The Library

Deep in the stacks of Butler Library, a man sat on the cold floor propped up against the high shelving with his legs straightened out. Around him were large piles of books, some twenty tomes high, like a castle fortification hiding him. The books came from the surrounding shelves, leaving huge spaces and gaps in the rows above his head and to his right and left. Occasionally he would hear the bing of the elevators or someone sighing by the far desks, burrowed in their studies, or the faint buzzing of the lightbulb above his head, but mostly it was quiet. In his hands was a large book, opened to the middle, with a blank tan cover and small white writing on the binding. He read undisturbed, flipping the pages, his mind somewhere out of time.

When the kid came running through the stacks later on, yelling that the library was closing, the man continued to read. The kid shook some people awake and there was rustling and a slow, fading march down the stairs. The man was concealed behind rows and piles of books and the kid never saw him. Soon, from the back to the front, the lights were turned off, cascading blackness in even envelopments, until the dark reached him and went past. The man felt around for his small flashlight, clicked it on, and put it in his mouth, aiming the circular light at the pages.

In the middle of the night, the man turned the last page and closed the book and smoothed his hands along the rough cover. He added the tan book atop one of the nearby piles next to him and stretched over for the next book on the shelf. On the first page, there was a new story.

The man rarely slept anymore and only left the library in the early mornings to clean up and get food, but not often. He was always alone with his books and stories and preferred it that way. He believed that books contained a true and pure reality, undiminished by the plotless universe outside. His ongoing exegesis of each story brought him closer to the totality of the human psyche, marked throughout all history and consequence in beautiful prose.

The increasing piles of books became tangible reminders of the stories he had read in the past, but they never felt like his past. Each story seemed ephemeral and would slip from memory so easily. A new book subsumed, further and further, those stories around him until some became just a title and streak memory of incident. The man wanted to believe they were there somewhere living in his subconscious, but he was never sure. So he continued reading for days upon days to retain that vividness of human nature foremost in his mind.

So forever on the man stayed in the library and welcomed each new opened book. Long ago, he learned to accept the new stories swallowing the old, just like that person on their way to work or on the subway all alone who suddenly remembers a brother, a friend, or an acquaintance who once so much liked to read.