Read The Incident Report Online
Authors: Martha Baillie
She entered the library as if it were a garden. The time was 11:15
AM
. Her lavender eye shadow matched her hat and blouse, which went with her skirt that trailed on the ground. Lavender. Her choice was lavender, lavender her necessity. She approached the Reference Desk, wearing the expression of someone carried aloft by the fragrance of flowers. Then she'd arrived and she sat down. “Americans.” She raised her pencilled eyebrows. “Just the other day I saw two of them, pulled up at the corner in their car and reading a map, lost, you know how they are, no sense of geography, so I went up and asked if they needed my help, and they rolled down their window, all friendly, you know how they are, well I told them to drive a block south then turn west and three more blocks, and they thanked me, all loud and bigger than anyone else, you know how they are, and I watched them go, and what do they do?”
She rolled her eyes and scrunched up her ancient nose. A dusting of face powder fell from her cheek onto my desk. From under their lavender hoods, her scavenger eyes searched me for signs of encouragement. I smiled, as recommended in the Manual
of Conduct for Encounters with Difficult Patrons. There was nothing floral about her now.
“Well,” she sighed in triumphant disgust, “I'll tell you what they did. They turned north. Can you believe it? North, when I'd told them south, clear as dayââGo south,' I'd said. Americans!” With a wave of her hand she dismissed the entire nation. “I shouted after them, oh, I shouted all rightââIdiots, fools, if you can't follow simple directions, don't bother leaving home. Take your bloated backsides in your big car back where you belong.' I shouted, and they heard me all right.”
In her glee she slapped her thighs. “Americans.” She paused, testing the air for the electricity of my approval. “The only people worse than Americans are telephone operators. Them!” With a wave of her hand, she cleared the air of the foulness of telephone operators. “They can hardly spell, have you noticed? I got one on the phone the other day. I called 411. I wanted the number for the Lucky Dollar Tavern. âCan you spell that please,' she said. I repeated, slowly: âLucky Dollar Tavern'. She asked me again, âCan you spell that, please.' âMy God,' I shouted into the receiver, âI barely finished grade five and even I can spell lucky. Aren't you ashamed? If I were your teacher I'd send you to the corner or I'd beat you.' And I hung up the phone.” To illustrate her point, she brought her hand down with a “thwack” on the Reference Desk.
“I hung up all right. Americans and telephone operatorsâthey think they rule the world. Well they don't and won't till they learn how to spell, and know a bit of geography. The fundamentals. That's what they're missing. Do you think she could have spelled âfundamentals,' that ninny? Not if her life depended on it. Ha!”
The patron in question gathered up her skirts, and, snorting with pleasure, offered me a lavender conspiratorial wink.
The time was 2:25
PM
. A beautiful young man, whose large dark eyes seemed to be watching a movie the rest of us could not see, walked slowly up to the Reference Desk and sat down in the chair intended for patrons with questions. In his fine, long-fingered hand he was carrying a magazine, a recent issue, protected by a plastic cover and labelled, Reference Only.
“May I help you?” I asked.
“Oh, no, Miss, no thank you. But may I sit here awhile?” he inquired, his voice melodious. For a second he truly looked at me, then once more the cinema of his thoughts consumed him. His eyes were lustrous and full of intelligence.
“Of course, yes, of course you can sit. Take your time,” I replied, then focused on the e-mails displayed on the screen in front of me.
The young manâhe couldn't have been older than nineteen or twentyâflipped idly through the pages of the magazine, until all at once he paused.
“Excuse me, Miss, but may I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Have you noticed, Miss, that outside, the cars keep shrinking? Have you been out and seen? They really are getting smaller.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “There are more and more small cars. With any luck it should mean less pollution.”
“Well I've been thinking, I've been driving cars since I was seven, and that's a long time, and wouldn't it be wonderful if they made a really small car, and made it bulletproof, and it would come when you called its name? Can you imagine? You'd say its name, and it would come to you. Wouldn't that be great?”
“It would be wonderful.”
“I think so too. And one day they will, not for a long time yet, but they will. You'll call its name and it will come, you wait and see.”
He set the magazine down on the chair, and walked eagerly off in the direction of adult nonfiction. But suddenly he turned and called back to me, “They will do it one day. I promise you. You wait and see.”
Ten minutes later he returned. It was a quiet day and nobody had taken his place. The magazine lay where he'd left it. He picked it up and sat down. I continued with my work. We were as before.
Several more minutes passed.
“Miss, excuse me, Miss, but I've been talking with some friends, and I've been thinking . . .” He paused long enough to open the magazine wide, and to point with his finger at the sleek naked torso of a muscular male model pressed in upon from all sides by
voluptuous, fawning women. He held up the advertisement to be sure I missed nothing. “My friends and I, we've been discussing, and we don't believe this is really the sort of guy women find attractive, I mean, it's more what a man thinks that turns women on, it's more his ideas they go for.”
He looked me excitedly in the eyes, wanting, it seemed, my agreement.
“Oh, yes, absolutely,” I stated.
He lowered his eyes and scrutinized the advertisement, then looked up again.
“Women,” he declared, “they get turned on by a man's ideas, what he thinks. This just isn't the sort of guy women really want, not women who are a hundred and five, especially not women who are a hundred and five.”
“Are there very many women around who are a hundred and five?” I asked.
He laughed. “You're right. I guess there aren't many around who are a hundred and five. I guess there aren't.”
He got up and walked away with languorous ease, his lovely hands thrust deep in his pockets.
Once, my father disappeared for three days. I was eleven years old. I listened while my mother telephoned the police to report his absence. She searched his pockets and the drawers of his desk for clues. I asked if he'd been murdered. She assured me, no. He was alive, she insisted, and wandering somewhere, ducking in and out of used-book stores. How did she know? I asked. Had he warned her? Could she promise me he hadn't accidentally stepped in front of a bus, or fallen down a flight of stairs? She explained that once before, when I was not yet born, he'd vanished, and spent his days of absence frequenting used-book stores. He'd promised her never to do so again. “What good is a promise?” I asked.
When, after three days, my father returned, my mother behaved as if he were still away. She set four place mats on the table, four bowls, four spoonsâthe right number for her and for me and my brother and sister. Each time my father apologized, I was reminded of a bird I'd recently seen fly into the glass of a closed window. My fury with my father and my anger with my mother for refusing to forgive him competed with each other.
Eventually the resentment my mother felt towards my father dissolved and was replaced by fear. I observed her fear. I noted itâthe altered shape of her mouth, the invitations turned down, a sudden aversion to buying new clothes for herself, an intensified efficiency which she hoisted like a flag.
We, the Public Libraries of Toronto, lend books to any person living, studying or working in the city of Toronto. We do not ask who you are or comment on your choice of reading materials. We require only that you return what you have borrowed in reasonable condition and that you do so in a timely manner. We operate out of ninety-nine branches of varying sizes, positioned across the city. Without statistics we would cease to exist. If we restricted ourselves to the lending of books we would cease to exist. DVDs, videos, CDs, Internet access, magazines, comics, word-processing, story hours, literacy classes for adults, puppet shows, reading clubs: the list of our efforts is impressive. Silence eludes us. If you hope to find silence we recommend that you visit one of our branches early in the morning and lay claim to a chair in a far corner near a window, or drag a chair into the stacks. We discourage all our patrons from urinating indiscriminately, singing loudly, snoring, drying their socks on the heating vents, verbally or physically assaulting each other, cutting out the colourful pictures from our cookbooks, writing in library materials, licking or kissing the lingerie advertisements in the magazines we lend, stealing library property.
How old is Nila Narayan? Fifty-five? Her exact age is difficult to determine. Her sleek skin contains her fleshiness, creating an impression of smooth roundness. But her soul is triangular, I'm quite sure of that.
If one of us, her coworkers, relieves her on desk two minutes late, she relieves that person exactly two minutes late at the first opportunity; and if the schedule offers no such occasion for petty revenge, she alters the schedule to meet her needs. She does not consider herself vengeful but hungry for order and fairness.
She is indeed hungry. She enquires what each of us intends to eat for lunch, then counts our calories for us. She rearranges the contents of the refrigerator in the staff lounge with the avidity of someone playing solitaire, determined to win.
At home she cuts out glossy advertisements for men's underwear, which she brings to work, close-up shots of scantily concealed genitals, snugly held in place for the camera by the latest in pastel stretchy briefs. She pins these to the bulletin board above her workspace. At any hour of the day she can look up from her dull labours into an array of anatomical possibilities.
I wheeled my cumbersome cart back past the circulation desk and through to the children's area. There was just one title I'd still not located:
Junior Adventures in Science: Animals in Danger of Extinction
. J 333.954 Mac.
Not every hold on the list can be filled. Certain patrons languish in disappointment when their desires go unmet, others move on with a shrug. I crouched in front of the shelves. The time was 10:30
AM
. The books, I discovered, were in a state of shameful disorderâthe biography of a basketball hero, haplessly wedged between
Kitchen Chemistry Experiments
and
Easy Origami
.
I found
The Big Goodbye: Animals Threatened by Extinction
, and another volume titled
Too Late: Animals You'll Never Meet
, but the exact book requested was nowhere to be seen. I wheeled my cart back to the circulation desk.
As I unloaded the books I'd collected, a folded sheet of paper caught my eye. Someone had left a page of their notes on my cart, no doubt inadvertently, while I was searching the shelves. Or perhaps it was a mislaid document? I unfolded it and read.
        Â
You know who I mean. The young librarian with the freckled hands. She's got soft, chestnut hair. She takes children into that room with the accordion door and tells them stories. She also sits behind the reference desk and answers questions. Have you noticed how many men come to talk with her? No, not you. You're blind. Blind, and drunk on your own power. Well, open your eyes wider. Have you at least listened? It doesn't matter how drunk or ugly they are, she speaks with them. She's too young to know danger. Ah you, what do you know anyway? That I'm Rigoletto and that it's my job to make you laugh. Me, poor old hunchback, with no right to happiness. You think that's funny, eh? Laugh, laugh, get on with your laughter at my expense. This time, I won't let any harm come to her. You don't think I'm capable of protecting my own daughter, do you? You'll see pretty soon, what I'm capable of. If one of those men should so much as touch a hair on her head. It's not me who's going to be doing any more suffering. I've got my Gilda back, my gorgeous daughter with the freckled hands. She's been restored to me, and nobody's taking her, see?
I dropped the paper. I did not intend to; it slipped. Quickly I snatched it up from the floor. I carried it
down to the basement where I closed myself in the bathroom and stared at my hands. They were as they had always beenâslim, pale and covered in freckles. I washed my face with cold water and returned upstairs.
The time was 3:15. A male patron in adult nonfiction started removing books from the shelves. He stacked the volumes on the floor. By 3:45 his biblio-towers obstructed access to a substantial portion of the 700s, and he was apprehended. He'd emptied an entire bay of books.
Our Branch Head, Irene Frenkel, approached him with her usual calm demeanor, and suggested he might wish to have a look through the items he'd selected, before removing more. The patron ignored her advice. He added another several volumes to one of his wobbling towers.