by Jesse Karp
The walls of concrete and wood were seamed and cracked, long fissures running up to end somewhere Mal couldn’t track, and they made him think of the face in the shadows of the monster’s lair, its seams and cracks deep and old. The color here was old, too, old and washed out, eve-rything merely suggesting a color; its pigment worn away and inexorably moving toward a disintegrating gray, including the scraps of produce still lying on the kitchen counter, dried and withering like dead plants. Even the light here— pouring through a crumbling window that no longer contained curtains, pane, or glass—was dim and muffled, a dirty light that fell from muted clouds and felt like old dust on your skin.
Mal wouldn’t look up at that sky now. Dim though it may be, its illumination was more than he wished to inflict on his aching brain at the moment. He knew it well, though; knew the muted colors and worn-out texture of this place as well as he knew his own scarred face. This place, places of its kind, had been a second home for nearly a year now. He was used to the sound, too, the way the thrum of traffic and quick rat-a-tat of thousands of walking feet blended together and Dopplered into this place in warped waves, one second far away, almost silent, the next second roaring like an angry ocean, louder than it would have been right next to him.
The nightmare he woke from still lingered, the same one he always had. It was his only constant companion in life now, this low-ceilinged dream of a man in a suit trying to drill into his brain.
He pressed his fingers into his temples—slowly, everything felt like it was moving through thick, unyielding syrup—and tried to gouge out the nightmare and the pain along with it, to absolutely no effect whatsoever. He swallowed and blinked and grunted and ran his tongue over the jagged shrapnel of tooth lodged in his soft, bloody gums, and did little things with his body, just to steady himself. It was difficult to focus, particularly on things that happened right before he went out, but he knew they had put something in him, something that would let them keep track of him. That, at least, he could counter. No technology they had could possibly penetrate into here, into a forgotten place. But, he suddenly wondered, was that to his advantage? How would they take it if their means of keeping him under tabs proved worthless as soon as they had let him go? He needed to keep this advantage in reserve, because while he was immediately safe in here, he couldn’t stay in here forever. That would mean death, not only for his body, but long before that, death for his spirit, which was slowly worn away every moment he spent in one of these places, just as the surfaces of the building and ground were slowly worn away.
He gave himself another moment before he tried to stand and then, nearly toppling over, sat down again. He did this twice before he overcame the unsteadiness by a sheer refusal to fall, turned the spinning alley and tilting floor into an enemy, and then simply refused to back down from it. He shuffled to the ragged and splintered doorway, and—bracing himself for the more intense light, the more intense world of input—he stepped out.
The world roared into life around him and, again, al-most knocked him backwards. He held himself with a powerful but trembling arm against a wall. People streamed by, not a single one sparing him a glance away from their cells or the images their cellenses were transmitting into their eyes. The flawlessly polished window of a gourmet coffee superstore incongruously reflected his ruin of a face back at him.
There was only one place for him, one person for him to go to. Putting her in danger made his blood boil hot, knowing they were tracking him wherever he went now. But the woman, Kliest, knew about her already. So going to her would not be putting her in any more jeopardy.
How to get there, though? With about five bucks in his pocket, he couldn’t get a cab, and he stayed clear of the shiny silver subway stations patrolled by the MCT. It was moot, since barely anyone took cash anymore, anyway. He steadied himself to begin what promised to be a grueling walk across town, when a shadow fell across his path and halted there.
“Mal, are you all right?” asked a person he’d never seen before, a plump woman with frizzy hair, pushing a baby carriage. He squinted into her eyes briefly, collecting himself.
“Yes.”
“What did they do to you?”
“Gave me a job.”
“What? What do you mean?” the woman asked as the baby in the carriage studied Mal upside down and kicked its legs energetically.
“How did you find me?” Mal questioned the unfamiliar woman, squinting down at the innocent, unspoiled little human like it was an alien creature.
“I saw them pick you up but couldn’t follow. I waited, and they dropped you back.”
“You’ve been watching me.”
“I . . .” The plump face could not seem to decide how to end that sentence, so Mal gathered himself and began shuffling away.
“Mal,” she said a moment later. “Can I help you?”
“No.” He took another two steps before he realized how limited his options really were. “Wait.” He turned slowly, oblivious crowds spinning around him, around both of them. “I need a cab ride.”
The plump woman opened her purse and scoured through it as though its recesses were alien to her. After a moment she produced a wallet and then slipped from that a credit card, which she studied cursorily before looking up to hail a taxi.
She watched while Mal lowered himself heavily into the back seat. The driver and the woman both looked at Mal expectantly.
“Use the card,” he said, not prepared to part with the address yet.
The woman, understanding what her role was to be, used the laser scanner in back to flash the card.
“Mal, if you would let me help, maybe we could—”
“You’ve helped.” Mal used what he had left to close the door and tell the driver where to go.
As the taxi slid back into the flow of traffic, Mal watched the woman tarry at the curb, then suddenly tilt her head as if caught in the middle of a daydream and look down and notice the stroller as though for the first time. She put her hands on it and pushed it away, joining the crowd.
The façade of the apartment was a clean white, the windows reflecting sparkling light on their tinted surface. Only if you were close enough and peered in could you see that they were barred on the inside. Indeed, as Mal fumbled the key from his pocket with clumsy fingers and pushed in, surface was all the building had going for it. Inside, the hall was filthy and stank of something sour and old, airing the decaying lie beneath the pleasant veneer. The elevator was pitted and scratched as though a war had been fought within its claustrophobic confines, and it rattled angrily as it rode up.
The hallway was lined with rusting doors, many of them roughly etched with nicknames, comments, or offenses, two or three twisted and scored at the locks and slightly ajar. He used the key to open the door and nearly tumbled into the tiny, dim apartment.
He lowered himself onto the cot in one corner, leaning his back against the cold concrete of the wall. He was grateful for the tint of the Plexiglas window, which dimmed the light that stabbed into his pounding eyes. Even so, he could see the tight forest of buildings, their surfaces perfectly crisp and welcoming, which opened some few blocks away to make space for the dome. Gleaming silver, it caught the light around it, glowing like some alien spacecraft. Rising behind it were the proud Lazarus Towers, five black points reaching up like a hand trying to tear God from the heavens. In the dome’s reflective surface, the buildings warped into a skewed world of barely recognizable curves and spires.
That was what he was staring at when he finally let himself go.
The quiet noise of movement nearby stirred him, but trapped in a state of groggy near-consciousness, Mal had to jab his tongue down hard onto the raw, bloody pulp of his jagged tooth to bring himself fully awake.
In the darkness, a girl moved about, her desire not to wake him clear in the tension and calculated movements of her body. It was dark out now, though the sounds of the city never slowed or wavered. He checked his muscles, flexing them slowly, one group at a
time. He burned with pain in many areas, and his head still felt as though someone were leaning on a vise they’d affixed to it. There were things on his body, adhesive bandages over the worst abrasions on his chest, his face, his arms. She’d bandaged him while he slept. Of course she had. It was a wonder she could tell the new from the old, his body an homage to damaged flesh: the scar across the bridge of his nose, the rough flesh on his forearms and elbows, the deep discolorations that old bruises had left on his torso, the mad frenzy of interlaced scar tissue across his knuckles.
“Thank you,” he said, and his voice sounded soft and mushy to him.
The girl stiffened and looked through the dark, then came to the cot and turned on a small lamp on the floor. She leaned into the hazy glow. Her eyes were obscured by thick locks of shaggy hair that she wore like a mask.
“Mal,” she said, her voice dense with his suffering, though it always issued so quietly you needed to listen as if to a whisper. “What did they do to you?”
“It’s complicated.”
She put her hand gently on the side of his face and held it there, casting the barely visible slivers of her eyes into his own.
“We’re going to need to get you away from here, Rose,” he said, pushing himself up on an elbow and coming to a seated position, with her help.
The question passed across her uncertain features, taking time as it always did to work its way to her mouth.
“This wasn’t bare knuckles down in the park, was it?”
“No.”
“What’s going on?”
He let his eyes close, touched the bandage on his face.
“People want something from me.”
“Give it to them,” she said plainly.
“I don’t have it.”
“But they won’t accept that, will they?”
“No. Which is why you have to go.”
Beneath her mask of hair, her lips shifted into a smile. It was a smile that recognized futility. Go? Go where? Would she be here at all if she had any choice?
“I’m going to take you somewhere safe,” he said.
“And then what?”
“I’m going to get what they want.”
She looked down. Partially visible, her fragile, anguished features held no doubt at all.
“But you’re not going to give it to them, are you?”
The darkness pressed in on them, held back only by the meager glow of the tiny lamp.
“No.”
Josh
LAURA WALKED THROUGH THE SERENE, vaulted stacks of the university library, coming out before the grand windows with the stained-glass designs on top. Between two such windows sat the reference desk, a small island of directed knowledge among all this free-floating information.
She went up to it and took the seat at the side. A tall man with a snappy bow tie turned his glasses on her.
“Hi,” she said quietly, “I think I got a message to see the librarian.”
“Which librarian?” he asked at a normal volume, which almost made Laura wince at the way it seemed to create an explosion of sound in this still place.
“Uh, didn’t say.”
“How did you receive the note?”
“Under my door.” It sounded ridiculous when she said it out loud.
“Your door.” His eyebrows raised, and the way the light caught him, it gave him the appearance of a sly cat. “Well, official notifications are voice-texted. Someone sent you a paper note?” He said it as though it was the set up for a joke.
She reached into her pocket and produced the slip and handed it over.
“This notice didn’t come from the library,” he informed her. “In fact, it doesn’t even call on you to see a librarian, really.”
“No,” Laura said. “I kind of figured all that. It’s just that, well, this is where all the librarians are.”
“Yes,” he said, and proffered the note with the tips of his thumb and forefinger and then sat looking at her.
“Sooo . . .” She drew out the syllable. “I guess I don’t need to be here.”
He continued looking at her.
“Okay, thanks.” She rose and began to walk away when the boom of his voice caught her.
“‘Librarian’ is capitalized in your note.”
“I’m sorry?”
“‘The Librarian.’ Capital L.” He was looking at his computer as he spoke, already casting off the exchange. “Like it’s not just a librarian, but the Librarian.”
She looked at the note again. It was true. She had assumed it was an idiosyncrasy of the author’s grammar, to the extent she’d considered it at all, and this dude struck her as a bit of stickler, but it was true. And so what if it was? Why was she wasting her time on this, anyway?
“Thanks,” she said, and he nodded, already off on another adventure.
Josh was waiting for her in the café, seated with a large Coke in front of him and a sweating glass of iced tea with lemon across from him. She spotted him immediately, despite the fact that his eyes were hidden beneath black cellenses and the stem of the glasses obscured the scar down his cheek. She walked over and stopped directly in front him, and he remained immersed in the internal world created by his new toy.
“Hi,” she said, “thanks for the tea.” She sat down and stared across the table into his face, and it took another moment before she realized he still had no idea she was here.
“Hello.” She slapped him on the hand, and he jolted as if someone had jumped out of an alley at him.
“Whoa,” he said, removing the lenses. “Sorry, Button, didn’t see you. You could just say ‘hi’ like a normal person.”
“I did, actually.”
“Oh. Sorry. I got you an iced tea,” he finished brightly, fixing one of those good smiles on his kisser.
She took a sip and regarded him silently.
“So, uh, how’s your mom?” he asked.
“Worried, as usual.”
“Uh-huh. And, uh . . . how are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you seem kind of—I don’t know—off?”
“Annoyed, you mean?”
“Yeah, that would be another way to put it. Remember before when you were all, like, happy to see me?”
Laura’s shoulders relaxed, and a smile escaped from the tension in her jaw.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and reached out to squeeze his hand.
“Your mom set you off?”
“No. She said . . . nothing. It’s nothing.”
“Laura.” He added a sideways glance to the smile. “You’re gonna tell me eventually.”
“There’s nothing to tell. Seriously.”
He gulped at his Coke, clearly dubious.
“Hey,” she said, perking up, “what do you know about librarians?”
“Uh, they always want to charge me fines?”
“Nice. What else?”
“Books, research, old, musty, glasses . . .” His eyes searched around his head for a couple more. “Oh, yeah. Quiet. How could I forget that one?”
“Do you know any famous librarians?” she asked. “Or really important ones?”
“Seriously? What are we talking about exactly?”
“Just go with me.”
“Okay. Uh, wasn’t, like, Benjamin Franklin a librarian or something?”
“Was he?”
“I don’t know, Laura, I’m trying to go with you here.” He took another gulp of his drink, slightly miffed.
“I bet your new toy knows.”
“You want me to look?” He sat up straighter, interested that she was maybe coming around to it.
“Yeah.”
She watched him clip the lenses back on.
“Whoa, hey, I was right,” he said almost immediately. “He founded something called the Library Company of Philadelphia, and he—”
“What about other famous librarians?” she asked, feeling something bubbling and urgent in her stomach suddenly.
“Lemme
look,” Josh said, and as he did, Laura watched his fine, strong face, as its identity was weirdly scoured away by the lenses. His lips moved gently and then stopped, and something left his face altogether. Maybe it was a tension in the muscles, but if so, it was tension that was supposed to be there, a set to the jaw line, a sense of animation in the expression. It left, like it had been sucked out of his eyes through those goddamned lenses.
“Look up Librarian with a capital L,” she said sharply, something harsher than mere urgency in her now.
“Uh, yeah, it doesn’t differentiate between lower- and uppercase, Button.”
“Put it in quotes, Josh. Jesus, have you ever actually done any research?”
“Hey, chill out, Laura. What’s the problem? I’ll put it in quotes.” He defended himself nominally, but his expression had not returned and his voice sounded subdued to her, as if he were speaking to her from behind a curtain, from another place altogether.
She had to clench her fists to keep herself from tearing the things from his face, and she didn’t know why.
“There’s a bunch of random stuff here, Laura. Beginnings of sentences and stuff. It doesn’t really refer to anyone specifically, you know? Laura?”
