The Lake and the Library (8 page)

He darted towards another row, and I pursued, and though I tried to bound right behind him, he was gone.

“Aren't you
ever
going to stand still?” I crept alongside the bookcase with one hand on its contents to keep myself composed, until another hand shot out from an empty space between the books and made a grab for my wrist. I shrieked and evaded, backing into the case on the other side, but something was there to nudge me on the shoulder. It was the toe of a shoe, Li's shoe, and when I looked up, there he was, hanging idly off a sliding ladder.

“How did you do that?” I asked, bewildered by his sleight-of-everything.

He held up a finger as though he'd suddenly had an epiphany. He dug through his pockets, his sleeves, and only when he gave his curly head a scratch did it come to him. Reaching behind my ear, he thin-air-snatched a Polaroid, tumbling it between his elongated, precise fingers. I took it before I could be teased with it, seeing that it was a picture of the deer clock on the back wall. A picture of time, a thing I was arrogantly convincing myself I had in infinite supply.

This time, the flapping got both of our attention. We both looked up, and floating down on us with all the grace it had failed to show before was the white bird. It kicked up its little feet before settling on Li's outstretched hand. I was delighted at first, thrilled and awed that I was going to be able to get up close, but my face fell. I backed away, and both Li and the bird looked at me as though I was the crazy one.

“What is that?” I pointed, feeling my spine tighten with something like shock. “How are you doing that?”

He and the bird tilted their heads in concert, absorbing my words as they both took a closer look at each other. The bird puffed itself up, each individual feather rustling in that familiar
papery
way. Because that's what the bird was made of. It did not have curves on it, but folds, and those black markings I couldn't make out before were letters, because the paper was book pages. I had searched Treade for some magic, and here it was, right in front of me. I just couldn't accept it.

Li jumped down from the ladder; the bird barely stirred. He came slowly towards me, his free hand reaching out and taking my wrist so he could position my arm properly. I let him mould me like an obedient marionette as he turned his own arm so it eased against mine, giving the bird an easier means to pass between us. Li's touch was so cold, but I stayed quiet, afraid that if I showed any real apprehension I'd lose the moment. A ripple of kinetic energy sizzled through my skin as his arm pressed into mine. I tensed, not knowing what to expect, but as the bird gingerly raised one talon, then the other, and settled on my wrist, I smiled. It didn't weigh anything; it was paper, after all. I experimented with moving my hand up and down, and though it shook its head and ruffled itself up again, it didn't fly away. I forgot that I had been afraid only a few seconds ago.

I looked up at Li, whose smile crinkled his eyes. “You really are a magician,” I whispered. “How can you be doing this? It's like . . . breathing origami or something.”

He ran a hand down the bird's breast affectionately, like they were old friends. It dipped its head down, gratefully. Lost in his thoughts, Li's face grew far away, going to a place that I couldn't see. I knew he couldn't answer in the way I was used to, so I tried to read him, tried to divine what was beneath the surface of his skin, but I got nowhere.

“Li?” I broke the silence. Suddenly, the bird on my hand collapsed, and I gasped, trying to catch it. It had quickly unfolded itself and reasserted into a pile of wrinkled pages at my feet. Li looked genuinely stricken. I stood there dumbly, bending down to pick the paper up, feeling like I had just broken all of the bird's fragile bones, if it had any. It had seemed so real in my hands.

“I . . .” I mouthed, trying to hand the pages back to him. “I'm so sorry. Can you . . . ?”
Can you fix it? Can you make it alive, again?
The questions sounded even stranger in my head.

All I could say was “I'm so sorry” again and again, unable to control my irrational feelings of guilt over ruining something so precious and remarkable. His hands were instantly over mine as he shook his head.
It's all right
, his eyes softened. He guided me into the centre aisle, right into the light of the rose window, pages in hand.

He was clasping my hands tight, and this time I didn't try to get away or incite a chase. This wasn't part of his slapdash comedy routine or his one-boy-circus act. This was something sacred. He turned my palms up and put one of the pages into them, his other hand over my eyes. I shut them obediently.

“What are you—”

He shushed me with one finger to my mouth. I swallowed. Then, before I could guess what he was going to do, he rested his hand right over my sternum. My heart rose to the occasion and beat against it. Other than Paul, I'd never been this close to or alone with a boy, let alone someone like Li; someone who shone from their centre, someone who made even the air around him buzz with possibility — all without saying a word. These thoughts rushed through my head as he pressed in harder, like he was trying to knead my heart in his palm. I was about to tell him to stop, until I felt the paper in my hand twitch.

I opened my eyes because I had to see this. The corners of the page were curling up, edge by edge, as if it was looking for a good place to start its life. I stood very still, barely breathing, feeling my pulse in my temples as the page straightened itself in portrait right there in my hands. It seemed to shiver. Li was as focused on it as I was, and he reached out a long finger to gently poke the paper right in the middle. A ripple passed through it, and in its wake were the insinuations of fold lines. Our eyes darted together, and grinning, he quirked both eyebrows at me.
Go on
, they encouraged. I focused on the page, trying to summon everything whimsical in me that I could imagine, and with a rush in my heart, I gave the paper a poke.

Fold, tuck, pull, revolve. I suddenly had a paper sparrow pecking at my palms, looking for paper seeds.

Speechless, I raised my palms up, and the bird took off into the light.

In the halo of Li's Cheshire smirk, all I could say was, “This whole place is magic, isn't it?”

He rolled his eyes, grabbed my hand, and took me for a chase after the little bird. It soared into the light of the rose window, and we lost sight of it.

We jerked to a stop, Li pulling me behind a bookcase and looking around like someone was hot on our trail. He had plunged us back into another game, and I was more than willing to dive right there with him. We were crusading archaeologists, maybe, pursued in the jungle by poachers as we sought the rare Paper Bird, which needed our help to evade the poachers' nets. Pace by pace we kept to the shadows of the shelves, each corner holding the possibility of being discovered, framed, or betrayed. In a rush, he pointed. There was a flash of light, the sparrow hopped into view, then took off again. We stumbled after it, climbing the curving iron staircase right on its tail, and listened to our footsteps fall away like raindrops behind us.

Maybe it was seeing the bird come to life, maybe it was my willing heart, but for a moment I thought that the ground had some give to it, like the squish of wet, warm moss beneath my sneakers; thought I felt beads of sweat dot my neck, and that, in the distance, something exotic was
caw
ing across the infinite canopy. The library felt like it was fading around the edges, giving way to something else,
somewhere
else, but every time I tried to grasp it with my eyes, it became solid again. And Li was there right along with me, playing the stoic Indiana Jones type
en pointe
, never missing a beat
.
How could we be sharing the same daydream, connected by a slender thread in the midst of infinity?

Stepping carefully on the landing, Li suddenly stopped, swerving his head around.
We've been spotted
, said the sudden twitch at the corner of his mouth. And also,
we're doomed
! Someone had loosed a booby trap on us and there was little time to escape. Our only apparent salvation was at the top of those mysterious stairs I had seen yesterday, the door, now that I could see it closer, seemed to be made out of the wall itself. We heard a rumbling — or did we? — of falling rock, and though we were on the doorknob quick as anything, it was jammed. Li patted himself furiously for a key, gesturing wildly, feeling our end drawing near. I shook him, demanding he
snap out of it
, and just as we were about to be toast, a rustling of wings made us both look up. The bird pecked on the lintel, and the door swung inward.

We shut it behind us to keep any imaginary poacher or their offensive rock slide at bay, panting at the relief of our adventure marathon coming to a close. The game fell around our ankles and we looked at each other, laughing midcollapse and wondering what got into us. I don't bother asking what had happened, because I wasn't sure it had happened at all.

A light tapping drew my eye around the room. I followed it along, and there was the little sparrow, perched on the edge of a small porthole window near the ceiling.

I looked around for a stepstool, and when I came up with nothing, gestured at Li. “Hey, can you give me a boost?”

He picked me up like I weighed as much as the sparrow. I tried not to turn red or let my face get hot, because this is what friends did, boost each other up to windows . . . in magic libraries while you tried to catch a paper sparrow from flitting away.
Right
. I reached out to cup the little thing in my hands, but it hopped away, persistently tapping against the glass.

Out there was the library's back property, lined by Wilson's Woods and the other abandoned junk. It seemed so far away, like I was looking into a faded photo whose meaning had changed just as much as I had. I held on to that sensation, let this enchanted world I occupied be my home instead. Out there, the morning light struck the trees, especially the ones busted up by the storm, and transformed their broken bodies into something of a miracle. Something so destroyed made into something that could, at least, pretend to be alive in sunlight. I was torn, wanting to dart between those trees with Li as easily as we did through the shelves, and never wanting to have to cross those woods to go home again.

The sparrow and I regarded each other. We were on the same page. “I think he wants to be set free,” I said, reaching for the rusted clasp that kept the window closed, the sparrow hopping excitedly at my hand. Li suddenly put me down.

“Hey!” I protested, but he leaned into me and scooped the bird out of the window. He carried it over to a fireplace, one big enough to stand inside, at the other end of the sitting room. He opened his hands there, and the bird fluttered up and away. I climbed into the fireplace from behind him; the walls were close for him, but nonetheless, I fit in there, with space enough to twirl.

This place really was a palace. “It's amazing! It's so big!” I peered into the shadows of the flue, and sure enough there was more fluttering. Little nests had been made in the incongruities of the brick, made out of shredded pages and anything else available. This was their aviary, and as I felt a hundred paper eyes settle on me, I decided not to disturb it any longer.

“I don't know if I can really trust my eyes, anymore,” I said, absently running my hand along the carved mantelpiece, which was devoid of anything personal or revealing about this place — no photos, no mementos. But from the way the door had been deliberately painted into the wall, I could tell that this sitting room was to always be a secret, to be private. A retreat. There was a sofa in the middle, all red velvet and curved, looking like something out of Louis XIV's cat-scratch bedroom. Fit for a king, but whose throne could it be? And books in here, too, but no shelves; they were spread around the floor in piles, just like in my room, some full open like they had just been freshly read and abandoned, midsentence.

I picked across the glossy hardwood floor, trying to make my dirty shoes avoid the crimson and gold tasselled rug, whose woven patterns looked like a hundred stars all blossoming outward. Li had eased himself down by the sofa, pulling from his pocket one of the pages that used to be the crow-like bird I first saw. It floated in front of him and became a hummingbird, thought coalescing in form like mercury. I knelt down on the carpet at his feet, tucking my ankles under me as I watched the fragile creature flutter like a heartbeat in his hands.

“How can any of this be real?”

The hummingbird folded in on itself, midair, and the page that had just been alive floated quietly down to the sofa. Li glanced down at me, squinting, pointing at my heart and nodding, then pointing to my forehead and frowning.

I got it, easily enough. “Usually when someone says
trust your heart
, it means they don't have any clue what's going on either.”

That got him. His smile broke against his mouth like a wave.

I guess I'd just have to accept it, paper birds, almost jungle, and all. But now that he was sitting still, I figured he would be willing to answer some more questions, in as much as he could in his own way. I got up and pulled him to his feet. “How long have you been coming here, Li?”

Eyes dropping to the ground, then swooping back up in the air, he seemed to be genuinely calculating. He drifted to a nearby wall, smoothing it out at first with one hand, then the other. He looked like he was feeling around for an answer, listening for something inside. But he came away without one, turned to face me, and stretched out his arms.

A long time
.

“Really? Man . . . I'm jealous!” I threw my arms up, reaching out to mimic him and smooth out the cool plaster of the wall. “I would give anything to have found this place years ago.” This place. This den of mysteries and enchantment. Where magic lay in concentrated wait before being snuffed out. It could have changed so much.