In the Stacks, the Rain Ripens

While Niigata and Tokushima, Hiroshima and Hanshin took turns battling on the screen, I was down in the stacks on basement level two, breathing in the smell of paper. Today, as every day, I packed books whose checkout records had gone silent into cardboard boxes, sending them off to a future someone else had decided on.

I am a stack attendant at this library. My job is to find the books the central terminal has selected, affix deaccession slips, and ready them for the courier’s pickup. The terminal tallies checkout counts, browsing histories, and search frequencies, and rules any material unrequested for over ten years “low demand.” A paper book is like air: if it isn’t there when needed, it is treated as though it never existed.

On the screen, the names of winning cities kept lighting up. The staff room’s recommended display changed to match the results, lining up books with ties to the victorious regions. The louder the cheering upstairs, the more quietly the collection below dwindled. I watched the terminal and lodged my objection only in my head. Books do not exist merely to be used. But no record was ever made of that objection.

An old picture book in a paper bag slid out of the returns slot. On its cover was drawn a frog soldier wearing a military cap. Inside was a small toy in the same likeness, and on the back, in a child’s handwriting: “This book has been occupied.”

The toy croaked low when the humidity rose. I set it in a corner of the shelves. After that, the frog kept appearing—atop the deaccession boxes, in front of the old map spines. Staff would put it away, yet it always found its way back, as though someone were helping it search for its original spot. On my own initiative, I took to calling it the stacks’ little occupier.

While sorting, I came across a cardboard box that looked like a donation from ten years ago. Inside was a thick booklet the color of soil. Its title: Emergency Cultivation and Food-Paper Materials. When I ran its barcode under the terminal, neither publisher nor registration date appeared; only the classification field blinked: UNAPPROVED EMERGENCY FOOD.

According to the booklet’s preface, someone had once experimented with weaving vegetable and grain seeds into layers of paper, for when the time came. Wet the paper and it became soil; the seeds would sprout. Those who could read would follow the instructions; those who could not would simply eat the grown shoots. There is no need to separate knowledge from food, it said.

Whether any of the pages actually contained sprouts, there was no telling. Perhaps because it was a prototype, the bottom of the box held a torn packet and some white grains. The grains looked like dried flecks of paper, and also like seeds that had slept for years.

After that, the central terminal began glitching in strange ways. One after another, it classified the stacks’ holdings as UNREGISTERED DIETARY FIBER. The complete works of literature became fermentable resources; local history materials, greening substrate; dictionaries, solid nutritional supplements. The staff laughed it off as user error, but deep down I was waiting for the day the terminal fell silent.

The following week, the central system was due for a major update. During the update, no searches or inventory management would be possible. If we didn’t finish the deaccession work before then, closing hours would shift, and the crew assignments would shift with them. We were hurried along, stacking boxes. At the very bottom of the pile went the soil-colored booklet and the packet of white grains.

On the morning of the update, the sky was the color of lead. The tournament matches meant to be held above ground were postponed for bad weather, and just as the crowd gathered in the plaza began to scatter, the fluorescent lights in the stacks flickered out for an instant. The central terminal’s screen went dark; the recommended displays and search logs vanished. All that remained in the stacks was the hum of the ventilation fan and the silence of paper.

In that silence, the frog in the military cap croaked. A low, long sound, like something rising from the bottom of wet earth. When I looked up, a thin thread of water was falling from the ceiling, pooling beside the returns cart. I felt my pulse quicken. I should have carried the books out to the dry corridor.

I gathered an armful of books. But I stopped in front of the box holding the soil-colored booklet. Dry it, and it could be preserved. Wet it, and something might break. Between those two futures, I stood perfectly still. Before long, the water traced its way along the paper bag and darkened the booklet’s corner black. I left the box as it was.

The rain opened the pages one book at a time, like a patron with no due date. Paper touched by water slowly loosened; the black characters blurred into illegibility; the white surfaces turned the color of soil. After a while, slender green things peeked through the torn pages. The first sprout was no bigger than a finger.

The next moment, shoots lit up throughout the dim shelves like blinking indicator lights. Roots tore through the cardboard boxes and coiled around the legs of the bookcases, gently binding shelf to shelf. The smell of green overtook the smells of mold inhibitor and old paper. It was not a forest. And yet, to me, the collection looked as though it had begun to grow.

The alarm didn’t sound, because the central terminal was still asleep. I reached for the receiver, then stopped halfway. It felt wrong that the world should miss the sound of seeds growing. And even more wrong to keep the seeds asleep.

The frog in the military cap sat atop a box that had fallen into the puddle. Neither croaking nor moving. Simply looking down on the green shoots like a commander. The bookcases hadn’t collapsed yet. Roots were crossing the floor, reaching toward the next box.

I had thought protecting books meant keeping words in the same shape. But perhaps a book is a husk—a way of handing itself to the future so it won’t be forgotten. If the end of the world begins with eating new shoots, should it even be called an end?

The rain kept falling, and on basement level two the shelves were quietly turning green, without a sound. How much time was left before someone noticed? I sat down beside the frog in the military cap and resolved to watch, quietly, whatever was being born.