The Incident Report Read online

  INCIDENT REPORT 33

  At 7:48 this evening, a rainy and cool evening, a female patron came to the desk to inform me that a man was “amusing himself with his genitals” at the back of the library. I made my way briskly to the 970s (History). The man in question, not a regular, having just experienced satisfaction, was rearranging himself. I issued the man a letter of exclusion. The affected books were bagged in clear plastic and withdrawn from the collection. These included:

  A Story with No End: Conflict in the Middle East

  The Agony of Palestine

  In the Beginning: Conversations between Rabbi Bernstein and Father O’Sullivan

  The Agony of Israel

  We have no reason to believe the patron found these titles particularly arousing. It is true, however, that the books most favoured by determined masturbators are those located at the back of the library. These include Fine Art, Poetry, Plays, Literary Criticism and History.

  INCIDENT REPORT 34

  At 3:45 this afternoon, Irene Frenkel, our Branch Head, emerged from her office and noticed the newly delivered children’s picture books, piled on the workroom table. She picked up each one and flipped through a few pages. Two of them she took upstairs to read during her coffee break. I followed her. If there’s anyone on staff that I consider a potentially close friend, it’s Irene.

  When I think of Irene, I picture her falling, tumbling through the unclouded blue of a summer sky. She grew up in Chile, the eldest daughter of educated, middle-class parents. Once, when she was seven, she was taken out for lunch in a fancy hotel with a garden. Partway through the meal, realizing she needed to pee, she asked to be excused. A waiter showed her the way to the washroom, and politely left her there. She closed the door of the cubicle, locked it, emptied her bladder, dried herself, pulled up her underpants, straightened her dress, then tried to open the door. It would not open. For several minutes she struggled with the handle.

  A well-brought-up young girl does not cause a disturbance—this much she knew, even in her panic. Children are to be seen not heard. She did not call for help or bang on the door with her fists. She looked for another way out. High above her, a small window admitted a pleasant breeze. By climbing onto the toilet seat she succeeded in peering out the window. When she’d hoisted herself up and sat perched in the frame, she looked down. Directly below her rippled the metal roof of a garden shed. It didn’t look far at all. Half an hour later, one of the hotel staff found her crumpled and unconscious in the dirt, next to the garden shed. Her left leg had broken in two places, her shoulder was dislocated and her right wrist fractured.

  For several weeks Irene lay in a hospital bed, and once a day her mother and father came to visit. They brought her a book, which she read from cover to cover, repeatedly. It was not her place to ask for another, and they did not bring her a second or a third book. They did not believe in excess.

  Once, a marching band came down the street and the nurse wheeled Irene over to the windows so she could watch the band march past.

  INCIDENT REPORT 35

  At 2:14 this afternoon, a man dressed in a suit of the sort a man might wear to an office to fulfill a role of little distinction refused to pay for the pages he’d printed from the Internet. Not only did he refuse to pay, but he clearly intended to print out more. I approached and requested that he refrain from using the library’s printer unless prepared to accept the cost. He became rude, accusing me of greed, sloth and dishonesty. I ignored his taunts, sat down at my desk, disabled his computer and immersed myself in my work.

  At 2:35, a Page reported that a man clothed in a nondescript suit and wearing glasses with heavy black frames was distributing religious material in the 640s (Cooking). By the time I arrived on the scene the man was working his way through the 910s (Travel), thrusting his religious printouts at anyone who happened by, and slipping the rest between the books on the shelves.

  Despite his glasses, I recognized him as the same man I’d spoken to earlier. I now presented him with the choice of desisting in his behaviour or leaving the building. He chose to leave.

  Once outside he opened his briefcase, and extracted a videotape cassette which he hurled into the air, aiming so that it landed on the library roof. Next he reentered the building and wrote a brief note on a piece of scrap paper, which he slid to me across the desk. His handwriting, contrary to my expectations, was generous, well-formed and easy to read: “To Her Majesty: if you want your video back, look for it on the roof.”

  He is not Rigoletto. Whoever wrote the Rigoletto note had a pinched and slanted hand.

  INCIDENT REPORT 36

  When I was a child I used to admire the loose ease of my father’s penmanship. He kept a box of filing cards on his desk in his insurance office, and on these cards he wrote the names, phone numbers and addresses of his clients, and noted down a few personal details about each of them, so that when he spoke with them over the phone he could ask in an informed and friendly manner about their children and pets and family life. That he knew their dog was “Tibs” and inquired about Tibs’s arthritis made them want to renew their Life Insurance plan.

  He sold them every type of insurance—car, house, life, bicycle, boat, racehorse and violin. He kept the cards in order. I’d stand in the doorway of his office and listen while he leaned back heavily in his chair, the crucial filing card held, nonchalantly as a cigarette, between two fingers, and asked in a tone of genuine concern, “And your lovely daughter, Gertrude, she’s eleven now isn’t she? Soon she’ll have her braces off? Still playing flute in the school band? Wonderful. It must take a lot of discipline to play an instrument.”

  When he’d hung up the receiver I’d rush in and ask to see the card. There it was, all written down, just as I’d expected:

  Gertrude: age 11, braces on her teeth (upper only), flute (school band)

  Cat: Siamese, age 7, named Alice (after Gertrude’s paternal grandmother)

  John: age 13, trombone (school band), hockey (goalie), feet (size 12)

  INCIDENT REPORT 37

  A petite blonde woman approached the Reference Desk and asked me for books on pregnancy and childbirth. The time was 11:30 AM. I offered to accompany her to the appropriate area (618) in adult nonfiction. Together we set out. In one hand she was carrying a tennis racket. With her free hand she reached under her T-shirt and scratched energetically at the skin above her navel. Her dishevelled hair hadn’t been brushed in days and her running shoes had lost their laces.

  “It’s the RCMP,” she explained. “An implant. They’ve put one in my uterus. I didn’t want them to. They can hear everything that goes on in there. They record it all.”

  “Everything on this shelf,” I told her. “Any of these books will tell you about pregnancy and birth.”

  She thanked me for my help, set her tennis racket on the floor, kneeled down and started looking along the shelf where I’d indicated, for the book that might answer her questions.

  INCIDENT REPORT 38

  Though my father collected books, it was my mother who read to me. She sat under the bright light fixed to the wall at the foot of my bed. While I lay with my head on my pillow, she fed me Peter Pan, one chapter each night. When I’d devoured that, she served me The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Swallows and Amazons and, later, a whole slew of Robert Louis Stephenson—Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantray.

  When I first started working in the library, someone returned a copy of Sleeping Beauty. I recognized the cover. I opened the book. There, on the right-hand page, towered the very cake I’d hungered for repeatedly during the earliest years of my childhood, when my mother read to me not only at night but during the day as well. The two of us sat on the living room sofa, she holding the book wide open, allowing me to pour over the illustrations. The cake had so many elaborate layers that it tilted slightly. But it didn’t fall. The cook and the servants and all the noble guests in their finery had collapsed into a deep, inescapable sleep—some had fallen
forward on the banquet table, and remained there, head on arms; others, mouths open, had slumped to the floor; and all the while the enticing, incomparable cake refused to crumble, to yield to any spell. It waited, intact. One day it would be mine. One day I would pick off every candied fruit and run my finger through the smooth, buttery icing.

  But one day became many days and I forgot the cake. For nearly thirty years I did not give it a thought, until without warning, the tilting layers and candied fruit reappeared on the page of a book returned to me across the circulation desk by a patron. Immense gratitude filled me, and I looked up to thank the patron, but she was gone.

  INCIDENT REPORT 39

  Rigoletto’s second message was not left on my book cart. The time was 2:08 when Nila found it on a table in the children’s area. She brought it into the workroom and held it up for anyone who cared to see.

  “Someone’s been writing a weird story, and forgot a page in the kids’ section. Either that, or a real nutter’s been hanging around. There’s no end to it, I tell you. And it’s not exactly winter anymore; these batty ones could go outdoors. The sunshine might do them some good.”

  I took the piece of paper from her.

  What do you know about suffering? I am the father of the most beautiful daughter in the world—that is suffering. They blindfolded me and I held their ladder. Did I argue? No, of course not. I played the fool, stupid fucker that I am. I held it for them willingly. I believed it was a joke, a well-deserved joke that we were playing on the count of Ceprano, a despicable man. We were kidnapping Ceprano’s wife, that’s what they told me. We’d deliver her to the Duke whose ravenous appetite for women no amount of feeding could satisfy.

  You don’t want to imagine that a hunchbacked fool can suffer, do you? It was my own daughter we kidnapped. While I, blindfolded, held the ladder, they climbed in the window of my house. They took my daughter to the Duke for him to do with as he pleased. No. You cannot comprehend my suffering. All these men who come to her with their questions—I watch them closely. They won’t blindfold me again, no fucking way. No harm will come to her. I will see that no harm comes to my Gilda. I will allow nobody to cause her more pain.

  I made my way quickly to the children’s area. Five children sat on the floor, playing contentedly with board books, while their mothers stood talking among themselves. I walked back to the Reference Desk. Of the patrons using the public computers across from the desk, six were regulars, two were not. I wanted to shout, “Which of you is Rigoletto? Show yourself.”

  I decided that none of them was Rigoletto, that having left his note he’d gone off in a hurry. But perhaps I was wrong and he’d lingered, eager to witness and to savour my reactions? Quite possibly he was present, and observing my discomfiture? No, that couldn’t be. I did not feel watched.

  “I am not your daughter,” I insisted silently, inside my head. “I don’t want your protection. My hands are my own.”

  INCIDENT REPORT 40

  I sat facing Irene in her small office off the work-room.

  “These two notes,” she inquired, “they’re the only two you’ve found so far?”

  “Yes.”

  She picked up her pen then put it down again. Her hands were oddly soft, seemingly boneless, the opposite of the rest of her. She wore her grey hair short as a man’s, and held herself very straight. She walked with a limp, the legacy of her childhood tumble through the air.

  “Do you think the notes are a joke?” she asked.

  “No. Not a joke.”

  “Do you feel unsafe, coming to work?”

  “No, not unsafe. Not so far.”

  “I’d like you to make two copies of each note, if you don’t mind. One set I’ll keep on file, the other I’ll pass along to Patricia Cheung, our District Manager. Does that sound all right to you?”

  “Yes. I’ll make the copies,” I promised.

  “Thank you.”

  She took out a packet of chewing gum and offered me a piece.

  “No thanks.”

  “I’m trying to quit smoking,” she explained.

  The Rigoletto notes lay on her desk between us. I felt exposed, as if the notes, by their very existence, reflected upon me.

  Again Irene picked up her pencil.

  “When I was growing up, my father carried a transistor radio with him from room to room,” she remarked. “Wherever he went in the house it accompanied him, and when I tried to speak with him he cranked up the volume or switched channels, so that we were both engulfed in crackling static.” She’d started doodling on the corner of an envelope. Abruptly she stopped, and, looking up, said with a smile, “Well? Nothing to worry about for now, it seems. Don’t you agree? You’ll let me know if you find any more notes?” Her brisk tone suggested that our meeting was over.

  “I’ll let you know,” I agreed. “Thank you.”

  I returned to my desk, slipped the Rigoletto notes into the bottom drawer, shut my eyes and heard the static of a radio.

  INCIDENT REPORT 41

  My father, the youngest of four sons, was inhabited by a passionate admiration of his mother—a devotion his older brothers freely outgrew or never experienced at all.

  My grandfather sent a postcard, without fail, to his mother, each and every day of his adult life until her death.

  INCIDENT REPORT 42

  Nila came up behind me while I was photocopying the Rigoletto notes.

  “And what are you up to?” she asked, peering over my shoulder, submerging me in her dizzying perfume.

  I tried to not answer, but she stepped around in front of me, and her look said: “Go ahead, offend me. I always knew you didn’t like me. Think you’re better than the rest of us, do you? But I’ll find out anyhow.”

  I started to speak and a story spilled out of me—something about an opera and freckled hands.

  INCIDENT REPORT 43

  He was a missionary, a Catholic Father who had travelled extensively, he explained. In no other country had he seen poverty so dire, so indescribable, as in Haiti.

  “They have only bananas, and not enough of these. If there were some way they might cook the skin of the banana to make it as palatable as the flesh of the fruit, this would go a long way to relieving their hunger. If I could bring them such a recipe on my next trip, they would welcome me with open arms.”

  I searched for “banana” Web sites. After some ten minutes I came upon a recipe for fried banana skins and was about to print it out for the patron in question when another site caught my attention. A museum in Texas claimed to possess Michael Jackson’s “jewelled banana.” As proof, the museum provided a small image of a silver sculpture of a banana, encrusted in what appeared to be diamonds, emeralds and rubies.

  INCIDENT REPORT 44

  At precisely 11:00 AM this morning, when the library was not yet full of urgency, John B., a regular, sat down and looked at me through his watery blue eyes. His long stiff legs stuck out in front of him. His bony hands rested on the Reference Desk. He asked that I locate the Web site of a small publishing house, Raccoon Jaw Press, and write down their address for him. I did so. He explained that the press was on the brink of publishing a collection of his poems.

  “Very soon, my book will be out. I’ll bring you a copy.”

  I thanked him and handed him the address, the same address I’d copied out for him the week before and the week before that. Once a week he requested this address.

  “I knew I could count on you,” he declared. He spread out his fingers, as if smoothing the surface of the desk between us.

  “I’m glad,” I told him, and smiled.

  “My father,” he stated, “my father was a man who read lots of books. He was a good man, as good a man as ever walked the face of this earth, and now he’s dead.”

  The paper in his hands trembled, and John B. started to weep. Tears filled his large blue eyes, which were always rather wet in any case, and through his tears he caught my gaze and held on. He appeared to be asking me to re
lieve him of his grief. I offered him a Kleenex. He dried his eyes and the rest of his face, including his forehead and chin.

  His face dry, he pulled himself out of the chair, crushing in his large hand as he pressed down on the chair’s arm the folded scrap of paper bearing the address of Raccoon Jaw Press. He walked out of the library. His profuse thanks remained behind, suspended, trembling in the air.

  I left the desk and went out the back door of the library into the alley where I stood with my eyes closed and concentrated on the task of filling and emptying my lungs until the word “father” shrank, freeing the universe from its grip.

  INCIDENT REPORT 45

  The morning passed quickly. According to the schedule it was lunchtime. I walked to Allan Gardens. I ate my sandwich then opened the book I’d brought with me. The young man with the calm oval face, whom I’d noticed on previous visits, closed his book, got up from his bench and walked along the path to where I sat.

  “I am Janko,” he said, “and you?”

  “Miriam.”

  “I’ve seen you in the library.”

  “I work there.”

  “Yes, I know. May I sit down?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  We sat together and watched the people lying on their sides on the clipped grass, and the dogs trying to wander but held back, attached to their masters by various leashes. Janko turned to me. He smiled, as if we’d sat together on some other bench, long ago, which we’d forgotten and were about to remember.

  If someone had asked me, I would have told them I was immune and that I could not fall in love, that I’d done so once before and did not wish to repeat the experience. If someone had asked, I would have said I was not the sort of person who recovered. I continued but did not recover. I did not want to recover. If someone had asked, I would have said that the way my father chose to end his life had made it impossible for me ever to fall in love again.