The Reality of Fiction

“Hey yeah, I wanna shhh, baby. Here I go, here I go, here I go again. Shhh shhhh ba-doop.”

“Yes, here you again,” she remarked to herself through gritted teeth. For the last two hours she had been listening to this man turn Salt N Peppa into a quiet joke that was ironically not quiet at all, the cadence of his deep voice crescendoing and decrescendoing as he roamed up and down the many lanes of bookshelves.

All she wanted to do was put her head down and finish this project. Is the library not the place for this exact situation? Peace N Quiet was what she needed. Not Salt N Peppa, though she was not too above humor to realize that salty was definitely what she was becoming.

What was he even doing here? He clearly had no concept of how a library is to be utilized.

“Shhh Shhh ba-doop.” The voice became louder as it moved to the shelf behind her working space.

That was it. She had had enough. Someone needed to tell this man that this was a library and a place for quietude. With this new resolve, she got up from her desk and skirted around the shelf to face this intruder of silence.

“Excuse me,” she said, sternly.

The man paused with his task, glancing down on her. “You’re excused,” he said, angling to the side, leaving space for her to get through, which was a necessary movement. The man almost filled up the entire aisle with the breadth of his body.

More disgruntled now than ever, she opened her mouth to rebuke this man, but then left it hanging open with no words. At that moment, she noticed the book he had been placing on the shelf. The top shelf, she might add, with no assistance of a stool.

“Excuse me,” she repeated, but with different intentions this time, getting distracted from the original purpose of her operation.

“You’ve already said that,” the man noted, turning back toward the shelf, and continuing on with his task, “and I’ve already permissed you.”

“First of all, that’s not a real word,” she stated. “But second of all, that there is fictional historical romance novel,” she continued, pointing up at the book he had put on the shelf.

“Astute observation,” he smiled. “Did you get that from the title, Love in the Time of Cholera, or from the fact that it’s one of the more critically acclaimed novels in history?” Even though his voice was kind, and his disposition genial, she could not help but read between the lines of someone who was being sarcastic.

“Clearly, you have no observational shrewdness of your own, because this is the health section,” she stated, gesticulating to the many books in the area, as if this would be enough to prove her point.

“10 points to Gryffindor!” he exclaimed, clapping his hand against another book still in his arms.

She looked around, horrorstruck by this outburst. Does this man have no awareness, no concept of the literal unspoken rule of the library?

“Why are you putting this book here? It doesn’t belong,” she whispered, frustrated, her voice coming through clenched teeth, like the quieter she spoke, the more she could make up for his noise.

“Hmm,” he observed, in what she perceived as fake ponderance. “Last I checked, Cholera was a disease that one would want to avoid in order to be healthy.”

“It’s fictional,” she replied.

“Cholera?” he asked, now smirking. He had finally decided to drop his fake pretenses.

She sighed, exasperated that she was even arguing a fact that she knew that he knew what she had meant.

“You know what, I don’t care,” she said. “All I wanted to do was to come over here to tell you that you’re being too loud, and if you could please keep quiet so that some of us can work in peace, that would be appreciated,” she responded. “If you want to upend the entire Dewey Decimal System for some form of personal amusement, then you know what, that’s up to you,” she rambled, turning on her heel to go, but then turning back around. “I mean really what is the point of this? Did you get lost? Or do you think someone is going to see that book and think, this is what I’ve been looking for? I’ve always wondered about Cholera and how it relates to love."

At this point, he was leaning against the shelf, clearly amused at the frustration he had caused. “I think this book’s creation is proof that someone has thought about cholera and how it related to love,” he pointed out.

“That’s not the point,” she stammered, taken aback by this logical argument.

“So, you made a point that is not a point?” he countered, his fake ponderance returning.

“Ugh,” she grumbled.

She wanted him to understand that it was wrong. Everything about him was wrong, from his singing in a library, to his displacement of books, to his misuse of words.

“The book is fictional,” she stated slowly. “This section is not. It doesn’t belong here, quite like you don’t belong in a library,” she retorted.

“Do I not?” he questioned, smirking again. “Why so? Perhaps you’re not a fan of my singing?” he continued, turning around. He began putting another book on a different shelf.

“Well that’s a start,” she said. She did not bother looking at the other title, lest it perturb her further.

“Maybe it’s the song?” he suggested, turning his head toward her with a smile. “Being a larger man with an exceptionally deep voice, I could never quite pull off the subtle sassiness of the artistic female. You do not want to see me attempt Beyoncé.”

“How about you attempt no one,” she recommended.

“I can attempt that, as you say, but I make no promises. When the words call…” he trailed off, in a fake mystifying trance.

“Then you read them in a book. Not out loud,” she interjected.

“So the spoken word is less meaningful than the written?” he countered.

“Maybe not less meaningful, but more permanent,” she stated, moving to grab the misplaced book off the shelf, which was too far out of her reach. “And they should be easily accessible, which starts with them being put in their rightful place.”

“Ah,” he said, again in the mystified voice, while grinning at her inability to get to the book. “So I don’t belong because I put books on what you perceive is the wrong shelf?”

“What I perceive?” she questioned, flabbergasted. “It is not I that perceives this. It is fact, like this section should be.”

“I wasn’t aware that systems were fact. In fact, I believe Dewey was an innovator, and innovation is almost like the antithesis of fact. Innovation is creation, brining into existence something that wasn’t there previously.”

“So you’re a self-proclaimed innovator?” she snorted, stepping off her tiptoes, and giving up on retrieving the book. “Saving libraries from the tedious nature they’ve become accustomed to, are you? A new system in a new era. What will you call it… The Reality of Fiction System?”

“Ah see, you do have ideas,” he mused. “Not necessarily good ones,” he added, raising an eyebrow at her in a studious glance, like he was taking her System suggestion into real consideration. “But all ideas start as scraps before someone can make sense of them,” he replied, giving her a doe eyed look of fake encouragement.

“Someone already did,” she noted.

“With that attitude, he never would have, and you’d be looking for your library book based on oldest to newest. Good luck finding the next George R.R. Martin book in that system, a book squished somewhere before Harry Potter, but after Lord of Rings. Although,” he added, pausing. “By the time you found all the corresponding books in the series, he may actually finish it. Then it’d be the last book, making it much more accessible, as you are so fond of.”

“This conversation is going nowhere,” she stated.

“Good thing it’s not permanent then, isn’t it?” he observed, amused.

“Yes, my only saving grace,” she scoffed, annoyed with herself now for letting this drag on. “I’m going now. Please keep it down, and please show some respect with the books. If not for the patrons that are looking in the section, then at least for the librarians who have to fix what you’ve done,” she finished, pleased with her final admonishment.

And before anymore could be said, she turned and walked back to her desk, sitting down with a sigh of relief that it was over. How anyone could be so unaware, was beyond her. Maybe, just maybe, she could finally work in peace and quiet.

She reached for her closed book with satisfaction at the now silent space around her, flipping it open with vehemence, accidentally knocking her water bottle to the floor. She panicked as it clonked to the ground and rolled noisily into a table leg. As she hurriedly reached over to pick it up, her elbow knocked her book off the table, causing a loud thump as it fell gracelessly to the floor. She quickly bent to retrieve both fallen items, stretching for her water bottle, which had sidled itself on the other side of the table. Just as her fingers trapped the loop on the top of the bottle, her butt knocked the edge of the chair backward. She quickly turned, watching it weeble wobble in uncertainty. Should it stay or should it fall... Forgetting her water bottle in her hand, she swiftly grabbed for the unstable chair, once again dropping the bottle with a clunk. In reflexive horror, her hands went to her face, releasing the chair to its tilted position. And fall it did. With a thunk louder than that of the book or the twice fallen water bottle, for it had managed to collide course with the tin trash can to the edge of her desk, creating a reverberating memory, echoing every fallen soldier before her.

“Excuse me,” a familiar voice said from above her.

She looked up to the man she knew was there, and for the first time, she saw him fully frontal, facing her. As she scanned to the top of the mountain before her, she frowned at his chest. There, plainly visible in this light and in this position, was a name tag. The inscription of the library’s name and logo engraved next to the name.

“This is a library, ma’am. I’m going to need you to quiet down. People are trying to work.” And like the etching on the owner’s name tag, the man walked away, a smile etched onto his face.