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Mercy
Copyright © 2004 Allison Corbett
February 28, Monday
I
went to Human Resources at the library to apply for a job today. I don't
need the money, but I have plenty of time to spare.
"Human Resources"
always makes me think of a closet in a back room somewhere where they
store all the humans: when a call comes in, they open the door, inspect
them all, pull out the most suitable one, and ship the lucky chosen Human
Resource away to its appointed place.
I told the woman
there I wanted somewhere quiet, where I didn't have to talk to anyone.
She looked at me over her spectacles and said, "Most students want
a desk job in Circulation so they can talk to their friends and pretend
to be working."
"I don't have
any friends," I said.
She said, "There
might be an opening in the Manuscripts unit. At the Mason."
She said she'd
call me.
She has bought
a coat with large pockets so she can fit books in them. Now whenever she
has to stand still she reads. At first she was afraid her white coat might
attract attention, but as she had hoped no one looks at her. She walks
across campus in a bubble of solitude.
In the dining hall
she selects the seat in the corner farthest from the door. When she stumbles
over someone's chair leg or pulls someone's coat off the back of a chair
she murmurs an apology and moves faster. She cuts her meat and vegetables
nervously as soon as she sits, places her spoon in her soup at the ready,
so that she can open her book as quickly as possible and bury herself.
Once the book is open she might sit there until the dining hall closes
over a mug of tea; she has made the other students disappear. When they
come to tell her she has to leave, she apologizes with her head down and
leaves immediately, her tea unfinished.
Her professors
pull her aside after class and urge her: You have such interesting
things to say, Mercy. Why don't you talk more in class? She nods and
mumbles I will, hurries away. She does not. She does her homework
assiduously. She listens to classical music and folk songs. She keeps
detailed records in a notebook of everything that happens to her.
Her phone does
not ring, except when her mother calls.
March 3, Monday
Mother called
last night. She had just come back from a party—Miss So-And-So from high
school, someone important's daughter, did I remember her, had just came
out as a debutante. I could hear her sipping when she paused.
I sent her the check
for my phone bill without enclosing a note, she said. How impolite, no
manners, she said. Didn't I teach you better? she said. I'm not sure if
she was angry because I didn't enclose a note or because I didn't make
enough phone calls. She asked when I was coming back to Cincinnati so
she could have a party for me. I told her I had a lot of work. She wanted
to know why there was a call to Dad on the bill. Don't worry, I told her.
He never called back.
The woman at library
Human Resources called yesterday. She said they're shorthanded in the
Manuscripts unit and would be delighted to have me. Not even a phone call
needed. I'm going over to do my orientation and maybe start work later
today. The sooner, the better.
By the door she reads
the inscription: The Edith and Gilbert Mason Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. A gift of Gilbert Mason, class of 1927. Outside, the sun
makes the white building glow and shines on the windows; inside, it is
clear that the sunlight penetrates no farther than the glass.
Daniel, her new
supervisor, meets her at the revolving doors, in baggy corduroy pants
and a striped shirt. He shows her where to sign in and get her employee
tag and tells her what kind of key she needs. She learns that she can
bring her coat and backpack downstairs except when it rains, so she doesn't
get the manuscripts wet, and that a manuscript is anything of which there
is only one copy.
The Manuscripts
unit is in the basement. They can take the elevator if she wants, Daniel
tells her, but she refuses. The main elevator's doors remind her of the
entrance to a mausoleum vault. Instead they pace carpeted hallways and
descend several flights of stairs carved out of the cinderblock walls.
There are no windows, and she feels abruptly claustrophobic.
When Daniel opens
the final locked door, the air of the manuscript unit rushes to greet
her. It passes through her nose cleanly, like desert air, but it clings
to her like water and she touches her hands, seeking moisture. The strange
feeling in her nose is the smell of age and preservation. She feels as
if she's underwater.
The manuscripts
unit is an island of bright light and normal air after the stairwell.
Her sneakers squeak loudly on the clean white floor. Daniel introduces
her to the other archivists and the student workers. They look up from
what they're doing and nod or smile, and turn back to their work just
as quickly. The unit seems quiet and private to her; she will not need
to make friends here.
After he has showed
her the various cubicles, Daniel takes her into the stacks. Rows upon
rows of gray bookshelves stretch into the distance. He leads her through
room after room of them, sometimes straight and sometimes set at oblique
and baffling angles. She imagines bringing a ball of string next time
to help her wind her way through this labyrinth, and thinks in despair
that at best she can hope to figure out how to get from one place to another
without getting lost.
Make sure you
always take your keys with you, Daniel tells her. Especially in
the stacks or on your way out—you need a key to get out of the stairwell.
Once we had a student who forgot his keys the Friday before Labor Day
weekend—he got trapped in there.
Did he die?
she asks hesitantly, shuddering. She envisions the archivists coming down
the stairs after the long weekend and stumbling over his emaciated body.
Of course not. There
are fire exits in every stairwell...once he realized no one was coming,
he used one of those. Set off every alarm in the building, and he was
pretty embarrassed when the police came. You don't want to do that.
They pass through
another door. None of the shelves here are lighted; she cannot see the
end of the row she is looking down. Spines of books and the corners of
boxes reach for her from their shelves. Where are the lights? she
says, reaching blindly around her. She feels suddenly panicked, as all
of her childhood fears of the dark come swarming. Anything could be down
that aisle, anything—from the demon that used to hide under the bed when
she was five to the rapist who hides there now; a bloody knife or a floating
pair of eyes or a Gutenburg Bible.
She visited the
Catacombs with her parents once on a trip to Rome—nine miles of dark corridors
scratched out of the dirt by the fingernails of early Christians, heavy
blackness punctuated by lonely torches every hundred yards. Between those
torches skeletal hands wavered in the torchlight, skulls seemed to bow
and withdraw. She was not afraid there; she watched her mother clutch
her father's arm, and she wanted to blow out all the torches and wander
away from her parents, in the dark so deep it was a smell, a touch, a
taste, until she was blind as a mole. But she is afraid here, in the smell
only of old paper and the dark only of no windows.
Daniel's hand reaches
out of the darkness as if disembodied and flicks on a switch. End
of every aisle, he says. Some are on the other side. She feels
silly now in the cold glare of those ranks of fluorescent lights, the
kind they used to warn you in elementary school not to break because they
were filled with poisonous gas.
He shows her how
to find the elevator from the manuscript unit, and leads her to the blast
freezer. We use it to freeze everything new we receive, he tells
her. The size of a small cottage, it is plated in quilted silver ripples
of metal, like something in the space shuttle. Even the name makes her
think of old Star Trek episodes. She imagines aliens made of ice living
in it, fading back into the walls when it's loaded and then feeding on
the books and papers inside.
Everyone's first
question is 'Can you get trapped in it?' Daniel says. He opens the
door and shows her the big red label inside: STOP! YOU ARE NOT TRAPPED!
DOOR IS EQUIPPED WITH AN INSIDE RELEASE MECHANISM. TURN HANDLE RIGHT.
Outside, a sign reads: Two people must be present to load or unload
the freezer. She smiles hesitantly.
On the way back
to the unit she notices the red containers of varying sizes placed at
intervals along the aisles like the torches in the Catacombs. Halon
cylinder, she reads off of the label. Halon gas, Daniel confirms.
If there's ever a fire, those cylinders open and the gas sucks all
the air out of the building.
I thought that
was just a rumor, she ventures. Daniel grins. Nope, it's true.
There's an alarm first, of course, so everyone can get out; the gas is
almost as dangerous as the fire. That's one of the reasons the fire exits
are so clearly marked.
When they come
through the door back into the unit, the light pours out and looks like
Christmas against the dark of the stacks. Daniel gives her some folders
to label—easy stuff to begin with, he says—and tells her to have a regular
schedule ready by next week. Eight to twelve hours is usual.
I want twelve, she
says immediately.
March 26, Wednesday
Mother made me talk to Aunt Eleanor on the phone tonight. She'd come over to visit
Mother after some hideous cocktail party, and she wanted to tell me all
about the Pattersons and the Elliots and the Withingdales. I couldn't
care less. Even though they're all related to me somehow (or were they
my mother's summer friends from Cape Cod? I can't remember) I can't keep
any of them straight. All the girls have blonde hair and horses and wear
makeup.
Then Auntie Eleanor
asked me what I did at my college job. So I told her. Then my mother got
back on the phone. "You read dead people's mail?" she screeched.
Famous dead people's mail, I told her, and I quoted some names at her.
I also told her I thought the Mason had Great-Uncle Edmund's papers. Then
I told her that I don't just read dead people's papers; I also label,
and freeze, and box, and sort. She asked me if I was meeting any new people:
"It's not good for you to be locked up with all those books all day,"
she said. "You read too much already." I told her I was
meeting lots of new people. Since she didn't understand, she stopped asking.
Over the summer
I'm thinking of organizing and alphabetizing my papers, now that I know
how to do it. The archivists have already let me take some of the old
boxes.
Her fingers grow
deft at library tasks. She knows how to apply labels to folders so that
two of the three are precisely the same distance from either side and
one is in the center, edges firmly pressed down. She puts together the
Paige boxes she struggled with at first easily now. First the box itself:
she turns it upside down so the bottom edges face up, pulls the flattened
box into a cube, and pushes the side edges down towards the floor in one
firm motion, so that the bottom of the box rises towards her and flattens
out into a plane. Then the lid: with quick fingers—first one hand, then
the other—she folds the short side flaps up with her thumbs, bends their
ends inward with her forefingers, holds them with one hand, and with the
other tucks the longer end flaps with their tabs over the ends of the
side flaps and into the slots, checking to make sure that the whole is
solid. She can roughly date photographs by their color and the facial
expressions of their subjects and tell daguerreotypes from photographs;
she has learned how to estimate the age of letters by their color and
texture. She is beginning to learn the abbreviations with which the archivists
label the boxes and folders like a military code in the war against entropy.
She is amazed by
what she finds in the library. She might have to maneuver her cart around
the bronze bust of some unknown mustached man, brush past elaborately-
framed oil paintings, or push aside Hemingway's marooned desk chair. Once
she knocks over a box, and marionettes with wooden heads and colorful
costumes spill out onto the floor. She wonders what is in the mysterious
file cabinets that line the side corridors. Gold and gems, or firearms,
or love poetry, or just catalogue cards?
Sometimes she passes
the locked safes scattered through the stacks. Daniel has told her that
important people, while still alive, give these safes to the Mason and
specify when they can be opened: immediately after their deaths, or after
twenty years, or when their wives die, or after the current President
leaves office. She hears the stories of some past safes: in one they found
reams of pornographic drawings, in another a bag of marijuana.
She reads endless
papers, when she is supposed to be photocopying or sorting or foldering
or boxing. Dearest Evangeline, one letter begins. I miss you—why
have you not written me? I have thought of nothing but you since that
night in the hotel...Another announces the death of an old friend,
accompanied by yellowing obituary clippings. One man describes his lover's
penis; a woman mourns the loss of her favorite cat; an American expatriate
describes a piazza in Venice. She flips through children's drawings, playbills,
rejection letters, novel proofs, fashion magazines from the 1800's. She
photocopies or sorts them and turns to the next box.
She can now get
easily from her unit to the freezer to the elevator to the Vault to the
side elevator to the Annex and back to the unit, and she is beginning
to explore. She feels like a diver now when she comes down the staircase
into the ancient atmosphere, her keys clinking on their wooden paddle,
and she takes a deep breath of the humid-dry air before she resurfaces
in the evening.
She asks the archivists
for jobs which send her into the stacks: she loads trash onto carts and
carries it upstairs to the trash area, or helps Public Services reshelve
when they're shorthanded, or lugs boxes up to the Vault to shelve them.
She asks once what happens to them once she puts them there; the archivist
stares at her, and says, Nothing.
The other students do
not like the stacks, and learning that she is an explorer they trade those
jobs with her for ones which keep them in the unit. She runs her fingers
along the spines of the books as she walks, enjoying the texture of gilt
and engraving and tooled leather and paper and fabric and the smooth feel
of the archival boxes interspersed with them. From every book in one aisle
white rectangular processing slips reach out for her like seaweed as she
passes; in another aisle all the books are in Arabic, with letters like
tangled thread. She learns that the thick metal doors of the back elevator
open with a sound exactly like an airlock. She likes the fact that she
rarely sees the other people in the stacks, so that carts and ladders
and stools seem to change places from one trip to another without visible
human intervention.
Sometimes her fingers
brush one of the red Halon cylinders. They remind her of the propane tanks
her Dad used to fuel the grill when she was little: her father, wearing
a straw hat and incongruous sunglasses and wielding a spatula like a sword;
her mother, dressed in something flowery, reclining on the lawn furniture
as gracefully as a Venus, a glass of something pale in her hand, disapproving
of anything barbecued. She imagines what it would be like in the stacks
if all the air was sucked out: would you flop and gasp like a fish washed
onto the beach? The air, she thinks, would be cold and sterile and very
clean, like space.
The freezer and
the halon have become intertwined in her thoughts. When she thinks of
the Mason without oxygen, she imagines ice crystals over everything, spines
of books frozen and crackling but suddenly purified. Space, she thinks,
is icy cold.
April 11, Tuesday
I met my first ghost today.
I should have known
right away: the Mason is full of them. Only a few talk to me, but when
I walk now I see them everywhere: librarians, authors, painters, students,
archivists. I wonder why no one ever talks about them?
I wonder what Mother
would say if she knew her daughter was locked in a musty basement with
ghosts for company. But she can't complain; her ghosts are with her constantly.
They rise out of the alcohol like fumes.
"It's spring,"
she said to me the other day. "Are you in love yet, Mercy, honey?"
"No,"
I said.
"What's the matter
with you?" she said. "Don't you know what to do?" Her voice
was too loud. Then she asked if I needed spring dresses. I told her if
she thought I needed them she could send me some.
I met a boy today
in the library. I don't think he knows we met.
The ghosts, she thinks, are why the stacks are so dark: wisps of them
block and filter the lighting, like mist. She has met many of them now:
Sebastian, the student shot and killed in 1978 who did graduate research
here; Nikita, who emigrated from the Soviet Union and is an expert on
realism; Ellen, the shy archivist whose affair with the security guard
was mostly enacted in the stacks. But her favorite is Mary. Mary was a
librarian in the 1930's, soon after the Mason was built. She has lingered
in the library for over half a century, and she knows everything about
it. The ghosts after all have watched every acquisition, every reorganization,
every shelving and change. She is never lonely now; even when the ghosts
do not speak she sees them everywhere, some coupled with the books like
Hamadryads, some reshelving ghostly works or studying old photographs.
She feels akin to them, similarly insubstantial.
She goes to Daniel
and asks to extend her hours. You've already done it once, he says
dubiously. The limit for students is fourteen hours a week. Don't you
have classes? But in the end he relents. She spends most of the daylight
hours there, cradled in the library's womb. She wishes the Mason were
open on weekends.
On her way into
the Vault from the elevator to shelve one day, she meets a cart coming
in the other direction. A young man is guiding it, looking off into space
as if he's done this too many times already and there's nothing interesting
enough in the stacks to hold his attention. His hair is only a little
less blond than her cousins', and waves a little to one side. He is slightly
shorter than she is and broad- shouldered. She freezes.
Do you need
to go by? he asks. She nods dumbly. And he wheels his cart into one
of the side aisles and waits, not even looking at her as she pushes her
own past too quickly. His name is Chris, Mary whispers into her
ear. He's been working here a year. He's a philosophy major, a senior;
his senior essay is on German philosophers. He plays lacrosse, works out
at the gym. He hates it here. She can hear the airlock yawning open
to admit him behind her.
She shelves all
that day. She has no choice. She passes him five more times. She would
like to ask him about his most recent lacrosse game, or what the weight
room at the gym is like, or what Kant said about libraries. But these
are ghostly words, and she can think of nothing else to say.
April 20, Thursday
I have
thrown out all the boxes from the Mason. There is nothing for me to do
with them. I am sitting in the reading room of the Mason. The air is reassuring.
My mother called
this afternoon. She wanted to know when I was coming home for the summer,
even though it's over a month early. I told her I was thinking of getting
an apartment in Boston for the summer. "With friends?" she asked.
Alone, I said. There was this kind of gasp, and then she said in her mother
voice, "Mercy, listen to me. You are going to come home after school
gets out. I need you here—and besides, what would you do in some city
by yourself all summer? Who knows what could happen? No. I have such big
plans for the summer, honey—there'll be parties, dinners, dances. Do you
remember how I taught you to dance, in the kitchen, when you were eight?
We'll go sailing, play tennis."
When I called my
father, Jerry answered the phone. He sounded uncomfortable. I asked for
my father. He paused, then said, "Stephen is away on a trip."
"When will
he be back?" I asked.
There was a long
pause, and Jerry said, "It's a long trip." I could hear water
running in the background.
"He's not
going to call me, is he?" I said. There was another long pause, and
when Jerry said, "Mercy..." as if he had a right to my name,
I hung up.
She has begun
to feel comforted by the darkness of the stacks. She no longer turns on
the lights at the ends of aisles; she can find her way to the center of
the labyrinth and back by feeling the spines of the books and the shape
of the boxes, the curve of the halon tanks, as if she were blind. The
ghosts tell her where to go. Sometimes between trips she touches the blast
freezer, and thinks of ice.
She has found a
way to move silently through the stacks with the ghosts. She has bought
a pair of moccasins with thin, soft leather soles, and now she carries
them in her backpack. Between the front desk and the manuscript unit she
pauses, slips off her sneakers, and dons the moccasins. With them on,
her feet do not squeak on the floor; she slips easily and noiselessly
through the darkened stacks.
One of her professors
pulls her aside after class. You never come to class anymore, she
says. I would have talked to you before, but I couldn't find you. You've
always been such a responsible student—is there something wrong? She
wishes she had her moccasins so she could slip away. Instead she shakes
her head and flees.
She passes Chris
almost every day. Mary whispers stories to her as they float by. Once
she nods to him, scraping her moccasined feet on the floor to make more
noise. She thinks he might have nodded back. She devours the thought like
a letter she cannot photocopy or box or sort.
May 1, Thursday (Mayday)
I
have it all planned out.
I've bought the alcohol
already; the little vodka bottles fit in the pockets of my coat and my jeans,
and I can put the bigger ones in my backpack. I always bring it with me,
so no one will notice tomorrow. I have three matchbooks, just in case. I
will leave this journal in the stacks when I do it.
I talked to my father
two days ago; he answered the phone when I called, by accident. I could
hear Jerry's voice in the background. "Mercy?" he said, very quietly.
"I've been trying
to call," I said.
"I know,"
he said.
"You're not
on a trip," I said.
"I know,"
he said. "Mercy—"
"I just want
to know why," I said. "I'm not Mother—I'm trying not to be Mother—you
don't have to be afraid of me—"
"I know,"
he said.
"Then why not
call me back, Dad? How hard is it?"
I guess I got my
answer. The line went dead. I won't try again.
Today I will warn
Chris.
She knows what she will say: Don't come to work tomorrow. Call in sick.
She practices phrases she has heard others use: Take a mental health
day. Stay home and de-stress. Chill out. The ghosts coach her. When
he asks Why, she will say, Something bad is going to happen,
and when he asks How do you know, she'll say, I just know,
or, The ghosts told me. She likes the mysteriousness; she has
forgotten that only she sees the ghosts.
Chris should be
in the Vault. She has them send her to take out the trash; she leaves
the trash in the trash area and takes the elevator up an extra floor,
turning over her speech.
She should hear
the voices right away, but she is listening to the ghosts. At first she
does not understand what she is seeing when she turns down the aisle.
Chris, yes, in a blue polo shirt and blond hair. And arms. Too many arms.
Too many arms around Chris. She has seen the woman before. Lilith,
Mary hints. Her name is Lilith. Lilith is kissing Chris. He is
kissing back. Too many arms around Lilith. Lilith is saying, between kisses,
"How convenient that we both work at the Mason, Brian."
Mercy says, clearly,
"I was going to warn you."
She takes the elevator
back down a floor, retrieves her cart, and takes the elevator back down
to the basement. She knows exactly what she will do.
Tomorrow, she will
have them send her into the stacks. There, she will find a safe place
to leave her diary. Then, she will re-collect all the trash she has taken
out. She will carry it down to the basement, and use it to block the fire
doors. Cardboard and paper is flammable. She will pick several corners
of the basement near the halon tanks. There, she will pour out the sherry
and whiskey and vodka she has bought over the books and cardboard and
boxes and papers, as widely as possible. Then, she will light as many
matches as she can and scatter them, running from site to site on soft
moccasined feet which have unravelled the labyrinth before to scatter
fire like Prometheus.
Some will escape
when the alarms go off, of course. Some will not. And in thirty seconds,
the halon tanks will open, and suck all the air out of the basement. Fire
and air and ice all purify.When she wakes, it will be silent: the flames
will have been extinguished by the halon, and the ice will be too new
yet to drip. Mercy will open her eyes to a world which is cold and white
and icy and smooth. She will rise to wander down the aisles which she
has learned by heart and run her fingers along uniformly frozen surfaces;
the shelves will drip icicles like tears. She will open books layered
with ice, cracking their new chilly bindings, and be the first to see
her own frozen memoir. In the aisles she will step over twisted, cleansed
bodies, blue and coated with an undiscerning icy film. She will have made
a world which is all blue, all white, all in her own image. She will be
mother to the Mason's holocaust of ice.
Mercy will awake
with the ghosts. Her world will be newborn, sparkling, scintillating with
icy points of light in darkness.