The library held forty-three texts that could only be read in specific conditions, and Pell had read thirty-eight of them.
Some were simple: the text that could only be read by someone who had not slept in forty hours, its writing becoming legible only when the brain reached a particular kind of exhaustion, was a text on the nature of attention. The text that could only be read during physical pain held instructions for a kind of work Pell had never been able to do before she'd read it, and still practiced every morning. These were the uncomplicated ones. The condition was achievable. The text was there when you arrived.
Five remained. Among them: a very short text, seventeen pages, bound in the color of nothing, that had been in the library for over a century and had been read by, as far as anyone knew, three people. The condition for reading it was not listed in the catalog. It was known to the institution but not recorded.
Pell had asked, and been told: grief.
Not crying. Not sadness. Grief specifically, the state that followed significant loss, in the weeks or months after. The state that was itself a kind of knowing, and apparently the only kind through which the text was legible.
She had tried, three years ago, during the period after her partner left, convinced that the state qualified. She had sat with the text for four hours. The text remained opaque.
Evidently there were degrees of grief, and hers had not been the right one.
She found out on a Tuesday in October that her mentor had died. He had been sick for two years and she had known it was coming, and knowing had not made the Tuesday different. She sat in the hall outside her office for a long time. A colleague passed and said nothing, which was the right thing. The building had its ordinary sounds.
She thought of the text. And then she thought: not now. Not yet.
She waited three weeks. Then she took the text from its shelf and carried it to the reading room and sat.
The pages, this time, had writing on them.
She read for two hours and then stopped and looked up at the window. The sky outside was the color of nothing. She did not know how to describe what she had read. She knew she would not be able to, that the condition for reading it was also the condition for holding what it said. It would remain in her, in that part of her that had arrived in this particular country and not yet left.
She closed the text and returned it to its shelf and wrote her name in the register: the fourth reader in a century.
Later she would try to explain to someone what the text contained. She would find that she had the words but not the capacity to arrange them in a way that meant anything outside the state. The text held what it held. The grief held what the grief held.
She left the library at dusk, when the building locked.