Public Safety Power Shutoffs

FICTION

By Mollie Hawkins

There are the ones that come to check out books, and then there are the ones that come to check out other things, like the new volunteer book shelver, the one that smells like lilac perfume and sunscreen. Or they’re watching YouTube videos on the internet that just barely fit within the confines of the Library Code of Conduct, so we can’t ask them to leave. There are the ones that bring their wild, sticky children and set them free during the story-time hour as if to say: here, these are yours now.

Every patron has a nickname.

There’s Tambourine Tonya, speaking in tongues and wiggling with the light of the Lord in the stacks. There’s Scratch n’ Sniff Sam, sitting at the computer we will have to spray with Lysol after. There’s a whole tribe of Karens—really, their names are Karen—shaking gnarled fists and hollering across the circulation desk that she can’t believe her bad fortune, having to suffer us millennials. Didn’t we know? This place used to be perfect. She could get a new book the day it came out; now the wait can take months, and who knows how much time she has left? Her tax dollars (our salaries, she will have us know) are going to waste. And shouldn’t we do something about the people sleeping on the memorial benches outside? Can’t we figure out

why her phone won’t download the eBook app? There’re the ones that don’t talk to us as much: the Anti-Vaccine Queen, Bay Area Bob, and Andrew Ankle Bracelet.

Don’t think I am ungrateful. I have a job, a one-bedroom apartment, and two dogs that love me. Before this, I was working in a coffee shop in a small Alabama town that got wiped out by a tornado. Most people stayed, helped their neighbors pluck family photo albums, baby dolls, and the good silver out of tree limbs, and waited quietly to take their insurance checks to the bank. I ran as fast and as far as I could with no savings or furniture: California. It seemed all right. There were no tornadoes there. And no bone-freezing winter, which is what kept me away from the east coast.

I have learned, wherever you go, home tends to follow like a tired old dog behind you. There are parts of California that may as well be rural Alabama, though people back home laugh at me when I say this, one eye squinted, hands flailing when I talk about the expanse and sheer country of Pike County, California. Really, I say. People don’t bathe up there. They are missing teeth. They smoke Virginia Slims. A lot of them do drugs in the bathroom. It is the living stereotype of what people think Alabama is, but it’s northern California. They don’t want to believe me. It’s supposed to be all palm trees, movie stars, surfing, tie-dye. No one wants to think of places the way they really are, full of generic lives, mortgages, school pickup schedules.

I started working at the library because it saved me as a bored teenager, desperate to get out of the small rural town. The irony is that I ended up here, in an even smaller, even more remote version—the only difference being the accents. Instead of serving coffee, I serve books and internet guest passes.

Despite popular opinion and unpopular funding, this library stays busy. Our doors are open to all: poor and wealthy, old and young. This is a safe space, for now. But that feeling wanes when the lights go out.

They called them “Public Safety Power Shutoffs.” The lights will snap out in a blink, for days on end, to prevent rapid wildfire from spreading like kudzu across water-starved land. The signs on our doors will read: “Closed due to PSPS.” And then, “Open during PSPS,” as we are warned via email from the Pike County Public Director that this is the new normal. We should report to work. Business as usual. We are a public resource, even if nearly all our resources are nonexistent without power, lights, the internet, water. Every time I read PSPS, I think of calling a cat. Pss, pss.

At my library, there is no running water without power. We are on a well. When the water does work, it spits out like a sticky gel that smells like rotten eggs; sometimes it’s black. I signed a waiver when I started work that said I would not, under any circumstances, drink the tap water. I use hand sanitizer after washing my hands. We go through a gallon of hand sanitizer in a month. The sign on the bathroom door reads: Out of Order during PSPS. No water means no flushing. The staff will use it only when we absolutely must and there is an unspoken agreement among us; don’t talk about it. Especially those of us on our periods. Mostly: me. We’ll be as quiet as librarians.

A million Californians sat in the dark, on and off for weeks in September and October, while Pacific Gas & Electric tried to prevent another demolition of a town because of a fire that may or not have been their fault, who’s to say? Let the lawyers decide. Headlines will skew to conspiracy and misappropriation of budgets, robust bonuses, faulty powerlines, lazy workers. We

won’t stand for another Paradise, they say. So, we sit in the dark to make our paychecks and listen with burning envy to the hum of full-house generators in the distance. The clerk, Darcy, says, can you believe how loud the regular world is when you’re not paying attention?

I say, so loud.

The fires are still on the news, and it’s ironic that most of us won’t know about them—carving through LA like a match burning towards its handle—because we are in the dark, spending nine hours writing down library card numbers and barcodes on a clipboard. Our cellphones don’t work in the foothills without wifi. I tell Darcy to be extra careful walking outside to take a break because our panic button does not work. There’s nobody to help if we need it.

I am too struck by the audacity of it all to really be truly afraid, or angry, like I would be later, the mantra in my head being The institution does not love you back. The institution does not love you back. I needed to make money and I had no vacation or sick days to claim.

The days went like this.

A patron walks in through the propped-open doors, like walking into a dark haunted house. They’re bored, they might as well read a book in the park, what the heck, why not. I give them a flashlight to browse the stacks. An actual flashlight! It’s like the olden days, they say. I laugh with them. They tell me they didn’t sleep because their neighbor’s whole-house generator rattled the walls of their house all night. They have a smaller, quieter generator that only keeps their refrigerator running. We have a lot of dairy, they say, like that explained everything. I wondered if their well water was off, too, like the library’s. They smelled faintly of stale socks. We all did.

Tambourine Tonya knew this would happen, but she is praying the lights will come back on soon. It’s like the days before computers, isn’t that crazy? We never know how much we rely on something until we can’t have it anymore, she says, eager to keep talking through the anxiety we share.

In a nine-hour shift we get about ten patrons, the true believers of books, those seeking no use of the public computers or free wifi. The Karens are pleased with the checkout system: I write down their library card number, the barcode of the book, and say, bring it back in three weeks. It’s an exercise in blind trust. Later, I will discover that I’ve written some of the numbers down wrong and hope the books find their way back. They usually do. Sometimes, for my favorite patrons, I break the rules if they don’t bring them back. I mark the book as a discard, with the note: old, unpopular, taking up space. There is never enough space.

Everyone in Pike County knows someone that lost things in the famous Camp fire, just up the road in Paradise. People lost houses, cars, pets. Some lost other people. Directors were already making documentaries about it, with clever names like Paradise Lost, or Trouble in Paradise. I drove through Paradise on a detour to Chico, once. I rolled my windows down and breathed in what smelled like a freshly dug grave filled with dead skunks. Churches outnumbered the houses on the windy roads of Paradise, and it reminded me of the town where I grew up in southern Alabama, the one filled with Baptists and a tornado siren that could outblast the scream of a tea kettle. Wherever you go, there you are.

The library director, Donna, stops by on day four of the power outage, smelling stale like everyone else and a nest of black hair twisted into a knot on top of her head. She’s there to

drop off flashlights, bottles of water, and encouragement. When Darcy and I are ready to run away from this dark library in the base of the foothills with no water, she reels us back in. She says, I just want you to know how much I appreciate you. She says, in her experience, people feel less freaked out by what’s going on in the world if the library is open. It can’t be that bad. The library is open. I nod and think, yes, things aren’t that bad. The library is open. This is the new normal. This is helping pluck family heirlooms out of trees.