Andromeda Klein (11 page)

He couldn’t possibly be the state’s governor somehow, could he? That would really make no sense.

Gordon was leaving, thank gods. It had been a hard day. She didn’t have the strength to smile weakly at him all through the shift. She just didn’t.

It occurred to Andromeda that she hadn’t thought to turn her phones on since the morning school switch-off. She turned on the red mom phone and saw that there were zero voice mails and seven text messages. Menu-Up-Select-Txts-down-down-down-Select-down-down-Select-Delete-Yes. That was the formula for Delete Unread, and she could do it with her eyes closed and without thinking, which was pretty much how she did it just then. Then she realized what she had done on automatic pilot and undeleted the unread messages to check, just to make sure the house hadn’t burned down or anything. No messages from St. Steve (UNAVAILABLE) on the other phone, as usual. She redeleted the mom messages, sighed, and cursed herself for being an idiot.

Gordon was pulling his jacket on as she came back into the back room.

“There you go,” he said. “That’s not so hard, is it?”

It took Andromeda nearly a second to realize that these condescending, encouraging words were not directed at her to congratulate her on a successful entrance into the break room. He was talking to his sleeve, praising it for its success in going all the way up his arm to his shoulder, leaving the hand exposed at the other end.

He looked up at Andromeda, and the next thing he said was to her, not his own clothing. At least, she was pretty sure it was to her.

“You look nice today.”

She smiled weakly. Okay, he’s on drugs again, she thought. Maybe he had been talking to his jacket after all. No way on
earth
could she look nice, by any measure. Marlyne said if Andromeda would give him the time of day he’d be over the moon and all over her. It was really a shame he was such an unappealing goofball who wore mandals. Even if he were to clean himself up a little, or a lot, she’d never be able to forget them.

“Where are the Sylvester Mouse carts?” she asked. She was returning the rather rare first issue of
S.S.O.T.B.M.E.;
Euclid’s
Elements
, books one and two; and
Shadows of Life and Thought
, A. E. Waite’s memoirs, all of which had been on the list, and had them out of her bag ready to file them amongst the others. For all her admiration for A.E., she had never gotten around to reading
Shadows
all the way through. She had studied only the pages on the tarot, which were difficult and obscure enough. She felt she owed it to his memory to wade through the entire book, and she was sure there were great truths hiding in the convoluted, cranky, scolding language, as there always were; but now it was needed by Sylvester Mouse, for some as-yet-unspecified reason.

Gordon was staring at her, trying to reverse-engineer
Sylvester Mouse
to trace it to its misheard original form. He got them sometimes.

“The whatie whats?” said Gordon, finally.

“The, you know, the carts. We’re pulling books from the list?” The three Sylvester Mouse carts were no longer tucked along the wall in the break room with
DO NOT SHELVE
signs taped to them.

“Well, the carts are over there,” said Gordon, breaking into a song, “but the books are gone. The carts are over there, but the books are gone….” He stopped the chant when he noticed Andromeda’s mouth beginning to form itself into one exceedingly thin line. “They packed them up this morning, I think. But there’s still more list to go. Lots more.” He pointed and she saw it, a new chunk of list in her mail slot with her time sheet. So that was what she’d be doing tonight. She was looking forward to it. It sure beat shelf reading.

“So they packed up the books,” she said. And then, before he could burst into song again, she quickly added: “Lots of good books there. What are they for, do you know? No one seems to know.” Some important Foundation or other wanted them for a class on the World’s Great Works of Esoterica, maybe, or there was going to be a display at Central of Wonderful and Unusual Featured Finds from the County Collection—something like that.

“They’re for reading,” said Gordon.

“What?” she said. “Oh.” Humorous.

“Damned witty,” said Altiverse AK.

“Yeah, of course they’re for reading….” Andromeda paused. Then it dawned on her what he had meant to say. A tiny droplet of disquiet opened into a limitlessly wide and deep ocean of pain. “Weeding?
Weeding?”
she said. “Weeding?”

“Yes,” said Gordon, more befuddled even than usual. “Weeding. What did you think it was? Don’t you read your e-mails?”

“Weeding?” she whimpered.

In fact, Andromeda rarely read any of her e-mail, figuring what was the point now that Daisy and St. Steve were gone. She had deleted most of her accounts and all of her Web sites, too, when she had realized there was a strong chance that her mother had been reading them. There was a library account, and a library staff Web site you were supposed to check, but it wasn’t something Andromeda was in the habit of doing and she hadn’t, she now realized, done it for some time.

She stood motionless in front of Gordon with a look of horror on her face as he explained.

“They’re weeding the collection to make room for more multimedia,” he said. “It’s never been done at this branch.”

“Yes,” she said, and Altiverse AK added: “Of course it hasn’t. That’s why it’s such a good collection!”

There was a lump in her throat, which was the only thing that prevented her from shouting those words. “Don’t melt down,” said Altiverse AK quietly, “just don’t.” She was trying not to. At this rate, there would be a gateway opening any moment, she could feel it.

It was a small building, Gordon went on, quoting the e-mail from memory, and an underutilized branch. The system regarded it as superfluous, and there had been talk of closing it down entirely, but the current plan was to “modernize” the collection and refocus on more popular titles and items like DVDs and magazines and workstations for accessing the Internet and digital files.

The resulting plan, explained in the staff newsletter and sent to everyone’s mailbox: Every book that hadn’t been checked out in the last eighteen months was to be pulled, discarded, and sold by the Friends of the Library. They were updating their usual sales methods by holding an online auction instead of the usual rummage sale for the more valuable titles.

“Friends!” was all she could say, thinking of three carts full of excellent, hard-to-come-by titles that had already gone, never to return, and the sinister “Friends” of the Library who were collaborating in the book purge. Many of the books already pulled were quite rare, and some nearly unique, and would fetch high, high prices—the real reason, certainly, that the “Friends” of the Library were so eager to sell them.
Magick Without Tears!
It was priceless. She would never be able to afford many of them, and perhaps not any, if it came to that. Obviously, staff-checking didn’t count as a checkout in the eighteen months; otherwise, a great many of the books would have been spared, as she’d staff-checked them many times.

She allowed herself a rueful snort. She had been so impressed by the list. What a wonderful choice of titles! Well, of course they were great titles: they were the ones no one ever checked out! The popular dreck, the wicker, the self-help, the sleazy novels were there to stay, of course. On that basis, the collection weeded itself. If they left it up to the patrons of this branch, all they’d have left would be romance novels and Civil War alternative histories and self-help and large-type and books on tape. Wasn’t the library supposed to be better than that, better than the lowest and most geriatric common denominator?

It was Altiverse AK who said that, but Andromeda herself asked a form of this final question aloud in a kind of despairing hiss, and Gordon finally seemed to realize that she was not pleased with the situation, though he appeared to have no idea why.

“Are you okay?” he was saying, but she had already snatched the list from her mailbox and zombied out of the room to find Darren Hedge.

“It’s beyond our control,” said Darren Hedge wearily. “No need to get hysterical.” He had the look of a man who devoutly wished someone else had his shift that day.

“Take your break,” he told her, when it became clear that hysteria, there and then in front of the reference desk, might well materialize.

He met her out in the breezeway.

“Don’t you read your e-mail? I thought you were taking this too well.”

“It’s not the books’ fault nobody uses this library.”

“That’s the problem,” said Darren Hedge. “We’re actually lucky. The family who donated this building to the city stipulated that it had to be preserved intact and used only as a public library, or else it would revert to the estate. Otherwise, they’d probably just close it and move everything to Central.” It was a valuable property, and they wanted to hang on to it, he added, but the board still felt they couldn’t justify the expense of running and staffing the branch in its current state.

“But look at this list,” said Andromeda, reading off titles from General Fiction.
Don Quixote
. Saki. Novels by Hemingway. Books by Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen.
The Marble Faun. Uncle Silas
. Jane Austen, for gods’ sake. Didn’t even old people read that? Andromeda hadn’t read most of those herself, but she certainly had been planning to at some point in her life.

“So they want to turn the library into an airport bookshop,” she said.

A small branch library, explained Darren Hedge, needed to cater to the needs of its patrons, and the mostly elderly patrons of Clearview Park just weren’t interested in reading any of that stuff.

“They’re not going to discard anything that isn’t already in a collection in the state. And if a patron wants something, there’s always interlibrary loan.”

“Fuck interlibrary loan,” said Altiverse AK, but Andromeda didn’t say it, because Darren Hedge was her boss and she disliked being vulgar anyway. She didn’t believe for one moment that they would hang on to every one of the unique titles, not if they could sell them for big money.

“But look,” she pleaded once again.
“Zanoni! The Golden Bough!”
She paged through the list. “Oh my gods. Look at this one:
Babylonian Liver Omens!”

Darren Hedge scrunched up his face.

“Do we really have that?” he said, and shook his head when she pointed to it on the printout. “How did we ever get that one? Can you imagine anyone at any time coming into this library and asking where they could find more information on”—he checked the list again—“Babylonian liver omens?”

He was trying to get her to laugh along with him, and was even arranging his face into a rueful expression as though to say “I share your distress, but you have to admit it’s kind of funny.” But she wasn’t going along with it. A world where the elderly were interested in Babylonian liver omens would be far superior to one where they were not, and it wasn’t the fault of
Babylonian Liver Omens
that the inferior world was the one the International House of Book-cakes happened to be stuck with. It was an important book. And quite hard to come by. And if the few elderly patrons who wandered into the library from time to time because they forgot where they lived didn’t realize it, it was their loss.

There was so much more to say, but not to Darren Hedge. Darren Hedge wasn’t in charge, and it was pointless to argue with him. The “Friends” of the Library were the culprits, the real enemy.

If a wave of hate magic had somehow arisen and formed itself into a corrosive cone of caustic black energy, and had smitten and destroyed Darren Hedge, the board of supervisors, and every single “Friend” of the Library simultaneously, she would not have minded all that much. But it was not to be. She was spent, deflated, defeated, incapable of summoning any type of cone.

Pulling the Sylvester Mouse books that night was the saddest, most dreary of tasks.
The Greater Trumps. Empire of the Sun. Five Children and It. The Castle of Otranto. Flatland
. It took her a long, long time because she had to pause to kiss and say goodbye to every one.