Read The Incident Report Online
Authors: Martha Baillie
The Incident Report (6 page)
When he'd hung up the receiver I'd rush in and ask to see the card. There it was, all written down, just as I'd expected:
Gertrude: age 11, braces on her teeth (upper only), flute (school band)
Cat: Siamese, age 7, named Alice (after Gertrude's paternal grandmother)
John: age 13, trombone (school band), hockey (goalie), feet (size 12)
A petite blonde woman approached the Reference Desk and asked me for books on pregnancy and childbirth. The time was 11:30
AM
. I offered to accompany her to the appropriate area (618) in adult nonfiction. Together we set out. In one hand she was carrying a tennis racket. With her free hand she reached under her T-shirt and scratched energetically at the skin above her navel. Her dishevelled hair hadn't been brushed in days and her running shoes had lost their laces.
“It's the RCMP,” she explained. “An implant. They've put one in my uterus. I didn't want them to. They can hear everything that goes on in there. They record it all.”
“Everything on this shelf,” I told her. “Any of these books will tell you about pregnancy and birth.”
She thanked me for my help, set her tennis racket on the floor, kneeled down and started looking along the shelf where I'd indicated, for the book that might answer her questions.
Though my father collected books, it was my mother who read to me. She sat under the bright light fixed to the wall at the foot of my bed. While I lay with my head on my pillow, she fed me
Peter Pan
, one chapter each night. When I'd devoured that, she served me
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Swallows and Amazons
and, later, a whole slew of Robert Louis Stephensonâ
Treasure Island, Kidnapped
and
The Master of Ballantray
.
When I first started working in the library, someone returned a copy of
Sleeping Beauty
. I recognized the cover. I opened the book. There, on the right-hand page, towered the very cake I'd hungered for repeatedly during the earliest years of my childhood, when my mother read to me not only at night but during the day as well. The two of us sat on the living room sofa, she holding the book wide open, allowing me to pour over the illustrations. The cake had so many elaborate layers that it tilted slightly. But it didn't fall. The cook and the servants and all the noble guests in their finery had collapsed into a deep, inescapable sleepâsome had fallen forward on the banquet table, and remained there, head on arms;
others, mouths open, had slumped to the floor; and all the while the enticing, incomparable cake refused to crumble, to yield to any spell. It waited, intact. One day it would be mine. One day I would pick off every candied fruit and run my finger through the smooth, buttery icing.
But one day became many days and I forgot the cake. For nearly thirty years I did not give it a thought, until without warning, the tilting layers and candied fruit reappeared on the page of a book returned to me across the circulation desk by a patron. Immense gratitude filled me, and I looked up to thank the patron, but she was gone.
Rigoletto's second message was not left on my book cart. The time was 2:08 when Nila found it on a table in the children's area. She brought it into the workroom and held it up for anyone who cared to see.
“Someone's been writing a weird story, and forgot a page in the kids' section. Either that, or a real nutter's been hanging around. There's no end to it, I tell you. And it's not exactly winter anymore; these batty ones could go outdoors. The sunshine might do them some good.”
I took the piece of paper from her.
        Â
What do you know about suffering? I am the father of the most beautiful daughter in the worldâthat is suffering. They blindfolded me and I held their ladder. Did I argue? No, of course not. I played the fool, stupid fucker that I am. I held it for them willingly. I believed it was a joke, a well-deserved joke that we were playing on the count of Ceprano, a despicable man. We were kidnapping Ceprano's wife, that's what they told me. We'd deliver
her to the Duke whose ravenous appetite for women no amount of feeding could satisfy.
              Â
You don't want to imagine that a hunchbacked fool can suffer, do you? It was my own daughter we kidnapped. While I, blindfolded, held the ladder, they climbed in the window of my house. They took my daughter to the Duke for him to do with as he pleased. No. You cannot comprehend my suffering. All these men who come to her with their questionsâI watch them closely. They won't blindfold me again, no fucking way. No harm will come to her. I will see that no harm comes to my Gilda. I will allow nobody to cause her more pain.
I made my way quickly to the children's area. Five children sat on the floor, playing contentedly with board books, while their mothers stood talking among themselves. I walked back to the Reference Desk. Of the patrons using the public computers across from the desk, six were regulars, two were not. I wanted to shout, “Which of you is Rigoletto? Show yourself.”
I decided that none of them was Rigoletto, that having left his note he'd gone off in a hurry. But perhaps I was wrong and he'd lingered, eager to witness and to savour my reactions? Quite possibly he was present, and observing my discomfiture? No, that couldn't be. I did not feel watched.
“I am not your daughter,” I insisted silently, inside my head. “I don't want your protection. My hands are my own.”
I sat facing Irene in her small office off the work-room.
“These two notes,” she inquired, “they're the only two you've found so far?”
“Yes.”
She picked up her pen then put it down again. Her hands were oddly soft, seemingly boneless, the opposite of the rest of her. She wore her grey hair short as a man's, and held herself very straight. She walked with a limp, the legacy of her childhood tumble through the air.
“Do you think the notes are a joke?” she asked.
“No. Not a joke.”
“Do you feel unsafe, coming to work?”
“No, not unsafe. Not so far.”
“I'd like you to make two copies of each note, if you don't mind. One set I'll keep on file, the other I'll pass along to Patricia Cheung, our District Manager. Does that sound all right to you?”
“Yes. I'll make the copies,” I promised.
“Thank you.”
She took out a packet of chewing gum and offered me a piece.
“No thanks.”
“I'm trying to quit smoking,” she explained.
The
Rigoletto
notes lay on her desk between us. I felt exposed, as if the notes, by their very existence, reflected upon me.
Again Irene picked up her pencil.
“When I was growing up, my father carried a transistor radio with him from room to room,” she remarked. “Wherever he went in the house it accompanied him, and when I tried to speak with him he cranked up the volume or switched channels, so that we were both engulfed in crackling static.” She'd started doodling on the corner of an envelope. Abruptly she stopped, and, looking up, said with a smile, “Well? Nothing to worry about for now, it seems. Don't you agree? You'll let me know if you find any more notes?” Her brisk tone suggested that our meeting was over.
“I'll let you know,” I agreed. “Thank you.”
I returned to my desk, slipped the
Rigoletto
notes into the bottom drawer, shut my eyes and heard the static of a radio.
My father, the youngest of four sons, was inhabited by a passionate admiration of his motherâa devotion his older brothers freely outgrew or never experienced at all.
My grandfather sent a postcard, without fail, to
his
mother, each and every day of his adult life until her death.
Nila came up behind me while I was photocopying the
Rigoletto
notes.
“And what are you up to?” she asked, peering over my shoulder, submerging me in her dizzying perfume.
I tried to not answer, but she stepped around in front of me, and her look said: “Go ahead, offend me. I always knew you didn't like me. Think you're better than the rest of us, do you? But I'll find out anyhow.”
I started to speak and a story spilled out of meâsomething about an opera and freckled hands.
He was a missionary, a Catholic Father who had travelled extensively, he explained. In no other country had he seen poverty so dire, so indescribable, as in Haiti.
“They have only bananas, and not enough of these. If there were some way they might cook the skin of the banana to make it as palatable as the flesh of the fruit, this would go a long way to relieving their hunger. If I could bring them such a recipe on my next trip, they would welcome me with open arms.”
I searched for “banana” Web sites. After some ten minutes I came upon a recipe for fried banana skins and was about to print it out for the patron in question when another site caught my attention. A museum in Texas claimed to possess Michael Jackson's “jewelled banana.” As proof, the museum provided a small image of a silver sculpture of a banana, encrusted in what appeared to be diamonds, emeralds and rubies.
At precisely 11:00
AM
this morning, when the library was not yet full of urgency, John B., a regular, sat down and looked at me through his watery blue eyes. His long stiff legs stuck out in front of him. His bony hands rested on the Reference Desk. He asked that I locate the Web site of a small publishing house, Raccoon Jaw Press, and write down their address for him. I did so. He explained that the press was on the brink of publishing a collection of his poems.
“Very soon, my book will be out. I'll bring you a copy.”
I thanked him and handed him the address, the same address I'd copied out for him the week before and the week before that. Once a week he requested this address.
“I knew I could count on you,” he declared. He spread out his fingers, as if smoothing the surface of the desk between us.
“I'm glad,” I told him, and smiled.
“My father,” he stated, “my father was a man who read lots of books. He was a good man, as good a man as ever walked the face of this earth, and now he's dead.”
The paper in his hands trembled, and John B. started to weep. Tears filled his large blue eyes, which were always rather wet in any case, and through his tears he caught my gaze and held on. He appeared to be asking me to relieve him of his grief. I offered him a Kleenex. He dried his eyes and the rest of his face, including his forehead and chin.
His face dry, he pulled himself out of the chair, crushing in his large hand as he pressed down on the chair's arm the folded scrap of paper bearing the address of Raccoon Jaw Press. He walked out of the library. His profuse thanks remained behind, suspended, trembling in the air.
I left the desk and went out the back door of the library into the alley where I stood with my eyes closed and concentrated on the task of filling and emptying my lungs until the word “father” shrank, freeing the universe from its grip.
The morning passed quickly. According to the schedule it was lunchtime. I walked to Allan Gardens. I ate my sandwich then opened the book I'd brought with me. The young man with the calm oval face, whom I'd noticed on previous visits, closed his book, got up from his bench and walked along the path to where I sat.
“I am Janko,” he said, “and you?”
“Miriam.”
“I've seen you in the library.”
“I work there.”
“Yes, I know. May I sit down?”
“Yes, of course.”
We sat together and watched the people lying on their sides on the clipped grass, and the dogs trying to wander but held back, attached to their masters by various leashes. Janko turned to me. He smiled, as if we'd sat together on some other bench, long ago, which we'd forgotten and were about to remember.
If someone had asked me, I would have told them I was immune and that I could not fall in love, that I'd done so once before and did not wish to repeat the experience. If someone had asked, I would have said
I was not the sort of person who recovered. I continued but did not recover. I did not want to recover. If someone had asked, I would have said that the way my father chose to end his life had made it impossible for me ever to fall in love again.
The tip of Janko's tongue appeared and wet his lower lip. It was a form of hesitation.
“And you, where do you work?” I asked.
“I drive a taxi.”
He was holding the same rather battered book as the last time I'd seen himâa square brown book, missing its jacket.
“What are you reading?”
“
Kekec
.”