The Librarian’s Daughter

When she was 14, she learned how to tie her shoes.

She was not slow, nor disadvantaged. She had simply never had a need to wear a shoe. From the time she took her first steps, the Librarian’s daughter swept from place to place on socked feet that slid over the floors of the Library halls. When she went outside, she peeled off the socks and went barefoot through the man-made lawn or the bubbling courtyard pond.

She had never met a fire ant, or a thorny bramble, or a rock with too sharp an edge. She had no need of shoes.

At puberty—a bit on the older side but not so much as to be concerning—the time came for the Librarian’s daughter to be given a choice. Like her mother and her mother’s mother before her, she would spend the next twenty-four hours deciding: leave her home for a world she’d never known, or commit her past, present, and future to the Library?

The Librarian and her daughter took a private car to the Long Island ferry, which they took to a bus, which brought them to the outskirts of the city, where they hailed a taxi cab and directed it to Central Park. They ate hot dogs and fed bits of the bread to the squirrels. They stretched out on the grass lawn and napped and read, then went to the museum where the Librarian’s daughter watched the faces of thousands of tourists light up at the sight of ancient Roman statuary and paintings that shone like the sun.

She loved: the people, the food, the neon lights, the taxi cabs and subway cars.

She hated: the barking dogs, the blaring sirens, the way strangers' elbows jostled her in the street. And she was terrified by the sight of the homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks.

At the end of their trip, she chose the library. She did not know why, other than that she had no money on her own and no friends, and anyway, she didn’t see any other teenage girls walking around the city by themselves.

The Librarian cooked her favorite meals for the next two weeks, which meant she was pleased, although she didn’t say it. The Librarian’s daughter felt that she had made the correct choice.

At 16, the Librarian’s daughter was promoted. Her title was raised from “Junior-assistant-in-training” to “Junior Assistant.” She was allowed to greet visitors independently now, and assist visiting scholars in their research.

Like all the women of the Librarian’s line, the Librarian’s daughter had a genetically perfect memory. She had memorized the content of every item in the Library’s catalog by the time she was ten, and she could recite them for visitors at will. This was her favorite part of the job.

She met with visitors in private study rooms. Their laptops and phones confiscated by security upon arrival, they took notes on legal pads and drafted manuscripts with pen and paper. An inconvenience, she had been told, and nodded sympathetically, but secretly she believed they preferred it this way. There were no distractions in the Library. The outside world did not exist. There were no friends, no family members, no strangers in need of a chat, or news reports relaying the day’s tragedies.

Some of the guests required silence, handing the Librarian’s daughter notes with requests rather than communicating with her directly. She pulled their sources, set them gently on the corners of their desks, and slid out of the room. These visitors were a necessary evil. Others, she formed more of a connection with—sometimes, ones that almost resembled something like a friendship. She recommended new avenues for research, brought out related works hidden away on dusty shelves before they thought to ask for them, and even reviewed first drafts for coherency. She liked to imagine that connecting with the guests gave her work, and therefore her life, a deeper purpose.

When the Librarian’s daughter was 22, she met a scholar close to her own age, a young man. This in itself was rare. The Library generally appealed to an older audience—retirees with lifelong projects they had yet to complete, professors on sabbatical from tenureships, Fulbright scholars.

The young man was working on his undergraduate thesis, a twenty-five-page paper on the ethics of starting a sustainable commune in the 21st century. He told her he was studying philosophy, like Steve Jobs or Thomas Jefferson. Like Martin Luther King Jr, he said. She was entranced by him.

His residency at the Library was set to last for one semester. After the first two weeks, the Librarian’s daughter felt she had adequately learned his moods and interests to predict the fluctuating directions of his research.

She devoted a special kind of attention to him and his work, one that she had never given to another visitor and which she knew was not necessary to fulfill her duties. She liked to linger by his desk after delivering a new source, sometimes smiling at him until he looked up and smiled back.

Halfway through his stay, he asked her to have dinner with him. Visitors’ meals were always hosted in the Dining Hall, while she ate in the ground-level cafeteria with her mother and the Library staff.

She blushed when he asked, something she had never before had reason to do.

“I’ll have to ask the Librarian for permission,” she said.

The Librarian was visibly disturbed by her request. Her daughter recognized the signs immediately: furrowed eyebrows that wrinkled in the middle, a slightly abnormal downturn to her lips.

“Protocol does not address dining circumstances directly, but I must advise against it,” her mother said.

“Why?”

“I have found that fixation on specific visitors inhibits our ability to fulfill our birthright responsibilities.”

“One dinner won’t interfere with my responsibilities,” the Librarian’s daughter said.

Her mother scowled.

“To the contrary, I think it could benefit the scholar’s research,” she added.

“Oh?”

She nodded. “I believe him to be one of those such scholars who require the opinion and active listening of outside sources in order to further their ideas.” She did not know if she believed what she said to be true.

“An extrovert, I suppose,” her mother sighed.

She permitted her daughter to attend one singular, independent dinner with the scholar in the Dining Hall.

She arrived before him—5 minutes early. She ordered two waters for the table, like she had seen characters do in the movies she memorized as part of their film scholar exchange program with NYU.

When the student arrived, he held in his hand a bundle of red carnations. She knew he must have ordered them from the mainland. She was honored. She blushed for a second time.

They were served crusted salmon and garlic butter asparagus. He offered to buy a bottle of wine, which she refused. The Protocol did not permit her to consume alcohol. They discussed his travels, the opera singer he listened to on the street in front of a church in Barcelona, a memorial he attended in Berlin, a karaoke bar in Copenhagen. She hung on his every word. She told him, in return, about the microflora that lived in the courtyard pond, the ten-year-long botched renovation that resulted in the uneven flight of stairs tucked away in the Library’s second floor.

They remained seated long after their meal had ended, until the Dining Hall servants had cleared their plates and begun to mop the floors. When they finally rose from their places at the table, he took her hand in his and kissed it.

“What a fantastic night I’ve had,” he said.

She responded in kind.

He asked her to have dinner with him one more time before his departure. Remembering her mother’s insistence on the singularity of this evening, she refused. Instead, she spent entire hours with him in his private study room, talking and laughing and even, on occasion, imagining leaving with him when his residency was set to end in a few short weeks.

A few days before he was scheduled to leave, she entered his private study room to find his things gone, and a note upon the desk:

Thought it would be easier this way. I’m sorry, I’m a coward. I hope you’ll write me and I’ll try to come back as soon as I can.

Beneath the sentiment was an address, a unit number for an apartment in the same city she and her mother had visited many years ago.

The Librarian’s daughter was devastated but, she hoped, reasonable. She attended to her duties, she worked diligently with the never-ending rotation of visitors in the pursuit of their goals, and she cried to herself only during appropriately scheduled fifteen-minute personal breaks. Romantic interest was not permitted by the Protocol.

She skipped every meal for three weeks, leaving her room only to work. Someone, her mother or one of the servants, took to leaving meals on a tray outside her room. She felt ashamed, but did not know why.

After the third week, she sent a letter to the address. She did not address anything they had discussed, or his sudden departure, or the intensity of his absence. She wrote instead about a new collection of books that the library was slated to acquire in the spring. She told him how when she heard the news she understood that she was meant to be elated, that she should have been thrilled, but she could not summon the feeling. She could not remember feeling anything since he left.

Two weeks later, he responded to her letter, and so, something new began.

Imagine: an illicit love affair in opposition to a predetermined destiny of celibacy and academic devotion. Unoriginal, right?

The student, no longer a student now but instead a celebrated philosopher, returned to the Library for the final time during his first sabbatical as a tenured professor at a prestigious university. He was writing a scientific book on love, he had told her in one of his letters. He had visited only one other time since that first semester all those years ago—for a sponsored university fellowship during his time as a PhD candidate. He had begged her to run away with him and she refused. The Library was the only home she’d ever known. There was no one to replace her if she left, and she could not and would not abandon it.

They parted on angry terms, but he wrote to her again only six months later.

As a qualified academic, the philosopher was quieter, more still. He did not kiss her hand when she moved to leave anymore. She had changed, too. She was legally a Librarian— “Librarian Two,” specifically. An unprecedented transfer from another location four years previous had brought Librarian Three. She was less concerned with getting in trouble, less bothered by minor infractions from the Protocol, and less watchful for her mother’s eye, which had itself grown less watchful as the years passed.

This new chapter of their connection began with a kiss in the study room, which turned into many long, indistinguishable kisses in the study room, which in turn bled into slightly-just-a-bit-more than kissing in dusty dark corners of rooms no one other than the Librarian’s daughter had entered for several decades. Finally, she invited him to her room, a place no one else other than her mother had ever seen. All of this was explicitly prohibited by the Protocol, of course. She did not care.

The first month was idyllic, then, the worry seeped in. She began to have nightmares about his departure. She woke weeping with despair from the thought of being alone in the Library again, then felt herself overcome with joy as she remembered he had not yet gone.

He felt the change in her mood immediately. Again, he begged her to run away with him. She could not bear the begging, but could not bear to say no, so she said “Maybe.” And every time he asked, and every time she said “Maybe,” she felt herself believe it a bit more. Maybe she would leave. Maybe she would marry him and maybe she would get a job in that beautiful strange city and maybe she would do a great number of other things the Protocol had forbidden her from doing. Maybe she would live.

In the end, after perhaps the fiftieth or the sixtieth time the philosopher asked, she decided to say “Yes.”

The philosopher urged her not to tell her mother, and she obliged. It was for the best, she decided. She believed this wholeheartedly, until the night before they were set to depart, when anxiety and grief overtook her and she rushed to the Librarian’s private wing and beat her fist against her mother’s bedroom door. The Librarian answered in her nightgown.

“Mother, I am leaving. I wanted to tell you in person.” she said.

Her mother laughed. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Do you remember that student who visited when I was in my twenties? The one I broke Protocol to have dinner with?”

“Vaguely, yes.”

“He’s here, and I’m leaving with him. I believe I’ve sufficiently fulfilled my responsibility to the Library.”

“Oh darling,” her mother said. “No.”

“I know you won’t be pleased—I expected that. But you won’t stop me”

“No, I know. I would let you go if you could. But you can’t leave. You literally can’t leave.”

“Of course I can.”

“You cannot.”

“What do you mean?” the Librarian’s daughter asked.

“You made your choice the day we went to the city, when you were fourteen,” her mother said. “Remember the oath you swore? To commit to the Library forever?”

“Oaths can be broken,” her daughter said.

“Sometimes,” the Librarian replied. “Not this one.”

The Librarian’s daughter was speechless for the first and only time in her life. “I can’t believe you would let me go like this, trying to manipulate me.” She turned and rushed away before the tears could fall.

“If you go, you will never be able to come back,” her mother called after her.

On the day they were intended to leave, the Librarian’s daughter rose before the sun only to find the philosopher had already gone. While she was confessing to her mother, he was boarding the hired boat she believed to be picking the two of them up at dawn. On his bed was a single note with her name on it and a copy of his completed manuscript.

The note reads:

I know what I have done is unforgivable, but here I am asking you to forgive me anyway. I hope you understand that I did it for the sake of the research. The entire world has learned so much from you and we thank you for your contribution. All the same, I am sorry.

The Librarian’s daughter tosses the note aside and begins to read aloud: “Love in the Time of Artificial Intelligence: Surveying the Ability of Inhabitant A.I. to Experience Romantic Love and Grief.”