Denise trudged up the stairs: head bowed, hand clinging to the concrete ledge to haul herself onward. A sigh every three steps, she was coming home. It was Friday, past eight in the evening. She was returning from the library, where she’d worked the front desk for the past three years. Exhausted, even though she’d stood up from her chair only a couple of times during her nine-hour shift.

When she’d applied for the job she was sure it was perfect for her: silence, dust, and books. She almost imagined herself as the heroine of a romantic novel, wandering among the shelves, surrounded by stories and trailing ethereal fingers over the spines of the books. Reality was considerably different. The library was in a mall, and it had mall schedules, mall patrons, and the fluorescent lights of a mall. The dust from the books made the skin on her hands split open. The dust and the alcohol gel, because every time she picked up a children’s book with a sticky plastic cover, she squeezed out a couple of drops of hand sanitizer. She had read on a forum that libraries had twenty-eight times more bacteria and viruses than public bathrooms, and it was recommended to put library books into the microwave for a few seconds before starting to read them. It’s not that she was obsessed with cleanliness—in her bedroom the coffee spoons accumulated one after the other on the nightstand, opaque like an antique collection, and she took out the garbage only when it couldn’t hold one tea bag more. But that was the thing about a 45-hour-a-week job: everything ended up becoming a phobia.

For a time she’d paid special attention to the patrons, to what they read in the reading room and what they checked out, and she’d kept a list of strange readers.

Woman, 27, three books: Biography of Father Hurtado; Biography of Saint Francis of Assisi; History of the Necronomicon, by Lovecraft.

Man, 48, book and magazine: Mysteries of Masonry; January’s Cosmopolitan.

Man, around 50 (always wears the same baseball cap, gray jacket, and navy-blue pants. Always!): photocopies a page about the parts of a cell from a children’s encyclopedia.

The list had been dormant for a while. She spent the afternoons suffering from the heat, fanning herself with magazines—the air-conditioning had been broken since the day it was installed. From time to time she wrinkled her nose in disgust at the food-court smells that inundated the library and mingled with its smell of confinement, of readers’ breath and sticky books . . . She never wandered among the shelves with a bucolic expression, waiting for some title to surprise her. She spent most of the time—as much as she could—sitting at the computer reading articles on Pajama Surf and Rusofilia, the blog of a punk makeup artist and her Brooklynite boyfriend, all kinds of Tumblrs, forums about bacteria and viruses, Facebook. Bored. Avoiding greetings, replying in monosyllables, and hating anyone who asked her for a photocopy. She found getting up from her chair and going to war with a decrepit machine almost offensive, and all for a fifty-peso photocopy—which in itself was a scam. That’s what it cost to get her to stand up: fifty pesos.