning ballet of reshelving,
Speaker 1: the daily battle with the copy machine's paper jams. The
Speaker 1: elevate of our only portal between basement storage and the
Speaker 1: main floor is famous for its moods, sometimes embarking without
Speaker 1: pass sometimes with them. People joke about the gross stacks,
Speaker 1: where mis cataloged novels turn out months later, their return
Speaker 1: slips fluttering as if an apology. I have my own routes,
Speaker 1: the zigzig behind new acquisitions, past the wall of staff
Speaker 1: commission paintings, turning left at the bronze drinking fountain with
Speaker 1: its inexplicable trip after so many months. I know the
Speaker 1: click of each light switch, the grown each day emits
Speaker 1: on foggy days. There are no mysteries in the mortar,
Speaker 1: or so I insisted until last week. If you trust
Speaker 1: nothing else in an old civic building, trust its corners.
Speaker 1: Every space is cataloged. Every room has a story stubbornly
Speaker 1: attached to a plaque or grateful donor's name. It's almost
Speaker 1: a point of pride with the staff. The building may creak,
Speaker 1: but we know every passage in Alcove. There have been
Speaker 1: endless renovations, true, but never enough resources to lose a wing,
Speaker 1: never a scandal big enough to swallow half the eastern elevation.
Speaker 1: The most we argue about is whether the city's shoving
Speaker 1: scheme is better classify budgy or by the practical reality
Speaker 1: of which chef can bear the most weight. I told
Speaker 1: myself all this while staring at the plan again that night.
Speaker 1: I trust buildings. You can measure, check, retrace in the
Speaker 1: flesh work was put on an inc The annex plan
Speaker 1: did not belong. Somehow, it felt like a deer. I
Speaker 1: spent Wednesday on a quiet reconnaissance, a kind of play
Speaker 1: for investigation. I mapped there should be walls from the
Speaker 1: blueprint against their real world counterparts. The annex would have
Speaker 1: begun just past the staff lunge east of the main
Speaker 1: staircase and trailed back in a long wedge parallel to
Speaker 1: the avenue. Yet the area is occupied by a restless
Speaker 1: tangle of storage rooms, the electrical panel and most telling
Speaker 1: plained unbroken masony. Every time I checked a spot where
Speaker 1: a gallery entrance store quiet ruined tent fell on paper.
Speaker 1: In life there was only plaster and pain decades old,
Speaker 1: or pepwoalls so warped by humidity that nothing still fit.
Speaker 1: I brought my old steel tape, as if measuring the
Speaker 1: wall land would reveal some hidden count deep. But the
Speaker 1: numbers were honest to the inch. No place for double walls,
Speaker 1: no empty vestibule. Lewis, when I asked about the eastern side,
Speaker 1: leaned back on his stool. Only place anyone really goes
Speaker 1: is the mober room of the alley, he said. The
Speaker 1: rest is wall hasn't been a door there since. He
Speaker 1: wrapped his knuckles for effect. As long as I've been here,
Speaker 1: could it have been walled up? I pressed, showing him
Speaker 1: the place he's quinted. My money's on a building plan
Speaker 1: they never followed. They used to dream big, right a
Speaker 1: whole neighborhoods got extensions, then budgets. He handed the plan
Speaker 1: back and concerned his mind. I sensed work differently from mine,
Speaker 1: never supplementing the present with what might have been satisfied
Speaker 1: instead of what hands could touch. Mess Coffee viewed the
Speaker 1: drawings with the polite patience she saves for especially stubborn patrons.
Speaker 1: These come up sometimes, she said, adjusting her glasses, A
Speaker 1: proposed wing or a grant application that never quite materialize.
Speaker 1: The building Commission did love their paperwork. There's no record
Speaker 1: of an annex being finished. In fact, the annual reports wead.
Speaker 1: She turned to a shelf, pulled out a sheaf of
Speaker 1: bound ports and paged through lips. Pursed, No, look, this
Speaker 1: is the nineteen sixty one annual, and there's only mention
Speaker 1: a fire along testing in the east hallway. Nothing about
Speaker 1: new rooms. I tried clumsily to suggest obliperntce this detailed
Speaker 1: on usually just ideas. Her response was definitive buildings are
Speaker 1: built errors sometimes, but they don't leave ghost rooms. If
Speaker 1: something truly existed, I would know. There is a kind
Speaker 1: of faith you alone, working in libraries of trust, in systems,
Speaker 1: even flowered ones. She returned to her tasks. I tapped
Speaker 1: the plan away with a growing scent of a knease.
Speaker 1: After lunch, I rode the elevator alone, pressing each floor
Speaker 1: and wrapping on the east wall panels. The bell rang
Speaker 1: for every stop, no sign of an extra bottom blow
Speaker 1: or above, no mysterious e glowing and in green. The
Speaker 1: staff room was its usual self, mismatched muggs, the bulletin
Speaker 1: from last year's gale culling on a corkpord, then yielding
Speaker 1: smell of burnt coffee. In the only place the blueprint
Speaker 1: promised to corridor, there was nothing now forgotten. Do no
Speaker 1: seam in the paneling. Even missus Ferrell Hugh, prided herself
Speaker 1: on preserving every scrap of the city's memory, squinted at
Speaker 1: the plan and then shook her head. I'd remember if
Speaker 1: we had a whole wing here, she insisted, But then
Speaker 1: a flick across her kraggy theater lit face. Wait a gallery,
Speaker 1: maybe ages ago at the end of the east corridor. God,
Speaker 1: it's fuzzy. There was talk of new reading rooms. She
Speaker 1: pressed her palm to her brow, rare furrowing. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't add up. Maybe I'm mixing it with the art school,
Speaker 1: or perhaps we just dreamed that Alex, working three feet away,
Speaker 1: peeked over a heap of city directors. It it makes sense,
Speaker 1: he said, tapping his temple. When you get a labyrinth's size.
Speaker 1: Who's to say a phantom one couldn't slitt the record
Speaker 1: books hegrin youthful skepticism shaded with affection, or just a
Speaker 1: clerical error. These archives could teach quantum mechanics about uncertainty.
Speaker 1: By closing, I was more certain of what I did
Speaker 1: not know. If the annex was ever real, it had
Speaker 1: vanished so perfectly that neither wall nor memory, not even
Speaker 1: the elevator's ancient circuitry, dared with Spirit's name. The next
Speaker 1: phase of my curiosity of compulsion, if I monester targeted
Speaker 1: something less physical, more systemic. I spent the next day
Speaker 1: trolling the digitized catalog, searching by location code A first nothing.
Speaker 1: Then I widened the query. Room assignments, circulation slips, accession
Speaker 1: numbers clustered by East Wing Annex Room forty two and
Speaker 1: the solitary gallery noted in call numbers seventy three entries, novels, monographs,
Speaker 1: local history, all attributed to Eastern Annex or variant room labels.
Speaker 1: To my surprise, many were marked as checked out within
Speaker 1: the last year, one with the n in the past month.
Speaker 1: The borrowers barcodes were legitimate, but no one on staff
Speaker 1: recognized the names. The computer showed the books as returned
Speaker 1: and michelved, but where each clue floated just out of reach.
Speaker 1: One title naded at me astus the fifth Voyage Lewis
Speaker 1: Carrol asterisk spelled with two l s. I've read Carol.
Speaker 1: There is no such book. Another asterisk, The Collected Letters
Speaker 1: of Missus Hadton astrsk, the famous Landlady in Sherlock Combs,
Speaker 1: has to my knowledge, no standalone volume of correspondence. I
Speaker 1: brought a copy of the new Logs to the morning meeting. Ms.
Speaker 1: Cartrey frowned over the pages. We haven't used these room
Speaker 1: codes since the seventies, she said, after a pause. Most
Speaker 1: rooms were consolidated when the city cut staffing. She turned
Speaker 1: the slip over a cream colored card, blue library stamp.
Speaker 1: The date line faded. This succession label predates me. Her
Speaker 1: eyes narrowed, but this checked out last week and returned.
Speaker 1: She glanced at me, and I felt a little chill,
Speaker 1: not a fear, but of recognition that a certainty was
Speaker 1: not vulnerable. I sought the stacks. Every shelf in the
Speaker 1: modern fiction Bay was as I remembered, except one book
Speaker 1: faced spying out with no visible call number. I picked
Speaker 1: it up astros through the shadows e Olt Janson asterisk.
Speaker 1: The slip glued inside bore an annex code and what
Speaker 1: might have been a staff initial or a Chell's attempt
Speaker 1: at script FM. The card looked like dozens I discarded
Speaker 1: while relabeling, except this one listed returned Room forty two
Speaker 1: Eastern Annex Thursday Shift. No Room forty two exists. The
Speaker 1: book itself seen normal until the end of twenty pages,
Speaker 1: missing entirely the final scene, vanishing mid sentence. Lewis, when
Speaker 1: I showed him the slip, only shrugged, that's just old paper,
Speaker 1: why not toss it? But for once his pragmatic dismissal
Speaker 1: struck me. His avoidance. The next few days brought new clues.
Speaker 1: The microfilm machine, an artifact from another decade, flickered through
Speaker 1: periodicals full of mundane civic news, photo contests, forward meetings,
Speaker 1: guard and lectures hosted in Ennex Gallery B book group
Speaker 1: listings always vaguely phrased. Discussions by the bay window never
Speaker 1: followed up in subsequent columns. Notices about art installations attributed
Speaker 1: to the annex lene disappearing without a trace in the
Speaker 1: weeks after the building too began to play its games
Speaker 1: too many moments of feinne inexplicable sum from the sealed
Speaker 1: utility hallway, at the trundle of a cart, a sudden,
Speaker 1: harsh what might have been a laugh or cough. Rationally,
Speaker 1: it choked this up to echo or water pipes. But
Speaker 1: the timing was odd, always when no one else seemed
Speaker 1: to notice. Thursday, the elevator glitched on its reluctant climb.
Speaker 1: For a split second, the button panel threw up a
Speaker 1: pale green knee. I joed at it, but it vanished
Speaker 1: before my finger landed. When I asked Lewis, he shook
Speaker 1: his head. Happens every spring, he explained. The panel shores
Speaker 1: a bit, some contacts misfire, no e just confusion. These
Speaker 1: old machines collect ghosts of their own. Yet each of
Speaker 1: these oddities felt less like individual malfunctions and more like
Speaker 1: a system of remembering or refusing to forget a place
Speaker 1: it wants new. I went back to physical measurements. I
Speaker 1: mapped every accessible wall, from the fogged trenched alley to
Speaker 1: the stats lunchnook every dementia match the city surveyed the
Speaker 1: public record the live experience of hundreds of visitors. No
Speaker 1: one explained in just no secret hollows. If the annex exists,
Speaker 1: did it did so in a dimension that left no
Speaker 1: trace for tip measure or studfinder, But the pattern in
Speaker 1: a catalog I could not let it go. Here were
Speaker 1: not random database errors, but references persisting in circulation locks,
Speaker 1: old slip tree surfacing among new books, A system's memory
Speaker 1: perhaps more durable than brick. The next step, im written
Speaker 1: in any engineering manual, was to look for memory rather
Speaker 1: than stone. I phoned Missus Ferrell, hoping to probably something
Speaker 1: from her vast and occasionally prickly recollection. She welcomed me
Speaker 1: to her condominium with a lemon cookie and an abashed hesitation.
Speaker 1: I recall my mother taking me to a long, bright room,
Speaker 1: she said, eyes narrowing, as if focusing through fog. Ye send,
Speaker 1: I think there were painting displays. I can picture the windows,
Speaker 1: but not the pat to get there, Or did I
Speaker 1: imagine it? She looked, mortified. YE know, at my age
Speaker 1: the mind invents. But there was always talk about the
Speaker 1: new reading rooms. A moment later she shook her head.
Speaker 1: But nobody I know was ever able to show me
Speaker 1: that space. Not once I spend a week tracking down
Speaker 1: staff Wood served here in the seventies and eighties. An
Speaker 1: old friend of mine, now a stayed away called Lych
Speaker 1: shifts reshelving and some corridor at the end of the
Speaker 1: East Wing, but maybe it was a closet. There were windows,
Speaker 1: and yet she trailed off, voice thin with confusion. It
Speaker 1: was always almost there, never a clear route. Another clay
Speaker 1: and declared, I stuck reference books where the plan said
Speaker 1: the annex was. But all I remember is being annoyed
Speaker 1: with the shelving order. Newspapers were no better. I shrolled microfilm,
Speaker 1: then digital back pages, and found event listings Civicot Guilt,
Speaker 1: Eastern Annex Gallery, are Friends of the Library, Meeting Thursday,
Speaker 1: Room four X. The articles always ended abruptly or without
Speaker 1: follow up. Next meeting location TBD. On those days, press
Speaker 1: coverage seemed to blur, as if no one could quite
Speaker 1: grasp what had happened. I gathered these stories, these hiccups
Speaker 1: and memory. They differed in the particulars, but a shade
Speaker 1: of quality remained. People spoke not of confusion, but of interruption,
Speaker 1: the sense that the East Wing was real until the
Speaker 1: moment he tried to recall it in detail, a memory
Speaker 1: that made you embarrass, reluctant to be sure, bleezing things.
Speaker 1: One patron put it, not misplacing them exactly, but skipping
Speaker 1: over them, as if some moments or a spaces just
Speaker 1: don't stick. This is a different kind of architecture. Space
Speaker 1: is not measured in feet or bricks, but in the
Speaker 1: reliability of recollection and the persistence of administrative habit. My
Speaker 1: own confidence trembled, not just my faith in walls, but
Speaker 1: in the ability of records, collective or personal, to whole
Speaker 1: reality in place. I tried to write down what I knew,
Speaker 1: tracing connections, a physical blueprint, catalog entries, circulations, lips labeled
Speaker 1: for rooms that don't exist, newspaper clippings trailing off at
Speaker 1: a course of elderly voices. Certain then uncertain about a
Speaker 1: long room at the east edge, not just absence, but
Speaker 1: a curated bureaurat, a kind of forgetting. Alex stopped me
Speaker 1: one afternoon, as I sat among my scattered notes. You're
Speaker 1: really going after this, ha t he said, smiling in
Speaker 1: the way someone does when they admire a coxotic quespa,
Speaker 1: expect little from it. I want to know how you
Speaker 1: lose a room, I replied, A space ray so thoroughly
Speaker 1: it leaves only paperwork. He considered this studying the plan.
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's bureaucracy catching up with lived reality. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the paper requites itself. Or maybe the paperwork is truer
Speaker 1: than what's physically here. Do you think it to be
Speaker 1: so stry range for this place? His words stuck. The
Speaker 1: library's reality was not just brick anymore. It was the
Speaker 1: sum of intentions, designs that almost took shape, records faithfully
Speaker 1: kept even when nothing physical remained, Memories that preferred the
Speaker 1: safety of venus. Perhaps the annex was not merely forgotten.
Speaker 1: It hovered at the edge of realization, always threatening to become,
Speaker 1: and always receding. On Friday, I took one last tour,
Speaker 1: blueprint in hand, overlaying the plan with each angle, each
Speaker 1: winto each crevice. I waited at the precise spot where
Speaker 1: the corridor and the plan insisted on a door. No sound,
Speaker 1: no draft, only the rumbling of distant cuts, and from
Speaker 1: behind the wall the faintest scent of dustin news printrolled there, slowly,
Speaker 1: cycling through pipe's first laid half a century ago. I
Speaker 1: pressed my hand to the plaster, half expecting something to give.
Speaker 1: Nothing did I paused and let the silence settle. For
Speaker 1: the first time, I allowed myself to consider, perhaps buildings
Speaker 1: are more than what is built. Perhaps, especially in old libraries,
Speaker 1: the blueprints are never entirely overwritten, complete plans, accumulated records,
Speaker 1: the scaffolding civic intention and memory, imperfect but persistent, finding
Speaker 1: a way to leave its trace at some level. The
Speaker 1: annex was as real as a paper on which it
Speaker 1: was drawn, as persistent as the catalog entries that no
Speaker 1: one could explain at present, as the hesitation in Missus
Speaker 1: Fairl's brow. The city, the library staff and patience together
Speaker 1: knitted a kind of almost space, not in stone, but
Speaker 1: in thought, an administration. I closed my notebook and looked
Speaker 1: again at the corridor in the planet, the one that
Speaker 1: rat behind the known rooms than out of sight, shaded softly,
Speaker 1: barely more than imagination or anticipation. I thought about how
Speaker 1: intentions are laid down, marked, revised, then sometimes abandoned mid sentence.
Speaker 1: What remains is not simply absence, but something like an echo,
Speaker 1: a ghost not of the supernatural but of human bureaucracy,
Speaker 1: and the stubborn half memory of what could have been.
Speaker 1: Can a place be almost real? That was where I
Speaker 1: left it for now, with more questions than answers, but
Speaker 1: for the first time something more than confusion. I held
Speaker 1: a new kind of map in my hands, not to
Speaker 1: hid in passageways or secret rooms, but to the borders
Speaker 1: between what is firmly built and what is perpetually unfinished.
Speaker 1: In that space, I realized the library was still quite
Speaker 1: rightly and possibly expanding. When you hover your palm over
Speaker 1: a blueprint long enough, it leaves a faint ridge of
Speaker 1: warmth on the paper, a sort of print physical or imagine,
Speaker 1: and not unlike those marks left by but pressed beneath
Speaker 1: a stack, almost visible when the light shifts. I stayed
Speaker 1: at that spot by the east wall, finger tip, stole
Speaker 1: tingling from a yielding plaster, and allowed the weight of
Speaker 1: almost to settle over me, like the tide mista dead
Speaker 1: from the bay. I thought, for a few minutes, I'd
Speaker 1: reach the end of what the library could show me.
Speaker 1: After all, you can disprove a myth with a ruler
Speaker 1: and a flasklight. But what are you supposed to do
Speaker 1: when the myth keeps signing its name on the paperwork,
Speaker 1: When each system catalog memory ledter insists against all physical evidence,
Speaker 1: The following Monday, Alex intercepted me as I was entering
Speaker 1: the basement archives. He was carrying two oversized binders, and
Speaker 1: his face was split, as always between eagerness and the
Speaker 1: worried energy of someone in perpetual deadline. Peter, do you
Speaker 1: have a minute? He followed me into a makeshift project nest,
Speaker 1: which was nothing more than a folding table surrounded by
Speaker 1: battter vetical files and the regular draft from a misaligned window.
Speaker 1: The desk lamp cast our faces and pulls of yellow,
Speaker 1: as if we were reploding somehast rather than volunteering in
Speaker 1: service of order. I was thinking about your missing winghole,
Speaker 1: the catalog weirdness, he said, sliding a laptop from his
Speaker 1: bag with the detectives flourish. So I ran a couple
Speaker 1: queries just for fun. It's not just old sluts. There's
Speaker 1: a pattern. If his quint at it a right way.
Speaker 1: He started scrolling through a spreadsheet with a hundred highlighted rows.
Speaker 1: Every title from the Eastern annex or however it's labeled,
Speaker 1: is off, sometimes by little, sometimes a lot. Like Hearer,
Speaker 1: he tapped the screen, watering heights Emily burnt with the
Speaker 1: numbat and the contents don't match the brunto. We note
Speaker 1: those collected letters of Missess Hudson, which shouldn't exist any
Speaker 1: works act maybe in someone's fun fiction and your loose
Speaker 1: caroalty a less different page count. I found a record
Speaker 1: for a froximity copy requested by someone named to get
Speaker 1: this Jay and Barruman, who definitely doesn't have a library
Speaker 1: acount to day. He looked up, grinning. It's not just
Speaker 1: varnished rooms, it's books that sort of exist but don't.
Speaker 1: I tried looking up their i sbns outside our catalog.
Speaker 1: The closest matches are all slightly wrong, two few pages,
Speaker 1: minor title differences, citation errors like imagine if we had
Speaker 1: a wing just touse alternate versions of things. Errors I
Speaker 1: suggested for was coming out more hopeful than convinced. He shrugged,
Speaker 1: Errors repeat themselves. Sure, but this is more like a theme.
Speaker 1: It's as if I don't know some part of the
Speaker 1: library keeps accepting things that never quite made it to
Speaker 1: the finish line. His observations center tremor through my comfortable
Speaker 1: understanding of buildings, and to my alarm, pushed me away
Speaker 1: from skepticism. I think I have clung to the idea
Speaker 1: of a missing room because it preserved the reliability of
Speaker 1: brooks and bends. But Alex was proposing something bigger than
Speaker 1: faulty memory or misfiled entries. We looked at the list together.
Speaker 1: Each record radiated a familiar and canny quality, the typhace
Speaker 1: peer of the publication details plausible, the content wrong by small,
Speaker 1: relentless increments. I was not prepared for the way realization
Speaker 1: started to trickle through my bones. What if the annex,
Speaker 1: if it existed, had been dedicated not to what was,
Speaker 1: but to what almost was. We settled into rhythm. Alex
Speaker 1: and I he creering locks and wrangling half broken databases,
Speaker 1: and I plodding through accession numbers, checking label formats and
Speaker 1: old shelf coats. I gathered the small, trembling stack of titles,
Speaker 1: all bearing the Eastern annex stamp. Astoris Connined Life, Sherlock
Speaker 1: Colne's Final Cases, Asterisk, Astorisk Lectures on Cypher's a loveless
Speaker 1: Asterius cromade at wrong discipline but wholly credible at a glance.
Speaker 1: ASTs the Fifth Voyage Asterisk, a slim blue banding with
Speaker 1: sly illustrations that faded half way through the last chapter.
Speaker 1: We poured over the lending logs, recurring barcodes and lone
Speaker 1: histories trailing off into non existence. The return slips read
Speaker 1: like confessions handwriting shifts. Dates that didn't correspond to the
Speaker 1: library's calendar notes likely returned after confusion left in annex corridor.
Speaker 1: Some names in the logs didn't match any recent patrons,
Speaker 1: or they belonged to elderly members known to both of us,
Speaker 1: people who didn't remember borrowing these books at all. On
Speaker 1: a brusk afternoon, swept by scudding fog, I asked Missus
Speaker 1: Farrow if she remembered any of these borrowed titles. She
Speaker 1: frank for a heartbeat, then bit her lip, searching her
Speaker 1: memory with the same intensity she usually reserves for her specialty,
Speaker 1: the anniversaries of bridge openings collected letters of Missus Hudson.
Speaker 1: That it rings a bell, I'll admit I think I
Speaker 1: tried to find it once by recall reading some of it,
Speaker 1: or at least holding it, But I can't be sure.
Speaker 1: Did it of a blue cover? She grimaced. The trouble is,
Speaker 1: whenever I tried to think of what was in it,
Speaker 1: my mind just seems to flick like a film. Real
Speaker 1: skipping a few frames. She pressed her fingers to her temple, uncertain,
Speaker 1: and I sense slightly embarrassed. Maybe my memory is failing,
Speaker 1: But I don't think it's just me. There's always been
Speaker 1: something about the east end of this place I used
Speaker 1: to imagine hall rooms, especially as a girl. Now, well,
Speaker 1: who's to say what? We almost had? Alex and I
Speaker 1: in turn grew bolder. We requested circulation history for every
Speaker 1: code referencing annex ease or forty two. Each entry slipped
Speaker 1: away as we followed it. The physical books turned up
Speaker 1: shelled out of order, missing their original slips, or they
Speaker 1: simply didn't exist elsewhere in a catalog. It was as
Speaker 1: if the system, sensing our scrutiny, began rejecting these ghosts.
Speaker 1: On a hunch, I dove into the microfilm Marquez again,
Speaker 1: looking from more than just circled events or meetings. There
Speaker 1: in an earliness one thousand, nine hundred sixty scan of
Speaker 1: a staff log book, I found a shelving request for
Speaker 1: in complete works an unfinished thought to please rochelve to
Speaker 1: gallery or quiet room per caretaker F. C. Morrow. That
Speaker 1: was the Falkrum. It was less flashy than secret blueprints
Speaker 1: or missing doors. But something about the phrasing complete works
Speaker 1: and unfinished thus crackled in my brain. It suggested a
Speaker 1: purpose to the annex, not just accident or absence. Morrow.
Speaker 1: The name felt almost familiar, as though it belonged to
Speaker 1: the same universe as col slips and end of your
Speaker 1: maintenance reports. I shared my find with Alex and Missesskatre,
Speaker 1: who read the microfilms screen with the tight skeptical expression.
Speaker 1: She clicked her tongue in the silence that followed. That's
Speaker 1: probably some staff joke, schimuse, but not with her usual certainty.
Speaker 1: Caretakers did tend to make their own rules, especially about shelving. Still,
Speaker 1: I've never come across those initials in my old rosters.
Speaker 1: She left us with the standing invitation to bring me
Speaker 1: something physical and meaning, actual evidence of an annex, not
Speaker 1: more spectral paperwork. Alex and I, undeterred, set out to
Speaker 1: locate anything. Further time this morrier to the library's records.
Speaker 1: It was during this phase that the audities began to
Speaker 1: seem less accidental and more systemic. There were occurring traces
Speaker 1: everywhere books that referenced events held in Gallery B Eastern Annex.
Speaker 1: On June twenty four, nineteen sixty six, accession cards for
Speaker 1: a works in progress awaiting final cataloging, room assignments for
Speaker 1: academic talks by speakers who never appear again in any
Speaker 1: other record. Each knit, it seemed, steeped in the same
Speaker 1: flavor of almost their deliberate, persistent liminality. We broadened our search,
Speaker 1: less concerned now with justifying our curiosity to the staff. Alex,
Speaker 1: with his university credentials, sent offquaries to the city's personnel office.
Speaker 1: In the library's old as payroll records. No one named F. C.
Speaker 1: Morrow appeared in the current employee registry, but the archivists
Speaker 1: sent back a scan of a faded ledger found in
Speaker 1: a rarely accessed cabinet, and sent she wrote, because I
Speaker 1: love a puzzle, and ye two sounded genuinely invested. Inside,
Speaker 1: in a precise slanting hand, was a journal care Deaker's
Speaker 1: Notes Eastern Annex, nineteen sixty five nineteen seventy eight. The
Speaker 1: log was a kind of anti catalog, part technical, part diary.
Speaker 1: Each entry dated and lined up with the librarian seal
Speaker 1: for order and the philosopher's predilection toward and soudainity. Every
Speaker 1: page opened a new puzzle a cart returned from gallery,
Speaker 1: contents not matching out Wood's lips read wonder. Patron requested
Speaker 1: volume Believe, not yet published, reshelved in Room forty two
Speaker 1: with the others other fragmentary works, another later on the
Speaker 1: key for the unfinished, all with shifts after falk keeped
Speaker 1: or to quiet room prop The books will circle if unattended.
Speaker 1: Pages of shoving instructions followed, describing locations and categories. I'd
Speaker 1: never seen in an assisive shelf in complete monographs appending
Speaker 1: narratives in one margin. The unfinished finds its own place.
Speaker 1: Do not correct room numbers. Patrons usually remembered them after
Speaker 1: a fashion. Alex, reading over my shoulder, looked up abruptly.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a collection policy, he muttered. Half an
Speaker 1: all or set of rules for something that resists catalogging,
Speaker 1: I said, feeling the hair rise on my arms. There
Speaker 1: was even enough hand complaint from nineteen seventy two about
Speaker 1: how the east wall maintenance inspection was postponed again pending
Speaker 1: with submission for fog klodure. The more entries we read,
Speaker 1: the clearer it became that pending was a permanent status,
Speaker 1: not a temporary delay. According to the Journal East War
Speaker 1: work warriders and annex references were always awaiting final sign off.
Speaker 1: The building's official expansion stalled on paper, but continued in
Speaker 1: catalog intent and the routines have whoever kept these notes alive?
Speaker 1: What does it mean? Alex asked? If the city kept
Speaker 1: authorizing a place that didn't physically exist, it was a
Speaker 1: question I carried to City Hall. I arranged to meet
Speaker 1: with Daphney Wilcox, an old friend from my own years
Speaker 1: with the municipal Works Department, now retired to gardening and
Speaker 1: the occasional neighborhood dispute mediation. We sat over coffee in
Speaker 1: her window bright kitchen. She remembered Mara's name, Bailey Morrow. Yes,
Speaker 1: plans always caught in limber Eastern expansion, never funded, but
Speaker 1: never canceled upright, the kind of project that stays in
Speaker 1: the ledger just so they don't have to admit it
Speaker 1: was abandoned. We joked, it was built out of paperwork
Speaker 1: and delay. They'd prove inspections, even file budget entries, and
Speaker 1: nothing ever happened. She pulled out a faded letter from
Speaker 1: her files, a copy of a building permit request from
Speaker 1: decades back, referencing the library and expending sight clearance. But
Speaker 1: Daffy remembered Enna's pending stamps, not outcomes. She's snorted. If
Speaker 1: he waited for everything in the city to be finalized,
Speaker 1: you'd still be standing in line with your coffee freezing.
Speaker 1: The feeling. The bureaucracy's ability to maintain something halfway between
Speaker 1: negation and existence scared and delighted me equally. Back at
Speaker 1: the library, I looked again at the more a journal,
Speaker 1: in its odd directives close stows only when fog Lift's
Speaker 1: shelve unresolved. Folumes by subject not author. The annex Luck's
Speaker 1: intention was it a coded message about administrative inertia, a
Speaker 1: personal philosophy of an et ceterric staffer, or a genuine
Speaker 1: practical guide to managing a space that refused to settle
Speaker 1: while the library persisted in referencing a wing that defied
Speaker 1: both demolition and construction. Why did patron's memories behave the
Speaker 1: same way as paperwork full of gaps, clances and sidelong admissions.
Speaker 1: Alex brought one last discovery a pattern in a data
Speaker 1: look Peter, he said, tapping his tablet display whenever the
Speaker 1: city's annual fogg is worst really thick for multiple day's
Speaker 1: circulation records for these or book spike, more returns, more
Speaker 1: notes lugged about, annex my theories. It's not just administry
Speaker 1: to err something about the foggy daysets the whole system
Speaker 1: loose may be a little more room for the unfinished
Speaker 1: to slip and d out. I realized suddenly to the fog.
Speaker 1: Always looking at the city's edge had become less a
Speaker 1: climatic feature and more stal permission. A time when everyone
Speaker 1: from engineers to cloaks to the visitors of the reference
Speaker 1: desk became just a little less certain, a time for
Speaker 1: lapses and more. I walked the perimeter again that afternoon.
Speaker 1: The city's fog had arrived early and thick, pressing up
Speaker 1: against the glass. By then I had abandoned the notion
Speaker 1: of finding a hidden door or a walled up stair. Instead,
Speaker 1: I traced the building's outlines with a different kind of measuring,
Speaker 1: testing door in ubs for the looseness of habit studying
Speaker 1: the wakeouts seemed always to appear, then disappeared by the
Speaker 1: east wall. It seemed to me that on the days
Speaker 1: when the city could quite see itself clearly, the library,
Speaker 1: This library may be any old institution became more permeable.
Speaker 1: All the intentions and half completions in the world found
Speaker 1: a home, if only for a day, in systems that
Speaker 1: didn't insist on closure. The walls might not admit me,
Speaker 1: but the catalog, the paperwork, and the sum of a
Speaker 1: hundred contradictory memories lent the annex of peculiar intermittent persistence.
Speaker 1: With Alex's help, I met the almost places in the city.
Speaker 1: I found evidence of a dozen pending parks, half built,
Speaker 1: brooches never finished nor torn down, a statue to a
Speaker 1: local hero whose pedestal was set and forgotten, plaqu half
Speaker 1: engraved permits, requested budget's approve, the memory of intent recorded
Speaker 1: somewhere a faintest pencil on tissue. It was more than poetic.
Speaker 1: City halls arquev showed occasional cross references, bizarrely specific a
Speaker 1: budget transfer annex maintenance line item reallocated when paper only
Speaker 1: to a park in waiting on the far west edge.
Speaker 1: Like paperwork had become its own parallel architecture, lines of
Speaker 1: intention looping and coiling between buildings, keeping the city and
Speaker 1: could not just by what stirred, but what almost did.
Speaker 1: I returned Finally to the libraries, he swore. As the
Speaker 1: fog rolled its gray, slow weight in through the avenue,
Speaker 1: past closing. When the last patients wandered up, brushing the
Speaker 1: moisture from the coats, I linger blueprint in hand. You
Speaker 1: could almost almost hear the distant squeak of wheels, a
Speaker 1: voice half lost in the gloom. I raised my hand,
Speaker 1: not to push again, but to aknowledge that whatever I
Speaker 1: had been hunting was not behind the bricks, but woven
Speaker 1: through the city's rituals of incompletion. That was when the realization,
Speaker 1: delicate as it was profound, slid into place. The Eastern
Speaker 1: Annex was neither fully constructed nor wholly imagined. It was
Speaker 1: not a lost room, but a physical record of community
Speaker 1: intentioned dreams, revisions, Near missus, bureaucratic echoes, its books, slips,
Speaker 1: and numbers lived where memory and paper were called each
Speaker 1: other in an endless arrange, a catalog for the almost remembered,
Speaker 1: They unfinalized, the stories and spaces abandoned but not erased.
Speaker 1: Maybe on the far guest days, a cart did appear
Speaker 1: with a book that didn't quite match his description, perhaps
Speaker 1: a patron sure of a particular gallery or readingknook wandered
Speaker 1: off in search of an ending to a story they
Speaker 1: never finished. Maybe the library wasn't just a container for
Speaker 1: the past, but a palimpsyst its edges blurred by the
Speaker 1: city's collective pasty to allow possibility and completion, dealt a
Speaker 1: kind of architecture of lemonality. I stood awhile at the window,
Speaker 1: tracing the city's gentle, persistent reluctance to settle its own
Speaker 1: limits and institution, breathing with the intentions of its people,
Speaker 1: embracing both what was finished and what was quietly, stubbornly andfinished.
Speaker 1: I thought about my own home, half built, shelving in
Speaker 1: the basement, a woodworking project I had never sanded smooth,
Speaker 1: a box of clip plans yellowing under the waight of decades.
Speaker 1: Perhaps we all live in our own annexes, wandering the
Speaker 1: margins of our unfinished ideas. When the fog thickened, I
Speaker 1: let myself be still. There was relief in it to
Speaker 1: be part of a city that kept not only what
Speaker 1: it completed, but also what it never could. The next morning,
Speaker 1: particularly dense fog pressed against the tall library windows, blowing
Speaker 1: every car and lamp. Pushed into suggestion. I was sorting
Speaker 1: through returns. When the elevator chined slower than usual and
Speaker 1: its door side open for a single impossible moment, the
Speaker 1: old metal button panel glowed with a pale greenee, the
Speaker 1: air hammed with possibility, the same frequency you hear when
Speaker 1: a story hangs suspended before its ending is told. Then,
Speaker 1: as quickly as it appeared, they be flickered and faded,
Speaker 1: numbers reasserting themselves mundane, uncertain. Beneath the front desk, a
Speaker 1: cut stood waiting. Three volumes purged to top it, their
Speaker 1: jackets gentle with years. Aster's story without endings Asterisk Asteris
Speaker 1: Mummer from the middle Asterisk Asterus, the final chapter untitled Asterisk.
Speaker 1: None of these appeared in the official catalog. Each title
Speaker 1: pulse were the quality both familiar and out of reach,
Speaker 1: as if they had been dreamt once and then misplaced.
Speaker 1: I hovered uncertain before the cart for the brief a second.
Speaker 1: I entertained a foolish plan to read them, to claim
Speaker 1: their contents, or to reshive them in the stacks where
Speaker 1: they might belong. But the impulse passed. Some books, some places,
Speaker 1: exist only to remind us of what slips the net
Speaker 1: of what the world leaves open. I left my volunteer
Speaker 1: badge and its customary drawer, passing Lewis on his way up. Humultuineously,
Speaker 1: I did not mention the cot or the elevator's softlit
Speaker 1: secret outside. The city was invisible at the edge, but
Speaker 1: humming with the lives and ambitions of people inside. There
Speaker 1: are places that remember what we almost built, Shelters for
Speaker 1: the stories half told, wings never quite opened, rooms that
Speaker 1: exist between paperwork and memory. I suspect the Eastern Annex
Speaker 1: will always be there in the realm of almost, a quiet,
Speaker 1: persistent invitation to let our unfinished ideas dwell alongside everything complete.
Speaker 1: And walking away through the fog, I wondered, with a
Speaker 1: fierce and sudden joy, just how many other almost spaces weighed,
Speaker 1: quietly present in stories, buildings and memories of everyone everywhere.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.