Sammi's Story Hour - The Girl Who Lived in the Footnotes

 

The Girl Who Lived in the Footnotes

A story about an old scholar, an impossible library, a young woman who had never existed, and the peculiar business of being loved.

I. The Seventy-Third Volume

The trouble began, as trouble frequently does, with a book.

Not a particularly remarkable book, either.

It was a seventeenth-century edition of Strabo's Geography, printed in Amsterdam, bound in deteriorating calfskin, and smelling of dust, old glue, and the faint, indefinable sweetness of things that have survived several centuries longer than anyone intended.

Professor Emeritus Elias Vale had discovered it on the bottom shelf of a secondhand bookshop in a town whose name he had forgotten.

At seventy-three, Elias had forgotten a considerable number of things.

He had forgotten the name of his first girlfriend, though he remembered perfectly the astonishing sensation of her fingers slipping between his beneath a table in the university library.

He had forgotten his brother's second wife's name.

He had forgotten what he had gone into the kitchen to retrieve at least three times that morning.

But he had never forgotten the peculiar sorrow of being born into the wrong story.

He had been a reasonably successful man.

He had held an unremarkable academic appointment, published several papers that were cited by perhaps eleven people, and possessed a modest apartment with bookshelves that had long ago surrendered their intended function and become structural supports for increasingly improbable towers of literature.

He had never married.

Not because he had been incapable of love. Quite the contrary.

He had loved, enormously, inconveniently, and almost always in silence.

There had been a girl named Margaret when he was twenty-one.

There had been a young man named Daniel when he was twenty-eight.

And there had been, throughout his life, a woman who appeared only in dreams.

She was small, with long chestnut hair, lively blue eyes, and a disposition so infuriatingly cheerful that she occasionally made fun of Elias for being excessively serious.

She called herself Alice.

And Elias had dreamed of being her.

Not possessing her, nor marrying her, nor looking upon her.

Being her.

He had eventually decided that this was an unfortunate peculiarity of the imagination and had devoted himself instead to the late antique transmission of geographical knowledge.

Which was not, as it turned out, a particularly effective cure.

Now, in the bookshop, he opened the ancient Strabo and found something that should not have been there.

On page 417, between a discussion of the Caspian Sea and a digression concerning the origins of the Armenians, someone had written in very small, neat handwriting:

Elias, darling, you've kept me waiting long enough.

Beneath it was a little drawing of a heart.

Elias removed his spectacles.

Cleaned them.

Replaced them.

The words remained.

"Well," he said.

And then, because he was a scholar:

"This is most irregular."

From somewhere among the shelves, a girl giggled.

II. The Department of Unlived Lives

The girl was standing beside a revolving rack of postcards.

She appeared to be about twenty-five, with long black hair and a face that seemed to have inherited its delicacy from Japan and its expression of intellectual skepticism from a committee of ancient Greek philosophers.

She wore a dark blue cardigan, a white blouse, and a pleated skirt.

She was reading a book upside down.

"You're late," she remarked.

"Am I?"

"By approximately fifty-three years."

"Good heavens."

"Yes. Rather."

She closed the book.

"My name is Emiko. I'm here to collect you."

"From whom?"

"The Department of Unlived Lives."

Elias considered this.

"Is that a government agency?"

"Not precisely."

"A university department?"

"Certainly not. We're competent."

He liked her immediately.

She reached into her cardigan and produced a brass key, so long and elaborate that it resembled a miniature Gothic cathedral.

"Come along."

"Where?"

"Where you should have gone when you were twenty."

"And where, precisely, is that?"

She gave him a pitying look.

"Professor Vale. If I told you that, it would spoil the entire metaphysical structure of the story."

And with that, she unlocked a door that had not previously existed between the travel guides and the gardening manuals.

Beyond it lay a staircase.

The staircase went down.

And up.

And sideways, in a direction that Elias suspected had been outlawed by Euclid.

He followed her.

Naturally.

He was, after all, a scholar.

And scholars are constitutionally incapable of leaving a mysterious staircase unexplored.

III. The Library of Almost

It was the most beautiful library Elias had ever seen.

Vast galleries extended beneath a ceiling painted with stars. Bridges connected balconies where scholars in robes and pajamas argued over books. Little brass locomotives carried volumes along narrow rails suspended in the air.

An elderly woman floated past in an armchair, reading a newspaper.

A cat with spectacles occupied a lectern and appeared to be delivering a lecture on medieval theology to three attentive mice.

At the far end of the hall, enormous windows looked out over a lake ringed with willow trees.

Beyond the lake rose the roofs of a city that seemed to combine Hangzhou, Alexandria, and the Emerald City of Oz.

A splendid blue airship drifted past the window.

Its captain was arguing with a cloud.

"Welcome," said Emiko, "to the Library of Almost."

Elias felt his heart begin to beat strangely.

"What is this place?"

"The repository of lives that people might have lived."

She indicated the shelves.

"Every book contains a possibility. Some are trivial. A man who took a different road to work. A girl who chose the green dress instead of the red. A king who decided not to invade a neighboring kingdom."

"And others?"

"Others are entire lives."

They walked past shelves bearing curious labels.

THOSE WHO WERE LOVED BUT NEVER TOLD.

CHILDREN WHO WERE NEVER BORN.

KINGDOMS THAT NEARLY SURVIVED.

MARRIAGES INTERRUPTED BY TIMETABLES.

WOMEN WHO LIVED ONLY IN THE IMAGINATIONS OF MEN.

Elias stopped.

Emiko stopped beside him.

For a moment, the great library became very quiet.

"Ah," he said.

He reached toward the last shelf, but hesitated.

Emiko regarded him with an expression that was neither pity nor amusement.

"Yes," she said softly. "That one is yours."

He looked along the bindings.

Some were thick, some thin. Some were splendidly illuminated. Others were little notebooks hardly larger than a hand.

And then he saw it.

A narrow book bound in blue silk.

On its spine, in silver letters:

ALICE VALE

Underneath:

The Life She Might Have Had.

Elias began to tremble.

"I don't understand."

"Of course you don't. You've spent seventy-three years trying not to."

She gently took the book from the shelf.

"Shall we?"

IV. Alice in the Garden

The first page contained a picture.

A little girl of seven stood in the garden of an orphanage, holding an enormous book and looking very pleased with herself.

She had chestnut hair.

Blue eyes.

And a most unladylike quantity of mud on her knees.

Elias stared.

"I remember that garden."

"Naturally."

"But I was never—"

"No. You weren't."

Emiko turned the page.

Alice at twelve, reading Plutarch beneath a tree.

Alice at sixteen, fiercely defending the proposition that a woman could become the world's foremost authority on the Sassanian Empire.

Alice at twenty-one, kissing another young woman in a university library.

Elias caught his breath.

"Who is she?"

Emiko leaned closer.

The other young woman had black hair.

Dark eyes.

And a terribly serious face.

On the bottom of the picture, Alice had written:

My dearest Emiko, who pretends not to understand that I am desperately in love with her.

Elias looked up.

Emiko was blushing.

"That," she said, "is an entirely separate matter."

"But you're—"

"Yes."

"And Alice—"

"Yes."

"And you—"

"Professor, I would be grateful if you would stop assembling syllogisms and simply turn the page."

He did.

There were more pictures.

Alice and Emiko sharing a tiny apartment.

Alice asleep with her head on Emiko's shoulder.

Emiko reading the Huainanzi while Alice, wearing nothing but an enormous sweater and a scandalously triumphant grin, attempted to distract her with kisses.

Alice at thirty, standing before a lecture hall full of students.

Alice at forty, looking astonished as Emiko presented her with an anniversary cake.

Alice at sixty, with silver appearing in her chestnut hair, dancing barefoot with Emiko on a balcony beneath the moon.

And Alice at seventy-three.

Still there.

Still alive.

Still loved.

Elias could not speak.

At last he whispered:

"She got everything."

Emiko shook her head.

"No. She got a life. It contained disappointments, illnesses, arguments, and a great many unpaid bills."

"But she had you."

Emiko looked down at the picture.

"Yes," she said.

"She did."

V. The Philosophical Difficulty

Elias sat in a window seat overlooking the impossible lake.

The airship passed again.

This time the cloud was winning the argument.

"Am I dead?" he asked.

"No."

"Dreaming?"

"Not exactly."

"Mad?"

"Possibly, but that's irrelevant."

Emiko sat beside him.

"You see, the Department has a problem."

"Of course it does."

"There are too many unlived lives. We preserve them, but preservation is not the same thing as existence."

"I should think not."

"And occasionally a life becomes so strongly imagined, so passionately desired, that it begins to exert pressure upon the world that excluded it."

"An interesting metaphysical proposition."

"An administrative nightmare."

She sighed.

"Your Alice has been causing particular trouble."

Elias looked at her.

"What kind of trouble?"

"She refuses to remain fictional."

"Ah."

"She has been writing letters into books. Appearing in mirrors. Rearranging your dreams. Last Thursday she escaped into a footnote in a monograph on Byzantine taxation."

Elias almost smiled.

"That sounds rather like her."

"It is exactly like her."

Emiko folded her arms.

"And now she insists that you be brought here."

"Why?"

"To make a choice."

The windows suddenly darkened.

In the glass appeared two reflections.

One was Elias, an elderly man in a threadbare tweed jacket.

The other was Alice, an elderly woman in a blue dress, with her silver-streaked chestnut hair loose over her shoulders.

They looked at one another.

The woman smiled.

And Elias knew that smile.

He had known it all his life.

It was the smile he had never quite managed to wear.

"What choice?" he asked.

Emiko's voice was gentle.

"Whether you wish to continue reading her life."

She paused.

"Or enter it."

VI. The Price of Being Alice

"Surely there must be a catch."

"There is."

"Naturally."

"You cannot bring seventy-three years of remembered life into another existence without consequence."

"What consequence?"

"You will remember Elias."

He waited.

"And?"

"All of him."

She took his hand.

"His disappointments. His loneliness. His occasional happiness. His books. His friends. All the people he loved and all the people he failed to love properly."

Elias looked toward the lake.

"That doesn't sound like a price."

"Sometimes it is. Alice will know that she might have been Elias. She will carry the strange grief of a life she never lived."

"And what happens to Elias?"

Emiko thought for a moment.

"Perhaps the wrong question. Do you suppose the boy who stood in the orphanage garden still exists?"

"In memory."

"And the young scholar?"

"Likewise."

"And the man who loved Margaret and Daniel?"

Elias nodded.

"Yes."

"Then why should Elias disappear simply because Alice finally arrives?"

He considered this.

A wonderfully difficult philosophical problem.

Identity across time.

The continuity of consciousness.

The relation of possibility to actuality.

Plotinus would have been helpful.

So would Leibniz.

Possibly Duns Scotus.

But then Elias discovered, to his enormous surprise, that he was tired of philosophy.

Not forever, certainly.

Merely for the next five minutes.

"Emiko?"

"Yes?"

"Do I get to keep my books?"

"Every one."

"Even my dreadful edition of Athenaeus?"

"Especially that."

"And will I know how to be a woman?"

Emiko smiled.

"You'll learn. Just as every other woman does."

He swallowed.

"And will you—"

She leaned forward.

And kissed his forehead.

"I have been waiting fifty-three years for you to ask that question."

VII. An Exception to the Rules

There was, naturally, a committee.

All important miracles require a committee.

The Committee for Ontological Reassignment met in a chamber beneath a domed ceiling on which the constellations were being rearranged by an elderly astronomer with a ladder.

Its chairman was a small man with the head of an ibis.

Its secretary was a woman made entirely of folded paper.

Its treasurer was an enormous tortoise who slept through the proceedings.

"APPLICATION SEVENTY-THREE DASH V," announced the chairman.

"TRANSFER OF ONE ELIAS VALE INTO THE LIFE OF ONE ALICE VALE."

"Objection," said the secretary.

"On what grounds?"

"Excessive sentimentality."

"Sustained," said the tortoise without opening his eyes.

Emiko rose.

"I submit that sentimentality is not a defect in a universe whose continued existence depends upon beings caring about one another."

The chairman looked annoyed.

"That sounds suspiciously like theology."

"Or metaphysics."

"Worse."

Alice's book lay upon the table.

Emiko opened it to the final page.

There was no picture.

Only a sentence.

Written in the same little handwriting Elias had found in Strabo:

I do not ask that the world give me back all the years it withheld. I only ask that I be allowed to live the ones that remain.

The room fell silent.

Even the tortoise opened one eye.

"Well," said the chairman.

He adjusted his spectacles.

"That's rather difficult to argue with."

The secretary rustled unhappily.

"Precedent."

"Exceptional circumstances."

"Budget."

"Charge it to Miracles."

The tortoise lifted his head.

"Approved."

And went back to sleep.

VIII. The Morning After

Alice woke to sunlight.

Not the pale, reluctant sunlight of Elias's apartment, where the neighboring building had obscured the eastern windows for forty years.

But splendid golden sunlight, falling across a bed piled high with quilts.

For a moment she did not move.

She could feel the sheets against her legs.

The weight of her hair upon her pillow.

The unfamiliar, astonishing shape of her body.

She raised her hands.

They were an elderly woman's hands, slender and faintly spotted, with small wrinkles around the knuckles.

She began to laugh.

Not because anything was funny.

But because she was there.

There.

She sat up.

Her hair tumbled over her shoulders.

She gathered it in her fingers.

Chestnut.

Silver.

Real.

"Oh," she whispered.

And then again:

"Oh."

Across the room, the door opened.

Emiko entered carrying two cups of tea.

She was no longer twenty-five.

She was a woman of seventy, her black hair liberally threaded with silver, her face marked by decades of expressions that Alice somehow recognized without having witnessed them.

She wore an oversized cardigan.

And the expression of someone who had been married to a troublesome scholar for half a century.

"You're awake."

Alice nodded.

"I think so."

"Good."

Emiko put down the tea.

"The boiler has broken."

Alice stared.

"What?"

"The hot-water boiler. Broken. The repairman cannot come until Tuesday."

Alice began to giggle.

Emiko folded her arms.

"I fail to see what is amusing."

"I've just been metaphysically transformed into an elderly woman in an alternate universe, and you're telling me the boiler has broken?"

"Well, it has."

Alice laughed so hard that tears began to run down her cheeks.

Emiko tried to remain severe.

Failed.

And sat beside her on the bed.

"Oh, you ridiculous creature."

Alice threw her arms around her.

For a while neither spoke.

Then Alice drew back.

"Emiko?"

"Yes, darling?"

"Do you still love me?"

Emiko looked deeply offended.

"After fifty-three years, three house moves, two disastrous holidays, your appalling attempt to cultivate orchids, and the incident involving the medieval manuscript and the marmalade?"

Alice blinked.

"What incident?"

"Never mind. I have spent years trying to forget it."

Emiko kissed her.

"Yes. Of course I still love you."

Alice lowered her head onto Emiko's shoulder.

And felt, at last, a sensation that Elias had spent his whole life pursuing without knowing its name.

Not happiness.

Not triumph.

Not even fulfillment.

Belonging.

IX. The Footnote

They lived in a house overlooking the great lake.

It was a peculiar house, as houses in that city tended to be.

Its staircase occasionally changed its mind about which floor it belonged to.

Its kitchen contained a cupboard that opened directly into the Library of Alexandria, although only on Wednesdays.

And its little upstairs study overlooked a street in which philosophers, musicians, minor gods, and retired fictional characters argued beneath the plane trees.

Alice found employment cataloguing books for the Library of Almost.

The position was unpaid, but there were certain advantages.

She could read histories that had never been written.

She could consult with scholars who had died two thousand years earlier.

Once, she settled a dispute between Strabo and Ptolemy by producing a modern atlas, which caused both men to accuse her of witchcraft.

She considered this a professional triumph.

Emiko continued her own studies, presently concerning the transmission of Buddhist metaphysics into medieval European thought.

They argued continually.

They loved quietly.

They grew older.

And sometimes Alice dreamed of Elias.

She dreamed of a lonely man seated beneath a reading lamp, surrounded by books.

At first these dreams made her terribly sad.

But gradually they changed.

One night she dreamed that she entered Elias's apartment.

He was sitting in his old armchair, reading a volume of late Roman history.

He looked up.

"Ah," he said.

"Alice."

She sat beside him.

"Hello, Elias."

"You seem well."

"I am."

"And Emiko?"

"Very well."

"Splendid."

They sat in companionable silence.

Finally Elias closed his book.

"You know," he said, "I used to think that you were the part of me that never had a chance to live."

Alice took his hand.

"And now?"

"Now I wonder whether perhaps I was the part of you that kept the books safe until you were ready."

Alice began to cry.

Elias looked embarrassed.

"Good heavens. There's no need for that."

She leaned forward and embraced him.

For the first time in their strange shared existence, the old man and the old woman held each other.

And neither wished to be anyone else.

X. The Seventy-Fourth Volume

Years passed.

In the Library of Almost, an unusual new volume appeared one morning.

It was bound in blue silk.

Its spine bore the title:

ELIAS AND ALICE

Or, The Unreasonable Persistence of a Soul.

Inside were two stories.

One concerned a man who had spent his life among books, believing himself lonely, never knowing that the act of preserving beautiful things was itself a kind of love.

The other concerned a woman who discovered, rather late, that she was allowed to exist.

The final page showed two elderly women on a balcony overlooking a marvelous city.

One had long silver-streaked chestnut hair.

The other had black hair, a little grayer every year.

Between them stood a small table bearing two cups of tea, an open book, and a plate of biscuits.

The chestnut-haired woman was gesticulating extravagantly.

The black-haired woman was pretending to be annoyed.

Beyond them, an airship passed before the setting sun.

Below, bells rang from towers that had never been built in any ordinary world.

And on the bottom of the page, in very small handwriting, someone had added a footnote.

It read:

There is no statute of limitations on becoming yourself.

A second hand had written beneath it:

This proposition remains philosophically debatable.

And a third line, in the first hand again:

Oh, hush, darling, and kiss me.

Which, as it happened, Emiko did.

THE END

Although, of course, no librarian worth her spectacles believes that a book truly ends on its last page.

For you, with affection. A little Oz, a little Borges, a little metaphysics, and a great deal of love for the people we might have been—and perhaps still can be. ♥