Working at the northern branch now, in the suburbs, she says little all day. She rarely looks up from checking in books. She knows all she would see is housewives and retirees anyway. Working in the city, at least – now nearly a decade ago – there had been the homeless to look out for, sink-bathing in the restroom, head down on a table trying to get some sleep in out of the cold. Not here. For an hour or two in the afternoon, she will look up occasionally at middle schoolers working on a group project, lift a languid finger to her lips.
Shhh, she says, goes back to the woman returning the latest Grisham or Patterson novel, watches patiently as she fishes a few dimes from the bottom of her purse.
She no longer dreams of a dream lover walking in, asking after Neruda or Garcia Marquez in the Spanish (she’s nearly fluent, herself). Instead, she will borrow Henry Miller or Anais Nin for the night.
Sometimes she can’t even wait to get home, she’ll flip to the right pages at a traffic light. Once, she even pulled over to the side of the road, sat there in a perfect sweat, breathing heavy until she could refocus to concentrate on her drive.
No one suspects that every night she dreams the world, floating through the cosmos on a million and one tiny hands. And in the morning, she rises at 4:30, for an hour or two dreams into existence the pages of a Russian novel, then drives to work in silence, no radio, only the sounds of her wheels giving shape to the road – and when she opens the darkened library (she’s always the first to arrive), she reaches out her hand without looking, without having to feel around, flips the switches that will illuminate the aisles of books, says: Let there be light.