Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

We called the bunny that lived in the children’s room Kaspar, as in Kaspar Hauser, but the children who came to torment and visit it thought we meant the friendly ghost. That might have made sense had the rabbit been white, but it was dun-colored. It cowered in the corner of its cage while children stuck their fingers through the wire; they sang, Bunny, bunny, bunny rabbit; they cried when their mothers informed them it was time to go, they’d see Bunny next time. Bunny, we suspected, prayed nightly to become a ghost. It never got out, never saw sunlight; it was never given a carrot or a chance to hop; it indulged in no lapine pleasures at all. Mostly, it shook or slept, was careless about its hygiene. Mornings, it ripped its newsprint bedding in strips and drew them into its mouth in damp pleats, chewing and swallowing by inches. The children’s librarian said this was normal, but we thought the bunny was trying to overdose, using the materials nearby.

The six finches, on the other hand, seemed happy in their communal cage; and if the fish were unhappy, we couldn’t tell. Maybe they wept in the terrible privacy of their tank. The occasional dog would slip in through the exit, wanting to find its owner, and one woman brought her cat, left it crying like a baby in the vestibule while she returned a video. “I am in a hurry,” she told the circulation desk. “My cat is waiting for me.” Also, once, a man found a wounded bird outside the library and brought it to the reference desk for identification. When he opened his hand to indicate the peculiarities of its markings, the bird took a notion to live after all and flew to the highest corner of the balcony, up by the replica Parthenon frieze that girdled the reading room. The bird stayed there for days, setting off the motion detectors at night. It never got close enough to the reference desk to identify.

That was it for wildlife, unless you counted the children themselves, often wild: not the toddlers, who couldn’t bear to leave the bunny’s side, but the ten- and eleven-year-olds who threw books off the balcony or slung their skinny legs on the tables or slipped whatever they wished, like a bad joke, into the book drop. The book drop was a door set in the library façade that opened like an oven and dropped its contents into a closet in the circulation office. Snow in the winter, firecrackers in the summer, uncapped bottles of Coke year-round. One weekend, a passing man employed the book drop for a public urinal, and several books were destroyed. “Urine is sterile,” the head of circulation explained to her staff as she dropped a sodden Garfield Rounds Out into a wastebasket, but it was clear nobody believed this perfectly scientific fact, including her.

It was on this day, a Monday, that we first saw Juliet.

She was a young woman, late twenties we thought, with long, loose dark hair. Her clothes were white, and at first we thought she was in uniform, a nurse, perhaps — she had a sort of nursey look to her, sweet and determined and recently divorced. Or maybe she was from an unfamiliar order of nuns, because in our library we did get the occasional Sister. But it turned out she just wore white that day. Maybe she wasn’t wearing white, maybe we just remember that now because in the picture we saw so often, later, she wore white. At any rate, there was something forsaken and hopeful about her. She stood patiently at the front desk, waiting for assistance. In front of her, a man filled out an application for a card. On the line marked OCCUPATION, he filled in EMPLOYEE.

She clutched a book in her hand in such a way that it looked like a knife she was prepared to use on herself, which was one of the reasons we ended up calling her Juliet. That, and her habit of leaning on the rail of the balcony that ran around the reading room, looking up instead of down, into the cloudy green of the skylight. Her book had that pebbly leatherette navy-blue grain usually found on diaries and giveaway Bibles. Are you returning that? somebody asked her.

“No,” she said. “No. It’s mine. I just was never in here before, and I was wondering what you could tell me.”

The departments were pointed out to her — audiovisual this way, children’s the other, adult library upstairs. She was offered a brochure.

“May I get a card?”

Was she a resident of the town? Yes. Had she had a card with us before? No. Did she have proof of address and a photo ID?

“Not with me,” she said. “Next time, then. For now, I’ll just look around.”

We had regulars, of course, and they were demanding. People wanted not just books but attention and advice and, in the case of one widower, the occasional rear end to pat affectionately. We got teenagers who came daily to read or nap or use the Internet away from their parents; mothers and their toddlers and their tiny trails of cheese crackers. We had two transgendered patrons that we knew of, one now a radical lesbian who came in with her girlfriend and wore a T-shirt that said, BECAUSE I’M THE TOP, THAT’S WHY, who liked to gab and gossip; the other the shy and girlish and bangled Janice, whom we’d first known as Jonathan, winner three years in a row of the junior high science fair, under both names one of our most regular regulars. There was a woman with no eyebrows who never said a word and a pleasant, paranoid old lady who occasionally, sweetly, accused us of poisoning her. There were the screamers, mostly businessmen who believed they could threaten our jobs and could not understand why we humble city employees weren’t frightened. One blond man — his face as ruddy and pitted as a basketball — screamed, “Where’s the guy who wouldn’t let my son take out books?” The guy in question was outside, obliviously smoking a cigarette, and though the matter was resolved, clearly what the man really wanted was to punch someone.

The man’s son, who looked just like him, though with a beautiful complexion, hadn’t seemed at all disturbed or surprised by the delinquency of his library card. He was a quiet kid who had to lick his lips several times to get his mouth to work, and then he’d said only, “OK.” It turned out he’d been checking out books for his grandfather, anyhow; the clerk at the desk told his father the kid should just bring in his grandfather’s card.

We got asked for love advice and job applications, the whereabouts of relatives. “Did you see a girl?” a kid would ask, and the head of circulation would answer wearily, “I’ve seen lots of girls.” One man called because he wanted to know whether his daughter, whom he had not seen in five years, had a library card she’d used recently.

“I’d like to see her again,” he said when he was told library records were confidential. “I think maybe she tried to contact me a few years ago.”

When somebody like this called — for instance, the woman who wanted to know how to stop having bad thoughts — the circulation desk happily sent the person to reference, because, after all, it sounded like a job for a professional librarian.

Juliet surprised us, coming back every day, clean, starched. Usually, the people who showed up like that looked slightly worse every visit. She never did get that library card, but many of our most beloved patrons never did. She favored the children’s room. She became special friends with the children’s librarian, a young woman who said everything as if she were reading a story, as if the end of her sentence contained a wonderful surprise: a beggar revealed to be a lost prince, a talkative young bear no longer afraid of the dark. The children’s librarian had no friends at the library. She wore peasant skirts and thick-soled shoes and pendants on long black strings. Juliet smiled, listened to the librarian’s stories, consoled her the day the Harriet Tubman impersonator failed to show up for the Black History Month program. Once a week, they ate lunch together in the park in front of the building, at one of the concrete tables with an inlaid chessboard. Frequently, Juliet talked to the rabbit. The bunny eyed her with its usual unhappiness, another grubby pair of hands reaching into the cage. Human flesh gave our neurotic bunny the willies.