Frank Callahan had worked at the Chicago Public Library -- specifically, at the branch on South Halsted Street, which was not a great branch but was Frank's branch, and he had spent thirty years knowing which chairs squeaked and which radiators clanked and which patrons preferred the fiction section to the non-fiction because fiction, as he once told a city councilman who was visiting, "doesn't pretend to tell you how things are, it tells you how things feel."

The branch was being closed. The city had made the decision in December, and by February the signs were up: THIS BRANCH WILL CEASE OPERATIONS ON MARCH 31. ALL BOOKS MUST BE TRANSFERRED TO THE CENTRAL BRANCH. ALL PATRONS MUST PICK UP THEIR MATERIALS BY MARCH 15.

Frank's job was to organize the transfer. Books going to Central. Books going to the donation center. Books going to the incinerator. He had six weeks to sort through forty thousand volumes and decide which ones were worth saving.

He was good at it. He was too good at it. Because in the course of sorting, he began to notice patterns.

The first pattern was small and insignificant. A stack of books near the back of the room, in the area that had been cordoned off for incineration, that had never been checked out successfully. Frank opened the first one -- it was a mystery novel, paperback, spine cracked -- and noticed on the circulation card inside the front cover: checked out 3/12/1987, returned 3/12/1987, status: never read.

He flipped to the next book. Same pattern. Checked out on a specific date and returned on the same date, but the pages were unstained by reading. Not a single thumb mark, not a single bent corner. The kind of checkout that was mechanical, not human.

He pulled books at random from the incineration pile. Every single one had the same pattern. Checked out, returned the same day, never read. He pulled fifty books. All fifty. He pulled one hundred. One hundred unread.

He began to research. He pulled the patron records -- the old paper cards that predated the computer system, which meant he could see who had checked these books out and when.

The names were real. The addresses were real. The dates spanned twenty years, from 1967 to 1987. But the reading history was identical: one book, one day, zero pages turned.

Frank started tracking the people. He used the addresses from the old cards, went to the neighborhoods he knew -- Little Village, Pilsen, the Near South Side -- and asked around. Some of the people were gone. Moved away, died, disappeared. Of the twenty people he found, seven were dead. Five had moved to another state. Three were retired and living in apartment complexes on the north side.

Of the three he spoke to, two had no memory of checking out any books during those dates. The third, an elderly woman named Ruthie Cohen who lived in a fourth-floor walk-up near Devon Avenue, said: "I remember this. I remember checking out a book and returning it the same day. I don't remember the title. I remember thinking it was the strangest thing I had ever done. I walked into the library, I took a book off the shelf, I walked to the desk, I said I wanted to check it out. The librarian stamped it. I walked home. I opened the book. And I couldn't read it. Not because I didn't want to. Because I couldn't. The words were there. The sentences were formed. But nothing came through. Like reading a language I had forgotten."

She looked at Frank with old, watery eyes. "After that, I never checked out another book in my life."

Frank went back to the branch. He found the incineration pile. He pulled a book at random. It was a collection of poetry. He opened it to page 47 and read the first line: "I am the book that was never read."

He closed the book. He put it back in the pile. He told himself it was coincidence. He told himself it was a printing error. He told himself a lot of things that evening.

The next morning, he found the catalog card for book number 713. It was not in the computer. It was not in the card catalog. It was a separate card, filed in a drawer that should not have existed, behind a panel of the card catalog cabinet that had been painted over and never noticed in thirty years of working there.

The card had no title. No author. No publisher. No call number. Just a borrowing card, and on that card, a single entry:

Frank Callahan. March 31.

Today's date.

Frank's hands were shaking so badly that he could barely hold the card. He looked at the drawer. There were 712 cards before it, each one with a name and a date and a book title that Frank could no longer see because he had put the card back. He knew there were 712 cards because he had counted them before he put this one back, before the blood went out of his face, before he walked out of the library and did not come back for two days.

On the third day, he returned. He pulled book 713 from the incineration pile. It was a small, thin volume, no cover, no title, just pages of blank paper except for one sentence on the first page:

YOU ARE THE LAST ONE. READ ME AND YOU WILL BE DONE. DO NOT READ ME AND YOU WILL BE THE SAME.

Frank read it three times. He put the book in his bag. He went home. He sat in his apartment with the book on his kitchen table and a cup of coffee that went cold while he stared at it.

He read it at 8 PM. By 8:15, he understood everything. The book was not a book. It was a record. A record of every person who had checked it out and not finished it, a record that existed in the space between reading and not-reading, a space that Frank had been occupying for thirty years without knowing it.

The library had been his library. He had known every chair, every radiator, every patron. He had been the keeper of the unread books for thirty years and he had not known it. And now the branch was closing, and the books were being moved or burned or donated, and the space between reading and not-reading was collapsing, and he was the last person in that space.

He finished reading at midnight. The last page said: "The 713th book is now complete. The collection is closed. Thank you for your service, Frank Callahan."

He walked to the library one last time. He stood in the empty branch, surrounded by the empty shelves, and he listened to the building breathe its last breath, and he thought of 713 people who had checked out a book and never read it, and he thought of the book that had been waiting for him, and he knew that when he walked out that door, he would never check out another book in his life.

He walked out. He locked the door. He did not look back.

--- OTMES-v2 Code: OTMES-v2-B9A4E7C6-713-ME-88-1F82-00F-0000