Bird passes shelf after shelf, slotting his fingers into the spaces where removed books once stood. There are fewer missing here than at the public library, where some shelves had been more gap than books. But still nearly every shelf is missing one, sometimes more. He wonders who decided which books were too dangerous to keep, and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner, ferrying them to their doom. He wonders if it is his father.
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An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. I donāt know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined.
While his father scanned the shelves, sliding the books one by one into the gaps from which theyād come, Bird ran his fingertips over the embossed spines where gilt lettering had long been rubbed away, breathing in the peculiar smell of the library: a mix of dust and leather and melted vanilla ice cream. Warm, like the scent of someoneās skin.
It soothed him and unsettled him at the same time, the murky hush like a wool blanket thrown over everything. Underneath, something large lying in wait. It never ended, the stacks of books needing to be set back in place, the constant insistent reiteration of order, and the thought was dizzying: that just beyond this shelf there were hundreds more, thousands of books, millions of words.
And suddenly, a door clicks open in Birdās mind. Why his father is always so cautious, why heās always nagging Bird to follow this particular route or that, to not go off on his own. How his father reached him so fast. It isnāt just dangerous to research China, or go looking for Japanese folktales. Itās dangerous to look like him, always has been. Itās dangerous to be his motherās child, in more ways than one. His father has always known it, has always been braced for something like this, always on a hair trigger for what inevitably would happen to his son. What heās afraid of: that one day someone will see Birdās face and see an enemy. That someone will see him as his motherās son, in blood or in deed, and take him away.
She grew larger. From within, Bird thrummed against her: his heels the mallets, her belly the drum. She could feel his hiccups, a microscopic ping. When he turned over, she felt the movement inside her stillness. Whatās it feel like, Ethan asked, wondrous, and she tried to explain: what the ocean floor felt as the waves rolled out, then in. The librarian slid another book across the counter toward her as she ventured farther and farther from shore.
All over the country, a scattered network of librarians would note this information, collating it with the Rolodex in their minds, cross-referencing it with the re-placed children they might have learned about. Some kept a running written list, but most, wary, simply trusted to memory. An imperfect system, but the brain of a librarian was a capacious place. Each of them had reasons of their own for taking this risk, and though most of them would never share these reasons with the others, would never even meet them face-to-face, all of them shared the same desperate hope of making a match, of sending a note back, sandwiched between pages, with a childās new location.