Speaker 1: The first time I stumbled upon the door, I was
Speaker 1: wedged between a mobilock off shelf groaning with crack VHS
Speaker 1: cases and a box of old skull programs, half crouched
Speaker 1: so my hips wouldn't bark at me. Later. It had
Speaker 1: been a slow morning in the basement, the usual valuating
Speaker 1: whether any donation was worth the mole check, mending the
Speaker 1: odd children's book sought in the slave maker tape. When
Speaker 1: I realized the shelf I was shelving wasn't flush against
Speaker 1: that far wall I could usually was. Instead, the row
Speaker 1: had bucked at an od angle, exposing a narrow wedge
Speaker 1: of space, like some secret device had slid it aside.
Speaker 1: It's worth saying I've worked here, in one way or
Speaker 1: another for nearly half my life. This library is no
Speaker 1: grand marble temple. It's a polite mishmush of renovations, patched
Speaker 1: corners and the sort of midnight green lanoleum the city
Speaker 1: must have gotten a steep discan thirty years ago, then
Speaker 1: never abated. But I'd have sworn I knew every inch,
Speaker 1: the idea that some little triangle had been lucking unnoticed step,
Speaker 1: my heart tapping in a predictable way it always does.
Speaker 1: One curiosity winds out over common sense, Rivling sideways, I
Speaker 1: found myself facing a door I could not It was
Speaker 1: painted a dur industrial gray, the only ornament a small
Speaker 1: neat plate, metal not plaster, decreed in simply eats section s.
Speaker 1: The font was old, the sort of block print I
Speaker 1: always associate with city issue time clocks or forbidden supply cupboards,
Speaker 1: A mild worth of authority clinging to each character. Below
Speaker 1: it was a dial lock, big lighte surprisingly smooth under
Speaker 1: my thumb, the numbers worn but legible, ring with the
Speaker 1: chilly confidence of a mechanism designed fifty years ago to last.
Speaker 1: The building itself in a proper handle, the kind you'd
Speaker 1: expect to see on an armored c of a room
Speaker 1: rather than a public institution's basement. My first thought, surely
Speaker 1: a Roebucks closet or staff breakrim faded as I sifted
Speaker 1: through my mental inventory. We had one storage closet. The
Speaker 1: blueprints had spent an unmentionable amount of time with them
Speaker 1: after my second knee surgery. When boredom demanded a product,
Speaker 1: made no mention of a section S. I rooted through
Speaker 1: the folder in my cart lists of every basement stack,
Speaker 1: neatly clipped into seas. Even fire code maps, there were
Speaker 1: sections RTU, even a short lived section queue that housed
Speaker 1: the zcene collection from the local college. Nothing labeled this,
Speaker 1: not as a section, not as a storage area, not
Speaker 1: a closet or historical room. I considered the proud, mundane
Speaker 1: secrecy of a city. Sometimes a supply closet is just
Speaker 1: a supply closet, conveniently unnamed on paper to save someone
Speaker 1: a headache about insurance. But the sense of and tether possibility,
Speaker 1: that giddy, almost chemical scent of an unsolved thing, refused
Speaker 1: to leave. I pressed my pump to the door, then
Speaker 1: hesitated for all the libraries faded pride. We rarely locked anything,
Speaker 1: specially not where the clim opposed a threat to brittle paper.
Speaker 1: Some distant part of my mind shift the familiar warning
Speaker 1: not everything left unattended, eat an audience. Still, the handle
Speaker 1: was cold, heavy in its stubborn way that makes one
Speaker 1: suspect a cleverer designer had once argued for the most
Speaker 1: durable solution, but it gave with up for us pivoting
Speaker 1: easily in sigh like a limitoftus metes like tiny ships
Speaker 1: coming into harbor childsbof battered woodam's matched metal shifted the
Speaker 1: geometry of the room into a kind of organized chaos.
Speaker 1: The ceiling lamps spaced regularly, soft enough to banish claim
Speaker 1: without inviting it to linger. Books and folders lined the stacks,
Speaker 1: some stacked upright, others piled as if a busy librarian
Speaker 1: had been called away mid task. There was a small
Speaker 1: table by the door, one leg bolstered by a square
Speaker 1: of cut carpet. I had time only for a fleeting
Speaker 1: glance the impression of an ancient fol io and a
Speaker 1: lament slip case, and a sheaf of paper in a
Speaker 1: folder marked with swelling hesit and pemianship before the clan
Speaker 1: of the upstairs poe neckered all the way down the
Speaker 1: Tineyan to calm, much abused, warbled mister Finch. We need
Speaker 1: that property file from the environmental shelf, please. I shut
Speaker 1: the door gently, refusing the hungry urge to rip through
Speaker 1: the artifacts like an over eager child. Even as I
Speaker 1: wheeled my cart towards the stairs, a puzzle drew behind me,
Speaker 1: sharp as a prickle at the nape. Where called that
Speaker 1: section s new one in my imagination waited with perfectly
Speaker 1: ordinary patience. I told myself that no mystery suffers by
Speaker 1: being forced to wait. I've always lived in my routines,
Speaker 1: even after retiring from paid work. Since giving up my
Speaker 1: titles had librarian four years ago, after the second round
Speaker 1: of knee issues in the first fetherings of aphritis, I'd
Speaker 1: taken to volunteering at the branch three days a week,
Speaker 1: sometimes if Tony the Janeta needed an extra hand with
Speaker 1: the heavy loads had come in on a saturd day
Speaker 1: as well. Our branch sits at the edge of a
Speaker 1: city both too small for anonymity and too tangled in
Speaker 1: its own history for clarity. I was born here, walked
Speaker 1: these rain gloss sidewalks as a boy, wandered at the
Speaker 1: ocean visible from the skull's upper windows. Have my first
Speaker 1: kiss in the shadow of the lighthouse, presided over my
Speaker 1: first library's story hour beneath the original mahogany ceiling, now
Speaker 1: hidden by ten layers of dropped tiles. The city is
Speaker 1: a mistake made of pride and neglect. The main lobby's
Speaker 1: marble warned of alvet at the edges patched till anolean
Speaker 1: by generations of budget committees and nanextraddled awkwardly across what
Speaker 1: once might have been the Children's Guard, and hasty renovations
Speaker 1: completed in three and again in seventeen, none quite matching
Speaker 1: the plans. My own habits have settled into gentle particularity.
Speaker 1: I arrived mid morning, chat with Mary at the front
Speaker 1: desk over that stuttering ketel she insists makes the best
Speaker 1: weak tea, then drift them on the old retens, sometimes
Speaker 1: reading aloud to the preschool set, other times lost in
Speaker 1: the gentle arithmetic of shelf re alignment. I keep my
Speaker 1: own notebook, a habit both scolded and relied on by others. Innate,
Speaker 1: I sketch details, others let past a left handed signature
Speaker 1: and a donated atlash pressed violet. At a poetry volume
Speaker 1: I find satisfaction and raskinely overlooked. Once returning a book
Speaker 1: of ballads, I discovered an envelope with a mathematical joodol
Speaker 1: in the corner. It became part of my favorite day,
Speaker 1: a child's imagined code itself in answer to a mystery
Speaker 1: I never fully cracked. My affection for the library's eccentricities
Speaker 1: co exists with a kind of zeal for order, a
Speaker 1: trait both cherished in lampooned by my colleagues. Mary, the
Speaker 1: pragmatic circulation manager, claims nobody uses those archives. Walter Short
Speaker 1: of the annual Haunted house set up. Tony, existing in
Speaker 1: a mythic space between staff and fixture, claims knowledge of
Speaker 1: every inch of for maintenance reasons, though he prefers not
Speaker 1: to be bothered in less a putt bursts. Then there
Speaker 1: is a mesquerrero, our most recent director, almost formal in
Speaker 1: her adherence to protocol, but quietly filled by any breach
Speaker 1: from routina. Trait we share, though neither of us will
Speaker 1: admit it aloud. These habits and people form a ballast.
Speaker 1: Yet sections did not fit library quirks. I understand leaky fixtures,
Speaker 1: mislabeled shells. A section wants to vote entirely to stamp albums,
Speaker 1: now housement storage. This door was another thing, entirely, impossibly real,
Speaker 1: stubbornly inclaimed. I spent that afternoon passing the archives, scurrying directories,
Speaker 1: staff blogs, blueprints left from the nineteen eighty seven renovation.
Speaker 1: I made a show of clearing space in the supply's bain,
Speaker 1: but my mind suckled the same kernel nothing matching section s,
Speaker 1: even in the disaster planning guys, where every hallway nook
Speaker 1: and janitorial cabi are meticulously listed at the space where
Speaker 1: the door stands as marked as a sheer wall. That night,
Speaker 1: I allowed myself the pleasure of restacking my own memory
Speaker 1: catalog in the sensation the peculiar weight of the handle,
Speaker 1: the dell sparkle off the dial, the sense that some
Speaker 1: threshold had shifted, however subtly beneath the day's familiar geometry.
Speaker 1: I tried not to place too much meaning on it.
Speaker 1: The library is old, and I have learned to let
Speaker 1: such discoveries Meller. Still, the notion of her room, both
Speaker 1: present and not accounted for, sank into my dreams, spoiling
Speaker 1: through images of endless halways and forgotten drawers. I resolved
Speaker 1: the next morning to test my perception against another pair
Speaker 1: of eyes. Mary keeps a stack of index cards beside
Speaker 1: the return shoot jarring notes in a line which only
Speaker 1: she in the stands. She reads every suggestion slept. However,
Speaker 1: Daften claims she can still recall the patron with the
Speaker 1: overgy Fishing Regulation pamphlet from nineteen ninety two. During a lull,
Speaker 1: i sidled up to her corner. Mary, does section S
Speaker 1: mean anything to you? She tipped her glasses down, ibra
Speaker 1: hiking with the practice skepticism of someone worry of equipment
Speaker 1: audits section s. All the sections are on the wall
Speaker 1: chart by the fire exit. Never heard of an S.
Speaker 1: Must be a misprint. It's a real door downstairs, past
Speaker 1: the record shelf, odd sign, metal plate dial, lock of
Speaker 1: all things. She crinkled her nose, her not another complained
Speaker 1: about the water heat of face. Did she check the blueprint?
Speaker 1: I've got last year's directory here. Want to take a peek.
Speaker 1: She pulled a batter binder from under her counter, the
Speaker 1: plastic sleeve sticky with the sweit of a thousand hands.
Speaker 1: We paged through the space listings together, section q r T,
Speaker 1: the fairbrotherless stacks, the children's alco even the utility rooms,
Speaker 1: boasting over specific dimensions. But S was missing, no reference
Speaker 1: in the official records. Shrugging, Mary's at the folders side
Speaker 1: supplies closet. Most likely they do love inventing new coos
Speaker 1: for old junk. Show me at lunch. When lunchtime came,
Speaker 1: sandwiches and tea balanced precariously atop a batted cart high
Speaker 1: led her into the chill of the basement, pointing out
Speaker 1: the familiar bows and buckles in the tile. There, the
Speaker 1: wedge of space, the heavy door, the unfussy plate. Mary
Speaker 1: didn't blink. Ha, how long has that been here? She
Speaker 1: poked the handle. Storage probably feels colder than it should.
Speaker 1: She turned back to me, unconcerned, already preparing a rebuke
Speaker 1: for the next line. Item on her day, wasn't on
Speaker 1: the chart a press, no mention of section s anywhere.
Speaker 1: Mary tucked her hands into her cardigan, lips twitching with
Speaker 1: practiced annoyance, now shading into impatience. Honestly, Walter, you know
Speaker 1: how these buildings are. Last year we found a broom
Speaker 1: closet labeled Paula and a janitor cart that belonged to
Speaker 1: a skull from upstate. If you want to clean it,
Speaker 1: I'll be my guess. No ghosts or secret codes will
Speaker 1: show up on your watch, I promise. And off she went,
Speaker 1: the wainfluorescent go trailing after her. That was the first contradiction,
Speaker 1: the first little cut in my confidence. The room existed,
Speaker 1: no question, solid, real under the flickering light. Yet aside
Speaker 1: from myself, no one attached meaning to it. The records
Speaker 1: were silent, the living memories blurred. Myr vied with fascination.
Speaker 1: Had the room always been here? Was everyone else simply
Speaker 1: a new to it? Or had it slipped in while
Speaker 1: no one was looking? The next logical stop was Tony.
Speaker 1: He may not have approved of my fast idious cataloging,
Speaker 1: but even he would admit to respecting results. I found
Speaker 1: him laboring over a stubborn pane of glass, wrestling with
Speaker 1: cocking so old a crumbled at his touch. Tony, you
Speaker 1: must no section ss, old metal door dial, lock down
Speaker 1: past the wreckage shelf mean anything to you. He cocked
Speaker 1: his head. That weird little room by the water pipe's
Speaker 1: been there since before I started, Maybe storage, maybe for
Speaker 1: old blueprints, maybe some ancient collection they were ashamed to display.
Speaker 1: He grinned. I never set foot in it myself, too busy,
Speaker 1: and anyway, those pipes rattled too much for my liking.
Speaker 1: Why something broke down in there? No it? I stopped reconsidering,
Speaker 1: you're sure it's always been here? He made a show
Speaker 1: of thinking, always sure, or at least as long as
Speaker 1: anyone remembers old rooms down here. You know, nobody bothers
Speaker 1: with half of them, and just like that, he was off,
Speaker 1: summoned by the erupting hiss of a bad event. In
Speaker 1: the duff restum, Mary admits the room must exist, but
Speaker 1: cannot remember why. Tony recognizes its location, and yet cannot
Speaker 1: recall ever entering, not even as a matter of maintenance.
Speaker 1: No record in the directories, no mention in the payroll
Speaker 1: for cleaning or utilities. The more direct my questions became,
Speaker 1: the more resistance I encountered. Are not angry or defensive,
Speaker 1: just mild boring indifference or reluctance. Did well on something
Speaker 1: off pattern? The contradiction widened. The room stood there, perfectly deniable,
Speaker 1: yet inexplicably familiar to every one I asked, but always
Speaker 1: just as irrelevant as an unclaimed umbrella. I recognized the
Speaker 1: shape of a real puzzle. Those contradictions I have treasured
Speaker 1: most always begin in the gulf between the visible and
Speaker 1: the remembered. Section SS was not simply an overlook cause.
Speaker 1: It it pressed upon the ordinary, praying at the borderlands
Speaker 1: of certainty. It was a quiet day, the slack hum
Speaker 1: of rain against the foundation, the distant ping pond of
Speaker 1: a kindergarten field trip in the meeting rooms when I
Speaker 1: resolved to return. This time, I wedged the mobile shelf
Speaker 1: a little further aside and brought my note bad, two pencils,
Speaker 1: and the dogged spirit inherited from years of methodical inquiry.
Speaker 1: I turned the die lock, though the door never resisted,
Speaker 1: and entered in sight. The place was transformed from my
Speaker 1: previous glance, not in the way a room might feel
Speaker 1: different in morning light or under shifting dust, but fundamentally changed,
Speaker 1: as if the parameters themselves had been nudged. Directly ahead
Speaker 1: was a cluster of low wooden shells, mismatched in stain
Speaker 1: and height, some bent under their own load. Scattered atop
Speaker 1: them were books, some familiar in size and design, others
Speaker 1: bound in textures I didn't immediately recognize. To the right,
Speaker 1: metal rocks held files of all kinds, accordion folders with
Speaker 1: bent tabs, boxes labeled in smeary blue pencil, and clip words,
Speaker 1: which os organized by taxonomies both rational and not. Fishing
Speaker 1: families un affiliated picnicking disappeared. Chess clubs beyond a squat
Speaker 1: table rested beneath an a laized lamp, it shade a
Speaker 1: faded yellow that suggested ear spent in a sunroom elsewhere.
Speaker 1: I roamed slowly, careful not to disturb any arrangement, until
Speaker 1: I'd satisfied myself with the visual sweep. A low stack
Speaker 1: of children's books caught my eye. One bound in sickle
Speaker 1: green leather, bore the cryptic title the Festival that could
Speaker 1: have been nineteen sixty three. Another in scrolling letters readd
Speaker 1: Return by June twenty forty nine. On its inside cover.
Speaker 1: The ink had bled slightly, as if the stamp were
Speaker 1: impossibly fresh. On more than one shelf, titles appeared in
Speaker 1: alphabets had didn't recognize angular ruins, looping scripts, squiggles like
Speaker 1: quiverine currents. I found about of pamphlet extalling a Nano
Speaker 1: Solstice preyed through the Haymarket district, an event that ever remembered,
Speaker 1: had it ever taken place. Posters announced poetry readings led
Speaker 1: by people with familiar lost names, though a quick mental
Speaker 1: cross check with our regular patrons yielded no matches. Testing
Speaker 1: a few of the buckotes at the small scanner by
Speaker 1: the door, I met only errors I am not recognized.
Speaker 1: When I fetched the old dates stamp from beside the
Speaker 1: love book spat out impossible numbers three slash twenty seven
Speaker 1: slash twenty eighty one, then at the next attempt to
Speaker 1: twelve slash fourteen slash eighteen eighty two, before recentering on
Speaker 1: today's dated running out of ink. The dial seemed longer
Speaker 1: than the basement could physically accommodate, weaving in odd patterns
Speaker 1: that surrounded me one moment and retreated the next. The
Speaker 1: table at the room's far end, which I tried and
Speaker 1: failed to find on a second pass, bore jam jar
Speaker 1: jammed but spent fireworks in a single faded polarid of
Speaker 1: a playgun I have never seen in this town. As
Speaker 1: I pressed on, I began to realize that objects within
Speaker 1: this room referenced and sometimes depicted things which were, by
Speaker 1: every official record impossible. City newswortters listing events that never
Speaker 1: made the local paper, mayor all photographs with names that
Speaker 1: never appeared in the election rolls, hand draw mats combining
Speaker 1: real streets with non existent landmarks, a lighthouse at the
Speaker 1: wrong end of the bay, A bakery once rumored but
Speaker 1: never opened. More unsettling was the fact that, between visits
Speaker 1: and I made several, always taking the same careful route,
Speaker 1: the layout itself seemed to shift items I had carefully
Speaker 1: indexed in my notepad would sometimes move a pamphlet on
Speaker 1: a corner table appearing two rows away, or a shelf
Speaker 1: I distinctly remembered one, marked oral histories and verified to
Speaker 1: vanishing entirely Until the next day items appeared, disappeared, or
Speaker 1: changed configuration, made examination, determined, tank and myself, I said
Speaker 1: about drawing a careful map. I charted every visible shelf,
Speaker 1: noting their borders and the relative positioning of each artifact.
Speaker 1: But when now returned after a short lunch, my hand
Speaker 1: drawn diagram was now inaccurate. A shelf was longer, a
Speaker 1: corner table gone, The exit door slid several feet down
Speaker 1: the far wall. No other room in the library shifted
Speaker 1: beneath its own designation. My attempts at cataloging failed in
Speaker 1: more ways than one. Even when I tried to check
Speaker 1: out one of the objects and news that are labeled
Speaker 1: as a reference only section as the scanner aerbosistor. At
Speaker 1: my next attempt, they due date fluster date ending in
Speaker 1: three digits, then vanished entirely. What sort of catalog could
Speaker 1: contain a booker to be returned at a date both
Speaker 1: impossibly near and centuries far. The prospect of simply ignoring
Speaker 1: the room was by now unthinkable. I tried to pull
Speaker 1: staff into my orbit once again. Tony, excited by a
Speaker 1: broken heater now urgently in need of his attention, reported
Speaker 1: may be as a special reserve collection. Before shuffling off,
Speaker 1: Mary summoned back, peered, and shrugged all genealogy stuff. Maybe
Speaker 1: places a warren of irrelevance. Try not to get lost.
Speaker 1: No one seemed was particularly worried about the existence of
Speaker 1: a door. Only I seemed to find troublesome. Their relationship
Speaker 1: with the anomaly was cordial but distant. Perhaps it was
Speaker 1: there all along, perhaps not as soon as I pressed
Speaker 1: for memories for concrete detail, their interest fated in exasperation
Speaker 1: or hope. I moved the inquiry outwards. Over the following weeks.
Speaker 1: I asked the people who haunt every public space daily regulars,
Speaker 1: retirees treating the library as a second living room, teenagers
Speaker 1: skulking around, panted for solen moments with contraband snacks. The
Speaker 1: earnest g analogists sketching his own families Byzantine chart in
Speaker 1: the corner. All had different responses. Most predictably, it had
Speaker 1: never set foot in section s. Some, when asked directly,
Speaker 1: assumed it was another supply room or special access stock
Speaker 1: have places nobody bothers with unlessness. Still it becomes urgent.
Speaker 1: Yet among my sample, a small number, mostly older, evidently
Speaker 1: native to the city, offered glimpses of past familiarity. Mister Dorsey,
Speaker 1: stooped in spry, recalled vague childhood afternoons poking about a
Speaker 1: storm with a smile of pencils and oceanaire. He remembered
Speaker 1: a murialed wall that his mother had said was for
Speaker 1: the special readers. Hetcher, student at the local college, remembered
Speaker 1: losing her way as a child on a skull trip,
Speaker 1: finding herself in a windowless room with stacks full of
Speaker 1: instruments and clocks. Misses tallmans wore ship beat in a
Speaker 1: room with a game library where he could borrow wind
Speaker 1: puzzles and unidentifiable tokens. By the hour, Each story shimmered
Speaker 1: with uncertainty. No two accounts matched. Each described different features,
Speaker 1: discordant layouts or objects. What's more, the longer our conversations went,
Speaker 1: the less conviction anyone displayed. Petra, after describing the clocks,
Speaker 1: retracted her memory with a frown. Suggesting perhaps it was
Speaker 1: just part of the old children's wing. Mister DAWs Loft
Speaker 1: haughtily suggesting his recollection might mix up with an old
Speaker 1: movie about a magical library. Details dissolved, we replaced by
Speaker 1: maybe I dreamed it, or perhaps your thinking of something else.
Speaker 1: Curiosity now led me to a deeper, stranger realization. Section
Speaker 1: S was no static art of act, no orphans supply
Speaker 1: closet waiting for a label. It seemed to recall from
Speaker 1: certainty one ever pressed by memory by logical inquiry, it shifted, refrained,
Speaker 1: or blurred, as if it could not abide clarity, as
Speaker 1: if its shape was not only mutable, but actively in contention.
Speaker 1: I learned to track the phenomenon by what it denied
Speaker 1: my assumption had been there. If Section S was real,
Speaker 1: it could be mapped, described, filed, and reference a collection
Speaker 1: to be solved as one diagrams the narrative of a book.
Speaker 1: This proach failed, and failed with assistance. The more I
Speaker 1: pressed for objectivity, the more the details crumbled. The room
Speaker 1: shaped itself to recollection, and recollection could never quite be trusted.
Speaker 1: Its contents were too rich, too contradictory, too locked. Shifting
Speaker 1: memory pamphlet for an event that never was, a photograph
Speaker 1: that could not exist, a map bending the reel and
Speaker 1: the possible. Each patron's memory provided another angle, another variation,
Speaker 1: but never anything that could be cross reference with certainty.
Speaker 1: I spent one late afternoon the street noise up of
Speaker 1: Gentle with departing traffic, working through the section as methodically
Speaker 1: as possible. I started at a low shelf nearest the
Speaker 1: entrance catalog in each spine. Each artifact then switched to
Speaker 1: random perusal, seeking to throw off any pattern imposed by routine.
Speaker 1: Some items referenced familiar local events, but with odd implausable auditions.
Speaker 1: A last bonfire ceremony on the city beach, may Well
Speaker 1: portrait with a different surname and face fatally reminiscent of
Speaker 1: a man who cloaked at the hard West hour in
Speaker 1: my childhood. A concert program listed as occurring in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six feet of my own elementary school, Yeate recited
Speaker 1: to teach his names I didn't recognize. I tried to
Speaker 1: be more sistipent. During one session, A noted the presence
Speaker 1: of a vivid blue folder precisely labeled Eastward. Building proposal
Speaker 1: adopted nineteen fifty four. Later that evening, in the city's
Speaker 1: digital archives, I learned that every major building proposal for
Speaker 1: that year ran west, not east, and none with the
Speaker 1: signatures had been formally tabled. Pressing further, I noticed small
Speaker 1: cumulative oddities, books whose copyright pages were obviously handmade and
Speaker 1: carried dates set in years not yet arrived or far
Speaker 1: in the past, Programs for an annual solstice festival which
Speaker 1: had never appeared in a single local newspaper. I could
Speaker 1: find newsletters referencing city wide initiatives where both the events
Speaker 1: and the supposed outcomes were lacking from every record. It
Speaker 1: occurred to me, after several cycles through what I realized
Speaker 1: was becoming a kind of mnemonic maze, that the contents
Speaker 1: of section as seemed to anchor themselves not to the
Speaker 1: strict facts of the city, but to its alternate memories.
Speaker 1: Almost histories could have beens things perhaps streamed, rumored, or
Speaker 1: half wished for. There was no error, no easy solution,
Speaker 1: only shifting possibilities. Determined to test the phenomenon another way,
Speaker 1: I brought a camera to document the strangeness. I aimed
Speaker 1: it at the oddest artifacts and enamel pin from a
Speaker 1: coastal science date. I could find no evidence of a
Speaker 1: painted miniature of city Hall with an extra wing. Appended
Speaker 1: and snapped a series of photos that evening at home,
Speaker 1: I connected the camera to my laptop and opened the files.
Speaker 1: Each image was a blowed, abstract wash of colors, as
Speaker 1: though the lens had failed to focus on anything real.
Speaker 1: The artifacts became obscured, no matter how directly I had
Speaker 1: centered them in the viewfinder. Undeterred, I opened my note
Speaker 1: had to review my written observations, to my chagrin. Some
Speaker 1: entries had changed, descriptions were more tentative. A few itemize
Speaker 1: lists had acquired printheticals, or was the west side it
Speaker 1: aded and clear shifted. I could not remember adding my
Speaker 1: own handwriting seemed different in color or slant in places,
Speaker 1: as if a half forgotten version of myself had revisited
Speaker 1: and tink overed the record. I started to feel as
Speaker 1: though the act of documentation itself was something section as
Speaker 1: resisted or entangled. The most dramatic discovery came just as
Speaker 1: I was winding down a late afternoon exploration. Talked in
Speaker 1: the lowest tier shelf labeled a Firmer special, I found
Speaker 1: a small oil painting and sign, probably ten inches square.
Speaker 1: It showed the library's basement from what seemed an impossible
Speaker 1: angle straight above, two tears up, as if the painter
Speaker 1: had hovered between the ceiling pipes. The details arrested me.
Speaker 1: A city issue car. It parted at an odd till,
Speaker 1: the old vent with it, drusty grill, a shelf slightly
Speaker 1: ski yetup was the central figure that held me in place.
Speaker 1: In the heart of the painting, turned midway between a
Speaker 1: stretch to reach a shelf and the sideways glance toward
Speaker 1: the viewer, was a figure in a green sweater and
Speaker 1: khaki slacks. My sweater, my slacks. The posture was mine, unmistakable,
Speaker 1: the hands braced as I must have stood just hours before.
Speaker 1: I had never sat for this painting, yet here it
Speaker 1: was impossible, a mirrored precise beyond the reach of accident.
Speaker 1: I stared searching for the artism, mark or hint, or
Speaker 1: even a date, but none was visible. The more I
Speaker 1: examined the painting, the more I realized it was not
Speaker 1: simply a record, but something more. Section as his way
Speaker 1: of catalogging the cattle Logger and folding me into its archive.
Speaker 1: It hit me then that the section was no passive
Speaker 1: collection of lost or overlooked things. It was crafting new
Speaker 1: artifacts drawn from my own engagement, echoing and reconfiguring whatever
Speaker 1: passed its threshold. Memory and present intertwined. The ordinary tricks
Speaker 1: man apping, documenting, cross referencing were not only useless, but
Speaker 1: perhaps beside the point. Section S was not to be
Speaker 1: solved by traditional method. It was neither static nor random.
Speaker 1: It was proticipatory, refluxive, attentive. If I looked at it differently, irresponded, mirrored,
Speaker 1: adapted all my prior assumptions. Tho stidy dreams of inventory
Speaker 1: and explanation dissolved. I left Section S that evening inclined
Speaker 1: the stairs, feeling not frightened so much as or to
Speaker 1: brush by a larger, subtler intelligence at work. The boundaries
Speaker 1: between what the library contained, what it remembered, and what
Speaker 1: it could almost remember, had blurred. Section S was not
Speaker 1: simply a room, nor even a repository for forgotten things.
Speaker 1: It was closer to a membrane, something shaped by attention
Speaker 1: and change by recollection, as fluctuating as possibility itself. I
Speaker 1: no longer thought of it as a secret to be solved,
Speaker 1: but as something alive, dynamically preserving and reshaping what the
Speaker 1: city chose not quite to forget. I did not sleep
Speaker 1: well the night after I found the painting, a sunset
Speaker 1: of color leaking across the ceiling, shadows gathering in the corners,
Speaker 1: my mind circling the impossible image of myself quietly folded
Speaker 1: inside the sas seen no one else would credit. Rest
Speaker 1: proved elusive, each half dream and spooling new variants of
Speaker 1: the basement doors opening on to beaches, shelves that bent
Speaker 1: like wooler branches, a slow tick of a clock that
Speaker 1: kept no proper time. By dawn, when the city's crows castle,
Speaker 1: and shadows across the salt flat glass, I resolved firmly,
Speaker 1: almost with relief. Thus section as could not be untangled
Speaker 1: by solitary method. Selfishly, I wanted company in my bewilderment.
Speaker 1: More than that, I needed to understand if the section
Speaker 1: shiftingness was a trick of my own mind or something
Speaker 1: that could be stretched and tested in the presence of others.
Speaker 1: I made a list. Not marry UTTONI, both too entrenched
Speaker 1: in their measured disbelief, but two people with some plame
Speaker 1: my memory and open curiosity, a kind of triangulation, or
Speaker 1: at least emotional ballast. One was mister Dorsey, who had
Speaker 1: offered fragments of childhood recollection bright enough to be real,
Speaker 1: or nearly so. The other was Petra At, the young
Speaker 1: university student who had recounted a fleeting sense of familiarity
Speaker 1: while researching for her senior thesis. Both had at least
Speaker 1: acknowledged sections to something more than mundane. I found mister
Speaker 1: Dorsey hunched over about a chessboard in the periodical's alcove,
Speaker 1: pencils stub clenched in the mornings, un gilding the fringe
Speaker 1: of what remained of his hair. Petro appeared soon after,
Speaker 1: lugging a director's chair in the sketch book, her backpack
Speaker 1: crowded with enough pens and sticky notes to relabel half
Speaker 1: the shelves in a building. There was laughter and trepidation
Speaker 1: as I explained my plan, just a walk, I insisted,
Speaker 1: an experiment in remembering, see what, if anything feels true.
Speaker 1: The three of us trundled down the main stairs, dorrisy
Speaker 1: chatting about the handrail, Petris gripping her first impressions as
Speaker 1: we passed a mural of the founding Librarian's mudge mythic
Speaker 1: perhaps too convenient in her stage propriety. I unlocked the
Speaker 1: mobile shelves, nudging them aside to reveal the door. They pause,
Speaker 1: Dorsey with the hand pressed to his section as if
Speaker 1: bracing for an indigestable meal, Petro bouncing lightly on her
Speaker 1: heels despite her height. We entered in single file, our
Speaker 1: shadows puddling inside sections. Immediately the room grew strange, with
Speaker 1: the hum of attention or attention buried and bright, the
Speaker 1: shells now bent at in familiar angles. A shaft of
Speaker 1: light appeared where none had been just the day before.
Speaker 1: Their quivered with the faint town of graphite and lemon polish.
Speaker 1: Dorsey stopped first, staring at a low table crowded with
Speaker 1: gears and bright blocks of wood. Everyone's wore. It was
Speaker 1: a workshop when I was a boy, he muttered, voice
Speaker 1: spilling with something like, wonder there see that cockrock toy,
Speaker 1: just like the one my uncle fixed for me after
Speaker 1: the flood. He pinched the tiny machine, its wheel spinning
Speaker 1: of their own accord, then blinked and the toy was gone,
Speaker 1: replaced by a heap of button shaped like little boats.
Speaker 1: Hatcha wandered to a far corner and folding her sketchbook,
Speaker 1: flipping to an old drawing that she declared her turn
Speaker 1: between embarrassment and certainty. She had modeled after a sunlit
Speaker 1: reading niko One's glimpsed during a kindergarten field drip. There
Speaker 1: in the space beneath the flickering lamp evidence of such
Speaker 1: a neck flicker, a bench, a faded cushion, sunlight dappling
Speaker 1: the dust. But as Dorosy walked over the bench grew indistinct,
Speaker 1: the lamp swelling brighter and shifting shape. That's not how
Speaker 1: I remember it, he said, and Patra's pencil stilled midstroke.
Speaker 1: We moved slowly through the aisles, noting, objecting, sometimes laughing
Speaker 1: in surprise at what appeared for one and vanished for another.
Speaker 1: We tried to catalog the shifting details. Allowed. There's a
Speaker 1: window here, Petra insisted. Dorosy squinted in. Know it's always
Speaker 1: been wall with a map on it. Look at this,
Speaker 1: I called, pointing to a plastic folder label Daniel Chess
Speaker 1: Club Banquet nineteen eighty three. Dorsy's eyes missed it as
Speaker 1: he recited names, including his own, though the group photo
Speaker 1: on the program bore faces neither a nor Petro recognized
Speaker 1: the objects came and went, as if attended by thought
Speaker 1: to respond into expectation, crumbling under scrutiny. A painted sign
Speaker 1: commemorated a Gray Shore elementary's final field day, which Petra
Speaker 1: remembered and Dorsy dismissed as all parent teacher legend, there
Speaker 1: has never been a Gray Show school. A faded concert
Speaker 1: ticket pulse with color as it crossed hands, the title
Speaker 1: of the performance rearranging itself with each of our readings.
Speaker 1: We tried together to record what we found. I held
Speaker 1: out my notebook, keeping a line for line account of
Speaker 1: wood each of us or didn't see. As we walked
Speaker 1: the shelves. Petro drew Quik's sketches of atoll narrow books
Speaker 1: bind and read of a clock with backward numbers of
Speaker 1: an unfamiliar festival poster. When we pause to review these
Speaker 1: artifacts as a group, confusion followed. A drawing that hat
Speaker 1: in my own handwriting shifted to an illustration of a
Speaker 1: familiar playground. A list of books, some of which neither
Speaker 1: Dawson nor Petro recod all seeing thought I could describe
Speaker 1: them in detail. Moments before, Peta pulled out her phone,
Speaker 1: taking discreet photos of two game boards and a warm
Speaker 1: mounted display of hands, gold signatures at the device's bry click.
Speaker 1: The artifacts stayed present, for so it seemed, until we
Speaker 1: checked the photos a minute later, only to find static
Speaker 1: and tumble color without discernible subject or form. Dorsy, unfazed, suggested,
Speaker 1: perhaps the room doesn't want to be remembered in the
Speaker 1: usual way, which drew a nervous laugh from Petra. Then,
Speaker 1: near about the bookcase, we came across a children's story book.
Speaker 1: Its battered cover featured our three names, a shock of
Speaker 1: unexpected inclusion, each printed as a different character teacher, student, librarian.
Speaker 1: When read aloud, the stories plot, dance, themes, and settings
Speaker 1: shifting as the book traded hands. For Dorothy, it was
Speaker 1: about a lecture in a noisy class room for Petra,
Speaker 1: a field trip through sunlit woods for me, the quietic
Speaker 1: of returning to a long empty home. By the second reading,
Speaker 1: the title had altered. By the third, there was no
Speaker 1: book on the shelf at all. At length, we sat
Speaker 1: at a broad table, once now gone, sharing reactions in
Speaker 1: the hush that followed disappointment and possibility. We argued gently
Speaker 1: in our memories up against one another, who had seen,
Speaker 1: which shelf, which artifact, who recalled what flavor of sunlight?
Speaker 1: Our recollections never lined up, even as we struggled to
Speaker 1: construct a single coherent rerecor section as confounded us, flickering
Speaker 1: new details into being, for some vanishing, others were all
Speaker 1: no camera, no sketch, no two voices held the same
Speaker 1: version for more than an instant. In frustration, Petro attempted
Speaker 1: a final sketch. She drew us a librarian, a teacher,
Speaker 1: a student, sharing a table in her room, bounded on
Speaker 1: one side by books, on the other by a painted
Speaker 1: mural for a breath. The scene felt both truthful and impossible.
Speaker 1: She looked away to select a colored pencil, and when
Speaker 1: she returned, a mural had changed her own drawing, now
Speaker 1: depicted a wall of unfamiliar symbols beneath the bright city
Speaker 1: skyline that didn't belong to our coats. Our collaborative trial
Speaker 1: proved only that section as responded to us as a
Speaker 1: group the way it had as individuals, shifting, confusing, not random,
Speaker 1: but never fix unrepeatable in the ordinary sense. It seemed
Speaker 1: to fall and unfold, patenting itself along the grain of
Speaker 1: our collective memory and anticiratory hup. I thought briefly of
Speaker 1: Schrodinger's cat of the infinite library imagined by Borges, but
Speaker 1: those metaphors fell clumsy, too small. Pierre was a room
Speaker 1: whose logic was not empirical but contingent, a place of
Speaker 1: Almos and Neelie's, as if catalogged by the city's half
Speaker 1: remembered aspirations. The experiment ended in laughter, the relief of
Speaker 1: shared bewilderment cutting through our quietor as we climbed the
Speaker 1: stairs dorsin nudge me, well, Walter, if you ever find
Speaker 1: the directions to that chest banquet, call me first. Kata
Speaker 1: struck a new label on her sketchbook, field notes for
Speaker 1: things that might have happened. We parted with the kind
Speaker 1: of camaraderie that only comes from encountering a puzzle not
Speaker 1: meant to be solved, but lived alongside. The deeper architecture
Speaker 1: of sections, now still revealed, its content and contours, glinting
Speaker 1: not from the reliable light of fact, but from the
Speaker 1: mercy shine of shared, drifting memory. What next I'd plodded, experiments,
Speaker 1: tested to patience of my colleagues, burned through more skepticism
Speaker 1: than one not tour in a season to press onward
Speaker 1: with mere empiricism, felt feudle. I needed a new direction,
Speaker 1: a weight of experienced tradition, rumor older than my own.
Speaker 1: The answer, oddly enough, arrived from the city's other edge
Speaker 1: of phone call. In the pale hours. Missus Finch croaked
Speaker 1: orderly from Brighton Home. A mess Holden is asking about
Speaker 1: her books, the ones you mentioned. She'd like a word,
Speaker 1: if you can manage before lunch. Mess Holden had been
Speaker 1: my first boss, long retired now, and the gatekeeper of
Speaker 1: the library's most sbecure traditions. In her heyday, she could
Speaker 1: recite every shelf location from memory correct miss fewl volume
Speaker 1: by sendalone, and unearth a lost patron in the space
Speaker 1: of five minutes with nothing but an overduly slip in
Speaker 1: her own deductive flare. She was the last person alive
Speaker 1: who might hold a memory older than any blueprint. The
Speaker 1: Brighton Home was close, paint still pealing from the old
Speaker 1: war years. Mess Holden greeted me with a sly smile,
Speaker 1: her hands folded on a pink cruteted blanket, eyes shop
Speaker 1: under the clouded lens of age. I explained as best
Speaker 1: I could. The room the contradictions, the responsiveness to memory.
Speaker 1: She listened, her gaze, never blinking, until I found myself
Speaker 1: tilling off in justified confusion. She spoke softly. But the
Speaker 1: library cadence was a mistakable sentences, balanced pauses, precise section ness,
Speaker 1: You say, she repeated, You were not the first first
Speaker 1: I leaned in? Was it always there? She laughed quietly,
Speaker 1: a sound more amused than mocking. Nothing's always anywhere, Walter
Speaker 1: section s as well. Let's say it's less a place
Speaker 1: than a practice, part of the memory of the building,
Speaker 1: if you like. Not the official record mind, but memory.
Speaker 1: Every town, every library worth its full wax collects more
Speaker 1: than books or official statements. We shelved everything, nobody could
Speaker 1: quite remember it, but weren't ready to forget. She tapped
Speaker 1: her fingers. Think of all the proposals never adopt, the parades,
Speaker 1: postponed stories, children invented for story out but never wrote down.
Speaker 1: That's what fills up at the edges. Sometimes when a
Speaker 1: city is uncertain it, memory grows a room of its own.
Speaker 1: For a while we called at the summer room or
Speaker 1: special collection s. Then that fell away to oppressed. But
Speaker 1: how is it a deliberate did you ever enter it
Speaker 1: yourself under She snorted, Of course, I did. You think
Speaker 1: librarians leave things unexplored, But you don't collect section S.
Speaker 1: You don't arc have it not really, It's a kind
Speaker 1: of living thing. It keeps what we nearly had. If
Speaker 1: you read too far into it, you risk weending up
Speaker 1: lost in your own reflection. But ignore it, and the
Speaker 1: section grows restless, seats into hallways, dreams up a festival
Speaker 1: no one can remember attending, but everyone wishes we'd had.
Speaker 1: We keep its custodian, not its conqueror. I struggled to
Speaker 1: absorb per meaning. The explanation was half fouc or half structuralism,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't dismiss it. Section S was not about
Speaker 1: lost objects were not just that. It was about the
Speaker 1: city's longing, its almost traditions, the stories invented but never realized.
Speaker 1: It made a kind of sense out of everything I'd seen,
Speaker 1: the moft objects, the clashing recollections, the painting that contain
Speaker 1: my own searching posture. I thank de messe Holden, promising
Speaker 1: to bring her a new book of poems. She gripped
Speaker 1: my hand firmly. Don't go fixing yet, she whispered, it's
Speaker 1: not broken. We need a place for the nearly remembered,
Speaker 1: Thus half a city's life. After all, it was late
Speaker 1: by the time I left, the sun dragging itself above
Speaker 1: the rooftops Briton's Roses liquido. I walked slowly, replaying her
Speaker 1: words alongside the memory of the shifting shelves and the
Speaker 1: laughter of my collaborators. In wonder, I realized that in
Speaker 1: a city where salesmen renamed shops every few months, where
Speaker 1: the ershin remakes the shoreline with the wind, a room
Speaker 1: like Section S is inevitable, not an accident, but in
Speaker 1: a say somewhere every place needs to store the versions
Speaker 1: of itself that don't quite come to be Back at
Speaker 1: the library, the day was ordinary in all the reassuring ways.
Speaker 1: It could be children racing past the lending desk, Merry
Speaker 1: issuing finds and forgive us an equal measure, Tony grumbling
Speaker 1: about the pipes of those pipes while some were downstairs.
Speaker 1: The air grew heavy with then choved. I roused old
Speaker 1: Section S's keychots, jagged nail, feeling a fondness for the
Speaker 1: way its weight fit my pom, a fondness nearly as
Speaker 1: old as my first library crush, That intoxicating sense of
Speaker 1: door was not yet opened. I kept my promise to
Speaker 1: a mess holden. I told Mary about my adventure, careful
Speaker 1: to leave out the painting, careful not to oversee the myth.
Speaker 1: She listened skeptical, but glanced at the basement with the
Speaker 1: new softness, as if ree considering her own assistance to possibility.
Speaker 1: Tony Well Tony just winked and asked if sections had
Speaker 1: a better heater than the rest of the floor. In
Speaker 1: the following weeks, I found myself moving more gently through
Speaker 1: the city. The boarded up bickery on Cross Street fell
Speaker 1: on some mornings as fresh as if its ground opening
Speaker 1: lay just ahead. A retired fairy horn never installed, hung
Speaker 1: in the civic garage with an ore of postponed ceremony.
Speaker 1: Sheildren's voices bounced off school out walls the cadence of
Speaker 1: their games, mixing new rules with all half remembered refrains.
Speaker 1: I added a new category to my notebook, possible traditions,
Speaker 1: small things overheard or nearly misheard, anchors to what might
Speaker 1: have taken root. I no longer sought to solve section s.
Speaker 1: I knew now that it was a kind of promise
Speaker 1: in trying as a practice rather than a puzzle, memory
Speaker 1: making room for all the spendid stories of a city.
Speaker 1: The boundary between historical fact and living community had grown porous,
Speaker 1: dappled with possibility. On my final visit, after speaking to
Speaker 1: a mess holden, I paused in the doorway, letting the
Speaker 1: silence wrap around me. Section S's shells climmered softly, their
Speaker 1: forms coalescing and dissolving. I lingered by the table nearest
Speaker 1: the engines, traced a finger over the grain of the wood,
Speaker 1: and placed a slip of paper, blank except for a
Speaker 1: hopeful question mark, at Topolu's stack and offering to what
Speaker 1: almost but never quite comes to pass. Locking up that evening,
Speaker 1: I caught my own reflection ghosted in the lobby's crack
Speaker 1: security glass. I wondered it, just for a heartbeat, to
Speaker 1: where other shells the city's memory might be growing. How
Speaker 1: could any place, any life be fully known or cataloged.
Speaker 1: As I SLID's section s is key onto its hook
Speaker 1: and let myself out into the gentle hush of dusk,
Speaker 1: I felt gratitude for the weight of all that doesn't
Speaker 1: quite fit. Half remembered festivals phantom maaeze, a shine of
Speaker 1: things just shy of becoming. How can one place contain
Speaker 1: so much that almost but not quite existed. Possibility lingers
Speaker 1: in every forgotten shelf and story, a quiet, unfinished light.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.