Page 111 of The Librarians
No collector would pack such a valuable reserve into a cardboard box with a bunch of titles by the Real Housewives and dump the whole thing on the library.
Unless…has Sophie found the box of books Hazel’s late husband brought in shortly before he died?
The library
Tuesday Night
Next to the meeting room is a perennially closed door that hardly anyone notices. Behind it rises a flight of narrow metal steps clad in bluethermoplastic. The steps lead up to a hidden gallery overlooking the circulation area, which serves as access to ducts and machinery essential for the smooth running of the building.
In the darkness inside the gallery, Hazel sits on a folded blanket, her back against a wall. The air is slightly stale up here, stale and warm. She racks the Glock in her hand.
A similarly deadly sound issues from two feet away.
After saying good night to Sophie and Astrid, Hazel left Astrid’s condo and reached the library twenty minutes ago. She went into the storage room via the Den of Calories, then out from the storage room’s back door into the bathroom corridor. Conrad was already there at the corridor’s other end, holding open the door to the hidden gallery.
Hazel has sent the agreed-upon texts to Astrid. And now Astrid, seated with her back to the camera, will give Sophie the signal and Sophie will press a button on a small device hidden from view. A pre-produced audio will play and it should sound, to those listening on the other end, as if Astrid and Sophie are on a prolonged call to Hazel, who is looking for El Dorado in the storage room.
The same recording is also playing in the storage room, in case their quarry somehow makes it past all the perimeters without alerting anyone and is at this very moment standing outside the storage room, listening.
But those ambient sounds with bits of conversation spliced in cannot be heard in the hidden gallery, its door shut tight. All Hazel can make out is the occasional low hum of the HVAC and the inevitable pops and creaks of a building cooling and contracting at night.
“No movement in the parking lot,” comes Jonathan’s voice in her ear. “Everything normal so far.”
“Same here,” answers Conrad.
A part of Hazel would feel wretched if after this whole song-and-dance they net nothing. But the other part of her—ninety-nine percent and rising—deeply regrets ever choosing to be more involved than absolutely necessary.
“You okay?” murmurs Conrad.
Their recent conversations all seem to start with this question from him. Hazel exhales and checks the safety on her firearm. “I feel like a damsel indistress in an action movie. Like it’s the Terminator out there or something.”
“Watch your example, Ms. Lee,” admonishes the shadowy silhouette that is her dream lover. “Those movies were before my time, but I’m pretty sure the poor human protector from the firstTerminatorbites the dust.”
She would laugh if her viscera weren’t compressed to the density of white dwarfs. “What if I compare you to Jason Bourne?”
“Even worse,” he retorts softly. “All Jason Bourne gets for his trouble is his girlfriend shot dead in a tropical paradise.”
Well, shit. “Is there a good action movie that ends happily for everyone involved?”
He is silent for a few seconds. “Everything Everywhere All at Once?”
Hazel remembers the movie primarily as the struggle of an immigrant family coming to grips with the everyday trauma and alienation that had come to define them, but there were indeed action sequences—some with dildos and butt plugs, no less.
Not to mention an extravagant, expansive multiverse.
If the multiverse truly exists, there must be at least a few realities in which she never tore up Conrad’s number. In those realities, did they meet in Charleston, South Carolina, two giddy young people caught off guard by love? Did she, groupie-like, follow him along the coast of South America, stealing a few hours every time his ship dropped anchor? And did she dip into the funds her maternal grandmother set aside for her, which she was not supposed to ever touch, to buy her way onto his ship, so that they could sit under starry skies together, as thePelagioshurtled ever toward the next horizon?
As if he heard her thoughts, he says, “After my father’s funeral, I changed my phone number.”
Her heart stops beating. The sound of her sharply indrawn breath bounces off the too-close walls. So he had given her up, just as she had given him up.
“I wasn’t in a good place—and didn’t believe I ever would be.” His words are slow and heavy, as if they are underwater wrecks that must be brought up with great care, lest they trap the diver or give him decompressionsickness. “All throughout my second contract on the ship and even during military service afterward, I believed I was right to cut you off, to spare you the person I became.”
People will try. They don’t want to accept that pain is simply a part of life; they still think, after thirty, sixty, or even ninety years on this earth, that something can be done, if not for themselves, then for those they love.
The old pain returns. Not like a knife, but like a fog. A fog of obliterating vapors, the sensation that she will be lost no matter which direction she chooses.
“But for some reason, I never gave up on running into you again—you would not believe the number of botanical gardens I visited. You would not believe how many botanical gardens there are under the sun. Except I always thought that I wouldn’t say hi when I eventually saw you. I would simply watch you go by, husband and children in tow, and that would have to be good enough.”
