help—or send me a pneum. I’ll be downstairs on Stack 6. But you won’t have trouble with Grace. She’s a friend.”
“That’s good,” I said. I was glad they had a place to get warm.
After half an hour, Anjali sent me out with a cart to collect the items the patrons had finished with. The rumbling woke the sleeping patron—Grace Farr—as I went past her. She looked up at me and I recognized her pale gray eyes. She was the woman with the shopping cart, the one I’d given my sneakers to! “Hello,” I said, startled.
“Hello again.” She winked. Then she put her head back down on the table, and I continued my rounds.
My favorite patrons were a pair of elderly men in threadbare but well-pressed suits. They requested a magnificent eighteenth-century Russian chess set, carved from walrus ivory, and took it to a corner table under the autumn windows, where they spent the rest of my shift playing an intense game.
One patron, a short man with a neatly cropped beard, was doing some sort of work with globes. He requested half a dozen and lined them up in the middle of one of the long tables under a lamp, where he twirled them this way and that, peering at the continents through a magnifying glass and taking notes. He seemed at home in the MER. He would stop to exchange a word or two with the chess players on his way to retrieve a new globe. He kept looking over at Anjali.
“What’s with the globes? Is that guy a cartographer?” I asked her.
“He’s an antiques dealer. He kind of gives me the creeps, the way he’s always staring at me.”
“Yeah, I noticed that too. Creepy. What’s he doing with the globes?”
“Probably trying to figure out whether some antique globe he’s trying to sell is real, or where it’s from, or what to charge for it,” Anjali said.
The man kept looking over in our direction with a little thoughtful frown. Not quite like he was admiring Anjali the way guys so often did—more like he was evaluating a painting he was thinking about buying.
After I’d been working for an hour or so, a patron came to pick up a pair of boots that looked a lot like the ones Marc had borrowed the day his feet got wet. In fact, they looked so similar I thought they must be the same ones. I checked the call number, expecting it to be from Stack 2, Textiles and Garb, but it started with I *GC, a designation I hadn’t seen before.
Soon the patron brought them back. “Excuse me—you gave me the wrong boots.”
I checked the label, which was tied to the laces: I *GC 391.413 S94. “No,” I said. “The label matches the call number on your call slip.”
“Well, they must be mislabeled. They don’t work.”
“What do you mean they don’t work?” I said. “You mean they don’t fit?”
“They fit fine, they just don’t
“How can boots not work?”
He peered at me. “I think I’d better speak to a librarian. Could you get me your supervisor, please?”
“Okay.” I took the boots over to Anjali. “Where do they keep the phone around here?” I asked her. “I need Ms. Callender.”
“Ask Sarah to send her a pneum. Why, what’s up?”
“Some patron’s insisting these boots were mislabeled. It’s weird. He says they don’t work.”
“What? Show me.” Anjali sounded alarmed. I handed her the boots. “Oh, let’s not bother Ms. Callender about this,” she said hurriedly. “You can handle things without me for a few minutes, can’t you? I’ll be right back.” She went to the window and spoke to the patron, then hurried out.
I had a hard time keeping up with the arriving objects. One dumbwaiter would ping while I was taking something out of another, then the third would chime and open. Things kept piling up as I ran back and forth between the dumbwaiters and the desk. I wondered how Anjali had managed it all so gracefully.
A line formed at the window, and the patrons started murmuring, a soft but threatening noise. The little man with the beard frowned at me when I let one of the globes slip and hit the base against the desk. I was relieved when Anjali came back with a pair of boots in her hand.
“Good, you’re back—I was starting to panic. Are those the right boots?”
“Yes, they were misshelved.”
“So that’s a different pair?” They looked the same to me.
She nodded and beckoned to the boot patron, who took the new boots and sniffed at them.
After a muttered conversation with Anjali that I couldn’t hear over the conveyor belt, he left with the boots, apparently satisfied.
“Everything cool?” I asked Anjali.
“Yes, it’s fine now,” she said. “You don’t need to bother Ms. Callender about it. I straightened it out.”
“Okay,” I said.
When Ms. Callender came in with Marc, Anjali looked momentarily worried, but she relaxed when he smiled at her reassuringly.
Ms. Callender consulted her clipboard. “Marc, you’re on dumbwaiters. Sarah, man the window, okay, hon? And Anjali, would you mind showing Elizabeth how to handle the tubes? I’ll be on 6 if you run into any difficulties.”
Anjali pointed me to the stool where Sarah had been sitting. She pulled up another wheeled stool in front of the tangle of tubes, where the pneums were hammering down.
“We’re basically operating a switchboard,” she told me. “All the pneum stations all over the building have a tube that leads here to us. A few of them are connected directly to each other, but most of them aren’t, so if someone wants to send a pneum from Stack 4, say, to Stack 7, it has to go through us.”
“That sounds like a lot of work,” I said.
“It is. We have to send them on quickly or the whole system backs up, and it’s easy to make a mistake. But don’t worry too much—if you send a pneum to the wrong stack, they’ll just send it back here.”
The job was exhausting yet exhilarating, like a video game. I had a thousand rules to remember. Anything in a red pneum went to Stack 6, where the librarians had their offices. Blue pneums went straight to Dr. Rust. Pneums carrying call slips went to the appropriate stack. I had to memorize which stack held which collection. Tools were on Stack 5, household items on 9, fungibles on 8.
“What on earth is a fungible?” I asked Anjali.
“Something that needs a lot of replacing.”
“You mean things like lightbulbs and paper towels?”
“No, that’s ephemera, on Stack 3. Well, the paper towels are. Lightbulbs are in various places. Some are on 5, Tools and Scientific Instruments; some are on 9, Household Goods.”
“Oh, okay. But what are fungibles?”
“Plants and animals.”
“What? You’re kidding! Is this like a zoo or something? Can people check out, like, a giraffe?”
“I doubt it,” said Anjali with a grin. “I don’t think we have any giraffes in the collection. If we did, they’d be in the annex anyway.”
“What’s the annex?”
“Off-site oversize storage. Those are call slips that start with *A. Like, here’s one—oops, no, that’s a *V.”
“What’s a *V?”
“Valuable items. They’re kept on the same stack as the rest of the things in their category. Pages aren’t allowed to run those slips. Only librarians have the keys, so send *V call slips to Stack 6.”
“Oh, right—like Marie Antoinette’s wig?” I asked. “Ms. Callender showed me, in a locked room on Stack 2.”
“Exactly.”
I routed a request for a teapot to Stack 9, one for a guitar to Stack 4, and three for hats to Stack 2.
It took me a while to get the hang of the tubes themselves. I kept snapping the doors on my thumb. Eventually, though, I fell into a sort of meditative rhythm. My hands flew peacefully from basket to tube. The hiss and clatter and creak of the machines began to feel like forest sounds: the rush of a waterfall, the rustle of leaves, the chatter of squirrels. Out of the corners of my eyes, I seemed to see things moving in the stained-glass
