The Wandering Library: A Series
Part 19: Choreographic Catastrophe
(I painted this in Procreate using the oil paint brush and charcoal brush - Chaiga T. Cheska)
Being an account of the time our workplace learned to dance and nearly killed us all
Compiled by Bramwell Corin, who has developed dance-related bruises in places he did not previously know could bruise
~~~
Preface
The Wandering Library has discovered dancing.
Not the purposeful walking it does each day. Not the occasional settling creak or the gentle shift it makes when repositioning itself in a new meadow. Actual dancing. Choreographed movement with rhythm, intention, and what the Library appears to regard as considerable artistic merit.
It has been learning different dances. Each produces its own variety of chaos. The waltz causes everything to slide. The jig causes books to become airborne. The tango has resulted in three furniture-related injuries, one broken tea service, and what Thaddeus has formally recorded in his catalogue as “an incident of involuntary architectural participation.”
What follows is a chronological account of architectural dance education and its consequences.
Day One: The Waltz
Bramwell’s Account (10:23 AM)
Lyria was practising in the reading room. This is not unusual. What was unusual was the Library joining in.
I first noticed when the floor began to sway. Gently. Rhythmically. In three-four time. I looked up from my cataloguing.
“Is the Library moving in time with Lyria?”
Pip looked up from his book. “It’s been doing that for about ten minutes. I didn’t want to interrupt you.”
“The building is waltzing, and you said nothing?”
“I assumed you’d noticed. We’ve all been swaying.”
I had been so absorbed in a demanding acquisitions ledger that I had not registered the movement had become rhythmic and deliberate. I chose not to examine what this said about my professional priorities.
The waltz expressed itself as a slow, considered shifting of weight from one side to the other, and one full rotation, very slow, very careful, during which every book on the reading room tables slid in a slow arc to the left. My tea went with them.
It was, I will concede, rather graceful. As experiences go.
Pip’s Account (2:34 PM)
I have been waltzed. Involuntarily. My lunch went past me twice. Pemberton rotated once, with the dignity of a chicken that has decided not to acknowledge what is happening to her. Bramwell went past several times in his chair, holding his tea like a man who has staked his entire reputation on not spilling it. He did not spill it. I don’t know whether to be impressed or worried.
I slid into the reading room doorframe and stayed there, holding on, watching the whole room go round.
It was actually rather wonderful. Obviously, I did not say this out loud.
Mistress Spine’s Assessment (Evening)
The Library waltzes competently. Everything inside it waltzes with it, which the staff have now confirmed through direct experience.
I suggested no dancing during working hours. The Library agreed to none of this but did stop when Bramwell used the tone he reserves for situations he considers beyond reasonable endurance.
I am noting this as partial progress.
Day Two: The Jig
Bramwell’s Account (Morning)
A travelling musician stayed overnight and demonstrated a traditional jig in the reading room after supper. The Library watched from every wall.
By nine o’clock the following morning, it had attempted a jig of its own.
The jig is not the waltz. The waltz slides things gently to the left. The jig launches them.
The entire Philosophy section became airborne simultaneously. I was catching books with both hands when Pip, who had been standing in the middle of the reading room for reasons now entirely irrelevant, was struck squarely in the ear by a volume on epistemology.
“A book hit me in the ear!”
“I can see that.”
“Epistemology! Right in the ear!”
We retreated under the nearest table. The jig continued for forty minutes, during which I abandoned any pretence of maintaining the shelving system and began creating organised piles against the walls instead. It seemed the more achievable ambition.
Pip’s Account (Evening)
My ear still hurts.
Day Three: The Tango
Pip’s Account
A dance instructor from the southern cities came seeking texts on choreography and demonstrated tango technique for Lyria whilst waiting. I had a feeling about what would follow. The feeling was correct.
One moment I was standing at my desk. The next, the floor lurched sideways, and I was sliding the full length of the reading room. I collided with the tea trolley at the far end. Everything on it went in different directions. The Library executed a settling motion afterwards that I can only describe as a bow.
Bramwell had books sliding off his head. He removed them one at a time and placed them on the nearest shelf with the expression of a man composing himself for a portrait. Then he told the Library the tango was forbidden.
The Library made a small, hurt creak.
“No tango,” Bramwell said again, more firmly.
I thought privately that the tango had been extraordinary. I did not say so. I have learned when not to say things.
Mistress Spine’s Log
Bramwell has strapped himself to his desk. He goes wherever the desk goes, which today was across the reading room and back twice. Pip has strapped himself to his reading chair and spent the afternoon being dragged in slow arcs whilst attempting to take notes. His notes for today are written at various angles and at one point completely sideways.
We are conducting our professional duties strapped to our own furniture. I had not anticipated this as a circumstance of employment.
Day Four: Ballet
Bramwell’s Account (Morning)
The Library has decided it wants to attempt a pirouette.
A pirouette is a spinning turn. I will leave the reader to work out what happens to everyone inside a building that is spinning.
My desk straps did not hold. I was deposited against the western wall. Pip met a bookcase. Books distributed themselves outward in a wide radius, and the tea service launched through an open window. The Library settled with what I can only describe as satisfaction.
“No pirouettes,” I said, from the floor, with great clarity.
The Library attempted a double pirouette.
Pip’s Account (Later)
Then came the pliés.
A grand plié is the building dropping six feet without warning. There is no time to brace. You simply drop. Then rise. Then drop again. After four of them, Bramwell had gone an interesting colour, and I was holding the edge of my desk purely for the sensation of holding something.
The port de bras afterwards was practically restful. We only swayed. Nobody dropped. I nearly wept with relief, which I also did not say out loud.
Bramwell looked at me across the room. I looked at him. We said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would make any of this more reasonable.
Day Five: Flamenco
Bramwell’s Account (9:00 AM)
Flamenco involves passionate stomping and dramatic pauses held at full intensity.
The stomping comes up through the floor and into your feet. It travels up through your legs and into your spine. It is not something you hear so much as something you absorb. The Natural Philosophy section has been partially redistributed across the ceiling.
I am writing this from under my desk. It is preferable to being struck by travelling literature.
Pip’s Account (11:00 AM)
The pauses are the worst part. Not the stomping, not the flying books. The pauses.
When the Library stops mid-sequence, everything stops with it. You freeze wherever you were. You cannot move, because it feels somehow wrong, like interrupting something. I was halfway across the room reaching for a catalogue when it stopped, and I stood there with one arm outstretched for forty-five seconds whilst the Library held its pose.
It is rather like being inside a painting you did not agree to be in.
Bramwell was frozen beside a bookcase, hand resting on it, perfectly still, not reaching for anything in particular. When the Library started again, he stood there a moment and then said something quietly to the bookcase that I couldn’t quite hear.
Then a book fell on him.
He put it back. Straightened his robes. Went to his desk.
I honestly don’t know how he does it.
Mistress Spine’s Log (Afternoon)
Small cracks have appeared in the plaster near the eastern staircase. I have pointed this out. The Library responded with what I believe was its most emotionally complex flamenco sequence yet, which I am interpreting as an acknowledgement rather than defiance.
The flamenco is processing something. I can hear it in the quality of the stomps: the paper bag incident, the ship that did not stay, the geese, the accumulated bewilderments of being a sentient wandering building in a world not designed with sentient wandering buildings in mind. It is stomping its feelings through its own floors, which would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do if it were not also stomping them through the staff.
I have added this to the operational log under Miscellaneous. Miscellaneous is now the most substantial section of the entire record.
Day Six: Dame Pellifrax Intervenes
Dame Pellifrax’s Conversation with the Library (Afternoon, as recorded by Pip)
Dame Pellifrax stood in the reading room with both hands resting on the nearest shelf and spoke to the walls in the steady, unhurried manner she uses when she wants to be heard properly.
She told the Library that it had found something real. That dancing was not a passing fancy but a genuine need, the sort of physical expression a building with feelings and opinions and a complicated inner life might reasonably require. She was not asking it to stop.
But it had staff. People who had given their professional lives to its keeping, who were currently nursing bruises and one spectacular collection of sideways notes that would never fully be explained. The Library was not a building that housed strangers. It was a building that housed a family of sorts, and a family of sorts deserved better than being flung repeatedly into its own bookshelves.
She paused. Then she said she believed the Library was clever enough to solve this. That a building capable of sentient wandering, of reading emotional states, of keeping a chicken and developing opinions about maritime romance, was capable of finding a way to do what it loved without breaking the people it loved doing it around.
She placed her palm flat against the wall. “I know you can work this out.”
Then she stepped back and waited.
What Happened Next (Bramwell’s Account, late afternoon)
I was at my desk. There was a warmth in the room that was not heat, and a stillness that was not absence of movement. Pip looked up from his notes. Mistress Spine appeared in her doorway with the expression of someone who has noticed something and not yet decided what it is.
Then I sneezed. Twice. Without cause.
“Are you quite all right?” asked Pip.
“I have no idea,” I replied, pulling out my handkerchief.
Something had changed in the quality of the room, settled differently than before, and then the Library moved.
Not tentatively. It stepped, fully and decisively, as a building that has made up its mind.
We collectively felt the movement, but it was just a perception of movement. Nothing was jostled even slightly.
Not a book. Not a chair. Not Pemberton’s loose tail feather, which has been sitting on the Natural Philosophy shelf for a fortnight.
The Library stepped again, faster, and through the windows the landscape lurched sideways, the tree line swinging past in a wide arc, the sky tilting, the meadow rushing by like water. Under our feet, we felt the building moving, but around us, everything stayed exactly where it was. My cup sat on my desk. Steam rose from it in a perfectly straight line.
“Don’t look at the windows,” said Mistress Spine from the doorway. “It is rather like being on a boat.”
None of us looked at the windows after the first few seconds. There is a specific variety of nausea available exclusively to people whose inside world has stopped moving whilst the outside world has not, and we learned to avoid it with some efficiency.
Then the Library broke into a jig.
We heard the sound of the Library’s feet beneath us stomping and springing. Outside, the meadow bounced past the glass in great joyful arcs. Inside, a book sat on a table and stayed there. I sat in my chair, perfectly upright, and felt the rhythm of it coming up through the soles of my feet into my legs, the sensation of the building dancing around me and under me and holding me still inside it all at once.
It was the strangest thing I have witnessed in considerable years of working here.
Then it moved into a tango. The meadow slid sharply sideways. Trees lurched past in quick succession. A startled bird wheeled across the glass.
“Oh my goodness!” exclaimed Pip, to no one in particular, as he tried not to look out of the windows.
“Don’t look out of the windows!” I reminded him as I struggled not to look at a window.
We sat inside a perfectly still room that was tangoing through a meadow, and this was, we each discovered independently, considerably better than the alternative.
Pip’s Account (Evening)
Do you know how hard it is not to look out of a window when there’s lots of activity outside, with a building dancing around? It’s really hard, and I think it takes great concentration that I don’t currently have, but I’m working on it.
I need practice, and I also need a bucket just in case the unexpected nausea hits again.
Afterwards
Bramwell’s Account (The following morning)
I came through to the reading room to find everything exactly as I had left it the previous evening. Books on shelves. Chairs at desks. The tea things on the trolley.
The Library walked whilst I made breakfast. Not dancing, simply moving, the ordinary morning motion of a building settling into its day, and the cup stayed on the saucer. The milk jug stayed on the shelf. Through the window, the landscape moved past in an unhurried way.
I stood with my tea and watched the trees go by for a moment. Then I put the cup down, walked to the nearest wall, and pressed my hand flat against the plaster. The wood beneath was warm in the way it sometimes is when the Library is paying attention.
“Thank you,” I said, quietly.
I did not look to see whether anyone had seen. Some things are between a person and the building they live in.
Mistress Spine’s Report
The internal gravity field appears stable and consistent across all rooms. Books remain shelved during movement. Furniture remains positioned. Staff remain where they place themselves.
The plaster cracks near the eastern staircase still require repair. I am contemplating asking the Library to repair itself for a change. We will see.
Pip’s Notes (Ongoing)
The Library dances every day now. A waltz in the early morning sometimes, a jig in the afternoon when it seems in good spirits, the flamenco in the evenings when the Library has something to say that it cannot otherwise say. The world moves past the windows in the rhythms of each dance. Under our feet and in the walls, we feel the music of it. Inside, everything stays where it is.
We do not look out of the windows during the flamenco. Thaddeus has moved his chair against a load-bearing wall as a precautionary measure. I have told him this is no longer necessary. He is doing it anyway, because some habits outlast their causes, and I find I cannot argue with that.
Pemberton sits in the window during the waltz. Not looking out. Just sitting there, with the air of something that has earned a pleasant view and intends to have one.
Last week, Bramwell was working at his desk during a long waltz, and I watched him begin to sway. Three-four time, very slight. His pen kept moving. He did not stop working. But he swayed. It was quite exciting to watch!
The Library noticed. It always does. The waltz slowed a fraction, just enough, settling into something that matched his rhythm rather than asking him to match its own.
Bramwell did not look up from his work.
But he smiled. Just slightly. The private kind, not meant for anyone.
The Library has begun leaving books about the mazurka on the staff room table. It is apparently in triple time and involves a great deal of heel-clicking. Thaddeus has already moved his chair closer to the wall.
We are, as always, prepared. In the sense that we are absolutely not prepared, but at least we live inside something that is.
Compiled over eight days of architectural choreography, involuntary dance participation, and one rather important afternoon. The Library has found its rhythm and learned to hold its people safely within it. Pemberton thrives. The plaster is being repaired. Normal operations continue in three-four time.