Relenting
You have spent an hour carefully collecting an appealing
stack of books and movies. I cannot let you check them out because the last
item you returned to us was coated in a sticky fluorescent green sugar glaze.
At least, "sugar" is what the note on your record says. I
am alarmed to think of my co-workers tasting of the returns,
especially when they've returned from their journeys with new
textures, smells and colors. Also, the pages appeared to have been lightly
toasted, like a gently roasted marshmallow. As this book is unsuitable for
circulation you now owe us $10.95. This exceeds our allowable
limits. No, we don't take credit cards. There is a cash machine down the
street. I'm sorry about your unemployment situation. No, it is unlikely you
checked the book out like that as your date due slip is actually affixed
to the book by an over coating of the green glaze. Oh really? I am
terribly sorry about your gangrenous leg.
We regard each other for a moment, me implacable, and you with
dimming light. You try to accept it all, but it's just too big. There is
something almost like a weight, misty, plowing inexorably down
on you. I watch the slump of your posture under it. It seems to thin you,
crush, leach and crack. The tight grip you have on your items slackens like a
great ocean liner sinking. Life is futile and darkness falls.
What you do not know, slouching in your private misery, is
that, barring your turning out to be a complete monster, I, at the
very start, decided to let you check out for today, whether you could pay
or not. Why then do I let you suffer like this? What kind of person am I? I am
a clerk, and as such I am only sort of a person. I am also my job. I am the
institution. I am a teacher. I am a performer. Yes, I am a performer, and
this is my performance. Here I play the cold bureaucrat, the institutional
wall, the end of your hopes and dreams. I have to sell that first. But hidden
here is mercy, the light of my humanity, your second chance. It is my secret
treat whose value I carefully cultivate to its apogee. Mercy must be delayed
here so that you understand it is not yours by right. I hope to make an
impression so that you will take us seriously, pay your debts, care for your
materials. And when I relent and exclaim "Oh, I'll just go ahead and check
your stuff out for today!" as if I can no longer hold the door back on my
irrepressible humanity, it is indeed a small light to shine. But in
my job I do not have much light to give, and in the deeper darkness
even the dimmest of lights can be seen from far away. Of course, this is also a
way of saying that if I, at little cost to myself, do a favor for you, I will
spare no effort to make sure you see it. I like to be noticed.
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