The Incident Report

  Copyright © 2009 Martha Baillie

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700

  Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com

  ISBN 978-1-941040-00-3 (ebook)

  First US edition 2014

  Interior design by Jakob Vala

  www.tinhouse.com

  Contents

  INCIDENT REPORT 1

  INCIDENT REPORT 2

  INCIDENT REPORT 3

  INCIDENT REPORT 4

  INCIDENT REPORT 5

  INCIDENT REPORT 6

  INCIDENT REPORT 7

  INCIDENT REPORT 8

  INCIDENT REPORT 9

  INCIDENT REPORT 10

  INCIDENT REPORT 11

  INCIDENT REPORT 12

  INCIDENT REPORT 13

  INCIDENT REPORT 14

  INCIDENT REPORT 15

  INCIDENT REPORT 16

  INCIDENT REPORT 17

  INCIDENT REPORT 18

  INCIDENT REPORT 19

  INCIDENT REPORT 20

  INCIDENT REPORT 21

  INCIDENT REPORT 22

  INCIDENT REPORT 23

  INCIDENT REPORT 24

  INCIDENT REPORT 25

  INCIDENT REPORT 26

  INCIDENT REPORT 27

  INCIDENT REPORT 28

  INCIDENT REPORT 29

  INCIDENT REPORT 30

  INCIDENT REPORT 31

  INCIDENT REPORT 32

  INCIDENT REPORT 33

  INCIDENT REPORT 34

  INCIDENT REPORT 35

  INCIDENT REPORT 36

  INCIDENT REPORT 37

  INCIDENT REPORT 38

  INCIDENT REPORT 39

  INCIDENT REPORT 40

  INCIDENT REPORT 41

  INCIDENT REPORT 42

  INCIDENT REPORT 43

  INCIDENT REPORT 44

  INCIDENT REPORT 45

  INCIDENT REPORT 46

  INCIDENT REPORT 47

  INCIDENT REPORT 48

  INCIDENT REPORT 49

  INCIDENT REPORT 50

  INCIDENT REPORT 51

  INCIDENT REPORT 52

  INCIDENT REPORT 53

  INCIDENT REPORT 54

  INCIDENT REPORT 55

  INCIDENT REPORT 56

  INCIDENT REPORT 57

  INCIDENT REPORT 58

  INCIDENT REPORT 59

  INCIDENT REPORT 60

  INCIDENT REPORT 61

  INCIDENT REPORT 62

  INCIDENT REPORT 63

  INCIDENT REPORT 64

  INCIDENT REPORT 65

  INCIDENT REPORT 66

  INCIDENT REPORT 67

  INCIDENT REPORT 68

  INCIDENT REPORT 69

  INCIDENT REPORT 70

  INCIDENT REPORT 71

  INCIDENT REPORT 72

  INCIDENT REPORT 73

  INCIDENT REPORT 74

  INCIDENT REPORT 75

  INCIDENT REPORT 76

  INCIDENT REPORT 77

  INCIDENT REPORT 78

  INCIDENT REPORT 79

  INCIDENT REPORT 80

  INCIDENT REPORT 81

  INCIDENT REPORT 82

  INCIDENT REPORT 83

  INCIDENT REPORT 84

  INCIDENT REPORT 85

  INCIDENT REPORT 86

  INCIDENT REPORT 87

  INCIDENT REPORT 88

  INCIDENT REPORT 89

  INCIDENT REPORT 90

  INCIDENT REPORT 91

  INCIDENT REPORT 92

  INCIDENT REPORT 93

  INCIDENT REPORT 94

  INCIDENT REPORT 95

  INCIDENT REPORT 96

  INCIDENT REPORT 97

  INCIDENT REPORT 98

  INCIDENT REPORT 99

  INCIDENT REPORT 100

  INCIDENT REPORT 101

  INCIDENT REPORT 102

  INCIDENT REPORT 103

  INCIDENT REPORT 104

  INCIDENT REPORT 105

  INCIDENT REPORT 106

  INCIDENT REPORT 107

  INCIDENT REPORT 108

  INCIDENT REPORT 109

  INCIDENT REPORT 110

  INCIDENT REPORT 111

  INCIDENT REPORT 112

  INCIDENT REPORT 113

  INCIDENT REPORT 114

  INCIDENT REPORT 115

  INCIDENT REPORT 116

  INCIDENT REPORT 117

  INCIDENT REPORT 118

  INCIDENT REPORT 119

  INCIDENT REPORT 120

  INCIDENT REPORT 121

  INCIDENT REPORT 122

  INCIDENT REPORT 123

  INCIDENT REPORT 124

  INCIDENT REPORT 125

  INCIDENT REPORT 126

  INCIDENT REPORT 127

  INCIDENT REPORT 128

  INCIDENT REPORT 129

  INCIDENT REPORT 130

  INCIDENT REPORT 131

  INCIDENT REPORT 132

  INCIDENT REPORT 133

  INCIDENT REPORT 134

  INCIDENT REPORT 135

  INCIDENT REPORT 136

  INCIDENT REPORT 137

  INCIDENT REPORT 138

  INCIDENT REPORT 139

  INCIDENT REPORT 140

  INCIDENT REPORT 141

  INCIDENT REPORT 142

  INCIDENT REPORT 143

  INCIDENT REPORT 144

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Emma and Inta

  From the tip of thought

  Du bout de la pensée

  In great goodness

  Dans une grande bonté

  In such a way as to obtain a hollow

  De manière à obtenir un creux

  Without pride

  Sans orgueil

  Advise yourself carefully

  Conseillez-vous soigneusement

  Bury the sound

  Enfouissez le son

  Alone for an instant

  Seul pendant un instant

  Very lost

  Très perdu

  Open your head.

  Ouvrez la tête.

  Suggestions by Satie on how to play his Gnossiennes for piano.

  Many incidents occur in public libraries, and when one does the librarian in charge is required to fill out the necessary forms, including a Suspect Identification Chart.

  INCIDENT REPORT

  (Complete within 24 hours of incident)

  The personal information on this form is collected under the authority of the Public Library Act and the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. The information will only be used for the proper administration of the library and the provisions of library services and programs.

  Incident Report—Revised: March 29, 2007

  page 1 of 3

  Incident Report—Revised: March 29, 2007

  page 2 of 3

  SUSPECT AND VEHICLE IDENTIFICATION CHART

  Incident Report—Revised: March 29, 2007

  page 3 of 3

  Without the library, you have no civilization.

  —Ray Bradbury

  I keep the following reports in the drawer of my desk. To my mind they resemble a pack of playing cards.

  INCIDENT REPORT 1

  The time was 2:15. A young man swaggered into the library. On his shaved head he wore a grey tweed hat. The words Love and Fuck, printed in large, dark letters, decorated the back of his green army jacket. His black boots added weight to his presence. A small, fine-boned man, hi
s eyes were the pale blue of a summer sky. Chains of varying thicknesses and degrees of intricacy, each link handwoven from copper wire, hung from his shoulders and crisscrossed his chest. He settled himself in a chair by the large window, behind the paperback spinners.

  At 4:15 he came to the desk and asked to borrow, “please, if possible,” a small hand-held vacuum. “I’ve got some shavings I’d like to clean up,” he explained. For the preceding two hours he’d sat, stripping electrical wire with the aid of his pocketknife. I brought him the battery powered Dust Buster from the shelf at the back of our workroom. I could think of nothing in the Rules and Regulations to prohibit me from lending it to him. He thanked me, and, crouching down, cleaned the debris from the carpet surrounding his chair—his territory of responsibility.

  INCIDENT REPORT 2

  The time was 11:15 AM. A slender woman with unusually dry and pale skin entered the library at an angle. She slipped in sideways. All of a sudden she was there, moving forward, lightly on her feet, as if prepared to elude an attacker. Her restless, almost colourless eyes took in her surroundings. She approached the Reference Desk, where I sat scrolling through the e-mails suspended in my In Box.

  “Where are your career information sheets?”

  I indicated two thick black binders. She peered in the direction I was pointing, but made no move to cross the room.

  “Shall I show you the binders?” I offered.

  “I see where you’re pointing. I’m not a fool.”

  Her voice snipped the word “fool” from the air and pasted it on my forehead. I lowered my eyes. The female patron in question set off on her journey. Several minutes later, she returned.

  “Those binders,” she informed me, “are black.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “they are.”

  “Then why did you say they were purple?” She leaned forward to make it clear that no route of escape was available to me.

  “Did I?”

  “You did. You said, ‘those purple binders over there.’ You knew they were black but you lied to me. ‘Those purple binders,’ you said.”

  I muttered my apology. “I didn’t intend . . .”

  She cut me off. “You did. You said purple, those purple binders. You knew they were black, but you told me they were purple.”

  “I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear.”

  “You were perfectly clear. Purple binders, you said. You lied to me.”

  I attempted to distract her from the subject of colour by asking, “Were you able to find what you wanted?”

  She glared at me through her white eyelashes.

  I repeated my question. “Were you able to find what you wanted?”

  She held my gaze with her hard little eyes, now the colour of dirty snow, and considered my query. “It’s not my abilities that are in doubt, but yours,” she informed me. “I asked you a simple question, and you lied to me.” The anger in her voice dragged, like a fingernail across a blackboard. I shifted my attention to her collarbone. She spoke her final judgment. “You should be put outside in a cage on the sidewalk.”

  Again I lowered my eyes to the computer screen in front of me, and read, but the words had become hollow gourds, little seeds of shrivelled meaning rattling inside them.

  INCIDENT REPORT 3

  This morning, the first to arrive, I unlocked the back door of the library, shouldered my bicycle, and descended the narrow stairs into the dim basement. The grey metal box fixed to the wall opened easily to reveal two vertical rows of stiff black switches made of a hard plastic. I started at the top and moved down. Each switch, succumbing to the pressure of my thumb, produced a loud “click”—a sound of finality—as it flipped from “Off” to “On.” Throughout the library above me, lights lit up. Nothing irrevocable had occurred. At the end of the day the lights would go off again. And yet for a few seconds I’d experienced certainty and a fleeting sensation of power. Sounds are more convincing than most of reality.

  My name is Miriam Gordon. I am an employee of the Public Libraries of Toronto. I am thirty-five years old and a “Clerical,” or that is how they referred to me until last month when they changed my title. I am now a “Public Service Assistant.”

  INCIDENT REPORT 4

  This afternoon at 4:55, a stout female patron, having spent several minutes exploring the contents of her purse, pulled out a small object. It lay in the plump palm of her hand. She thrust her arm across the desk. “This is for you,” she explained. She was rewarding me. I’d provided her with the books she needed. In its brightly coloured wrapper, the condom resembled a candy. At first I thought it was a candy. She was not a regular. I had never seen her before. Naturally, I thanked her for her gift.

  INCIDENT REPORT 5

  In the library workroom, a schedule hangs from two clips. As always, the day has been divided into compartments, as if it were a train about to set out on a well-planned voyage along shining rails. My initials have been pencilled into many of the little boxes that correspond to each hour between 9:00 AM and 8:30 PM. We, the staff, don’t always greet the public with enthusiasm. We don’t feel, every one of us without fail, that we are travelling out, embarked upon an adventure, and yet there we are, inscribed in our little boxes, as if the day were pulled by a solid locomotive.

  Every morning in the warmth of my bed, as I surface from sleep, fear—small as a cherry stone, it cracks open behind my breastbone. I don’t want the fruit. With each quick breath the fear grows, a rustling of leaves in the cavity of my chest. But soon I’ve washed, dressed, drunk a cup of tea, eaten a piece of toast, and am on my way to work, riding my bicycle in a prescribed direction.

  INCIDENT REPORT 6

  Suitcase Man arrives carrying his suitcase. The hard little handle is covered in leather. It is not the sort of suitcase anyone uses anymore—stiff, beige, almost a box. More leather reinforces its corners. He is a short man, he wears a raincoat. His raincoat, though in perfect condition, is also out of fashion. When he places his suitcase on his lap and presses down on the two little metal buttons, two corresponding metal tabs spring sharply back. If these were to hit his fingers, it would hurt. Possibly his suitcase is lined in red satin. I’ve tried standing next to him, pretending to examine the paperbacks on the fiction spinner, but he’s too quick. I can never catch a glimpse inside, before he brings down the lid.

  He sits very straight, and talks to himself, his bald scalp gleaming. I suspect he was born in Eastern Europe—in Prague or Budapest or Warsaw, though I can’t tell from exactly which country he’s trying to escape. His words rush, tripping over each other in their haste to be free. That the Soviet Union no longer exists changes nothing. Inside him the Soviet State is alive and well. Cruel and vigilant as ever, it carries on, squeezing his inner organs, puncturing his most secret membranes. He waits his turn for the photocopier. The officials, the dry-mouthed party members who once benefitted from his services as a translator and academic, are now determined to steal his documents. He is arming himself with multiples.

  He arrives at no particular hour. At the circulation desk he stops and bows, bending abruptly at the waist. While bowing, he stops talking to himself. Not one of us has ever seen him remove his raincoat.

  He’s a man of singular purpose. He never borrows books, CDs or DVDs, never surfs the net or nervously taps messages, hunching over the keyboard, as the others do, firing off electronic soliloquies, desperate e-mail requests for love or recognition. He comes with one purpose only: to make multiple copies of the documents riding in his suitcase.

  INCIDENT REPORT 7

  At 2:20 this afternoon, the unusually pale female patron who suggested, a few days ago, that I deserved to be placed in a cage, walked briskly into the library. She was clothed in blue jogging shorts and a white tennis skirt, which she wore as if it were a Roman toga, the waistband slung confidently over her right shoulder. The crisp white pleats released themselves in a fan across her chest. We did not speak. She found what she wanted without my assistance. She left, almost
skipping with delight. Sunlight fell through the windows in broad swaths. A man looked up from his book and smiled.

  INCIDENT REPORT 8

  According to yesterday’s schedule, Wednesday, April 1, 2009, between the hours of ten and eleven, I was to do the Holds Alert Report. It fell to me to locate on our shelves, and send off to the correct destinations, the items listed as having been requested by patrons in other branches scattered across the city.

  I wheeled my metal cart around the library, and for every book, DVD, CD or video I successfully found and pulled from the shelf, for every item neither stolen nor misshelved, I inscribed a thick red check mark on the list. Red is not compulsory. In fact, any colour will do. Using a felt-tipped marker, however, feels more satisfying than pressing down with a hard thin pencil.

  Curious combinations of desired books lined up on my cart as I proceeded from shelf to shelf: The Mennonite Solid Food Cookbook, Semiotics for Dummies, The Official Guide for Identifying UFOs, Grease Girl: Advanced Auto Mechanics and How to Find and Keep Your Perfect Mate—a slender, well-thumbed volume, written in point form.

  I labelled each item and dropped it in the appropriate grey plastic shipping box behind the circulation desk.

  INCIDENT REPORT 9

  At 11:20 this morning, a patron entered the library to report that a man outside, who was embracing a tree, appeared to be experiencing some distress.

  By the time the ambulance arrived the man had lost hold of the tree and lay unconscious. He was lifted from the ground into the ambulance, which drove away without event.

  INCIDENT REPORT 10

  When I was eighteen, someone broke my heart. Within the period of a week, without warning, the love in my breast became opaque and hardened into a substance resembling glass. A few well-placed blows, and my heart shattered. One of these blows was administered over the telephone. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I slammed down the receiver. I was still living with my parents. I rushed out the front door without stopping to pull on my coat or boots. The freezing air slapped my cheeks; it plunged down my throat into my unsuspecting lungs. My father, who happened to be clearing the front walk, tossed aside his shovel and ran after me across the lawn, his feet breaking the crust, sinking into the deep snow. When he’d caught up, he took me in his arms. I present this memory in my father’s defence whenever I take him to trial, as I so often do, laying my fears and shyness, my crippling self-doubt, at his feet.