Always the Bridesmaid

Part IX

There are quiet moments in the Library. A lot of them, actually. It's not so much a steady stream of patrons as it is a blob of them, followed by hours upon hours of just . . . wandering. When the patrons first started coming, the Librarian found these moments in between—the moments where he's left with this void, free of voices or shuffling or the signs of life the patrons usually represented—absolutely unbearable. It was worse than discovering his predicament for the first time. It was like being reminded over and over again of just how alone he actually was.

He doesn't like to think of the Library as cruel. This isn't because he believes it to be capable of kindness. If anything, all evidence points to the idea that it's very cruel, or at least very oblivious to his needs, what with its penchant for giving him what he needed to live but also allowing him patrons and glimpses of the other Librarians. But it's the thought of considering it sentient at all, even though he knows it is, that gives him pause.

But as with all things, the Librarian grew used to even the reminders of his predicament, the balance between the loneliness and the servitude of an uncaring force, with time. That's the funny thing about the things that hurt the most. Eventually, you get so used to the hurt . . . or you adapt. And the Librarian adapted.

He fills his hours with anything he can find. Reshelving. Reorganizing books. Wandering the halls. Rereading volumes he hasn't read in centuries. Reading the newer ones that pop up as freshly pressed books with glossy covers or new files on the funny devices he finds. Anything to keep him busy.

But his favorite thing is the video room.

It's a new addition, floating ethereal in the structure of the Library, just like all the other rooms in that place, and as such, it doesn't look as old-fashioned. Carpeted floors. Odd chairs that aren't so much chairs as they are blobs of materials the Librarian just can't bring himself to admit are actually half-comfortable. And of course, the videos, fed through a projection onto the only wall not honeycombed with cubbies full of VHS tapes, DVD cases, and formats that existed in only a blip of time. He ignores the things in the cubbyholes, though. Oh, sometimes, he's interested in movies or things that people pay real money to see. But what interests him more are . . . people.

Home movies. Homemade productions. Those funny, seconds-long videos of cats and dances and food. Sometimes even commercials. These were the real things to him, the things that best captured the bits and bobs of life outside. Here's a day in the life of a family. Here's a commercial for the things people are interested in now. Here's a funny joke they're telling each other these days. These are the things that made the Librarian feel more connected to the outside world than anything else. There have always been diaries and ads and all the other things that were scraps of humanity—mask off, nonfiction, naked, unadorned, unembellished humanity—since the dawn of all creativity, but now he can see them. He can see their faces and their movements. What lights them up and what makes them feel. He can see them be them, and it makes him feel . . . real somehow. Vicariously real.

It hurts, of course. But that's why he does it. This is something he knows he can't have; it's something he knows he will probably never have. But he can't stop watching it and thinking about how much he can't have it, and . . . it's a different hurt, really. It's a hurt that reminds him he's here and human for once. It's a hurt that makes everything he's experienced in those silences between patrons all the more tangible. It gives a name to the beast, and that's why he keeps doing it. Why he keeps watching them.

So that's where he is now. Watching a young woman sing off-key to a song he knows but doesn't really know in the front seat of a car, which he only really understands because of photos and videos, as she rides it through a city, which he's only ever seen in things like this. He's lost in thought, caught up in pure fantasies about one day maybe seeing a city for himself, so forgive him for the fact that he doesn't notice when Sadie sits down beside him.