Pulse

33

New York, the present

Q uinn’s immediate thought when Pearl went to the door and let in Jody Jason was that she looked nothing like Pearl.

Then he realized that was her attitude. Whoever this girl-woman-was, she stood like a wayward waif, her springy red hair sticking out over her ears as if there might be a mild current of electricity running through her. She was wearing jeans and a pale green blouse. Once you looked more closely at her, at the angle of her nose, the shape of her head, her ears, the look in her eyes-yes, Pearl was there. She was busty like Pearl, though the rest of her was much thinner than her mother. When she moved toward him, she moved like Pearl.

Quinn stood his ground. What the hell am I supposed to do?

Jody continued toward him, visibly gaining courage as she came. When she reached him she didn’t hesitate, but gave him a brief, hard hug that almost made him whoosh out a breath of air. He couldn’t help but think it: Her breasts feel like Pearl’s.

“There hasn’t been time to have heard much about you,” Jody said through Pearl’s smile, “but everything I’ve heard has been good.”

Quinn grinned stupidly. Felt like it, anyway. “All true,” he said. When in doubt, be witty. Sure.

“Of course,” Jody said, stepping back. “Mom wouldn’t lie.”

Oh-ho! “No,” he said, “she wouldn’t.”

Pearl was giving him a look he was glad Jody couldn’t see.

“Come all the way in,” he said, “and sit down. Something to drink?”

“A beer, if you have it,” Jody said.

“Easy,” Quinn said, and went into the kitchen.

He could hear the two of them talking while he got three Heineken cans from the refrigerator and opened them.

“Glass?” he called in.

“For sissies,” Jody called back. Or maybe it was Pearl. Quinn smiled. Suddenly, unaccountably, he liked this unexpected development. Like that. Flip. That was how it worked. Jody was a fact, and he’d have to learn to deal with her. Maybe it would be more than tolerable. Maybe it would be fun.

He returned to the living room with the three beer cans held in one huge hand. Jody and Pearl quickly relieved him of two of the frosty cans. Quinn raised his beer, grinning, and they clicked the cans together in a metallic toast. He felt some of his beer run down between his fingers, but he didn’t care.

“Welcome to the almost family,” he said.

Pearl was grinning her widest grin, nodding at Quinn as if he’d passed some kind of test. Good boy! said her eyes.

The landline phone rang, and he went to the table by the sofa, lifted the receiver, and identified himself.

“Captain Quinn?” said the voice. “I’ve been calling and calling Pearl’s cell phone, but there’s always a click and a message saying half of something, and then there’s a terrible buzzing noise. Technology will kill us all.”

Quinn held the receiver out toward Pearl but was looking at Jody when he spoke: “It’s your grandmother.”

Jody’s eyes widened and then took on a look of comprehension. Quinn couldn’t help but notice that she’d grasped this sudden overload of information fast.

Pearl thought, Jumpin’ Jesus!

Pearl went to Quinn slowly. She took the receiver from his hand as if it were a live thing that might bite her any second.

Quinn heard Pearl’s mother’s rasping voice even four feet from the phone.

“It’s your mother, dear, checking to see if you’re alive or dead, and if you are alive-and God willing you are-what is going on in your life?”

“Well,” Pearl said, feeling her nerves vibrate like cello strings, “there is some news.”

Penny and her supervisor, the austere Ms. Culver, were alone in the library except for a few people browsing the stacks, and a man operating one of the microfiche machines in the research department. The Albert A. Aal library had never computerized its newspaper and periodical files.

Penny was pushing a cart stacked with returned books to be replaced in their correct order on the shelves. The library was familiar to her. Working here was almost like having returned home.

When she was finished replacing the books, she wheeled the cart back to its place behind the front desk, where it could gradually be reloaded as books were returned.

Ms. Culver was wearing a severe gray dress with black low heels, had her mud-colored hair in a bun, and was as impeccable as ever. If librarians were manufactured somewhere, Ms. Culver must be the prototype.

Yet there was something in her severity that didn’t ring true. Penny thought she saw a slight tremor in Ms. Culver’s right hand when she dropped a copy of Pride and Prejudice onto the cart Penny had just wheeled up. Or maybe it struck her odd that Ms. Culver didn’t place the book down in the cart more gently, and square it neatly in a wooden corner. Ms. Culver worshipped symmetry.

“Is anything wrong?” Penny asked.

“Wrong as in what?”

“As in not right,” Penny said.

Ms. Culver placed both her hands flat on the return desk. She seemed to be debating internally whether to confide in Penny.

“DVDs,” she said.

Penny stared at her.

“Last week, for the first time, we had more DVDs out on loan than books.”

“Kids love them,” Penny said. “Video games with car chases and shootouts and violence. The comic books of today.”

“It wasn’t only kids that borrowed them. Same with audiobooks. More and more people are listening to books while they sit in traffic, or do something else that demands half their attention, or fall asleep in their recliners.”

“You might be right.”

“I am right. I know by the declining percentage of actual books we loan. And by the decreasing number of library patrons who come and go here because they go someplace else. And that someplace else is the Internet. They use Wi-Fi, whatever that is. Where they can download e-books for their electronic readers or computers. There’s no paper involved in any of this, Penny. It’s as if we’ve reverted to oral history and fiction, storytelling passed down through generations while sitting around campfires. We read something on a screen, and then it goes from substance to memory, just the way those ancient stories did. They’re nothing but electronic impulses. When they’re deleted from the machines, they no longer exist. There are fewer and fewer actual, tangible books.”

“Yes, what you say is true. So we’re worried about unemployment.”

But both women knew Penny wasn’t worried about it. She had a husband, another wage earner, and there were other kinds of jobs she could get. Ms. Culver was a librarian, had always been a librarian, and always would be. The way an obsolete buggy whip would always be a buggy whip.

Ms. Culver was watching Penny through rimless glasses as if reading her thoughts. “I’m worried about the future,” she said. “I have nieces, nephews.”

Penny hadn’t known that.

“We’re just dipping our toes in a new era,” Penny said. “Like the era following the invention of the printing press, only everything’s moving faster. Your nieces and nephews will adapt.”

“That’s the problem. They have adapted. They don’t type; they keyboard. They’ve made keyboard a verb, Penny. They’ve made text a verb. They don’t read text in books, and hardly ever do on a computer screen. Not for pleasure, anyway. It’s distressing.”

Returning to her job at the library might have been a mistake, Penny thought. She’d sought solace and security here, a shelter from the world of worry about all the things that could happen to Feds and to her, to their marriage. Maybe Feds was right and there was no real security. If you lived, you risked. Even if you weren’t a cop. Feds’s enemies were the bad guys. Ms. Culver’s enemies were e-books.

“You know how the French say the more things change the more they stay the same,” Penny said, trying to brighten Ms. Culver’s mood. “Books are books, even if they’re electronic books.”

“All the books in this library could be stored on one chip,” Ms. Culver said. “And I’m not French. Now I suggest you go straighten up the magazines.”

Penny did, but she was thinking about this evening, when Feds would be working late. She’d told him she didn’t mind, that she wasn’t worried about him. But she was. Only now she was doing something about her worries. Something for others but, ultimately, something for Feds and herself and their marriage. He wouldn’t approve.

But then, he didn’t know.