The Librarianist

by Patrick deWitt

Bob had long given up on the notion of knowing anyone, or of being known. He communicated with the world partly by walking through it, but mainly by reading about it. Bob

had read novels exclusively and dedicatedly from childhood and through to the present.

believed Bob was reading beyond the accepted level of personal pleasure and wondered if it wasn’t symptomatic of a spiritual or emotional deformity. Bob thought her true question was, Why do you read rather than live? As

“Why read at all? Why does anyone do it in the first place? Why do I? There is the element of escape, which is real enough—that’s a real-enough comfort. But also we read as a way to come to grips with the randomness of our being alive. To read a book by an observant, sympathetic mind is to see the human landscape in all its odd detail, and the reader says to him or herself, Yes, that’s how it is, only I didn’t know it to describe it.

There’s a fraternity achieved, then: we are not alone.

Because I have an idea. Will you listen to me?” “I’m listening.” “I’d like to propose that you keep coming back here but without the books.” “Come back without the books.” “Leave those books at home, Bob.” “And what would I be doing there?” “Just that: being here.” “Being there doing what?” “Being here being around. Most of the people at the center are in a state of letting go. Some of them are unbothered by this, or unaware; but others are afraid, or confused, or angry. You’re the steady, hand-on-the-tiller type, and I think your presence might be useful.

He was not laughing at his mother’s death, but death in general, or life in general, or both in equal measure.

But neither of them won anything, not a solitary dollar, and they sat for a time in silence, feeling the feeling that was failure. Linus said, “When we gamble, we’re asking the universe what we’re worth, and the universe, terrifyingly, tells us.” He patted his hand on the table, pinched his big beret. “Good night, amigo,” he said. “Good night,” said Bob.

Chip’s son looked like Ethan.

In a crouching voice she said, “Connie Augustine,” then hung up the phone.

“It’s a job whose usefulness has gone away. The language-based life of the mind was a needed thing in the syrup-slow era of our elders, but who has time for it now? There aren’t

any metalsmiths anymore, and soon there’ll be no authors, publishers, booksellers—the entire industry will topple into the sea, like Atlantis; and the librarianists will be buried most deeply in the silt.”

He graduated high school with an A average and not a close friend, on campus or off. And why? There is such a thing as charisma, which is the ability to inveigle the devotion of others to benefit your personal cause; the inverse of charisma is horribleness, which is the phenomenon of fouling the mood of a room by simply being. Bob was neither one of these, and neither was he set at a midpoint between the extremes. He was to the side, out of the race completely.

He handed over the temporary card and watched her flipping it over. Bob wondered if her life was small in the way his was small.

“Well,” she said, “I live in an

abnormal environment. So I must be at least a little bit abnormal myself, right?”

“And while the partial truth is that I don’t believe, the fuller truth is that I believe just enough that I’m uncomfortab...

“My aspiration is to become a completely normal human being,” Connie said. “That’s my aspiration as well,” said Bob.

“Maybe it was all in my head,” said Bob. Ethan, who understood as well as anyone that romantic emotion was often to the side of language, said, “But maybe it was in hers too.”

When he next saw her she was cape-less, in a wine-colored sweater and tweed skirt, black tights and flats, and he understood when their eyes met that he was very seriously sickened by an ancient and terrorific affliction.