Days before the exam
It’s five days until the exam.
We leave the hotel as soon as the night-hours begin to go to “the S” across the river. It’s the only letter of “supermarket” left that still holds on to one side of the building which is now a food delivery centre. We move like spectres under the never changing grey-orange sky. The air tastes more bitter every day: I always tell myself this when we leave the hotel, though I can barely remember how it was when you could still sometimes spot some blue sky beyond the smog. If you don’t look at your phone there is nothing out here to tell you what day or night-hour it is and time becomes, more than ever, some made up concept. I wonder if my friends are tempted to just continue roaming the streets now filled only with delivery trucks and other spectres like us; there’s no blue sky to breathe in during a quick break outside anymore.
Yet we walk quickly. It’s illegal to take food from the trash bins, but no one we met there ever reported us and we agree to the same silent pact.
༄
“Good collection today,” Alex determines once we are back, as they look at the slightly wrinkled fruit and veggies they have tidily arranged on the table. They would cost a fortune to order. There is also some luxuriously smelling sour-dough bread and three cookies, as well as five packaged meals.
“Lots of good things to get us through exam season! Priya, do you want to cook?”
She is leaning on one of the old leather stools, which two decades ago must have looked fancy in the bar area that is now our home. Her elbows are propped on the seat, face ready to disappear between her hands.
“Are you serious right now?”
“Maintaining a routine is important during stressful periods,” Alex says, their mismatched eyes meeting Priya’s without a blink.
She twists her fingers into her black hair and for a moment I think she’s going to yank it out.
“This is not a stressful period. This is the fucking end, Alex!”
She lets go of the dark strands and her head falls into the fold of her elbows as her back shakes with soundless sobs.
Alex rubs their hands over the seams of the trousers at their sides, takes a step forward, looks at me for help as they come to stand next to Priya.
I shake my head, mouthing, “Let her breathe” and then I disappear behind the marble bar counter to prepare us some food.
We have dinner on the floor, huddled together around Priya’s mattress with the fancy porcelain hotel plates and heavy water-filled liqueur glasses. I made vegetable curry with rice from a packaged meal and a wrinkled courgette. The lounge is enormous at our backs. Usually we try to sit properly at one of the tables, but Priya has lain down here, with her face pressed into the pillow, and we followed to be close. She finally rises and her eyes are dark, deep puddles that could swallow you whole.
Alex offers to do the dishes; the pass-through dishwasher we were so excited about when we first moved in broke just a month after. Then they come back with a tiny plastic zip-lock bag from their “Emergency Stash” and offers us a sleeping pill. During exam season you can get one for free every day if you are a student on campus, but one of Alex’s friends doesn’t always use them and gifts some to us. I know it would be better to sleep, but there are five nights left and only seven pills, so initially none of us dares taking one.
I look at the dark circles under Priya’s eyes, wet now like puddles after a shower, then I share a glance with Alex. Finally, they silently press a pill into our friend's hand and hold her as she falls asleep.
We will all be thinking about home tonight, dreading it, calculating the price of the plane tickets (one or two transfers?) and how we will feel even more empty-handed after having spent that money, coming home four years later without a degree. But Priya’s way here has been much longer than ours, half way across the world: a fortune paid for a chance at a freer future. It is almost impossible to find a decently paid job without a degree these days. And without one you are left to beg. So it is good for Priya to sleep, not think at all for a while.
As I wait for the day-hours to begin I listen to the wind howling through the empty hotel halls and Alex tossing in their bed like a rock caught between waves. The university’s library page with “Resource Access Fee (RAF) required to view this source” is engraved behind my eyelids and becomes visible as soon as I close them. I stare at the ceiling instead, as I did as a child when we were on holiday and I would spend the night imagining the adventures of the next day. I must have been five or six the last time my parents and I stayed in a hotel and already there were barely any open ones anymore. People booked houses on Airbnb where they would be undisturbed now. But my parents had liked to stay in hotels any time it had been possible—for the nostalgia.
Alex thinks this could have been a five-star hotel—because of the fancy kitchenware—even though there is only one star left, which still hangs above the entrance and incredibly lights up during the night-hours. Priya says four-stars because her aunt used to be a cook in a luxury hotel and they used bone china plates, not porcelain.
When our clock announces the day-hours and I open my eyes my pillow is moist and I can almost read “Resource Access Fee (RAF) required to view this source” in wrinkled, washed out letters. I only ever cry during the night, when I can’t stop myself.
༄
It’s four days until the exam.
One of the packaged meals has plum compote and yogurt as a dessert, so Alex methodically puts it on the sour-dough for breakfast instead, neatly spreading it along the line of the crust, leaving just enough space for holding the breadslice in one’s hand.
“If only one of us had paid the RAF, we wouldn’t be in this situation” they mumble. They must feel tired and dizzy from all the turning over the night-hours.
“If any of us had been in the position to afford the RAF we wouldn’t be here in the first place, but in some campus sleeping-room,” I remind them, as I gratefully take a breakfast plate from the table.
“We held on for so long,” Priya finally dares to speak out in a whisper the one enormous thought which has been painfully pressing on the inside of our skulls.
The sleeping pill has left a heaviness on her that grounds her.
We are almost, almost done. After four years, one last exam and it’s done. Would have been. The time I’ve spent at university occupies such a large portion of space in my mind. It is hard to distinguish between the memories of all the wonderful moments spent with my friends, but I can name every title of the essays I’ve written. And I am sure Priya and Alex could do the same: we’ve spent so many hours feeding on articles, chapters, critiques, analyses like children on mother’s milk.
There has never been a fixed-text exam so far. And still, we would have made it if it had been a 200-page book, maybe we could have even managed typing out 300 pages—or at least most of it—by dividing it up. But copying 700 pages in the six remaining day-hours after the lecture before they kicked us out of campus had been impossible; the magic of ctrl+c and ctrl+v does not work on university sources. And so the exam will come in four days and we will fail and then return home where the only proof of all of this ever happening will be all the knowledge amassed in our heads, which we will slowly forget, little by little, and the half a million or so missing from our parents’ bank account. It’s not like we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. The terms had been stated clearly in the letter of acceptance:
The Resource Access Fee (RAF) is required to view all the sources from the university library website. Students who do not pay the RAF will only gain access to the lecture specific sources during a limited time period starting at the hour of the lecture and ending on the 12th day-hour of the same day.
I had read through that section while biting on the nail of my right thumb immediately after screaming and dancing around the kitchen with my parents to celebrate receiving the offer. My mother had winked at me, “I became a pirating expert at uni,” she’d grinned. But stories about pirating texts from some illegal sites were about as outdated now as legends of pirate treasures. And paper books had become museum pieces half a century ago. Priya had still tried—she was good at it—,but the only website she had successfully managed to hack was the food delivery one, which was useless because they would never deliver to an empty hotel.
Half way through their slice of bread Alex drops it on the plate with a sigh, but then shakes their head and finishes it after all.
“Ok. Time to lock in. What do we do?” they say as soon as the plates have been washed and dried.
Priya looks at them and smiles as tears reach the corners of her mouth. I take a heavy linen napkin from a drawer under the bar counter and pass it to her. She holds on to my wrist and leans her head on my shoulder and I can feel a dense mass of dread and tears pressing hard at the back of my throat, but it stays there, so Alex locks eyes with me.
“Do you think—Is there anyone on campus we could ask?”
The answer is obvious, we have all thought about it, but it seems like the logical first hypothesis to test and then discard. The question has two sides to it. One has to do with trust, so we leave it unspoken because admitting to being scared that one of our friends on campus could report us to the Dean, if we were to ask to borrow their laptop, equals admitting that we don’t have any friends on campus at all.
So I jump right to the other, kinder, answer, “What if they’re found out and expelled along with us?”
Alex shrugs their shoulders, “Maybe they wouldn’t be. People have done it in the past.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek, “Well, we don’t actually know anyone who has done so, we’ve just been told stories.”
“I think it’s worth the risk,” Alex insists, “whether we just wait to do the exam and fail or are discovered using someone else’s laptop to read the text, we’ll be kicked out in any case.”
“Then it should be our last resort, only in case we find no other solution,” Priya says, as she lifts her head from my shoulder and suddenly there is a splendid easiness to breathing. There is such a relief in not thinking about the problem itself, only how to solve it. A god-like feeling; capable of using one’s full range of skills without the bothers of humanity. Like machines.
“How many hours do you think we need to read about 700 pages? Without taking notes.”
“About 500 actually,” Priya corrects me, “I’d feel confident enough not to reread the 200 pages we’ve typed out.”
“Same,” Alex says, “So what do we think? Ten, twelve hours?”
“We can do it in ten,” this is the kind of situation in which bold statements do not require supporting evidence and I take pleasure in every word as it smoothly slides over my tongue and out of my lips.
“Alright, so we have to get the text by the 8th hour of the night before the exam, the latest,” Alex calculates on their fingers.
Priya nods, “The exam is at the 6th hour, so that would leave us exactly 4 night-hours and 6 day-hours to get through it.”
It’s like we’re preparing an essay: by lunch we have come up with an outline. To start, we made a list of all the people we know on campus—because if you can afford to live on campus you can definitely pay the RAF as well—and slowly crossed out those we judge to be least likely to lend us their laptop. We halve the list in one go because it can’t be anyone that suffers from anxiety in any way. Uni patriots are the next we exclude. Five of our friends have been assigned student-representative roles this year, so we can’t ask and expect them not to report us. Finally, we come up with the best working hypothesis: if we have to ask someone it will be Jen, Alex’s friend who gave them the sleeping pills, and we will do so by the first hour of the day before the exam.
༄
What we haven’t taken into consideration while planning what to do at the very end, when the time will be up, is the wait in between.
”We keep thinking,” Alex determines, “We’ve come up with a final resort, not a solution, so we keep going.”
But it’s as if time feeds on our minds and the day-hours pass one after the other, slowly consuming any of our thoughts or feelings filling the lounge. At some point we eat because it is the 6th day-hour and we drink because we haven’t done so in a while. Finally, by the 9th hour, it is the feeling of urgency violently pressing down onto our heads that forces us to stir.
Alex starts pacing round and round and round and round the room and I feel dizzy watching them.
“Let’s get some air,” I suggest.
”Yes,” Alexs claps their hands together gratefully, “It’ll be good for our brains. Are you coming, Priya?”
She is curled up like a child on her mattress in the left corner of the lounge, as if waiting for the shadows to engulf her, and her words are barely a whisper when they reach us.
“No. I think I have to call my parents and tell them.”
There is nothing Alex and I can do but nodding, words of comfort are no use now.
The lounge goes completely dark at our backs as we leave it. A call to the other side of the world through any of the official network providers is too expensive, so she has created her own SIP device with which she can illegally call through internet connection. It uses a lot of energy, however, so all electrical appliances in the lounge need to be turned off before she plugs her device in, or it will cause a blackout.
A bitter cold wind screams at us when Alex and I open the emergency door on the uppermost floor. There is a small landing from which one can reach a metal ladder sticking out from the outer wall, beneath it there are about 30 metres of nothingness and then the ground. To the right side of the ladder is a thick metal bar onto which workers probably used to secure their climbing gear for moving up and down the roof. Of course, we don’t have any, but Alex went climbing often as a teenager in their hometown, so they’re good with knots and we’ve made some makeshift climbing harnesses with some leftover rope we’ve found that will keep you from falling long enough for someone to grab you and pull you up, Alex has said.
When we’re finally on the roof I turn my face towards the wind that never stops blowing up here. I wonder if it’s strong enough to wipe memories from your mind. I wonder if I would want it to. Forget about four hard years leading up to likely failure. Forget about Priya and Alex. I turn the other way, quickly.
My friend is standing right at the edge of the roof. Tips of the shoes already touching the empty air below, head bowed to the void.
Their name tears itself from my chest.
I claw at their back, nails digging into them as I pull them backwards.
We fall and I rejoice with the pain as we hit the concrete surface of the roof. I grab my friend by the collar of their jacket and pull them up.
“What are you doing?” I scream at them.
We are both breathless, my voice scratched and bloody after shouting their name.
“I was just checking,” Alex says.
“Checking what?”
“If looking down still feels scary.”
I press my fingertips harder into their arms, not quite sure if I’m holding up or holding on to my friend.
“I am sorry for scaring you,” they say, “What can I do to apologise?”
The air moves so quickly up here that I can barely breathe.
“Tell me you are scared of looking down,” I demand.
Alex reaches for my wrists steadily.
“I am scared. Terrified. Are you?”, they ask and I nod.
When we’ve regained our breath we look to the East as always to try and spot the sea somewhere behind the greyness of the smog. We can never quite catch a glimpse.
“I hope Priya’s call is going well,” I sigh at some point, when my eyes have started burning from looking for the horizon for so long.
“How can it go well?”
The genuinity of Alex’s question is written on their face in the line between their eyebrows. I stare back. I don’t really have an answer.
I never thought about what I’d do if I failed, I think, but I say, “I hope we’ll all be fine.”
Before the cold gets too much to bear Alex asks, ”When you first started uni, what did you want to do after?”
“Work in a museum,” I answer despite its ridiculeness because it will be stolen by the wind anyway and because we haven’t laughed in such a long time that the feeling is almost alien to me. Until I stop suddenly and grasp my friend’s arm, “A museum.”
We rush down, back to our pitch black lounge.
༄
No sound reaches us as we stand breathlessly at the entrance.
“Priya!” Alex calls into the darkness, “We’re going to get it from a museum!”
Neither our friend, nor the darkness answer.
I ask another question, “What did your parents say?”
The light is back on suddenly and Priya is very close to us, hand still on the switch. It’s as if she has swallowed the shadows instead of the other way around.
“That I’m as stubborn as a mule and that I’ll get the degree.”
We stare at her.
“It was easier for them to say that than to cry with me. I think if they have to face desperation once I’ve devoured all their resources to come back, they’d rather delay it a little longer.”
We all agreed with Priya’s parents, so we say nothing more and sit at one of the round cherry wood tables with our laptops.
Alex offers to pay the €2 to access the Museum of Literature website. You can buy the 3D Virtual Tour for €50, 3D Guided Virtual Tour for €70, Virtual Reality Tour for 100€ and Virtual Reality Guided Tour for €120. But the “Our Collection” section is only €1 extra. Alex scrolls to the very end of the list until they find the right time period and then, in it, “Scholarly Editions”. And then the title is right there, before our eyes, and it takes some seconds before Priya says, “They have it.”
We spend the night-hours laying on my mattress, tight, tight together, melting into one another, as I tell my friends everything I remember from the museum visits with my parents as a child, when one could still walk into them.
“Do you think they still use CCTV?” Alex asks, “There are no more people going in to watch now…”
“I don’t know,” I admit, “The books are still valuable, after all.”
Priya yawns, as she raises her arms over her head to stretch them and says, “No matter, if they’re still in use there’s definitely not someone checking the CCTV footage at all times and once I have access to the cameras I’ll have them down in no time.”
Alex is staring at the ceiling, they haven’t blinked in ages, “There’s no way for us to know when or if they’d be watching before you disable the CCTV though.”
“There’s no way for us to know that Jen wouldn’t report us to the Dean either,” I say, as the last seconds of the 12th night-hour fly the room.
༄
It’s three days until the exam.
We pack our bags: Priya’s laptop, Alex’s makeshift climbing gear, fully charged powerbanks, water bottles and a pocket knife we are unsure we’ll need, but don’t want to leave behind either.
We set the alarm for the 12th day-hour and take a sleeping-pill each. I feel the tears caressing my face as silence finally caresses my thoughts, it’s been such a long time.
By the time we wake up and the night-hours have arrived the courage we had felt while lying close, close together, breathing in each other’s breaths, has melted from us like wax off a burned-out candle.
We sit staring at one another from our mattresses in the different corners of the room. My legs tremble as I join my friends behind the bar. We remain silent, focused on washing down a cookie and an apple with sips of scolding tea. I watch Priya’s throat constrict hard, as if she’s swallowing a rock, but we almost get away with it: with not saying a word and just keep going as we’ve so often been demanded to do.
It is Alex who finally sets the cup down just hard enough to make the tea splash over the rim.
“Perhaps we are going insane.”
Perhaps we are. The words sound nightmarish coming from my undeterredly precise, factual friend.
“What do you mean, Alex?” I ask. I can feel the tremble go up from my legs to my throat.
They lean onto the marble counter with their elbows, hands pressing into their eyes, “We’re just going to go out now and break into a museum.”
I’m not quite sure it is a question. Regardless, I don’t have an answer for it.
Tears are already glistening on Priya’s waterline, ready to run down her face once again. Perhaps they will carve little rivers into our faces at some point.
She grasps my wrist and then Alex’s, forcing them to look up.
“Let’s just—let’s just go and have a look, please,” she begs, “If we see that it’s not doable, we’ll just come back here.”
I wonder if she dreamt of her parents tonight. If it was a good dream, a memory, or a nightmare about the future.
Alex drops their head to the back of Priya’s hand briefly, but nods as they look back at her. I pull them with me towards our bags we’ve left by the door of the lounge, “Let’s go.”
༄
It’s cold when we go out. We move through the streets, pushed by the wind along with a few plastic packages that have been roaming this emptiness for who knows how long. There’s never anyone out here, yet my eyes linger anxiously on every shape emerging from the grayness. We’ve taken this route almost every day to college: at first it is only the skeletons of old office buildings, here and there the glow of a neon shop sign permeates the darkness like a beacon that will never attract anyone, because everything has been ordered online for decades now. As we get closer to the city center and begin to pass the lit windows of the first houses, Alex and Priya also cast glance after glance over their shoulders. We’ve never done anything more illegal than taking food from bins. After all, we have to eat. After all, I think, when the mass of the museum materialises in front of us, we have to pass the exam.
When we stop in front of the museum, a feeling of minuteness hits me at the same time as the memory of it. This is the moment when, 15 years ago, my parents would have taken me by the hand and we would have crossed the threshold, the enormity around us forgotten. But my parents are not here, and no one has entered this building for years and years.
Alex takes a step forward, turns to us, opens their arms wide and lets them fall to their sides immediately after.
“So we’ll go in now, or what?” they scoff.
I want to shush them, even though there’s no one out here.
Priya raises her hand slowly and points to the left, behind our friend’s shoulder: “There.”
I squint: the metal rungs of a fire escape ladder, not dissimilar to the one on the hotel roof, stick out from the side of the building like a ribcage. They might lead us to the heart.
Priya is the first one to move. She puts an arm around Alex’s back and we walk up to the museum. I place my hands on the damp stone wall as I look up to the ladder which is at least 3 metres above us.
“How would we get there?”
My friends glance at each other and, finally, Alex follows my gaze up and says, “Let’s take out the climbing gear.”
It takes us five tries before we manage to throw the end of the rope through the first rung so that it’ll work as a makeshift pulley system to hoist at least two of us to the ladder.
A shiver shakes my entire body. Still, I offer to be the first one to go up because I can feel the thought of the rope slipping from my hands and one of my friends’ bodies racing toward the ground pressing against my temples. I’m shocked by the weight of my body and how easy it feels like to let go as I manage to grab the first rung. Alex follows me and I gratefully watch the steady movements of their fingers as they tie a knot strong enough for them to lean away from the wall and help pull Priya up.
We’re unable to move even once we’re all on the ladder. My breath joined the crazed rhythm of my friends’ breaths. There’s no metal bar on the side of the rungs like the one at the hotel, no way to secure our makeshift climbing gear and the metal is slick with humidity. At some point Alex lets out one long, final, purposeful breath, “We’re just wasting our strength, let’s go up” and we do as they say.
We lie trembling on the platform of the fire escape when we reach it, but Priya sits up as soon as she can breathe normally and we stand, holding onto one another. She turns on the flashlight on her phone and as I take out the university card from my pocket I grip it so tightly that it almost cuts into my hand; I’m terrified of it slipping from my fingers and falling over the edge of the platform. It slides into the slit of the door easily and it’s just a moment before we hear the click of the latch.
The outlines of a corridor, dimly lit by a security light above the door, stretch out before us, and the smell that greets us pricks the inner corners of my eyes as soon as I inhale it: dry, slightly dusty, the scent of wooden floors smoothed by thousands of footsteps. Again, the memories of my childhood, forcefully expanding in my mind, are utterly inadequate for the pounding of my heart that barely allows me to breathe.
I only realise that I’ve already taken a step forward when Alex’s fingers tighten around my wrist.
“The cameras,” they whisper, chin pointing to the flashing red light glowing in the darkness, “They’re turned on.”
“But no alarm has gone off after opening the door,” Priya says.
“Yet,” Alex points out and we remain motionless like that for a little longer until our friend pulls her hood over the dark locks of her hair and steps through the door.
“No one’s watching. Let’s go.”
“Priya!” Alex calls her name, but we’re already going after her into the darkness.
As we run toward the central staircase, the vision of doors and rooms beyond them along the corridor is so vivid in the corner of my eye that it’s almost painful, but we press on. Our friend is leaning over the marble banister of the staircase.
“Would the security office be downstairs?” she asks me when we reach her and I barely nod before she’s flying down the stone steps.
She slams the laptop down so hard on the desk of the security office that I’m scared it’ll fall apart and starts unplugging seemingly random cables. Her crazed movements stop with a grunt only when her hands shake so hard that she’s unable to plug the cables into her own device and I do it for her. Priya doesn’t even sit down; she stands curved over the laptop as her fingers fly over the keyboard. The halos of light from Alex’s phone and mine waver in the darkness to the rhythm of our breaths, which never seem to catch quite enough air.
Then our friend straightens up, raising her head toward the camera in the corner of the room, which flashes one last time and then no more. A laugh or a sob escapes her, either way, she turns with a proud teary smile and says, “I did it.”
༄
We stand next to the stairs where a museum plan would have been when people still needed one and look up into the blackness of the stairwell as far as the light from our phones can reach. Alex asks me if I have an idea about where the book could be, but I can only guess that the museum probably uses a time period or genre system. It’s already the third night-hour: there’s nothing for us to do but start searching. We decide to split up, check each floor, and meet back at the stairs if unsuccessful.
When I enter the room no sense of pressing urgency can make me check its contents quickly and then go on. The walls aren’t visible: shelves upon shelves are stacked all the way from the floor to the ceiling. And on them books, books, books. It’s as if the structure of the entire building is made from them. My head swims, I’ve never imagined so many together and their mass is terrifying: I’m scared they might fall at any moment and submerge me, suffocate me.
I feel like I am covering kilometres with every slow step I take toward the shelves and, finally, I can smell them. It’s a comforting scent: not too subtle, not too strong, yet distinctive, solid. I can’t think of anything like it. I wonder if the smell changes over time, with every touch left on the paper. My fingers glide over a spine: it has ridges covered by the skin of some dead animal. Some of the golden engraving still glints in the light coming from my phone: so this is what A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft feels like. I can feel my heartbeat in the tips of my fingers as I slide it out from the shelf and hold it flat in my hand: it’s heavier than expected. I wonder if it has the same weight in my memory, if the words read from the screen of my laptop during high school occupy the same space in my head.
I struggle to get to the first page, the paper is so thin, almost translucent at the edges, and it’s difficult to flip through them while holding my phone with the light in one hand. I don’t remember how it begins so I read:
‘After thinking about the sweep of history and viewing the present world
with anxious care, I find my spirits depressed by the most melancholy
emotions of sorrowful indignation.’
I jump at the echo of my own gasp that fills the room as blood from my finger stains the page: it cut me. I rub at the stain with the sleeve of my jumper and watch some particles of paper stick to it, making the paper even thinner. I could just keep going. Not with the rubbing. With the book. But almost half of the third night-hour has already gone by and these leather bound tomes are far too old to include the scholarly edition of the book we are looking for. So I go on, tracing my fingers over the infinite spines as I move from room to room and think about whether it would feel the same to run my index over some part of my brain, where I’ve stored all those words I’ve read from my computer screen.
When I meet Alex and Priya at the stairs we shake our heads silently. Do my eyes look as big as theirs? I wonder what books they’ve held in their hands. We stand still for some moments, but no one says anything. It would take much longer than the eight and a half remaining night-hours to speak the thoughts we must all be sharing out loud. So we ascend, up to the next floor.
Alex grasps our hands before we split up once more, “Twenty minutes, ok?” they say and we all nod to one another quickly to avoid looking into each other’s eyes for too long.
As soon as I take the first book from a shelf I understand the order in which they are kept. Floors must correspond to centuries, wings to a number of decades, rooms to genres, and I know that the book we are looking for is not going to be here. Yet we only meet back at the stairs once every second of the twenty minutes has passed. We don’t say a word, go up to the next level: 20th century.
Alex peaks into the first room of the east wing, “This one looks bigger. Maybe we should give ourselves 30 minutes this time.”
Priya bites at the nail of her thumb as she looks at her phone: it’s the fourth night-hour.
“Alright,” her voice trembles, “But then we really have to find it.”
Again, all we can do is hold our lying tongues and nod.
In the last, slim volume I pick up before the half an hour is spent I read:
‘I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea’
Awareness of the exam that awaits us in less than 48 hours returns to me so quickly that it knocks all breath from my lungs. I remember the beginning of the text it will cover well: I’ve typed it out word by word.
‘Arms and the man I sing of Troy, who first from its seashores,
Italy-bound, fate’s refugee, arrived at Lavinia’s
Coastlands. How he was battered about over land, over high deep Seas
by the powers above! Savage Juno’s anger remembered
Him, and he suffered profoundly in war to establish a city,
Settle his gods into Latium, making this land of the Latins
Future home to the Elders of Alba and Rome’s mighty ramparts.’
I rush back to the staircase, breathlessly calling my friends. I’m about to say, we’re wasting time, but lies will be left unspoken tonight, so I just remind them, “We need to find that book and finish it.”
We run up to our own century and find the one room full of white spines, a scarlet band at the top, followed by a small image and the blood-red letters of the titles underneath. Alex and Priya split up, each running their fingers over the books to the left and the right, but there’s a glass case in the center—I’ve already seen some on the lower floors protecting damaged volumes—and when I approach, I’m not surprised to find our assigned text inside, pristine. It’s shiny, perhaps never opened: on its orange and black cover Aeneas carries his father towards the sea.
Alex lets their head fall on my shoulder when they reach me, “Fuck.”
They never swear.
“How are we going to get that?”
Priya is boring through the glass with her eyes, “I can probably hack into the alarm system, but it’s harder than with the CCTV.”
“How long would you need?” I ask.
She bites at the right corner of her lower lip and it bleeds a little.
“I don’t know. Two, three hours?”, she murmurs and then adds, “Maybe we should just ask Jen for her laptop.”
Said out loud now, surrounded by walls and walls of books it sounds like a ridiculous proposition to me.
“All of this just to turn back? Pretend it has never happened? When, for once, the book we need is right here for us to take?”
༄
The alarm goes off once we are half way down the stairs to the security office.
The marble stairwell is swallowed by blue flashing lights that cut through the glass panes by the main entrance. They must have realised that the CCTV stopped working. Or worse: they’ve reversed the recording and discovered us.
We halt at the top of the steps to the second floor, holding on to each other, barely avoiding the fall. All thoughts are pressed out of my mind by the deafening sound of the siren. We trip multiple times as we run back up, gripping one another like castaways.
I regain control of my body once we reach the top floor and pass by the room with the book. I stop.
“What are you doing? We need to get back to the fire escape!” Alex shouts over the alarm and grabs my wrist, but I pull away.
“They’ll catch us in any case,” I say and neither of my friends have an answer to offer in return and we enter the room together.
I take the pocket knife out of my bag and the sirens intensify as soon as I wedge the blade under the glass case. Finally it gives way, sensing shards flying everywhere that I feel cutting the skin of my face.
We run back to the fire escape as I hold the smooth, scholarly edition of the Aeneid in my hand and fittingly ruin its pristine cover with some blood. Sitting on the ledge of the platform, we lean on each other as we cry.
“How does it end?” Priya asks.
I turn to the final line.
‘Life flutters off on a groan, under protest, down among shadows.’
My friend raises her face to mine, shaking. Her lips are smeared with blood from where she’s bitten into them, her eyes are two black holes that have swallowed all light from her.
“What,” Alex barely breathes.
They bring their hands to their throat, “All of it—all of it for that.”
༄
We stare into the abyss and let go.
The book is devoured by the darkness below easily, it takes barely a second and it’s gone.
We sit close, close to one another and I think about a sunrise when it still existed.
Far, far away to the East we catch a glimpse of the sea.
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