Read The Incident Report Online
Authors: Martha Baillie
The Incident Report (2 page)
Without the library, you have no civilization.
âRay Bradbury
I keep the following reports in the drawer of my desk. To my mind they resemble a pack of playing cards.
The time was 2:15. A young man swaggered into the library. On his shaved head he wore a grey tweed hat. The words Love and Fuck, printed in large, dark letters, decorated the back of his green army jacket. His black boots added weight to his presence. A small, fine-boned man, his eyes were the pale blue of a summer sky. Chains of varying thicknesses and degrees of intricacy, each link handwoven from copper wire, hung from his shoulders and crisscrossed his chest. He settled himself in a chair by the large window, behind the paperback spinners.
At 4:15 he came to the desk and asked to borrow, “please, if possible,” a small hand-held vacuum. “I've got some shavings I'd like to clean up,” he explained. For the preceding two hours he'd sat, stripping electrical wire with the aid of his pocketknife. I brought him the battery powered Dust Buster from the shelf at the back of our workroom. I could think of nothing in the Rules and Regulations to prohibit me from lending it to him. He thanked me, and, crouching down, cleaned the debris from the carpet surrounding his chairâhis territory of responsibility.
The time was 11:15
AM
. A slender woman with unusually dry and pale skin entered the library at an angle. She slipped in sideways. All of a sudden she was there, moving forward, lightly on her feet, as if prepared to elude an attacker. Her restless, almost colourless eyes took in her surroundings. She approached the Reference Desk, where I sat scrolling through the e-mails suspended in my In Box.
“Where are your career information sheets?”
I indicated two thick black binders. She peered in the direction I was pointing, but made no move to cross the room.
“Shall I show you the binders?” I offered.
“I see where you're pointing. I'm not a fool.”
Her voice snipped the word “fool” from the air and pasted it on my forehead. I lowered my eyes. The female patron in question set off on her journey. Several minutes later, she returned.
“Those binders,” she informed me, “are black.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “they are.”
“Then why did you say they were purple?” She leaned forward to make it clear that no route of escape was available to me.
“Did I?”
“You did. You said, âthose purple binders over there.' You knew they were black but you lied to me. âThose purple binders,' you said.”
I muttered my apology. “I didn't intend . . .”
She cut me off. “You did. You said purple, those purple binders. You knew they were black, but you told me they were purple.”
“I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.”
“You were perfectly clear. Purple binders, you said. You lied to me.”
I attempted to distract her from the subject of colour by asking, “Were you able to find what you wanted?”
She glared at me through her white eyelashes.
I repeated my question. “Were you able to find what you wanted?”
She held my gaze with her hard little eyes, now the colour of dirty snow, and considered my query. “It's not my abilities that are in doubt, but yours,” she informed me. “I asked you a simple question, and you lied to me.” The anger in her voice dragged, like a fingernail across a blackboard. I shifted my attention to her collarbone. She spoke her final judgment. “You should be put outside in a cage on the sidewalk.”
Again I lowered my eyes to the computer screen in front of me, and read, but the words had become hollow gourds, little seeds of shrivelled meaning rattling inside them.
This morning, the first to arrive, I unlocked the back door of the library, shouldered my bicycle, and descended the narrow stairs into the dim basement. The grey metal box fixed to the wall opened easily to reveal two vertical rows of stiff black switches made of a hard plastic. I started at the top and moved down. Each switch, succumbing to the pressure of my thumb, produced a loud “click”âa sound of finalityâas it flipped from “Off” to “On.” Throughout the library above me, lights lit up. Nothing irrevocable had occurred. At the end of the day the lights would go off again. And yet for a few seconds I'd experienced certainty and a fleeting sensation of power. Sounds are more convincing than most of reality.
My name is Miriam Gordon. I am an employee of the Public Libraries of Toronto. I am thirty-five years old and a “Clerical,” or that is how they referred to me until last month when they changed my title. I am now a “Public Service Assistant.”
This afternoon at 4:55, a stout female patron, having spent several minutes exploring the contents of her purse, pulled out a small object. It lay in the plump palm of her hand. She thrust her arm across the desk. “This is for you,” she explained. She was rewarding me. I'd provided her with the books she needed. In its brightly coloured wrapper, the condom resembled a candy. At first I thought it was a candy. She was not a regular. I had never seen her before. Naturally, I thanked her for her gift.
In the library workroom, a schedule hangs from two clips. As always, the day has been divided into compartments, as if it were a train about to set out on a well-planned voyage along shining rails. My initials have been pencilled into many of the little boxes that correspond to each hour between 9:00
AM
and 8:30
PM
. We, the staff, don't always greet the public with enthusiasm. We don't feel, every one of us without fail, that we are travelling out, embarked upon an adventure, and yet there we are, inscribed in our little boxes, as if the day were pulled by a solid locomotive.
Every morning in the warmth of my bed, as I surface from sleep, fearâsmall as a cherry stone, it cracks open behind my breastbone. I don't want the fruit. With each quick breath the fear grows, a rustling of leaves in the cavity of my chest. But soon I've washed, dressed, drunk a cup of tea, eaten a piece of toast, and am on my way to work, riding my bicycle in a prescribed direction.
Suitcase Man arrives carrying his suitcase. The hard little handle is covered in leather. It is not the sort of suitcase anyone uses anymoreâstiff, beige, almost a box. More leather reinforces its corners. He is a short man, he wears a raincoat. His raincoat, though in perfect condition, is also out of fashion. When he places his suitcase on his lap and presses down on the two little metal buttons, two corresponding metal tabs spring sharply back. If these were to hit his fingers, it would hurt. Possibly his suitcase is lined in red satin. I've tried standing next to him, pretending to examine the paperbacks on the fiction spinner, but he's too quick. I can never catch a glimpse inside, before he brings down the lid.
He sits very straight, and talks to himself, his bald scalp gleaming. I suspect he was born in Eastern Europeâin Prague or Budapest or Warsaw, though I can't tell from exactly which country he's trying to escape. His words rush, tripping over each other in their haste to be free. That the Soviet Union no longer exists changes nothing. Inside him the Soviet State is alive and well. Cruel and vigilant as ever, it carries on, squeezing his inner organs, puncturing
his most secret membranes. He waits his turn for the photocopier. The officials, the dry-mouthed party members who once benefitted from his services as a translator and academic, are now determined to steal his documents. He is arming himself with multiples.
He arrives at no particular hour. At the circulation desk he stops and bows, bending abruptly at the waist. While bowing, he stops talking to himself. Not one of us has ever seen him remove his raincoat.
He's a man of singular purpose. He never borrows books, CDs or DVDs, never surfs the net or nervously taps messages, hunching over the keyboard, as the others do, firing off electronic soliloquies, desperate e-mail requests for love or recognition. He comes with one purpose only: to make multiple copies of the documents riding in his suitcase.
At 2:20 this afternoon, the unusually pale female patron who suggested, a few days ago, that I deserved to be placed in a cage, walked briskly into the library. She was clothed in blue jogging shorts and a white tennis skirt, which she wore as if it were a Roman toga, the waistband slung confidently over her right shoulder. The crisp white pleats released themselves in a fan across her chest. We did not speak. She found what she wanted without my assistance. She left, almost skipping with delight. Sunlight fell through the windows in broad swaths. A man looked up from his book and smiled.
According to yesterday's schedule, Wednesday, April 1, 2009, between the hours of ten and eleven, I was to do the Holds Alert Report. It fell to me to locate on our shelves, and send off to the correct destinations, the items listed as having been requested by patrons in other branches scattered across the city.
I wheeled my metal cart around the library, and for every book, DVD, CD or video I successfully found and pulled from the shelf, for every item neither stolen nor misshelved, I inscribed a thick red check mark on the list. Red is not compulsory. In fact, any colour will do. Using a felt-tipped marker, however, feels more satisfying than pressing down with a hard thin pencil.
Curious combinations of desired books lined up on my cart as I proceeded from shelf to shelf:
The Mennonite Solid Food Cookbook, Semiotics for Dummies, The Official Guide for Identifying UFOs, Grease Girl: Advanced Auto Mechanics
and
How to Find and Keep Your Perfect Mate
âa slender, well-thumbed volume, written in point form.
I labelled each item and dropped it in the appropriate grey plastic shipping box behind the circulation desk.
At 11:20 this morning, a patron entered the library to report that a man outside, who was embracing a tree, appeared to be experiencing some distress.
By the time the ambulance arrived the man had lost hold of the tree and lay unconscious. He was lifted from the ground into the ambulance, which drove away without event.
When I was eighteen, someone broke my heart. Within the period of a week, without warning, the love in my breast became opaque and hardened into a substance resembling glass. A few well-placed blows, and my heart shattered. One of these blows was administered over the telephone. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I slammed down the receiver. I was still living with my parents. I rushed out the front door without stopping to pull on my coat or boots. The freezing air slapped my cheeks; it plunged down my throat into my unsuspecting lungs. My father, who happened to be clearing the front walk, tossed aside his shovel and ran after me across the lawn, his feet breaking the crust, sinking into the deep snow. When he'd caught up, he took me in his arms. I present this memory in my father's defence whenever I take him to trial, as I so often do, laying my fears and shyness, my crippling self-doubt, at his feet.
At 12:30 this afternoon, a female patron, grey-haired and well-dressed, entered the library, pushing a male patron, equally respectable, in his wheelchair. She took him right up to the shelves. He pointed to the books he wanted. She lifted down the volumes, filled the cloth sack that hung from the back of his chair, then wheeled both him and his selection over to the circulation desk.
There the man and woman switched places, the man getting out of his wheelchair. She sat down. He unloaded the sack of books, checked them out, packed them in again and wheeled her through the exit, seemingly without effort. As he pushed, she hummed a little tune of contentment.
My father was a man who whistled, who wove himself an armour of cheerful notes, and smiled and smiled. A large man whose presence felt solid, he greeted everyone with a gesture of outdated gallantry, tipping his hat, or, in the case of women, kissing a hand. He'd cock his genial, balding head as if listening, and ask how people felt about the weather or what they thought of a certain event mentioned on the news. While they answered he'd nod, or smooth his naked crown with his broad hand, and remark, “Well, well, now isn't that interesting,” or “How true indeed, I couldn't have put it better myself.” He spoke with a ponderous sincerity.