And then, after class, its brute bell ringing out to air their excited shrieks, enter the age of extracurriculars: our ocean lately iced, they quickly change to dip themselves in the heated pools, Olympically domed in glass to Island — West; Free Swim’s M — Th, 3–8, and Sun 10–5, though the times just like everything else are subject to change or plague…what a life, what encouragement, support — to become involved, included, to be welcomed warmly into every club ever founded under heaven: chess instruction’s offered and so soon teams are formed, and tournaments are organized, lessons in piano and violin are made available to those demonstrative of talent — apply in person at the Prodigy Office, POD 33–6…community service is an option, an opportunity it’s called, also that of interdenominational outreach: hobbying at a home for the aged; litter pickup along local highways; mornings publicly speaking for broadcast at Midtown mosques and churches, detailing recent experiences, the script of how thankful we are; then, evenings privately reading poetry to other orphans and the ill throughout the greater metro area: instructing the world, in its popular mass or only one at a quiet time, in the very culture in which they, too, are being instructed, despite the fact it’s dead.
Attention, the Library is Open.
And here they gather, standing amid haphazard stacks unbound, confiscated from the collections of the lifeless, Fifth Avenue’s umbilically far and stillborn twin.
A miracle, in that they’re women — though they’re employees, the only women here. And don’t even think — there’re strict policies against that, and they’re enforced, too, any infraction punished with affection withheld. Of those paid to attend to the survivors, these are the most beautiful, conventionally speaking; they’ve been hired for that, then gathered up into the folds of this room that’s most recently become the Library with the dedication of appropriate plaque, which is bronze, a ceremony accomplished in silence, without circumstance, without attendees: a multipurpose, utilitarian hall, with a gymnasia’s appointments, heated by the humidity of shvitz once spent upon its burnished burls of flooring, laminate, polished to a greasy slick, walled in by plaster festooned with insignia and jerseys, the retired shrouds of police and fire heroes; streamers faint in light fluttery from raftered sag, amid the stick of banners, bunting, spattered with squalid insects; two hoops, one on each side, lacking nets — between them, an empty scoreboard’s hung over a stage; the books are stacked in alphabetical piles atop the inbuilt bleachers opposite, stadiumed precariously as if to cheer in their silence the topple of the ceiling.
At 1800, precisely, this matron enters all in a bustle.
How to describe her? She’s busty, chesty, whatever it’s called she requires for herself and even her title a hall’s wide berth, is due an approach that is its own announcement, given grand entrance with suitable clearance; flushed and winded, hoarselunged with her sighing and how exuberantly she’s entitled, but to what, she hasn’t yet demanded; her heels click as if in preemptory reprimand, clack pushy; you can tell just by the way she carries herself she thinks she’s better than you, her very presence a judgment on yours, which is an imposition; the strap to her purse wound around her arm as if a vein, darkened to writhe above the skin; a frump knot of hair and a loose flap of film: she leads a porter who schleps with him the podium on loan from the Registry’s morning assembly; the porter’s son falters behind his father, with an ancient 8mm film setup he sets atop a bleacher’s books librating. Breathlessly, the woman lays down her purse at the edge of the stage below which the podium’s placed, alongside more heapings of books these without covers and perhaps just loose pages all of a single book, a universal, unread, unreadably total book yet to be cataloged as to the interest of its worthlessness. With fingers dunced with arty nails she dismisses the hired librarians: homely women stooped to their unpedicured toes; they drop their tasks, shuffle out with stares for the young women seated and silent; then, she dismisses the porters, too, these family Kush (mostly shvartze or otherwise minority inmates repurposed from prison, their Garden service intended to lenience their sentence), who gape at the girls on their slow ways out; the woman takes her position at podium, straightens it centered then begins with roll, leering a moment at each face as she kisses out their names…
