For 75 cents, I get eighteen minutes. It is, I have determined, about the minimum I need. For three quarters, or a small handful of dimes and nickels, if I am lucky and have some I can put to use, thus saving the precious quarters for laundry, I can park my car outside the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library for three tenths of an hour. Every minute will count, so I am careful to select the spot nearest the entrance, and by the time the last coin has fallen into the meter I am already on the move, a left-handed batter leaving the box early on a drag bunt.

I used to think I could get by on fifteen minutes, but the library is large and oddly designed—I will have to go down one floor before I can go up two, and traverse foyers and atria—and I now know that this is not enough, not worth the creeping dread I will feel as time expires with me still southeast of the information desk. Even eighteen may not be enough, but there is the sense that it has to do, so I’m up the wheelchair ramp and breaking the plane of the entrance in full stride, hitched briefly by automatic doors that never quite make good on their promise of continuous passage. (One day, the mechanism will be out of service, and I will crash grandly through the front doors of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, and then I will go back to buying my books for a time.)

Inside, I am all hypotenuses and banked turns. I angle hard across the endless main hall, bending my torso around obstacles so I needn’t break the line of my feet. Then, arms pumping banisters, it’s up two twisting stairways to Nonfiction, where I have my first appointment, Nonfiction being complexly organized, and thus requiring advance card catalog research. If I did not look up nonfiction in advance, I would have to spend 90 cents on the meter, and that is too much.

Collections of essays and memoirs w/ literary merit gained, I shed altitude, bearing down on Fiction in a handsomely managed freefall. Here, time will slip away from me, I know this now, have made some peace with it. Nonfiction is in code, but Fiction is all too legible, and though I come in with a plan, it becomes obvious that Ba - Bl will contain Baker, and for that matter Barker, and all around me loom these siren duets of alphabet.

I escape by necessity—my arms are full, and I am at fifteen minutes before I even reach self-checkout, which is exactly why I need eighteen minutes when I make a trip to the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Of course, I am also now slowed by the books, twice as many as I thought I’d have, and I am slowed further by indecision in how to carry them. Like Pnin in Nabokov’s slim Pnin, which I once found a place for under my arm in this building, I’m made imperfect by a vision of perfection, in seeking the ideal spot for my lecture notes I forget which one I settled on; I squander time in a vestibule as I try to make my load more manageable.

I slow only when my windshield appears, then melt goods into the interior of my vehicle. I have a ticket or I don’t. My reading list has congealed. Information gathers itself, I gather myself, we head out.

By Theo Schell-Lambert