The Dodo Egg

By Jason A. Wendleton

The yellow florescent tube angrily buzzed, like a trapped hornet. It flickered on and off like a dying strobe light, casting menacing shadows onto the narrow aisle of books below. Rows and rows of books. Neat, leather bound packets of knowledge, the wisdom of the ages distilled. Jeremy Williams walked among them, an intruder in the dark. His eyes shifted back and forth—side to side. The multicolored book spines created a strange, fragmented mosaic. He was supposed to be studying…but here he was...

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The ground floor of the University library beamed with academic promise. There were clusters of fancy computer desks adjacent to the polished wooden tables. Approaching one of these, however, Jeremy was stuck by a bolt of laziness. It was the perfect place for him to sit down and get serious about studying. There were dozens of students just like him—some were even in quiet, serious study. Heads buried in paper, noses planted firmly in the open faces of textbooks. He thought of nothing but Lord Byron, metric conversions, auxiliary verbs, photosynthesis, Cartesian Products…

A girl was nervously flipping through an encyclopedia. Her obnoxious pink fingernails were spinning through the thin sheets as the flimsy pages rustled and gnashed together. A few seats away sat a pale-faced boy sporting white ear buds. The faint aroma of barely stifled rap music wafted past Jeremy’s sensitive eardrums. Someone coughed, it was wet sounding—loaded with phlegm.

Another unseen person smacked their chewing gum.

This wouldn’t do. He knew his Algebra homework wasn’t going to do itself, but there were too many people here. Yes, that was the problem. This space was taken by a motley group participating in merely casual study. Jeremy decided to head upstairs and find a more out-of-the-way place to work. Besides, he craved solitude after spending the entire day crammed and cooped up in crowded lecture halls. There he had no choice but to sit next to sweaty, sniffly people. He sure as hell wasn’t going to spend his free time like that.

It was well known that the second floor of the library had uncomfortable chairs—so he skipped it and made his way up to the third floor. There were fewer desks and most of the floor space was devoted to books. Neat, symmetrical rows of books—there were dozens of them. Near the edges of the floor were sporadically placed, single-student study desks. The narrow windows reminded Jeremy of a basement, rather than an uppermost floor. Though there were a few library aides scattered among the stacks, Jeremy was basically alone. A sinister mechanical murmuring whispered to him as he entered the complex hedge maze of paper. It’s myriad of twists and turns stretched out before him.

He began to wonder aimlessly around. At first he told himself he was looking for one of the scattered, isolated study desks. But as he walked, it became harder and harder for him to recall why he’d come to the library in the first place.
Jeremy lost himself.

His nervous feet pulled him through the darkened library at a break neck speed. The dark leather bound books hypnotized him. He wanted to stop and maybe touch one of them…maybe even pull one of them down and see what was lurking inside. Occasionally he was able to catch a glimpse of a blurry sideways title: “The Complete Mennonite Cookbook,” “The Economics of World Peace,” “Man in Science-The Science of Man” and many others with titles that were equal parts impressive and ridiculous.

Jeremy gave up trying to halt himself. He gave into the mad impulse to rush forward. Then he quit trying to read the various book spines whizzing past him. It was only after he’d completely forgotten about his homework that his feet slowed down. Perusing the shelves, he felt the life drain from his limbs. The back of his throat itched and tickled, no doubt from the thick layer of dust he sliced through as he walked along. There was so much knowledge—tangible, pure knowledge here. And yet, it was obvious that this was a place people rarely visited. It was a jungle dense with cobwebs and dust bunnies.

He stopped and yanked a book down and opened it up. On the inside was a faded check-out card. It had only been stamped once:

Due back on 16 FEB ‘89

He put that one back and pulled down two more. Both of them had never even been checked out. Their spines cracked sharply as he thumbed through them. Despite the time-yellowed edges of their pages, it was clear to him that he was the first person to open them. This sudden realization filled him with a deep melancholy.

It was a shame, a horrible waste, that nobody had disturbed these tomes. No doubt the authors of these books would have been even more depressed to learn that no one had read what they’d worked so hard to produce. A book was the product of blood, sweat, and pure determination. Jeremy knew how hard it was to write one, he’d been trying to write his own book now for the past three years. Someone out there, in the larger world, had put his or her soul into each and every one of these now forgotten hunks of paper and glue.

He thought about the rows of computers downstairs. People didn’t really consult books anymore. Jeremy recalled a conversation he’d had earlier in the week with one of his new classmates. A pimply faced kid in his literature class who had given him a URL to a great website for plot synopses of most of the books on the required reading lists.

“It’s awesome, you can read the book, without, you know…having to read the book.”

At the time, Jeremy had laughed as he tucked the web address into his coat pocket. But now he felt a pang of guilt. Now fully depressed, Jeremy shuffled through the dark alleys of books. Each one seemed to be both a coffin and a time capsule. His personal problems wilted before the enormity of it all.

There had to be an answer here.

Despite the outlandishness of the notion, it writhed and wiggled behind his eyes. Until he became convinced that the solution to all his and the world’s problems lay hidden behind a dusty book jacket. The grand “cosmic solution.” E=MC2. A universal panacea—was here, neatly tucked away. The answer wasn’t on a database downstairs, it was here living in these books. World Peace, the cure for Cancer, and the solution to global warming…it was all here, slowly withering under the weak florescent lighting, forgotten. All he had to do was find it. He began to walk faster now.

His thirst for knowledge wasn’t purely philanthropic. He didn’t really want to solve the world’s problems—just his own. Jeremy needed direction, he needed inspiration…he needed to know what he was supposed to do with the rest of his life. The easy years were over; anxiety had now enveloped him like a plastic bag over his face.

The long lost library of Alexandria suddenly sprang into his mind and he shuddered. This was worst than Alexandria though, because there had been no great, all consuming fire. No catastrophic war had wiped this collection off the face of the Earth. It was all still here, waiting. The slate of knowledge had not been wiped dry, it was just being ignored.

A mad grin smeared itself across his face as he turned a corner. He started his search by randomly grabbing books, left and right: gardening, mathematics, Greek poetry, the theory behind superconductors, the theory of creation, the theory of theories…

All of it both meaningful and meaningless to him.

Each time he cracked a book open and failed to find what he was looking for (whatever that was) within, he became even more encouraged that he’d eventually find it. Every corner he turned there was a new aisle to search, and another—then another. Whirling about the entire floor once, then twice, Jeremy thumbed through countless books. Whatever he was looking for was calling to him, singing out for his discovery. It taunted him.

“Come out, come out…wherever you are…”

Arms outstretched, he ran his fingers across them, eyes closed. Each book was a living, breathing thing he came to realize, with its own unique pulse. Now that he could feel it, he didn’t need to bother with taking them off the shelf.

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The yellow florescent tube angrily buzzed, like a trapped hornet. It flickered on and off like a dying strobe light, casting menacing shadows onto the narrow aisle of books below. Rows and rows of books. Neat, leather bound packets of knowledge, the wisdom of the ages distilled. Jeremy Williams walked among them, an intruder in the dark. His eyes shifted back and forth—side to side. The multicolored book spines created a strange, fragmented mosaic. He was supposed to be studying…but here he was.

Reaching out with his left hand, he drummed his fingers across a series of withered looking hardbacks.

Throb, throb, throb…

He was close, he could feel it.

Jeremy’s palms sweated and his throat tightened like he’d just finished smoking too many cigarettes. Finally, his index finger stopped on a large, gray book. Inhaling deeply, he took it from off the shelf.
Ignoring the cover, he turned it over in his hands. He was surprised at its weight—how the heft failed to betray the weight contained within.

Here was his answer.

Somehow, though he couldn’t explain it exactly, he knew this was the book. The book that was going to change his life. To save it even.
He handled it like it was a rare bird egg. A Dodo egg, perhaps. The thought made him laugh. In his mind’s eye he could picture the headline:

“College Student finds Last Surviving Dodo Egg in University Library!”

Jeremy could almost see himself building an incubator and placing the book inside. He imagined himself watching a huge, awkward bird slowly claw its way out of the book. Wet, sticky pages clinging to it’s new feathers like splintered bits of egg shell.

Was the Dodo really a stupid bird or not? He decided to find out.

He sat down on the floor cross legged and opened the book. Thumbing through it carefully, he began to giggle. Quickly, he snapped it shut—then opened it again. It was too funny.
Inside he found page after indecipherable page. Upside down question marks peppered the paragraphs. There were upside down exclamation marks, emphasizing his complete and utter lack of understanding. He’d found the answer—his solution to everything…and it was written in a language he couldn’t understand.