The Incident Report Read online

  INCIDENT REPORT 11

  At 12:30 this afternoon, a female patron, grey-haired and well-dressed, entered the library, pushing a male patron, equally respectable, in his wheelchair. She took him right up to the shelves. He pointed to the books he wanted. She lifted down the volumes, filled the cloth sack that hung from the back of his chair, then wheeled both him and his selection over to the circulation desk.

  There the man and woman switched places, the man getting out of his wheelchair. She sat down. He unloaded the sack of books, checked them out, packed them in again and wheeled her through the exit, seemingly without effort. As he pushed, she hummed a little tune of contentment.

  INCIDENT REPORT 12

  My father was a man who whistled, who wove himself an armour of cheerful notes, and smiled and smiled. A large man whose presence felt solid, he greeted everyone with a gesture of outdated gallantry, tipping his hat, or, in the case of women, kissing a hand. He’d cock his genial, balding head as if listening, and ask how people felt about the weather or what they thought of a certain event mentioned on the news. While they answered he’d nod, or smooth his naked crown with his broad hand, and remark, “Well, well, now isn’t that interesting,” or “How true indeed, I couldn’t have put it better myself.” He spoke with a ponderous sincerity.

  It was all a performance, one he wanted badly to believe in, while inside his head he was whistling a private tune of grave self-deprecation and despair. A master of distractions, light on his feet for such a heavy man, and quick with his hands, he would have made a fine magician or boxer. Instead he wrote poems in rhyming verse that nobody would publish, and earned his living by selling insurance of various kinds.

  I wanted to save him from humiliation. One night I set myself the task of memorizing as many of his poems as I could. Shut in my room, I recited them and wept. In the morning, my pity and sadness, which I could not conceal from him, made the kitchen clock tick all the more loudly, its sound filling the room.

  My father set his cereal bowl in the sink, and, unlatching the back door, announced, “What a fine day. Fine, fine weather and not a minute too soon.” Then, gathering up the books he’d left on the kitchen counter the night before, he walked briskly down the path to our garage at the foot of the yard.

  INCIDENT REPORT 13

  Two girls came to the circulation desk to complain that a plump woman wearing dark glasses had accused them of willfully breaking a computer mouse, a crime of which they claimed to be innocent. The woman, they stated, had taken it upon herself to pinch their ears as punishment.

  The time was 4:05. The woman in question, overhearing the girls as they described her mistreatment of their ears, stepped forward to defend herself. She fervently denied the girls’ claims, and, calling the girls liars, she gave one of them a gentle push, a mild shove just below the shoulder. I reminded the woman that according to the Rules and Regulations she must not touch other patrons without their consent, and I asked her to leave the building. She was a regular. She did as she was told. I expect she will return tomorrow.

  INCIDENT REPORT 14

  I’d completed the Holds Alert Report and done my hour on desk. I was free.

  In the workroom I plugged in the kettle. The time was 1:00, and through the back door Nila Narayan entered, arriving just on time for her late shift. Of all of us, she’s worked the longest at the Allan Gardens Library. In the centre of the workroom she stopped, and pulled from her purse, for everyone to see, what appeared to be a flattened tuna sandwich in a plastic bag. She held it high, dangling it from her fingertips.

  “Bloody man on the bloody bus sat his big bum right on my dinner. Can you fucking believe it? Excuse my French. This used to be a sandwich, and what does it look like now? I’d rather not say, not in mixed company. Bloody pathetic, if you ask me. I’ll just skip upstairs and put my yummy, bum-squashed meal in the fridge then, shall I?”

  A child in Calcutta, Nila used to walk, on her small bare feet, the length of her father’s back while he lay facedown on the living room carpet and emitted groans of pleasure. Her tiny, strong toes massaging his muscles, she never lost her balance. Now and again, devilish, uncaring, she stepped onto his round rump and rose like a ballerina.

  “While my Dad smoked, I’d look at the hairs growing from his wrist. He’d wriggle his shoulders that I’d loosened up for him, and he’d beam at me, his Nila. I’d flop down on the carpet, and my mum brought in the tea. It sailed through the air above me on a big round brass tray, balanced on my mum’s hand.”

  Of all Nila’s childhood memories, this is the one she has chosen to report during our lunch hour—her father sighing with pleasure, and her mother bringing in the tea. I hope she wants nothing from me in return. I have nothing to offer her. I have listened and smiled, and smiled again, just as my father would have done.

  INCIDENT REPORT 15

  The time was 10:15 AM. Budgie Man entered the library, head held high. Because he listens to recordings of songbirds, because he rides a bicycle, because he expects to be served, because he is tall and waves his fist while complaining that Hitler did not do a good enough job cleaning up the world, because he disgusts and frightens me, because he breeds budgies, because I am a trained employee of the Public Libraries of Toronto, this morning when he called me over to where he sat, I went. I went, believing that the computer terminal to which he’d been assigned was malfunctioning.

  “Next time I call, you can bring me my slippers,” he mocked.

  I have decided that I will no longer serve Budgie Man, regardless of my obligations as a civil servant. He is a loathsome man, a bully who demands that we feed him cake whenever we have a staff party, and that we bow and scrape while he insults us. I will not serve him. He is not dangerous. The more dangerous have less to say. They sit quietly.

  INCIDENT REPORT 16

  The time was 11:20 AM. I asked Wire Stripper Man about his copper weaving. Was he making the piece to hang on a wall?

  “No, no,” he answered with a delighted smile. “It’s to go on my back. I’ve got this poetry on my jacket, see.”

  He stood and turned so I might read the large words, Love and Fuck.

  “Well, sometimes I’m not in the mood for that sort of poetry,” he explained. “This will cover it up. The trouble is, I want the whole thing to move with me when I walk. Some of the wires have to stay free, but the others have got to be fixed in place or it will all fall apart. That’s what’s giving me trouble.”

  I admired the complexity of his work and wished him luck. He blushingly thanked me.

  INCIDENT REPORT 17

  The morning passed quickly. According to the schedule, it was my lunchtime. I walked to Allan Gardens. The park is a huge sigh, a deep breath. The venerable age of its trees, the generous arrangement of its crisscrossing paths, the fragile domed presence of the greenhouse at its centre—all these suggest forgiveness. Men and women lie on their sides on the clipped grass—a cubist composition of hips and shoulders. Some sprawl on their backs in the unquestioning shade of the wide-limbed trees. Some sit up to observe. Others wander in and out of pools of light and darkness, cursing. Along the paved paths leading to the greenhouse, benches face into the sun, and when the sun passes behind a cloud the benches face into the clouds. On these benches people sit, alone or together, some playing cards, alone or together. Others scream, and flail their arms, as if fighting off flames. It is always others who flail their arms. Fights break out where the paths cross. Large objects are carried along these paths—TVs and sofas—objects that must be set down every few yards and kicked or perched upon, then picked up and carried further.

  I was seated on a bench and eating my sandwich when I noticed a young man with a calm, oval face. He was seated on a bench, reading a book. The book did not look new and had lost its jacket. His hands were small and from the right one he was missing a finger. I wondered how he’d lost his finger and what he was reading. When his eyes left the page I saw that they were quiet, but full of eagerne
ss. It was an eagerness suspended, not hanging from strings like a marionette but held gently in check all the same. He continued with his reading. Every few minutes the tip of his tongue appeared and caressed his lower lip. The tip of his tongue resembled a small thought. Without warning, out it slipped to slowly move along his lower lip; then it was gone.

  INCIDENT REPORT 18

  We were about to close when I heard the sound of something landing in the return box under the circulation desk. It was not a magazine, a book, a DVD, a video or CD; I knew the sounds such objects made when falling and none of them made the light swishing sound I’d just heard. I reached into the box and pulled out half a dozen sheets of lined paper. They’d been densely inscribed. Using first a blue pen then a black, someone had covered both sides of each page with numbers. The numbers, tightly packed, had ceased to be numbers. They’d become pure pattern, a weaving of ink marks. The paper, transformed by such insistent scarring, had acquired the texture of a withered skin. The writer of numbers had worked diligently. The sheets represented hours of concentrated labour, and perhaps an escape into order.

  0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789023455678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 . . .

  I had no reason to believe the writer of numbers was a man, but often as not beliefs ignore reason.

  INCIDENT REPORT 19

  I lifted the lid of the photocopier. A piece of paper lay facedown on the glass. I picked it up. It was a sheet of music—Verdi’s Rigoletto, both score and libretto. As I read, I could hear in my head the Duke singing his famous song: “La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento, muta d’accento e di pensiero.” Woman is fickle as a feather in the breeze, changeable in word and thought.

  When I was eleven, my parents, for the first time, took me with them to the opera. They chose Rigoletto. The story was explained to me in advance.

  Rigoletto, the Duke’s hunchbacked jester, has a beautiful daughter, Gilda, whom he keeps hidden in a small house outside the city. She is his only joy, the one person who loves and respects him. He hides her because he knows that he is detested by the nobles at court, whom he mocks pitilessly to amuse the Duke—the powerful Duke who has seduced, with impunity, nearly every nobleman’s wife or daughter.

  The nobles, itching for revenge, kidnap Gilda, whom they believe to be Rigoletto’s mistress, and offer her to the Duke. Unbeknownst to them, however, Gilda and the Duke have already met. Disguised as a student, the Duke, days ago, has followed her home from church and won her heart.

  When Rigoletto learns of his daughter’s kidnapping and dishonour, he hires a murderer to kill the Duke. Through a series of convoluted events, Gilda discovers that the Duke’s life is in danger and, dressed as a boy, she offers herself in his place.

  In the final scene of the opera, Rigoletto, triumphant, receives the sack he believes contains the Duke’s body, and he is about to heave it into the river when suddenly he hears an unmistakable voice singing off stage—“la donna è mobile . . .” It is the Duke. In a terrible panic Rigoletto kneels, unties the sack and finds his dying daughter.

  Not quite an adolescent, I sat on the edge of my chair, watching and listening. Rigoletto’s pain felt excruciating to me. Gilda I regarded with a mixture of sorrow and disdain. She’d behaved foolishly. I would not give up my life, I told myself, for someone like the Duke. And yet, when the Duke sang his song, accusing women of his own fickleness, I ignored the words and easily allowed the melody to seduce me. It entered me by means of Rigoletto’s pain, and inhabited my being utterly. “La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento, muta d’accento e di pensiero.”

  Though I ought to have dropped the sheet music and libretto into the lost and found, instead I slipped them into the drawer of my desk. I had no proof they belonged to Suitcase Man, but I hoped they did, and that he shared my passion for Verdi.

  INCIDENT REPORT 20

  The morning passed quickly. According to the schedule it was my lunchtime. I walked to Allan Gardens. A bench stood unclaimed in the sun. The bench faced the greenhouse. I sat down. Minutes passed but the young man with the calm, oval face did not arrive; and then he came, carrying a book in his hand. It was the same book as before. He chose a seat not far away and I thought he’d successfully lost himself in the world of words when he looked over and into my eyes. I don’t know what he saw there. Though the corners of his mouth lifted in a quick, shy smile, he returned to his reading.

  In front of me stood the greenhouse—a large display case built in a time when mandatory ruffles covered the legs of sofas, while greenhouses revealed the unabashed sex lives of exotic plants brought from the four colonized corners of the world. I got up from my bench and went in. Spores and protuberances, labelled examples of cunning survival surrounded me. In the humid heat, sturdy palm fronds pressed upwards against the rounded interior of the glass dome.

  Four young children stood in a row, posing in front of the immense palm tree, waiting for their father to take their picture. “Happy, happy,” he called to them, holding the camera perfectly still then pressing down with his index finger, while from behind the palm tree, a thin, long-legged drunk shouted, “Fuck, Fuck.”

  INCIDENT REPORT 21

  When I was a child, my father owned a suitcase similar to that of Suitcase Man. It opened with a “click” to reveal a rich red interior, and I watched in fascination on those rare occasions when my father folded all he needed into his suitcase and briefly left us to go out into the world. He allowed me to press the metal buttons, and if I wasn’t quick enough, the tabs, springing back, struck me on the knuckles, causing me to cry out. Sometimes my father placed his hand kindly on my head, to show that he understood my suffering. Other times, he chuckled, pleased to see that I was learning my lesson. When he closed his suitcase, the dull exterior gobbled the royal lining, leaving nothing visible but hard drabness. I sucked on my knuckles. My father adventured out into the unknown. He left and came back. My mother never left. She was always there and wanting to know more than I told her. She was always there and refusing to hear what I told her.

  INCIDENT REPORT 22

  She entered the library as if it were a garden. The time was 11:15 AM. Her lavender eye shadow matched her hat and blouse, which went with her skirt that trailed on the ground. Lavender. Her choice was lavender, lavender her necessity. She approached the Reference Desk, wearing the expression of someone carried aloft by the fragrance of flowers. Then she’d arrived and she sat down. “Americans.” She raised her pencilled eyebrows. “Just the other day I saw two of them, pulled up at the corner in their car and reading a map, lost, you know how they are, no sense of geography, so I went up and asked if they needed my help, and they rolled down their window, all friendly, you know how they are, well I told them to drive a block south then turn west and three more blocks, and they thanked me, all loud and bigger than anyone else, you know how they are, and I watched them go, and what do they do?”

  She rolled her eyes and scrunched up her ancient nose. A dusting of face powder fell from her cheek onto my desk. From under their lavender hoods, her scavenger eyes searched me for signs of encouragement. I smiled, as recommended in the Manual of Conduct for Encounters with Difficult Patrons. There was nothing floral about her now.

  “Well,” she sighed in triumphant disgust, “I’ll tell you what they did. They turned north. Can you believe it? North, when I’d told them south, clear as day—‘Go south,’ I’d said. Americans!” With a wave of her hand she dismissed the entire nation. “I shouted after them, oh, I shouted all right—‘Idiots, fools, if you can’t follow simple directions, don’t bother leaving home. Take your bloated backsides in your big car back where you belong.’ I shouted, and they heard me all right.”

  In her glee she slapped h
er thighs. “Americans.” She paused, testing the air for the electricity of my approval. “The only people worse than Americans are telephone operators. Them!” With a wave of her hand, she cleared the air of the foulness of telephone operators. “They can hardly spell, have you noticed? I got one on the phone the other day. I called 411. I wanted the number for the Lucky Dollar Tavern. ‘Can you spell that please,’ she said. I repeated, slowly: ‘Lucky Dollar Tavern’. She asked me again, ‘Can you spell that, please.’ ‘My God,’ I shouted into the receiver, ‘I barely finished grade five and even I can spell lucky. Aren’t you ashamed? If I were your teacher I’d send you to the corner or I’d beat you.’ And I hung up the phone.” To illustrate her point, she brought her hand down with a “thwack” on the Reference Desk.

  “I hung up all right. Americans and telephone operators—they think they rule the world. Well they don’t and won’t till they learn how to spell, and know a bit of geography. The fundamentals. That’s what they’re missing. Do you think she could have spelled ‘fundamentals,’ that ninny? Not if her life depended on it. Ha!”