Went to return a book to the library the other day and it refused to go in the BOOKS ONLY slot. Odd. I tried again several times, thinking perhaps I had suddenly aged beyond belief and could not muster the muscle to cram it through the wall, but no, it was the book itself, adamant, recalcitrant, bristling and ruffling indignantly, that would not allow itself to be returned.
This was a conundrum unlike any I had known before.
I tried the return bin in the library parking lot, a steel tank big as a refrigerator where I have seen many unusual things, among them a small boy climbing into the bin to see what it was like inside, people tossing books at the maw of the bin from moving cars, and a man with a ball-peen hammer attacking the bin for reasons that remain murky.
But again the book refused to be returned.
I should perhaps note that this was the first volume of Jan Morris's magisterial Pax Brittanica trilogy, Heaven's Command, an unbelievably great book, the single best-written history I have ever read, and this includes William Manchester's glorious first two volumes about Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, which remain superb even though I cannot forgive Manchester for dying on me before he finished the third and concluding volume. The sheer nerve of the man, leaving me hanging like that.
I tried the AUDIOVISUAL ONLY slot in the adjoining gaping steel bin, to no avail, and then tried the AUDIOVISUAL MATERIAL ONLY AND WE MEAN IT slot by the front door, looking around carefully to see if there were any slimy little kids who would rat on the strange man stuffing books into the wrong slot, but there weren't any, not even the usual ubiquitous Girl Scouts with their rickety card tables and boxes of howling sugar and those evil laser glares they deliver when you say airily that you bought 50 boxes yesterday, they can smell lies, you know, like wolves do, and did you know there are ten million Girl Scouts worldwide, try to think of that without a shiver of fear as you crawl into bed tonight.
I thought about just heaving the book at the door of the library and shuffling away briskly, pretending to scour the heavens for falcons and rockets, but that would be a disservice to the holy librarians, and it was a moist day also, and no man