Speaker 1: If there's a sound you could copyright for retirement, maybe
Speaker 1: it's the muffled thunker for library. But being dropped into
Speaker 1: the return shoot bore the quiet argument between two different
Speaker 1: dwart book carts bumping in a hallway with the four
Speaker 1: that was never in a century quite level the library
Speaker 1: where I started volunteering after my last day on Rat
Speaker 1: seventeen in Nelson Heights, branch red brick odd editions, a
Speaker 1: whiff of wax polish, and the cardboard tan of years
Speaker 1: of paper offered all of these in a single busy morning.
Speaker 1: My first shift was mainly meant to be a trial run,
Speaker 1: just shelving and sorting, but the desk supervisor, Genine, greeted
Speaker 1: me with a rare opening the in tick desk single handed,
Speaker 1: just for one hour to see your system attests. I
Speaker 1: was sure she had that fees for putting people through
Speaker 1: minor gauntlets and seemed to relish finding out who could
Speaker 1: think a round clatter. It suited me. After thirty five
Speaker 1: years in a postal service, handling the unpredictable arrivals and
Speaker 1: vanishments of paper, things seemed like home. There were returns
Speaker 1: from every corner of the city, thick coled manuals, dog
Speaker 1: teed mysteries, slick as new cook books, and spiny children's
Speaker 1: books with strange creatures on their hard covers. They came
Speaker 1: in stacks, sometimes under trembling hands of seniors, or wedged
Speaker 1: and folded arms by apparent wrangling a toddler. Some people
Speaker 1: return their books with a grin, others with an apologetic
Speaker 1: mumble about overjufines and lost slips. I took it all
Speaker 1: with slow nod, marking things in by hand, then in
Speaker 1: the art clunky tablets. The library had just started rolling
Speaker 1: out half way through as I reached for the next
Speaker 1: book from an unruly heap, a sweet looking picture book
Speaker 1: with cloud stitched sheep high glanced down the return slip
Speaker 1: yellow increase at a corner was stamped clearly returned by
Speaker 1: six March twenty twenty nine. I blinked, then actually double
Speaker 1: checked the cover copyright twenty eighteen, fine stamp in blue striking,
Speaker 1: the brisk not faded at all. The rest of the
Speaker 1: card was filled with recent plausible dates. This is the
Speaker 1: first time I can remember being both amused and a
Speaker 1: little disoriented by a date, which is saying something when
Speaker 1: you've spent decades sorting holiday cards in October. I held
Speaker 1: up the book for a second, looking around, and waved
Speaker 1: the slip Apollo, who was passing by in the corridor,
Speaker 1: A cheerful twenty something children's librarian with the Herbert's permanently
Speaker 1: trailing her neck, paula quick opinion for a rookie. Did
Speaker 1: I just time jump, she laughed, leaning in to check,
Speaker 1: though the crazy returned slips again. Must have slipped through
Speaker 1: from the South branch. They always mess up the dates,
Speaker 1: or she shrugged, almost mischievously, Or it's just the kids
Speaker 1: or something. One came back last month's stamped for twenty
Speaker 1: seventy four. There was something in her tone, caught between
Speaker 1: a joke and a brush off, that I noticed in
Speaker 1: my work. You get a third deer for when someone
Speaker 1: is stone moalling with Hima, or when a story hides
Speaker 1: somewhere else. Entirely, I set the book aside to jaculator.
Speaker 1: If I noticed a pattern, maybe I'd give myself a
Speaker 1: prize for observation, or just file it away as one
Speaker 1: of those institutional Quirk's libraries collect along with audible donors
Speaker 1: and mysterious stains. But the next stack contained an old
Speaker 1: dan or pin quart a paperback, the Hobboken Chicken Emergency.
Speaker 1: It spine cracked, but reparable would a pale slip stamp
Speaker 1: returned sixteen April nineteen fifty seven on a book published
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty two. The stamp was black. The card
Speaker 1: itself looked deliberately old, not weather by age, but with
Speaker 1: a cream color and machine cut I'd only seen in
Speaker 1: my childhood libraries. The ink was sharp, as if it
Speaker 1: had only just a memory of rubber and pressure. I
Speaker 1: thumbed through the book, nothing out of place. I stacked
Speaker 1: it in the questionable pile I was making uninstinct to
Speaker 1: two more children's books join it, both with odd slips,
Speaker 1: one stamped for in the future, another with the name
Speaker 1: scrolled in a style that looked like the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: Why Abbess Asal and a curly dipping hand. I leaned back,
Speaker 1: fiding the urge to comment to a strange of five books,
Speaker 1: four implausible dates, three different kinds of paper, and at
Speaker 1: least two fake DearS. Who was trying to amuse themselves?
Speaker 1: Some jokers shelving books with forgeries, or one of the
Speaker 1: night's staff playing a prank. Maybe it was standard every
Speaker 1: library's got something a bit bent about it, a note
Speaker 1: that never quite matches the rest of the court. Jeanein
Speaker 1: strove pass hair, short blue sweater, announcing a Davenport delivery,
Speaker 1: her mouth set for briskness. Janine questioned, for you, I
Speaker 1: called waving the daynelpincutter with its nineteen fifty seven return slip.
Speaker 1: I tried for casual. Do we run a time travel
Speaker 1: program here? She gave me the faint smile you give
Speaker 1: to some one, return into a long, warm joke and
Speaker 1: didn't slow down much. Other branches problem. Probably if it's
Speaker 1: not on the digital log, just file it in tick anomalies.
Speaker 1: But the book wasn't published. And told the eighties. She
Speaker 1: shrugged and nothing in her face gave way. But when
Speaker 1: she replied, it was quicker and lighter than I expected. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe the book got there early library time. Then she
Speaker 1: was gone. Conversation closed, but not before giving the slip
Speaker 1: a second, very brief rown. I left my growing stack
Speaker 1: of a question marks next to the desk cafel, not
Speaker 1: to let them mix with reshelving. By the end of day,
Speaker 1: nobody had asked about them. As the lights flickered and
Speaker 1: the clatter faded, and I clocked out, I felt to
Speaker 1: tickle deep in my chest, to quiet wad on earth
Speaker 1: with just the right flavor of delight, no sign of trouble,
Speaker 1: only the opening of a door into some gentle, slow,
Speaker 1: unfolding mischief. My second week on intake routine made it
Speaker 1: easier to poke at the edges of oddity. The Nelson
Speaker 1: Heights Library was neither big city grand nor rural crant
Speaker 1: to building designed for a hundred years of temporary solutions.
Speaker 1: Enter through the old brick arch, passed the scuffed blue
Speaker 1: pillows from the nineteen sixties edition. I make it to
Speaker 1: the staff office one minute to eight for sign engine,
Speaker 1: never missed a late slip in the middle. Circulation ran
Speaker 1: like small streams into tributaries. Kit bounced into the staf
Speaker 1: for story time. Old whom men arrived in pairs for chess,
Speaker 1: but the battered local newspapers, and a college girl Hannah
Speaker 1: unfolded maps with the care you'd give anti glace. Here.
Speaker 1: Tyan didn't move fast, except when people argued about who
Speaker 1: had a hold on the only good sequel in town.
Speaker 1: Jeanine ran things with a clipped efficiency, barely needing to
Speaker 1: check the screen to remember a face or a book's
Speaker 1: wandering habits. Mister Ray, the cataloger had an unpredictable supply
Speaker 1: of dry, low volume puns and an endless affection for
Speaker 1: the old systems. He'd been there since Watergate by his
Speaker 1: own math, and could smell a spurious barkoot four shelves away. Paula,
Speaker 1: in comparison, was a comet, always fast, always cheery, speaking
Speaker 1: in Bursa but newy, but providers but tolerating. The annal
Speaker 1: of messes are part of the heritage. That first fortnight,
Speaker 1: I explored the stack spangled maze between my shelving shifts.
Speaker 1: The halls twisted, often literally near the old reference wing,
Speaker 1: the wall's flash between decca white tile and poor gray concrete,
Speaker 1: as EF decorators tried to outlast each other. Lighting changed
Speaker 1: mid corridor from amber pulled to pale hospital glow. The
Speaker 1: back rooms, especially where old returns lingered awaiting decision, seemed
Speaker 1: to her new doors. I found myself wheeling a card
Speaker 1: on to a landing that, in theory was a dead end,
Speaker 1: except there was a bathroom door sign that didn't match
Speaker 1: the building's font. Nobody else seemed to find any of
Speaker 1: this unusual. When started to mention another of these micromisteries.
Speaker 1: Mister Ray only nodded quarks of the old system, he said,
Speaker 1: as if that explained not only books but bricks themselves.
Speaker 1: Bookcott came and when Paula claimed that some carts held
Speaker 1: haunted returns, meaning books that no matter where Rochelle turned
Speaker 1: up off by one row in six hours or less,
Speaker 1: we traded bobs about whether the new barcoding tech could
Speaker 1: utwhit cursed narrative drift. I discovered, with a slight catch
Speaker 1: in my breath, that one particular copy of the Joy
Speaker 1: of Cooking appeared, unsuccessfully reshelved in different systems, three days
Speaker 1: in a row, each time with the new return slip appended,
Speaker 1: each with a date thirty years apart. The card catalog
Speaker 1: in three half a symbol cabinets was tucked away under
Speaker 1: a do not move arco's pending sign. Half the drower's
Speaker 1: boxed and rubber banded type just in case, Janine told
Speaker 1: me when I half jokingly asked if anyone used it.
Speaker 1: By the sound of her voice, even a just in
Speaker 1: case was who was drawn the world, it seemed now
Speaker 1: belonged to the barcode. But even the newest off it
Speaker 1: tags were no match for the circulation quirks. I began
Speaker 1: to track, always around the process of return. I made
Speaker 1: a habit of reading each and ticks slip, partly from boredom,
Speaker 1: hotly out of habit. By midweek I'd found five more
Speaker 1: examples odd ball dates, missing years, names that sounded faintly literary,
Speaker 1: samped in fresh blue. Every time I mentioned it to
Speaker 1: a staffer, the anterer fell between joking and a warning
Speaker 1: not to take library life too seriously. It was on
Speaker 1: my six shift, late Friday afternoon, rain barely tapping off
Speaker 1: the aluminum frame library, nearly ready to close, coffee just
Speaker 1: cooling at my elbow, that I seriously considered I was
Speaker 1: missing something. I had by then set aside a suspiciously
Speaker 1: tidy half stack of books under the desk. There were
Speaker 1: more of them than I could write off as one
Speaker 1: night prank or date entry fumble. One book and unknown
Speaker 1: poetry collection Boundaries of the Inn and Sea, stitched in
Speaker 1: matt Navy, presented a particularly neat problem its returned slip overlapping.
Speaker 1: Another was stamped with a return date from twenty forty
Speaker 1: three and signed in smooth leaping ink by Sea anglo
Speaker 1: at supervisor. There was no such supervisor, and in twenty
Speaker 1: forty three at Bee well either a hundred or a
Speaker 1: work of fiction. Yet the ink was real. My thumb
Speaker 1: came away faintly blue. After closing, When Jeanne was filing
Speaker 1: the last box of repairs, I decided to stat my
Speaker 1: strange slips in front of her with a flourish the
Speaker 1: janine these days slok, they're getting creative, She glanced briefly
Speaker 1: brow raised. Sism was a mess before their renovation. You know,
Speaker 1: you get used to it eventually, she said, eventually, with
Speaker 1: a particular energy, like it wasn't really a joke, but
Speaker 1: coded for something you either ignore or accept. At that,
Speaker 1: her voice floated up from the read and corner the
Speaker 1: retired English teacher mister Anders, who'd started coming in after
Speaker 1: his wife passed, mostly for conversation in Thinck Dickens's novels.
Speaker 1: You think these are odd? I remember when everything was
Speaker 1: by hand and the book sometimes went missing for decades.
Speaker 1: They always turned up again. Eventually, nobody ever explained it.
Speaker 1: I waited for more, but he only smiled ice far away.
Speaker 1: I took it home that first month, like a puzzle
Speaker 1: bit in a folder. Slip after slip that made no
Speaker 1: internal sense, but all seemed to belong in some small
Speaker 1: way to the rhythm of the place. Most anomalies in
Speaker 1: life shovel under the sun of attention, mill that's misroded,
Speaker 1: a mislabeled box, a digit scaped. These I thought would
Speaker 1: be the same, Yet each time I checked, reality gave
Speaker 1: me another tiny contradiction, like a spot that moved but
Speaker 1: could never be entirely scrubbed away. One Saturday morning, I
Speaker 1: decided to line up every odd slip. I'd collected a dozen,
Speaker 1: then a baker's dozen, now almost two file folders full.
Speaker 1: I'd color corded them by era or whatever they seemed
Speaker 1: to mimick. Faded gulls with fountain pen lines, bright purple
Speaker 1: stamps with digital print hups beneath an aerial font. The
Speaker 1: biggest defenders bore names like y Abs or aunt Kester,
Speaker 1: neither of whom I could find on the staff roster,
Speaker 1: old staff photos, or even Google. Down a coffee and
Speaker 1: a listless attempt at Sudoku, I let my former postman's
Speaker 1: eye for patterns take over. I double checked the staff log.
Speaker 1: No m Kester, not even a retired version, not even
Speaker 1: in an early staff list that mister Ray Captain has
Speaker 1: batted Tan Binder. I scrolled back through the digital system
Speaker 1: in nothing since at least the Midmanuts one thousand, nine
Speaker 1: hundred eighties, not even an obituary who then was stamping books.
Speaker 1: As recently as last month, more than one book seemed
Speaker 1: to collect odd slips, especially the well loved ones that
Speaker 1: cycle FASTUS thrillers, cook books, annotated city maps. Sometimes a
Speaker 1: cookbook returned with a slip stamp nineteen twenty one, or
Speaker 1: called when it was published in nineteen eighty five and
Speaker 1: in a neat leaping skirt to our Franklin sobed lib.
Speaker 1: The more I compare it, the more names repeated, but
Speaker 1: with no connection to any known person in or out
Speaker 1: of the library community. Monday, in a law I asked Paula,
Speaker 1: who was prepping the new story Time flyer, do these
Speaker 1: make sense to you? She took a casual occur an,
Speaker 1: so quick as always. Ah, the children's section gets a wallace,
Speaker 1: returns old slips mixed in with new ones. But that's
Speaker 1: just little kids playing and make believe. If there are more,
Speaker 1: maybe blamed the dad's playing library at home that didn't
Speaker 1: quite fit some slip names had a way of being
Speaker 1: too old fashioned or too early modern for any one
Speaker 1: to conjure. By accident, I took to checking the old
Speaker 1: card catalog drawer by drawer when nobody else needed something
Speaker 1: from under the sign in ther Sea drawer. As a
Speaker 1: kind of experiment, I rifled through check out cards from
Speaker 1: the sixties four In a volume of local bird guides,
Speaker 1: I found the yellow and slip marked in aale blue
Speaker 1: borrow room says est to chew one hundred eighty eight
Speaker 1: miles with a phone number too short to be modern,
Speaker 1: stamped up behind in nineteen ninety one, two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: and then oddly twenty twenty seven one hundred eighty eight
Speaker 1: wells didn't exist in city directories before the seventies. Near
Speaker 1: By another card boris surname that belonged unmistakably to a
Speaker 1: famous but fictional film character, borrowed in nineteen eighty four
Speaker 1: and again in twenty nineteen. There were cards with addresses
Speaker 1: that came and went as houses did, sometimes jump into
Speaker 1: or three digits, as if the city itself were stuttling
Speaker 1: around the libraryes or a memory. Out of ply frustration,
Speaker 1: I put the matter to Groupershell volunteers, the junior high
Speaker 1: kid helping for service credit, the grandparent who ran the
Speaker 1: quiet reading hour, an accountant turned novelist who was prone
Speaker 1: alarm pauses. Is there a secret to these lips? Or
Speaker 1: am I missing? And in joke? The responses ranged from
Speaker 1: shoulder shrugs, wow, they always had issues tracking the branches
Speaker 1: after the merger, to more cryptic ones of Some books
Speaker 1: get bored if left too long, said the novelist, entirely
Speaker 1: straight faced. But the contradiction refused to settle into something simple.
Speaker 1: When I checked the physical copis of high circulation books,
Speaker 1: I found that somewhere living documents. Each week, pencil notes
Speaker 1: in the margins would change erased clean, only for new
Speaker 1: ones to appear. In one case a paragraph about pancakes,
Speaker 1: or place last week's comment about fried rice in the
Speaker 1: same wobb we hand, but but different advice. Sometimes a
Speaker 1: returned slip would be pasted over another dates overlapping, as
Speaker 1: if both histories wanted to be present. But light a paper.
Speaker 1: That afternoon, mister Ray was in a catalog room fixing
Speaker 1: a stuck drawer with a brass ruler. I asked half
Speaker 1: as a joke, you ever seen a return slip that
Speaker 1: didn't believe in time. He set the ruler down, adjusted
Speaker 1: his wire framed glasses at his beard, and said, some
Speaker 1: books have a mind of their own. Back before the computers,
Speaker 1: there were always wandering, reckless names, that drifted addresses nobody'd
Speaker 1: heard of, saw a book returned before it was even
Speaker 1: bought more than once. There is a reason we keep
Speaker 1: the backup files. Don't you think it's odd? He smiled,
Speaker 1: an old man's privilege to be amused rather than disturbed
Speaker 1: by small violations of order. Worry about the ones that
Speaker 1: never come back. The rest, well, they find their place again,
Speaker 1: or you do after a while. There was something deeply
Speaker 1: comforting in and how nobody seemed particularly bothered. Maybe the
Speaker 1: very point of a library wasn't just a fixed memory,
Speaker 1: but to allow a little drift, a bit of shared myth.
Speaker 1: By the end of the month, my curiosity had gone
Speaker 1: from idle to methodical. I kept a special folder under
Speaker 1: the intic desk, anomaly sit stone file, with every card
Speaker 1: and oddity annotated, and pen a new kind of postal bag,
Speaker 1: sorted by mystery. Rather than address. One rainy evening, walking
Speaker 1: through the book repay room, I discovered the Boundaries of
Speaker 1: the Inn Sea Poetry Mythology again. This time the final
Speaker 1: page which had been missing was back in place, complete
Speaker 1: with a return slip from twenty thirty three Gluton sideways
Speaker 1: on the in papers, some one had lightly penciled two verses,
Speaker 1: only for them to vanish three days later, with new
Speaker 1: notes feathered in as if the book had been taken
Speaker 1: apart under built. Every night I began systematic and persons.
Speaker 1: I'd pull the same book in two different branches, one
Speaker 1: from children's, one from adult fiction, and the annotations sometimes matched,
Speaker 1: sometimes didn't, but the slips always offer different names in
Speaker 1: impossible gaps in chronology. On one especially odd Monday, I
Speaker 1: check out a children's biography that a co ding to
Speaker 1: its return slip had been borrowed and brought back by
Speaker 1: the same tea Evans five times in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, nineteen ninety eight, and twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Each signature matched their tea with an exaggerated loop. I
Speaker 1: was now sure these weren't isolated clerical fumbles or the
Speaker 1: work of a single prankster. The error, if it was
Speaker 1: an error, conducted itself like a slow moving river, always
Speaker 1: rearranging its own banks, never bothering to apologize. But perhaps
Speaker 1: the biggest shift came in realizing that while the paper
Speaker 1: told one story, the people told three or four. Whenever
Speaker 1: I'd asked, Janine should say half the card catalog is
Speaker 1: fiction anyway. Yet mister Ray would defend the book's provements,
Speaker 1: Paul would jerk about imagination. The only consistent thing was inconsistency.
Speaker 1: I decided to put it to the test. Whenever I
Speaker 1: double checked the book's records covers of circulation logs from
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties onward, the difference is multiplied. Sometimes according
Speaker 1: to the lock. The same individual borrowed a book every
Speaker 1: ten years, identical signature, never once in notice of a
Speaker 1: deceased or moved away, in convenient as it was. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the the same title contained a history in flux, or
Speaker 1: a row of borrowings that disappeared, then returned, sometimes with
Speaker 1: the dates reordered, sometimes with a retroactive overdue warning. If
Speaker 1: the physical prediction of reality was the paper slip, the
Speaker 1: reality in this building was a ghost humming through the wires,
Speaker 1: the stacks, and the community memory. I think the turning
Speaker 1: point for me was in a conversation with mister Ray.
Speaker 1: Just before closing on a windy Thursday, we were inspecting
Speaker 1: a trolley full of recent returns and sharing stories over
Speaker 1: instant coffee. I rituel now established between us. Maybe the
Speaker 1: books don't care as much about what's true as we do.
Speaker 1: I offered, it was only half a joke. He laughed,
Speaker 1: slow and soft. Some books never quite decide who they've
Speaker 1: belonged to or when. Sometimes I think they are just
Speaker 1: as careful as we are, writing themselves till they like
Speaker 1: what they see. That stayed with me. I took to
Speaker 1: watching each evening for changes that, though only appeared when
Speaker 1: the building was full, busy readers, shifting groups, splacards rattling
Speaker 1: like nervous ghosts. Occasionally a book there seen stubborn about
Speaker 1: its slip or annetition, would revert to something I'd never
Speaker 1: seen before, matching a story A just overheard from a patron,
Speaker 1: tall looking at a table. It was difficult not to
Speaker 1: wonder if we were all unconsciously tuning the record together,
Speaker 1: letting the facts float a little, shifting the stones. Because
Speaker 1: everyone remembered the river is a bit wider, or shallower,
Speaker 1: or farther east. A possibility startled me. If what mattered
Speaker 1: in a library was less what truly happened than what
Speaker 1: was convincingly remembered, than even chaos had his place. The
Speaker 1: contradiction was no longer just in the cards, but in
Speaker 1: a kind of collective a need to come invention. No
Speaker 1: single slip or nay more annotation could be counted unto
Speaker 1: stay the facts, and the librarians were always writing or
Speaker 1: counted as a record. Late one afternoon, after a long
Speaker 1: shuffle reshelving biographies, mister Ray caught me eyeing the sub
Speaker 1: basement door, where old inventory was kept and rumors of
Speaker 1: lost ledges abounded. If you really want to see library
Speaker 1: times behaving, he said, voice pitched for mischief, try the
Speaker 1: basement archouve. Sometimes boxes will lie about what's inside. We
Speaker 1: keep a list just in case. With a wink, he
Speaker 1: handed me a battered access key, metal scar from dozens
Speaker 1: of hands invitation and dare in one. I waited until
Speaker 1: the next slow morning rain, feathering the glass, and asked
Speaker 1: Janine if she needed anything brought up from below old reference.
Speaker 1: Perhaps she barely glanced up. If you find an original
Speaker 1: French dictionary, that's mine. Otherwise, don't let the boxes multiply
Speaker 1: on you. The basement was as I'd expected, pickled light,
Speaker 1: aisles of label dust with the kush of things waiting
Speaker 1: for rediscovery. Boxes sat in pyramids, stacks organized by someone
Speaker 1: whom we either trusted in chaos were no longer believed
Speaker 1: in numbers at all. Newspapers half bound in twine microvumbriels,
Speaker 1: the odd vhsque set walls of abandoned computer pots. In
Speaker 1: one corner, under a fireproof blanket was an unlabeled box
Speaker 1: marked in black pen do not shelve reference inside three books,
Speaker 1: one children's at this cartoon style, a batter of French cookbook,
Speaker 1: and an illustrated almanac, each with a touched and slit
Speaker 1: each stamp for years far in the future twenty eighty
Speaker 1: nine for the cookbok, full of recipes that, as far
Speaker 1: as I could tell, required ingredients not sold in any
Speaker 1: market now twenty ninety six. For the almanac. The slup's
Speaker 1: name knew never seen librarians s choudhurry a greeves with
Speaker 1: initials typed and then crossed out, replaced by fresh call
Speaker 1: on closer inspect small edits to These slips had a
Speaker 1: paid since they were packed in an added return date,
Speaker 1: a margin note about special shelving. Sequent I turned to
Speaker 1: the books themselves. Their annotations didn't match the shelf coppers upstairs.
Speaker 1: One outside notes in careful French. Another contained a recipe
Speaker 1: for a nutritional gel Peelanto Bay Cp. Forty nine, which
Speaker 1: did not exist in any other version. The Almanac included
Speaker 1: a description of a city festival that, as far as
Speaker 1: I recall, was never held. I pulled my phone to
Speaker 1: check nothing in city histories, not in mister rais carefully
Speaker 1: and ex festival list. With a box in hand and
Speaker 1: a rising sense of gentle delighted disorientation, I brought it
Speaker 1: upstairs for review. When I showed Janine and mister Ray,
Speaker 1: they shared a sharp look, more curious than alarmed. Together
Speaker 1: we decided to test the special shelving secrets suggested by
Speaker 1: the slits shelving. The future dated cookook in different places
Speaker 1: in the reference section, making notes as we went for
Speaker 1: one brief hour. Nearby reference books began to update themselves.
Speaker 1: The City Almanac gained a brand new ol entry for
Speaker 1: a festival of adaptive lanterns, then reverted by closing time
Speaker 1: to a standard winter calendar. The French Cuok gained, then
Speaker 1: Lows lost a set of annotated vegan recipes twice over
Speaker 1: depending on wharen When we shelved the anomaly book, it
Speaker 1: was like the air itself rippled, or more precisely, like
Speaker 1: the memory of what blonde in a book danced at
Speaker 1: the edge of decision, depending on who was looking and
Speaker 1: who was present. We called it inventory night. In informal
Speaker 1: gathering were staff and a few regular patrons agreed to
Speaker 1: join in trying as a group to test the reference shelves.
Speaker 1: Mister Ria laid out as batteredless, Paul contributed from the
Speaker 1: children's wing, and even mister Arnos lingered quietly bemused as
Speaker 1: we placed books, compared records, and ask group members to
Speaker 1: recall events or recipes or maps. The library scene to
Speaker 1: briefly aligned to everyone's expectations. One City History gained an
Speaker 1: entire summer parade of the March of Magpie's on page
Speaker 1: one hundred ten after Janine's war. She remembered it from
Speaker 1: her childhood. The book conferreed her for the night, firmly
Speaker 1: for the entry to vanish by morning. Another participant, a
Speaker 1: young Chefney Malof, recognized her vegan recipe in the cookok
Speaker 1: that didn't belong to nineteen seventy eight, though she insisted
Speaker 1: she copied it years ago. The rest of us drew diagrams,
Speaker 1: took notes, compared logs. None of us could ex explain
Speaker 1: why the maps too expended or contracted to favor different
Speaker 1: decades depending on which wing of the library we worked in.
Speaker 1: Nobody paniced. Instead, there was a strange collective exhilaration AMoD
Speaker 1: I recall from great school science fairs that sense of
Speaker 1: the extraordinary hiding in plain sight. The air carried more laughter,
Speaker 1: more midnight debate, the night herd and years. I realized
Speaker 1: then that curiosity when shared souls feared the way sunlight
Speaker 1: erodes old spiderweb. By midnight, as we wrapped up in
Speaker 1: the rest drifted out into the froste air, I stood
Speaker 1: at the entrance to circulation, holding one of the oldest,
Speaker 1: most spattered books in my folder, a City Gquizittier that
Speaker 1: have forever lottered on the shelf, collecting slits from every ear.
Speaker 1: I checked the in paper and for the first time
Speaker 1: saw my own name written in what looked like my
Speaker 1: hand but dated for three years ahead. The pattern was
Speaker 1: now clear in a way no record could have explained
Speaker 1: the libraries, truth moved with us, with our prisons and memory.
Speaker 1: Slip dates and records were ways we translated memory into
Speaker 1: matter and back again. The books themselves, the catalog, the routines.
Speaker 1: Everything was infrastructure for a deeper process, a patchwork of
Speaker 1: collective mind and shifting story. And for the first time
Speaker 1: in weeks, I did want to assolve the anomaly, only
Speaker 1: to keep watching how a city, its people, and its
Speaker 1: passed and future re arrange each other every day, one
Speaker 1: check out, one return for the time the city guiztee
Speaker 1: balanced in my hand, with that impossible slip bearing my name,
Speaker 1: and a day three years too far ahead, the fluorescent
Speaker 1: library light bending over the scuff cover. I stood there,
Speaker 1: heart quietly tapping, with a mix of embarrassment and thrill,
Speaker 1: tracing the shape of my signature, my own, undoubtedly by
Speaker 1: the memory of my own. Others made their way out, past,
Speaker 1: closing footsteps, softening down the corridor, misake, their laughter echoing
Speaker 1: in places the light bulbs never quite reached. I ran
Speaker 1: my thumb across the slip, half expecting ning to be wet,
Speaker 1: or to smear, or to vanish. The second I tried
Speaker 1: to show some one else the library was settling into
Speaker 1: its night time hush, though shifting shells and air in
Speaker 1: books asleep for the moment, the usual electric come joined
Speaker 1: by something else, a sense that the air around me
Speaker 1: remembered something I had not yet done, as if I
Speaker 1: were part of a performance that hadn't reached its cue.
Speaker 1: That night, sleep didn't quite fit. I lay awaken, flat
Speaker 1: on Norch Street, inventory cause and marginalia flickering through my mind.
Speaker 1: I try it, almost stubbornly, to sort at all slips, dates,
Speaker 1: phantom librarians, borrowed recipes, ever, shifting maps. The books that
Speaker 1: were wrote themselves were never a group, remembered them together,
Speaker 1: but never in perfect agreement. But it was clear now
Speaker 1: that the mystery wasn't in clocks or paper or mischief,
Speaker 1: even if that's what it had seemed at first. It
Speaker 1: didn't hide in tapos or deliberate confusion, but existed because
Speaker 1: people me Genine, mister Ray Paula, the chef, mister Andrews Mahla,
Speaker 1: even the children with their extra kingdoms, passed memory back
Speaker 1: and forth every day, using books as a bridge. What
Speaker 1: I was holding on to was not a factual error,
Speaker 1: but a record alive in the same way our recollections
Speaker 1: are checked out, returned a raised overeddin, ever the same
Speaker 1: between two readings, but always feeling somehow like the truth
Speaker 1: at the moment you hold it. The next morning, the
Speaker 1: fog on Nord Street clung to the brick, and I
Speaker 1: greeted it with a kind of anticipation. Were freshed. To
Speaker 1: spite the restless night, I arrived at the library before
Speaker 1: the first regulars, letting myself in with the walkegen entrusted
Speaker 1: me with on Saturdays. At the intick desk, the folders
Speaker 1: sat a disturbed, the old anomalies, stacked in the same
Speaker 1: patience they'd learned for a hundred years. There was no
Speaker 1: point I knew in photocopying the slips yet again, or
Speaker 1: in trying to catch the ch change. The notion of
Speaker 1: pinning down a phenomenon that lived in a shifting overlap
Speaker 1: between what people remembered and what was written, and felt
Speaker 1: small now, like consisting the river was only the water
Speaker 1: and never the current beneath. I spent the early shift
Speaker 1: in a gentle trance of sorting. Every so often my
Speaker 1: hand drifted over volumes with odd weight, thinking about what
Speaker 1: changed since the night before. The kokook with vegan recipes
Speaker 1: had came and when the French dictionary, still eluding Janine
Speaker 1: the parade that had surfaced for a single night in
Speaker 1: the City Almanac. But the question that now not quiety
Speaker 1: wasn't just how the record change, but what drew the
Speaker 1: line between them being altered and why. I thought about
Speaker 1: the groups, how in the heady moment of inventory night,
Speaker 1: a single memory could propagate like rumor the book adopting
Speaker 1: and discarding maps with stories to mash who ever read it.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see if those boundaries shifted in any pattern,
Speaker 1: if memory was truly contagious, or if the physical place
Speaker 1: itself is part of brooks and unexpected corridors was nudging
Speaker 1: the story along, amplifying some recollections while letting others fade out.
Speaker 1: I started by quietly mapping him. I'p had the various wings,
Speaker 1: scribbling down features as I moved, Which dax fel at prison,
Speaker 1: which seemed closer to the pass, Which book showed the
Speaker 1: most change after a particular the early busy story time
Speaker 1: or crowded afternoon, The old Art Deco wing glowed creamy
Speaker 1: and solid, with titles in gold across the spines. Everything
Speaker 1: hunkoed into the thick hush of pass Grunda. The newer
Speaker 1: annex modern lines clashing against the rest, felt lighter, maybe
Speaker 1: not because of the white walls, but because it collected
Speaker 1: energy from people who still expected things to change. The
Speaker 1: map for nat At Kanna arrive around ten thirty, rolling
Speaker 1: her cutstacked with city pans and surveyor's match she checked
Speaker 1: out from other branches. She saw me sketching and offered
Speaker 1: an easy comparing the layout to the nineteen fifties. Not exactly,
Speaker 1: I said, trying to trace where our more eccentric books
Speaker 1: tend to land. Her eyes narrowed in polite confusion, but
Speaker 1: she humored me, reaching for her own Printats he know
Speaker 1: the map's section is weirder than most. Every so often
Speaker 1: the city boundary schief. I had one map last year
Speaker 1: that showed an extra revenue. I thought I'd lost my
Speaker 1: mind it did any one else see it? Only mister Ray,
Speaker 1: He said it must have been a planning error. But
Speaker 1: when I showed Pola it was already gone. I thought
Speaker 1: about the barid that materialized for an evening and vanished
Speaker 1: with the sun rise. Let's check just for Kix. If
Speaker 1: the art Deco room's history books match what you have
Speaker 1: in your surveys. We hold you heavy city history books
Speaker 1: to read and table by the Decco windows. One copy
Speaker 1: with a haunted, waxy dust jacket laid out a list
Speaker 1: of anual events, including a festival of glass Land, into
Speaker 1: a phrase that surfaced and disappeared with the regularity of tides.
Speaker 1: Hannily for her own maps, eyebrows steadily climbing. This can't be,
Speaker 1: she said quietly, on this plan from nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 1: There's an amph theater labeled for the festival, but the
Speaker 1: lined registry has nothing. We checked the catalog database. There
Speaker 1: the festival blinked into existence for three minutes before vanishing again.
Speaker 1: When refreshed, I felt for the first time of full
Speaker 1: body certainty. This wasn't an error or joke, but a
Speaker 1: fluid summing up the books and building, quietly adapting around
Speaker 1: the intersection of memory, location and vulnerable certainty. Over lunches
Speaker 1: and coffee in the staff room, I drew in the
Speaker 1: others with different degrees of openness. Jeanine, guarded as ever,
Speaker 1: dismiss my new notes with a gentle If you are lucky,
Speaker 1: every library in the country has a story or too
Speaker 1: go missing. It is the human touch in the record keeping,
Speaker 1: or in our case, the humans mudge. But Jeanine, you've
Speaker 1: joke for months that no other libraries cookbook's self update
Speaker 1: ap preassed, she grinned, acknowledging the gentle contest. That's fair,
Speaker 1: But sometimes community one something to be true so badly
Speaker 1: the books just give in. It's not the end of
Speaker 1: the world. Besides, you're here on You're now written into
Speaker 1: this just as much as you read it. I couldn't
Speaker 1: argue my own name on the impossible slit said as much.
Speaker 1: Paula meanwhile, leaned him with the gleeful energy of someone
Speaker 1: who'd always suspected there was a trick afoot her contribution.
Speaker 1: You think children's and my genations could shape the library.
Speaker 1: Last month, one cave return a fantasy book, and when
Speaker 1: I open it there was a map of an extra
Speaker 1: kingdom brought in with colored pencil, not in the original,
Speaker 1: but somehow printed to only she and I seemed to
Speaker 1: see it. When I showed it to Janine, it was
Speaker 1: back to normal. What did the kids say? She just
Speaker 1: whispered the kingdom's name like it was a secret she'd
Speaker 1: been given. Sometimes I think the library lets us all
Speaker 1: co author for a few minutes at a time. Mister
Speaker 1: Braystake was gentler, more philosophical. Every library in the world
Speaker 1: keeps two stories, the official record and the one everybody
Speaker 1: actually remembers. How used to worry about reconciling the two
Speaker 1: Now I think recasilation isn't the point. The record is
Speaker 1: a living thing. It's only as fixed as a community
Speaker 1: that cares about it. In the afternoons, I made my
Speaker 1: rounds beyond staff, I canvassed the regulars. The elderly couple
Speaker 1: in the corner recalled the romance section being twice as
Speaker 1: large were titles nobody else remembered. The local historian insisted
Speaker 1: he'd read about his centennial parade, missing from every extant
Speaker 1: city record. Marla the chef grumbled about learning a recipe
Speaker 1: for orange blossoms, to that, even when she scoured internet,
Speaker 1: didn't exist anywhere except in her memory of our batt
Speaker 1: of Kupok. With the updating cards, it dawned on me
Speaker 1: that what we thought of as anomalist were not glitches.
Speaker 1: They were instead something like pressure points. Surfacing were people's
Speaker 1: certainty about fruit, about parades, about kingdoms, Robe against the
Speaker 1: accumulation of the collective archive. Sometimes the book told the story,
Speaker 1: Sometimes we told it to the book. The more I
Speaker 1: traced the phenomenon, the less I believe knowledge ever settled
Speaker 1: easily into history. I hung up a paper on intake corkboard.
Speaker 1: If you remember a book, recipe, event, or even a
Speaker 1: shelf that seems not to exist any more, let's talk.
Speaker 1: By the end of the week, half a dozen slips
Speaker 1: dotted it wrote about the missing amphitheater. A patron remembered
Speaker 1: a half translated French novel she had taken out as
Speaker 1: a girl but can't find since nineteen eighty four. A
Speaker 1: child wrote with elaborate vewls about the Book of the
Speaker 1: Shifting Houses. The responses revealed as much about people as
Speaker 1: about books. A construction were commumbled about as grand for
Speaker 1: the stories see me more real each time stories changed
Speaker 1: in a new edition. A college student wandered aloud if
Speaker 1: the wing of the library that always fell colder belonged
Speaker 1: to the old city. Marla mused, in a little wistful
Speaker 1: offered two seat her favorite recipe for Turkish lndel steward
Speaker 1: to a community notebook, just to see if it would
Speaker 1: show up. Later in the cookbook's margins. It was Paula
Speaker 1: who helped me take the idea further lots experiment. She suggested,
Speaker 1: take a book with lots of different memories and read
Speaker 1: it together in every wing, then compare notes. The perfect
Speaker 1: candidate an old, battered edition of city festivals and Parades,
Speaker 1: slip History, nearly opig beneath layers of stamp and pencil.
Speaker 1: We gathered one afternoon in the new annex, myself, Paula,
Speaker 1: Mister Ray, Marla Hannah, and two regulars reading a chapter aloud,
Speaker 1: each contributing stories of what they'd heard from family on memory.
Speaker 1: For an hour on their a sun furun through the
Speaker 1: annexes odd mismatched windows, we debated the details of the
Speaker 1: Lanton Parade, whether it featured glass floats, whether it was
Speaker 1: held in August or October, whether the lemonade was pink
Speaker 1: or yellow. By the time we finished, the book itself
Speaker 1: reflected our confusionist marged annotation in the margin echoed Marla's
Speaker 1: passing joke about the torch dance that nearly set City
Speaker 1: Hall ablaze. When we compared the official history book in
Speaker 1: the Art deco wing next door, the dance was there
Speaker 1: as if always ed been in the main collection, it
Speaker 1: was missing. Later, when mister Ray took the same become
Speaker 1: for the weekend, he returned it swearing that Lanton Parade
Speaker 1: wasn't mentioned at all. We wrote down our recollections before
Speaker 1: and after, mapping how our reading changed what any given
Speaker 1: book would offer. Next, nobody lost their own memory. Each
Speaker 1: was firm in what had always been there for them.
Speaker 1: But the record slippery realigned itself for whoever collectively held it.
Speaker 1: It became clear the library responded to the expectations and
Speaker 1: needs of its users, yes, but also to the space itself.
Speaker 1: Hannah and I developed a new chart. When specific books
Speaker 1: or genres were shelved in the nineteen seventies annex. They
Speaker 1: began picking up details, photographs, and effimmer from later decades
Speaker 1: in a Decca wing. Pro war events expanded their influence,
Speaker 1: as if location and memory prehabited the same patch of ground.
Speaker 1: The next test, we attempted too seed a new event
Speaker 1: into the wrecord. Quietly but deliberately, at coffee, I told
Speaker 1: Janine a story about a mythical city event to Firefly Festival,
Speaker 1: where everyone released paper lanterns down the river to commemorate
Speaker 1: Mitamer I described it with invented names, borrowed details, and
Speaker 1: a deadline for the annual event. That afternoon, Hannah wandered
Speaker 1: back with the most recent year city history in it,
Speaker 1: a new footnote describing the firefly Festival with a date
Speaker 1: on a passing anecdote. By the next day, the entry
Speaker 1: was gone before a brief time story had become record.
Speaker 1: It was subtle, never sinister. The knowledge was reciprocal, a
Speaker 1: cyclical negotiation. The community supported the slip in the book,
Speaker 1: and the book, for a while, supported the community's memory.
Speaker 1: No single voice dominated For long, the record and the
Speaker 1: archive drifted together, anchored perhaps by the weight of collective
Speaker 1: longing or certainty. The more I mapped the holes and
Speaker 1: rooms of the building, the more architecture itself seemed to
Speaker 1: shape the phenomenon. I dug into archive blueprints and renovation
Speaker 1: documents squirrel the way in the City file Room Downtown,
Speaker 1: many yellow stamp of dates as erratic as the slips.
Speaker 1: There were references to lost rooms, never properly mapped, discrepancies
Speaker 1: between where the plan suggested a wall should be and
Speaker 1: worre corridor in truth ran an old building supervisor, now
Speaker 1: long since retired, recalled half brick doors never matching any
Speaker 1: floor plan, a stairwell that dead ended after one landing,
Speaker 1: a closet window that looked out on nothing at all.
Speaker 1: With mister Ray's help, we tested is further, moving a
Speaker 1: battered atlas from the main stacks to the reference wing,
Speaker 1: then to the annex. We charted small changes in one
Speaker 1: the river moved by a block in another, new roads
Speaker 1: snaked into the city diagram, then faded again when we
Speaker 1: returned the book floor plans, it turned out, weren't just
Speaker 1: products of chance, but reflected the interplay between the library's
Speaker 1: own history and the patterns of its patrons. Books placed
Speaker 1: in places with heavy for traffic swelled with annotation, but
Speaker 1: is left alone for weeks grew silent. Sometimes I catched
Speaker 1: myself on a late afternoon, tracing a slow arc through
Speaker 1: the old building, feeling the twitch of something just out
Speaker 1: of sight, a sense not of being watched, but of
Speaker 1: being very gently held in live expectancy by the record
Speaker 1: the walls and the stories that had filled them for decades.
Speaker 1: I felt an ache of humility and of affection, as
Speaker 1: if I were taking part in one lawn unceasing conversation,
Speaker 1: one that would continue with were without me. The digital catalog,
Speaker 1: so trusted by newcomers and staff alike, proved just as mutable.
Speaker 1: On days after group readings or after a particularly lively
Speaker 1: children's story hour, it updated itself with new entries, phantom
Speaker 1: events of staff names that only appeared for a few
Speaker 1: hours before vanishing. I watched Marla, frustrated but entertained, try
Speaker 1: writing her missing stew recipe into a returned cookbook unless
Speaker 1: other patrons remembered it without the recipe vanished, sometimes replaced
Speaker 1: by a different one, at the other times simply dissolving
Speaker 1: into blank space recipes. I began to suspect followed the
Speaker 1: rules of oral tradition. When a community needed them, the
Speaker 1: library applied, but only for as long as the memory
Speaker 1: was shared. One afternoon in the Children's Way, Paul hosted
Speaker 1: a group reading of an old fairy tale. She let
Speaker 1: the children make up new adventures for the characters, and
Speaker 1: when she turned the pages afterwards, some of those new
Speaker 1: adventures had scribbled themselves briefly into the printed book. Illustrations
Speaker 1: expanded and died match to their game. A colleague claimed
Speaker 1: she saw whole new paragraphs for an hour, then found
Speaker 1: them missing on her next for shelving round. I started
Speaker 1: to see how much of the record wasn't about books
Speaker 1: at all, but the way we enacted memory together, How
Speaker 1: even disagreement, casual or passionate could press a claim on
Speaker 1: the archive. I tested this by gathering and disperate crewe Ganine, Hannah,
Speaker 1: Mister Ray, Marla Paul had a pair of rigulous read
Speaker 1: a passage aloud and asked each to recall it in turn.
Speaker 1: For a magical half hour, our recollection synchronized perfectly. As
Speaker 1: soon as we left, the alignment faded, a new divergence appeared.
Speaker 1: We chased the idea further, digging through all renovation plans
Speaker 1: with building codes that didn't match real rooms, books with
Speaker 1: sections that seemed to belong entirely to rumors, group readings
Speaker 1: that seeded fleeting consensus into the catalog. Sometimes the early
Speaker 1: evidence of a ghostly alignment was a brief collective, of course,
Speaker 1: that dissolved by the time coffee was finished. And then,
Speaker 1: after weeks of notes and comparisons, patiently thing and watching
Speaker 1: memories flare, merge and fade, came the moment everything came together.
Speaker 1: It was a slow rain tumbled Thursday. The library was
Speaker 1: full in it in group bluff by the periodicals, kids
Speaker 1: built cities with foam blocks. The chef Marla handed me
Speaker 1: that battered city history again the gazzeteer, She grumbled, look
Speaker 1: now it says. I returned it in two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: I was still in Chicago. Then we sat down at
Speaker 1: an empty table in the reference room. The map spread
Speaker 1: between us. Every slip and annotation in the gazeteer shimmered
Speaker 1: with erasures and additions. Names jumped through time, events re emerged,
Speaker 1: margins thick with cross outs. There in the top corner
Speaker 1: of the current slip, my name appeared three times, dates
Speaker 1: for two years past the prison and three years in
Speaker 1: the future. Marla is as well, and mister Ray's, and
Speaker 1: at the very bottom a y abbas dated precisely on
Speaker 1: to day. I looked at my own hand for comparison.
Speaker 1: The signature was mine, slightly neater perhaps than my usual scroll,
Speaker 1: but still mine. Unmistakably so. A cold rulled past through me.
Speaker 1: But now for the first time it didn't chill. I
Speaker 1: felt quietly ordinary, as if the wreco was returning me
Speaker 1: to myself as much as to anyone else. It was
Speaker 1: the oddest moment. Marla and I both touching the slip,
Speaker 1: then the cap of her pen then the slip again.
Speaker 1: How does that happen? She asked, amuse not alarmed forwards
Speaker 1: and backwards. Did we already return it? Or haven't we yet?
Speaker 1: I shrugged, smiling. Maybe it's all true at once, because
Speaker 1: every time the story is needed, it's written again. Maybe
Speaker 1: the record is a draft cap forever in pencil. As
Speaker 1: I set the book back on the reshelving cot, my
Speaker 1: mind played through everything, the slips, the shells, the shifting annotations,
Speaker 1: the old room swallowing new corridors. The library now looked,
Speaker 1: in every detail, like a system designed to hold not
Speaker 1: one truth, but a living overlap, a reality written and
Speaker 1: be written with every shared encounter, every group memory, every
Speaker 1: hopeful suggestion. Slips were not evidence of error. They were,
Speaker 1: I realized, with the sudden, deep warmth, the residue of
Speaker 1: every version our community had ever needed to hold on to.
Speaker 1: No two people's memory was ever the sum the record's beauty.
Speaker 1: Its trustworthiness was in its provisional kindness. Books, slips, catalog entries.
Speaker 1: They performed the miracle again and again, creating room for
Speaker 1: the story that someone hoped to find. I recalled mister
Speaker 1: Ray's phrase, some books never quite decide who they've belonged
Speaker 1: to or when he was right, the record wasn't a ledger,
Speaker 1: but a living or her. We all performed ourselves here,
Speaker 1: returned and borrowed, lost and refound, each time shaping the
Speaker 1: library and weighs the building, the community, and time itself
Speaker 1: quietly allowed. Walking through the stacks with the Rochelle City History,
Speaker 1: my name nowither for some future date. I caught Janine's
Speaker 1: conspiratorial glance. Another miracle. She teased, something like that, or
Speaker 1: just a reminder. Libraries always know who needs to belong.
Speaker 1: Shoving the gazeteer, I stood for a moment, fingers trailing
Speaker 1: the spine, feeling quietly both part of the record and
Speaker 1: the record itself. The boundary between what had happened and
Speaker 1: what would happen had never been fixed, and I was
Speaker 1: glad for it. Every patron, it seemed, was forever involved
Speaker 1: in the making, and were making not just of the stories,
Speaker 1: but of the community itself. I closed the book gently,
Speaker 1: the slip still inside, not exactly proof, but perfectly real.
Speaker 1: All around me the library hummed with small acts of
Speaker 1: remembering and forgetting, of discovery and restoration as people came
Speaker 1: and went, and the stories bent, always a little toward
Speaker 1: those who needed them most. I looked once more at
Speaker 1: the return slip with my name dated a week from now,
Speaker 1: and felt the profere joy of being a borrow and
Speaker 1: a returner at the same time. Perhaps that's where all
Speaker 1: knowledge was, not the fixed keeping of fact, but the
Speaker 1: kind return of possibility, creative and provisional, like the library,
Speaker 1: like memory, like community itself. Each draft of the slip
Speaker 1: holy true for a moment to all who loved it,
Speaker 1: and that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.