A Letter to a Stranger

On Tuesday she went to the library.

She had not been in three months, which was, she thought, the longest she had stayed away since she had learned to read, and the library had noticed in the small impersonal way libraries notice — her card had been flagged for a book she had not returned, which was the Bulgakov, which she had, in the strict legal sense, stolen, and which she had decided to address by the simple expedient of buying a replacement copy at Behr's and slipping it onto the shelf herself, with the library's sticker carefully transferred from the old spine to the new one by Mr. Behr, who had done it without comment in the way he did most things. The flag had cleared. The librarian, a woman named Iris who had known Iyla since she was twelve, had said welcome back without making it mean anything, which was one of the reasons Iyla had been coming here for sixteen years.

She walked the fiction shelves slowly. She was looking, she had decided on the way over, for a book that met three conditions. It had to be a book she loved, because she was not going to leave a note in a book she did not respect. It had to be a book that got borrowed — not constantly, because constant borrowing meant the note would be found and dismissed by the wrong sort of reader inside a week, but reliably, by the sort of person who took a book home on a Wednesday and brought it back on a Wednesday three weeks later with a receipt tucked at page one hundred and four. And it had to be a book whose margins were, currently, empty. She had spent forty minutes on the third condition. Most of the books she loved had been written in already, by hands she did not know, in pencil and pen and once, distressingly, in highlighter, and she had stood in the aisle reading other people's marginalia for longer than she had meant to and had been reminded, in the small way she liked to be reminded, that she had never been the only person doing this.

She chose, in the end, a copy of Middlemarch.

It was the right book for several reasons, most of which she did not bother to articulate to herself, but the chief one was that Middlemarch was a book that taught patience, and she wanted the note to be found by a patient person. She took it to a carrel in the back, where the light was bad and nobody sat by choice, and she put it down on the small scarred desk and opened it to the inside front cover, which was blank except for the library's bookplate and the small ghost of a pencil mark someone had erased badly in 1994.

She sat with the pencil over the page for a while without writing.

She had thought, walking over, that she knew what she wanted to say. She had drafted it in her head on the bus. She had drafted it again in line at the librarian's desk. Now, with the page in front of her and the pencil in her hand and the small permanent fact of the library around her, she discovered that all of the drafts had been wrong, because all of them had been written by a person who was trying to sound like she knew what she was doing, and the note, she thought, should not sound like that. The note should sound like what it was, which was one reader leaving a door open for another, in case the other one needed a door.

She wrote, finally, in the small hand she used for everything:

Hello.

She looked at it. She let it sit. Then she went on.

If you are reading this, she wrote, you are probably the sort of person who reads the front matter of a library book, which means you are already the sort of person I am writing to. I do not know you. I am leaving this note for you anyway, because someone left a note for me, eleven years before I knew it had been left, and the note did things to my life that I would not undo, and I have decided, on a Tuesday in November, that the only honest thing to do with a gift like that is to pass it along to a stranger and trust them with what they make of it.

She paused. She thought. She wrote:

I am not going to tell you what the gift is. If I told you, you would either believe me, in which case you would go looking for it in the wrong way, or you would not believe me, in which case you would close the book and remember me as a person who wrote a strange thing in Middlemarch. Both outcomes are worse than the one I am hoping for, which is that you go on being the kind of reader who reads the front matter of library books and argues with sentences in the margin, and that one day, possibly soon and possibly not for a decade, you will notice something happen while you are reading that you do not have a name for. When that happens, I would like you to do three things.

She numbered them. She had not planned to. The numbering came because the things were, in fact, three.

One. Do not tell yourself you imagined it. You did not imagine it. You may have been tired, or hungry, or in love, or none of those things, but you did not imagine it. Write down, on a piece of paper you can find again, exactly what you noticed, in the order you noticed it, and put the paper somewhere that is not the book you were reading. The book is not the right place to keep the evidence.

Two. Do not be alone with it for longer than you have to. I was alone with it for several months and I do not, in retrospect, recommend it. Find a person who listens to you when you say small odd things without trying to fix the small odd things, and tell them. If you cannot think of such a person, find a bookseller. Booksellers are, on average, better at this than most professionals.

Three. When somebody finds you — and somebody will, because the people who know about this watch for the marginalia, and your marginalia, if you are the person I think you are, will be findable — do not say yes to anything for at least a week. Ask three questions. Write down the answers. Read the answers in a different room, on a different day, in a different mood, before you decide whether they are true. The people who find you will be, in the main, not unkind. Some of them will be useful. None of them, in my experience, are to be agreed with on the afternoon they introduce themselves.

She stopped. She read what she had written. It was, she thought, more like a letter to her younger self than she had intended, and she decided that this was probably correct, because her younger self and the stranger she was writing to were, in the relevant sense, the same person — a reader sitting alone with a book in a public room, holding a pencil, suspecting that the book was doing more than it admitted to.

She added, beneath the three numbers, in slightly smaller writing:

I should also tell you what I am not asking you to do. I am not asking you to find me. I have built, in the back of a paperback at home, a kind of postbox, and the people who need to write to me already know where it is, and the channel is, for various reasons I will not bore you with, already as crowded as I want it to be. I am not asking you to write back in this margin, either, although if you do I will not mind, because someone else will find what you have written and the chain will get one link longer and that is, I have come to believe, how this works. I am not asking you to be brave. I am not asking you to be careful. I am asking you, if you will, to be honest with the page in front of you in the way you would be honest with a friend who had asked you a real question, because that, as far as I can tell, is the whole of the practice, and everything else — the doors, the cities, the apples, the people — follows from it.

She thought about signing it. She thought about not signing it. She decided, in the end, on neither — neither the full name, which felt like asking for a reply she had just said she did not want, nor anonymity, which felt like cowardice dressed as discretion. She wrote, in the bottom corner of the inside cover, the small initial she had been using on her anchor list since Tuesday, and after it, the date, and after the date, in parentheses, the small phrase she had written in Jane Eyre on Saturday and decided to keep: same table, different reader.

She closed the book. She held it for a moment. She thought, briefly, about whether what she had just done was a good idea, and decided that the question was the wrong question — that a person who had been given a door and then spent a week reasoning about whether to leave the door propped open for the next person was a person who had already decided, and was only looking for permission. She had not needed permission to write in the margin of Middlemarch when she was nineteen. She did not, she thought, need it now.

She took the book to Iris at the desk. Iris scanned it without looking at the cover, which was the small mercy of librarians, and stamped the date, and slid it back across the counter, and said see you Wednesday, although it was already Tuesday, in the way she said most things. Iyla walked back to the carrel. She put the book on the returns trolley herself, because she had decided, on the walk over, that she did not want to be the person who took it home. The book needed to be in circulation. The note needed to be available. The stranger, whoever she was, was not going to find it on Iyla's kitchen shelf.

Outside, it had started to rain in the small undecided way it rained in November, and Iyla stood on the library steps for a moment with the hood of her coat half up and watched a man across the street fold a newspaper into a hat for a child who did not want a hat, and put the man folded the newspaper into a hat on the list, and walked home.

That evening, at her kitchen table, she wrote in her notebook: left a note in Middlemarch at the central library, inside front cover, signed with the initial and the date. She looked at it. She added: I do not know who will find it. I do not need to. She thought for a moment longer, and added, in the smaller hand she used for the things she wanted to remember without underlining:

This is how it gets passed on. Not by being explained. By being left where the right person will find it, in the place where the right person already looks.

Then she closed the notebook, because there was, on the desk beside it, one more small thing she had been waiting all week to do.