Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcoined stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it. I have always trusted the bones
Speaker 1: of a building. After thirty years as a school librarian,
Speaker 1: I can read a four planed away. Some people re
Speaker 1: Pum's tipps of the fingers trace In the past, students
Speaker 1: might wander I skipping alertly for corners that attracts, build
Speaker 1: juice or secret notes. So in retirement, volunteering at the
Speaker 1: city's grand library, I expected, at the very least the
Speaker 1: security of knowing that bookshelves do not walk away when
Speaker 1: you turn your back. The Bryan Public Library was built
Speaker 1: on confidence, columns of a colored marble, broad windows flashing
Speaker 1: afternoon sun, and a floor plan unchanged, so I believed
Speaker 1: since before I was born. So when on a soffer
Speaker 1: bright Wednesday, I was sent to shelve stack of reference books,
Speaker 1: marshou skuffed familiar trail Fictions is closest to the atrium.
Speaker 1: Young adults spoils along the mezzanine loft, and the local
Speaker 1: history section has always always fanked the south windows, overlooking
Speaker 1: statues of city founders with frowning bronze brows. The faces
Speaker 1: in those statues are indistinct, but the shelving never was.
Speaker 1: That day, arriving at my station with my annotated slip,
Speaker 1: I found myself instead facing gardening and horticulture, rose and
Speaker 1: rows of tissue, thin books and late spring colors, each
Speaker 1: stamped with green sycamore leaves. I stole in the aisle
Speaker 1: as watering a little from the slant a sun that
Speaker 1: always hit local history, just saw the shelf labels orderly,
Speaker 1: as always declared gardening, horticulture, then in psychology in a tight,
Speaker 1: careful hand, Margaret's handwriting surely. Yet two days ago I
Speaker 1: had directed a man in a pork pahatube. Strange crimes,
Speaker 1: urban myths of bryaned exactly here the Detective had been
Speaker 1: shelved in this spot since the eighties. For a moment,
Speaker 1: I squinted at the dust on the eyes shelf. No
Speaker 1: sign of disturbance, no smudges of faint rectangles betraying a
Speaker 1: recent transition, No wagons of books of stray moving carts,
Speaker 1: no tags enance in temporary closure, no hint of the
Speaker 1: temporary chaos that follows a shift of the scale. And
Speaker 1: yet all the world ran me behaved as if nothing
Speaker 1: had changed. A regular patron with a pencil. Thin musta
Speaker 1: sat cross like it in the sunlight, thumbing fuil E
Speaker 1: rohoded Endrons, and Margaret at the desk left into her phone.
Speaker 1: Deep in the mirrow of my muscles. I was certain
Speaker 1: this was not right. Just then a spotted ben, the
Speaker 1: new trainee peering through the book, returned slot. He waved,
Speaker 1: stacked tevering in his arms. A mess, howard mind helping
Speaker 1: me sort these go in local history? Well, what we
Speaker 1: have a bit left? He nodded in the direction of
Speaker 1: the marble stairwell and airy generally reserved for Atlas's and
Speaker 1: city planning reports. When I hesitated a little too long,
Speaker 1: bend blink, then beamed right this way, always tuck beside
Speaker 1: the banisters. I had two old times chase me done
Speaker 1: because I tried putting biographies in with local history. They
Speaker 1: briet if we ever moved it away from the staircase.
Speaker 1: He chuckled, inviting me to join the joke. I told myself,
Speaker 1: perhaps I'd made an error, After all, buildings are larger
Speaker 1: than one person's memory. Still, I followed him, hot hammering
Speaker 1: toward the banister's cat crescent of light over Smithstone. Sure enough,
Speaker 1: the local history shelves were away beside the stairs the
Speaker 1: familiar row Bryan eighteen seventy two, nineteen hundred business directory
Speaker 1: a local legends in that same label style, But the
Speaker 1: volumes were settled dustless, just as in this opposed original home.
Speaker 1: Just then it shuffled. By squinting through his glasses, he
Speaker 1: gave a crooked grin, waving a copy of Public Works
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two. He moved as if nothing were odd.
Speaker 1: On the opposite side of the counter, a woman stooped
Speaker 1: to retrieve a ghost, so brine passed her actions common habitual.
Speaker 1: No one betrayed any surprise. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps they
Speaker 1: simply reorganized this morning and failed to mention it. Though
Speaker 1: the more I watched Margaret pulling circulation numbers bid micheleve
Speaker 1: in a city directory at Hammingtonsley, the more impossible that
Speaker 1: explanation seemed. I found myself soaking the shelves twice before
Speaker 1: retreating to the staff break room. There, the shadows hung
Speaker 1: thickly dull, settling among them smatched muggs, as if even
Speaker 1: the air refused to move. The world around me denied
Speaker 1: anything had happened, And yet my uncertainty took group. I'm
Speaker 1: not unaccustomed to doubts. The mind grow as fallible as
Speaker 1: the eostretch. Still, even now, I can walk the rud
Speaker 1: of every fire drill we ever held in my old
Speaker 1: elementary school downstairs will be past the Jim's trophy case
Speaker 1: out of the kerbapple tree. Those patterns do not drift.
Speaker 1: Buildings I thought are trustworthy. But that night I lay
Speaker 1: awake cataloging every placement every March sunlight slant, convinced there
Speaker 1: had been an unacknowledged, is subtle shift not only in
Speaker 1: the world, but in how the world insisted it existed.
Speaker 1: The mystery burrowed in quietly. Why had nobody else questioned it?
Speaker 1: Why if local history had always been by the stairs,
Speaker 1: did I recall retrieving a guide to Brian Pausus by
Speaker 1: the garden windows only last month. The next afternoon, I
Speaker 1: arrived early for my volunteer shift, determined to ground myself
Speaker 1: in routine. Bryant Library, for all its reputation, grand, as
Speaker 1: heavy as a cathedral, ran on rituals both formal and informal,
Speaker 1: market presided at the front desk, encamped behind a round
Speaker 1: part of a virgune, notices and dribbling looks of horrible tea.
Speaker 1: We greeted each other by name a habit, Margaret any
Speaker 1: ghost to day. It was a jerk between us aching
Speaker 1: decades of staff or about friendly spirits. Whispering along the hrack.
Speaker 1: Margaret grinned, her thick glasses sliding down her nose. The
Speaker 1: closest I've come to a haunting is that the coffee's
Speaker 1: gone again. Don't let benyar the break room unless you
Speaker 1: want Camma Mile in your mug. The exchange, which was
Speaker 1: as grounding as the clatter of the front doors, the
Speaker 1: scent of lemb and polish rising faintly from the stone floors. These,
Speaker 1: I reminded myself, do not change. There are routines, and
Speaker 1: there are the rituals with which we orient ourselves. The
Speaker 1: orientation of desks, the placement of book cuts, the familiar
Speaker 1: weight of the story I read A love sprung from
Speaker 1: the bottom shelf. My own works followed suit I catalog.
Speaker 1: Not just books, but the ways in which the world
Speaker 1: was ordered were pens vanished each week, which shed developed
Speaker 1: the permanent wobble in my margin filled planner sketches dart
Speaker 1: at the page's little rectangles marking restrooms, notes, about whichetlets
Speaker 1: powered which lamps, not out of suspicion, only the old
Speaker 1: impulse for order that made the children at my school
Speaker 1: call me a mess maps, even my recipes at home
Speaker 1: lived in a Grudachell's, living alone in my facale condo.
Speaker 1: The library was now my best map of the city. Then,
Speaker 1: for his part, barely survived his first weeks. He was
Speaker 1: gangly strawberries and cream, polite, stumbling over ge decimals, but
Speaker 1: he was hungry for approval, and his delight in every
Speaker 1: cartful of books grew infectious. He hovered near Margaret, hungry
Speaker 1: for structure, his badge always slightly askew. Ed, meanwhile, was
Speaker 1: the library as an acknowledged resident. He'd entered the building
Speaker 1: every single day, excluding the brief pandemic closure and too
Speaker 1: irregular blizzards, since Ed first encountered him during a city
Speaker 1: history night in nineteen seventy two. Ed remembered the codes
Speaker 1: to the old microfilm cabinets and never forgot a magazine's column.
Speaker 1: Other regulars, missas Robinson, who pestered circulation with questions about
Speaker 1: forgotten poetry books. Sam behind the engineering descoal, gave the
Speaker 1: place its character specimens in a living dirama. Then there
Speaker 1: was the building itself. Bryant wasn't one of those glossy
Speaker 1: minimum modern libraries with glass walls and echoing auditoriums. The
Speaker 1: marble was patched with generations of different tile, windows grew
Speaker 1: in and out of use, and the children's wing had
Speaker 1: once been by some bizarre plant an open air terrace.
Speaker 1: Stories flitted among staff of od drafts near the fictionalcove,
Speaker 1: or the ghosts of a vanished basement lavatory. None of
Speaker 1: these tales were told with gravity. We laughed them away,
Speaker 1: comforting one another with union jokes and familiar routines. Yet
Speaker 1: nothing in the building's mix of grandeur and patrick prepared
Speaker 1: me for for the business of wandering shelves. I had
Speaker 1: always been mor ch into small changes, a missing light bulb,
Speaker 1: the familiar creek that meant some one had set foot
Speaker 1: in the periodical aisle, the big things where reference lived,
Speaker 1: where one searched for city planning maps were fixed, no
Speaker 1: more likely to move than the sun. Every Thursday began
Speaker 1: the same way, ten minute chat with Margaret, while swapping
Speaker 1: notes on the state of the building. She quis bent
Speaker 1: about shelf reading, directed head toward new rivals, commented rly
Speaker 1: on the crop rotation in the garden and stacks. Each
Speaker 1: time I added a tiny schematic to my planner, a
Speaker 1: test of memory. In fact, the first time I drew
Speaker 1: in the local history shells beside the windows, and the
Speaker 1: next day so I eyed my old diagram as I
Speaker 1: watched it glide effortlessly to spot near the stairwell. My
Speaker 1: finger traced in visible lines on the page, wondering whether
Speaker 1: I ought to redraw or trist in something less tangible.
Speaker 1: A few days later, I swung by in a misty drizzle,
Speaker 1: clutching a plastic bag of donated books from my neighbor.
Speaker 1: The air smell sharply of wet tarmac and battled cardboard.
Speaker 1: Stepping in, I stomped water from my shoes, delighting in
Speaker 1: the steadiness of the tiled entrance and the hush of
Speaker 1: old stone beneath. The plan was to deposit the bag
Speaker 1: at the volunteer services desk, and, if energy permitted, skip
Speaker 1: upstairs for the new mural and veiling. A scene builders
Speaker 1: now and then fryened in color. When I passed the
Speaker 1: reference area, I instinctively angled toward the mezzanine, seeking out
Speaker 1: the old periodicals room row on row of chairs, sturdy
Speaker 1: grey tables under winking pendent lance. That was where I
Speaker 1: had for years etched microfilm for impatient genealogists. To day
Speaker 1: periodicals was missing. In its place, there stood the local
Speaker 1: history section, sun painting long rectangles over the book spines,
Speaker 1: the south facing windows bill gold. There was no evidence
Speaker 1: the swap had been staged. Nothing out of place, but
Speaker 1: everything out of time. It rang so false in my mind.
Speaker 1: At I placed a hand to the shelf, checking its stability,
Speaker 1: half expecting the particleble to slip through my fingers, but
Speaker 1: the labels were unchanged. Bryan, nineteen o two, nineteen twenty seven.
Speaker 1: A directory tragedy at the Bridge is societal Oddities. Even
Speaker 1: the shelf height seemed identical to what I'd recalled, but
Speaker 1: the conviction grew firmer within me. Something was off, and
Speaker 1: the building had changed the skin over night, as if
Speaker 1: on cue. Margat called out taking off the day's inventory.
Speaker 1: You know, I always liked sorting fupioardticles down here, She
Speaker 1: gestured toward the sunlit stretch, Nothing like reading the society
Speaker 1: pages with the light just so. Her voice was casual
Speaker 1: and trouble, as if the arrangement had been carved into
Speaker 1: the stone since her first day. She rifled through a
Speaker 1: pile of catalogs and perturbed, and passed me a slip
Speaker 1: for approval. Meanwhile, I pressed my palm to the floor
Speaker 1: near the third bay. There, barely visible beneath the toe
Speaker 1: of my sneaker, the tile had a faint, worn in print,
Speaker 1: rounded capital letter spelling a hissed inefadd inly, now half
Speaker 1: lost under years of polish. The letter T curved slightly
Speaker 1: up like a tail, a design I recognized from when
Speaker 1: the city replaced part of the towerwalk in the late nineties,
Speaker 1: the time I argued with the facility's manager about matching
Speaker 1: stone collars. Their hiss tile for local history had rooted
Speaker 1: there for decades. Near By, Missess Robinson glared at the
Speaker 1: morning light, fanning herself with a folded catalog. The magazine
Speaker 1: to were better when the light came from the east windows.
Speaker 1: She muttered under her breath, voiced heart with irritation. He
Speaker 1: used to set upstairs, read my white whitman by the lattice.
Speaker 1: Everywhere has moved these days. Then as I opened my mouth,
Speaker 1: she waved the thought away, Well, I must be misremembered
Speaker 1: and can't keep track now? Can I? The world around me?
Speaker 1: I saw reflective little confusion. Margaret quoted coll numbers with confidence.
Speaker 1: Ben Dart had passed reading off the day's statistics, oblivious
Speaker 1: to the impossibilities unfolding beneath the sunlit windows. Only the
Speaker 1: floor acknowledged what Mammory insisted, a ghostly trace of her history,
Speaker 1: refusing to yield to the new order. Later, moving down
Speaker 1: the hall, I noticed another oddity in all cat woll
Speaker 1: outlet shape for a desktop computer, perfectly pleased miss the periodicals,
Speaker 1: though the computer stations had been asked from the space.
Speaker 1: In my first year of volunteering in the children's area,
Speaker 1: a bookshelf scuffed the shape of an end, phantom evidence
Speaker 1: that nonfiction had once lived here, before breeds of rabbits
Speaker 1: conquered the shelves. I began to question softly, at first,
Speaker 1: quietly so as not to draw a humiliation from the
Speaker 1: younger code, whether the age was robbing me of certainty,
Speaker 1: or whether the fabric of the library itself had begun
Speaker 1: to shift. I returned to home that day with a
Speaker 1: distinct taste of brass in the doll like of a
Speaker 1: question unanswered. Still the itch grew. Was I slipping? Was
Speaker 1: the world? Or was something ignored? Looking between? That night,
Speaker 1: surrounded by the silence of my tiny kitchen, I opened
Speaker 1: my planner and inked anew cus grid of the library
Speaker 1: laout as I recalled at every shelf, every window, every nook.
Speaker 1: I began to plan. If uncertainty was seeking me out,
Speaker 1: I would meet it in the open, pen in hand,
Speaker 1: ready to catch at shifting. By the next week, the
Speaker 1: project had claimed me completely. Each afternoon I arrived on
Speaker 1: with the clipworts, lynd journals stashed beneath the yellow scarf.
Speaker 1: I became a quiet observer, slow walking the perimeter as
Speaker 1: the staff and patrons lived and changed routines. Marget and'sconced
Speaker 1: herself in gossip at the desk, while Ben spun between
Speaker 1: carts and Kid's story time, the awkward rhythm of an
Speaker 1: enthusiastic novice. I started simply labeling each section by hand,
Speaker 1: jotting in the jury numbers specifying which alcoves held which
Speaker 1: poetry anthologies. On Wednesday, I found the atlases tucked near
Speaker 1: children's non fiction, a pairing that tickled me. Children legs
Speaker 1: swinging forward over maps of cities reel and imagine as
Speaker 1: if it were bedtime reading. The oversized tatalus is dwarfed,
Speaker 1: the tiny desks bright with colored pencil shavings, and every
Speaker 1: time I looked, another map was folded into oergomi shapes
Speaker 1: and abandoned under a chair. I made a note Atlas's
Speaker 1: second floor east shared with children's non fiction, But on Friday,
Speaker 1: after a day's absence, children's craft books had wormed their
Speaker 1: way into a narrow basement alcove line with ghostly wallpipper,
Speaker 1: a cluster of shells I had never visited, though I
Speaker 1: could have sworn only reference works lived here. When Monday
Speaker 1: rolled round, I found the same craft books, tallied and
Speaker 1: up corridor beside the biography wall. Every glimpse backward, every
Speaker 1: ever to pin down the layout left me further drift.
Speaker 1: The diagrams I drew became ornate, intricate crossings and corrections
Speaker 1: blooming wildly in the margins. Ruins shifted like living things,
Speaker 1: returned to one's matt space, and you were greeted with
Speaker 1: entirely new contents. The shapes persisted, shells banisters, the occasional mural,
Speaker 1: but the spirits of the rooms, the bookish inhabitants never
Speaker 1: sat still. On one shelf, I found a scuffed blue
Speaker 1: bookmark labeled Atlas three F halfway through the Language of Cows,
Speaker 1: that is, in the Animal Husbandry section, a lonely corner
Speaker 1: that had not neighbored atlases in living memory. Rubbing the
Speaker 1: edge between my fingers, I wondered who had left this breadcrumb,
Speaker 1: or whether it had simply traveled without permission, as if conjured,
Speaker 1: been drifted into the isle searching for a missing circulation slip.
Speaker 1: Having trouble finding things, ben I teased, watching him check
Speaker 1: each shelf twice, hegrin sheepish, this place is a trickster.
Speaker 1: I swear it a mess. Margat puts the shells in
Speaker 1: a new place every morning, just to test me. Or
Speaker 1: it's the ghost or both. He smiles, but his brow
Speaker 1: furrowed lightly. Was it his usual confusion or something else.
Speaker 1: Later that morning, Missess Robinson again appeared, casting her gaze
Speaker 1: over empty shelves. No poetry, she said, flatly, hands on
Speaker 1: hips always in the southeastalko always, but to day not
Speaker 1: even an anthology. Oh well, must have slipped into the
Speaker 1: new system. She pulled a volume of foulkhor instead and
Speaker 1: complained to mix of irritation and acceptance, and gone set
Speaker 1: me with a rice smile. I suppose when you've lived
Speaker 1: long enough, even the building's start to get away from you. Then,
Speaker 1: as if it no longer mattered, she wandered toward reference
Speaker 1: with an old fashioned patience. There was one afternoon, blinking
Speaker 1: fluorescent lamps overhead, when I found a door wedged at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the main stair, Wileedora had never seen open,
Speaker 1: painted above it in precise gouldscript Ifemmel events room. Peeking inside,
Speaker 1: I counted two dozen mismashed chairs in the circle boxes,
Speaker 1: and stocks of cataloged pamphlets rising in half hearted towers.
Speaker 1: The pamphlets were a mixed breed theater programs, lost and
Speaker 1: found slips. A city council flier advertising a snow emergency
Speaker 1: from nineteen seventy four, pid you with delight. Afflecked through
Speaker 1: the pile, noting the named penn and careful block letters.
Speaker 1: I touched one into my pocket to youth Poetry slam
Speaker 1: Nowhere USA to bring up with Margaret forgetting about it
Speaker 1: until later that week. But when I attempted to return,
Speaker 1: the door had vanished. Replaced with a dull wall and
Speaker 1: a cart filled with discarded text books. At the next
Speaker 1: morning staff check in, I tried my luck with Margaret,
Speaker 1: careful to guard my pride, but tell me, has the
Speaker 1: ephemeral events room always been by the stairwell? Margaret, frown
Speaker 1: leafing through her clipbore, Oh, you mean the Harper room.
Speaker 1: We've only ever had that for rental events, and that's
Speaker 1: off the main corridor. She caught my word gaze and winked.
Speaker 1: E Former librarians always convinced the library should stay the same.
Speaker 1: We like to keep our reader's lively, keep things moving
Speaker 1: now and then, don't you behind her? Ben bad his
Speaker 1: lip watching me on the sly determament. I dug into
Speaker 1: the blue prints, descending into the chilly concrete archive. It
Speaker 1: had always suthed, the stubborn anxiety to touch things written
Speaker 1: in a confident hand of architects, the certainty of tape,
Speaker 1: measure and square. Lifting the plan from its drawer, I
Speaker 1: was greeted by the usual hodgepodge layers and layers of lines,
Speaker 1: notes in red from every age, expansions and contractions, warring
Speaker 1: an annotated pencil. But as I traced the halls. Corridor
Speaker 1: by corridor, I saw none of the possible permutations of space.
Speaker 1: I now observed Upstairs. Rooms were marked, but always occupying
Speaker 1: contradictory impossible positions, sometimes the same section existing in two
Speaker 1: wings at the her times the same room raised entirely
Speaker 1: from the plan. Even entries and staircases trusted in ways
Speaker 1: that a current building would not accommodate. I jotted numbers
Speaker 1: in my margin, overlaying my day's observations atop these jeweling realities.
Speaker 1: Returning to the main floor, I watched as Head dropped
Speaker 1: his cane, stooping awkwardly to pick it up, looking for
Speaker 1: the old microfiche again. Add I offered a hand, He
Speaker 1: pursed his lips. Move it again, swear on my dear
Speaker 1: wife's grave every time the weather changes. The building tries
Speaker 1: to help fox me. Then back to his business, he whistled,
Speaker 1: But I'll find it always do. Twinkle in his eye
Speaker 1: was not nostalgia nor irritation, but something subt loud or
Speaker 1: practiced adjustment. At home, my plan a bristled with contradictions.
Speaker 1: Flour plans erased and replaced, a chart of outlet shapes
Speaker 1: that no longer matched any room. They occupied oddities like
Speaker 1: bits of old TA spelling, cryptic abbreviations, a murror in
Speaker 1: the brick room nowhere USA, now impossibly positioned behind a
Speaker 1: newly built supply shelf. Each day, buildings conspired, shifting dimensions,
Speaker 1: almost under my nose. If I hesitated, the evidence grew.
Speaker 1: Wall seems whose history I could not track. An emergency
Speaker 1: exit described by irregular, which I'd never found. The persistent
Speaker 1: tale of the phantom lavatory told by stuff who'd never
Speaker 1: once seen a toilet. Their living memory, the library's memory,
Speaker 1: and the cities, and perhaps mine as well, seemed to
Speaker 1: part company as a feature clung to a separate map.
Speaker 1: When I pressed Margaret directly on the vanished Femeral events room,
Speaker 1: she only blinked. We haven't had a room down there, except,
Speaker 1: of course, when we hosted that Kraft Fair in the nineties.
Speaker 1: Must be blending things, dear, She reset her glasses. We
Speaker 1: all do as we get older. But the next day,
Speaker 1: flipping through the returned donations, I found the youth poetry
Speaker 1: pamphlet I pocketed, tucked, insiged, a book mark marked Atlas
Speaker 1: to be The evidence grew not just in memory, but
Speaker 1: in physical things. Either the building was ropturing beneath or
Speaker 1: notice or memory itself was playing tricks beyond the counting.
Speaker 1: I held my tongue, but no longer my curiosity. Now.
Speaker 1: When I arrived for each shift, I set aside half
Speaker 1: my time for obtivation. I wandered corridors with the deliberate
Speaker 1: care of zoologists, to test in each hypothesis, with the
Speaker 1: patience of many years in a quiet profession. I count
Speaker 1: its steps, mark locations and colored pen traced over murals
Speaker 1: and columns, and scratched telltale next into the edge of
Speaker 1: one shelf, a code just for me, just in case.
Speaker 1: Every evening, sometimes as a joke, sometimes for reassurance, I
Speaker 1: found myself humming bits of the old school librarian's coat.
Speaker 1: A place for everything, and everything in its place. But
Speaker 1: here the places themselves refused to stay put. One rainy afternoon,
Speaker 1: just as thunder rolled like applause outside the library's great doors,
Speaker 1: I ran into bed at the drop slot. Raindrops peppered
Speaker 1: his shoulders, and his tie was askew. He bounced three
Speaker 1: boxes a clipboard under one arm. I watched as he
Speaker 1: checked off return's lips. Moving silently, I carried my findings
Speaker 1: bravely that day, Ben, do you ever find it's strange
Speaker 1: how the building rearranges things? Ben didn't meet my eyes
Speaker 1: at first. He fixed his gaze to the list, chewed
Speaker 1: his lower lip, then glanced around to make sure Margaret
Speaker 1: was out of ear. Shut he set the boxes down.
Speaker 1: You are you notice it too? His voice was so
Speaker 1: careful it might have meant nothing. Sometimes I'm absolutely convinced
Speaker 1: I shalve something, even checked it twice, and then is
Speaker 1: gone or just moved. The ghost of a smile flickered.
Speaker 1: The other day, a left book in a social sciences
Speaker 1: section came back an hour later, found it in Sports
Speaker 1: and Leisure, like it had migrated by itself. Thought I
Speaker 1: was losing my mind. I leaned in tension, draining into amusement.
Speaker 1: So it's not just me with a shifty mental mat
Speaker 1: What about the stacks? Do you ever see the layouts themselves,
Speaker 1: not just the books moving? Ben exhaled sharply. God, Yes,
Speaker 1: just last week I went looking for the periodicals. Thought
Speaker 1: they were by the south windows because that light is
Speaker 1: the best. Swere I remember Margaret saying something about it,
Speaker 1: but found them next to the stairwill I choked it
Speaker 1: up to first weak confusion. He glanced down at his shoes.
Speaker 1: But now that you mention it, it we both laughed quietly.
Speaker 1: Startled by relief, I asked, have you ever tried mapping
Speaker 1: what you see? I've got sketches that don't match any
Speaker 1: version I know. He grinned lighter. I tried once, but
Speaker 1: mine ended up looking more like a subwaymap. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: dream about the building changing itself. I wake up convinced
Speaker 1: I've just wandered through another impossible hallway. So it was
Speaker 1: an only superstition, nor memories tricks. Perhaps some people were
Speaker 1: witnessed to the shifts, while most remained content with their
Speaker 1: received history. That possibility freed something inside me, a kind
Speaker 1: of kinship with Ben, and with Old Head, and even
Speaker 1: with Missus Robinson, who'd stopped hunting for poultry on the
Speaker 1: mezzanine every other day. Determined to pursue this fleeting shared
Speaker 1: tension with reality, I next visited the archives. I half
Speaker 1: expected to find the archive room itself missing, or perhaps
Speaker 1: doubled or split between wings. Instead, it had shifted, in
Speaker 1: the most literal sense, to a far corner i'd never entered,
Speaker 1: worn cold and dry, scented with all glue and linseed oil.
Speaker 1: There tucked in a battered file cabinet, I discovered a
Speaker 1: folder stamped building mapped by year. Pulling out the contents,
Speaker 1: I unfolded a decades worth of four plans, drawings and
Speaker 1: spidery hands, updated for every city modernization. I studied them
Speaker 1: the way chess player contemplates aboard every move, every configuration
Speaker 1: map year by year. Yet nothing aligned. The stairwells rotated position,
Speaker 1: the main entrance waved between west and south. Even the
Speaker 1: window shapes and street facing arches reconfigured at random. By
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, the diagrams described a second floor gallery
Speaker 1: I had never glimpsed, with a spiral staircase that did
Speaker 1: not exist. Even the blueprint scene to drift, refusing to settle.
Speaker 1: There was an entrance labeled North vestibule that had been
Speaker 1: breaked over before my time, and name that appeared here
Speaker 1: and again vanish, sometimes replaced by South annex, sometimes with
Speaker 1: simply an empty square. I documented every discrepancy, every fleeting entrance,
Speaker 1: and impossible winder. What I discovered as I scribbled notes
Speaker 1: faster and faster was not merely patchwork renovation, but a
Speaker 1: kind of physical instability of protein geometry beneath the cue
Speaker 1: as I compared notes and noted something. The sections most
Speaker 1: commonly in use periodicals popular fiction surfaced in layouts not
Speaker 1: only more frequently, but closer to central busy areas, neglected
Speaker 1: one's medical reference. The technology uck of crew harder defined,
Speaker 1: nearly vanishing. It was as though the building itself adjusted
Speaker 1: for the weight of attention, drifting to serve the hands
Speaker 1: and eyes that saw its treasures. Then when I shared
Speaker 1: my near findings, was quietly thoughtful, he confided. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: get dishovy on stairs, like I know I've walked this
Speaker 1: path before, and yet it all feels combined, like bits
Speaker 1: of the past mixed up for a moment. And sometimes
Speaker 1: when the patrons aren't here, the hallways feel longer or
Speaker 1: the light feels different. He fiddled with the Pengay's distant.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Maybe it's just nerves. Missus Robinson continued
Speaker 1: her daily rituals, always managing to locate her favorite volume
Speaker 1: of poetry, no matter where I'd last seen her. Searching luck,
Speaker 1: I suppose, she told me on a Monday patting the
Speaker 1: soft green spine, always find it eventually, even if the
Speaker 1: sections buried, someone new it was here last week. I'm
Speaker 1: sure she never seen alarmed, only mildly inconvenienced, as if
Speaker 1: all buildings had a right to shift their clothes when
Speaker 1: the mood took them. The more I paid attention, the
Speaker 1: more acute the strangeness became. I tried leaving bookmarks in sections.
Speaker 1: Each would migrate, as if magnetized, impossible but undeniable. When
Speaker 1: charted in sequence, plug sockets migrated. Four plans changed overnight.
Speaker 1: Once mural depicting nowhere Usa'd appeared behind a shelf in
Speaker 1: the new reference room, having occupied a different wall entirely
Speaker 1: the last time I checked. Each time I redrew, saw
Speaker 1: my diagrams become instantly obsolete. I watched as staff and
Speaker 1: most patrons swallowed the new layouts without pause, responding with
Speaker 1: pausable but consistent histories. When I pressed them on the past, Margaret,
Speaker 1: disinterested in details, would tease me, don't sweat for shelfing, dear.
Speaker 1: There may be method in my manners, but the building
Speaker 1: does what it Once, I found myself smiling, but inside
Speaker 1: a compulsion to disprove or unravel grew stronger with every contradiction. Finally,
Speaker 1: the question was inescapable? Was the building truly old and strange,
Speaker 1: as all ibrowers claimed to be, Or had I stumbled
Speaker 1: into something less explainable, something masked by the collector assumptions
Speaker 1: and easy laughter of those content with tradition. My own
Speaker 1: memory was robust. What if the problem was not recall
Speaker 1: but a reality? And willing to stay fixed? That evening,
Speaker 1: I sat with my diagrams, blueprint and annotated journal, the
Speaker 1: evidence of days folding and refolding. As the dust deepened,
Speaker 1: I knew this was not simply a matter of memory,
Speaker 1: not merely a librarian's nostalgia for a childhood order. Some
Speaker 1: truth rippled beneath the surface, the geography of the familiar,
Speaker 1: forever just out of reach. My pen hovered and certain
Speaker 1: as the city's light flickered into being. A line from
Speaker 1: the youth poetry pamph that I'd pocketed echoed, Maps are
Speaker 1: made by those who walk. If so, Bryant Library's maps
Speaker 1: were a living thing, moving to the beat of hundreds
Speaker 1: of readers, coarsely and otherwise? Was it memory thus shaped
Speaker 1: the building? Or had the building cast its spell over
Speaker 1: our recollections? That night, the question held me captive, not
Speaker 1: with dread, but with the sharp the light of a
Speaker 1: puzzle whose edges will not stay still. I had tested
Speaker 1: all the maps. I had listened, jotted, sketched, compared, left
Speaker 1: notes and bird combs and mental marks all throughout the stacks.
Speaker 1: After a dozen visits charles worth of migrated books a
Speaker 1: pocket full of old fiction, I saw the pattern clearly.
Speaker 1: Not only was the library's geography fundamentally unstable, but only
Speaker 1: the few myself bern perhaps said and assessed Robinson, seemed
Speaker 1: even to have the faintest idea that anything had changed.
Speaker 1: To the rest. The library was as it had always been,
Speaker 1: regardless of what logic, memory, and the ghostly traces on
Speaker 1: the tiles suggested. The realization was liberating and unsettling all
Speaker 1: at once. The phenomenon was real, not just about memory
Speaker 1: or nostalgia. The library moved. Not everyone saw, but some
Speaker 1: of us did, perhaps those most deeply entwined with the
Speaker 1: place or already half in love with its oddities. What then,
Speaker 1: was I to do with this knowledge? For the first
Speaker 1: time in my life, a map offered no answers, only
Speaker 1: new territory for wonder then, and I did not speak
Speaker 1: of out discovery directly again that week, But a quiet
Speaker 1: thread now connected us compact and private, braided of share bewilderment.
Speaker 1: Our conversation settled in the easy banter of routine, if
Speaker 1: flickered underneath, with a mutual awareness our reality. Here at
Speaker 1: Bryan obeyed rules far more liquid than the cataloging manuals
Speaker 1: or building could could ever admit. On Friday morning, as
Speaker 1: I straightened pamphlets in the Foy's wire wreck, Ben sidled by,
Speaker 1: trailing the scent of Welsh breakfast tea and fresh copitone.
Speaker 1: I've got air coming by later, he said, quietly, barely
Speaker 1: glancing at me, as he reviewed the morning's holds. If
Speaker 1: you want, maybe check and near the city directories around one.
Speaker 1: I nodded, tucking my pencil behind my ear, and carried
Speaker 1: on pleasing literature about water wise households and weakest story hours.
Speaker 1: Then busied himself near the juvenile periodicals, while Margaret called
Speaker 1: after him to mind his shoelaces. But when the ground
Speaker 1: father clock tolling near one, I drifted slowly toward the
Speaker 1: city directory's heart ticking in reply, ed arrived punctually, cut
Speaker 1: still damp from the day drizzle. He tapped his battered
Speaker 1: cane twice on the floor and pointed it north toward
Speaker 1: the genealogy stands. When Ben arrived moments later, three in
Speaker 1: our small korum, we exchanged only the necessary greetings. The
Speaker 1: silence between us thickened with the importance of unseat things.
Speaker 1: I felt for all the world like I was embarking
Speaker 1: on a saint so the start of scavenger hunt and
Speaker 1: some half forbidden attic. I plunked himself on a rolling stool,
Speaker 1: massaging his knee. Now, he said, as voci dry shirrety
Speaker 1: was wispur. Suppose you want to compare notes. He extracted
Speaker 1: from his coats inner pocket a square of folded raft
Speaker 1: paper at the corner's warn soft made a map, made
Speaker 1: a dozen. Come to think, not a one match is
Speaker 1: what I find. When I walked the place, Ben fidgeted,
Speaker 1: extracting his own sketch, a more uncertain affair, lines running
Speaker 1: off at odd angles, staircases broken and spiraling. Nowhere, I
Speaker 1: added the day's map from my planner, jagged and newly
Speaker 1: corrected over yesterday's mistakes. We spread them atop the shelf,
Speaker 1: three cartographies that shared more disagreement than overlap. That's what
Speaker 1: it's like, Ed grumbled. Some days I look for local
Speaker 1: history behind periodicals. Other times can even find the damn periodicals.
Speaker 1: You too think it's gotten worse worse then ventured ass
Speaker 1: I was twinkled, half conspiratorial, half exasperated, more jumpy used
Speaker 1: to be if he stid put everything sort itself in
Speaker 1: your favor. Now things feel restless, like the libraries grown
Speaker 1: more comfortable being strange. The idea landed with satisfying certainty.
Speaker 1: We keep finding its lock together. We tested it, deciding
Speaker 1: almost in pantamental experiment. Each drew the library as they
Speaker 1: remembered it now, descriptions outloud, making us blush with their contradictions.
Speaker 1: The south windows line up with reference no thereby gardening.
Speaker 1: The north stair isn't at gunnaw gone, it's never left.
Speaker 1: We may plans to revisit this experiment, not out of
Speaker 1: hope for consensus, but curious what the act of recollection
Speaker 1: itself might manifest. Before breaking apart, ed issued a day.
Speaker 1: If the building moves for those who notice, let's see
Speaker 1: if we can catch it doing so. Deliberately, he paused,
Speaker 1: pressing his pond to his knee, searching our faces for
Speaker 1: disbelief or for the same delight that lit his own.
Speaker 1: The opportunity found us sooner than expected. The very next day,
Speaker 1: when I returned with my annotated notebook, a new curiosity
Speaker 1: awaited near what should have been children's non fiction, today
Speaker 1: hosting a misplaced track of travel guides. We found a
Speaker 1: room labeled books returned to nowhere. I remembered old circulation
Speaker 1: cards mentioning this section never shoved, always awaiting recatalog now
Speaker 1: behind a polished oak door we'd never seen. Ajar lay
Speaker 1: the missing within shell strained under the weight of battered editions.
Speaker 1: Each of us recognized at least one title lost in
Speaker 1: prior years. A ghost resurfaced the copy of Sailing the
Speaker 1: Bryan Bridge I'd readed from reference before their remodel. A
Speaker 1: collection of city ordinance has been recalled shelving somewhere impossible
Speaker 1: in his second week a diary, it adds careful script,
Speaker 1: dated Library nineteen seventy six. Missing. The sensation was not
Speaker 1: nostalgia or fear, but a kind of collective satisfaction, as
Speaker 1: if the room acknowledged its role as the library's impossible index.
Speaker 1: I pulled down a volume at random, and then through
Speaker 1: the hundred and slits inside, dates from all across the
Speaker 1: last forty years names half legible, some in the careful
Speaker 1: lupinscript I had not used since the days of carbon paper.
Speaker 1: The pass here survived through disruption, an accident, more vivid
Speaker 1: by its waywardness. My heart thump with recognition. This, we
Speaker 1: realized was not a trick of memory, but a tangible demonstration.
Speaker 1: Sections lost to the wider library preserved here for those
Speaker 1: able to look with the right eyes and with the
Speaker 1: right companions. But every time we discussed our findings, even obliquely,
Speaker 1: even in the shallowest language, the Beldings seemed to lean
Speaker 1: in listening. In the week that followed, the three of
Speaker 1: us mapped our visits and shared notes, each acting as
Speaker 1: both participant and observer. We left bookmarks at the edge
Speaker 1: of shells, sometimes joking in secret codes, sometimes writing riddles
Speaker 1: meant only for each other. These marks, tucked and tracked
Speaker 1: as faithfully as any artifact, were never found precisely where
Speaker 1: we placed them. Sometimes a card marked History South that
Speaker 1: would migrate from garden into the book's returned to nowhere room.
Speaker 1: Other times, original scribbles on a post had appeared on
Speaker 1: the back of a microfie slip across the building. Perhaps
Speaker 1: most astonishing, sections rarely appeared side by side twice in
Speaker 1: a row. No matter how fast our observations or how
Speaker 1: cunning our anticipation, the logic denied repetition atlases. When coss
Speaker 1: of near fiction one day would leap next to the
Speaker 1: reference wall, and the children's crafts drifted between the basement
Speaker 1: and second floor without pattern, we began to see a
Speaker 1: system two sections could never but more than once a day.
Speaker 1: The largest ones always gravitated to the parts of the
Speaker 1: building busiest with visitors. The patterns seemed not mechanical, but organic,
Speaker 1: almost playful. Sometimes the migration made sense, placing gardening near
Speaker 1: the sunniest windows just as patrons arrived searching for flower guides.
Speaker 1: More often, the arrangement paid tribute to the flocks of
Speaker 1: activity were reflecting the surge and way of need. We
Speaker 1: compared this to the building's blueprint, again, pouring over microfisi
Speaker 1: and digitized scans, and found them more pliable than ever now.
Speaker 1: The architectural diagrams, themselves, seen to rewrite between visits, sometimes
Speaker 1: were in shrank or stretched to accommodate shifting sections. On
Speaker 1: one sheet, a corridor labeled possibilities nestled between periodicals and reminuscripts.
Speaker 1: On another the same area was simply a shaded blank.
Speaker 1: None among us could recall seeing this ruin before. Though
Speaker 1: the words stuck in the minders of draiged from a dream,
Speaker 1: it became clear at the manifestations these spaces that shouldn't
Speaker 1: exist appear to order, femeral yet insistent. One afternoon, venturing
Speaker 1: near the main stairwell, we found an arc of labeled
Speaker 1: cartographs as a collision of English and French that typified
Speaker 1: the library's cosmopolitan roots. Inside the shelves billed over with
Speaker 1: maps annotated in every language, from the bureaucratic stamp of
Speaker 1: a faded property Soviet to illustrations of non existent neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: Some imagined the cities river winding two blocks south of
Speaker 1: its prison course. Others depicted looping street grades. No one
Speaker 1: had ever walked. City Plan nineteen ten, never built, read one.
Speaker 1: A pamphlet titled Ephemeral City Plans sam to Circulation Not
Speaker 1: Permitted crowned the stack. Ben thumbed the maps, his lips
Speaker 1: moving silently as he made mental notes. Look at this
Speaker 1: harbor District ease extension proposed nineteen forty eight. That's three
Speaker 1: neighborhoods downstream from anything that exists. He pressed the pamphlet
Speaker 1: into my palm light as old air pure decides which
Speaker 1: version gets built or remembered ed Meanwhile, chuckled rifling through
Speaker 1: a folder of neighborhood association newsletters, some with dates that
Speaker 1: never aligned with official city records. He looked up a
Speaker 1: slice smile. Maybe nobody decides lad, Maybe all the versions
Speaker 1: stick around waiting for someone to poke their nose in.
Speaker 1: We left the cartograph as miss room. At least we try.
Speaker 1: When we retraced our steps the following day, the label
Speaker 1: had changed to utlases to Elimo Jennaire, and a collection
Speaker 1: mixed in sea routes, cloud charts, and highways, promising destinations
Speaker 1: that memory could not verify. My hands trembled pleasantly, as
Speaker 1: if on the verge of understanding something hidden in the
Speaker 1: periphery of certainty. To test further, we decided to leave
Speaker 1: a trail. I scrolled a short novaan alle Iberry index
Speaker 1: card to found at cartographicsments four or thirteen p M. Thursday,
Speaker 1: signed with my initials, then placed it between two books
Speaker 1: in the city plan shelf. Edward turned alone the next
Speaker 1: morning found a card not where placed, but slipped into
Speaker 1: volume of Bryant before the grid. A new Atlas's section,
Speaker 1: now adjacent to the magazine knockouve. The sections, as if
Speaker 1: responding to our method, arranged themselves anew playfully, but always
Speaker 1: just ahead of comprehension. As our experiment continued over a week,
Speaker 1: we expanded our invitations subtly, shepherding in as regular as
Speaker 1: we suspected of being notices to missus Robinson, after an
Speaker 1: initial dose of skepticism, emitted one day when prodded with respect,
Speaker 1: The play sometimes gets away from me, but it always
Speaker 1: comes right in the end. She looked fondly at the shelves,
Speaker 1: as if amused by the building's tricks rather than troubled.
Speaker 1: You know, in my youth, I swore the poetry lived
Speaker 1: on the top floor. Now, well, I just follow the
Speaker 1: sun and hope. Margaret tolerated our games with cheerful Forebrandts,
Speaker 1: merely shaking her head at our scribbled maps and new obsessions.
Speaker 1: You all seem intent on proving the libraries haunted, when
Speaker 1: all I want is for the wholed shelf to stay
Speaker 1: near my desk. She'd fixed us with one of her
Speaker 1: lopside ardigrins, but I'm used to people getting lost. Let
Speaker 1: me know if you ever find a bathroom that doesn't
Speaker 1: require a map. At this point, the curiosity sharpened, and
Speaker 1: not why the library moved, but why only some could follow?
Speaker 1: And how the structure decided its new configurations. Could attention
Speaker 1: itself be the engine? Did they overlook, disappear or simply
Speaker 1: weigh off the main path to be rediscovered? We noticed
Speaker 1: that the more we pressed, the more dramatically the sections
Speaker 1: rearranged the building scene to delight in a company of
Speaker 1: inquisitive minds. The sense grew that discovery was in itself
Speaker 1: a kind of pact forgotten rooms returned for those looking.
Speaker 1: Hamphlets about events of femeral events, books returned to nowhere,
Speaker 1: and now possibilities surface when we needed confirmation that the
Speaker 1: past was more layer than any catalog. That sense of
Speaker 1: expectation reached its peak one Saturday when ben Ad and
Speaker 1: I were joined by a woman whose presence brought Gravida's
Speaker 1: unfamiliar to our circle of habitual odd balls. Her name
Speaker 1: was a mess Alvarez, known to some as a resident
Speaker 1: city historian, A careful, amused woman with a slow rolling
Speaker 1: voice and glasses that caught every spark of window light.
Speaker 1: Ben had invited her after a chance encounter at the
Speaker 1: reference desk, where he'd spotted her puzzling over plans of
Speaker 1: Bryant's West End. She arrived in the early afternoon, clad
Speaker 1: and tweed and chewing on a pen that seemed barely
Speaker 1: up to the task of containing her curiosity. I understand
Speaker 1: you have a question, she said, after introductions. Examining the
Speaker 1: tangle of four maps we derayed in the staff room,
Speaker 1: a mystry of place or is it history? Or possibly both?
Speaker 1: She raised an eyebrowt light, warring with skepticism. We've been
Speaker 1: keeping track, I said, sliding across my Keffel diagrams. Has
Speaker 1: been showed some of his more whimsical subway sketches, and
Speaker 1: Ed pointed out a few entries that made no architectural sense.
Speaker 1: The library never stays the same two days running, and
Speaker 1: the building's history seems to support a long standing inconsistency.
Speaker 1: Mess over aservedo Work then asked, have you factored in
Speaker 1: the ovalays you know, old city street maps, property lines,
Speaker 1: the original river course, even the service predating the library.
Speaker 1: This plot was part of a cartographic conundrum at one time,
Speaker 1: several expansion plans, none ever fully realized. She paged through
Speaker 1: the blueprints, her finger landing on the segment marked potential
Speaker 1: construction unbuilt eighteen ninety four. Watch a she unearthed coppice
Speaker 1: of nineteenth century plats faded Serveey's ghost in multiple street
Speaker 1: grades across the land that became Bryant Library. The patterns
Speaker 1: wobble lines, starting overlapping, vanishing between one decades optimism and
Speaker 1: another civic missap. It's all here, she mused, tracing with
Speaker 1: a slow finger, a river beds, shifted, property match redrawn
Speaker 1: after every freeze and fall, even accounts of the ground
Speaker 1: swallowing up a street or two. Surveyors with poor compasses,
Speaker 1: Perhaps are more creative history than we're used to owning
Speaker 1: up to missing streets, then asked, leaning forward, She nodded, smiling.
Speaker 1: There are always missing streets and old cities, but Bryant,
Speaker 1: more than most, favolain enough contradictory blueprints, and the result
Speaker 1: is a patchwork impossible to reconcile in reality, maybe not
Speaker 1: just for the city, but for the buildings to As
Speaker 1: we listen, the library's fluctuations came into sharper focus cast,
Speaker 1: not as accidents of pro bookkeeping, but an inheritance. One
Speaker 1: match in the city is on the resolved past, the
Speaker 1: legend she recounted phantom allies, survey errors. A library constructed
Speaker 1: atop with some sort of map tangle made our predicament
Speaker 1: feel suddenly less extraordinary and more likely logical, if extraordinary
Speaker 1: consiquince its tempting to imagine. Ms Alvarez mused that the library,
Speaker 1: sensitive as it is to being used, loved, and remembered,
Speaker 1: is always negotiating its identity between these competing possibilities, the architectural,
Speaker 1: the historical of the personal. In her voice, I heard
Speaker 1: the echo of my own early questions. Did places respond
Speaker 1: to how we remembered them? Was the past ever singular?
Speaker 1: All afternoon, our circle hunched around blueprints, plat Ovalais city directories,
Speaker 1: and half remembered stories. For a time, Bryne Library's history
Speaker 1: seemed to resolve, collapsing from uncertainty into a layered richness,
Speaker 1: not of course, but of real decisions mapped onto unreliable
Speaker 1: ground as we colored and underlined our conjectures. Ben noted
Speaker 1: that when we focused, our curiosity directed our collective minds,
Speaker 1: so a specific place, a shelf for a room previously
Speaker 1: and accounted for the Kaima Shiva. As if the air
Speaker 1: itself bent momentarily to our inquiry. A door would appear,
Speaker 1: a shelf would realign, A pamphlet missing for decades would
Speaker 1: be waiting on the desk for perusal. This phenomenon, we realize,
Speaker 1: was not mere architectural drift. For the combined effect of
Speaker 1: renovation and neglect, the space responded only so far as
Speaker 1: anyone thought to examine it. Not all patrons, not even
Speaker 1: all staff, but those moved by need of curiosity to
Speaker 1: truly notice, and in noticing, in carrying, we shaped the map. Benue.
Speaker 1: A pattern emerged moments of crowded interests, when children filled
Speaker 1: the craft akove, when eds's regroup helf from bridge expansions
Speaker 1: seen to attract the corresponding section to the area, sometimes
Speaker 1: even directly into new or impossible rooms. When a subject
Speaker 1: sat neglected too long, it faded away, sometimes vanishing altogether.
Speaker 1: But now we realized it was only hidden, waiting for
Speaker 1: some one to look. That same afternoon, Ben made a
Speaker 1: tangible breakthrough. He found a book on a return cot
Speaker 1: that he'd never checked out, nor shelved, nor even seen
Speaker 1: in the Cataloga slim green volume Bryant rejected city plans.
Speaker 1: Inside the dates slip was stamped June nineteen eighty four
Speaker 1: and the borrower's name was we penetrated in handwriting. No
Speaker 1: record in the system shewed it as missing, but the
Speaker 1: coal number matched a spot I knew for certain head
Speaker 1: of times belonged to gardening, at others to local history.
Speaker 1: The book itself into a leave practical munistful records with
Speaker 1: hand drawn city EMPs, some outlined painstickingly, others obviously whintericle.
Speaker 1: Tucked inside the cover was a pocket containing a family
Speaker 1: snapshot head as a young man standing in front of
Speaker 1: the Brant River and a built bridge in the far distance.
Speaker 1: Ed regarded the photo quietly. I remember this, he said,
Speaker 1: staring as if through a window on time. Only the
Speaker 1: bridge it was never built, The river always turned there,
Speaker 1: The street plan never matched. He closed the book with care,
Speaker 1: but we thought it would. I remember hoping to have
Speaker 1: a picnic there some day. His voice did not break,
Speaker 1: but took on a note of longing for a possibility
Speaker 1: miss but not quite lost. That's light It grew in me, too,
Speaker 1: a recognition that this library shifting forms were not chaos,
Speaker 1: but layered with intied dreads of a collective past, half remembered,
Speaker 1: half imagined, and all the true for being multiple, All
Speaker 1: the notices gathered in an impossible room, surrounded by possible arrangements,
Speaker 1: possible lives. I stood, for a moment, lost in a hush,
Speaker 1: grateful for walls that held so many and collapsed futures,
Speaker 1: and for this group who took delight not in solving,
Speaker 1: but in asking. We delved deeper into the archival room,
Speaker 1: which that day spilled over with boxes not marked on
Speaker 1: any inventory. These bore hasti labels, not cataloged possibilities, events
Speaker 1: never held. I cracked open one box, hands trembling faintly
Speaker 1: to a trove of city event posters announcing lectures, readings,
Speaker 1: and holiday concerts that I recalled planning, but never saw realized.
Speaker 1: Each poster bore notes in a hand that, with a
Speaker 1: jowl I recognized as my own from decade before. I
Speaker 1: lifted a pamphlet titled Poetry Read Aloud Series nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: with thell hout my maiden name. For one brief but
Speaker 1: weighty moment, time seemed to collapse inward. Here was proof
Speaker 1: not of haunting, but of continuity. The part of me
Speaker 1: who'd once typed that program doubted it would ever happen,
Speaker 1: hoped the building would find a place for it. She
Speaker 1: lived here to you, somewhere within these reflected walls, just
Speaker 1: as every noticer and dreamer had made their own mark.
Speaker 1: Inside the pamphlet, folded carefully, was an index card. It
Speaker 1: carried my own handwriting, unmistakable after years of self corrected scripts.
Speaker 1: What will you find if you keep looking? I had,
Speaker 1: in some way left myself a question there in the
Speaker 1: artificial events room, with Ben ed and a mess Alvarez watching.
Speaker 1: I understand Bryant Library did not merely houst the city
Speaker 1: stories and newspaper records, council minutes, borrow dreams. It was
Speaker 1: itself a story told across decades, a collaboration between builders, readers, librarians,
Speaker 1: and the restless hope of possibility. Its form bent to
Speaker 1: the pattern of sustained attention, need, affection, walls, bent, rooms, appeered,
Speaker 1: shells wondered, shaped by the overlap of memory, hope, and
Speaker 1: the ceaseless energy of looking. I closed the card in
Speaker 1: my hand hot light, not with the pleasure of solution,
Speaker 1: but with a deeper contentment that some places, especially beloved ones,
Speaker 1: live in the tension between plan and usage, between the
Speaker 1: city that was and the city that could be, that
Speaker 1: may be. The very idea of a map is less
Speaker 1: to instruct than to invite, return, revision, re imagining. We
Speaker 1: left the archival room together, not in possession of an answer,
Speaker 1: but in communion with the truth about places, about libraries,
Speaker 1: in particular, so saturated with expectation and shifting desire that
Speaker 1: their boundaries must inevitably blur. After that day, our group
Speaker 1: met informally in corners new and familiar, sometimes the same,
Speaker 1: sometimes wildly altered after just an errand or two. Each
Speaker 1: session of ritual, a circuit of maps, a charting of loss,
Speaker 1: and found a laugh over vanished bathrooms. We invited others
Speaker 1: gently and were careful never to explain too much at once. Margaret,
Speaker 1: for her part, ruded us for our hobby. As her
Speaker 1: society for stubborn cartographers. She issued us coffee mugs decorated
Speaker 1: with blank city grids, as if to reward our stubborn attentions.
Speaker 1: In months that trickled by, I grew less invested in
Speaker 1: holding on to fixed geography certainty. Once my ballasts now
Speaker 1: seemed almost amusing. The deeper joy arrived in surprise in
Speaker 1: the invisible logic that unfolded. If he paid close attention
Speaker 1: but never forced the answer, then an I'd along with that,
Speaker 1: and sometimes a mess. Al Varrouz learned how to act
Speaker 1: as gentle hosts for fellow notices. Our group never needed
Speaker 1: a name, only a context. Four or five people mapsiskey,
Speaker 1: ready to swap stories of the not quite possible. We
Speaker 1: speculated on how far in theory the building could stretch,
Speaker 1: and then delighted in not being able to find at
Speaker 1: the urge to pin everything down, loose and gently. Instead,
Speaker 1: I found myself absorbed in the rhythm sketch, a map,
Speaker 1: exchange clues traced the place in you in ever shifted shelf.
Speaker 1: Every appearing room was the open invitation to participate in
Speaker 1: the making on making, and were making of the layered
Speaker 1: horm the business of curation preservation. All the stern guardian
Speaker 1: rolls I cherished softened at the edges. Now the honest
Speaker 1: labor was in noticing, not for the sake of correction,
Speaker 1: but for appreciation the invisible architectures built by generations of
Speaker 1: reader's absent minded staff children, hunting treasure, and even by me,
Speaker 1: could be mapped only as they flickered. After a while,
Speaker 1: I came to understand that the finest map was not
Speaker 1: in any city archive, but an end to woven narratives
Speaker 1: of its people read in a flexibility of Bryant's halls.
Speaker 1: On a late afternoon, when the light slanted golden and
Speaker 1: every pane gloud, I wandered down a new corridor I
Speaker 1: would have sworn had never been there before. The hush
Speaker 1: was complete, broken only by the muffled laughter drifting from
Speaker 1: the reference desk market. The loud, as ever, were stocking
Speaker 1: a shelf in a now familiar configuration she swore hadn't
Speaker 1: changed in all her years. A single window, impossibly tall,
Speaker 1: cast sunlight onto a small, empty chest up beneath it.
Speaker 1: The space was simple, but pristine, as if waiting for
Speaker 1: someone to discover its it and rest. I lingered one
Speaker 1: hand on the back of the chair, not quite se yet,
Speaker 1: feeling the pulse of all the possible arrangements lingering in
Speaker 1: the walls around me. How does a place decide where
Speaker 1: its own part to belong? Perhaps it listens for footsteps
Speaker 1: of questions, for hands that reach for maps, for curiosity
Speaker 1: that is in content with yesterday's arrangement. As I watched
Speaker 1: Margaret humming Rechelving as if her certainty was the truest
Speaker 1: magic of all, I felt the thrill of anticipation rise.
Speaker 1: Tomorrow something may be different. I look forward to it,
Speaker 1: knowing the library would be ready to me whatever map
Speaker 1: I brought with me, real or imagined. And that is
Speaker 1: the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
Speaker 1: you in the next one.