“Come on, you had some good times at uni,” they chuckled.
I reached for my dagger to stab the motherfucker out of spite, but I noticed I wasn’t wearing my clothes anymore. Instead, I had been demoted back to my old, white laboratory coat. I wasn’t dressed in the skin of some poor albino Labrador dogs, PETA, I swear.
“Can I move freely around the building?” I asked.
“Sure, you are the boss here. Relax, they cannot hear, smell, touch, taste or see me.”
I buried my hands in the pockets of the coat and pondered my options. “Can they see me?”
“Yes, of course. This is as real as you’d like it to be.”
“Would I die if a meteor struck this place, like, right fucking now?”
They shrugged. “Possibly.”
I patted all the pockets on my person looking for money. I had several jaguars at my disposal. There they were, all green and smug, thinking George Washington would never snuff them because they were both green. By 2023, both them and the horneros would be entombed, crumpled in the depths of Argentinian’s pockets. Used as toilet paper by the brave ones.
Out of a mere reflex, I checked the time on my cellphone. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the goddamn contraption. I had forgot how many times had checked on my person for it, or woke from a night’s sleep and reached for it under the pillow, just to realize Planet wasn’t a dream.
I missed modern life, but I didn’t miss the FCEN. Luckily, I wasn’t in 2021, but on early 2016: the bills in my pocket still held a good value. It was still early in the day, which explained the absence of people in the immediacies.
I arrived in the middle of autumn, in May. First quarter, and by my attire, I had to assume I’d need to attend a laboratory class soon enough.
“Where is my backpack?”
“In your locker. You left it there last time, didn’t you?”
I tried to remember the locker combination. It was always the magic numbers of my favorite doujinshi. Now, I had to remember, what was I into back in 2016?
Right. That. Fuck. Past Walter, why?
I recovered my bag from the locker and then turned the corner, towards the main stairs. I tried to ignore all the political paraphernalia that adorned the heart of the building, that sprawled over every wall and wooden rail. Yellow and red, White and pink or blue, it didn’t matter. The student council and their matters during my stay in the institution were not easy to ignore, yet I would do it again.
The incoming wave of fellow students made my rush for the exit difficult. They come in all sorts of colors and shapes, the people of Exactas. Skinny or fat, tall or old, immature teens or sweet grandmas, all came for knowledge, and many of those left after discovering what their careers truly entailed.
I turned right after going through the exit door, and there she was, my love, my passion: one of pabellón 2’s jacarandas. I ran out of the pathway and met the tree. It was perfect! every leaf correctly shaped, every blue flower of the right hue. When I caressed the bark, it felt real, it felt true.
I cleared my throat. They put a hand on my shoulder.
“Please no. This is no fantasy, maker. Behave like a human being, and Earth will be yours again.”
I smirked and flipped them the bird.
“Do you prefer Cristian Castro? Or are you all about Ricardo Montaner, ma chérie?” I asked the jacaranda, and she didn’t answer, because she was a shy girl, like most of her species.
My playful fingers perambulated softly over her cork.
My interpretation of “Tan Enamorados” was off tone, but I didn’t care. The other Walter was shaking his head in shame and denial. As they climbed the concrete stairs and led for the main door, the passersby stared at me like they would at a drunk man, and mumbled things—that were terrible, I am sure— to their peers.
A guitar, I needed a guitar. I didn’t know how to play, but I had enough cash to enroll some starving CBC victim and torture it with the aberrations that came out of my vocal chords. Still, getting a guitar was the main issue with that idea.
I turned towards my fictions.“Hey, other Walter, can you manifest a guitar?”
“The library can, but this is not a fantasy world. There is no magic here, Maker.”
“Explain your presence, then.”
“No, fuck you.”
Ah, like father, like… offspring of both sexes. A Sonther. Or Daugon.
We will go with daugon.
Like father, like daugon.
I directed the attention to my lovely Jacaranda once again. “So, um, I know I shouldn’t ask a lady her age, but what is yours, my fair sprout?”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“For the knowledge of all bookshelves on existence. Make it stop,” they pledged.
“Walter, ¿Qué carajo estás haciendo?” asked Raúl, one of my classmates from the inorganic chemistry lab. Right, it was that quarter. It meant “Walter, what the fuck are you doing?”
“Uno de la FADU me convidó un muffin de chocolate y ahora el árbol se transformó en mi novia a distancia.” Or “A FADU-goer shared a chocolate muffin with me and now the tree turned into my long-distance girlfriend.”
“Ah…qué bien. Nos vemos en clase.” Which could be translated as “Ah, nice. See you in class.”
That’s when I decided to drop the charade and face the other Walter.
“What?” they asked, with a smile infested of counterfeited innocence.
“Come on, say your line, tell me this ‘is all real if I want for it to be real’ once again.”
The wind stopped blowing, the people moving. If nobody else, it seemed that time was interested in our conversation.
“Because that is the truth. The library knows how to take you here, to make this world anew for you. It has a collection about everything your parents ever did or said, another with their exact genetic sequence, the story of each of their cells down to a T, and so on for each being on Earth. The story of every subatomic particle of the universe. Every justice and injustice that shaped your reality is recorded, and everything that is accurately recorded can be accurately recreated. So—”
I bared my teeth and barked my answer, “Bullshit. These people are not real, they are bad, secondary and tertiary characters in this fiction the library made. Look at them: responsible university students that don’t stop to take a video of my self-humiliating person for Instagram.” I pointed at the frozen masses. “You think people ranging from teens to elders, from black belts in taekwondo to Magic the Gathering players, from lazy slobs to cross-fit obsessed workaholics, and everything in between, would react all the same way to a little bit of madness? That no stranger would reprimand me, beg me to cease, call the police, or god forbid, join me? The library knows a theoretical lot about people, but it’s a lazy storyteller. Or, rather, a normal storyteller, with all their faults. In reality, there are only main characters: from the bloodiest dictator to the smallest of living beings, each one of us has their own, personal, unseen by others, spotlight. And even if we cannot always see it, people are not made only of flesh and skin, but of mirrors. Yet, due to the nature of the medium it adopts —that is, humans and their limited tools— storytelling cannot ever replace reality. We made stories, and they reflect our faults and biases.” I made a long pause, reaching to my waist to grab the dagger that should be there, and wasn’t yet. Yet. “A library is not going to tell me what is, and what isn’t, real. That is not its job. It excels at storing and organizing knowledge, and also, stories. But learning only from books is to be subhuman, to think you can make men and women out of stories and data. And like no man knows how to build a companion or bring back the dead, a library with Pinocchio complex cannot possibly know how to make more than faulty characters that need the eyes of the beholder to place the adequate mirrors over them.”
With my diatribe concluded, I rested my back against the trunk of the Jacaranda.
“Please, Walter, do not insult the library. It can give you your reality back, and make you the main character on it.”
They stretched their hand. I slapped it.
“You didn’t listen to a single word of what I said: this is not my world; this cannot ever be my world. I want the place where Mariana can cause our deaths, where she could get a terrible cancer or run away from home and come back pregnant from a Rottweiler. A world that’s gritty, cruel, and, over all else, mine. There is one Earth where I am dead and so is Mariana, and that is where I want to go back. Not to this—”
“The library can correct all of that! it can learn as it goes, change things to fit your desires. It has an infinity of perfect registries to draw from.”
They threw their hat of ceibo flowers into the air, and each flower became a bird of paradise, and each bird was drawn, superimposed into the world. And where the hat had been, instead of a scalp, there was a field of pink, orange and red moss roses.
“If I wanted a god fixing my life, I would be religious. It cannot give me an unadulterated world.”
I pushed them to a side and started walking towards the road.
“Any woman you want, Walter, all the money in the world, Walter, as much power as you desire, W—“
My bird got flipped again. Poor thing was being severely overworked that day.
“Yeah, I can play The Sims or GTA with cheat codes if I want pretend money and pretend bitches. And when I feel like being an asshole of a god, I can boot up Black and White 2. Or The Sims,” I answered without turning to look at them, and kept walking towards the bus stops.
“You …little shit, you… you passed!” they said, cheerfully.
As I walked, the world began to darken. The shapes became smudges and then clouds of color. Ducks came to my mind, because it was never a bad time to think about ducks. Reality seemed to crumble, like the bread I’d use to feed the ducks. But ducks would also have crumbled, creating a paradox that would engulf the universe. Like a duck would engulf bread.
Still nude, the black gates of the library stood once again before me. For the record, I was clothed back in my belts and fantashit world apparel, but the gates, the blackerrimous gates, were naked.
“Thirty seconds is a good time,” commented the fish.
With excessive fanfare the gates began to part, revealing the dark interior of the library, and, most importantly, Mariana, who was about to take a dump in front of the receptionist fish. Said fish was paying attention but not moving from his desk, nor doing anything to avoid Mariana shitting on the blue tiles of the city’s heart.
“Won’t you stop her?” I asked, pointing at the guilty party.
“Why? the library is infinite; she cannot soil a significant portion of it.”
“But. I. Can. Try,” she said, and the struggle was notorious in her voice.
If Mariana hated libraries, it was for reasons foreign to her upbringing by yours, truly. Maybe she just needed to take a crap, and, when you are a dog, the world is your toilet.
As she struggled against her inner brown demons, I contemplated the place. In a semicircle you could see —granted you had eyesight, which is really ableist on my part so I will keep using it, fuck you and your blindness— titanic bookshelves that got lost into the dark heights.
And from the halls between the bookshelves, fossil air blew. Air that smelled untouched by the world, air that had never been breathed. How to heat up or cool down an endless expanse? How to regulate the temperature of a measureless system? You can’t, I can’t, and wind can’t. But you and I know, unlike the breeze that brought the aroma of old, dusty tomes.
There were no light sources visible, things in the library just gave a dim glow out of their own volition.
“We need to find books on how to kill the moon.”
“We have those. Somewhere. We don’t know where, feel free to search for them,” said the fish, and then scratched the side of the head with one of his meaty pectoral fins.
An uncomfortable silence set on, only broken by Mariana’s farts.
“It’s… infinite…and… wait, how many languages do you know?
“All of them.”
I let my shoulders down and sighed.
“I am not going to be part of this sick joke of creation. Mariana, we are leaving.”
“So. Is. The. Turd.”
“Teleport us to Matu’s castle after you finish, Mar.” I turned to the fish. “Show me your finest collection of porn.”