The Librarianist

Maria had told Bob he should jettison the schedule and come and go as he wished; deciding he’d had enough for the day, he bid the group at the long tables goodbye, and made for Maria’s office. Her door was half-open and she was — on the phone. She made a question mark face at Bob and Bob gave her a thumbs-up. She made the OK sign and he saluted. He made walking fingers and she made the OK sign and he bowed and left the center. Stepping down the path, Bob found that he felt happy; and he understood Maria had been correct regarding her adjustments to his visits. The thought he carried with him as he made his way home was that he’d landed in a place where, in getting to know the individuals at the center, he would likely not suffer a boredom.

JILL WAS A SINCERELY NEGATIVE HUMAN BEING WITH UNWAVERINGLY bad luck and an attitude of ceaseless headlong indignation. Every day she was met with evidence of a hostile fate, and every day she endeavored to endure it, but also to combat it, but also to locate people to talk to about it. She found Bob willing to listen to a degree that was, she told him quietly, as if it were a secret she could somehow keep from him while at the same time telling him, uncommon. In this way he was precious to her, but she was never gentle with him, never thankful. Bob was like a horse run and run, and never fed or watered, only whipped. By the end of Bob’s first month of bookless visits to the center he had established something like a friendship with Jill, or what passed for friendship in her world. No warmth, but a familiarity, with each party comfortable to act as him and herself. Bob couldn’t say what Jill thought of him, but he found her an engaging presence, and he began to look forward to their communications whenever he moved in the direction of the Gambell-Reed Senior Center.

It was a moody day. Bob arrived at the center and found Jill at her usual station, where she sat working on another thousand-piece puzzle: a desert sky at dawn cluttered with hot-air balloons. She did not say hello to Bob, because she never said hello; but he knew she knew he was there, and he knew she would eventually speak, and that this speaking would be the naming of a complaint, and it was: she sighed a long sigh and said, “I’m so tired, Bob.”

“Rough night?” he asked.

“Stupid question.”

Bob took up a puzzle piece and began searching for its position in the picture. “I thought there were no stupid questions,” he said.

“Where’d you hear that? On the internet?” Jill laughed ruefully to herself. Anti-internet sentiment was common from Jill. Bob had almost no experience with that overvast landscape, but somewhere along the line Jill decided he was a devotee and she was disdainful of his behaviors.

She began pumping her hands, explaining to Bob that she had at long last regained the feeling in her thumbs.

“That’s good,” he said.

“No, it isn’t,” she told him, explaining that the numbness had been replaced by a throbbing pain at the thumb joints. The reference to her thumb pain made her think of other pains, and she became expansive on the subject, soliloquizing about her history with pain: the pain of her youth, and the pain of midlife, and her present engagement with it. She spoke of pain as a perceived punishment, pain as a discipline, and lastly, about how much the pain hurt. “You understand that, right?” she said.

“Understand what?”

“It’s only pain if it hurts.”

This seemed self-evident. But then, as was not uncommon, Jill made Bob doubtful of his knowledge. He thought of his own aches, which in recent months had been mounting, and asked, “But what’s the definition of hurts?”

“Do you involuntarily jolt in your seat? Are you sucking in short, sharp breaths with your eyes shut up tight? Does your vision go red in splotchy flashes, and you’re worried you might fall over or faint?”

“No.”

“What you’re experiencing is not pain,” Jill said, “it’s discomfort.”

“Not pain.”

“Discomfort is not pain.”