The Librarianist

She pointed that Bob should follow her out of the center and onto the porch. Once the front door clacked shut behind them, she said, “If I could be frank with you, I would encourage you to think twice before volunteering. I say this for your sake as well as mine. Because the volunteer program has been nothing but a strain on the center. Actually, I’ve asked the AVA to take us off their rotation because every person they’ve sent us has been far more problematic than helpful. Each one of them arrives here simply beaming from their own good deed, but none of them lasts out the month because the reality of the situation here is thornier than they can comprehend. You will never, for example, be thanked; but you will be criticized, scrutinized, and verbally abused. The men and women here are sensitive to the state of their lives; a single hint of charity and they lash out, and I can’t really say that I blame them.”

“Well,” said Bob.

“I don’t mean it as a critique against you personally,” Maria told him. “You seem like a very nice man.” She paused, and made the face of someone reapproaching an issue from a fresh angle. “May I assume you’re retired?”

“Yes.”

“What position did you hold?”

“I was a librarian.”

“For how long were you a librarian?”

“From the ages of twenty-two to sixty-seven.”

Maria said, “Sometimes retirees volunteer for us in hopes we’ll take their malaise away.”

“I don’t suffer from malaise,” Bob said. “And I don’t care to be thanked.” The cloud cover had thinned and the sky was lit in pastel pinks, purples, and an orange. Bob was marking these colors when he had his idea. “I could read to them.”

“Read to who?”

He pointed at the center.

“Read to them what?”

“Stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Stories of entertainment.”

Maria was nodding, then shaking her head. “Yes, but no,” she said. “These aren’t readers, for the most part, Bob.”

“But to be read to is another thing,” he told her. “Everyone likes to be told a story.”

“Okay, but do they?” she asked.

They were stepping down the tall concrete stairwell set to the side of the zigzagging path. Maria restated her belief that the reading angle was a mistake; but Bob had won her over with his pluck, and she said she was willing to let him try it out. When they arrived at the sidewalk, she gave him her business card and said, “Just refer the AVA to my office number, and we’ll get you placed here.” Bob thanked her and shook her hand and walked off. Halfway up the block he turned back and saw that Maria was watching him. “What did you think of Jill?” she called out, and Bob made the half-and-half gesture. Now Maria smiled, and she turned and jogged up the steps, which surprised Bob; he wouldn’t have thought of her as a jogger-up-the-steps.

BOB TELEPHONED THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER ASSOCIATION THE NEXT morning and later in the week received a packet in the mail, color brochures featuring pictures of glad seniors, glad people in wheelchairs. The text was highly praiseful and petting of Bob’s decision to lend a hand, but there was a hitch, which was that he had to be vetted before the AVA welcomed him officially into the fold. Saturday morning and he drove to a storefront on Broadway that specialized in such things as passport photos and notarizations and fingerprints, the last being what he was after. His prints were sent off to what he imagined was a subterranean robot cityscape, a bunker database where they kept the shit list under dense glass, to check his history for uncommon cruelties, irregular moralities. He didn’t expect there to be an issue and there wasn’t, but he did feel a doubt reminiscent of his experience of passing through the exit barriers at the pharmacy and wondering if the security alarm would sound even though he’d not stolen anything.

Bob had not been particularly good or bad in his life. Like many, like most, he rode the center line, not going out of his way to perform damage against the undeserving but never arcing toward helping the deserving, either. Why now, then? He himself didn’t know for certain. The night before his first official visit to the center he dreamed he arrived and was greeted in the same garrulous, teasing manner as the man with the big beret had been. The scene of group acceptance was heady, but when Bob stepped into the center the next morning no one acknowledged his presence. “Hello,” he said, but nobody so much as glanced at him, and he understood he was going to have to work his way toward visibility, to earn the right to be seen by these people, which he believed was fair, and correct.