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The boy does not have a name, pre-schism. He does not believe in monsters, being far too old for that now. His feet tap on wooden floors, and his hands hold a large book. He brings it down to the hole in the hallway so that he may read after dark. His father is putting up birthday decorations and does not notice him. The tunnel is well-lit, with lamps that emit some odious smell. They are always lit. They light up a dentist’s poster, someone who looks like the boy. The person in the poster smiles, and the smile never fades.
To read his book, he must sit in front of the poster. He must look at the smile with every glance up from the book. He does not look at the smile often; it distracts him. He does not know why someone would smile when someone is about to bring sharp implements near their teeth. What is the purpose of smiling?
The man who takes him one night and the woman who takes the boy who lives with him, and the other boy who lives with him find him staring at the poster- The Man in the Iron Mask finished.
“Dewey, are your parents home?” The man is short, his hair thin on the sides- unlike the boy’s father, who had thick hair on the sides- and none on the top.
His name was Dewey.
“I thought so. Its already too late, then. There should be two more of them.” The man waits until three boys and the woman are in the tunnel, then knocks over the lamp. The glass shatters, and the flames spread. The smile is the last thing the boy sees and the first thing Dewey sees.
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The man smiles at him while he cries. He holds his hand, patting it. The hurt is not simple; it is a continual poke until Dewey is screaming and held down. Dewey is not brave; he is not solemn. It hurts, so he screams. The man continues to smile. The woman holding Earnest is crying while Earnest has his face pressed into the folds of her shawl. Frank is not being held at all. His tears are silent. He does not have a shawl to press his face into.
In the end, they are set to sleep, and Dewey finds sleep easier to find. He only wakes when there is a hand pressing against his ankle. The pain crawls up his leg, claws clever and quick. Dewey screams once again. The hand on his ankle tightens and pulls. His brothers do not wake, and so they fade out of memory- for the moment.
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The hand belongs to a giant- tall and broad. His fingers are short, nails cut and jagged- but they engulf every part of Dewey they touch. They push the back of his head into books too simple and then press his head into too complex books. He is eight, maybe ten when he starts reading books, and they change from complex to things- terrible and unguessable[i]. His mind is pushed to wonder; there is too much mystery to do anything but wonder. He is given a book and a pen. He starts recording.
The hand also engulfs his while his fingers press on keys too stiff. They move his wrists afterward. The ink has dried, and his hands rounded and without the hair and defined muscled with age- looked small in the hands of a giant. There is callous scratching as Dewey is made to stretch what had been strengthened during the day.
During this day, the giant’s voice booms in Dewey’s mind. It tells him of nobility and wickedness. It tells him of wealth and poverty. It talks of rescue, research, and missions. The giant shows him weapons to defend the research and brings him to odd places to speak with odd people. He learns about a car’s engine, and then he drives a car. He learns the tactics needed to salt and burn the places of the wicked, and then he advises a stately girl with long nails.
The girl returns with a book and a smile. Her name is B.
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The giant does not smile. When Dewey learns the names and the faces of the children with the tattoos (he reads their notes, files them, and cross references them). A few smile to see him, but the number dwindles quickly. Dewey, who knows to count to eighteen in his commonplace book, never counts as many children.
He has so much to say, and he must never say it.[ii] The first time he tells the boy with a ponytail the name of the man who murdered the duke, he is placed in a small box and is not allowed out until he has soiled himself and his body is in unbearable pain. When he is allowed out of the box, the boy is dead- and the murderer is inconsolable on the library floor, having killed a child. Twelve people had died that day- and the man died on the library floor- though he got up again and walked and talked like the living. The world had become a stranger to him.[iii] Dewey, for a moment, thought of the world’s wickedness- and thought it better that a wicked person live than a noble person die in such a manner.
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The Giant, who is no longer a giant, brings him to a librarian under a pond. The librarian tells him he is an orphan, which Dewey had not known, and tells him that librarians do not live long lives since the schism.[iv]
Dewey learns all manner of things- starting with the Dewey Decimal System- his namesake- and then moving on by sections. He is not allowed to look at some sections[v]. There are other sections he spends a great deal of time in.
He is pushed to his physical limits as the librarian has him climbing very fragile devices to reach very high shelves. He is called on by many colleagues, who slowly go from being much older than him to around his age. He never learns the results of his research; only the librarian receives the results and notes the time passing.
Then, as the librarian said he would, he dies. Dewey can’t grow a mustache, but he shaves every week. The librarian’s body is being sent to a lumber mill, escorted by a beautiful young woman and a rather bashful young man. Dewey told them how to preserve the body and lay it down- how to forge the most diabolical of crimes so that the lumbermill is kept from supplying the wicked with matchsticks and the volunteers can rebuild and control the supply of wood going to rebuild the many places burned down. They smile and chat, but neither smiles when they return to the library.
Dewey looks at the journal articles in his hands and starts reading the number of deaths. He looks at the accounting articles and sees the money gained. Then he looks at the old books- the Lumbermill hadn’t made many matches. They were not worth the deaths.
He writes it down. He cries. He tries to drink a bit of wine. He tries to read his favorite book on library science.
All he can think about is how his chest is filled with a tight ball of tension. It connects to the depths of his stomach, where gravity tries to pull him, hunched, to his knees.
Sleep is the only relief, and sleep cannot come often enough.
The next year, he stops a Firestarter[vi] from killing him. The Firestarter is short and broad. He smiles as he tries to shoot Dewey with a harpoon gun. He bludgeons him on the head with a book stand. He doesn’t know what to do with the body, so he calls the nearest volunteer.
The woman who appears has hair taller and fuller than any he has seen before, and she speaks as if he is not the Librarian. She speaks of the sensibilities of the matter. Dewey can’t reply. His voice is hoarse, and he has not spoken outside of a scream for the past year. She doesn’t smile at him.
Dewey researches the body after it has left the library- and Dewey has ignored the stain on the wooden floor for a month. He was looking for his daughter- who had been taken by the firestarters three years before. The girl had saved nine lives and died before the age of twelve- killed by the man’s partner.
It is noted in the list of recruits and mentors of the past eight years. Showing the man would have endangered over a hundred lives. Still, Dewey closes his eyes and thinks- pressing his head against the book.
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Dewey’s days look like this:
He wakes to daylight being filtered through glass panes. The water distorts the light into rainbows and light twists and moves, making shapes appear in Dewey’s eyes. Dewey can read the notes carved into the floorboards- and sometimes a shadow comes along and Dewey feels as if he can see the volunteer bent over the floor with a very fine dagger or a knitting needle. Their sweat still stains the floors.
He checks the radio first. Then he checks the sonar, hoping that he doesn’t have to sit, watching the question mark drift closer and closer to safe spaces. The librarian had shown him a recording of the question mark once. The black and white images clawed at his imagination while his mind did its best to slide from knowledge’s grasp.
He takes notes on the newspapers and drinks his tea. This is often the time volunteers will come to him. The new recruits frown, and the elders smile. Dewey, every third or fourth day, strangles someone with a grappling hook and rope. They are trying to get to one of three books.
There is a grey volume with an embossed title. Dewey has not learned the language- only that it does not have a basis in Latin. It is eight-hundred pages and is firmly attached to a book stand. Dewey can not read it, but every person who has read it has died within twelve days. It has been recorded in the pink book.
The pink book is also never meant to be read. It has brown stains on it. The pink is a waterproofing measure that causes most people to laugh, but Dewey has never been able to have the same reaction to the book. It is a recording of the lives and deaths, and disappearances of every associate and previous associate. Dewey dutifully records each name and each event each morning. Every now and then, he will place an asterisk next to a name.
Earnest has two. Frank has one.
The third volume contains several mathematical formulas that mean nothing but to the people who read them. Dewey understands two pages of the book- they are headed with the title- Librarian. M. understands the ones named Poison. J.S., who came in after their mentor died, still wearing children’s shoes, says they understand the one labeled Bookkeeping. The ones who know the book’s name are those who get to look at it.
Dewey spends most of his day reading after his book has been kept. He sits near the sonar, his feet up on a mixing bowl, turned upside down. The bowl is sealed, so whatever died under there cannot escape.
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Ten years later, there is a truce. There is a sugar bowl. There is a set of spectacles. The schism has left Dewey with a small number of peers- but a smaller number of elders. “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”[vii]
Dewey has sent five volunteers to their death. He has given information to judges for the safety of twenty more. He cries, often. There is a hotel being built above the lake and Dewey has spent the last several years pretending his brothers do not exist outside of the hotel. None of them can tell one from the other- and Dewey isn’t quite sure he can tell them from himself. They all carry the same flinch, the same backward clarity of purpose. They are not at war with each other- but neither can they be at peace.
Schisms.
Dewey is in the middle of one of Dumas’ works, when E.S. comes to him. She tells of a ransom and a deep desire to separate herself from the war of the chaperones. She can not steal a child. She can not raise one. She places a small object between the two of them. It is wrapped in a small piece of torn cloth- decorated with the embroidery of a hem. The object is glass; it is beautiful and ugly. There is a deep pang somewhere deep in his stomach. It is as if a knife, burning hot, has been shoved into his stomach.
The object is ransom. E.S. explains that she will gather them, all of them who have been stolen- that it will hold the elders at bay. E.S. is beautiful, and she does not smile. She asks Dewey to hide her from all who wish for the object. He is to hide her in her books- so that those who wish to leave may know whom to go to and those who wish to stay can do noble deeds without knowing her name.
Dewey swallows and agrees.
Many people come to the library. A smile will get them the runaround; a frown will get them information- those with tears, he sends to E.S.
Slowly, ever so slowly, missions are left undone. A library is lost, but W. is able to keep his stepdaughter. Earnest is seeing someone on the side- and when a mission comes through for their death, Dewey can bury it- he can lead the victims to E.S. Dewey can breathe again.
So, when B comes to him, heartbroken and with a piece of a typewriter in her hand- Dewey’s panic overwhelms him. He is not used to nausea sitting low in his gut. There is a low pang of claws at his stomach. He can not send B to E.S. when the ransom demand is the only thing holding him together.
Farewell to Kindness, Humanity, and Gratitude[viii], Dewey thinks to himself. Dewey does not tell B.
B.comes back. She comes every day in the morning, before dawn. Dewey denies her. On the seventh day, she comes with darts. Dewey defends himself, but when B. screams and falls to the floor, he runs to her. He pulls her into his arms and lets her sob.
When she pulls herself up, she goes to section 296 – she points to Sanhedrin 37[ix] and begs once more. Dewey had never believed in monsters, before that moment. It is only when he becomes a monster, that he truly believes in their existence. He condemns children to monsters that day- and he finally understands how many of the teachers of his youth were monsters.
It is on the seventh day Dewey breaks, and B. smiles.
There is a second schism four days later.
B. is the last to see him weep.
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Dewey’s days look like this:
He wakes to daylight being filtered through glass panes. The water distorts the light into rainbows and light twists and moves, making shapes appear in Dewey’s eyes. Dewey can read the notes carved into the floorboards- and sometimes a shadow comes along and Dewey feels as if he can see the volunteer bent over the floor with a very fine dagger or a knitting needle. Their sweat still stains the floors. A shadow grows over the glass panes, little by little. Eventually, and by design, the shadow with cover the glass panes, and Dewey will put up light fixtures.
He checks the radio first. Then he checks the sonar, hoping that he doesn’t have to sit, watching the question mark drift closer and closer to safe spaces. He takes notes on the newspapers and drinks his tea. This is often the time volunteers will come to him. The new recruits frown, and the elders smile. Dewey, every third or fourth day, strangles someone with a grappling hook and rope. They ask about the sugar bowl and money and orphans. They try to kill him with harpoon guns.
Dewey spends most of his day reading after his book has been kept. He sits near the sonar, his feet up on a mixing bowl, turned upside down. The bowl is sealed, so whatever died under there can not escape.
Every now and then, a man with a typewriter comes. He doesn’t say much to Dewey, and Dewey doesn’t say much to him. He read the Dead page of the third volume. He writes poetry and brings Dewey beautiful bookmarks and old worn commonplace books. Dewey greets him with a smile, and it is always returned.
The man knows why Dewey smiles, and Dewey knows why the typewriter is new.
[i] Turning of the Screw- Governess haunted by two ghosts and two very strange children.
[ii] All Quiet on the Western Front- War is terrible and costly
[iii] Wuthering Heights- Selfishness in Love
[iv] שֹׁמֵ֣ר פִּ֖יו וּלְשׁוֹנ֑וֹ שֹׁמֵ֖ר מִצָּר֣וֹת נַפְשֽׁוֹ:
[v] 130; 990; 360;
[vi] Former Duke of Winnapeg, known by Lemony to his friends. Donated three hundred books to the library and paid for five newspaper subscriptions. Burned down a library containing volunteers. Granddaughter follows him, put in the custody of a Count.
[vii] Karl Marx
[viii] Dumas, Count of Monte Cristo
[ix] “Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the whole world.”