November 14. Friday. Fog.
There are fourteen steps down to the basement stacks. The windows ride lower the farther down you go, and on the last step the sill is level with the ground outside.
This morning the fog was pressed against the glass from outside. Beyond it everything was white, as if milk had been poured over it. Arkham people call November fog the river breathing out, I'm told.
The donated manuscripts came in six wooden crates. Latin manuscripts some family collected over generations, they say, and each crate has its own smell of mildew. Today I opened the third.
Take out a manuscript, measure it, copy its first line and its last. Then one card. Codex, membr., s. XV.
Finished cards I stack with their corners squared by my thumbnail. Let one card with a crooked corner slip in and the whole drawer seems to list.
At ten Mr. Whitmore came down. The head librarian stood on the bottom step and measured the height of the card pile with his eye.
"That drawer is to be full by Thanksgiving, Mr. Kim."
"There are six crates."
"Which is why I came down at ten."
Mr. Whitmore picked up the top card, read it, set it back askew, and went up. I squared its corners again.
In the afternoon the third crate was empty. To make room for the fourth, I lifted a bundle of old newspapers off the bottom shelf of the case against the wall. When I set my palm on the empty shelf, the back board gave and tilted inward.
Behind the board was the gap between the shelves and the wall. I pushed the flashlight in. Crumbs of rotted paper lay heaped knee-high, and out of them rose one corner green with verdigris.
A casket. Bronze.
When I lifted it with both hands my elbows straightened right out. Heavy.
While I wiped off the verdigris with my handkerchief I had laid the flashlight on the floor, and its beam crept under the shelves and reached the far wall, where the shadow of my hands moved about many times larger than the casket.
Small dots were set into the lid, and a band ran all the way around the sides. There were letters cut into the band.
Where I had lifted the casket out, the heap sank into a hollow. When I brushed the crumbs aside, a corner of leather caught at my fingertips. A notebook bound in calfskin. It had been buried right there beside the casket, then. Inside the cover was a name. B. Duncan. Below it, 1882.
Dean Duncan. The one whose portrait hangs in the second-floor corridor of the main building. The brass plate under the portrait says he was dean from 1882 to 1893. I walk past it every day and still can't call up his face.
I turned the first page. In the middle, a single line in English, nothing else. I set it down here in Korean.
Read no further.
The corner of the next page came along with my fingertip and then fell back. The writing there had faded brown, but the ink on the first page alone was black. The line written in last of all, I'd guess. I shut the notebook. Library regulations say no private paper of any past dean may be examined without leave of the Board of Trustees. I signed a pledge to that very clause last spring.
I carried the casket and the notebook upstairs and set them on Mr. Whitmore's desk. He looked only at the name inside the cover and drew back his hand.
"Catalogue the casket. Put the diary in an envelope, in the document cabinet."
"Who would apply to read it?"
"No one will."
He laid the cabinet key in my palm. The brass was warm. A key he had carried a long while, gripped in his pocket.
Until evening I copied the band's letters onto a card. Worn letters mustn't be filled in by guesswork, so I wrote one letter, looked at the band, and wrote one more. When I had them all and raised my head, the window was pitch dark.
MENTEM MORTALIUM SUBJUGARE POSSUNT NEC NON CORPORA
The sense isn't hard. Can bring into subjection the minds of those with mortal bodies, and the bodies as well. Only there's no subject; nothing says who can. I turned the casket all the way around, but the band only came back to its first letter.
The dots on the lid number nine. They don't run three in a row like Orion's belt, and they don't curve like the dipper in the Great Bear. I copied the nine dots onto the back of the card.
On my way home I went round by the second-floor corridor of the main building. I stood before the portrait. Gray beard, a pen in the right hand. His gaze fell outside the picture and downward, at about the toes of my shoes.
When I got back to the boardinghouse Mrs. O'Brien was warming soup. She said something to me across the table. That the soup was getting cold.
The words did not arrive in one piece. Get. ting. cold. The syllables dropped into my ear one by one, and the meaning came last.
It was like this the year I first landed at Boston harbor too. When English ran long, the meaning trailed the sound a good way behind.
That winter I took down my landlord's words in the corner of a notebook just as I heard them, and every night I opened the dictionary and stuck the syllables back together one at a time into words, and that notebook is still at the bottom of my trunk. Has that ear come back after five years? From staring at nothing but Latin letters all day, I suppose.
November 15. Saturday. Clear, fog in the afternoon.
Saturday, so the library closes at noon.
In the morning at the circulation desk a student called out a call number. The numbers and letters came one at a time, apart. I asked him to say it again; he said it slower, and so it broke up finer.
Mr. Whitmore's speech, too. His voice is low and even. The more even the voice, the more neatly it arrives broken at the joints, it seems.
I borrowed a star atlas from the reference reading room. I set the nine dots on the back of the card beside it and turned the plates one by one, starting with the northern sky. I went all the way to the last plate of the southern sky and found no place that matched.
When I returned the atlas the reading-room librarian asked what I'd been looking for. A constellation, I said. I did not say it wasn't in the sky.
I wrote the casket's card. Bronze casket, one. Nine dots on lid. Latin inscription on band around sides. I left the accession field blank. Neither the casket nor the shelf says when it came in or who brought it, after all.
I put the diary in a brown envelope and wrote on its face. Private papers of Dean Duncan. Restricted.
I laid the envelope flat on the bottom shelf of the cabinet and turned the key. The key went into my waistcoat pocket.
Then I opened this journal to its first page. The top margin was empty, so I copied yesterday's line there. Read no further. So as not to forget what I had closed.
As I turned off the stack lights at noon and came out, Mr. Whitmore called from the top of the stairs. Mis. ter. Kim. My name was set down one piece to each step.
November 16. Sunday. Rain.
The library's day off. In the morning the church bell rang. A bell comes one stroke at a time from the start, so there's nowhere for it to split. My ears were at ease for once.
After lunch Mrs. O'Brien's son read the funnies aloud. Ten years old, he reads with his finger on the speech balloons. The words from the boy's mouth scattered over the table a syllable at a time.
Up in my room I read this journal aloud. The Korean came joined. Each character is one syllable, so there'd be nothing left to split, I suppose.
I took the draft card from my coat pocket. The one where I first copied out the band. I went to read MENTEM, and MEN came first and TEM a beat late.
There is a gap between them. Wide enough for a fingernail. Did I leave a space when I wrote it? I set my fingernail to the gap. It fit exactly.
In the evening the casket's card caught at me again. The accession field is blank. Mr. Whitmore once said the Board dislikes the words "provenance unknown."
Only one person knows when the casket came in. The owner of the notebook buried beside it.
I took the cabinet key from my waistcoat pocket and set it on the desk. Tomorrow morning I'll skip the first page and look only at a single date on the second. One date can hardly count as reading, I'd think.