The Library Anniversaire Collection (Last Section)
Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2014 8:43 am
Here by Sea's kind request and permission, and Comrade's benediction, is the last part of the Library Anniversaire Collection.
Part 4, from brythain with love…
=====
The Library: States of Meta
I’m at work in the library when it happens. The lights flicker. Things suddenly become different. I hear a ringing sound in my ears.
“Ah, um… help?” I whisper, confused and slightly terrified. Cautiously, I look over the counter from my crouching position.
Everything’s changed! What are all these books? I’m quite sure there weren’t these many uncatalogued… wait, here’s a catalogue I’ve never seen before. ‘The Yamaku Library’, says the title on its cover.
Aaaaaah! I must’ve hit my head again! Things are spinning around me! Ohhh…
Another day in the life of Yuuko Shirakawa, school librarian, I think miserably to myself… and then there’s darkness.
*****
“Kenji! Open up!”
A male voice. Those damn cryptofeminists, I swear… wait, that one sounds like my neighbour. But I smell female smells. Damn, did one get in here? No? There must be a goddamn swarm of them outside. And all in heat. How horrifying!
“The library! Something’s happened!”
“K-Kenji didn’t do it. I’m quite sure he likes b-books as much as I do.”
Argh! It’s the toilet ghost girl!
“Hey Setou-san, if you don’t come out, Shicchan says she’s coming in to get you, and she’ll sit on your face until you come! Wahahahaha!~ oops, what do you mean, that sounds gross, Hicchan? Awww, you think you can translate better?”
I can hear the first one pouting through the door, but I can also imagine the other one in thigh-high boots… decisions, decisions! And that –is- my neighbour with them.
“Dear Kenji, this is your class representative. Please emerge from your room? We have matters of great concern which perhaps only you can address.”
“Shicchan says her cousin is being too polite, but yeah! Only someone as… Shicchan! You can’t expect me to say that out loud!”
*****
“It looks different. The light is all wrong. Maybe the library’s turned into a Library the way my mural turned into a Mural. I can feel it in my toes. It would probably tingle my fingers. Except that I don’t have any because I don’t have hands, and that’s because I don’t have wrists, and that…”
“Rin! Honestly, that’s as bad as me singing ‘the foot-bone is connected to the ankle-bone’! I never had much to do with the library, but now it’s… growing bigger! It’s eaten Saki and the art room, that’s serious! They’ve disappeared, and so has the track!”
“Well fuck me blind, kids.”
“Oh, hello, Miki.”
“Shit, Emi, you’ll just have to be the fastest thing on no track, then, right? I hope when things get back to normal, Math will have gone for good. Maybe the library will eat all the classrooms, ha!”
*****
“This is Natsume Ooe, reporting from the Yamaku Academy in Sendai, Japan. As of 8 am this morning, local time, a strange phenomenon has manifested in the central academic block of the school on Mount Aoba. Local experts have characterized it as a pseudo-singularity or warping of space-time. We bring you live to Yamaku, where Naomi Inoue is interviewing one such expert. Naomi?”
“Natsume. I have with me here Akio Mutou, renowned author of ‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Sendai’ and other works. Mr Mutou is senior science teacher at the Academy, and has agreed to answer a few questions…”
Durrmm… dummm… dham!
“Something’s happened, Nat.”
*****
I knew that waking up today was a bad idea the moment just after I realized I was dreaming of my ex-wife. Because in that moment, I had multiple visions of who that ex-wife was, and indeed, whether I had ever had a wife or not.
And in the moment after that, my wife (presumably) rolled over sleepily and thwacked me in the face with her unreasonably long braid.
Now I’m here being interviewed by a Newspaper Club that seems to have turned into the Asahi Shimbun Lite. I just want to get to the library. The local geometry seems considerably deviant. Just look at this… forgetting the interview, I get to my feet, gently move past Kawana and her camera, Inoue and her microphone.
There’s something odd about that door. It seems to have turned completely black. Hmm. It has a 9:4 height-width ratio, how odd. Oh. Oh gods. It’s… full of stars.
*****
The snowflakes silently falling from the white-painted sky are the only sign of time passing in this stagnant world.
Feeling nervous and with this realization set in my head, I open the front door.
“Do you want to introduce yourself to the class?”
At any one of these points, the universe could already have changed, I think. What if it were Iwanako, and not me? What if, oh, my poor dear Shizune… wait, that’s not right. And yet it is. Lilly? Hanako? Emi? Rin? What’s going on?
“When the world wants to know how it works, we tell it. Even if all we've got is a decent hypothesis.” That’s what he said. So I take a deep breath, and…
I look at him, my mentor on the other side of what seems to be a console column. But it’s labeled ‘moderator control panel’. I have no idea what that means. Something is silently cooking, and there’s a strange aura in the background that might answer my questions.
“We know a lot, sure, but nobody's an expert on how the world works, if only because nobody can be sure. With no certainty, there are no experts.”
Time slows down, to a crawl. Maybe a walking pace, if not a crawl. Crawling like a crab. You could call it a ‘carapace’. Oh no, any longer, and I’ll be…
“There's a lot of stuff out there that makes no sense, comrade. Your job is to get it to make sense.”
*****
It’s Lils’s science teacher who gets the door open, after all. He’s a scruffy-looking but somehow familiar person… wait, how do I know him so well?
Dammit, I know I shouldn’t have drunk so much last night. Must’ve passed out in Hanako’s dorm room, how embarrassing! And here I am, stumbling around in the school in someone else’s flannel nightgown because I can’t find my clothes—I mean, can you imagine me, Akira Satou, dressed in anything but a business suit? Gah.
But maybe it’s not him who has got the door open. It’s the door that lets us in. It’s… huge. What’s happening?
Whoa, that’s me, in a beautiful black dress. Damn, it’s all I’m wearing, I can tell there’s nothing under it. How… embarrassing. What a turn-on. Hey, where did that thought come from? Oh, look, it’s Hanako…
*****
W-what’s happening to my precious library? Where are all the sections? Yuuko? I’ll never find anything this way, it’s like a mirage.
This is s-strange. These are stories about… m-me. Hanako’s story. Hanako’s tale. Hanako’s arc. Hisao x Hanako… h-how strange, how terrible, how sweet… no! Rejection, acceptance, premature death, children, what am I doing as a…. t-taxi driver?
I love my library! How could it do all this to me?! I want the old library back, and my books, and… No, I won’t give up. I must be brave. I’ll explore this new library and read everything in it. Eh? What a sweet little boy… but why’s he dressed like that?
*****
Interesting. Little did I expect that by turning a knob while escaping from my infuriated father, who was wielding his katana with intent to kill, I would have ended up in what seemed to be an old curiosity shop and is now a… library.
Moreover, it appears to be one in which the books are about… whatever they’re about. I shall attempt a visual catalogue, since nobody has bothered to alphabetize them or apply a logical order such as the Dewey Decimal System.
Hmm. ‘Mean Time to Breakdown’ — apparently an incomplete sequence in which Hisao Nakai abandons his girlfriend to a life of eternal suffering. ‘Developments’ — ah, my sister mucking around with other people’s lives as usual, although… hmm. No, this thing is at least fifty volumes long and it’s about other people as well. Goodness, my cousin. Such dithering. Wait, this one is about me… getting married?!
Hypothesis: self-referential pocket universe? Worth investigating.
*****
It’s a blessing I don’t talk. Then I don’t act so much like an idiot. Otherwise, I would. Look at this. While the rest wander around gawking—except for Hanako, who’s curled up in her beanbag sobbing with happiness or grief, I’m not sure—only I have the initiative to start taking notes.
And Hisao of course. Except that he and Mutou-sensei are now having a heart-to-heart talk with… Kenji? It boggles the mind. Almost as weird as seeing Rin and Emi in this place—they never come here! Is that cousin Akira?
I grab hold of Misha just in time to save her from reading yet another of those one-word-title pieces that make her fall apart. Surely not all these stories are about us? The horrible thing is that when they’re about me, I can imagine having lived such a life. Or died such a death.
All kinds of relationships. All kinds of sex. Am I really like that? Am I such a bitch? I look at what they say about Saki, and Suzu, and I shudder.
But it’s not all about me, I realize. My over-tall other cousin is standing there shuddering as she runs her fingers across pages of Braille text. Then she comes to what appears to be a metal plate with stars and clouds on it, and she bows her head in grief and begins to weep.
I wonder why. And then another book leaps into my hands, and I know. Oh, Hisao, you fool.
*****
It’s been a year now, as we pick through the convoluted architecture, ascending and descending. There’s a sense that we don’t belong, that we’re only guests. But we’re sharing the space with what appears to be a large number of iterations of people we’ve come to love. They’re real, and in the darker corners, lethal.
Sure, there are moderating influences. But after having seen a few gory deaths and sanity-destroying events, I wouldn’t count on them for total protection. We’re like sailors in an uncharted sea.
This is the Yamaku Library, and it is far greater than the sum of its parts. You can enjoy the silence, that is clearer than words; you can sit by a dying fire and look behind the scars; you can watch master detectives searching for a certain someone; you can enjoy starbursts and fireworks, manly tea parties and sisterhood. You will find blame and butterflies, dreams and depression, iron or titanium. It may take five years or ten; a weekend or a lifetime; 2400 words or 240,000. You might want a nail, or scent a blossom. Tomorrow may be doomed, but in the end, you can find closure.
Because in the end, it’s all about life. Little slices, beautiful moments, vast spans or delicate touches. There have always been libraries, worlds within worlds. This one is ours, for however long it lasts.
=====
not the end
Part 4, from brythain with love…
=====
The Library: States of Meta
I’m at work in the library when it happens. The lights flicker. Things suddenly become different. I hear a ringing sound in my ears.
“Ah, um… help?” I whisper, confused and slightly terrified. Cautiously, I look over the counter from my crouching position.
Everything’s changed! What are all these books? I’m quite sure there weren’t these many uncatalogued… wait, here’s a catalogue I’ve never seen before. ‘The Yamaku Library’, says the title on its cover.
Aaaaaah! I must’ve hit my head again! Things are spinning around me! Ohhh…
Another day in the life of Yuuko Shirakawa, school librarian, I think miserably to myself… and then there’s darkness.
*****
“Kenji! Open up!”
A male voice. Those damn cryptofeminists, I swear… wait, that one sounds like my neighbour. But I smell female smells. Damn, did one get in here? No? There must be a goddamn swarm of them outside. And all in heat. How horrifying!
“The library! Something’s happened!”
“K-Kenji didn’t do it. I’m quite sure he likes b-books as much as I do.”
Argh! It’s the toilet ghost girl!
“Hey Setou-san, if you don’t come out, Shicchan says she’s coming in to get you, and she’ll sit on your face until you come! Wahahahaha!~ oops, what do you mean, that sounds gross, Hicchan? Awww, you think you can translate better?”
I can hear the first one pouting through the door, but I can also imagine the other one in thigh-high boots… decisions, decisions! And that –is- my neighbour with them.
“Dear Kenji, this is your class representative. Please emerge from your room? We have matters of great concern which perhaps only you can address.”
“Shicchan says her cousin is being too polite, but yeah! Only someone as… Shicchan! You can’t expect me to say that out loud!”
*****
“It looks different. The light is all wrong. Maybe the library’s turned into a Library the way my mural turned into a Mural. I can feel it in my toes. It would probably tingle my fingers. Except that I don’t have any because I don’t have hands, and that’s because I don’t have wrists, and that…”
“Rin! Honestly, that’s as bad as me singing ‘the foot-bone is connected to the ankle-bone’! I never had much to do with the library, but now it’s… growing bigger! It’s eaten Saki and the art room, that’s serious! They’ve disappeared, and so has the track!”
“Well fuck me blind, kids.”
“Oh, hello, Miki.”
“Shit, Emi, you’ll just have to be the fastest thing on no track, then, right? I hope when things get back to normal, Math will have gone for good. Maybe the library will eat all the classrooms, ha!”
*****
“This is Natsume Ooe, reporting from the Yamaku Academy in Sendai, Japan. As of 8 am this morning, local time, a strange phenomenon has manifested in the central academic block of the school on Mount Aoba. Local experts have characterized it as a pseudo-singularity or warping of space-time. We bring you live to Yamaku, where Naomi Inoue is interviewing one such expert. Naomi?”
“Natsume. I have with me here Akio Mutou, renowned author of ‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Sendai’ and other works. Mr Mutou is senior science teacher at the Academy, and has agreed to answer a few questions…”
Durrmm… dummm… dham!
“Something’s happened, Nat.”
*****
I knew that waking up today was a bad idea the moment just after I realized I was dreaming of my ex-wife. Because in that moment, I had multiple visions of who that ex-wife was, and indeed, whether I had ever had a wife or not.
And in the moment after that, my wife (presumably) rolled over sleepily and thwacked me in the face with her unreasonably long braid.
Now I’m here being interviewed by a Newspaper Club that seems to have turned into the Asahi Shimbun Lite. I just want to get to the library. The local geometry seems considerably deviant. Just look at this… forgetting the interview, I get to my feet, gently move past Kawana and her camera, Inoue and her microphone.
There’s something odd about that door. It seems to have turned completely black. Hmm. It has a 9:4 height-width ratio, how odd. Oh. Oh gods. It’s… full of stars.
*****
The snowflakes silently falling from the white-painted sky are the only sign of time passing in this stagnant world.
Feeling nervous and with this realization set in my head, I open the front door.
“Do you want to introduce yourself to the class?”
At any one of these points, the universe could already have changed, I think. What if it were Iwanako, and not me? What if, oh, my poor dear Shizune… wait, that’s not right. And yet it is. Lilly? Hanako? Emi? Rin? What’s going on?
“When the world wants to know how it works, we tell it. Even if all we've got is a decent hypothesis.” That’s what he said. So I take a deep breath, and…
I look at him, my mentor on the other side of what seems to be a console column. But it’s labeled ‘moderator control panel’. I have no idea what that means. Something is silently cooking, and there’s a strange aura in the background that might answer my questions.
“We know a lot, sure, but nobody's an expert on how the world works, if only because nobody can be sure. With no certainty, there are no experts.”
Time slows down, to a crawl. Maybe a walking pace, if not a crawl. Crawling like a crab. You could call it a ‘carapace’. Oh no, any longer, and I’ll be…
“There's a lot of stuff out there that makes no sense, comrade. Your job is to get it to make sense.”
*****
It’s Lils’s science teacher who gets the door open, after all. He’s a scruffy-looking but somehow familiar person… wait, how do I know him so well?
Dammit, I know I shouldn’t have drunk so much last night. Must’ve passed out in Hanako’s dorm room, how embarrassing! And here I am, stumbling around in the school in someone else’s flannel nightgown because I can’t find my clothes—I mean, can you imagine me, Akira Satou, dressed in anything but a business suit? Gah.
But maybe it’s not him who has got the door open. It’s the door that lets us in. It’s… huge. What’s happening?
Whoa, that’s me, in a beautiful black dress. Damn, it’s all I’m wearing, I can tell there’s nothing under it. How… embarrassing. What a turn-on. Hey, where did that thought come from? Oh, look, it’s Hanako…
*****
W-what’s happening to my precious library? Where are all the sections? Yuuko? I’ll never find anything this way, it’s like a mirage.
This is s-strange. These are stories about… m-me. Hanako’s story. Hanako’s tale. Hanako’s arc. Hisao x Hanako… h-how strange, how terrible, how sweet… no! Rejection, acceptance, premature death, children, what am I doing as a…. t-taxi driver?
I love my library! How could it do all this to me?! I want the old library back, and my books, and… No, I won’t give up. I must be brave. I’ll explore this new library and read everything in it. Eh? What a sweet little boy… but why’s he dressed like that?
*****
Interesting. Little did I expect that by turning a knob while escaping from my infuriated father, who was wielding his katana with intent to kill, I would have ended up in what seemed to be an old curiosity shop and is now a… library.
Moreover, it appears to be one in which the books are about… whatever they’re about. I shall attempt a visual catalogue, since nobody has bothered to alphabetize them or apply a logical order such as the Dewey Decimal System.
Hmm. ‘Mean Time to Breakdown’ — apparently an incomplete sequence in which Hisao Nakai abandons his girlfriend to a life of eternal suffering. ‘Developments’ — ah, my sister mucking around with other people’s lives as usual, although… hmm. No, this thing is at least fifty volumes long and it’s about other people as well. Goodness, my cousin. Such dithering. Wait, this one is about me… getting married?!
Hypothesis: self-referential pocket universe? Worth investigating.
*****
It’s a blessing I don’t talk. Then I don’t act so much like an idiot. Otherwise, I would. Look at this. While the rest wander around gawking—except for Hanako, who’s curled up in her beanbag sobbing with happiness or grief, I’m not sure—only I have the initiative to start taking notes.
And Hisao of course. Except that he and Mutou-sensei are now having a heart-to-heart talk with… Kenji? It boggles the mind. Almost as weird as seeing Rin and Emi in this place—they never come here! Is that cousin Akira?
I grab hold of Misha just in time to save her from reading yet another of those one-word-title pieces that make her fall apart. Surely not all these stories are about us? The horrible thing is that when they’re about me, I can imagine having lived such a life. Or died such a death.
All kinds of relationships. All kinds of sex. Am I really like that? Am I such a bitch? I look at what they say about Saki, and Suzu, and I shudder.
But it’s not all about me, I realize. My over-tall other cousin is standing there shuddering as she runs her fingers across pages of Braille text. Then she comes to what appears to be a metal plate with stars and clouds on it, and she bows her head in grief and begins to weep.
I wonder why. And then another book leaps into my hands, and I know. Oh, Hisao, you fool.
*****
It’s been a year now, as we pick through the convoluted architecture, ascending and descending. There’s a sense that we don’t belong, that we’re only guests. But we’re sharing the space with what appears to be a large number of iterations of people we’ve come to love. They’re real, and in the darker corners, lethal.
Sure, there are moderating influences. But after having seen a few gory deaths and sanity-destroying events, I wouldn’t count on them for total protection. We’re like sailors in an uncharted sea.
This is the Yamaku Library, and it is far greater than the sum of its parts. You can enjoy the silence, that is clearer than words; you can sit by a dying fire and look behind the scars; you can watch master detectives searching for a certain someone; you can enjoy starbursts and fireworks, manly tea parties and sisterhood. You will find blame and butterflies, dreams and depression, iron or titanium. It may take five years or ten; a weekend or a lifetime; 2400 words or 240,000. You might want a nail, or scent a blossom. Tomorrow may be doomed, but in the end, you can find closure.
Because in the end, it’s all about life. Little slices, beautiful moments, vast spans or delicate touches. There have always been libraries, worlds within worlds. This one is ours, for however long it lasts.
=====
not the end
