them. That wouldn’t scratch time’s record. This guy you met today. Did he have trouble seeing the books?”
I nodded. My arms were crawling with goose bumps. Meeting the man from 1965 had been less uncanny than this calm, reasonable conversation about it over coffee with my employer.
“He could only take one that wouldn’t threaten anything, and even then it had to be one that was right for him. When you consider that . . . well. Just imagine if you lived in the fifties and liked the twists in Agatha Christie novels. Now imagine that right before you died, you had a chance to read Gone Girl. You’d die for sure—of happiness. For all we know, that’s what happened to the man you saw today!”
“Don’t say that,” I objected, flinching. “That’s awful.”
“I can think of worse ways to go than with a good book in my hand. Especially if it was one I had no right to ever read, because it wasn’t going to be published until after I was dead. If you don’t quit on me, you’ll see others, now and then. And you won’t be able to give them anything that hurts them.”
“But what if I give them something that changes history?”
“How would you know?” he asked me, smiling again. “Maybe you did! Maybe this crap is all your fault!” He looked around the café—customers on their smartphones, a checkout girl ringing up coffees on a tablet computer—and back to me, and he looked pleased with himself. “The history you have is the only history you know. Besides. People come to the library to improve themselves or to be entertained or to discover something new about the world. How can that be bad? I believe that the late returns who visit the old Bookmobile are just having themselves a little literary dessert before the restaurant kicks them out.”
“So it’s like, what? A reward from God for living a good life?”
“Why can’t it be a reward from the library,” he said, “for returning overdue books in spite of the inconvenience of being dead? Are you going to quit?”
“No,” I said, and heard a faintly peevish tone in my own voice. “I’m listening to a Michael Koryta novel on audio, and I can only concentrate on it while I’m driving.”
He laughed. “I hope you didn’t pay for it. The library has an excellent audiobook collection.” He stood up with his pipe. “I have to step out now. They quite sensibly won’t let me smoke inside. Why don’t you come play rummy with Loren and me? I’m sure you’d have a lot to talk about.”
He started toward the door.
“Mr. Tanner?” I asked.
He looked back, his hand on the handle.
“Did you ever think of driving the Bookmobile yourself? To see who turns up?”
He smiled. “I don’t have my Class B license. Big trucks scare me. Good night, John.”
FOR THE NEXT TEN DAYS, I drove around hunched over the steering wheel, scanning the sidewalks for anyone who looked like they had stumbled out of a black-and-white movie. I could not have been more anxious or more alert if the Bookmobile had been loaded with crates of sweating TNT.
It was hard to control the temperature in the cab. The heat came on full blast, smelling like old socks, and soon I’d be tacky with sweat, my shirt sticking to my sides. But if I turned it off, the temperature would plummet in a handful of minutes, and soon it would be so cold that my toes went numb in their shoes and my sweat froze against my skin. My thoughts ran the same way, hot and cold, careening between eagerness and anxiety, between hoping I would see someone who didn’t belong in my time and dreading it.
Thing is, nothing happened, and after another couple weeks of making my rounds I realized that nothing was going to happen and it took the heart out of me. Not all at once. It snuck up on me, an emotion stronger than simple disappointment, a numb, dull lethargy. At the time I blamed my depression on what had happened when I tried to clean out the garage, but looking back, I can see I was going down hard even before then.
I’d finished cleaning out the master bedroom and my mother’s home office. Boots and scarves went to Goodwill. I emptied a filing cabinet, shredded what wasn’t important, collected together what mattered into a pile to deal with later. I filled trash bags and recycling bins.