I got my first paycheck two weeks later—enough to replace my sneakers and even a few clothes I’d missed after Hannah left for college. I was working three shifts a week, two after school and one on Saturday.
I spent the next few shifts on Stack 5 (V T: Tools), Stack 4 (IV M: Music), and Stack 7 (VII FA: Fine Arts). It was fun to roll out the racks of paintings and see the mosaic of styles side by side. Cubist portraits rubbed elbows with sentimental domestic scenes and heroic landscapes. The sculpture was very heavy, which made it harder to deal with. Fortunately, Ms. Callender assigned us to the stacks in pairs, so there was always someone to help me, usually Marc or a quiet, burly guy named Josh.
After a few weeks at the repository, I found myself looking at everything differently—ordinary things, like chairs and windows and hot dog stands. I noticed their shapes; I noticed what they were made of. I noticed how they worked. I noticed the different doors in my neighborhood, the carved oak doors on the brownstones and the lacy iron gates on the apartment buildings and the graffitied metal gates on the shops. Objects would remind me suddenly of other objects, often ones in the collection: the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel was like an egg cup on Stack 9, my father’s bicycle helmet had the same built-for-speed curves as a record player on Stack 4. I felt as if I had new eyes. My father himself still hadn’t found time to come visit. His loss, I told myself.
After I caught a potentially serious error on Stack 9—Josh was about to misshelve a lead-smelting cauldron from Stack 5 (V T: Tools) with the saucepans in the kitchenwares section on Stack 9 (IX HG: Household Goods)—Ms. Callender decided I was ready for the Main Examination Room, the MER.
My first shift there was on a cold, bright Saturday. I’d never been in the MER on a sunny day. When I opened the door from the dim hallway, I could hardly believe I was in the same building, or any building at all. Sunlight poured in all around me, filtered through leaves and blossoms and bare tree branches. It sparkled off streams and waterfalls and snowdrifts. It gleamed on wet rocks and the wings of blackbirds.
After a moment, I realized what I was looking at: not an enchanted grove, but the famous Tiffany windows. All four sides of the MER were paneled with forest scenes. To the north was winter, with frost-rimed rocks and black branches against a bright sky. To the east, spring: crocuses, the barest glimmer of green, blossoming trees dropping petals that seemed to twist and float. To the south, summer: layer upon layer of green, with birds peeking out here and there and a pair of deer stooping to drink from the mossy stream. And to the west, fall in all its blazing yellows and reds. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
After a minute I noticed Ms. Callender beckoning from the center of the room, where the dumbwaiters and pneumatic tubes came together behind the magnificent carved wood partition.
She smiled at my expression. “Pretty, aren’t they? I love it up here. Tiffany really knew what he was doing,” she said.
“It’s gorgeous.” I thought of my father again. His loss, that was for sure!
“Well, let’s get you to work. You can sit at the desk today to get the hang of things. You’ll be giving the patrons their items when the pages send them from the various stacks. And every half hour, you’ll do a collection round—take the cart through the room and pick up any items the patrons are done with.”
I expected a library hush in the MER, but it was fairly noisy, especially in the carved staging cage where we three pages were working. The radiators hissed like lovesick lizards, the dumbwaiters chimed when they arrived, and the pneums came thumping and banging into their baskets like baby meteorites, while all around us the windows shimmered and glowed. I kept staring at them and losing track of my work.
Sarah, a plump blond page, sat on a swivel stool by a long, knotted row of pneumatic pipes, at least a dozen of them. Whenever a pneum fell into the basket at her elbow, she would pop it into one of the pipes, scooting up and down the row on her wheeled stool to find the right pipe—each one led to a different stack. She worked so fast it made me dizzy to watch her. I was glad I didn’t have her job.
It was fascinating to see the patrons in person. I remembered some of their names from the call slips I’d run in the stacks downstairs. They all wore white cotton gloves, which made them look strangely formal.
The man from Dark on Monday Productions came to claim another doublet. He was shorter than I’d imagined.
In the back of the room, under the winter windows, a couple of homeless-looking people had settled in. One of them had half a dozen shopping bags and was dozing, head down at the table.
“Is sleeping allowed?” I asked Ms. Callender.
She glanced over. “It’s fine—that’s just Grace Farr. Sometimes people come in to get warm in the winter. You can let them sleep unless they’re snoring and bothering the other patrons. If you have any trouble, ask Anjali for help—or send me a pneum. I’ll be downstairs on Stack 6. But you won’t have trouble with Grace. She’s a friend.”
“That’s good,” I said. I was glad they had a place to get warm.
After half an hour, Anjali sent me out with a cart to collect the items the patrons had finished with. The rumbling woke the sleeping patron—Grace Farr—as I went past her. She looked up at me and I recognized her pale gray eyes. She was the woman with the shopping cart, the one I’d given my sneakers to! “Hello,” I said, startled.
“Hello again.” She winked. Then she put her head back down on the table, and I continued my rounds.
My favorite patrons were a pair of elderly men in threadbare but well-pressed suits. They requested a magnificent eighteenth-century Russian chess set, carved from walrus ivory, and took it to a corner table under the autumn windows, where they spent the rest of my shift playing an intense game.
One patron, a short man with a neatly cropped beard, was doing some sort of work with globes. He requested half a dozen and lined them up in the middle of one of the long tables under a lamp, where he twirled them this way and that, peering at the continents through a magnifying glass and taking notes. He seemed at home in the MER. He would stop to exchange a word or two with the chess players on his way to retrieve a new globe. He kept looking over at Anjali.
“What’s with the globes? Is that guy a cartographer?” I asked her.
“He’s an antiques dealer. He kind of gives me the creeps, the way he’s always staring at me.”
“Yeah, I noticed that too. Creepy. What’s he doing with the globes?”
“Probably trying to figure out whether some antique globe he’s trying to sell is real, or where it’s from, or what to charge for it,” Anjali said.
The man kept looking over in our direction with a little thoughtful frown. Not quite like he was admiring Anjali the way guys so often did—more like he was evaluating a painting he was thinking about buying.
After I’d been working for an hour or so, a patron came to pick up a pair of boots that looked a lot like the ones Marc had borrowed the day his feet got wet. In fact, they looked so similar I thought they must be the same ones. I checked the call number, expecting it to be from Stack 2, Textiles and Garb, but it started with I *GC, a designation I hadn’t seen before.
Soon the patron brought them back. “Excuse me—you gave me the wrong boots.”
I checked the label, which was tied to the laces: I *GC 391.413 S94. “No,” I said. “The label matches the call number on your call slip.”
“Well, they must be mislabeled. They don’t work.”
“What do you mean they don’t work?” I said. “You mean they don’t fit?”
“They fit fine, they just don’t work.”
“How can boots not work?”
He peered at me. “I think I’d better speak to a librarian. Could you get me your supervisor, please?”
“Okay.” I took the boots over to Anjali. “Where do they keep the phone around here?” I asked her. “I need Ms. Callender.”
“Ask Sarah to send her a pneum. Why, what’s up?”
“Some patron’s insisting these boots were mislabeled. It’s weird. He says they don’t work.”
“What? Show me.” Anjali sounded alarmed. I handed her the boots. “Oh, let’s not bother Ms. Callender about this,” she said hurriedly. “You can handle things without me for a few minutes, can’t you? I’ll be right back.” She went to the window and spoke to the patron, then hurried out.
I had a hard time keeping up with the arriving objects. One dumbwaiter would ping while I was taking something out of another, then the third would chime and open. Things kept piling up as I ran back and forth between the dumbwaiters and the desk. I wondered how Anjali had managed it all so gracefully.
A line formed at the window, and the patrons started murmuring, a soft but threatening noise. The little man with the beard frowned at me when I let one of the globes slip and hit the base against the desk. I was relieved when Anjali came back with a pair of boots in her hand.
“Good, you’re back—I was starting to panic. Are those the right boots?”
“Yes, they were misshelved.”
“So that’s a different pair?” They looked the same to me.
She nodded and beckoned to the boot patron, who took the new boots and sniffed at them.
After a muttered conversation with Anjali that I couldn’t hear over the conveyor belt, he left with the boots, apparently satisfied.
“Everything cool?” I asked Anjali.
“Yes, it’s fine now,” she said. “You don’t need to bother Ms. Callender about it. I straightened it out.”
“Okay,” I said.
When Ms. Callender came in with Marc, Anjali looked momentarily worried, but she relaxed when he smiled at her reassuringly.
Ms. Callender consulted her clipboard. “Marc, you’re on dumbwaiters. Sarah, man the window, okay, hon? And Anjali, would you mind showing Elizabeth how to handle the tubes? I’ll be on 6 if you run into any difficulties.”
Anjali pointed me to the stool where Sarah had been sitting. She pulled up another wheeled stool in front of the tangle of tubes, where the pneums were hammering down.
“We’re basically operating a switchboard,” she told me. “All the pneum stations all over the building have a tube that leads here to us. A few of them are connected directly to each other, but most of them aren’t, so if someone wants to send a pneum from Stack 4, say, to Stack 7, it has to go through us.”
“That sounds like a lot of work,” I said.
“It is. We have to send them on quickly or the whole system backs up, and it’s easy to make a mistake. But don’t worry too much—if you send a pneum to the wrong stack, they’ll just send it back here.”
The job was exhausting yet exhilarating, like a video game. I had a thousand rules to remember. Anything in a red pneum went to Stack 6, where the librarians had their offices. Blue pneums went straight to Dr. Rust. Pneums carrying call slips went to the appropriate stack. I had to memorize which stack held which collection. Tools were on Stack 5, household items on 9, fungibles on 8.
“What on earth is a fungible?” I asked Anjali.
“Something that needs a lot of replacing.”
“You mean things like lightbulbs and paper towels?”
“No, that’s ephemera, on Stack 3. Well, the paper towels are. Lightbulbs are in various places. Some are on 5, Tools and Scientific Instruments; some are on 9, Household Goods.”
“Oh, okay. But what are fungibles?”
“Plants and animals.”
“What? You’re kidding! Is this like a zoo or something? Can people check out, like, a giraffe?”
“I doubt it,” said Anjali with a grin. “I don’t think we have any giraffes in the collection. If we did, they’d be in the annex anyway.”
“What’s the annex?”
“Off-site oversize storage. Those are call slips that start with *A. Like, here’s one—oops, no, that’s a *V.”
“What’s a *V?”
“Valuable items. They’re kept on the same stack as the rest of the things in their category. Pages aren’t allowed to run those slips. Only librarians have the keys, so send *V call slips to Stack 6.”
“Oh, right—like Marie Antoinette’s wig?” I asked. “Ms. Callender showed me, in a locked room on Stack 2.”
“Exactly.”
I routed a request for a teapot to Stack 9, one for a guitar to Stack 4, and three for hats to Stack 2.
It took me a while to get the hang of the tubes themselves. I kept snapping the doors on my thumb. Eventually, though, I fell into a sort of meditative rhythm. My hands flew peacefully from basket to tube. The hiss and clatter and creak of the machines began to feel like forest sounds: the rush of a waterfall, the rustle of leaves, the chatter of squirrels. Out of the corners of my eyes, I seemed to see things moving in the stained-glass windows—birds, branches, water—though I knew that was impossible.
A call slip beginning *WB landed in the basket. “What’s *WB?” I asked Anjali.
“That’s the Wells Bequest—next door to the Grimm Collection. Send it down to the Dungeon—Stack 1.”
The Dungeon again. That was obviously where they kept the most interesting stuff. “What’s in the Wells Bequest?” I asked.
Anjali took a deep breath and looked sideways. I could tell she was preparing to not answer my question, so I said quickly, “Dr. Rust told me the Grimm Collection is full of things the Brothers Grimm found when they were collecting fairy tales.” I hoped Anjali would take that as permission to talk. “Is the Wells Bequest more fairy-tale stuff?”
It worked. “Sort of—it’s science fiction,” she said. “It’s named after H. G. Wells, who wrote The Time Machine.”
“Oh—so what’s in the bequest? Is there, like, a time machine?” I joked.
Marc overheard me. He glared at Anjali from the desk. She got cagey.
“It’s hard to say. I don’t know anybody who’s tried it,” she said.
“Tried what?”
“The time machine.”
“So there is a time machine?” That was crazy. “What else is in there?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, lots of things. That’s really Aaron’s department. You should ask him about it if you’re interested. He’s kind of a science-fiction expert.”
Like Aaron would tell me anything! “Okay, but what’s the collection all about? Is it stuff that inspired famous science-fiction books?”
“Yes, exactly! That kind of thing.”
“Why’s it called the Wells Bequest? Did the objects used to belong to H. G. Wells?”
“A few of them, but there are other things too.”
“Like what?”
“Shrink rays and miniature rockets and so forth.”
That had to be a joke. “Do they work?” I asked, playing along.
“Well, the rockets work. It’s not hard to make a miniature rocket. I made one myself last year, for the science fair.”
“What about the shrink rays?”
“What do you think?”
“What else is down there?”
“Where, the Dungeon? Well, there’s the Garden of Seasons. And the Gibson Chrestomathy and the Lovecraft Corpus. They’re both fairly recent additions.”
Marc came over to our station. “You’re telling her about that?” he said to Anjali. He sounded alarmed.
“It’s okay, Merritt—Doc already told her about the Grimm Collection.”
“Did she get her key yet?”
Anjali raised her eyebrows at me inquiringly.
“What key?” I asked.
“Anjali!” said Marc.
“It’s okay,” said Anjali. “She’s one of the good ones. I have a sense for these things—I recognized you, didn’t I?”
“If you say so,” said Marc dubiously.
“What key?” I asked again.
“You’ll find out soon enough, if Anjali’s right,” said Marc.
“So what’s in the Gibson Crestothingy and the Lovecraft Corpus? And the Garden of Seasons?” I asked.
“The Gibson Chrestomathy is mostly software and computer technology,” said Anjali.
“Really? I thought all that was on Stack 5, Tools.”
“Most of it is. They keep the . . . special stuff downstairs.”
“What kinds of things are in the Gibson thingy, then?”
“The Chrestomathy? Artificial intelligence, interesting computer viruses, that kind of thing.”
“And the Garden of Seasons?”
“I’m not sure,” said Marc. “I’ve never been in there. It’s supposed to be as amazing as the Tiffany windows.”
I made a mental note to check out the garden if I ever could. “And what about the Lovecraft Corpus, what’s that?” I asked.
“Don’t talk about that! You shouldn’t even be thinking about it,” Marc said. “Anjali shouldn’t have mentioned it. Don’t go down there.”
“Why? What’s in it?”
“I’m serious. Stay out of the Lovecraft Corpus! That place is bad news.”
I really had to get down to the Dungeon soon, I decided. Even if Anjali and Marc were pulling my leg about some of these things, it sounded like all the really fascinating—and maybe dangerous—stuff was in the Special Collections, and I wanted to see it.