Published by Green Snake Publishing

In the Library Mario Milosevic

Andy threw another book into the pot. “Hey,” I said, fishing it out of the sludge. “You didn’t take the covers off. I hate the covers.” Andy shrugged. Crouched before me, with the fire cooking our meal between us, his face looked like the soupy muck we were about to eat. “So?” he said. “I don’t mind them.” “You didn’t even look to see if this was a good one.” I tried to wipe the volume clean, but the yellowish pulp clung like porridge. Neither of us knew much about cooking books. When I had just started my search I was lucky enough to find a group that could cook well. I even liked the covers then, but not now. They made the soup bitter and hard to digest. In the universal library there isn’t much working material besides books. Our stove was made from metal shelving which Andy had fashioned into a sturdy stand that held one fair-sized pot and allowed room for a fire underneath it. The smoke rose up past endless shelves of books until it faded from sight. The pot was made from shelving material, too. We used book covers for fuel because pages burn too fast and give off insufficient heat. There are always rumors of wooden shelves somewhere in the library, but no one has ever found any. I flipped through the book Andy had tried to add to our meal. The first line made some sense but subsequent lines degenerated into the usual gibberish. I avoided Andy’s eyes as I struggled to rip off the covers. Was the binding better here, or was I just getting weak after so many months of eating nothing but liquefied pages? The last meat I had was human. That was with my first group. I had to leave them because I wouldn’t do any hunting for them. I didn’t even carry a knife with me. If I had to kill people to survive, I think I wouldn’t last a week. So no meat. Just book soup. “Who’s the cook here, Lowell?” asked Andy. “You’re no better than me.” “I can’t eat the shit you make. It tastes like garbage.” I didn’t say anything. Andy was touchy, but he was good at making things and he was a good fighter, stocky and solidly built. I needed him to protect me. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything. Here.” I picked up the covers I ripped off and put them in the pot. “Truce?” He stirred in the two stiff boards, watching them slowly melt into the pasty mass. “How close are we, Lowell?” he asked quietly. “Very close, Andy,” I lied. “I feel we’re only a couple of months away.” “I hope you’re right. I hope you’re not bullshitting me.” We were close, but not as close as I let on. We had taken a few wrong turns down unpromising corridors, but I covered up well, and Andy could never tell when we circled back to our original path over a couple of days. My strength was my sense of direction and we both knew it. “Look, you saw the last book. You know how close we are. It’s just a matter of time, that’s all. Believe me.” He eyed me again. Andy had hard eyes. Sometimes he gave me the creeps worse than the library did. He pulled the stand off the fire. “Come on. Let’s eat before it gets hard.” I used my fingers while Andy dug in with a nicely fashioned spoon. I used to have one, but I lost it and Andy wouldn’t make me a new one. The ones I tried to make from shelving always had sharp edges that cut me when I tried to use them. After we ate Andy began pulling down shelves to make a bed for himself. This was something I was proud of because I had thought it up. What we did was arrange four shelves on their edge into a square on the floor, then fill the centre with as many crumpled up pages as we needed to feel comfortable. It was not really a mattress, but it was better than marble floor. What Andy didn’t know, and what I didn’t tell him, was that the meal we had just finished was lunch, not supper. I knew it was a good thing for me to keep that from him. It kept me one step ahead.

There is no darkness in the library; the lights shine constantly. I got used to that quickly. Now it takes sounds to wake me. I heard a muffled noise from Andy’s bed. I sat up and saw a big man, bigger even than Andy, straddling his chest and choking him with a length of shelving. My reaction was not instantaneous. Wildly I thought this new guy might be even better for me than Andy, but that was stupid. Andy made a noise again. Blood was dripping from his throat as the shelf began a sawing motion under the attacker’s strong grip. I grabbed a side of my own bed and, leaping awkwardly, swung it at the attacker’s head. I felt the shelf bend against his skull. I swung again. He let go of his weapon and reached for his head. I swung again and again until he rolled off Andy and his head struck the floor, shaking blood off his hair. I began kicking at him, mad with blood thirst. When he was still and blood was streaming freely from his head I stood above him, breathing heavily. I looked at Andy. He was unconscious, but he didn’t seem too badly injured. The cut was a long one, stretching across his throat at the Adam’s apple, but it was also shallow. I bent down and grabbed a handful of pages and tried to stop the bleeding with them. The paper made an excellent blotter. I used more to clean his throat. I did the best I could, then examined the cut again. It was hardly a cut at all. It was more like a messy scrape, but he was going to have a nasty bruise for a long time. I wondered again if maybe I had killed the wrong man. Andy would be no use to me for a couple of days at least. I had never been attacked while asleep before, but it seemed possible that we were in a part of the library where this type of thing was common. I bent over the man and began to pull off his clothes. I searched through his pockets and found his paper. A page of a manual on temporal locomotion. It was fairly crisp, newly folded. That meant he was probably new in the library. That could explain why he was on the index trail alone. There are two ways to conduct a search in the universal library. I was using the index method, in which you search for the volumes containing the correct index to the universal library. Since the library holds every possible book in the language, it must also hold its own index. This is a good way to approach the search because you can team up with someone else and conduct the search as a more powerful group. The other way is to search for the actual volume you are assigned, without going through the index first. This type of search is normally conducted solo because one person’s assignment is rarely similar to another’s. This is why it was so strange to find the attacker here on the index trail alone. If he were alone he would more profitably be engaged in the direct search. I put the shirt over Andy to keep him warm. The pants were quite new, so I exchanged them for my own. The stranger didn’t have any weapons. To make sure he was dead I hit his head with the shelf until his skull was jagged pieces of bone. Killing was easier than I had thought it could be, but I still had to swallow hard against the bile rising in my throat.

There is always disagreement about the reality of the universal library. Mathematicians say the number of possible books in the language is impossibly large. If a volume of the universal library were assigned to each atom in our universe there still wouldn’t be enough stuff to hold the entire collection. We would need a million million universes like our own. Yet it is hard to dispute the reality of marble floors and impossibly tall book-lined walls extending so far in all directions that they come to a point that is a shifting blur, playing tricks with the eyes and games with the mind. Everything is here. In these vast halls you could find the letter from a friend that you lost long ago. You could find the 29 February 1920 edition of the Toronto Star. You could find the complete works of any author you care to name. Any technical manual, all Zen koans, every court transcript is here, somewhere. The catch is that every possible error is here as well. There are a billion billion wrong versions of Ulysses. Every page of every newspaper is printed with every wrong date possible. Every author’s books are attributed to every other author, known and imagined. Then there is the real garbage. There are books that are pages and pages of punctuation marks. There is one blank volume. There is a volume with the alphabet repeated endlessly. And there are volumes, countless trillions of books, that are filled with random letters that mean nothing, that are merely necessary bits of completeness. To find one’s way through the corridors of the universal library takes a certain intuitive faculty, an ability to cut through the garbage and follow one’s nose to the proper place. I have that; that’s why I took the job. I was searching for a book that would explain how to build a universe. My employers were ambitious. I had the first page of the book. That’s generally the way a search is conducted. They wrote the first page, not knowing how the thing could possibly finish, then they gave what they had to me. I had to find the correct or most useful book with that beginning. I didn’t know what Andy was searching for. He would never tell me. As he lay on his bed, unconscious, I searched through his clothes looking for his first page. I couldn’t find it, but didn’t expect to, either. He told me he had memorized it long ago. Andy was like that, secretive and independent. I was a bit wary of teaming up with him, but we saw each other as helpful to our cause. The trick for me was to get out safely when I could. When we find the index, Andy will have no use for me. We are undoubtedly searching for completely different books, so there would be no need for either of us to follow the other once we found from the index where our books were. As I was going through his pockets with my back to his head, I felt a hand grab me by the wrist. I whirled, expecting another hungry marauder, but it was Andy. His injury was not as serious as I thought. “What are you doing?” His voice was low and labored, rasping in his injured throat. “Looking for your knife. I have to protect myself.” He released me. I could tell he was weak, but he still had a stronger grip than I could manage. “Give me something to eat. My head is pounding.” “It’ll take some time to make soup,” I said. “I don’t want soup. Give me a piece of that guy that tried to kill me.” I blanched. “I don’t think you’re ready for meat. That’s a nasty injury you have. I don’t think you can swallow solid food.” One thing I could always do was make Andy believe my lies. He let his head flop to the side, then yelled as the pain caught him and he moved back to face the ceiling again, “Damn,” he said through gritted teeth. “How did you kill him? “ “I cracked his head with a piece of shelf.” He smiled. “I didn’t think you could do it.” I didn’t say anything. I thought of draining some of the dead man’s blood for Andy to drink, but didn’t think I could stomach it.