Chapter 4: The Library of Forgotten Tuesdays

The Library of Forgotten Tuesdays did not appear on any map of Midweek, which was less surprising than it sounded, because no two maps of Midweek agreed on much of anything. The cartographers of the city had long ago entered into a kind of bitter, productive feud, each insisting that her version of the streets was the real one, while the streets, indifferent, rearranged themselves on Sundays the way other cities rearranged their furniture. But even by the standards of a city that occasionally lost an entire neighborhood in the rain, the Library of Forgotten Tuesdays was unusually shy. Wednesday found it the way one finds most important things: by getting genuinely lost.

Wednesday discovered the Library of Forgotten Tuesdays on her third day in Midweek, which was a Saturday, which meant she had been in the city for exactly long enough to know she didn't know it at all. She had gone out to learn the city the way she learned most things: by walking through it with no particular destination and absolute attention, cataloguing what she found with the systematic patience of someone who believes that everything is eventually explicable if you accumulate enough data. She had a notebook. She had a pen. She had the specific expression of someone who is simultaneously absolutely at ease and absolutely alert, which made her look, she had been told on several occasions, mildly threatening. She considered this a feature. Midweek, she was finding, repaid attention.

The city was dense with what she was coming to think of as secondary information… things happening just underneath the surface of the obvious things, like how a palimpsest still contains the ghosts of the writing that was scraped away. The streets that seemed to go one direction by day went a subtly different direction by evening. Shopfronts changed their signage between Monday and Tuesday without explanation. The pigeons, of which there were many, moved in formations that were either meaningless or a code, and Wednesday had not yet decided which. At the end of the street there was a door. The door was set into a wall that ought, by the geometry of the street, to have been the back of some other building, but the door was clearly meant to be a front door, because it had a brass knocker shaped like a crescent moon and a brass plaque underneath, and on the brass plaque someone had engraved, in a careful script: The Library of Forgotten Tuesdays – Open When You Need It.

She was on the corner of Axis Street and Meridian Lane: a crossing she had noticed on her map because someone had marked it in pencil with a small asterisk and no explanation, when she saw the door. It was set into the wall of a building between a dry cleaner's and a shop that sold only hats of one specific style that she couldn't quite identify. The door was the kind of dark that is not painted but simply is, the dark of old wood that has absorbed decades of weather and decision and significance. There was no sign. There was no handle, only a brass plate worn smooth from use. And there was, scratched lightly into the stone above the frame in letters so small she had to lean close to read them: THE LIBRARY OF FORGOTTEN TUESDAYS. Lending is not permitted. Everything else is. Wednesday stood back. She looked at the door. She looked at the dry cleaner's on its left and the hat shop on its right. Neither establishment seemed to find the library remarkable, which was either reassuring or the reverse. She pressed the brass plate. The door opened inward.

The Library of Forgotten Tuesdays was larger than was architecturally defensible. This was Midweek, so Wednesday had been prepared for a certain amount of spatial improbability, but the library still managed to surprise her, which she noted approvingly. The entrance was modest; a vestibule of polished dark wood with coat hooks and a small rug that was doing its best. But beyond the inner door, the space simply… expanded. Ceilings rose into a darkness that suggested they didn't end so much as taper into irrelevance. Shelves climbed floors that shouldn't exist, accessed by staircases that switched directions in ways that felt more like preferences than engineering decisions. The air was the very specific air of places that have held a great many books for a very long time: slightly pressurized, faintly electrical, redolent of paper and the particular absence of certainty that old knowledge produces in the people who encounter it. Wednesday loved it immediately and unconditionally, which was unusual for her. Behind it was a librarian.

The librarian was a tall woman in a grey suit cut like an undertaker's, with hair so pale it looked silver and eyes so pale they looked like the absence of eyes. Wednesday, who had been around extraordinary people her entire life, recognized the look at once. Here was someone else who did not throw a shadow. Here was someone who absorbed. The librarian did not say can I help you. The librarian said:

"You're new," said a voice.

She turned. At a desk of such organized chaos that it constituted its own biome, a woman sat surrounded by stacked files and open ledgers and a collection of small objects whose purpose was unclear. She was perhaps sixty, with the air of someone who had decided very firmly, at some point in her forties, that other people's opinions were an administrative problem she no longer had the bandwidth to manage. Her hair was white and arranged in a way that suggested it had been consulted but not controlled. Her glasses were on top of her head. She was reading with naked eyes the document in her hands, which meant the glasses were either decorative or a backup system.

"I'm Wednesday," Wednesday said.

The woman looked up. The Oh happened, but it was a particularly complex Oh, layered, like the woman was recognizing something on multiple frequencies simultaneously.

"Of course you are," she said. "I'm Agatha. I run this place." She set down her document and folded her hands. "The rules: no lending. No food. No cell phones, they don't work in here anyway, the signal gets confused by the memories. No writing on the books. You may write on yourself, which some people find useful and others find alarming. Any questions?"

"What does it hold?" Wednesday asked, looking at the shelves. "What kind of library stores forgotten Tuesdays?"

Agatha's expression suggested this was either the most obvious or the most profound question anyone had asked her in recent memory, and she was reserving judgment on which.

"Come," she said, and got up.

The library stored memories. Not all memories that would have required more square footage than the building codes would sanction, even in Midweek. Specifically, it stored the memories of Tuesdays: days that had been forgotten so thoroughly, by so many people, that they had detached from their owners and required a place to go. Agatha explained this as they walked through the stacks, her voice carrying the brisk matter-of-factness of someone who has long since passed the point of finding their vocation strange.

"Tuesday is the most forgettable day," she said. "People forget Tuesdays constantly. They exist in the week the way filler words exist in conversation; structurally necessary but experientially invisible. A person can live an entire Tuesday of significance and wake up Wednesday remembering nothing but the shape of it. The fact of it. Not the content."

"And those Tuesdays end up here?"

"The memories of them, yes. They have to go somewhere." Agatha gestured at a shelf. "This whole section is Tuesdays from the 1990s. Domestically dense; a lot of school runs and supermarket trips and conversations that changed people's lives without anyone realizing at the time. Quite beautiful, actually, if melancholy."

The books on the shelf were not quite books. They were objects that had taken the approximate shape of books, the way that water takes the approximate shape of its container— you could see the book-ness in them, the binding, the thickness, the sense of information organized within a spine. But they shimmered. They had a quality of being not-quite-solid, and when Wednesday raised her hand toward one, she felt warmth before she touched it, the particular warmth of something that once was held by living hands and remembers the fact.

"Can I…"

"Yes," Agatha said, before she finished the question. "You're allowed. Not everyone is. But you're — well. You're you."

Wednesday took the book from the shelf. It opened on its own to a Tuesday in October, 1994. A kitchen. Morning light. A woman Wednesday didn't recognize standing at a counter, making toast, listening to the radio, and thinking. Wednesday could feel the thinking, the texture of it, the way you feel the texture of fabric in the dark, thinking about a letter she'd received the day before and hadn't opened yet. And the toast burning slightly and the scraping and the smell of it and the specific quality of that particular October morning light, the way it came through a window with a plant on the sill and threw leaf-shaped shadows across the linoleum. It was, objectively, a completely unremarkable Tuesday. It was, subjectively, devastating. Wednesday closed the book. She put it back. She stood with her hand on the spine for a moment, steadying herself.

"Are they all like that?" she asked.

"Like what?"

"Like something enormous happened but the enormousness is invisible. Like the day itself doesn't know."

Agatha was quiet for a moment. "Most of them," she said finally. "That's the particular tragedy of Tuesdays. Very little important happens on a Tuesday that anyone recognizes as important at the time. It tends to be retrospective. People remember later — oh, that was the Tuesday before everything changed. That was the Tuesday I made the decision without knowing I was making it." She paused. "That's why they're forgotten. Not because they were empty. Because they were too full in ways that were hard to hold."

Wednesday thought about this. She thought about all the Tuesdays she had spent waiting for something to happen, not recognizing the things that were happening.

"I grew up in a town without a library like this," she said.

"I know," Agatha said.

Wednesday looked at her. "You know?"

"I know most things about people who come here for the first time." Agatha turned and began walking back toward the desk, her tone suggesting the conversation was pivoting from the personal to the practical. "Most people who walk through that door for the first time — truly walk through, not stumble in by accident — have a particular relationship with the past. Usually something to do with a day they can't locate. A Tuesday that matters more than it should and that they cannot find the memory of."

Wednesday followed her. "And me?"

"You're different." Agatha settled back into her chair and picked up her document. "You're not looking for a lost Tuesday. You're the reason the library exists."

Wednesday stood very still.

"Excuse me?"

Agatha peered at her document. "Tuesday is forgotten because Wednesday follows it. People live through Tuesday and go to sleep and wake up in you. In Wednesday. And you are so much…" she waved a hand, searching for the word, "...so much, that Tuesday gets swallowed in the approach of you. Every Tuesday that ever ended has ended in the shadow of Wednesday coming. And since you have no shadow…" she looked up, "...they have nowhere to be absorbed. So they come here."

The library hummed around them. The books, the not-quite-books… shimmered on their shelves. Somewhere in the upper stacks, a Tuesday from the mid-seventies rustled like a creature turning in its sleep.

"You're saying I'm responsible for all of this," Wednesday said. "For all of these lost memories."

"I'm saying you're the reason they need a home." Agatha returned to her reading. "Which is different from being responsible. Though I understand the distinction can feel academic.”