At the Library

By Matthew Wherttam

--

Its ceiling lights are bright, the books on its highest shelves are unreachable, and I am alone and seated at a dark-brown wooden table in a padded chair. A chair covered with cloth printed with white, black, brown, and dull-blue streaks. Not clearly outlined streaks but raggedy streaks which, in places, even dribble into dots. And the carpet here is also a mess—a mess of dirty blobs; gray, brown, and black blobs.

There are many books here, but one shelf holds no books; only three large, off-white, oversized and unpleasantly shaped bottles which are filled, I hope, with nothing, or at least nothing noxious. These bottles are covered with thin ribs and are solemn and sphinx-like.

The lower and reachable shelves are filled with pulp fiction. Trash. Books with stories that are forgettable and have been forgotten. And these books have lurid covers and sensational, overblown titles. I scoop up a bunch of them and start to read what the blurb writers have written about them:

“Readers will race through these pages.”

“An all-out, non-stop thriller with a story that hits the gas pedal and never taps the brakes.”

“Nuanced, compassionate, a captivating tale.”

“Relatable, unnerving, helter-skelter. A portable portal into other dimensions.”

“Powerful, peaceful, thoughtful, taut, terrifying, hot, rowdy, and compellingly offensive.”

(What a sea of adjectives. Will we ever reach shore? We will try.)

“The sheer insanity of the storyline will keep readers guessing till the final page and beyond.”

“The wife, her husband, her sister-in-law, even her blameless 10-year-old … one by one their secrets are uncovered. Who will be destroyed next?”

And finally:

“This tale gets better and better until its very last sentence, which, unbelievably, is the best part of this entire book.”

Should I flip to the last page and that very last, best sentence? Or, instead, should I lean back in this padded chair, next to this dark-brown wooden table, under these bright ceiling lights, and close my eyes; and as long as I can keep them closed, never make it to that last page, and its unbelievably, unbearably best, last sentence?

The library’s shelves and books form a fortress of sorts, and I have now closed my eyes to complete that fortress. Should I keep that fortress intact? I am comfortable here. All the books around me have been praised so extravagantly and ecstatically that they no longer attract me.

I will keep my eyes closed. I will stay in my fortress. I may be surrounded by books, but I might as well be in a place that has no pages, no words, and is altogether even without any letters.