Speaker 1: Hollo, i' moalcan stories all the time. Glad you are here,
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: For as long as I can remember, the city library
Speaker 2: has been the one place I could count on to
Speaker 2: remain unchanged, even as the city itself blurred and rebuilt
Speaker 2: around it. I suppose that's an occupational bias. A historian
Speaker 2: is always searching for continuity, something firm to anchor the
Speaker 2: uncertainty of memory and gossip, the flickering unreliability of local legend.
Speaker 2: Three times a week, rain or shine, I settle into
Speaker 2: my rhythm, walk the brick path beneath the elms, exchange
Speaker 2: a smile with Sandra at the circulation desk, hang my
Speaker 2: threadbare tweed jacket on the carved coat track, and make
Speaker 2: my way to the local history alcove. I have always
Speaker 2: insisted on the same little window seat, wedged between the
Speaker 2: city directory collection and a row of slightly sun faded
Speaker 2: family memoirs. If I'm feeling methodical, I phone in a
Speaker 2: hold for the latest mystery novel or an out of
Speaker 2: print city map. If I'm restless, I peruse the return's cart,
Speaker 2: mentally correcting miss shelvings On this morning, A calm slate
Speaker 2: gray week day, with the kind of autumn chill that
Speaker 2: leaves cold in your socks. I entered the library as
Speaker 2: I always had, Yet something unremarkable nagged a sensation as
Speaker 2: faint and persistent as static electricity in a sweater. The
Speaker 2: lobby's terrazzo floor chimed under my shoes and over my shoulder.
Speaker 2: Sandra was warbling good morning to a child in mismatched boots.
Speaker 2: I nodded to her, pocketed my battered note book, and
Speaker 2: made for the historic wing, hoping to review a handful
Speaker 2: of sauces on Saint Mark's Tower for the monthly round table.
Speaker 2: That's when a gap, a precise, knife straight absence, caught
Speaker 2: my eye in the local history shelves. Not the usual
Speaker 2: casual sort of space left by an enthusiastic researcher or
Speaker 2: careless page, but a blankness of intent. Three or four
Speaker 2: inches worth of shelf stood untouched, a careful dent between
Speaker 2: two clusters of titles so tightly packed their spines pressed
Speaker 2: together in sunken mutual exhaustion. I stopped finger hovering, uncertain
Speaker 2: if I ought to shift the volumes together. I'm by
Speaker 2: nature a fixer of such small errors. But near the gap.
Speaker 2: A fixed just to the under side of the varnished
Speaker 2: oak shelf glinted a tiny brass plaque. The engraving struck
Speaker 2: me immediately as wrong yet deliberate call hash l H
Speaker 2: two hundred and thirty one r at The sequence made
Speaker 2: no sense, not dewy, not Library of Congress, not even
Speaker 2: the home grown color band system the library once trialed
Speaker 2: in the sixties. No context, no corresponding label, no guidance,
Speaker 2: just this cryptic slice of information, couched among books on
Speaker 2: trolley lines and prohibitioneerer ice houses. I bent closer. The
Speaker 2: brass was newly polished, barely smudged. No glue around the
Speaker 2: edges suggested a hasty application, no roughness like one of
Speaker 2: Anton's April fool stunts. A glance left right, no staff
Speaker 2: in sight. Across the room, a young librarian looked up
Speaker 2: from her cart, muttering something about occasional shelf shifting into
Speaker 2: her phone. I made a faint note in my mind,
Speaker 2: odd to say the least, but perhaps some internal update.
Speaker 2: I pressed on with my research, but each time I
Speaker 2: reached for a familiar title, my eyes kept flicking back
Speaker 2: to that blank space. The anomaly hung over the day.
Speaker 2: Unnecessary inexplicable, as though I had stumbled on the punchline
Speaker 2: to a joke no one else had heard. All afternoon,
Speaker 2: the gap remained untouched. No one else remarked on it.
Speaker 2: Yet it felt as if, once observed, it no longer
Speaker 2: belonged to the background hum of daily oddities. It had
Speaker 2: become a question that refused to dissolve. Outside, dusk bunched
Speaker 2: up against the stained glass windows, throwing patterns of blue
Speaker 2: and rose on to the polished floor. As the lights
Speaker 2: flickered on. I told myself i'd ask about the shelf
Speaker 2: the next time, but found that the quiet puzzle had
Speaker 2: already wormed into the usual order of my week. Retirement
Speaker 2: had not made me less methodical. If anything, the free
Speaker 2: time allowed my old fussy habits to ripen. For over
Speaker 2: thirty years, I taught at the secondary school barely two
Speaker 2: blocks from city Center, specializing first in Commonwealth history, then
Speaker 2: in the city's improbable patchwork of neighborhoods, rivers and vanished factories.
Speaker 2: I counted myself among the reliable characters at the library,
Speaker 2: Whether by reputation or accident. Someone had once pinned a
Speaker 2: little sign to the genealogy room that read unpaid archivist
Speaker 2: answers all queries, whether requested or not. That was me,
Speaker 2: and I leaned into it. The staff knew my routines,
Speaker 2: especially Miss Renner, the head librarian, who had ushered over
Speaker 2: forty years of change through the building's grand halls. She
Speaker 2: and I once shared a running gag that the library's
Speaker 2: expansion plans always seemed to involve at least one extra
Speaker 2: corridor that no one could keep straight, as if the
Speaker 2: building's senior architect had been guided by a hand prone
Speaker 2: to deetours and afterthoughts. Still, for all its architectural eccentricity,
Speaker 2: I had committed every major change to memory. I could
Speaker 2: recite from experience the day the marble stairs were cordoned
Speaker 2: off the summer, the new elevator stalled with seven oblivious
Speaker 2: children inside, or when the stacks on the east side
Speaker 2: lost their afternoon sun after the nineteen seventy five office
Speaker 2: wing went up. Anton, on the other hand, was a
Speaker 2: recent phenomenon. Young distracted, always scribbling in a grid line notebook.
Speaker 2: He was completing a thesis on urban planning and using
Speaker 2: the library's meandering structure as a case study. He volunteered
Speaker 2: for the occasional night's shift, filing census records and correcting
Speaker 2: old cartography misprints, never losing the air of someone who
Speaker 2: had only just arrived in adulthood with shoes untied. And
Speaker 2: then there was missus Lee, a stalwart volunteer in genealogy,
Speaker 2: all sharp wit and unmoored stories. She could tease from
Speaker 2: microfeish the history of any city block, even as she
Speaker 2: sometimes stopped mid sentence to confess she could not recall
Speaker 2: her own daughter's address. She wore a silk scarf every day,
Speaker 2: knotted differently for each season, and she claimed it helped
Speaker 2: her find her way back out of the family archives.
Speaker 2: These were the people who rounded out my weeks. Miss
Speaker 2: Renner with her dignified recollections, Anton with half formed questions,
Speaker 2: Missus Lee with her selective memory. Others orbited through regulars
Speaker 2: like the History Round Table members, an assortment of reta ease,
Speaker 2: amateur historians, and the odd lost student. No matter how
Speaker 2: wide the world spun, these routines and these people offered
Speaker 2: an anchor. The library itself, of course, lent itself to
Speaker 2: change the brick and glass facade, grand as any museum,
Speaker 2: was the backdrop for an interior that refused easy mapping
Speaker 2: a ground floor reading room with a gravity defying column.
Speaker 2: Here a bibliophal's nook there. Each expansion had left a
Speaker 2: subtle seam. Even the permanent directories set in hand painted
Speaker 2: tiles and then later in acrylic stands, never quite agreed.
Speaker 2: I took care always to note when a shelf might
Speaker 2: lose a category when genealogy gained a file. After all, histories, familial,
Speaker 2: municipal were as much about what vanished as about what remained.
Speaker 2: That's why when I noticed the gap and the brass plaque,
Speaker 2: it stuck in my mind. It was not just that
Speaker 2: it was new. It was that I would have recognized
Speaker 2: instantly if it hadn't belonged before, A kind of professional pride,
Speaker 2: I suppose, in knowing the geography of places and the
Speaker 2: arrangement of their stories better than any one. I should
Speaker 2: say now, I do not consider myself prone to annoi
Speaker 2: or fancy. I believe in skepticism, the kind that leads
Speaker 2: not to dismissal, but to careful checking, double checking, and
Speaker 2: a willingness to admit to being mistaken. On my first
Speaker 2: day as a teacher, I reminded my students that rumor
Speaker 2: is often just a misfiled fact waiting for its card
Speaker 2: to be rewritten. I have lived by that. It is
Speaker 2: why I have always trusted the library to stay stubbornly itself,
Speaker 2: no matter the change is outside. And so perhaps I
Speaker 2: was the wrong or precisely the right person to be
Speaker 2: so troubled by that little brass plaque, by the disturbance
Speaker 2: in the perfect line of books. Perhaps that is why
Speaker 2: several days later I returned specifically to check. It had
Speaker 2: become a small obsession to return to the same shelf
Speaker 2: to see if the gap remained, To finally politely inquire
Speaker 2: about the odd call number. I even drew a small
Speaker 2: map in my note book, marking the neighboring volumes, just
Speaker 2: in case. History, after all, is often a footnote, overlooked
Speaker 2: by all but the most determined. When I pushed open
Speaker 2: the heavy, swinging door to the local history alcove, however,
Speaker 2: my anticipation dissolved into mild bewilderment. The shelves, every one
Speaker 2: of them, pressed together in a unified, unspectacular seam, no gap,
Speaker 2: no plaque. The shelf, which weeks before had offered a
Speaker 2: precise slice of nothing, now looked indistinguishable from every other.
Speaker 2: The familiar run of books on local labor, riots, house histories,
Speaker 2: and the Great Railway ghost stories. I ran my hand
Speaker 2: along the underside where the plaque had been nothing but smooth,
Speaker 2: unbroken wood. And here is where the contradiction settled. In
Speaker 2: the book about the City's Lost Railway, my old favorite,
Speaker 2: the one I had intended to review for round table,
Speaker 2: did not occupy its customary place at the end of
Speaker 2: the Transportation defunct sub section. Instead, that spot now housed
Speaker 2: a battered guide to city fountains, wedged precisely where I
Speaker 2: would have laid down the tome on the true trolley line.
Speaker 2: Unsettled but determined, I checked the library's catalog, a system
Speaker 2: I had trusted for decades. The books identifier had shifted
Speaker 2: just one digit, almost as if by accident, no longer
Speaker 2: LH two thirty D, but now cataloged as LH two
Speaker 2: thirty E. When I keyed in the original number, the
Speaker 2: record returned nothing, no cross reference, not even a transferred
Speaker 2: to archive's message. The battered guide, once housed a shelf away,
Speaker 2: now officially belonged beside the railway histories, as if it
Speaker 2: had always been so. I found Anton that afternoon, shelving
Speaker 2: a trolley of city council minutes, whistling a tune at odds.
Speaker 2: With the solemnity of his burden, I explained as simply
Speaker 2: as I could, my sense that something about the shelving
Speaker 2: and catalog numbers had subtly but undeniably changed. He gave
Speaker 2: a bemused shrug, pausing mid song. Since the catalog went digital,
Speaker 2: there have been little blips happened with old records. Maybe
Speaker 2: you spotted a transition in process. He flashed his lopsided
Speaker 2: smile altogether too much like someone brushing away dust that
Speaker 2: only I could see. It's always been this way, hasn't it.
Speaker 2: That phrase it's always been this way has a way
Speaker 2: of erasing the documentation of any oddity. But I am,
Speaker 2: by temperament and training, opposed to erasure. I scribbled every
Speaker 2: detail into my note book, shelf order, vanished plaque, the
Speaker 2: numerical sleight of hand, Anton's cheerful indifference, my own recollection,
Speaker 2: the electronic catalog, and the visible physical reality now disagreed
Speaker 2: in ways that could not be written off as mere oversight.
Speaker 2: Thus began for me a changing kind of curiosity, not
Speaker 2: the laughter brushed sort that comes with finding a children's
Speaker 2: book in the law section, but the prickling urge to
Speaker 2: pursue an inconsistency until it stops wriggling. Over the next
Speaker 2: several weeks, my life visits became a quiet investigation. I
Speaker 2: tried to proceed as I always had, checking in on
Speaker 2: the round table, reviewing the papers, fielding the occasional question
Speaker 2: about city trivia from the staff. But each visit left
Speaker 2: me more aware of the building's malleability, as though I
Speaker 2: now carried a new lens. Each day, I documented every
Speaker 2: minor shift that I could not chalk up to the
Speaker 2: erratic hand of time or accident. Twice I watched the
Speaker 2: poetry section, long familiar to me, slide improbably closer to
Speaker 2: the corner hallway. The next day, that same hallway had
Speaker 2: acquired an exit sign and a spill of new daylight
Speaker 2: from a direction I had never known to exist. I
Speaker 2: traced the local periodicals on a Tuesday and found three
Speaker 2: shelving bays instead of the usual two. By Saturday, it
Speaker 2: had reverted to the classic layout. I acquired a half
Speaker 2: dozen maps of the library, some printed, others hand drawn,
Speaker 2: and attempted to wreck consul them with my own movements.
Speaker 2: Pages quickly filled with messy lines and notations. Rooms alternately
Speaker 2: designated meeting room or storage seemed to exist only on
Speaker 2: alternate days. A reference to a children's study section appeared
Speaker 2: in the print directory, but was nowhere to be found
Speaker 2: in the actual building. And yet, in an old event
Speaker 2: flier pulled from the archives, that self same supposedly demolished
Speaker 2: room hosted a book day carnival in two thousand nine.
Speaker 2: The contradiction was not merely physical but categorical. In one
Speaker 2: interview at the Weekly History round Table, an amiable mid
Speaker 2: morning gathering of half a dozen regulars, the topic turned
Speaker 2: inevitably to the mystery of the changing maps. When did
Speaker 2: they knock out the marble banister for the east stairs,
Speaker 2: asked June, the round table's unofficial dramaturge. Don't be ridiculous,
Speaker 2: counted Hal. They never removed the marble. It's there since
Speaker 2: the day they opened the wing. You mean the north
Speaker 2: stairs those got swapped during the asbestos fiasco. Wasn't there
Speaker 2: a whole wing they closed for that? June pressed? Or
Speaker 2: was that for the leaking roof? Offered s H. Wetta,
Speaker 2: always the peace maker. Paging through her notes, the conversation
Speaker 2: wound on, veering between colliding memories and gentle insistence. Dates shifted,
Speaker 2: details inverted themselves. No consensus emerged. I scribbled down the variations,
Speaker 2: adding them to my growing matrix of contradiction. Seeking clarity,
Speaker 2: I approached missus Lee, who on any given week day
Speaker 2: could be found adjusting microfilm reels like a composer at
Speaker 2: a pipe organ. I led her gently into the genealogy section,
Speaker 2: asking about the family history files that had or hadn't
Speaker 2: moved to the end bay. Of course, it's always looked
Speaker 2: just like this, she said, confidently. That little nook over there,
Speaker 2: she gestured, vaguely, used to house the Polish records, didn't it?
Speaker 2: Or was that the old Scandinavian corner? I remember, I think,
Speaker 2: but not exactly why. She trailed off her hands, still
Speaker 2: busy at the reels, her stories, vibrant and detailed, drifted
Speaker 2: back and forth between certainty and doubt. On a particularly
Speaker 2: drizzly Thursday, I delved into the online city archives. There, too,
Speaker 2: uncertainty flourished. A recorded discussion of the children's study area,
Speaker 2: torn down in the seventies, appeared alongside a more recent
Speaker 2: flier referencing a grand parent story telling event in that
Speaker 2: very room, just a handful of years ago, council minutes disagreed,
Speaker 2: renovation schedules overlapped, and digital photographs seethed with discrepancies in
Speaker 2: brick color, pillar location, and wall art. Frustrated but energized,
Speaker 2: I sought out Miss Renner as the undisputed keeper of
Speaker 2: the old blueprints. She brooded over the building with the
Speaker 2: measured patience of one who had seen every initiative twice,
Speaker 2: once in council committee, once in reality. Her office, dominated
Speaker 2: by a wall of rolled plans, always smelled faintly of
Speaker 2: ancient paper and lemon oil. She sifted through the stacks
Speaker 2: and eventually produced two large format blueprints, both dated within
Speaker 2: the past thirty years. In one, the events room was
Speaker 2: unambiguously located beside the archives. In the other, drawn during
Speaker 2: a quiet period of expansion in the nineteen nineties, the
Speaker 2: same room resided almost on the opposite end of the building.
Speaker 2: We had to redraw things so often, Miss Renner admitted,
Speaker 2: Sometimes I wonder if the library itself doesn't prefer to
Speaker 2: keep us guessing. She looked at me over her glasses.
Speaker 2: But you say, the shelves themselves shift, not just in
Speaker 2: the records I told her, as plainly as I could
Speaker 2: about the gap, the plaque, the vanished room, the shifty numbers.
Speaker 2: I've heard stranger, she replied finally, though her tone carried
Speaker 2: more amusement than worry. But she promised to look into it,
Speaker 2: and I left her puzzling over the discordant maps. It
Speaker 2: had taken only a handful of days for the little
Speaker 2: puzzle of the shelf gap to expand into a wider
Speaker 2: web of contradiction, rooms and shelves, adjusting over night, event
Speaker 2: fliers testifying to spaces nobody could find memories, refusing to reconcile,
Speaker 2: even amongst those who ought to know. Every observation I
Speaker 2: made seem to interlock with the next, forming a pattern,
Speaker 2: not one of careless maintenance or clerical error, but an
Speaker 2: ongoing choreography just beneath the surface, shifting gently around the
Speaker 2: constancy of daily life. I would have called it a
Speaker 2: recipe for unease, except that what I mostly felt was wonder.
Speaker 2: My note book, once reserved for tidy lists, now bulged
Speaker 2: with cross references, call numbers, shelf orders, quotes from round
Speaker 2: table members, half overheard staff conversations. A mundane act retrieving
Speaker 2: a book had given way to a search project that
Speaker 2: was at once more elusive and more alive than anything
Speaker 2: in my teaching years. The question that had begun so simply,
Speaker 2: why had a single plaque appeared and vanished now cracked
Speaker 2: open into something deeper. What determines the very shape of
Speaker 2: this building? What could account for rooms and shelves fading
Speaker 2: in and out of existence, for the blueprint and the
Speaker 2: catalog to shift in ways that elude every simple explanation.
Speaker 2: It became clear the answer lay neither in modern logistics
Speaker 2: nor lazy maintenance, but in the terrain of memory itself.
Speaker 2: I began tentatively, at first, to chart the discoveries in
Speaker 2: my notebook by date and by witness. What emerged was
Speaker 2: not a table of corrections, but a chart of competing realities.
Speaker 2: This shelf moved, that room returned, This call number existed
Speaker 2: for the briefest time, and then did not. Each piece
Speaker 2: of the puzzle seemed contingent, provisional, dependent not on the
Speaker 2: logic of records, but on the energy of notice, discussion,
Speaker 2: and belief. Something else struck me at about the third week,
Speaker 2: certain lost rooms, collections, or books seemed to reappear after
Speaker 2: conversation about them. Sometimes almost immediately, other times after days
Speaker 2: or weeks, often in a form mismatched to the memory
Speaker 2: that summoned them. One morning, in a moment of gentle mischief,
Speaker 2: I found Anton hunched behind the circulation desk, practicing cursive
Speaker 2: signatures on a napkin. I launched a gentle experiment. Do
Speaker 2: you remember the children's reading room, the old one with
Speaker 2: the teal bean bags and the mural of the river boats?
Speaker 2: He looked up, blinking. I thought that was only a rumor,
Speaker 2: was there? Actually? He searched my face for confirmation. No
Speaker 2: one ever showed it to me. I described it in
Speaker 2: greater detail, painting the chipped paint and the dragonfly carpet,
Speaker 2: the narrow, clear story windows, the habit of sneaking in
Speaker 2: with a thermas of cooco. We talked it through, laughing
Speaker 2: at our collective uncertainty. He promised to keep an eye out.
Speaker 2: A week later, as we both passed the labyrinth of periodicals,
Speaker 2: returning from lunch, he nudged my arm grinning. Found an
Speaker 2: old corner I'd never noticed before had the weirdest bit
Speaker 2: of pale blue on the wall. Looked just like your mural.
Speaker 2: His tone was both playful and uncertain, as if he
Speaker 2: waited for me to confess a prank, But I only smiled,
Speaker 2: the implications tumbling quietly in my mind. It was as
Speaker 2: if the act of discussing, of remembering in shared detail,
Speaker 2: had carved a wedge into reality, if only for a moment.
Speaker 2: From that day on, the catalog of phenomena in my
Speaker 2: notebook changed. I stopped treating the entries as errors and
Speaker 2: began to treat them like fleeting constellations, pattens, liable to
Speaker 2: vanish if unacknowledged, newly vivid if summoned by collective attention.
Speaker 2: Did we share the building with our memories? Did forgotten
Speaker 2: details fade from catalogs and then the shelves themselves, only
Speaker 2: to return under scrutiny. Were even the official blueprints as
Speaker 2: provisional as a hand drawn map in a child's note book.
Speaker 2: My skepticism, always my anchor, began to fray, replaced by
Speaker 2: a kind of intellectual thrill, a fascination with the notion
Speaker 2: that the library was not merely a warehouse of the
Speaker 2: city's past, but a living palimpsest, a sort of architectural
Speaker 2: negotiation between recollection and forgetting. The question now was not
Speaker 2: merely why do the shelves move? But is the library
Speaker 2: itself shaped by what is remembered and what is not?
Speaker 2: In a city of steady change, could there really be
Speaker 2: such a place where reality and memory contended in ongoing
Speaker 2: daily dialogue. One rainy evening, while compiling old clippings for
Speaker 2: the round table, I stumbled across the rumor of a
Speaker 2: vanished city neighborhood, Silver End, an area I'd never heard of,
Speaker 2: though its name hummed with old fashioned significance. It was
Speaker 2: referenced off hand in an overdue biography, but nowhere else
Speaker 2: in official records. The mansion set off a small fire
Speaker 2: in my mind. I resolved to see if, just perhaps
Speaker 2: the building itself could offer more. The next afternoon, with
Speaker 2: the memory of Silver Ends still echoing in my mind,
Speaker 2: I wandered a stretch of the back stacks said to
Speaker 2: border the utility chase by, now a zone I knew
Speaker 2: as well as my own kitchen. As I ran a
Speaker 2: hand along a mobile shelf, it glided silently aside, revealing
Speaker 2: not the cinder block wall I expected, but the mouth
Speaker 2: of an impossibly narrow aisle, lit only by the thinnest
Speaker 2: stream of dust laced daylight. I paused. This corridor had
Speaker 2: no business existing. The area was boxed in according to
Speaker 2: every structural plan I had ever seen or handled. The
Speaker 2: blueprints in my bag confirmed the impossibility. There was quite
Speaker 2: literally nowhere for this passage to go. But there it
Speaker 2: was a tight avenue of mismatched shelves. The wood darker,
Speaker 2: the grain worn smooth by countless unseen hands. The smell
Speaker 2: was different, old paper, thickened by decades. I ducked in
Speaker 2: the air suddenly cooler. The books here bore odd bindings,
Speaker 2: fraying unpolished leather alongside factory embossed cloth, some with titles
Speaker 2: impressed crookedly in gold. Their call numbers did not match
Speaker 2: the catalog system, or indeed any system familiar to me.
Speaker 2: As I ran a finger over the spines, a shiver
Speaker 2: of words prickled at the edges of memory. Rivertown days,
Speaker 2: a celebration, districts of the Silver End, the Farer's Loop incident,
Speaker 2: whole stretches of civic history, whole neighborhoods, festivals, initiatives, and organizations, documented, indexed, authoritatively, described,
Speaker 2: all entirely outside any record I had ever known. Some books,
Speaker 2: bizarrely were arranged by categories that made sense only in retrospect.
Speaker 2: Urban myths, first hand accounts, disbanded societies, lost streets, even
Speaker 2: events provisional. One battered volume, written in eclipped formal script,
Speaker 2: described Rivertown days at length, from its pageant queens to
Speaker 2: the construction of a festival archway I had never glimpsed
Speaker 2: in any city photograph. There were exaggerated festival pictures, maps
Speaker 2: of a winding district known as Silver End, replete with
Speaker 2: photos of shop fronts and several references to Fairer's Loop
Speaker 2: and its annual lantern parade. I cracked a few books open.
Speaker 2: The text was dense, complete with footnotes, civic planning references,
Speaker 2: even lists of contributors. But a quick check through the
Speaker 2: city directory, online newspaper archives, and council minutes showed no
Speaker 2: sign these people or events had ever functioned outside the books.
Speaker 2: Most striking were the books in languages that seemed almost
Speaker 2: post but not quite familiar, or formats that recalled Victorian
Speaker 2: gild reports or urban fantasy guides. I snapped photos with
Speaker 2: my phone, the flash catching across the gold leaf each page.
Speaker 2: Each record detailed a world that by every measure of
Speaker 2: public record simply never existed. Bringing a stack into the
Speaker 2: reading room, I tested theory against memory. I approached Miss Wrenner,
Speaker 2: who pressed her lips together in amused skepticism when she
Speaker 2: heard my description of Rivertown days. That sounds like the
Speaker 2: sort of thing we'd have done in the fifties or sixties,
Speaker 2: she mused, then shook her head. But no, nothing like
Speaker 2: that comes to mind. Missus Lee, when pressed, peered over
Speaker 2: her spectacles and frowned. Of course, I attended a festival
Speaker 2: just like that once, But it wasn't called Rivertown, I
Speaker 2: don't think, Or was it. She trailed off into uncertainty,
Speaker 2: unsure whether she'd conjured the memory herself. Nobody else in
Speaker 2: the library or in the city offices knew a thing
Speaker 2: about these events or places. The anomalous corridor seemed to
Speaker 2: close itself up within hours later, trying to retrace my steps,
Speaker 2: I found only an unbroken wall, as if the passage
Speaker 2: had been a fleeting architectural hallucination. That night, I spread
Speaker 2: out my growing dossier, photographs of the impossibly shelved books,
Speaker 2: catalog print outs that no longer matched physical reality, a
Speaker 2: pair of blueprints now more contradictory than ever, and a
Speaker 2: patchwork of recollections, each pointed uncannily persistently to the existence
Speaker 2: of shifting phenomena not just tied to the library's geography,
Speaker 2: but to some deeper entanglement with the currents of memory
Speaker 2: and city history itself. My mind whirled as I compared
Speaker 2: the timelines, the cataloging systems, the unraveling and reforming shelf sequences.
Speaker 2: This was no longer a matter of misfiled books or
Speaker 2: accidental renovations. Instead, it began and to seem as though
Speaker 2: the library itself was generating new records, complete physical artifacts,
Speaker 2: out of the whispers of collective remembering and forgetting, the
Speaker 2: back and forth of possibility and history. The next morning,
Speaker 2: before the library filled with children and committee chairs, I
Speaker 2: approached Miss Renner and Anton in her office, laying out
Speaker 2: my findings in as measured a tone as my excitement
Speaker 2: would allow. Miss Renner, after some hesitation, uncorked a bottle
Speaker 2: of logic. Do you know there have always been stories
Speaker 2: about vanishing rooms here? When I started, the old head
Speaker 2: librarian insisted the genealogy alcove used to face the river.
Speaker 2: No blueprints supported it, But well, the older you get,
Speaker 2: the more plausible the impossible seems anton. Ever, the pragmatic
Speaker 2: leaned forward, eyes wide with the prospect of a good puzzle.
Speaker 2: What if libraries do more than just store records, he suggested,
Speaker 2: What if they generate them? What if if rumor and
Speaker 2: memory are admitted as evidence. What if the city's wishes, fears,
Speaker 2: and half remembered stories get a say. I sat there,
Speaker 2: notebook open between us, feeling the air in the office thicken,
Speaker 2: not with fear, but with a sense of doors creaking
Speaker 2: open behind ordinary things. The simple library of my previous
Speaker 2: weeks had vanished, replaced by something at once familiar and
Speaker 2: breathlessly undetermined, a vessel of all that was remembered, half forgotten,
Speaker 2: wished for, or quietly disbelieved. The question now, as I
Speaker 2: set down my pen, was both larger and more marvelous
Speaker 2: than before. What is the boundary, if any, between the
Speaker 2: records we keep and the possibilities we create? And if
Speaker 2: the library itself is alive to those currents, what else
Speaker 2: out there in the city awaits rediscovery? Shaped by our
Speaker 2: shifting consensus. All certainty for now had been replaced by
Speaker 2: a mysterious and tremendous multiplicity, one that had been hiding
Speaker 2: perhaps in plain sight among the shelves all along. Miss
Speaker 2: Wrenner's office still quivered with the aftermath of our improbable discussion,
Speaker 2: Her rolled blueprints cast like driftwood by the tide, antm
Speaker 2: perched as if half poised for escape but unwilling to blink.
Speaker 2: Between us. My notebook lay open pages, a blur of
Speaker 2: hasty short hand and clippings, all pointing to our new
Speaker 2: essential uncertainty. Shelves, rooms, and histories not just remembered, but
Speaker 2: made and unmade by our very need to remember. I
Speaker 2: could almost hear the city itself breathing through the mulli
Speaker 2: and windows. Almost without needing a word, the three of
Speaker 2: us assembled an unspoken pact. If the library was in
Speaker 2: dialogue with our recollections, our skepticism, and our imaginings, then
Speaker 2: the next step was obvious. Anton ripped a page from
Speaker 2: his gridlined pad and drew a looping question marked outline
Speaker 2: of the library's main floor. Miss Wrenner scavenged colored pencils
Speaker 2: from her drawer. We should at least document the range
Speaker 2: of realities currently on offer, she said, her lilt threaded
Speaker 2: with playfulness. There was an exhilaration more than a scientist
Speaker 2: in a moment of discovery less than religious awe somewhere
Speaker 2: between the two that ran through me. If the present
Speaker 2: shape of things was not fixed, but disputed, mapped by
Speaker 2: consensus and imagination, then what might we find in the
Speaker 2: company of many memories colliding? Within two days, invitations spread
Speaker 2: quietly to avoid spooking any one into self conscious performance,
Speaker 2: round table regulars, a couple of staff, missus Lee, who
Speaker 2: arrived with her scarf tied in a complicated double knot
Speaker 2: for courage, even a handful of the city's more attentive
Speaker 2: high schoolers lured by the vague promise of campus credit research.
Speaker 2: We began the survey in the main entry, with Sandra
Speaker 2: keeping an amused eye from the desk and occasionally chiming
Speaker 2: in with her insistence that they put the bath rooms
Speaker 2: on the left in seventy seven. I'll swear to it
Speaker 2: until I die, and anyone who disagrees owes me coffee.
Speaker 2: Each participant received a template of the floor plan printed
Speaker 2: from the digital archives, along with colored pencils, sticky notes,
Speaker 2: and an hour to wander and record the building as
Speaker 2: they remembered it. What followed was a chaos of memory.
Speaker 2: In one version, the teen writing lounge had always been
Speaker 2: a glass walled perch over the lobby's mosaic tile. In
Speaker 2: another it existed only as a windless room behind the
Speaker 2: staff break area with bean bags in acid green. The
Speaker 2: spiral stairs on four out of eighteen maps snaked up
Speaker 2: from the periodical section to a loft labeled phantom mezzanine.
Speaker 2: Four others included a tunnel to the school gardens behind
Speaker 2: the fiction stacks. Anton, with impish seriousness, detailed the old
Speaker 2: underwater mural in the main corridor, something Miss Renner and
Speaker 2: missus Lee both denied, but which three others described in
Speaker 2: intricate chromatic detail. We compared our findings immediately, laying every
Speaker 2: map and marked up directory across the conference table. It
Speaker 2: did not add up. Two people would argue a certain
Speaker 2: corridor never existed, while a third quietly would stand and
Speaker 2: describe its shape, the precise candescence of the lamp shades,
Speaker 2: the loamy sent particular to that isolated space, sometimes prompting
Speaker 2: an oh, now I do recall, and sometimes evoking only
Speaker 2: blank confusion. No one could agree on a definitive version
Speaker 2: of the building. Yet at the moment that a memory
Speaker 2: crystallized between several of us. Something subtle would ripple through
Speaker 2: the surroundings. A hallways acoustic changed, the crown molding seemed
Speaker 2: to shimmer. A door, long painted shut stood ajar. If
Speaker 2: the conversations shifted elsewhere, or if consensus evaporated, these features
Speaker 2: faded away, sometimes replaced by another small oddity, sometimes leaving
Speaker 2: only the ineffable sense of something out of joint. Missus Lee,
Speaker 2: who started the day cheerfully skeptical, was the first to
Speaker 2: articulate what I'd only been dancing around. It's as if,
Speaker 2: well as if being certain makes a thing more real.
Speaker 2: But when we bicker or stop caring, it's like letting
Speaker 2: go of a string. The balloon floats off or turns invisible.
Speaker 2: She said this with a laugh, But there was a
Speaker 2: shiver beneath it. I recognized a sense of the ground shifting,
Speaker 2: but not in any way that threatened. Midway through, Anton
Speaker 2: led us on a spontaneous group walk, tracing where he
Speaker 2: insisted the mural corridor should be Sandra, who had just
Speaker 2: that weak swap to the afternoon shift, complained, you're all
Speaker 2: chasing ghosts. But as two others threw in memories of
Speaker 2: strangely cool air by the reference desk, and an unexplained plaque,
Speaker 2: once seen but now vanished. A flutter of faint blue
Speaker 2: brushstrokes flickered into sight at the corner, the barest echo
Speaker 2: of moving water. It vanished as soon as we tried
Speaker 2: to pin it down, but not before three participants reached
Speaker 2: out to touch the wall and declared it slightly colder,
Speaker 2: slightly damp. I found myself laughing, a bubbling, delighted sound.
Speaker 2: I almost didn't recognize. The physical world was not surrendering
Speaker 2: to nonsense, the library was not becoming a fantasy. Instead,
Speaker 2: it felt as if there was a kind of negotiation,
Speaker 2: as if the building was porous to vivid, mutually sustained memory.
Speaker 2: As the exercise wore on, I noticed a pattern wherever
Speaker 2: two or three recollections strongly overlapped, especially those tinged with
Speaker 2: nostalgia or described with detail, the evidence of their truth increased.
Speaker 2: A faint whiff of poster paint in the phantom mezzanine,
Speaker 2: a single step up in a corridor that had always
Speaker 2: officially been flat, an unexplained, neatly hand lettered sign on
Speaker 2: the community board advertising a chess club meeting in the
Speaker 2: very room Anton had always sworn was storage, and yet
Speaker 2: attempts to trap these anomalies by mapping or photographing them
Speaker 2: directly almost always failed. A photograph would yield only the
Speaker 2: unremarkable expected walls and signs. The phantom mezzanine vanished from
Speaker 2: every picture, leaving only shadows. The evidence abided by the
Speaker 2: same laws as a shared story, real while being told absent.
Speaker 2: As soon as consensus waned that night, I left the
Speaker 2: building with a sense of reality not undermined, but expanded,
Speaker 2: a crowd sourced reality, collective but always provisional. The gap
Speaker 2: between imagination and experience was narrower than I had ever
Speaker 2: allowed in my years of teaching. All my skepticism had
Speaker 2: not been wasted, it had simply mistaken its object determined, Now,
Speaker 2: I resolved to aim my curiosity outward. If the library
Speaker 2: could be so constructed, woven as much from what's wished
Speaker 2: for or half recalled as from what's truly documented, then
Speaker 2: what of the city's broader, less tangible stories. The next morning,
Speaker 2: note book in hand, I set out with Anton for
Speaker 2: the impossible isle. We found it, though naturally it took
Speaker 2: a peculiar combination of reference points, conversational cues, and the
Speaker 2: mild disinterest of a passing page to even slide aside
Speaker 2: the mobile shelf. This time I brought missus Lee, hoping
Speaker 2: her selective memory would stir the contents, and to my
Speaker 2: surprise it did. Within the books, again clustered in less
Speaker 2: than expected logic, here were the lost city streets, harbor promenade,
Speaker 2: lakeside market, garnet Court, Each book filled with maps and
Speaker 2: now even old photographs sepiotone groupings posed in front of storefronts,
Speaker 2: children with dogs, a parade I could almost picture, winding
Speaker 2: down some blind alley of recollection. Missus Lee, squinting at
Speaker 2: a photograph, tapped a finger. I know that face. Didn't
Speaker 2: he run the hardware store near the old bridge in
Speaker 2: what did they call it? Silver End? She faltered, ganning
Speaker 2: my expression for confirmation. Anton, his brow furrowed, told her gently,
Speaker 2: No such neighborhood exists, at least it doesn't now. She shrugged,
Speaker 2: not fussed, and drifted to a shelf marked initiatives, failed
Speaker 2: and forgotten. Pamphlets described citywide tramway pilots, ambitious utopian gardens,
Speaker 2: a neighborhood literary journal called Asterisk, The Loop Ledger Asterisk.
Speaker 2: None of which survived any cross examination of the city
Speaker 2: newspaper archives, nor the proud oral traditions of the round table.
Speaker 2: This backstage of the library, this impossible corridor, felt like
Speaker 2: the repository of everything that might have been. Out of curiosity,
Speaker 2: I borrowed one slender volume, returning it to the primary
Speaker 2: reading room, laying it gently between the new books and
Speaker 2: the local history display. I watched quietly as patrons drifted
Speaker 2: by Hall. One of the round table contrarians skimmed a
Speaker 2: page and announced, I remember the Lakeside Market smelled of
Speaker 2: oranges before they built that hideous apartment block. Another shook
Speaker 2: their head. I swear you're remembering somewhere else. They never
Speaker 2: sold produce after the fire. Already you could see the
Speaker 2: thing happening. The more we talked, the clearer the weird
Speaker 2: shifting line between fact and fiction grew. Out of scrutiny, disagreement,
Speaker 2: and affectionate debate. An odd stabilization occurred. The book's entry
Speaker 2: migrated to the digital catalog as asterisk Lakeside Market a
Speaker 2: community History, and its call number edged itself into proper sequence.
Speaker 2: But a day later, when conversation died away and no
Speaker 2: one referenced the neighborhood. Again, the catalog reverted, the book
Speaker 2: simply drifting, first misshelved, then returned, then absent entirely. I
Speaker 2: was left with a distinct impression, not just that the
Speaker 2: library recorded asterisk the fullness of reality, but that it
Speaker 2: preserved a sort of quantum of possibility, a many world's
Speaker 2: shelf of half enacted, half ignored stories and places. The
Speaker 2: act of attention, of memory, of dispute even was the
Speaker 2: main ingredient. It was not simply archive. It was collection,
Speaker 2: curation and negotiation of all that wavered at the edges
Speaker 2: of collective. Knowing this all begged a new experiment, I
Speaker 2: approached Anton with my wildest idea. Yet, what if we
Speaker 2: fabricated an event out of whole cloth, no basis, in fact,
Speaker 2: no rumor nothing salvagable from the past, and seeded it
Speaker 2: in the local history to test what kind of echo,
Speaker 2: if any, the library produced. Anton, delighted, reached for his
Speaker 2: ever present supply of fluorescent post it notes. The Big
Speaker 2: Silver Parade nineteen sixty eight, he said, with a flourish
Speaker 2: penning out a flier, complete with sketched trombones and confetti.
Speaker 2: Come one, come all, celebrate the city's unity route down
Speaker 2: King Street, live music Mayre's address. We added details with
Speaker 2: care make it plausible but clearly fabricated. We left the
Speaker 2: fly attack to the cork board inside the local event archive,
Speaker 2: then waited days passed on my next visit, or what
Speaker 2: felt like the appropriate time interval, for time also ran differently.
Speaker 2: Amid these uncertainties, I found to my mingled horror and
Speaker 2: delight that not only had our flier accumulated a small
Speaker 2: passel of curious sticky notes, did this really happen? Sounds fun?
Speaker 2: Wish we could do it again? But a new entry
Speaker 2: had appeared in a battered library bulletin referencing the return
Speaker 2: of the Silver Parade, last seen in sixty eight, even stranger,
Speaker 2: in an out of the way shelving area, three pamphlets
Speaker 2: and a thin typescript book chronicled the Big Silver Parade,
Speaker 2: its impact and legacy. The effect was not perfect, The
Speaker 2: memory was delicate and felt more like a house of
Speaker 2: cards than a robust scaffolding. But it had occurred. We'd
Speaker 2: watched by pure invention and the mild complicity of passing curiosity,
Speaker 2: as the library generated asterisk, a trace, then a wreck,
Speaker 2: then for a short time a sliver of official reality.
Speaker 2: Eager to pull the thread further, I attempted to remove
Speaker 2: the fliers. Oddly, the literature clung to its existence. Some
Speaker 2: pamphlets no longer appeared in the catalog, but resisted full excision,
Speaker 2: reappearing after being reshelved, or at times simply unreadable, as
Speaker 2: if the type had run with water. The effect was
Speaker 2: neither sinister nor comic, but instead deeply and quietly fascinating.
Speaker 2: When I confessed all to Miss Renner, she smiled with
Speaker 2: the calm of someone who has long grown comfortable with ambiguity.
Speaker 2: There are stories cartographers drawing in whole towns by mistake
Speaker 2: on maps, and those towns becoming real for decades just
Speaker 2: by virtue of being repeated. Perhaps our library is just
Speaker 2: more transparent, more honest about how we shaped the world.
Speaker 2: By discussing it later, reflecting by the main windows over
Speaker 2: the dusklet stacks, I found my fascination shift again. The
Speaker 2: library was not some magical engine conjuring nonsense, nor a
Speaker 2: random generator. It was curating on several translucent tears, the possible,
Speaker 2: the mistaken, the cherished, the almost true. There was a reckoning,
Speaker 2: a system, even a gravity to what persisted. Anton confirmed
Speaker 2: after further trials that a pure fiction rarely lasted unless
Speaker 2: it was picked up, wondered about, debated, or woven into
Speaker 2: the city's myriad family stories. Small typos or tangential flights
Speaker 2: of invention disappeared unless they were fed by conversation and retelling.
Speaker 2: It was at this stage that my curiosity, no longer
Speaker 2: so easily satisfied by collecting examples, shifted to pattern. With
Speaker 2: Missus Lee Anton and others, we began to log instances
Speaker 2: of shelf shifting and catalog distortion beyond ordinary forgetfulness. The
Speaker 2: results built a new theory. The more something was debated
Speaker 2: or fondly remembered, the longer it persisted in the architecture,
Speaker 2: sometimes even migrating into wider memory, as if the library
Speaker 2: ceded the city's oral histories. Conversely, things that failed to
Speaker 2: arouse attention that evoked neither nostalgia nor disputation faded rapidly.
Speaker 2: Files overwritten records blacked out or dissolved into ambiguous shelf space,
Speaker 2: a palimpsest forever in the process of being rewritten. We
Speaker 2: saw this most clearly in the catalogs. Entries with misspelled
Speaker 2: street names or orphaned event descriptions which gleamed for a
Speaker 2: day or two in the digital record, and then slipped
Speaker 2: back into the void unless enough people noticed to keep
Speaker 2: the anomaly alive. Such meticulous culling and renewals slowly raised
Speaker 2: a deeper question. If reality within these walls and perhaps beyond,
Speaker 2: depended so directly on consensus, recollection and imaginative attention, what
Speaker 2: exactly was being stored, manufactured, or preserved? Here was the city,
Speaker 2: through its library, maintaining a WRECS reord of all possible histories,
Speaker 2: or only those that were most needed, most beloved, most
Speaker 2: argued over? And what finally might this say about all
Speaker 2: the other archives, the histories half glimpsed and never quite
Speaker 2: committed to certainty by the world beyond. As the weeks passed,
Speaker 2: I conducted longer interviews, not just with miss Renner or
Speaker 2: Anton or missus Lee, but with children with newcomers to
Speaker 2: the city, with high school students and juniors who'd spent
Speaker 2: their saturdays curled beneath the reading windows. I asked about
Speaker 2: the oldest, strangest, or most cherished memory they carried of
Speaker 2: the library or the city at large. Their responses mapped
Speaker 2: alongside my chaotic blueprints produced not only a topography of
Speaker 2: shifting rooms, but a heat map of changing convictions. One
Speaker 2: participant recalled with unswerving confidence that the old auditorium was
Speaker 2: once painted sky blue. Another insisted it had always been cream.
Speaker 2: These conflicting recollections debated passionately, sometimes produced brief, fragile evidence,
Speaker 2: a sky blue ceiling beam here, a borrowed folding chair
Speaker 2: painted cream there, but vanished if not revisited within days.
Speaker 2: Incorporating these narratives, I began to see a fabric emerge,
Speaker 2: a dynamic, city scale version of the palimpsest, endlessly revised,
Speaker 2: not only in fact but in belief. My scribbled diagrams
Speaker 2: now coexisted with digital spreadsheets and a short presentation I
Speaker 2: crafted for the History round table, not a lecture, but
Speaker 2: an invitation to see the records of the city as vital, plural, alive,
Speaker 2: to revision alive because of it. At the round table,
Speaker 2: instead of my usual prasis, I spoke of what we'd witnessed.
Speaker 2: The library isn't the cold warehouse of the city's past,
Speaker 2: I said, feeling every eye sharpened with curiosity. It is
Speaker 2: an ever renewed conversation. Every floorboard and call number and
Speaker 2: vanished room is the record of concern, nostalgia, hope, rumor invention,
Speaker 2: a palimpsest not only of what was, but of what
Speaker 2: could have been. And perhaps that's not unique to hear.
Speaker 2: Perhaps every town hides such a place somewhere, if you
Speaker 2: know where to look. What happened next was a gentle eruption,
Speaker 2: each member offering suddenly their own impossible memory. June recalled
Speaker 2: an old city lane that vanished overnight. S h Wetta
Speaker 2: recounted a vanished corner bakery, too stubbornly remembered to be dismissed.
Speaker 2: The line between recollection, wish and disguised fabrication dissolved not
Speaker 2: to confusion or chaos, but to delight, the joyful acceptance
Speaker 2: that certainty is overvalued, that meaning comes more from sharing
Speaker 2: and disputing than from the silent accumulation of proven fact.
Speaker 2: In that moment, I recognized the climax of my investigation.
Speaker 2: The library's phenomena were not merely eccentricities of space or catalog.
Speaker 2: They were revelations about the way human communities anchor themselves,
Speaker 2: not just in what's true, but in what's asterisk held
Speaker 2: as true for as long as enough of us care
Speaker 2: or wonder or remember together. The building, its static outline,
Speaker 2: as provisional as any myth anchored those shared stories, and
Speaker 2: in anchoring gave them just enough embodiment that the world
Speaker 2: seemed bigger, richer, more provisional, and infinitely more wondrous than
Speaker 2: I had believed possible. After the round table, I lingered
Speaker 2: in the stillness of the genealogy room, not out of
Speaker 2: doubt or defeat, but in quiet awe. All those years
Speaker 2: of demanding reliable references, tidy conclusions, single correct versions. How
Speaker 2: small those ambitions felt now compared to the generative, complicated,
Speaker 2: collective wildness of memory. Outside the city, Pilgrims, students, ritarees.
Speaker 2: City staff wandered under the shifting trees, none the wiser
Speaker 2: that within these walls, the record of the city was
Speaker 2: being drafted, erased, and reimagined, not by a select few,
Speaker 2: but by every voice willing to wonder. Missus Lee, on
Speaker 2: her way out, paused beside me. You know, to day
Speaker 2: I remembered something else. My sister's wedding happened right here
Speaker 2: in a room that doesn't exist now, or maybe it
Speaker 2: never did. She smiled, untroubled. It was nice all the same. Anton,
Speaker 2: shaking out his note book, added, maybe next year we'll
Speaker 2: rediscover another lost hallway, if we remember it hard enough.
Speaker 2: Miss Renner, hearing this, only winked in that final hour,
Speaker 2: as the last patron slipped away for the evening, I
Speaker 2: returned to my usual reading nook by the window, watching
Speaker 2: lamplight scribble bright shapes across the floor. The city outside
Speaker 2: looked unchanged, commuters crossing the square, street lights blinking on
Speaker 2: at precise intervals, a dog chasing a stubborn pigeon. But
Speaker 2: the world now thrummed with hidden richness, not just for
Speaker 2: what we know, but for what we allow ourselves to remember,
Speaker 2: to imagine, to stubbornly half believe. The library, my anchor,
Speaker 2: my greatest subject of study, had revealed itself less as
Speaker 2: a stockpoll of what's fixed, and more as a living,
Speaker 2: co authored network of remembered possibility. I realized, with profound
Speaker 2: humility that much of what I'd taken as rigid fact,
Speaker 2: what I defended in my classroom or round table arguments,
Speaker 2: had always borne the fingerprints of collective provisional agreement, each
Speaker 2: certainty provisional, each record reversible, and every community alive. Not
Speaker 2: because it found the perfect record, but because it kept telling, revising,
Speaker 2: and sharing the stories it needed. I will always return
Speaker 2: to the library. Sometimes I search for my favorite shelf.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I walk unfamiliar corners, now cheerfully tolerant of their
Speaker 2: shifting outlines. The history round table continues, heated debates and all,
Speaker 2: but the tone is lighter, closer to joy than to
Speaker 2: frustrated research. The city's map may be drawn and redrawn,
Speaker 2: but it is always richer for possibility. So let me
Speaker 2: leave you with this, the last and most important implication
Speaker 2: I have to offer. Perhaps if you return to your
Speaker 2: own library, or your favorite block, cafe, alleyway, even your
Speaker 2: corner store often and attentively enough, you might some day
Speaker 2: stumble across a book, a room, or even a whole
Speaker 2: street you have only half remembered or only just begun
Speaker 2: to imagine, and perhaps for a little while, it will
Speaker 2: be as real as anything else. You know. That is
Speaker 2: the wonder open to all of us, the world we
Speaker 2: shape together with the shifting, indelible work of memory.
Speaker 1: And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.