Page 2 of The Librarians
Austin, Texas
Monday, two days before Halloween
In the fortunate places of the world, libraries are everywhere to be found.
Some are architectural marvels. Some are touchstones of civilization. Some awe by the depth and granularity of their seemingly infinite collections.
But the greater wonder is perhaps not the phenomenal libraries proudly associated with illustrious universities or storied seats of power. The greater wonder lies in the ordinary ones, the ones that in the fortunate places are everywhere to be found.
They exist and serve quietly, standing apart not at all from their unexceptional surroundings.
Sometimes they are squeezed into tight corners; sometimes they share walls with grocery stores and sellers of electronic cigarettes.
There is rarely anything unique or unforgettable about their collections, humble aggregates of popular novels, standard reference volumes, how-to books, and DVDs for those who don’t yet stream all their audiovisual entertainment.
Yet their ubiquity is their most fundamental virtue. Their unremarkable holdings would have dazzled scholars from the Age of Enlightenment. And as much as anything, they represent a community’s investment in its members, a commitment to care for and nourish hearts and minds.
Or libraries can be merely another place to work, another place of mundane chores, minor dramas, and mediocre compensation.
I have become a pessimist , thinks Hazel Lee.
Or perhaps she has long been a fatalist in an optimist’s athleisure, her acceptance of the inexorable sweep of fate and entropy masked by her willingness to put some effort into the here and now.
Her grandmother wanted her to take a position with the library system and Hazel acquiesced. But she didn’t think she would be assigned to this particular branch. Nainai, on the other hand, is delighted. “So close by. And you loved going there when you were a little girl.”
One should be wary of revisiting childhood icons.
Epics she adored turn out to have undertones—and overtones—of sexism and colonialism.
People she loved embody a large spectrum of human frailties.
Places that occupied hallowed ground in her heart are demolished or become something else entirely, such as the old noodle shop that is now an establishment called The Furless Kitty, specializing in Brazilian waxing.
The branch library too has changed. The current incarnation is a red-brick building, its aluminum roof covered with solar panels.
Two hundred yards away, a highway meets a local thoroughfare, but a shopping center separates and shields the library from the intersection.
On the library’s large lot, much of which has been left unpaved, mature live oaks flourish and further foster a sense of comfortable seclusion.
Pleasant. Not impressive, but pleasant. And Hazel is satisfied with pleasant.
She parks her e-bike on the rack at the front of the library and hooks her helmet to her backpack.
Nearer to the entrance stands a stack of a free regional weekly.
She remembers the publication from decades ago and is happier than she thought she would be that it still exists.
A hesitant question comes as she browses the latest issue’s guidance on the upcoming off-year election. “Hi. Are you Hazel?”
Hazel turns around; a young white woman in her late twenties waves.
Other than the red streaks in her sandy hair, she looks a lot like a hobbit: round-faced, with pink cheeks and brown eyes.
Hazel can see her dancing, in the exact dusty-rose sweater vest and long corduroy skirt she’s wearing, at Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party.
In other words, absurdly cute.
She smiles. “Yes, hi, I’m Hazel.”
They shake hands. The young woman, who speaks with a Scandinavian accent, introduces herself as Astrid, a librarian at the branch.
“It’s great to have you here,” says Astrid, looking a little shy. “Let me open the place up and show you around.”
The library’s two sets of automatic doors slide apart to reveal ten computer terminals set up for the public.
To the left of the computer terminals are the stacks.
To the right, the circulation area. An L-shaped children’s department wraps around the circulation area on the farther side, making the latter feel like a snug island, the warm heart of the library.
Behind the stacks, a long rectangular work gallery unspools with desks, chairs, and plenty of outlets set beneath a bank of wide windows. Outside the windows, thick vines on metal trellises form natural sunscreens.
Beyond the work gallery, invisible from the front entrance, nestles a reading area.
There are fewer magazines on the periodicals shelf now—the times have not been kind to print publications—and the spin racks of audio CDs are gone.
But DVDs still take up half a wall and the collection of graphic novels has proliferated.
Given that Halloween is right around the corner, there are a fair number of skeletons scattered around the library, mostly on posters that will be taken down on November first. But there is a fully articulated skeleton in the children’s area, peering intently into a shelf of image-heavy compendiums on dinosaurs.
Not far away, three chubby and friendly-looking ghosts cluster around a Brambly Hedge collection.
Astrid has Hazel deposit her personal items in the librarians’ office, sandwiched between the circulation area and the drive-through pickup at the very back.
She helps Hazel turn on the public terminals and the checkout stations’ computers, then introduces Hazel to Sophie, a striking Black woman in a perfectly fitted hunter green suit and sky-high heels, and a tall, bearded white man named Jonathan—Sophie is the branch administrator, Jonathan their program director.
She also presents two other librarians, but Inez and Raj protest that they are only clerks, not real librarians.
Hazel takes that to mean that they, like her, do not have an advanced degree in library and information science.
Not everyone at an attorneys’ office is a lawyer and not everyone on a flight crew is a pilot—Hazel, no information specialist, will shoulder relatively humble duties.
“To the public we are all librarians,” insists Astrid. “And you’re one of us now, Hazel. You’re going to love it here.”
Before Hazel left Nainai’s house this morning, the venerable old lady said, “Go on. Start a new life for yourself.”
Except Hazel does not want a new life. She would simply like to have her old life back, that untroublesome existence she hadn’t appreciated enough when she still drifted along its placid currents.
She smiles at everyone. “Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.”
Astrid has done a lot of fantasy casting over the years, putting faces—mostly those of well-known actors—onto characters from her favorite books. Hazel, she is sure, would have been perfectly cast as a woman with whom a chance encounter alters the course of a protagonist’s life.
Or at least costs them sleep and focus for a good long while.
She is beautiful—perfect forehead, wide-set eyes, complexion as smooth as fondant on a wedding cake. Yet it isn’t her loveliness that instantly fascinates Astrid.
Near the university campus where Astrid spent her undergraduate years, there was a lake that teemed with expensive properties along its shores. One was finished right as Astrid began her freshman year.
The house stood empty for a few weeks, then one day, curtains appeared. A few days after that, some downstairs curtains were pulled back to reveal a spotless living room, a baby grand piano set against a far window, a blue settee to the side.
Those downstairs curtains never closed again. No matter what season of the year or day of the week Astrid walked, biked, or rollerbladed by, the curtains were always open, the settee plush and inviting, the piano placed just so to silhouette against the lake beyond the house.
Never in her four years there had Astrid seen a single person inside, a car in the driveway, or a stray toy on the lawn.
The house seemed to exist in its own separate reality, so much so that it was always a shock—and a profound thrill—when a fully lit Christmas tree appeared next to the piano each December.
Hazel, like that house, also seems to exist on her own plane.
Her attire is simple, a black blouse over a pair of black trousers, but they drape beautifully over her tall, elegant frame.
When she speaks, though her accent is North American enough, Astrid hears echoes of distant lands, a life lived globally.
(And her instinct is proven correct within the hour, when Hazel tells Inez that she’s spent most of her life in Singapore and moved back to the US only recently.)
For someone who should exude glamour, though, Hazel manages to be marvelously low-key.
Shortly after she meets the morning crew of librarians, it’s as if she’s always been there.
She moves about at an unhurried pace, yet when Astrid looks in on her around lunchtime, she finds that Hazel has culled all reserved titles that have not been picked up on time, pulled all the new requested transfers, and restocked two entire rolling carts of sorted returned items.
And then sauntered out of the library.
Astrid retreats into the Den of Calories, the affectionate term for the staff breakroom.
Jonathan is there, munching on a bag of Indonesian cassava chips.
When people think of librarians, they don’t immediately conjure a six-foot-four, blond, blue-eyed former college football player.
Jonathan is all that and more and he is a great librarian.
“Why, hello, Divinely Beautiful,” he says, holding out his bag of chips. “Want some?”
The name Astrid means “divinely beautiful.”