Loafers
Flash Fiction
Hearing a voice, Tyrone craned his neck cautiously around the end of the tall, metal bookshelf. The talkers continued past the other end of the row, deeper into the subterranean stacks of the Columbia Library. Tyrone leaned back, refocused his eyes in the dim light on the book in his hands: “The English Monarchy: A History.” He gently turned a page, fearing the ancient manuscript might crumble in his fingers.
These weren’t published works by famous or infamous, like so many other areas of the library stacks. This wasn’t the rare-book section. Everyone believed that all the famous rare finds were upstairs, guarded, ruled over by the head librarian. No, here in the Columbia Library many secret floors of books exist and only those with keys and permissions can visit. But, this manuscript, ancient as it was, wasn’t of any real value. No, not at all.
The talkers were headed back toward him and he held his breath, hoping not to be noticed, to fade into the shadows with the blue-bound book in his lap.
This was his refuge, Floor Eleven. Down eleven, not up. The smell of moldering pages and ink fading and lifting from thick pages, from onion skin, from, as was the case here, a velum that reminded him of ancient, illuminated manuscripts. Those were guarded upstairs.
No, here, these books, bound in blue leather, each with the Columbia seal on their spines, were ancient doctoral thesis. Columbia had been a university in New York for hundreds of years and had produced tens of thousands of doctoral degrees. The work of the famous grads, Eisenhower and Comings, for example, those works were housed in glass cases up nearer the light. But, these thousands and thousands of books, required for completion of an advanced degree, lived here, moldered here, died here…eventually.
Tyrone loved these books. He’d escape the sunlit world, under the guise of reshelving returned volumes — a job most of the student workers hated. He volunteered, quickly returned books to their Dewey-Decimal homes, and then took the back staircase, the one that few used, and ventured down to Eleven, down to the thesis shelves. Here, he hid in the shadows and read the intellectual’s views on the minutia of the world. He’d learned all he cared to about the life cycle of the yak. About urban sprawl. About the history of long dead Ancient Peoples and about Whales and about Trilobites and about…
His colleagues, the others on student work plans, they spent their shifts with earphones inserted, ignoring the world, listening to music and avoiding their jobs of shelving books. He, Tyrone, he did his job quickly so he could disappear here, to learn about men’s undergarments before the Enlightenment and about the creation of pigments in the 600 shades of crimson and about poisonous South American frogs and about the decay cycle of amber. His head filled with details that would probably never matter, by people who, likewise, were unimportant.
Again, voices invaded the eleventh floor. He waited, listened. Not wanting to be discovered, longing instead to return to Phillip, who only ruled for twenty-seven days before being —
“Tyrone? Is that you?”
His supervisor.
“Yes. This book was on the floor and I — ”
“Well, shelve it,” she said with a prehensile finger outstretched. “I need you.”
Phillip would wait until tomorrow.
