“Come on, my girl. Imagine misplacing half a million dollars.” He signaled to the server.
“Christopher didn’t put it in the safe, and I accidentally had it shelved in an effort to tidy up. I think.”
“Have you not called the police then?”
“It wasn’t stolen,” she said, and she believed that. Hardly anyone had access to the thing. Certainly no one who would want to steal it. “It couldn’t have been.”
They ordered their usual spicy garlic ramen bowls and sat in silence while the server fussed over their table, pouring water, arranging napkins, chopsticks, chili sauce. “I’ll take a pint of lager too,” Liesl said.
“You have to call the police, darling.”
She waited to answer while her lager arrived. “You don’t understand this,” she said, once the server had gone.
“Explain then,” he said. “The gist I’m getting is that you’re failing to report the loss of something more valuable than our house.”
Liesl shook her head. Arguing with John would require drawing a detailed picture of the intricacies of academic reputation management. She didn’t have the energy for the art project. “I can fix this myself.”
“And if you can’t?”
“I can.”
John reached over and cleared a small bit of foam that was clinging to Liesl’s upper lip.
“That library,” he said. “That collection. It’s your responsibility now.”
“Exactly. A responsibility that no one thinks I’m capable of as it is.”
“You can’t think this is your fault.”
“It’s my responsibility.” She put her hand over her face, skimming where he had just touched her lip.
“You never even saw the thing,” he said.
“I might have,” she said. “If I had paid more attention to what was on Christopher’s desk.”
“You don’t know that it was ever there.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
Liesl saw something cross John’s face that suggested he did still want to talk about it, and she knew that he could build a blue period out of scraps of conversation. Their daughter, Hannah, called it scrapyarding. She said it mostly jokingly, but it was true that sometimes John couldn’t see the whole car, only the rusted-out hubcaps and a bent antenna. And those things could convince him that there was no driving forward. Liesl was ready to assuage him, to play down the seriousness, if he looked to be heading in that direction, but he ended it first, the discussion about the police.
“Drink your beer then,” said John, and their noodles arrived, and that was that.
***
Liesl walked to work in the early-morning hours. She’d abandoned the blow-dryer after that first day, letting her gray hair go wiry in exchange for the gift of an extra thirty minutes to herself before sunrise. It was easy to forget how quickly the summers ended— how quickly the dawn moved later and later and later—when one didn’t spend a lot of time outside this early in the day. The noodle shop where they had eaten dinner the night before was darkened, and through its windows she could just make out the outlines of chairs turned upside down and stacked on tables. The Starbucks across the street had opened, and she could hear its John Mayer soundtrack leaking onto the street as the door swung open and closed, but the coffee shop she preferred, the one with the blue awning and the small ginger cookies, would not be open for another hour. There was another noodle shop and another and then a pharmacy. Closed, closed, closed. She felt she had more privacy here than even in her bedroom. The library was less than thirty minutes away on foot. Often she took the subway, and after she did, she always beat herself up a little. For forgoing this little bit of exercise on top of everything else.
Once inside the library building, she ignored the administrative tasks that beckoned from the office. Invoices sat unpaid, the faculty reception details remained unconfirmed. The basements drew her downstairs. The collections that were shelved in the upper stacks, the ones that were so often photographed by building visitors, were beautiful, true. But Liesl had always loved the basements. There was no intellectual arrangement of materials here; the books were shelved by size so that shelf space could be used to its maximum capacity and so the fragile old volumes could act as supports to their neighbors. The result was that Darwin might sit next to Shakespeare, and in Liesl’s imagination they might convene and brew new ideas that would be impossible under the limits of the Library of Congress classification system. Each stack sat on a roller so it could be pushed flush with its neighbor, leaving the books alone to their secrets once a visitor pushed them aside to view the next bookshelf and then the next. Like everything else in the basements, the rollers were for space. They could fit twice as many stacks if they stored them right against each other, but in truth, the tall, heavy bookshelves on their flimsy rollers had always turned Liesl’s stomach. It was inevitable, wasn’t it, that one of these shelves would one day tip over onto a person?
The public, the donors, even university faculty—they weren’t allowed down into these basements. They would see the books all scrunched together, they would see the Darwin right next to the Shakespeare, and they wouldn’t understand. The basements were only for the ones who knew. From inside each book popped a tiny flag on acid-free card stock where someone had typed each book’s call number. No title, nothing about the book itself. Just a number. Of course, there were computers and databases now, all sorts of things to tie it together, but it was all dependent on keeping the right little flag inside the right big book and putting the book in the exact right place next to its similarly sized neighbors. It seemed inevitable that something would go wrong eventually. It seemed impossible that nothing had gone seriously wrong up until that point. Someone sticks the wrong flag into the wrong book, or someone breaks up a six-volume set or slides a book next to the wrong neighbor, and it might be years before someone realized the mistake. They might never realize.
Liesl’s head hurt again. The old headaches. She thought she should try to drink more water. She thought she should try to drink less lager. She walked through the fire door from one section of the basement to another, flipping the light switches as she went. There were four such fireproof chambers on this floor and two other levels of basement below her. There were books in the collection that she had never seen before, and she had always loved that, loved that she might discover something entirely new that no one had touched in one hundred years in these stacks. Now she was terrified by it. There were books in these stacks that hadn’t been touched in one hundred years. How could they ever expect to find the Plantin volumes among all this? She pulled the book closest to her hand out of the stacks. A 1683 treatise by a religious dissenter from the library of an Italian priest. Not the Plantin. She pulled out its nearest neighbor. A 2018 book by a Polish comic artist working out of Montreal. Not the Plantin. Next to it, an 1832 Hebrew dictionary. Not the Plantin.