Life and Death in the Stacks

[whistlersmum]

Whistler had so become a fixture at the university library, students had started approaching him for reference information.

UNLV's Special Collections housed unique, rare, and specialized research material that documented the history, culture and physical environment of the city of Las Vegas, the Southern Nevada region, the gaming industry, and the University of Nevada Las Vegas.The collections included books, pamphlets, posters, serials and periodicals, scrapbooks, archives and manuscripts, maps, architectural drawings, photographs, and more recently, video and audio tapes.

Everything he needed about the history of Searchlight, the boomtown years, the historic landscape, prominent citizens. And, after days of searching, the Agent finally found the real treasure map he'd sought: a map of the town before it's decline in the nineteen forties.

His finger traced the streets that led to the (former) Catholic Church. "Here's the church, and here's the steeple. Open the doors..."

Comments

[dori_bell]

The door sighed shut on unseasonably cold weather. A light scent of tea rose wafted into the library and settled like a perfumed fog over the card catalogs, the stacks, and the bent heads of students. The young woman who had entered continued past the circulation desk, though her gaze lingered on the silvery head of a librarian, who pressed her fingers to her temple and a headache that wouldn’t abate.

Her clothes were drab: a wool coat, a pleated skirt, tights and clunky shoes. Her hair was just shy of blonde. Mouse brown, a stylist once called it. There were anemic half-moons beneath her eyes. She climbed a staircase to a lesser frequented part of the building, a reference section where nonfiction books, government publications, U.S. geological surveys, and the like collected dust and silverfish.

She stopped behind Whistler’s chair and tilted her head.

Slowly, she leaned over his shoulder to place her fingertip on the map.

“This is where I live.”

[dori_bell]

“It may not have to explode,” Dori agreed slowly, seeming to weigh this conversation as heavily as Whistler did, although more for cognitive purposes than personal. “But maybe it should.” She imagined a star becoming a supernova, a fire raging through a forest, a wave wiping out a coastal village. In all cases, the desolation gave way to something new. Eventually.

Dori thought of James; he said that she was unusually pensive in this iteration of life. She couldn’t say. Her memories of the lives that came before ‘Dorothy’ were incomplete. They came in earnest snatches, vivid and close but all too brief. Like dreams, she couldn’t discern anyone’s identity, including her own. People were faceless, and her vantage point was from above. She remembered a doctor euthanizing a patient with a nurse at his side. Was Dori the physician, the nurse in white, or the man lying prone on the table? Was she the mother drowning her offspring in a baby pool or the neighbor standing silent with a garden hose, watching? Was she none of those things?

Dori’s memories of James throughout the centuries were clearer. He said it was the same for him. That double-mystery kept them from accumulating too much mental ‘stuff’ from life to life. They were reference points for one another.

“How do you know which it is?” Dori asked.