I looked at the book myself, and for a moment my vision darkened and my head went woozy, as if I had stood up too fast.
He was still holding The Hunger Games, although it took a moment for me to recognize it. It remained a black paperback, but the cover now showed a girl in a clinging flame-colored sci-fi gown preparing to shoot an arrow from some kind of mechanical, laser-guided bow. Her face was drawn in an expression of terror while her eyes flashed with righteous fury. She crouched in a Dagobah-like forest of psychedelic-colored trees. It was the cover of a pulp sci-fi novel from the early sixties, right down to the price tag in the upper left corner: 35¢. I know something about the famous pulp artists of the era, and I think it was a Victor Kalin, although I find it hard to tell him from Mitchell Hooks. Google ’em—you’ll get the idea. It had the battered look of a paperback that has passed through quite a few hands, most of them clumsy and in a hurry.
Something sharp twinged in my head, behind my eye. It was as if someone was pressing their thumbs into my temples. Earflaps looked at me with some concern.
“You okay, mac?” he said.
I didn’t answer. Instead I said, “Can I see that?” and took the book back from him.
It was a 35¢ paperback when I looked down at the cover. But when I turned it over to read the back, I found myself looking down at a black trade paperback, the one I recognized from my own time. I flipped to the cover again. Black, smooth, glossy, with a golden brooch printed on it and a bird on the brooch. Then I lifted my face and looked at Earflaps. His gaze had drifted away from me, was floating across the books on the top shelf.
“I can’t see some of them,” he said in a casual tone of voice. “They go all funny when I try to read the titles. The words swim away when I try to concentrate on them. Some of them anyhow. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is all right. So’s the Narnia books. But the ones in between”—he was staring at the Harry Potter novels—“I can’t see them right. Mister, am I having a stroke?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
He sighed and looked at me and smiled and put one palm to his left temple. “I ought to take my book and go. I think I need to lie down.”
“Let me get you checked out,” I said.
I sat behind the mahogany desk, and he produced his library card: Fred Mueller, 46 Gilead Road. There was a borrower number (1919) but no barcode to scan with my phone. Which was just as well—when I picked up my smartphone, the screen was completely black and the white circle was spinning around and around, as if it had just crashed and was trying to reload.
Mueller didn’t seem to notice the phone. His gaze passed the gadget in my hand without catching upon it. Here was the very embodiment of the future, the twenty-first century made solid in the form of an iPhone Plus, so much more beautiful and science-fictional than anything in Heinlein, than anything on the original Star Trek—and it might’ve been a pencil for all he cared. His indifference didn’t surprise me, though. He couldn’t see the Harry Potter books either, and I thought I knew why. They didn’t belong in his when, hadn’t happened yet. He could see The Hunger Games, and I thought I understood that, too. It didn’t belong in his when either—not until I handed it to him. Once it was in his hands, he saw it as he needed to see it, to accept it. It took a form he could understand, that wouldn’t trouble him.
I’m probably wrong to suggest I understood this all right away. I was more like the blind man holding on to the elephant’s knee, dimly beginning to suspect he had his hands on an animal instead of a tree trunk. It didn’t all make sense in the moment, but I instinctively felt that there was a logic to the situation that might yet be revealed.
“Don’t you need to stamp it?” he asked, putting his hand on the paperback and turning it to face me.
And there was that pulp cover again that I’m almost sure was painted by Victor Kalin, although if you look at Kalin’s Web site showcasing