A Long Night in the Library

Phase One went exactly as planned. Jack and Jill, two otherwise upstanding Harvard undergraduates, climbed the front steps of Widener Library at 9:15 p.m. and separated on the way into the reference room. Jill headed for the card catalogue and dawdled till Jack was well on his way into the stacks. Then she followed.

By 9:30 p.m. they were squared away on separate floors, in hiding places they had chosen during a late-afternoon reconnaissance trip. Jill squeezed into an alcove behind a desk on Level Two West, located at approximately 1590.5 (Scientific Periodicals). Jack opted to play it cooler, slumping as if asleep over a remote first-floor carrel desk crammed with books on the status of women in Vichy France.

Figuring it would be at least an hour before they could move around safely, Jill tried to go to sleep Jack fidgeted and struggled to get his mind off Tom Petty's "The Waitin' Is The Hardest Part."

At 9:40 Jack got tired of waiting and wandered up to Level Two to make sure Jill had arrived at the previously determined location on schedule Finding her carrel empty, he frowned, flipped on the light and started to write her a note. Jill poked her head out from under the desk.

"Holy shit You are here," said Jack.

Somewhat reassured, they resumed position. At 9:50 the scattered footsteps of researchers died down, and a guard with a megaphone could be heard methodically pacing the corridors, intoning at intervals. "The library is closing in 10 minutes...the library is closing in 10 minutes." Jack started panicking--he'd counted on his dead-end row of carrels being dark, but a graduate student was still engrossed in work four carrels away, and there was an overhead light that stayed obstinately on with no switch in sight. Time moved at a crawl, especially since he had incautiously put his head down directly on top of his watchband.

By closing time proper, the library noises had subsided to occasional clicks and footsteps as guards walked through the corridors snapping off stray lights. At 10:21, all the overhead lights went off at once--evidently, to Jack and Jill's relief, controlled by a central switch. No one had come within two bookcases of them.

* * *

Phase Two was scheduled to begin at 11 p.m. with a rendezvous at Carrel # 232 (Br239.195, facing Mass Ave). At 11:02, Jack had yet to appear. Jill figured he'd been carried off in handcuffs. He showed up a minute later, and at 11:05 they commenced exploring the now-silent monolith.

"Got any food?"

"I filed a pack of Bubble-Yum in the shelves somewhere on Three. See if you can find it."

"You've got to be kidding."

After innumerable hints from Jack, who had written down the location in his notebook, Jill located the Bubble-Yum, which was filed under Bacteria. Proceeding upward, they became acquainted with some of the tricks their ears would continue to play on them. Footsteps from anywhere above seemed to be on their floor, up to the moment they passed overhead. Even noises from outside sounded remarkably like dastards lurking one stack above. No floors on earth creak quite so loudly as the Widener stairs.

At 11:45 they heard footsteps.

"They must have heard us on the stairs. Where are the bathrooms?"

"Level Four. Upstairs, quick!"

They spiraled hurriedly up from Level One, noting with irritation that the doors to the stair-wells made more noise than the stairs themselves. The men's bathroom door--the closest--made the most noise of all. After a suitable period of skulking--including one abortive escape mission cut short by a door slamming right around the corner--quiet returned and they cautiously worked their way back downstairs.

* * *

Earlier in the day, in a fit of self-dramatization, they had arranged for two friends to show up at midnight at the Gate on Mass Ave and look for them in the third-level window. Because of the delay in the men's room, Jack and Jill barely made it to Carrel # 232 in time. The original contacts had brought along three more, and the entire group was waving and jumping up and down and pointing. But just as Jack and Jill flipped on the individual carrel light to improve the view, a woman walked through the Mass Ave gate directly towards the library. With natural curiosity she glanced up, saw the lit window and the silhouettes, paused for a moment, and then walked into Widener through the back door. She was, of course, the midnight janitor.

"Now we've blown it."

"She must have seen us. Let's get outta here."

Turning off the light, they ducked down the stairs and reconnoitered Level Two, whose quiet emboldened them to go back to the window. From the window directly below their original one (Carrel # 252), they switched on another light and boldly hailed their friends. The outside group looked horrified and pointed upward. The gesture became abruptly comprehensible with the sound of footsteps and the rhythmic "Click-click...click-click" of light switches being flicked in succession by someone passing directly overhead.

Jack and Jill turned their light off and tiptoed around the corner to Jack's home base on the same floor, Carrel # 164. (They learned later that the gang of five, seeing most of the lights in the building on and guards prowling, had given them up for lost.)

Carrel # 164 was conveniently snuggled behind the Baltic and Finnish Literature at the end of a dead-end hallway, which was dark. Jack and Jill figured they couldn't do much better without giving themselves away on the stairs again. They chose a couple of desks hallway along the corridor Jack pretended to be asleep while Jill tried to fit in the windowsill She was just deciding that it wouldn't work, that it made more sense to look "naturally" asleep, when the footsteps approached briskly. The woman janitor who had seen them in the window was coming along the corridor, turning on lights as she walked.

She passed Jack without seeing him and turned on the light in Jill's carrel. Jill was caught standing stupidly, trying desperately to look sleepy. The woman looked at her, said "Oh--sorry to bother you," and left, turning the lights off behind her.

Several minutes later, against all odds, she really seemed to have gone away. "Jill," said Jack through the barrier.

"Yeah?"

"What the hell just happened?"

"Search me."

When it became obvious that no full-scale chase was in progress, they decided to stay put and gamble on the janitor's not retracing her own steps. For the next 45 minutes they sat motionless and listened while their janitor and one other clanked around Levels One and Two with their cleaning equipment. At 12:55 Jill's nerves gave out and she hid under her desk. At 1:15 the clanking became so insistent that neither of them could take it any more Betting on another rumor they'd heard, that the tunnel to Pusey Library stayed open all night, they risked the stairs again and headed all the way down--from One. to A. to B. to C. to D.

The tunnel was open, and at 1:18 they passed through

* * *

Pusey was floodlit, carpeted, and vibrating with a disconcerting electronic hum. It also seemed completely empty. Not being Pusey habituees, they explored. At first the wide-open entrance doors and quietly blinking monitors got on their nerves, but at 2:30 they happened on a luxurious lounge area equipped with two cushioned chairs, a complete 15-volume Oxford English Dictionary, a picture window overlooking Pusey's under ground courtyard, and a Centrex phone. They used the Centrex for duty calls to several home bases and then relaxed It was time for some reading.

"You know, this is too easy. We could stay in Pusey all night."

"You're right--like cheating."

At 4:15 a.m. they pledged not to leave the stacks again.

* * *

Between 4:30 and dawn, five or six near-encounters with guards left them terrorized One of these guards had casually strolled up the corridor 10 feet from where Jack and Jill were sitting under a large carrel, backs against the wall and legs stretched out parallel with two concealing rows of books. Most of the guard activity, it seemed, took place on Levels One through Four, making it all but impossible to retrieve the books and candy Jack and Jill had left on Three. It remained unclear whether the guards always walk so briskly and purposefully or whether they had heard Jack and Jill and were looking for them.

Jack and Jill never found out for sure. But they hid behind stacks on D West, in carrel B-20 under the archives of the World Zionist Organization, and on C near Mass Ave (Educ 1028.2) In carrel B-20 after a prolonged skulk up to Level Two, they fell asleep and were awakened rudely at 5:45 by a radio.

A guard on A level or maybe One was moving around again to the tune of soft Latin rock. Jack and Jill were soon awake enough to get down to strategy. According to what they'd heard and the unexpected difficulty of staying hidden, the mass janitorial onslaught at 7 a.m. was going to be a serious problem. Bluntly put, if they tried to go upstairs they were probably dead. The noises increased upstairs. As the chances of actually making it to the 9 a.m. survival deadline improved. Jack and Jill, perversely, became more and more scared.

* * *

Things ended fast. At 7 a.m., doors seemed to open everywhere, and at least 30 janitors swooped in upstairs and started turning on lights, moving downward. "We're going to get squeezed out," Jill told Jack. "We'd better get down to D and delay it as long as possible."

D level has no carrels. They hunched over between two stacks, discussing their fast diminishing options. Jack wanted to play it bold and take the horrendously clanking elevator all the way up to Five--"It's like James Bond, it suits my image." Jill thought it was too dangerous. While they were debating it, the light suddenly went on in the stack next to them. Mindlessly, they hightailed it around the stack and managed to keep the obstacle between them and the janitor, who heard the racket but was able to catch only a glimpse of Jill on the way to the stairs. They switched stair-cases at C level and, out of habit, made for One and home base, which was still dark. Shortly thereafter, the same janitor came along snapping on lights and looked at them pretending to be asleep on desks. He said, "What are you doing here?" and added without waiting for an answer, "Come on with me, I'll let you out."

Jack and Jill trailed downstairs with him and waited while a couple of genial Cambridge cops scrutinized their bursar's cards and warned them never to get locked in again ("You take one of these guards by surprise in the night, he'll probably hit you with the first thing he sees"). One officer winked at Jack, patted him on the back a couple of times, and assured him that others had done the same thing before him.

They walked out the back door onto Mass Ave, checking their watches--7:21. Jack still thinks they would have made it if they had taken the elevator. Jill still thinks they would have made it if they had run upstairs three more floors and hidden in the men's room. But next time they want a serene and uninterrupted night of study, they'll try Grand Central Station.