Jim's Story 2, Take 2

This is Jim's story again, really.

So where were we... Jim, not his real name, but in this case for trademark purposes it was, librarian at the Library of Alexandria, not afraid of water but of the stuff underneath the water, cataloging all the arriving scholars who, apparently, were allergic to filling out forms, heard of legendary chocolate water place, and looking for an accounted for Druid. Right.

And, in fact, he'd largely given up. On the Druid. The rumours of a place of chocolate waters haunted him, but it was nothing he'd ever seriously acted on. The other Druids had moved on, Jim managed to clean up the 'Q' aisle to the best of his abilities, which were, in fact, pretty good, seeing as how he'd been a librarian at the Library of Alexandria for some 30 years at that point. The Druids were now out on the beaches of Alexandria getting more red than a Maine lobster in a pot of boiling water and frolicking in the sand drunker than a March hare, as apparently they were wont to do, Jim was told by various visiting scholars from the Italian, Spanish, and Greek coastlines.

Jim had moved on with his life, in so far as he could, which meant he shuffled around the halls of the Library, cleaning up this and that, returning books to their shelves, and chasing visiting scholars from the rows when they looked a little too settled. He'd no idea, when he got into the librarian business that scholars could be so randy. He'd caught scores upon scores of scholars sans their traditional robes with the girls from the cities, whom they'd snuck in (the most common alias was "Scholar Hera-Klitus," with an unusual and awkward emphasis on the "Hera" -- but this was the way scholars attempted to joke... they didn't get out much) disguised in a scholar's traditional robes, of which they were also relieved. That was, should it ever come up in a performance review or anything, his least favourite thing about the job. No one ever thought to ask, though. Some scholars just weren't meant to be naked. Ever. He never saw anything of the sort when he was apprenticing to his uncle at the family-run comic book store on the lower East Side of Cairo. Sure, he was thankful to see the back of the monkeys (not literally) when he received his call up to the much lesser known Library of Luxor, a smaller and much flashier version of the Library of Alexandria where they trained their librarians-to-be under a much lesser degree of pressure. He spent a few years there, one entire year lost amongst the bookshelves for the letters ♣ through ®. It was one of the standard tests they performed — take a student down into the non-lettered shelves, then take off, pretending you needed to use the toilet, and leave the student to find his own way back. It was usually reserved as the final test of a librarian's mettle. Not many survived, Jim was proud to report. Not that he did that often. Not many people were interested enough in a librarian's trials and tribulations to enquire after how they got to be that way.

This particular day he rounded the corner on the 'T' row, on reports of some joker having put Ptolemy's works back down there. This was no small feat, as before the fire that was to come in 30 AD and take most of his more popular romance novels Ptolemy had three whole rows to himself, the most of any other author in the ancient Library of Alexandria. Some newly arrived scholar would always attempt this joke sometime early into his tenure, Jim suspected it was a ritual reserved for the rookie scholars, due to the frequency, and often the sobbing scholar at the foot of the shelf, collapsed under a pile of works combining his interests in geometry and romance novels which were surprisingly popular, at the time. They put a lot of stock in those confluence books in those days of 10 AD, nine out of ten books in the top ten, internationally were about the combination of various disciplines, and Ptolemy's tended to run a bit weighty. In volume, if not in actual content, or so ran the common critique.

The figure huddled at the end he had assumed was a new scholar, weeping silently over his failure to shift all the books to their newly appointed shelves. It was the sticky floor and the mild stench of death that tipped him off that maybe this wasn't any normal new scholar.

To be continued...