“No.”
“I can call the police.”
“Take them a half-hour to get here,” Serenity said. “Besides, he’s cousin to the wife of the district attorney. We’ll just wind up in a long discussion about his constitutional rights, again. No, we need to end this once and for all. We’re a library. Our power is books.”
She pulled out the biggest atlas she could carry. “Keep his attention so he won’t see me coming.”
Serenity weaved through the stacks until she heard two teen-aged girls giggling.
“Smaller than I thought it would be,” said one. More giggles.
Serenity peeked through a gap in the books and saw the back of a 1940’s style trench coat. She eased her way around behind him and stepped into his aisle.
Doom was standing in front of the man as requested, looking shocked, but now she smiled at Serenity and the surprise was gone. The trench coat spun toward her. Move fast. She opened the atlas and took one giant step forward. The opening of the trench coat rotated into view followed by the man’s grinning face and his… pride.
Serenity slammed the heavy book shut on the man with a vengeance. He jumped and screamed and she yanked the book away with a nasty jerk.
He fell back against the stacks and put his hands over himself. “My rights.”
She held the book up in both hands like Moses handing down the commandments. “Freedom of the press trumps freedom of expression.” Shook it at him. “By. The. Book.”
She shoved him aside.
“Come back again, Cy, and I’m going for the unabridged dictionary.” The teenaged girls giggled at “dictionary.” She held the book out to Doom and the girl took it like she was accepting a dead rat.
“Shelve this, please.” Serenity looked back at Cy and said, “I’m tired of wasting my big books on you little pricks.”
two
little cash
I NEED ARMOR.
Serenity looked at her office door and knew that the real battle lay inside, but she didn’t have the heart to face it yet.
So, she called in support.
She picked up a book at random from the shelving cart, glanced at the spine (Paula Brackston’s The Midnight Witch), and headed into the stacks.
Other people have horoscopes and morning prayers to predict their future. Librarians have books. Shelves and shelves of books. This was the tiny part of her day that she fought for. Moments with the smell and look and touch of thousands of books, walking among them, imagining a child reading a book and learning what it was like to be a man, an old woman reading another book and feeling the wonder of being a child again. Pride and Prejudice, Catcher in the Rye, The Jungle—books that had changed her life, and the world’s. She took a deep breath and inhaled as much of the dust of paper and ink as she could and wished she could disappear into the two-dimensional world forever.
Carl Sagan said we are all made of stardust; she was made of book dust. And, like every day, she would take her omen for the day from the book dust. She slid The Midnight Witch into its home and looked at the next book on the right to see an omen of what the day would bring. The book was Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
That can’t be right.
She studied the shelf and found a reprieve. Someone had carelessly shelved Something Wicked This Way Comes ahead of The Illustrated Man. She swapped the books.
Better.
“An illuminating day ahead,” she said to the books. Encouraged by the random promise of her books, she went into her office to face all the bills, paperwork and accounting books it took to keep her books alive one more day. She sat down at her desk, just her alone against the world.
Almost. Something scampered through the stack of books on her work table. She jumped up and stared at a small, beady pair of rat eyes that were staring back at her. The rat waddled out from the pile, a tiny ball of fur afeared of neither God nor man. He stood up on his hind legs and studied her. They both stared, waiting for the other to run away. Neither ran.
“Hope you’ve got your library card,” said Serenity, “’cause I sure as hell don’t have money to pay an exterminator.”
The rat didn’t seem impressed. She studied him and tried to find some meaning here.
“Karma. I’m going to be kind to you and share my office, and the universe will be kind to my library.” She looked back at the rat. “You can stay, but you’d better deliver.”
She flopped down at her desk and picked up a half-empty cup of cold coffee from the top of a stack of paperwork. Then she reached into the left-side drawer and pulled out an almost-full bottle of Myers’s rum that she had taken off a gaggle of teenagers who were drinking in the stacks. She looked at the clock. Ten a.m.
When she acquired the rum, her rule had been one taste at the end of the day. Then she decided to put her drinking in God’s hands and only drink after he had handed her the first crazy crisis of the day. Cy and his itty-bitty problem qualified.
Who am I to defy the Almighty?
She gulped the cold coffee to get rid of it, made a face, poured the rum, had the first taste, and made a better face. Then she thought about it and poured a little in a bottle cap and put it as close to the rat as she could without scaring him and his good karma away.
She put the bottle back and studied the stacks of books, unpaid invoices, and paperwork that overflowed her office. She fired up her ancient computer and brought up the library’s accounting program. She had enough cash on hand to maybe buy a free Jehovah’s Witness handout, and no more money coming in anytime soon. She swiveled to the stack of bills and picked up the top one. It was from the library’s internet provider. Overdue. She picked up the phone and dialed.
“Janice?” she said. “Tell me you’ve got some good karma for me there.”
There was a long, awkward pause. “I hope this is about lunch, Serenity. I’d love to do lunch with you. But if this is about the library’s bill, I can’t do anything about that. Today is turn off day for the library. Four o’clock, and you know it.”
Serenity studied the rat, and the broken shelf on the wall behind him. “Janice, we’re the library, for Christ’s sake. We can make do without a lot, but we can’t function without internet. The day we lose our internet is the day we close our doors.”
“And internet providers can’t function without money. Serenity, don’t do this to me. Look, why don’t you put out a collection jar, ask for donations?”
“If you’ll accept whatever I collect today as partial payment, I’ll bring the money to you personally.”
Janice paused. “No, sorry. I just looked at the account. You owe a lot more than any collection or donor can come up with. And my boss is insisting on full payment this time.” She sighed. “Serenity, you know I support the library, but I’ve got a boss, just like you do. I’ve got to give him something. Now.”
“C’mon, Janice. You know that’s not fair, we’re the library. I know for a fact that you let TLA Aerospace slide a lot longer.”
“Yeah. And while TLA didn’t have enough money to pay their bills, they still found money to contribute to every local politician—and get a tax credit for it to boot. And their president plays golf with my boss. They got connections. You don’t.”
Serenity looked at a set of dog-eared blueprints pinned to the wall, starting to yellow. “Yeah. Been told.”
There was silence, then Janice said, “Have you tried short skirts and push-up bras?”
“Only on Joe. How long have we got, really?”