George stood on the steps of Lakeland Public Library—his library—and studied his reflection in the tall glass doors. Intelligent gray eyes set in a pleasantly round face, a full head of auburn hair, all his own, thank you very much. All in all, a cheerful sort of guy. Squinting at his reflection, he smoothed back an unruly lock with the palm of his hand, straightened his tie, and wondered, for the fourth morning in a row, why such a friendly-looking fellow deserved such punishment.
Years ago, sitting at a solitary cataloger’s desk deep in the bowels of Lakeland Public, aspiring to be head of it one day, he wished he had known then what he knew now. Management would be simple, he told himself, if it weren’t for all the people.
These doors, for example. He winced as the plain glass panels whooshed open automatically before him, followed by a blast of heat that ruffled his carefully styled hair. At their weekly staff meetings the circulation librarian, Jean McBride, had gone on and on about the old revolving doors. “That’s the second time this week a mother with a stroller’s been caught in that door, not to mention the indignity of forcing our handicapped patrons to use the basement entrance!” Counterarguments about the architectural significance of the doors—made of brass, glass, and ornately carved wood, part of the original building when Andrew Carnegie had dedicated it at the turn of the century—not to mention the added cost of heating the lobby, had fallen on deaf ears. When the readers’ services librarian and the head of cataloging had stood in solidarity with their colleagues, George had capitulated. Now, fully ten percent of his fuel oil budget was going to heat four parallel parking spaces on Cuyahoga Street and keep the blasted forsythia bushes warm throughout the winter. He had the bills to prove it.
“Morning, Dr. Hopkins.”
“Morning, Jean.” It annoyed him that no matter how early he arrived at work, that damned woman was there ahead of him. Already his stomach was in knots thinking about the staff meeting he’d scheduled for later that morning. He prayed they wouldn’t gang up on him again.
Jean had been a particular challenge. When he’d first taken the directorship, she had been manning the circulation desk wearing tennis shoes, slacks, dumpy sweaters, and once, to his horror, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. At his first staff meeting, he’d impressed on her, indeed on all “front office” staff, the importance of their appearance. “If we don’t look professional,” he had admonished, “how can we expect our customers (never patrons!) to treat us as such?”
Today he smiled at Jean, who wore, he was pleased to note, a frilly white blouse under a chic, navy blue suit. He pictured navy hose ending in black, patent-leather t-strap shoes, but could only imagine this without leaning very obviously over the counter.
George punched the up button and waited, pacing, while the elevator made a slow, creaking ascent from the basement. When the doors shuddered open, he climbed aboard and rode to the fifth floor, where his office was tucked into a corner with windows overlooking Lake Erie on two sides.
Lolly, his secretary, was already at her desk, head bent over her keyboard. When he pushed through the double doors, she popped up as if shot from a toaster. “Dr. Hopkins! Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
As he crossed the carpet to his office, Lolly orbited around her cubicle, keeping her body between her boss and whatever was displayed on her monitor screen. George’s eyes narrowed. “Coffee will be fine, Miss Taylor.” He took three steps toward his office, then suddenly turned, catching his secretary, already on her way to the coffee machine, off guard. “What’s that on your monitor?”
Lolly smiled uncertainly. “Just a screen saver.”
George squinted toward the monitor where manic dogs frolicked, gradually gobbling bits of the Word document Lolly had been working on. He scowled. “What’s wrong with the one that came with the computer?” he demanded, thinking of the soothing, cloud-studded landscape that materialized on his screen whenever it had been idle for ten minutes.
Lolly’s dark eyes bored into his, her lips forming a thin, hard line. She opened her mouth, then seemed to reconsider. “I’ll change it back,” she whispered.
George grunted. “What if a board member should come in and see that? Very unprofessional!” He unlocked the door to his office and slipped in, thinking this was not an auspicious start to the day.
For the next two hours, sipping the hot coffee Lolly periodically provided, hoping, vainly, to feel the revitalizing effects of caffeine surging through his system, George proofed the final draft of his annual report. On page twenty-seven, he added a paragraph that had just occurred to him about estate planning and the Friends of the Library Foundation. Then, exuding self-confidence after a short but productively persuasive telephone conversation with an elderly, chronically ill donor, George gathered up the annual report, slid it into his secretary’s in-box, and headed toward the conference room, smiling.
His confidence evaporated the minute he entered the room. Arranged in a horseshoe around the table was his staff, presided over like a malevolent Buddha by Claudia Fairfield, head of readers’ services, narrow-eyed and unsmiling. Instantly, he regretted appointing Claudia head of the facilities management committee. Before he had time to pull up his chair, she thrust her triangular chin over the table and announced, “We have our report.”
George swallowed, the coffee he’d recently consumed making an unwelcome comeback. On his left sat Jean McBride, hands folded on the table in front of her, quietly studying her painted thumbnails. On Jean’s left was Belinda D’Arcy, the archivist, leafing through some papers and refusing to meet his eyes; still fuming, no doubt, over George’s refusal to grant her request for leave without pay to take care of her mother. Next to Belinda sat Miles Nichols, the head cataloger who, with his floppy hair, flattish nose, and lipless mouth, reminded George of a lizard. Myles had an elderly mother, too. If George were to grant Belinda’s request, soon Myles would be asking for leave, and the next thing he knew, the whole staff would be expecting George to bend over backward for them. There’d be no end to it. Time off to attend classes. Write a thesis. Get married. Go on vacations even.
George had done his homework on Belinda, at least. She’d threatened to quit, but George had been through her personnel folder and knew that the threat was an empty one. Just two years short of retirement, Belinda could hardly risk losing her pension.
As Claudia droned on about the annual picnic, vending machines in the staff area (including one that dispensed cappuccino), and electrical outlets in the ladies’ rest rooms to accommodate their damn hair dryers, George zoned out. He found himself wondering about the package he was expecting from L.L. Bean and whether he’d have time to eat before his evening karate class.
“Overtime.” The word sliced through his reverie like a knife. George had replaced his predecessor’s rather lackadaisical approach to payroll with a computerized system, well aware that the institution of time cards would make him about as popular as mosquitoes at a nudist colony. But it had to be done. Now, it appeared, he was being punished for his pains. “Because of the Friends’ meeting, I worked forty-nine hours last week,” Jean was whining. “How does the library plan to pay me for it?”
Controlling his exasperation, George explained, for what seemed like the hundredth time, that overtime hours had to be approved in advance, and referred her to the new staff manual.
“Nobody told me I had to ask in advance,” Jean complained.
“It’s in the cover memo I sent out to all staff,” George reminded her. He hastily finessed by referring Jean to the personnel office all the while knowing, with fear’s cold fingers squeezing his gut, that before long he’d be summoned by the Brunehilde in charge of that office and forced to attend another session of “sensitivity training.”
“And now,” Claudia continued with relentless momentum, “we want to discuss some new concerns about library safety. As you know, Lakeland is an elderly library, and because of budgetary constraints, needed repairs have been shamefully neglected.”
George knew all about budgetary restraints. He’d met with the Board of Governors just last week, and although he’d pleaded for more money, none had been forthcoming. Indeed, the bond issue in November had failed; the library would simply have to make do with funding at last year’s level. George doubted he merited the confidence the Board had placed in him. With automatic cost-of-living salary increases and the price of magazines and newspapers spiraling out of control, he was at his wit’s end. Even if he fired that good-for-nothing gaggle of Madonna wannabees who shelved the books with all the speed of molasses in January, he’d save only enough to buy a one-year subscription to Science Citation Index. It was discouraging.
“Nevertheless,” Claudia forged on, “we must address some safety issues.”
“Which are?” George inquired.
Claudia raised an index finger. “One. The dumbwaiter. It doesn’t work half the time. Yesterday I looked up the shaft to see what was holding it up and nearly got decapitated when it suddenly decided to come down.’’
George suppressed a smile. If that happened, Claudia’s mouth would go on flapping a full ten minutes after her head had parted company with her body. He nodded sagely, his fingers tented over his lips.
“Two. The compact shelving. The hand cranks are stiff and difficult for our older staff to manage.” Claudia braved a sideways glance at Belinda. “Nowadays, they’re electric,” she added, as if George had just emerged, dazed and blinking, from a time machine sent from the seventeenth century. “With automatic shutoff controls. I shudder to think what would happen if someone was reaching for the Bryant Papers when somebody else decided to check out the World War II correspondence.”
Myles, who had until this point been mindlessly tracing the lifeline on his palm with a ballpoint pen, raised both hands in front of his face and brought them sharply together. “Splat!”
Belinda glared at him from across the table. “Not funny, Myles.” Myles shrugged and returned to his doodling.
“Three.” Claudia soldiered on, like a suffragette on a mission. “We’ve got to get rid of the halon.”
“Why?” George inquired. “It’s the most effective fire retardant ever invented. And since it’s a gas, it doesn’t ruin the manuscripts as water would.”
“True,” Claudia admitted, “But it does deplete the ozone layer.”
“Like freon,” Jean added.
All around the table, George’s staff nodded sagely. Good God almighty! He was captaining a Greenpeace vessel. “But surely...” he began, until Claudia raised a caterpillar-like eyebrow.
“No choice, I’m afraid. Halon gas hasn’t been manufactured since 1994, and in 2003 it will be banned altogether.”
With fat, ringless fingers, she started a three-page Internet printout on a circuit around the table. When it reached George, everybody waited silently while he scanned the document. Indeed, halon was being phased out in favor of an alphabet of substances like FM200 and ETEC Agent A, but it was the price tag that caught his eye. If he handed over his entire salary for a year, it would just about cover the cost of a retrofit.
“Besides, it sucks all the oxygen out of the air,” Jean commented. “What if there was a fire, and Belinda was working in the vault when the halon went off?”
Myles threw his head back, eyelids fluttering grotesquely over the whites of his eyes and gurgled like a clogged drain.
“Nonsense!” George scoffed. “There are safeguards.” Although he didn’t have the vaguest idea what they might be. “Let me study the issue and get back to you. Anything else?” His question met a wall of silence. “Good. Back to work, then.”
George stood, shook the kinks out of his calves, and concentrated on shoving papers back into his folder. When he glanced up again, everyone had gone except Belinda. “Dr. Hopkins?”
“Yes, Belinda?”
“I was wondering if you’d reconsider your decision about my request for leave without pay.”
George stared. “I thought we’d settled that.”
“Well, I consulted the city employees’ manual, like you suggested just now, and it clearly states that leave without pay may be granted under certain circumstances.” A button dangled from her cardigan by a thin thread and she twisted it round and round. “I met a clerk at the court house yesterday who’s on three months’ leave just to study for her bar exam!”
George tucked his folder under his arm. “If you had read those regulations carefully, Miss D’Arcy, you’d have seen that such leave is granted at supervisor discretion. If I let you go for so long a time, it’s as good as announcing to the Board of Governors that I don’t really need an archivist.”
A tear slid down Belinda D’Arcy’s cheek and made a dark splotch on her lime green blouse. “My mother has Alzheimer’s, Dr. Hopkins.”
“So you said.” George leaned against the doorframe. “Look, I don’t wish to appear uncompromising and hardhearted, but I have a library to run, Miss D’Arcy. Surely there are, uh, arrangements you can make. Adult day care? Hospice? A nursing home? We certainly pay you enough.” Belinda turned and fled.
George stooped to pick up the button that had fallen from the archivist’s sweater. “Wait! You’ve lost your button!” But the door to the corridor slammed, and Belinda was gone.
George spent the next week glued to the chair in front of his computer, plugging new figures into his Excel spreadsheet, moving them about from column to column like some elaborate chess game. If he put off the new photocopier acquisition until next year, he discovered, the dumbwaiter could be fixed, but replacing the compact shelving and the halon system that protected the manuscript vault was simply out of the question, either now or in the foreseeable future.
Late one afternoon, with the cleaning staff busily emptying trash baskets nearby, George determined that the cranks on the compact shelving units did work a bit stiffly, but nothing that a little WD-40 couldn’t fix. He worked the lubricant well into the crank mechanisms at the end of each row of shelves, then, beginning with the section where the atlases were kept, he knelt and began spraying WD-40 on the tracks that ran along the floor. He was so intent on his task that it took him a while to notice that the shelves were closing in on him. “Hey!” he shouted over the drone of the vacuum cleaner. “Someone’s in here!” But the gap continued to narrow.
George scrambled to his feet and braced his arms, Sampson-like, against the shelves. “Hey!” he shouted again, feeling the flab on his upper arms quiver ineffectually beneath his sleeves. “Hey! Hey!”
It was an oversize Atlas of the World: 1750, Volume IV that saved him when he managed to wedge it into the narrowing gap between the shelves. Underarms ringed with sweat, he stepped over the blessed book and peeked out into the room. “Who’s there?”
But he saw no one. Even the cleaning crew had vanished.
Later, relaxing at home with a cold glass of Chablis, his blood pressure and heart rate returned to normal, George almost succeeded in convincing himself that it was one of the cleaning crew who had moved the shelves, but was simply too frightened to admit it. Yet a feeling of uneasiness hung about him like a cloud, and for the next couple of days, he rarely left his office.
Until Belinda D’Arcy called. “Please come down to the manuscript vault, Dr. Hopkins. I have something to show you.”
George laid aside his Publishers Weekly and sighed. It had been a fine, sunny day. He had eaten lunch at a picnic table in the park. Later, his mother had telephoned to say that she was not coming for Christmas this year. Yes, a near perfect day. The last thing in the world George wanted to do was spoil it by talking to Belinda D’Arcy. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
“I’ll have to show you.”
George checked his watch. “Okay. If it’s that important, I’ll try to stop by on my way home.”
In the next few minutes while George packed up his briefcase, locked his office door, and caught the elevator to the archives on Sublevel A, he wondered what was bothering the archivist this time. A dead rat, probably. Or a bit of condensation on the pipes.
He found Belinda waiting for him in the spacious vault, standing behind one of two long, narrow study tables, her plain face unflatteringly sallow under the bright fluorescent lights. “What did you decide about the halon?” she asked.
“We’ll need new cylinders, pipework, and nozzles,” George explained. “I’m putting them into the five-year plan.”
“But it’s dangerous now,” Belinda complained, moving between George and the door.
“Look,” George snapped. “I’ve studied the installation carefully. I’ve read the manual. Even if halon should suddenly fill this room, it would last only ten seconds.” He pointed to a gridded opening near the floor. “After that, those big exhaust fans kick in and suck it all out. Nobody’s in danger.”
“Really.” It was a statement, not a question. “I’ve left a report on the table,” she said. “I suggest you read it.”
Before he could reply, Belinda slipped out the door and slammed it shut behind her.
At first, George wasn’t alarmed. It wasn’t the first time Belinda had stormed out of a meeting; for someone in her sixties, she was surprisingly immature.
The room was scrupulously neat, so it didn’t take him long to find the folder where she had left it for him, on the table farthest from the door. He skimmed over the report—something with an official-looking logo from a firm called Foggo, Inc.—but it didn’t seem to contain anything he didn’t already know.
He put the report down and went to the door, but the damned woman had slammed it so hard that it was jammed. “Belinda?” Feeling foolish, he pounded against the door with his fist. “Belinda!”
Her voice was soft, and surprisingly close, just on the other side of the door. “I suggest you read the small print, Dr. Hopkins.”
The woman has lost her marbles! George was caught up in some sort of macabre game, and if he wanted to get home tonight in time to feed the cat, the only thing he could do was play along.
He grabbed the report and flipped through it again, noticing for the first time where someone—probably Belinda—had highlighted a footnote with yellow marker:
Caution. Do not place boxes, papers, or other objects on shelves or tables near the nozzles, as they will be blown off by the extremely high velocities created by the gas shooting from the tanks. To minimize this potential hazard, install pegboard sheets at the ends of shelving units near the nozzles in order to allow penetration, but deflect the blast. Ceiling panels must be secured...
George felt his face grow hot; blood pounded in his ears. He glanced quickly around the room. No pegboard sheets. Boxes all over the shelves. And how the hell was he supposed to know how the ceiling panels were secured.
“And by the way, George,” he heard Belinda say. “I think I smell smoke!”
George’s stomach lurched. “Belinda! Open the door!”
“Fire, fire, fire!” she singsonged.
George knew the klaxon would be loud, but he was totally unprepared for the ear-splitting sound of the halon being discharged. It exploded from vents all around him, knocking the boxes off their shelves, sending their contents—manuscripts and letters and antique photographs— swirling about the room in a furious hurricane. Floor tiles erupted from their framework grid, narrowly missing his head as they shot toward the ceiling. All around him, the air shimmered as halon mixed with the oxygen in it.
Ten seconds? It seemed to George like ten years.
A tile flew up, striking a shelf, which tilted. A bronze bust of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry teetered on the edge, then toppled, falling on an aquatint of the barge Seneca Chief, dated 1825, shattering the glass. A glistening shard spun through the air, sliced through his collar, and severed his jugular.
By the time the exhaust fans kicked in, George was already dead.