Chapter 1 Davey

A building is a building. Sticks and stones. Concrete and steel. It wishes its inhabitants no harm. A building doesn't dream or weep or hope, any more than the carved lions that stand in front of it do. It has no ideas, no opinions.

A library is a building full of ideas and opinions. A contradiction!

The William E. Woodend Rare Books Library, more alive than inanimate, stood elbow to elbow with the other gray stone buildings that made up the old campus, so often featured in university brochures. The first book had been shelved nearly one hundred and twenty years earlier. It wasn't a rare books library then. At some point in the intervening century, the collection of books was called "special" and the doors were closed to the public.

One hundred and twenty years for the books to whisper and scheme. If given one hundred and fifty more, those books might find a way to make those sticks and stones, that concrete and steel, tumble to the ground.

***

Davey Kebede signed in for his last-ever shift at the library at one o'clock on the afternoon of Thursday, June 24. It had been Davey's intention to sleep in that morning, to gather rest for the long night ahead, but a tiny hole in the screen of his bedroom window had allowed in one of Vermont's awful predawn mosquitoes, and after biting him in the fleshy crevasse below his eyebrow, the thing continued to buzz near his ear until he finally abandoned all hope of sleep at six thirty.

The library extended its hours until eight on Thursdays during the academic year. Every other night it closed at five, and once the university switched to summer hours it didn't stay open late at all. The proper librarians, those with tenure and business cards and health insurance, hated working Thursdays, refused to work Thursdays. Shift work was for public librarians. Let them run their seven p.m. romance novel book clubs for working moms; the rare books specialists were going home in time to watch the evening news.

Davey loved the late Thursdays. They were staffed by student library assistants and, performatively, by Ronald, the chief librarian, who would spend the time in his office reviewing invoices. No one had ever explicitly told Davey he was in charge on Thursdays, but nature abhors a vacuum (Aristotle believed that), so Davey would be a leader where he found none.

There was a Ge'ez manuscript on Davey's desk, a nineteenth-century prayer book in red and black inks, that he was supposed to be writing descriptive metadata for, and the most difficult decision of his day was whether he should reshelve it with the rest of the cataloging backlog or leave it on his desk as winking confirmation of the inevitable.

Davey took his dinner break at five. Most everyone else called it a lunch break, even on Thursdays when it occurred in late afternoon or early evening, but Davey thought that was classless and insisted on calling something what it was. On that day it was neither a dinner nor a lunch break because Davey didn't eat. The library had a lunchroom, necessary because food and beverage weren't allowed on desks, where crumbs or coffee might damage an ancient text. Davey stomped his feet like an angry toddler—loud, dramatic, purposefully exaggerated—on his way into the room that was empty but for a saggy old couch. Once, someone had seen a mouse dash out from underneath that rose-printed couch. The toddler-like stomping was so the mouse knew it didn't have the run of the room. Davey was fasting, but that didn't mean his soul had to starve, so he settled on the couch with an edition of Homeri hymnus in Cererem. Davey loved this edition; the curving Greek typography alongside the rigidity of the Latin explanatory notes. Anyone who argued that this handsome 1782 book belonged safely on the shelf (from which Davey had retrieved it) and not settled in on the lunchroom couch with him wasn't worthy of Homer's poetry.

Still, on the offhand chance that Ronald was such a philistine, Davey had snuck the volume into the lunchroom under a pile of more modern papers.

***

It was Davey's desire to have staged the ritual in September, as the Greeks had, but the student assistant staffing model made September impossible. For anyone getting a diploma at the ceremony tomorrow, Thursday, June 24, it would be their last shift as a student assistant at the library. That included Davey.

The graduate students for the evening tour were waiting for him in the elevator lobby by the coatroom when he had finished his dinner break at six. An odd mix of learners, starting in the summer session instead of with their peers in the fall. The ceremony was supposed to start at sundown. If they were staging the thing in September like Davey had wanted, that would be a full hour earlier. He'd be an hour less hungry.

The tour was supposed to focus on the Ge'ez manuscripts. Not that these graduate students were coming to the university to study them. These new students, this sign that the library, the university, was ready to move on, this crop of fresh meat, they were there to study literature, the classics, religion. He'd show them the Ethiopian prayer books, sure, but he knew what they really wanted to see.

Davey had walked through the maze of the stacks, flipped through dusty bibliographies, peered into acid-free boxes, for the two years he'd been lucky enough to work at the library to put together a dynamic show for his tours. There was what Ronald told him was important, and then there was what Davey knew was important. It was the same level of care he'd used to put together the list of invitations for the ritual that night.

***

Of the twelve or so undergraduate and graduate students who worked at the library, he first eliminated those who had too strong a moral compass. The Catholics, the collegiate sexual assault whistleblowers, anyone who might feel the need to unburden their conscience by sharing information about the event with Ronald. Each of the six remaining graduate student library assistants, themselves on the eve of graduation, received a whispered invitation in the preceding weeks to spend the whole night at the library away from Ronald's watchful eye, where Davey promised there would be chanting, reenactments, spirituality, and a lot of drugs. He tailored the specific invitation to each recipient.

Davey didn't go into a lot of detail about the mechanics of the ritual during that initial invitation. The necessity for fasting, for example, he mentioned only on Monday, at which point he lost one of his participants. As it was, he hadn't received enough positive replies to fill all the roles, so he'd had to loosen the criteria quite a bit. Not about the moral compass, that rule held fast, but he allowed one of the participants, Soraya, to invite her boyfriend Kip—a PhD candidate who often worked at the library. Kip had mentioned the event and Soraya's disappointment that it wasn't something they could do as a couple, repeatedly, when he ran into Davey at the library. Kip in turn invited an undergraduate student in his tutorial section for the Survey of Greek Literature to 450 BCE course that he assisted for Professor Hanink because he believed the undergraduate could procure the drugs they needed, and when she had to go to a friend to get those drugs, the friend was invited along too.

That brought them to six if Davey counted himself, and the ritual was really best with at least seven, so just that week, Davey had taken a long look around the workroom until his eyes landed on one of the undergraduates who occasionally did project work at the library on behalf of one of her professors. It wasn't that he had ruled her out when considering her against the criteria before. She was something of a mouse and, failing to appear from under the couch and make herself known, Davey hadn't thought about her at all.

Three days before they were to shut themselves into the library basement, Davey persuaded the others to accept the mousy undergraduate. Not only a kid, she was a sciences student, who reportedly hailed from somewhere in the vast prairies where the wheat and soybeans grew. They never would have considered her if not for the need to fill numbers, but everyone agreed she had one exceptional quality: the kid always kept her mouth shut. And so on Monday, June 21, Faye Bradshaw received her invitation.