Speaker 1: Hollo. I'm moalcan stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: The first time it happened, Leo and I were hunting
Speaker 2: for pirates. We'd spent the late morning browsing the shiny,
Speaker 2: newly shelved children's books near the main stairwell. He loved
Speaker 2: anything promising secrets, swords, or hidden treasure. I was happy
Speaker 2: to drift after him, half listening, content to watch him
Speaker 2: puzzle over cover art and page thickness, his freckled fingers
Speaker 2: darting to next long before I could finish a paragraph.
Speaker 2: We agreed, well, I agreed, while Leo beamed approval to
Speaker 2: try a staff recommended adventure story. The desk clerk gave
Speaker 2: us a slip of paper back room left. After the maps,
Speaker 2: you'll see the old fire exit. We'd never searched that
Speaker 2: far north in the library before. The building's sprawl was legendary,
Speaker 2: built up over half a century, with each generation's idea
Speaker 2: of modernity layered as brick or paneling or vinyl. One
Speaker 2: corridor was linoleum, smelling faintly of floor polish and shoe rubber.
Speaker 2: Next we passed an elderly drinking fountain. Burbling under a
Speaker 2: wall of yellowed civic portraits. A short flight of stairs
Speaker 2: descended to carpet slashed with curious triangles, the geometry of
Speaker 2: some long forgotten designer. At first I thought we'd wandered
Speaker 2: the wrong way. Each turned both familiar and subtly off,
Speaker 2: like a dream version of the library I knew. Eventually
Speaker 2: we arrived in the room, a squat, slightly musty annex
Speaker 2: lit by late morning suns slanting through glass blocks. The
Speaker 2: silence here was different, less the purposeful hush of readers,
Speaker 2: more like a lull, a space holding its breath. The
Speaker 2: shelves seemed older, uneven in color and height, topped with
Speaker 2: patchwork signs written by many hands. A round table stood
Speaker 2: near the window with a stack of children's books in
Speaker 2: bright cloth covers. Leo pounced eagerly. I was slow, brushing
Speaker 2: my finger tips across the bindings, my old habit, almost
Speaker 2: a secret handshake with every institution that prided itself on order.
Speaker 2: That's when I noticed the first oddity. I couldn't spot
Speaker 2: a single sticker. My brain did the steps before I
Speaker 2: knew what I was doing. Scan for the dewy decimal
Speaker 2: in crisp black on white. Check for faint donor plaques
Speaker 2: pressed along the inside cover. Look for barcodes with their
Speaker 2: neat machine printed digits. Instead, nothing, not a scrap. I
Speaker 2: pulled three books at random, one about city gardens, another
Speaker 2: a mystery involving a lost dog, and a battered anthology
Speaker 2: with only stories for young folks left on its cover.
Speaker 2: No marks at all except for ordinary printed titles, some
Speaker 2: faded to a mere whisper. No date stamps, no property
Speaker 2: of City Central Library, no indelible red pen, no sign
Speaker 2: of the countless hands that should have touched and recorded
Speaker 2: these items. I replaced them on the shelf, each spine.
Speaker 2: Now a hiny, unsettled question. How did the library remember
Speaker 2: where these books belonged, or, for that matter, even that
Speaker 2: they existed. I retraced my steps, briefly, peering at neighboring shelves.
Speaker 2: Still nothing. Every book was naked of classification or claim.
Speaker 2: Leo tugged at a corner of my sleeve, holding up
Speaker 2: a particularly gaudy looking chapter book. This room is extra quiet, Grandma,
Speaker 2: he said, I think it's sleepier here. His voice was
Speaker 2: bright but soft. The words seemed to drift upward rather
Speaker 2: than outward. He had already begun peering into the story,
Speaker 2: unconcerned content, I realized, just to float in the gentle
Speaker 2: oddness of a room that to him was simply cozy.
Speaker 2: For a second, I considered asking the nearest desk, but
Speaker 2: there was no one visible, just the gentle hum of
Speaker 2: the vents, the distant clatter beyond the closed door. I
Speaker 2: shelved my question, telling myself i'd circle back later. My
Speaker 2: sense of order prickled, Yet the world didn't tilt. Maybe
Speaker 2: some one somewhere had a reason for this. Perhaps these
Speaker 2: were overflow donations, or volunteer projects pending inspection, or special
Speaker 2: reading room copies not for circulation. Still, I found myself
Speaker 2: glancing back, cataloging what I'd seen. Leo, much more at
Speaker 2: home with stories than systems, tugged me forward toward his
Speaker 2: fictional pirates, and the mystery faded for the time into
Speaker 2: the bright distraction of his adventures. That evening, after I
Speaker 2: dropped Leo at his mother s, I sat with a
Speaker 2: mug of tea and let my mind drift. My fingers
Speaker 2: drummed quietly on the kitchen counter while my eyes traced
Speaker 2: the faint stains on my ledger. It was a minor riddle,
Speaker 2: I told myself nothing more than an untidy corner in
Speaker 2: an institution otherwise famous for its rigor. The world was
Speaker 2: full of exceptions, but I washed the dishes with extra purpose,
Speaker 2: Caught off guard by how the question kept winding itself
Speaker 2: around the back of my mind. Maybe I would let
Speaker 2: it go, or maybe, as so often in life after teaching,
Speaker 2: I would not. I didn't set out to become a
Speaker 2: watcher of order, but after four decades corralling third and
Speaker 2: fifth graders, overseeing hundreds of lunch counts, math drills, and
Speaker 2: attendant slips, my world established itself in patterns. Numbers were
Speaker 2: gentle sentinels, class lists, decimal points, multiplication tables, marching on
Speaker 2: laminated posters in bright rows. Even after retirement, my affection
Speaker 2: for systems and their secret harmonies never slipped away. My
Speaker 2: days were gentler now, short morning walks through the city's
Speaker 2: puzzle piece neighborhoods clustered with half renovated row houses, and
Speaker 2: the occasional surviving bakery. Most afternoons found me tucked in
Speaker 2: the library's reading lounge, meeting Leo after school or catching
Speaker 2: up with a weekly book group. Retirement was for me
Speaker 2: a chance to pursue curiosities lightly to save us slow
Speaker 2: puzzles and city council bulletins to take comfort in the
Speaker 2: labeling of things. Leo, mercureurial and full of importunate questions,
Speaker 2: was my favorite companion, if not always the one who
Speaker 2: made life tidiest. He toggled effortlessly between fact and fancy.
Speaker 2: Our running games included name the flag, flash cards, then
Speaker 2: inventing a new country for each one. He loved riddles,
Speaker 2: especially the sort that resisted a singular answer, and he
Speaker 2: had a gift for drawing connections between the wildest subjects,
Speaker 2: whether dinosaur bones, chess or storm drains. Sometimes I believed
Speaker 2: he could have mapped the city by smell alone, or
Speaker 2: by which blocks seemed safest for day dreams. Our city,
Speaker 2: too was a palimpsest, layers jostling for recognition, brick with steel,
Speaker 2: trim new glass beside chipped stone. Everything in conversation with
Speaker 2: the past, I saw it reflected in the Central Library,
Speaker 2: an institution purportedly at the city's heart. The library had rules, rituals,
Speaker 2: whole generations of readers trained to find comfort there. Holiday
Speaker 2: puppet shows bloomed out of the meeting rooms, migration between
Speaker 2: poetry readings and tax clinics filled every odd hour. There
Speaker 2: were regulars at every table, the crossword woman with the
Speaker 2: pink scarf, the wiry man with three historical novels at once,
Speaker 2: Clusters of home schooled kids playing impromptu geography games in
Speaker 2: the children's wing. I found satisfaction in these small habits.
Speaker 2: The weekly ritual of scanning for missing books, a minor
Speaker 2: game after years of keeping class room inventory, tickled some
Speaker 2: vestigial muscle for order. I'd grown used to trusting in
Speaker 2: tidy systems, catalog numbers, the warmth of barcodes, the polite
Speaker 2: machinery that let you believe nothing would ever be truly lost. This,
Speaker 2: I think, is why the numberless room, though hardly alarming,
Speaker 2: left such an impression. It did not fit the pattern.
Speaker 2: The entire library was a marvel of codification spreadsheets, merged
Speaker 2: with Ledger cards, digital back ups. Donors logged and thanked.
Speaker 2: There was a place for everything, and yet here was
Speaker 2: an entire alcove, if it could be called that uncataloged,
Speaker 2: freed from sticker or system. My mind kept twisting around it,
Speaker 2: the way a mathematician returns quietly to a deceptively simple contradiction.
Speaker 2: I suppose most people would have shrugged, But for me,
Speaker 2: there was something oddly tender, almost embarrassing, about letting such
Speaker 2: a gap persist, unexamined, a loose thread, begging just a
Speaker 2: gentle tug. On our next scheduled visit a week later,
Speaker 2: Leo's hand in mine and an armful of checked out
Speaker 2: chapter books, curiosity overruled all hesitation. After we dropped Leo's
Speaker 2: last paperback at the returned chute, I found Sarah, one
Speaker 2: of the senior librarians, shepherding a story time group through
Speaker 2: the main row tunder Sarah was unfailingly patient with every
Speaker 2: cranky patron, and had, over two decades built an intellect
Speaker 2: both sharp and forgiving. She smiled as Leo flashed his
Speaker 2: good Reading Star sticker and grinned warily when I leaned
Speaker 2: in voice low. I wanted to ask about that back
Speaker 2: reading room, I said, the one passed the city maps,
Speaker 2: no call numbers, no stickers. Sarah's brow creased in a
Speaker 2: modest uncharacteristic hesitation. Oh ah, yes, that room. She smoothed,
Speaker 2: her vest, eyes darting for a second before fixing on mine.
Speaker 2: I think them those are mostly extra donations, or maybe
Speaker 2: uncataloged spares, maybe overflow from oh, some grant project a
Speaker 2: year or two ago. Her fingers fluttered, as though swatting gnats.
Speaker 2: Sometimes things pile up there. I'll have to check if
Speaker 2: they're even supposed to be on the shelves. She brightened, suddenly, pivoting.
Speaker 2: Did you see the Origami Club display in the lobby.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely wonderful, I pressed, just gently. But if I
Speaker 2: wanted to borrow a book from there, she shrugged, half laughing,
Speaker 2: bring it to the desk. I suppose it depends what
Speaker 2: you picked. I'm not sure they're in the circulation system
Speaker 2: right now. Things are always moving around, you know. Later,
Speaker 2: as a test, I did just that, selecting two books
Speaker 2: from the numberless shelves under pretense of curiosity Leo has
Speaker 2: ever joined. At the desk, we met the usual circulation clerk,
Speaker 2: a college aged woman with neat braids in an earbud
Speaker 2: tucked behind one ear. I presented the first book open,
Speaker 2: the second closed. She examined the covers, then frowned, scanning
Speaker 2: first one cover, then the next. There were no barcodes,
Speaker 2: no stamped numbers. She whispered to a second clerk disappeared briefly.
Speaker 2: Leo was fascinated, craning his neck to peek behind the
Speaker 2: circulation wall. After a minute or two, the clerk returned,
Speaker 2: cheeks slightly pink. I'm sorry, but these aren't in the
Speaker 2: system right now. They might be getting reprocessed or belonged
Speaker 2: to the local donation lot. We are updating all those,
Speaker 2: I think. But the reading room is open to the public.
Speaker 2: She nodded, non committal. Oh, yes, the room is open,
Speaker 2: just not every book is um checked out through the
Speaker 2: system at the moment. She hesitated, then added, You're free
Speaker 2: to read them in there, though, if you have any
Speaker 2: other questions, mister Pattle is in his office on three.
Speaker 2: Maybe he knows more about the AH updates. We returned
Speaker 2: our borrowed children's book from the previous visit. It had
Speaker 2: been checked out in perfect order, a barcode, a pristine
Speaker 2: white rectangle, the city's rubber stamp inside the back cover. Leo,
Speaker 2: always restless, plopped it down and begged to reread the
Speaker 2: submarine chapter in the numberless room. I let him. He
Speaker 2: finished content, and we packed up for home that night.
Speaker 2: Sorting through our stack, I found the Submarine Adventure, but
Speaker 2: the bar code was gone. In its place was a
Speaker 2: faint outline and a patch of sticky residue rubbed The
Speaker 2: old rectangle remained smooth but empty, as if the sticker
Speaker 2: had melted away in sunlight. The interior rubber stamp was gone,
Speaker 2: replaced by a bare whiteness like the untouched page. Even
Speaker 2: the pencil due date had vanished beneath my eyes. I
Speaker 2: double checked the book was the same, same title, same
Speaker 2: dogg eared corners, but every mark that made it belong,
Speaker 2: that allowed it to be counted, was gone. I tried
Speaker 2: to check it in online item not found. My fingers
Speaker 2: trembled a little, not with fear, but with a mathematician's
Speaker 2: feverish doubt. Where precisely had the identifiers gone? And more importantly,
Speaker 2: how in a meticulously supervised building could such a thing persist?
Speaker 2: A question when properly seeded refuses to remain still by nature.
Speaker 2: I am not given to dramatics, nor do I enjoy
Speaker 2: turning sawdust into mystery. But there is a peculiar thrill
Speaker 2: when a pattern fails to resolve, a signal that something real,
Speaker 2: if only in the machinery of systems resists. Explanation I
Speaker 2: framed my next few days as experiment rather than obsession.
Speaker 2: Leo helped his natural mischief, waking up at the first
Speaker 2: whiff of secret library rules. On our next Saturday visit,
Speaker 2: I placed a hard back nonfiction book fresh from the
Speaker 2: new arrival's cart, complete with clear barcode inside, cover plate
Speaker 2: and Neon green science sticker inside my purse. I told
Speaker 2: Leo we would do library science, and he agreed. Donning
Speaker 2: the air of a tiny detective magnifying glass and digital
Speaker 2: camera ready, we spent thirty minutes in the numberless room.
Speaker 2: I read aloud from the mystery, keeping the purse at
Speaker 2: my feet. Leo giddy hopped about, sometimes placing other books
Speaker 2: in odd piles to see if they change. On our
Speaker 2: way out, I inspected the non fiction book. The sticker
Speaker 2: was missing, the barcode rectangle blank, the edges sticky and
Speaker 2: faintly ghosted by outline inside the donor plate had faded,
Speaker 2: just a fog of glue where crisp type had once
Speaker 2: named a miss Carroner C. H Habra as benefactor. In
Speaker 2: the quiet of the lobby, I tried to scan it
Speaker 2: at the self check item, not found. Undeterred, I tried
Speaker 2: again the following Tuesday, this time carrying in a battered
Speaker 2: magazine and an old library map. Same result. After fifteen
Speaker 2: minutes in the numberless room, the magazine's spine sticker had
Speaker 2: flaked off onto my sweater. The map's highlighted legend disappeared.
Speaker 2: No sign, not even with Leo's magnifying glass. At home,
Speaker 2: I thumbed through our digital photographs and noticed a further oddity.
Speaker 2: Sometimes the photos showed a fuzzy rectangle where a bar
Speaker 2: coat had been. Other times the space was just blank,
Speaker 2: as if the number had never been there. We puzzled
Speaker 2: and laughed. It's like trying to find the invisible ink.
Speaker 2: Leo said. This was enough to prompt grown up questions.
Speaker 2: The next afternoon, I found Denis near the reference desk.
Speaker 2: He was one of the college student pages, part time
Speaker 2: and cheerful, if not always precise. I flagged him politely, Dennis,
Speaker 2: have you shelved any books back in the little room,
Speaker 2: the one off the old maps. He raised his eyebrows
Speaker 2: and nodded, I pretty much do all the donations right now.
Speaker 2: I'm sure I put those on the shelf last week.
Speaker 2: He hesitated. I remember the stickers. I think actually come
Speaker 2: to think of it, He chewed his lip. I can't
Speaker 2: actually remember which ones they were or exactly where I
Speaker 2: put them, but I do remember stickers, or maybe I
Speaker 2: peeled them. Sorry, miss Alice, that was a blur. I
Speaker 2: checked in with missus Vernon when I was a new patron.
Speaker 2: She'd been the stentorian guardian at the main desk. Now retired,
Speaker 2: she still ran the Thursday book club and commanded a
Speaker 2: complicated personal card index of every patron's preferences. Oh that
Speaker 2: back room, I remember when it. We was city directories,
Speaker 2: big old tomes, brilliant blue or maybe green. We had
Speaker 2: shelf numbers written in ink back then, I think, or stickers.
Speaker 2: One year it was blue stickers. Her hand traced at
Speaker 2: memory's edge. Or did we just shelve by size? She
Speaker 2: shook her head. That part of the buildings changed a
Speaker 2: half dozen times since the nineties. Mister Pattill, the library manager,
Speaker 2: at least had a professional's aplom He welcomed me into
Speaker 2: his office, offered perfunctory tea, and nodded as I relayed
Speaker 2: my findings. We try to keep up with the renovations,
Speaker 2: but the north corner's always been a challenge, just not
Speaker 2: up to fire code, and the shelving s been updated piecemeal.
Speaker 2: We got special grants to rebuild part of it. But
Speaker 2: the old records are I'll admit Patchee I pressed. But
Speaker 2: the labeling system he grimmaced flipping a thin folder. Some
Speaker 2: of those notes were lost during the last move. Maybe
Speaker 2: last centuries card catalog has it. We switched to the
Speaker 2: new system in two. The room just wasn't a priority,
Speaker 2: truth be told. There were no clear records for any
Speaker 2: prior cataloging, just references to overflow, uncataloged annexed stock, nothing else.
Speaker 2: A volunteer miss Aka suggested cheerily, community donations are always
Speaker 2: processed in the back. Someone must have been behind. It
Speaker 2: was always a mess back there until it was. She
Speaker 2: squinted at the calendar, unsure when precisely anything had changed.
Speaker 2: I began my own hunt for gaps, cross referencing the
Speaker 2: library's online catalog with old city directories stashed in the
Speaker 2: reading room or what remained The years with missing books, confusingly,
Speaker 2: were also the years with missing directories. Indices jumped from
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven to nineteen ninety one with no explanation.
Speaker 2: It was like Sherlock Holmes's dog that didn't bark. The
Speaker 2: silence had its own evidence. Leo's fascination with the Magic
Speaker 2: Room grew. We spent one windy Thursday taking pictures of
Speaker 2: every available title, hoping to catch the loss in progress
Speaker 2: at home. His photos sometimes suggested the trace of raised numbers,
Speaker 2: a blurred three hundred two point three here, a faded
Speaker 2: orange square there. Sometimes nothing at all, just an ordinary
Speaker 2: book with no history. Leo insisted he could almost see
Speaker 2: them if you squint. I didn't argue. We scrolled and scrolled,
Speaker 2: drawing no conclusions, and so the puzzle multiplied. This was
Speaker 2: no simple case of missing records or half forgotten renovations.
Speaker 2: Every practical explanation that staff current or past offered was
Speaker 2: muddy at best, contradicting known facts or each other. What
Speaker 2: seemed a basic technical lapse, a lost label, a misplaced donation,
Speaker 2: now radiated outward, reshaping itself with every attempt to pin
Speaker 2: it down. In fact, the farther I pushed, the more
Speaker 2: the anomaly seemed not just a failure of cataloging, but
Speaker 2: something more deliberate, or at least more persistent than that.
Speaker 2: It felt in summingcoat way, as if the very design
Speaker 2: of the room resisted being brought into the net of order.
Speaker 2: Not only its books lacked numbers, the story of the
Speaker 2: space itself became impossible to collate, the human recollections tangling
Speaker 2: just as untraceably as the books on its uneven shelves.
Speaker 2: After a few days of these small discoveries and the
Speaker 2: sense that I'd started something larger than a quirk, my
Speaker 2: mind wandered to an older class room lesson entropy, the
Speaker 2: way in which order inevitably leaks away. But this wasn't
Speaker 2: entropy in the classical sense. This wasn't just the loss
Speaker 2: of stickers or the fading of ink. Here was something different,
Speaker 2: dangerously close to magic, if magic could be measured by
Speaker 2: the steady erasure of the very things librarians and former
Speaker 2: school teachers rely on. Most. Reflecting late one evening, I
Speaker 2: had to admit it was thrilling, tame, but wild, not threatening,
Speaker 2: only deepening. Even Leo, with his bouncing, irrepressible energy, seemed
Speaker 2: to sense that we had been invited not into a problem,
Speaker 2: but into a gentle, ongoing contradiction. Unusual results tend to
Speaker 2: multiply when watched carefully, a fact I took as encouragement.
Speaker 2: The real puzzle lay not just in running another test,
Speaker 2: but in shifting the question. So on a rain soaked Tuesday,
Speaker 2: I found myself asking not how the numbers vanished, but
Speaker 2: what it meant for a room, any room, to shed
Speaker 2: its ability to be counted. The next experiment was, in
Speaker 2: hindsight more deliberate, borrowing a book newly arrived, an acclaimed
Speaker 2: biography praised for detailed footnotes and precise historical dates. I
Speaker 2: entered the numberless reading room and read three chapters in
Speaker 2: the company of Leo and his stealth camera. Leo, in turn,
Speaker 2: brought a thick collection of brain teasers, the sort I
Speaker 2: would have pressed on reluctant students to break their math resistance.
Speaker 2: We took the books home, I made tea, Leo unspooled legos,
Speaker 2: and I settled in to check the biography for evidence
Speaker 2: of alteration. At first, all looked normal, the author's voice
Speaker 2: measured and clear as expected. But turning to the familiar
Speaker 2: time markers, I frowned. The sentences, originally rich in specific
Speaker 2: dates July twenty eighth, nineteen sixty seven, after our father's
Speaker 2: death in nineteen seventy three, now read late nineteen sixties
Speaker 2: or in her youth, the numbers alighted, the certainties replaced
Speaker 2: by soft suggestions. Even the protagonist's full name, previously present
Speaker 2: on every page, fell away in several instances, traded for
Speaker 2: ambiguous initials. When I checked the family tree in the index,
Speaker 2: it seemed less a tree and more a tangle generations
Speaker 2: referred to only as a cousin or sibling, or simply
Speaker 2: a relation. I all but lunged for the puzzle book.
Speaker 2: The first section, as I had borrowed, it, was a
Speaker 2: parade of numbered logic challenges. Seek fifteen, then leaped to sixteen,
Speaker 2: the order bringing comfort to anyone with a taste for solution.
Speaker 2: Now the numbers were gone, the challenges still existed, clever
Speaker 2: set ups, the diagrams intact, but any explicit reference to
Speaker 2: which puzzle followed which had melted out of the chapters,
Speaker 2: hints shunted to see elsewhere, answers now floating untethered. I
Speaker 2: felt dizzy excited, had I misremembered? I searched my phone,
Speaker 2: loading the library's digital copy. There the original numbering and
Speaker 2: precise ordering persisted, preserved in digital amber. Only. The physical book,
Speaker 2: after its trip through the numberless room, was unbound from
Speaker 2: the sequence te forgotten. I snatched up the history book
Speaker 2: Leo had left on my nightstand, a sprawling account of
Speaker 2: the city's founding. I flipped straight to the footnotes, only
Speaker 2: to find them altered see page with a blank or
Speaker 2: before the fire, lacking all numerical anchors. Dates in the
Speaker 2: main text were now some years before the revolution or
Speaker 2: after she married, never precisely fixed. Leo perched cross legged
Speaker 2: on the couch, grinned. My almanac's table of contents is
Speaker 2: weird now, Grandma. It only has the chapter names, not
Speaker 2: the page numbers. See. He held up a doggyared volume,
Speaker 2: proud of his discovery, as though he'd invented ambiguity on command.
Speaker 2: On a hunch. I tried to track changes over time,
Speaker 2: deserving which identifiers survived, which vanished, and whether the books
Speaker 2: in different genres suffered equally. It wasn't random. The transformation
Speaker 2: hewed to one unwavering line. Anything that pinned, fixed, numbered,
Speaker 2: or ordered a book was likely to be effaced. Stories
Speaker 2: retained their shape, faxed their outlines, but the structure, the sequencing,
Speaker 2: the ordinality of information grew soft and shifting. It was
Speaker 2: not here was the crucial point damage exactly No text
Speaker 2: was torn out and no page erased. Rather, every book
Speaker 2: seemed quietly to shed those features by which it could
Speaker 2: be tracked, shelved, or contained. It made the contents more ambiguous,
Speaker 2: more resistant to summary. Reading such a book became an
Speaker 2: exercise in open endedness. Even holding the book was an
Speaker 2: exercise in uncertainty. You could feel the lack, like a
Speaker 2: tooth missing in a familiar smile. I took this evidence
Speaker 2: back to the library and shared it with Denis and Sarah.
Speaker 2: They were, by turns amused and unsettled. Ennis suggested, with
Speaker 2: a sheepish flourish, that maybe the books are being contaminated
Speaker 2: by the room, decontextualized, like if you left a cook
Speaker 2: book in a forest. Sarah, less flappable, quipped, sounds like
Speaker 2: we've got Borges. Poltergests, you know that story, the infinite
Speaker 2: library full of unreadable books. I made a note to
Speaker 2: revisit Borges just in case. Yet, clouded as these answers were,
Speaker 2: the central contradiction sharpened. I realized deep into the small
Speaker 2: hours that the room was not merely another example of
Speaker 2: neglected order. It was, in effect a standing rebuttal to
Speaker 2: the entire project of systematization. One quiet, persistent anomaly at
Speaker 2: the very edge of what could be mapped or labeled.
Speaker 2: For over forty years I taught children, Leo Now among them,
Speaker 2: that mathematics was the study of patterns, that its power
Speaker 2: lay in fitting chaos to rule and system. Now, for
Speaker 2: the first time I glimpsed the other side of that certainty,
Speaker 2: a place within my own city that refused calculation, that
Speaker 2: would not stay counted, inventoried, or summarized. It altered my
Speaker 2: sense of what mattered. Instead of asking, how do the
Speaker 2: numbers vanish? I began to wonder, why should a place
Speaker 2: exist in the world that steadfastly, almost benignly resists the
Speaker 2: mathematics of closure, What larger need, What persistent gentle pressure
Speaker 2: let such a space slip through generations of record keeping
Speaker 2: in a city otherwise obsessed with knowing. I didn't have
Speaker 2: an answer, but I did have a new sense, humbling
Speaker 2: and oddly thrilling, of wonder. The curiosity, for the first
Speaker 2: time in years, wasn't about solving, but seeing just how
Speaker 2: far the question could be stretched. In that sense, the
Speaker 2: numberless room offered not just a puzzle, but a tantalizing
Speaker 2: expansion of what I thought could be real. For a
Speaker 2: day and a night after the realization struck, I lived
Speaker 2: in what used to be called the open question, the
Speaker 2: mathematical limbo, a pre roof enters just before resolution. The
Speaker 2: numberless room had revealed itself, not merely as a quirk
Speaker 2: or a slap dash accident of record keeping, but as
Speaker 2: something at once gentler and wider in scope, a persistent
Speaker 2: blind spot present in building and human memory alike, sheltering,
Speaker 2: an unaccounted for uncertainty at the heart of the city's
Speaker 2: most orderly place. If I had been a younger woman,
Speaker 2: the temptation might have been to try all over again,
Speaker 2: to file, stamp, and enumerate, to press the room back
Speaker 2: into category by sheer force of will. Instead, my curiosity
Speaker 2: moved outward, not in the geometry of shelves, but in
Speaker 2: the wider, untidy spiral of history and intention that surrounds
Speaker 2: any institution after enough years. Numbers are a comfort, yes,
Speaker 2: But beyond number there are stories, and beyond stories there
Speaker 2: are patterns so large or so fluid that no ledger
Speaker 2: could ever contain them. Still, I wanted more than abstraction.
Speaker 2: I wanted to dig at the founder who had decided
Speaker 2: this room would slip between naming and not naming. Was
Speaker 2: it always this way? Or had it become thus by accretion,
Speaker 2: a byproduct of benign neglect, or paradoxically, of some half
Speaker 2: forgotten vision. The question itched unbearably as I pressed the
Speaker 2: library staff for architectural records. An anomaly repeated in time
Speaker 2: is rarely random history. If you coax, it will sometimes
Speaker 2: show its hand. My first morning step was City Hall.
Speaker 2: There in the humid, echoing archives, I paged through decades
Speaker 2: of blueprints and council minutes, pencil in hand, Leo beside me,
Speaker 2: scribbling Pirate's maps. In the margins of scrap paper, I
Speaker 2: traced the outline of the library's expansion nineteen hundred and
Speaker 2: forty nine, nineteen sixty seven, nineteen eighty two, that strange
Speaker 2: no man's land of mid nineties grant projects. Looking closely
Speaker 2: for any detailed mention of the room itself, every blueprint
Speaker 2: that included the north corner told a different story. One
Speaker 2: vaguely rectangular space was labeled record storage. Another two years
Speaker 2: later marked the same footprint as youth Gallery. Yet two
Speaker 2: subsequent plans simply omitted the space altogether, drawing a main
Speaker 2: hall straight through where the reading room, by every account,
Speaker 2: continued to exist. Worse, the naming conventions drifted overflow, annex
Speaker 2: temporary reserve, unallocated. The floorplands couldn't agree even on the
Speaker 2: room's dimensions. Sometimes a janitorial closet claimed the same square footage.
Speaker 2: Sometimes the wall abutted an office that in real life
Speaker 2: did not exist. Even Leo noticed peering over the blueprints.
Speaker 2: Is it a room or not a room? Grandma? He asked, voice,
Speaker 2: both teasing and sincere. Maybe it moves. On our walk home,
Speaker 2: the city buzzed, zigzagging between the decades, in the cross
Speaker 2: hatch of new curbs, old statuary, and post war messes.
Speaker 2: I wondered, for the first time in year, if places
Speaker 2: could slip between identities as easily as people do, if
Speaker 2: buildings could lose their names, grow ambiguous, reinvent themselves. The
Speaker 2: next week I tracked down a group of library regulars
Speaker 2: known connoisseurs of memory, to test the edges of communal recall.
Speaker 2: Around a battered oak table by the historical periodicals, I
Speaker 2: found miss Leslie older than the Carnegie Wing and proud
Speaker 2: of it, along with two book club veterans, Bill and Nadine.
Speaker 2: I remember that room being part of the story time
Speaker 2: rotation twenty maybe twenty five years back. Leslie said, chin up,
Speaker 2: we called it the overflow gallery, or sometimes the hidden corner.
Speaker 2: Was never in the catalog, but everyone knew it was
Speaker 2: for Kid's hour when the main space was full. Or
Speaker 2: maybe it was a storage closet, now that I think
Speaker 2: about it. Did you ever check out books from there?
Speaker 2: I asked, rarely. It wasn't for that. They just let
Speaker 2: us borrow things. If we left our names with missus
Speaker 2: Boone at the front desk, or was it Boone? Could
Speaker 2: have been after she left. Nadine piped in. My son
Speaker 2: had his birthday there once. They called at the memory
Speaker 2: room back then, had balloons, rice crispy treats. There's a picture,
Speaker 2: no weight. I lost that batch when we moved, I pressed,
Speaker 2: do you recall how the room was labeled, any signage
Speaker 2: or stickers on the shelves. Bill peered over his glasses.
Speaker 2: Can't say, honestly, only that nobody asked questions about what
Speaker 2: got stored there. I think it switched uses every time
Speaker 2: there's a budget shortfall. Their recollections disagreed on dates, function,
Speaker 2: even the arrangement of shelves but in one aspect they
Speaker 2: are lined. Any certainty about the room bled away at
Speaker 2: the edges. Even where memory might have crisped the details,
Speaker 2: the years seemed to dissolve them, with each version contradicting
Speaker 2: the next. No one had ever consciously decided to forget.
Speaker 2: Forgetting perhaps was built in to the room's foundations. Still,
Speaker 2: I returned to the library's digital catalog, scanning for corroborating evidence.
Speaker 2: Using the back door access kindly provided by Sarah, I
Speaker 2: hunted for inventory gaps, undocumented events, books marked as missing
Speaker 2: only during certain years, entire call number blocks, skipping over
Speaker 2: frames of time like records scratched bare. Each search led
Speaker 2: to the same curious result. The holes corresponded not to
Speaker 2: periods of disaster or known renovation, but to quiet, unnoted absences.
Speaker 2: The computer system listed the room as na annex or.
Speaker 2: In some cases, the field was simply blank, no error message,
Speaker 2: no warning, only a polite digital silence, a blankness as
Speaker 2: gentle as sleep. The pattern began to feel less like
Speaker 2: negligence and more like a sustained, inexplicable equivocation, a space,
Speaker 2: a habit, perhaps even an institutional defense against enumeration. The
Speaker 2: oddity did not restrict itself to shelves either. Approaching a
Speaker 2: mathematics anthology the next afternoon, I noticed something off. The book,
Speaker 2: borrowed only a week prior, had, when left ten minutes
Speaker 2: in the numberless room, lost not just external markers but
Speaker 2: internal ones. Theorems previously labeled crisply by number lemma three
Speaker 2: point four proof of theorem seven point eight now instead
Speaker 2: referred to an earlier result or. Some experts claim it
Speaker 2: was as if certainty itself retreated when the book spent
Speaker 2: time within the ambiguous boundaries. To my quiet astonishment, the
Speaker 2: effect even seemed to migrate. A fellow patron, Hannah, who
Speaker 2: borrowed a novel after reading it in the numberless Room,
Speaker 2: confessed a vagueness about the plot and setting that exceeded
Speaker 2: the usual blur between fictions. Another regular, mister Feld, claimed
Speaker 2: the recipes he'd copied from a cook book must have
Speaker 2: been in code, though he couldn't say why. He simply
Speaker 2: recalled no amounts, only a bit of this, a pinch
Speaker 2: of that. All of these incidents formed a tapestry whose
Speaker 2: central pattern was not absence but resistance to certainty. The
Speaker 2: more I tested, the less I trusted in any fixed
Speaker 2: truth about the room, or the act of knowing, at
Speaker 2: least in the way I had once been trained as
Speaker 2: a teacher, a citizen, a tax beayer to expect. It
Speaker 2: was Leo who reframed our experiment one blustery afternoon. Grandma,
Speaker 2: does the room steal facts? Like snatch them out of
Speaker 2: the air? I laughed, then paused, realizing the insight hidden
Speaker 2: in his mischief. I'm not sure it steals them. Maybe
Speaker 2: it just lets them drift off instead of pinning them
Speaker 2: to a wall, like letting a bird out of a cage,
Speaker 2: exactly I found. After this, the urge to press for
Speaker 2: explanation softened. I did not stop investigating, but my questions
Speaker 2: grew richer, broader in their design. I wanted not just
Speaker 2: to map what vanished, but to understand the room's place
Speaker 2: in the larger story the city tells about itself, about
Speaker 2: its limits, about what's left outside the fence of knowledge.
Speaker 2: The next week, Sarah put me in touch with Miss
Speaker 2: Edith Silver, former head librarian, who, by glorious good luck,
Speaker 2: now lived in a tidy brick retirement complex not far
Speaker 2: from my old school. For decades, Edith had commanded the
Speaker 2: city's literary memory both as guardian and occasionally as trickster.
Speaker 2: Her mind, by all accounts, was sharp as a paper creaser,
Speaker 2: though her body moved more slowly. Now. She received me
Speaker 2: with the courtesy and skepticism of her era. We sat
Speaker 2: over tea set with china cups, her living room a
Speaker 2: quietly wholly mess of correspondence, post cards and battered reading glasses.
Speaker 2: I recall the North annex well, she said, eyes glittering
Speaker 2: behind wire frames. Though it was never really an annex
Speaker 2: in the plans. There was something impossibly fluid about that
Speaker 2: part of the building, even from the beginning. You never
Speaker 2: could keep track of it. Book counts wouldn't match, memory
Speaker 2: wouldn't stick. Did anyone ever try to fix it? I asked.
Speaker 2: Edith pursed her lips, then broke into a laugh that
Speaker 2: echoed the old rotunda's stone. We tried, Oh did we try?
Speaker 2: Catalog cards, computer inventories. It was like chasing shadows. Rumor
Speaker 2: was back. In the library's last big expansion, the one
Speaker 2: in the nineteen sixties. The city brought in a fellow
Speaker 2: from the university, a kind of consultant with an interest
Speaker 2: in well experimental ideas about libraries. He was enamored of Borges,
Speaker 2: especially the story about the library that contains all books
Speaker 2: ordered or not. He convinced the trustees we should have
Speaker 2: at least in part, a room for what he called
Speaker 2: infinite literature books stories knowledge that couldn't strictly be ordered,
Speaker 2: couldn't be numbered, that would evade any attempt to fence
Speaker 2: them in an ante room, if you will. I tried
Speaker 2: to imagine a city council meeting in nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 2: approving an annex for the express purpose of ambiguity, and
Speaker 2: nearly smiled. Edith swirled her spoon. Of course, the money
Speaker 2: ran out before much of anything took shape. Some shelving
Speaker 2: was put up, A coat of paint may be a
Speaker 2: small dedication in an annual report that no one ever found,
Speaker 2: but the idea sort of stuck in the bones of
Speaker 2: the place. No one could keep a ledger straight for
Speaker 2: very long after that. It became a running joke among staff.
Speaker 2: Every system would sooner or later develop a blind spot
Speaker 2: for that room that corner. Blueprints changed, shelving units multiplied
Speaker 2: or shrank. Paperwork would vanish. At some point we stopped
Speaker 2: trying to label everything and just let it be. She
Speaker 2: leaned back, mug in hand, surveying me as though deciding
Speaker 2: the lesson to share with a stubborn student. Some places, Alice,
Speaker 2: do not want to be known to the inch. Some phenomena,
Speaker 2: once set in motion, would rather the remain open, indeterminate,
Speaker 2: always just beyond the reach of certainty. I felt the
Speaker 2: thrill of intellectual recognition, the small vertigo that comes when
Speaker 2: an abstraction steps off the page into the living world.
Speaker 2: But the books, Edith, do you know lately not only
Speaker 2: labels vanish, but the contents themselves grow ambiguous, as if
Speaker 2: the very effort to fix them to a page is foiled.
Speaker 2: A satisfied smile exactly as intended. I suspect a place
Speaker 2: for stories that can't be fully told, facts that refuse
Speaker 2: to be settled. Of course, it doesn't make budgeting any easier,
Speaker 2: but perhaps, as Borges wrote, certainty is a smaller cage
Speaker 2: than we imagine. We talked a while longer of city traditions,
Speaker 2: old jokes, the way institutions weave their own private magic
Speaker 2: through habit and error. Edith offered no conclusion, only a
Speaker 2: sort of gentle endorsement of persistent unknowing. As I left,
Speaker 2: she pressed into my hand an ancient library card. It's
Speaker 2: issued by signature, as faded as everything else, and winked
Speaker 2: for admittance to everywhere and nowhere. Walking home, I saw
Speaker 2: the room differently, not as an error waiting to be corrected,
Speaker 2: but as the living artifact of a philosophy too radical
Speaker 2: perhaps for every day service, and yet essential too, for
Speaker 2: the work of living in a world bigger than order.
Speaker 2: That week, I sat with Leo in our kitchen, a
Speaker 2: healthy stack of joke books and adventure stories before us.
Speaker 2: He wanted, as always to make a game out of
Speaker 2: the unfindable facts. Do you think the library room could
Speaker 2: turn a treasure map into a riddle? Grandma? He asked,
Speaker 2: Maybe so, maybe it helps you find the adventure rather
Speaker 2: than the answer. He looked, delighted, as though an entire
Speaker 2: secret handshake had been handed to him alone. Next time
Speaker 2: we go, can we try to make a map that
Speaker 2: is different each time you read it? We can try, replied,
Speaker 2: aware now that the experiment was less about restoration and
Speaker 2: more about willing participation in ambiguity. The next few visits
Speaker 2: to the numberless room passed outside any expectation of resolution.
Speaker 2: The routine persisted, but the tension had gone replaced by
Speaker 2: something more buoyant. People came and went, some with a vague,
Speaker 2: purposeful drift, others apparently in search of something they'd soon forget.
Speaker 2: I began to notice a gentle camaraderie among the regulars,
Speaker 2: a knowing glance, a mischievous smile, as though we'd entered, however, briefly,
Speaker 2: a quiet society of the unenumerated. Once in the corner,
Speaker 2: the sunlight slid across the table and scattered the alphabet
Speaker 2: blocks in a pattern I never managed to reconstruct. I
Speaker 2: made no effort to unite them or note their order. Instead,
Speaker 2: I let them drift content in their temporary, wild arrangement.
Speaker 2: Back at home, I recorded my findings in a log book,
Speaker 2: a holdover habit from years of teaching, pages filled with hypotheses,
Speaker 2: test results, wild surmise. The old devotion to system survived,
Speaker 2: but so too did my new affinity for the anomalies,
Speaker 2: the patterns that twine beyond reach. I wrote, for every
Speaker 2: number that brings the world to order, some generous space
Speaker 2: must exist where number turns aside, and wonder, wild and
Speaker 2: undiminished concede itself. It would be tempting to say that
Speaker 2: my concept of knowledge was appended overnight, but the truth
Speaker 2: is subtler. I began to appreciate the hidden kindness in
Speaker 2: unordered things, memories that overlap, stories that shift in the telling,
Speaker 2: facts that escape, the neatness of a spreadsheet. Leo, who
Speaker 2: had taught me the value of delighted uncertainty, was the
Speaker 2: natural inheritor of these new games. We invented them together.
Speaker 2: Find an uncounted thing, ask an unanswerable question, try to
Speaker 2: build a map that refused to be completed. You can't
Speaker 2: know everything and still have adventures, he decided. A motto
Speaker 2: casually dropped between them, rounds of guess my favorite color. Now,
Speaker 2: the numberless room and the traditions it bred worked their
Speaker 2: quiet changes in me. I found myself noticing the wildness
Speaker 2: at the edges, the building's shifting seams, the story's residence
Speaker 2: told about why the old water fountain sometimes hissed in
Speaker 2: morse code, or why the carpet triangles never lined up.
Speaker 2: I grew gentler in my habits, less eager to bind
Speaker 2: the world's inventory to my sense of safety. If my
Speaker 2: trust in enumeration collapsed, it was only to give rise
Speaker 2: to a new, more flexible sense of what could be held,
Speaker 2: and what must be let free. The act of letting
Speaker 2: go of certainty of orderly naming no longer frightened. A
Speaker 2: space had opened, neither error nor answer rich in its absence.
Speaker 2: On a crystalline afternoon in April, I stood with Leo
Speaker 2: at the library entrance, a bag full of stories between us.
Speaker 2: A breeze ruffled the city's patchwork streets. For a moment,
Speaker 2: I wondered aloud, not to solve, but to savor. In
Speaker 2: a city ordered by numbers, what grows in the space's
Speaker 2: numbers can't reach. The air was full of possibilities, the
Speaker 2: kind that shimmer when left unnamed. And that was wonder enough.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.