“That train isn’t going anywhere. It’s just sitting on the tracks,” I said, looking around.
He had his unlit pipe in one hand and a coffee in the other. If I’d given it the slightest thought, I might’ve expected I’d run into him. It was time for his evening pipe and his last hit of caffeine, and the café was just a short walk from the library.
“How’s bookslinging treating you?” he asked, settling onto a stool beside me.
I considered his half smile and his pale, watchful eyes and had an unexpected, jolting thought: He knows. I remembered that first conversation and my sudden impression that he knew about my parents but was too polite to broach the subject. In time I came to feel it was characteristic of Ralph Tanner to always know a little more than he let on, to hold his hand so close to the vest you could hardly tell he had cards to play at all.
“Not too bad,” I said. “A guy returned an overdue copy of Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein.”
“Ah! The juveniles. Quite a bit better than Heinlein’s work for adults, in my opinion.”
“It was very late. He took it out in December 1964. He would’ve returned it sooner, but he died in January 1965, and that kept him and his book out of circulation for a while.”
“Ah,” Ralph said, and he smiled and sipped his coffee and looked away. “One of them.”
I turned my own coffee cup around and around with my fingertips. “So this isn’t new?”
“It happened to Loren Hayes from time to time. I told you that, although I admit I was happy to let you think his encounters with the dead were strictly imaginary. At first it was just once, maybe twice a year. Toward the end it happened more frequently.”
“That why he gave it up?”
Ralph nodded, slowly, not looking at me. “He thought . . . when he was young, and his concentration was sharper, he could mostly hold the Bookmobile here, in the present, where it belongs. But as he got older and his attention started to drift, the Bookmobile began to find its way into the past more frequently. More and more of his customers were . . . well, like whoever you met today. He calls them late returns.” He had another taste of his coffee and spoke with no urgency. We might’ve been discussing the Bookmobile’s tendency to drip oil or the way the heating system smelled like old shoes. “In one sense, you know, it’s perfectly unremarkable. It’s quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn. In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.”
“Nice analogy, but this wasn’t a metaphorical encounter with a long-gone mind. His coat was wet. I could smell it. Smelled like a sheep. And I don’t think he was dead— No, wait. I mean I know he was dead. He’s been dead for fifty years. But while he was in the Bookmobile, he was—”
“‘I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me,’” Ralph sang, and I shuddered. Joan Baez had sung that song. When it came on, my parents always sang along with her.
“He borrowed a book, and I think—I can’t know this—but I think he took it back with him. The Hunger Games. Jesus. I gave him a book that didn’t come out until fifty years after he died.”
I was surprised when Ralph’s mouth widened in a great grin. “Wonderful. Good man.”
“Good man? What if I fucked up—excuse me, messed up—the space-time continuum? Like, what if now John Lennon doesn’t get shot?”
“That would be wonderful, too, don’t you think?”
“Yes, but—obviously. But you know what I’m talking about. The butterfly effect.” He was smiling at me in a way I found mildly maddening. “What would’ve happened if I gave him a book about the Columbine massacre?”
“Did he ask for a book about school shootings?”
“No.”
“Well, there you go, then.” He must’ve seen the frustration in my face, because he softened a little, bumped his shoulder against mine in an avuncular sort of way. “Loren Hayes, who you should meet, thought they could only find their way to the Bookmobile at the end of their story and that they could only borrow books that wouldn’t hurt