The Unfinished World (19 page)

From the Eternal Library's Official Employee Handbook
: The brain of the Fever Librarian should be made mostly of melancholy. The Fever Librarian should wear black bile in the veins. The Fever Librarian should be an unmarried woman with a soft, drowned heart, and a choleric disposition. She should be pale and thin, with a
look that hints at Perpetual Anguish of the Soul. She should resemble someone's grandmother,
someone we have known for ages in the abstract. Dependable. Invisible
.

From the Eternal Library's Official Employee Handbook:
One
would do better to forget the Fever Librarian's name as soon as one ha
s learned it. She would do better to forget her own.

The opposite of melancholy is fierce, bright delirium. It has a name: fever, also known as pyrexia, comes from the Greek
pyr
, meaning
fire
.

The fever librarian has read all the scholarship, has attended the debates and listened to the shouted discussion on the radio programs. Some scholars are furious at the fevers being catalogued and contained. These scholars say the fevers are a good, or at least a necessary evil, humanity's way of fighting illness and tedium. We once prayed they did not last long, and endured the irrationality they engendered, and we breathed a long slow breath of relief when they had gone. And now humanity, these scholars claim, is scarcely human at all. We move like molasses, they say, in this mire of supreme rationality. We are barely beings, so calculating and calm are we.

The scholars on the other side argue, of course, that man lives in a golden age of enlightenment. Now, they say, we have the mental reserves and energy to study and dream up great improvements for the human race. Now, they say, we have rid the body of wasteful passions and useless energies expended, hours stolen from every day to relieve our unspeakable animal urges. We are more human than ever, these scholars say; we have finally risen above our shameful pasts, more than angels, we, with each new experiment.

The fever librarian comes from a time of incredible yearning. Plucked from the past, deprived of memory, she still retains certain physical imprints of that time. Her body remembers dancing, and driving, and craning the neck to take in great tall buildings going up at greater speeds. Her body remembers fear, too, and pain, and the way her limbs had of leaving her control for the refuge of a neck or a chest or another pair of lips—unthinkable, the idea of violating the space of another human body, but as her veins thaw and her skin warms, these memories begin to surface as she moves, as she walks and rises and sits and stands and even as she breathes.

When the Eternal Librarians chose her, they sealed all things past in a great ice heart, frozen inside her for all of time. This is always the way the Librarians are created, and contained. This is the way the world's memory is kept safe. But the Eternal Librarians did not understand the far-reaching effects of the fevers. They did not understand what such heat could do to an ice heart.

And so the fever librarian sleeps a great deal now, for only in sleep can she find relief from all the human passions caged in her four chambers. And so the fever librarian spends a great deal of time studying herself in mirrors, fearful of giving anything away. She is trying very hard to be invisible, tepid and faint as an early morning shadow. But she watches with awe and fear as the hair reddens, the skin reddens, as the eyes betray the rising temperature of the body underneath them. She watches and she worries she will soon be found out. She worries she will soon be overtaken.

Pliny the Elder estimated the number of human illnesses at three hundred, but of course assented that no one really knew the full range. He believed fever an illness, like most learned men of his time, and suggested, among other remedies, wine for shoring up good health and preventing disease. His favorite brew contained spikenard, cardamom, cinnamon, saffron, and ginger. The truth, he said, comes out in wine.

There is no wine in the Eternal Library. Wine warms unforgivably; truths breed euphoria and inevitably, passion. The preferred drink now is a weak tea brewed faintly with calming herbs like lavender and chamomile, cooled and drunk at room temperature. From the Eternal Library's Official Employee Handbook:
The Librarian's preferred draft should be the heady nectar of a day's careful research. External foods and beverages are necessary only to sustain the inner studies, and should never be enjoyed or sought out during working hours. Such seeking could prove dangerous to the Librarian and indeed, to the efficient functioning of the Library itself.

There are only working hours for the fever librarian. These triple-lined, carefully cooled cabinets are full of all the fevers man and god could dream up: alchemy, Cat-Scratch Fever, Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, goldfish swallowing, Dr. Spock, Trench Fever. Acid wash, chariot racing, ant farms, holy wars, hula hoops, Humidifier Fever, monkeys on television. Jumping beans, Beatniks, ballooning, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, the Orient, witch mania, cockfighting, Maternal Fever, table-rapping, drag racing, Pac Man, Parrot Fever, Metal Fume Fever, dance marathons, self-flagellation, African Hemorrhage Fever, the Crusades, Typhoid Fever, quiz shows, Lassa Fever, Rubix Cube, phone booth stuffing, toga parties, Scarlet Fever, Septic Fever, Swamp Fever, water beds, zoot suits, trading cards,
competitive sports, Autumn Fever, spring fever, beach movies, chivalry, secret orders, grail quests. Little Lord Fauntleroy. Dream fever. Sexual fever.

Love.

The Egyptians recognized that local inflammation was responsible for fever. They observed that the pulse would accelerate under its influence.

Throughout history, it was assumed that fever gave either divine or devilish powers to the possessor, or rather, the possessed. In some cases, the fevered person was observed in acts of prophecy; the fevered person related fantastic visions that had come to them in this heightened state. In other cases, the fevered person was seized by demons and flung about the room, or made to spout unintelligible gibberish, or commit violence upon themselves or others. In some cases, the fevered person was given to fits of sexual passion and mania, and opinion differed in these cases as to whether demonic or angelic possession was at work in the human flesh.

The Mesopotamians believed that only evil spirits brought fever, and that only under the priests' cool influence could it be exorcised from the body. There were no exceptions, for the side of good could never be the side of the flame.

As of late, the fever librarian dislikes the days she is asked to be grateful for facts, to applaud their long-term stability, their rigid domesticity. The fever librarian has tried to explain about the mutability and unreliability of facts on a very long timeline. Facts, she says, exist for ages—whole lifetimes, centuries, epochs—and then they disappear into the wretched night of ignorance and myth.

The fever librarian is increasingly unwilling to rely on the hardwood floor of facts as a foundation. She is increasingly unwilling to ignore the rot that eventually sets in anywhere, in any seemingly sturdy floor. She is increasingly unwilling to sit here, day in and day out, no love, no conversation, no apartment to call home. No dreams but those locked in this thawing ice heart.

This is not to say that the fever librarian is not a very good steward of facts, just the same. She is vigilant and organized. Her notebooks and memories and databases are full of all the world's facts, the passions of every age etched in permanent slashes and dots over the membranes and folds. The fever librarian does not forget. The facts are always at her fingertips, whether the subject is fallout shelters or conical bras or the swift speed at which the bubonic fever strikes. The fever librarian remembers everything. She remembers the danger, especially; all human sickness and folly is her waking, worrisome dream.

The rooms in which the fevers are stored must be cool and dark and quiet to keep the fevers from stray sparks, from reignition. The fever librarian has, as a result, spent a lifetime as silent as a Benedictine monk. Forget conversation or music; even the sun is not allowed to shine aloud in these halls. As of late, the fever librarian has felt isolated, has felt lonely, has felt the walls not closing in but expanding, spreading, growing the silent darkness into a massive, arctic sort of prison.

When she first began to work in these rooms, many eons ago, she was assured that the Librarians were solitary creatures, meant to work alone in a kind of devotion, a worship of knowledge and learning. As of late, she is not so sure of this. As of late, the fever librarian
is starting to hunger for the touch, the smell, the weight of another human body. She is starting to feel a little mad.