Eat your dinner, his father says gently. Before it gets cold.
He knows then: even if he asks, his father won’t track down this book. He’ll have to find another way.
* * *
? ? ?
It is difficult to sneak into the university library; it always has been. There are old books in there, valuable books. A Gutenberg Bible and a first folio of Shakespeare, Bird’s father told him once, though Bird has only a hazy idea what this means. Countless irreplaceable old documents. Even—his father wriggled his fingers creepily in the air—an anatomy book bound in human skin. He had just transferred over—linguistics professor to book shelver—and Bird, age nine and newly cynical, had decided all of this was an attempt to make his job sound more impressive, and had ignored it.
What he does know is that he needs a keycard to enter the building, huge and impressive, a marble paperweight pinning down one end of the college yard—and even then, only staff are permitted to pass further into the warm labyrinth of shelves where all the books are kept. But when he was younger, on days off school, he’d trotted along after his father into the reshelving room, where carts of books sat waiting to be set back in place. You can help, his father had suggested, and once or twice Bird had, pushing the cart through the narrow aisles until they found the right one, pressing the antique switch in the corridor to flick on the lights. While his father scanned the shelves, sliding the books one by one into the gaps from which they’d come, Bird ran his fingertips over the embossed spines where gilt lettering had long been rubbed away, breathing in the peculiar smell of the library: a mix of dust and leather and melted vanilla ice cream. Warm, like the scent of someone’s skin.
It soothed him and unsettled him at the same time, the murky hush like a wool blanket thrown over everything. Underneath, something large lying in wait. It never ended, the stacks of books needing to be set back in place, the constant insistent reiteration of order, and the thought was dizzying: that just beyond this shelf there were hundreds more, thousands of books, millions of words. Sometimes after his father had nestled one book into its spot, lining up the spines, Bird had the impulse to sweep the whole rack clear with one arm, to send the whole shelf dominoing into the next and the next and the next, to shred the smothering silence. It frightened him, and he made excuses for not coming into the stacks. He was tired, he would rather sit in the staff room and have a snack, he would rather stay home and play.
He hasn’t come to the library in years; the last time, he was ten.
That evening, while his father is brushing his teeth, Bird rifles through his briefcase. His father is a creature of habit; after he comes back to the apartment he always stores his keycard in the outside pocket of his bag, ready for the next day. Bird slips the card into his back pocket and zips the bag shut again. His father never checks for it in the morning: for the past three years it’s been right there when he arrives at work, exactly where he put it the night before. Tomorrow, just this once, it won’t be. But the security guard knows him, has seen him every day for years, will let him in for the day, just this one time. Tomorrow evening, when Bird’s father arrives home and does a thorough search for the keycard, he’ll find it right there on the floor beneath the table, right where his briefcase always sits. Must have slipped it next to the bag rather than into it, he’ll think, and that will be that.
* * *
? ? ?
At first the plan works perfectly. After school, Bird heads to the college yard, climbs the huge mountain of stairs to the library’s front entrance. In the lobby, he copies the impatient and vaguely annoyed look the students always wear and swipes his father’s card quickly through the reader. The turnstile turns green and he passes through without stopping and without looking back. As if he has somewhere to be, on the trail of important knowledge. The security guard doesn’t even glance up from his monitor.
The next problem: how to get into the stacks. Long ago, his father told him, they’d been open to anyone. You could go in and wander, exploring whatever came your way. Now they don’t let just anyone in. Now you have to fill out a slip of paper at the counter, explain why you need the book, show your ID. And if your reason is good enough—a treatise on the failures that led to the Crisis, perhaps, or new strategies for detecting internal enemies—someone, like his father, will venture into the stacks and retrieve it for you. He doesn’t say what changed, but Bird understands: it is PACT, of course, that changed everything. That deemed some books dangerous, to be kept only if they were kept out of reach.