Ex Libris
As you may or may not know, a city accumulates ghosts the way a ship accumulates barnacles.
So if you should ever visit Oxford, you must know that it is full of them.
Don’t be alarmed. They rarely bite, and none of them would stoop so low as to actually “boo,” particularly at tourists. You may take ghost tours, led by suspiciously well-fed men in too-clean tophats who know how to enunciate well in that particularly English way, with the rolling r’s that feel like they should be accompanied by a flash of stage lightning. You’ll hear horrifying tales of this or that murder, or even just the run of the mill terrors that cling to a place where people have lived.
Oxford, you’ll remember, is a city of centuries, and with that comes both a well-earned sense of dignity and a well-worn set of monsters. Crimes build up; there is little that anyone can do to stop them from producing ghosts. And not all ghosts are the product of a crime: some are just residue, of people forgotten or lingering or just not altogether together enough to take all of themselves into the great beyond.
You’ve heard of hungry ghosts, but this story is not about those. This is the story of the ghosts of the Oxford libraries.
These weren’t hungry ghosts—in fact, they were the opposite. They were ghosts of people who hadn’t tasted food—not really tasted it—even when they were alive. As flesh and blood they’d already seemed somewhat… faded. So death wasn’t much of a transition, just a soft sigh and a lapse into further pallor. For some it was even a relief to shed their skins and return to the altar where they prayed: the libraries.
There were other ghosts, too—ghosts who haunted the ports, the thatched cottages, the estates. There was a complicated, labyrinthine hierarchy, and to be completely honest, most of the time the library ghosts were squarely in the middle, where they of course they turned up their noses at not only the richer bourgeoisie, but also the ghosts of tradesmen, coopers, barmaids, and dockworkers.
Some of the library ghosts preferred Jonathan Swift, took Pope’s side in the fight between the ancients and moderns. These ghosts found the ghosts of the Conrad scholars to be flashy, loud, even a little vulgar. The Conrad ghosts brought with them a specific smell: a whiff of criticism of empire, which smelled like the hint of something slightly rotten behind a sea breeze. The ghosts of the Sheldonian theatre preferred ritual and drama; those of the Radcliffe Camera saw the most light, and tended to glow a little more brightly.
The ghosts of the main Bodleian building had yet another hierarchy within all the larger ones: a sphere within a sphere. The Duke Humphries ghosts, who belonged to the mustiest, grandest, oldest room of the Bodleian, a room of dark wood paneling and blue and gold wainscoting, believed themselves to be at the top of the heap, and ruled (they believed) with a benign condescension.
All the ghosts, however, even with all their factions, cliques, concerns, assemblies, and squabbles, were united by one thing: they hated Americans. They loathed them, in fact—even the slightest whisper of a hard “r” in the library sent shivers up their nonexistent spines. Some of the more charitable ghosts (mostly from the lower reading room, a Duke Humphries veteran sniffed) reminded the others that these were the good Americans, the students who had taken their oath and gotten their badge of honor (this was the ghosts’ understanding of the library card—they didn’t understand plastic, but they understood barriers). But this argument didn’t sway many of them.
“They’re so loud,” the ghost of a Romantic poet sighed. (The ghosts of Romantic poets are always sighing, and often young—their living counterparts often having been so fragile as to be carried off by a whiff of disease on the wind.)
“And they have no respect for the rules of the library,” another ghost sniffed. This was the portly mustachioed ghost of a scholar without tenure, and so very few of the professor ghosts ever listened to him, but he felt he needed to speak anyway.
The Rules of the Library: an ironclad system. The ghosts often didn’t understand all the intricacies of these rules. With the arrogance of the long dead their eyes glazed over at the sign of any new technology, and they saw laptops as little more than glowing boxes that made irritating noises. But they knew that there were rules, “and that,” as the non-tenured ghost huffed, “ought to stand for something.”
And they knew that the Americans were breaking these rules: trying to take pictures with their little glowing boxes, for example, or bringing pens into the Duke Humphries library (a cardinal sin). When that didn’t suffice, the heathens just broke the unwritten rules, clomping around or traveling in groups, whispering. None of them had pince nez or half-moon spectacles (of course none of the English or other foreign visitors had these, either, but the ghosts took this harder from Americans). And none of them ever ever had the intangible quality these ghosts demanded from visitors to the library: a hushed sense of awe which seemed to express their feelings of unworthiness at their surroundings.
Of course, I’m speaking of the ghosts as if they were one entity, which decidedly they were not. And the ghost of the cabinet of MA-MN on the lower level of the Radcliffe Camera, a ghost who believed in a vague way that his name was once Henry, held slightly different opinions than the rest. He held them tentatively, like a woman holds a handbag she’s not certain she’s going to purchase, but he held them nonetheless.
Henry was a lower ghost, lower by reason of his level in the library, of course, but also because of his human background. Many of the ghosts had been dead so long that they couldn’t really remember their living souls, but even the few stubborn echoes of memory that they clung to gave them a sense of Who They Were and Who They Are Now as a Result. And Probably-Henry only had vague memories of Before, but most of them were of a dim room where he moved books around—memories of moving books around, as it was explained to him, and not sitting and having them brought to him, marked him as mostly likely a library employee, not a patron. He was downgraded accordingly.
Henry didn’t mind. He was happy, or contented, or whatever passed for contented in their stuffy, shadowy world. He loved the Radcliffe Camera, felt a secret flash of pride in the place and an even more secret pity for the ghosts of the main Bodleian building, who had no chance to roam around at night under the Camera’s huge domed ceiling or flit around corners in the day, soaking up all the checkered sunlight.
And he loved his cabinet, MA-MN, which contained Maugham and Mann and McDonald. He loved the smell of the books. Of course he couldn’t smell, but even the memory of smelling was enough to bring something very close to the sense of it back to him. And the memories of the books sometimes unearthed other flickers of memories: tallow candles, stinking of grease, a line of birds across a red-orange sky, a thick dark room where a woman lay sweating in a straw bed.
He read everything in his cabinet, several times over. He mourned whenever a book was pulled out; it was like someone had yanked a tooth out of his head. He growled when a book he knew belonged in his cabinet was misplaced in another; if he’d had the energy, or even the power, he’d have haunted every single person who ever dared to put one of his treasured McElligott books in the MO-MZ cabinet.
So when Henry saw a girl approaching his cabinet one autumn Monday, a chubby girl with what looked like a sheen of oil on her fingers, who was tilting away from the cabinet to talk to her friend (too loudly), he readied himself for the familiar anger. He liked the anger—it gave a flavor to his days, if only a faint one.
She opened the cabinet with a slight creak. “God, they make it impossible to find things…” she said.
An American accent. No surprises there. And the way she handled the books! She pushed them aside, yanked them out, practically bullying them. At first, he half expected her to take one out and turn it spine up, shaking its pages to see what might fall out.
But even Henry had to admit she found the right book quickly, and when she pulled it out, she held it in her hands like…well, like Henry might have, if he still had fingers. She examined it, ran her fingers over the cover and then pulled it up to her face and…indignity, but understandable—she smelled its pages. Henry felt a small, strange stir of recognition.
“You got it?” The girl’s friend, a tall Indian woman with a long nose and a noble profile, approached the cabinet.
The girl nodded and closed the cabinet. Henry only just slipped out, and then there he was, in the middle of the day. They couldn’t see him, of course, or feel him, but he still felt exposed. Out of habit more than anything else, you see, ghosts tend to shun sunlight. The memories it brings with it, of light and life and wind, are far too painful.
The girl and her friend started to walk away, back to the desks on the upper levels. Henry floated after.
The girl had an unremarkable face, he thought, and a thick body covered in a gray, unremarkable cardigan. He followed her up the stairs to her seat. Her friend waved her goodbye, and moved to another table.
The girl wrote. Well, sort of.
She wrote slowly, about a sentence at a time. Henry was used to the glowing boxes—computers, he called them computers, didn’t hold with the older ghosts’ tradition of underlining and even celebrating their ignorance of the future. So the typing wasn’t a surprise. He liked the sound of it, actually, the clacking of the keys. He’d liked typewriters even more, but—
But this girl. She cracked her knuckles after each sentence, after each word, it seemed. Henry appreciated the pace and the flickers of the memories of quills that it gave him—tan feathers, thick yellowing paper, dark blobs of ink. But still. She sighed and cracked her knuckles, sighed and deleted, sighed and wrote. He hovered near her, above her, around her, for hours, as the paper on the screen slowly filled, and the girl’s sighs slowly diminished.
Soon, the light outside the Camera filtered darker, to a dull orange shimmer, and then an orange-black, and Henry realized that for the first time in a long time, time had passed, and he hadn’t been achingly, grindingly aware of its passage.
The girl started to pack up, but in this, as in all other things, she took her time, so Henry had time to maneuver and glance at her screen. What had she been writing?
Only phrases jumped out at him… “intersectionality” was one, then “the painful realities of an unequal system,” and several references to “Edward Said’s Orientalism” and “the concept of the Other.” And a sentence at the end: “The creature’s tantrums and frustrations represent the painful emotional reality of existing in a world that would prefer if you didn’t.”
But Henry didn’t see much more. All of a sudden the girl slammed the laptop shut and joined the crowd of other scholars lining up to leave, retracing their steps down the polished circular stairs under the dome and out, out into the air. For some of these people, Henry thought, watching an older man with a goatee wind a gray-green scarf around his head with an air of abstracted boredom, the transition to ghosthood would be both painless and imminent. But his eyes kept going back to the girl.
Slow as she was, she vibrated with energy. Where she went, life flowed. He felt it. Not many of the ghosts held with the theory of life energy—it was all seen as rather distasteful and New Age. But Henry knew that souls, like books, had a heat and a flavor, and this girl’s soul burned.
Henry followed her again, all the way to the exit, and he nearly followed her past that, although he hadn’t been past the turnstile in…was it exaggerating to say centuries? The ghosts rarely referred to time in any living terms. It was considered gauche, like farting on a host’s sofa.
Within an hour of the girl’s departure, the sun set fully, and the Camera’s lights were switched off. The last staffer went home. Henry found himself drifting to the nonfiction cabinets. The Dewey Decimal System was unfamiliar, but there was a ghost for that, although he hovered off in yet another corner, the most shadowy one yet, and had a bleached, abstract air.
Their conversation wasn’t worth remarking on. Henry barely dared to say the book’s title aloud, and instead hinted that he was looking for “recent scholarship.” The ghost raised his milky, impressive eyebrows, but soon enough Henry was in the 950s, and then there was the book: a handsome red cover with a binding coming slightly unglued. Unlike many of the books in many of the cabinets, Henry noted, this one wasn’t dusty or difficult to open: its spine fell open immediately in his nonexistent hands, to a page that was a little dogeared and faintly underlined and even (gasp) highlighted in places.
Henry began shuffling through the pages. Amazingly, even with all the time in the world, most ghosts choose to browse rather than truly engage with texts, even the library ghosts. Henry was no exception. He didn’t need light to read, since he no longer had eyes, but still he skimmed. The beginning: “I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature.” Henry had never been to the Orient, as far as he remembered: the word conjured up paintings, snakes, a flickering lamp in a caravan, but these felt like pictures rather than real memories. He moved on.
As the moon made its way across the sky, his fellow ghosts left their corners and cabinets to float, skim, and fly around the Camera’s staircases, cloakrooms, and the high domed ceiling. They drifted above him, streaks of white, beige, and gray cloud in the navy blue of night. A few called out greetings—George, another ghost understood to have lived as a library security guard, and snubbed accordingly, even stopped to talk to him. But Henry waved him off. For some reason this reading felt important.
Still he skimmed. He understood very little of it, got lost in the mazes of sentences. Philology he’d heard of—the scholarly ghosts spoke of it often. But he got the sense from the binding and the wear that this was a modern book, a sense that linked the book intimately with the chubby American girl. Modernity was…well, “modernity is a problem to be solved,” Robert Exley, a ghost with a perfectly trimmed mustache had said once. Henry didn’t know quite what that meant, not having read many books on the subject, but the word made him slightly itchy, as any word that brought conflict to the ghosts’ discussions did.
Henry didn’t sleep—no ghost does. But the book bored him, and he found himself sinking into what the more poetic ghosts called “evanescence,” a state where his individual ghost-ness blended and blotched into the surroundings. It was as close as a ghost got to napping.
Then a section jumped out:
“…The Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien… Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people…”
This struck Henry. Another flicker of memory: a man in a frockcoat in this very room, raised voices, a missing book and a disputed bill, the frockcoat tails whipping past Henry as the man strode away. Henry even saw himself: younger, alive, a library porter with a bedraggled expression and a hand-me-down suit.
A scholar—Henry remembered now. A plummy voice, a rich, almost royal accent, and he’d dazzled his way into the Camera that afternoon, talking too loudly and trailing sycophantic librarians in his wake. He’d needed access to the cabinet—Henry’s cabinet, MA-MN. A famous man, although Henry didn’t remember his name.
Henry hadn’t been quick enough for him. He’d first tutted in impatience, then scowled, then sneered when Henry didn’t know and couldn’t spell the name McGillicuddy. There’d been a cutting glance, a stifled laugh. Henry was surprised at the memory, but still more surprised that this was the thing his brain chose to remember, particularly in that moment.
Still: it was there. A precious memory, something real. And the sentence had struck it out of him. The book had done it. The girl had done it.
He felt a flutter, another hint of something waking up inside him. And he knew what he had to do.
The next day, Henry waited, praying the girl would come back. He wanted to know more. But she didn’t come. He hovered near the table she’d chosen, admiring the chair’s well-worn seat and wishing absently for a bottom to sit on. But she didn’t come. That day, or the next, or the next.
On the fourth day, Beryl floated over. She was old, squat and thick, dark gray and more opaque than most of the other ghosts, and she had retained an apron from life even through her ghostly transformation. She had thick owlish glasses and blinked frequently, speaking excruciatingly slowly. As far as everyone knew, she’d been one of the library cleaners, of a later period than Henry, as shown by her thick sensible pumps and pantyhose lined with runs. She was, as you have probably guessed, deeply unpopular with the other ghosts. Her appearance combined with her thick Northern accent and tendency to tidy up nonexistent messes made most of them regard her as the stern mother figure they’d always loathed, in life and in death.
In spite of this, however, Henry knew her to be something else: deeply kind. She’d cried, actually cried one day watching out the window as a young Japanese tourist ran across the gravel in front of the Camera, looking for her lost son. And she’d told Henry the whole story (it had taken quite a while), about how the boy had been found and wandered back to his mother, face sticky with ice cream, bemused by the fuss she was making.
“What’re ye waitin’ for?” Beryl croaked, as slowly as ever.
Henry, slow himself, felt an itch of impatience. The library was about to open. He wanted to be alone.
But Beryl had all the time in the world, and merely blinked in his silence.
He realized he’d have to tell her.
“There’s a—a girl,” he began.
“Ooohhhh,” Beryl crowed. She sat (as much as ghosts can) on the edge of the table.
“Not like that,” Henry said quickly. “She’s a student, an American, I think. She…” he didn’t know how to explain himself. “She had an interesting perspective.”
Beryl blinked at him. Too late, Henry realized this was probably beyond her. The scholar ghosts had told him many times—higher ghosts associating with the lowers didn’t help them, either. It just made them feel less than. He’d probably embarrassed her.
“Ahh, the Said,” Beryl said.
Henry blinked.
“I seen you readin’ it t’other night,” Beryl explained. “When I was tidyin’.”
Henry had seen her tidying: following directly in the footsteps of the living cleaners, echoing their work like the shadow she was. He felt a flicker of pity in the midst of his surprise.
“An’ now you want to find out what else she’s up to.”
Henry, who’d been mentally preparing an explanation, closed his mouth. Beryl had summed it up neatly.
“Yes,” he said.
Beryl nodded, flicked her nose with one finger. “I’ll wait with ye.”
Another week passed. The air turned colder, the sweaters of the students bulkier. On Tuesday, Beryl tutted when an old man tracked fallen leaves onto the library’s pristine floors. On Thursday, a gust of wind from outside ruffled all the ghosts, causing the most nostalgic of them to race to the door to pretend to feel the breath and gust of autumn once more. But still no sign of the girl.
On Friday, Beryl insisted on trying to read the Said book.
Henry had explained the book and the flash of memory to Beryl. She’d been as eager as he was to see it, and together they decided to read bits and pieces.
“Bit tricky to figure it out,” she concluded, after one particularly winding sentence. “But I think it’s about us.”
“Us?”
“The lowers, you know. The…Others. I think he’s talking about us, you and me, the ghosts of the lower libraries.”
“Surely not,” Henry bristled.
Beryl rolled her eyes. “No, not like that…just…we need more to read.”
On that at least, they agreed.
And then—Monday. She came. This time she was alone, wearing a lumpy, ill-fitting sweater and rubbing rain off her glasses. She raced in and pulled out her laptop and a notepad. Beryl and Henry exchanged excited looks and hovered near her on either side, just beside her shoulder blades.
She wrote more quickly this time, chewing on the end of her pen as she scribbled notes. They hoped to be able to read it, but her head was blocking the screen, and ghosts were strictly forbidden to float in the living spaces of others. It made the living shiver, and it made the ghosts’ bodies tingle unpleasantly like harp strings plucked discordantly.
Her notes were no help, either. Try as they might, they couldn’t decipher her handwriting. They picked out a phrase here and there—“second paragraph – how modernity defines personhood,” “CONCLUSION??? FIGURE OUT,” “rework early THESIS statement,” but no list of books. And she didn’t pick up anymore, either. They were out of luck.
Beryl and Henry shrugged at one another, keeping their voices to a whisper. (The living couldn’t hear them, but this was a strict rule in the library, for both the living and the dead.)
"What exactly were ye lookin’ for?” Beryl asked him over the girl’s head, as she sighed and frizzed her hair in frustration.
“I don’t know,” Henry said honestly. “Just…maybe another book she could point us to.”
“She don’t even ‘ave any with her,” Beryl pointed out.
“I know that,” Henry snapped.
They waited, for hours as it turned out. Still nothing. The girl grew more and more frustrated, her hair frizzier and frizzier, and the dark grew outside. The lamps flicked on in the street. The girl stood, stretched and started to pack up her things. Beryl and Henry looked at each other. Still nothing.
The girl was leaving. She took the staircase down, paused to glance at the domed ceiling and trace her hand on the stair railing. “I’ll miss this place,” she said to no one in particular. And she joined the few other students who’d stayed this long, waiting in line to leave through the turnstile.
Beryl and Henry exchanged horrified glances. “Did she say she was leaving?” Henry asked.
“Implied it,” Beryl corrected.
They watched helplessly as she went out, out past the security guard with his set of keys, out into the autumn air, which in another helpless flash of memory dragged Henry into an ancient smell of wet leaves and damp roads.
The line of students slowly trickled out. Then even the security guard was gone, and the lights flicked off. Around them the scholarly ghosts filtered gently upwards to the domed ceiling, to their nightly roosts, for all the world like a murder of crows. Tonight there was, as George explained to Henry in passing, a meeting of the “Alexander Papacy” club.
Beryl and Henry stayed where they were, hovering next to the girl’s table. Henry felt an ache, as strong as the fluttering he’d felt from the sentence and the memories. He suddenly remembered a lesson, learned long ago in his days of life, that sometimes it hurts worse to hope.
“Hang on,” Beryl said suddenly. She floated next to the chair, hovering, then stooped. “There’s a piece of paper down ‘ere.” She looked back up at Henry, who hovered over too. She was right. A piece of paper, covered in inky marginalia. The girl’s handwriting, no question. But there were typed words on it, too, words their milky eyes could read without a hint of light.
“Look at the title,” Beryl breathed.
Henry looked, and his heart started to beat faster.
“WORKS CITED.”
Names spilled out of the typeface, and Henry drank them all in greedily: Ralph Ellison, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Italo Calvino…
He turned to Beryl, whose smile brought him flickers of warm bread, the crackle of fires, a thick quilt.
“I think it’s time we started our own little somethin,’” she said. “Like theirs—“ she gestured to the ghosts of the uppers, who’d now floated back up to the dome for their meetings, speaking in hushed, reverent voices. “But different. A literary society for the lowers.” She pointed at the paper.
“After all, we’ve got our readin’ list.”
Henry’s bloodless heart fluttered.
