When the Municipal Archive Closed for Pest Fumigation She Stayed Behind With the Score Cataloguer and Found That Silence Between Pages Was Not the Only Thing That Could Be Broken

The notice went up on a Thursday. Pest fumigation. Stacks closed Friday through Sunday. Staff were to clear the most fragile scores from the west bay before the contractors sealed the vents.

Anjali Mehta had worked in the municipal music archive for eleven months. She was twenty six. She catalogued nineteenth century band parts, repaired torn spines with wheat paste, and spoke so little that the security guard sometimes checked if she was still in the building. She had never been with anyone. Not in college. Not after. She told herself it was patience. It was also fear dressed as order.

Karan Dsouza arrived on Friday at four with a trolley and a list. He was a contract cataloguer from the university, thirty one, quiet in a different way. He hummed under his breath when he thought no one heard. He had a scar on the side of his thumb from a paper cut that had gone septic two winters ago. Anjali had noticed the scar the first week and then pretended she had not.

By six the rest of the staff had gone. The shutters on the public side were down. The west bay smelled of old glue and the faint sweetness of insecticide that had not yet been released. They had three hours, the supervisor had said. Then they were to lock and leave.

They did not leave.

The last trolley jammed on a ridge in the linoleum. Karan crouched to lift the wheel. Anjali held the stack of bound parts so they would not slide. Their hands met on the same board. Neither pulled away at once.

Sorry, he said.

It is all right, she said, and her voice sounded thinner than she wanted.

They moved the scores into the sealed inner room, the one with the dehumidifier and the metal cabinets that locked with two keys. The room was small. The light was a single tube that hummed. When Karan shut the door to keep the dust out, the sound of the empty building dropped away.

Anjali took off her cotton gloves to turn a page that had stuck. Her fingers were cold. He watched her do it and then looked at the list as if the list could save him.

You can stay if you want, he said after a while. I still have the register to finish. The supervisor will not come back.

I know, she said.

She stayed.

They sat on the floor between two cabinets because the chairs had been stacked for the contractors. The linoleum was cool through her salwar. He opened a tin of biscuits he had bought at the stall outside. She ate one. The sugar made her mouth wet.

Why music? he asked.

Because it does not ask me to speak first, she said. Then she laughed once, surprised at herself. And because my father kept a harmonium he never played after my mother left. I used to open it and look at the reeds. I thought if I understood the machine I would understand why a house goes quiet.

Karan nodded as if that sentence had been waiting for him. My brother played trumpet in a wedding band, he said. He died in a bus. I started cataloguing because I could not stand the sound of brass for two years. Then I missed it so much I came back through the paper.

They sat with that. The tube light buzzed. Somewhere in the building a pipe ticked.

Anjali looked at his mouth when he drank water from the steel bottle. She looked away. She looked again.

He set the bottle down.

If I touch your hand, he said, will you tell me to stop?

She shook her head.

His fingers were warmer than the room. He held her wrist as if it were a page that might tear. She turned her palm up. He traced the line there. She felt it in her stomach and lower, a slow gathering she had only known alone, in the dark, with the door locked and the shame sitting on the pillow like a third person.

There is no third person here, she thought, and the thought made her brave.

She leaned in first. The kiss was clumsy. Her teeth clicked his. She made a small sound of apology. He smiled against her mouth and tried again, slower. His tongue was careful. She opened for it because she had spent years imagining opening and had never practiced.

His hand went to her waist over the kurta. She put her hand on his chest and felt the beat. When she pulled the kurta up he helped. The air of the archive touched her stomach and she shivered.

Tell me if anything is wrong, he said.

I do not know what wrong would feel like yet, she said. I only know I do not want you to stop.

He kissed the place below her ear. She had not known that place could do that. Heat ran down her neck. He unhooked her bra with a patience that made her want to laugh and cry at once. When his mouth found her breast she held the back of his head and stared at the cabinet numbers and saw nothing.

The first time a man put his mouth on her she thought of catalogue numbers. Then she thought of nothing. Then she thought of his name.

Karan, she said, and it came out as a plea.

He laid her back on the folded dust cloth they used for the trolley. It smelled of cotton and a little of mothball. She did not care. He drew her salwar down. She lifted her hips. The act felt ceremonial and filthy at the same time. Her underwear was plain. She almost apologized for that too. He kissed the inside of her knee instead.

When he put his mouth between her legs she made a sound she did not recognize. It bounced off the metal and came back smaller. He learned her by listening. When she tightened he stayed. When she pulled his hair he did not take it as a stop. She came with her wrist over her own mouth because even here some old rule tried to keep her quiet. He pulled the wrist away.

I want to hear you, he said.

She came again, less hidden, and the second one left her shaking.

She sat up on her elbows. Her hair had come loose. She looked at the shape of him in his trousers and felt a new kind of hunger, not abstract, not literary. Practical.

I want you inside me, she said. I have not done that. I need you to go slow and I need you not to treat me like glass after the first minute.

He closed his eyes as if the sentence had weight. Then he nodded.

He had a condom in his wallet. She watched him put it on with a focus that would have embarrassed her in any other room. Here it felt like another kind of cataloguing: this is the body, this is the care, this is the risk named and handled.

He settled between her thighs. The first press hurt. She breathed out through her teeth. He waited. She nodded. He went further. The hurt changed temperature. It became a fullness that made her eyes water for a reason that was not only pain.

She held his shoulders. He moved as if he were counting. She learned the count and then broke it by lifting to meet him. The cloth slid. Her shoulder blade hit the cabinet. She laughed, breathless, and he laughed too, and the laugh made the next thrust easier.

The archive held them. The scores in the cabinets did not judge. The tube light kept its stupid hum. She felt herself open around him in a way no book had prepared her for. When he asked if she wanted more she said yes. When he went deeper she said his name again and did not cover her mouth.

She did not come from the thrusting alone. He put his hand between them and found the place his mouth had learned. The combination undid her. She clenched and he followed, forehead to her collarbone, a groan he tried and failed to swallow.

They stayed joined for a minute after. She felt the small pulses leave him. She felt her own body still fluttering as if it had not received the news that the work was done.

They dressed badly. Her kurta was inside out at first. She fixed it. He tied the dust cloth into a bundle and then untied it because his hands needed a task.

Are you all right, he said.

I am sore, she said. I am also not sorry. Those two facts can sit together.

He smiled, tired and real.

They drank the rest of the water. She told him about the first time she had touched herself, at nineteen, after a concert, still in the dress she had worn to the hall, ashamed and curious in equal measure. He told her about a relationship that had ended because he worked too many nights among dead composers and the living woman had grown tired of competing with paper.

I am not paper, Anjali said.

I noticed, he said.

She kissed him again, standing this time, her back against the cabinet. The kiss grew. His hand slid under her kurta. She was tender and still wanted. That surprise pleased her more than any theory of desire she had read.

On the metal work table, with the register pushed aside, she took him in her hand. She had no technique. She watched his face to invent one. When he thickened she felt proud in a way that had nothing to do with virtue. He stopped her before he finished and asked if she wanted him again.

Yes, she said. From behind. I want to see the cabinet numbers while you do it. I want this room to keep the picture.

He bent her gently over the table. The edge pressed her hips. He entered slower than the first time and the soreness flared and then settled into a deeper ache that she chose. His hand splayed on her stomach. She pushed back. The table legs complained. She did not care if the night watch heard a table. Let him think a cabinet had shifted.

This time she reached down herself. She was wet from both of them, from the first round, from the talking. She came with her cheek on the register cover and left a faint mark of her mouth on the cloth tape. He followed soon after, holding her hips as if the table might vanish.

They cleaned what they could. She wiped the table. He folded the cloth. They put the last scores in the cabinet and locked it with both keys.

The building was still empty. Dawn made a grey line under the shutter.

I do not know what this is tomorrow, Karan said in the corridor.

Tomorrow I will catalog the east bay, she said. You will finish the register. We will drink tea at the stall like people who work here. And if you ask to walk me to the bus I will say yes. I am not asking you to marry the night. I am asking you not to pretend it did not happen.

He nodded. I can do that.

At the staff door he touched her wrist again, the same place as the first permission. She let him. Then she went down the steps into the thin morning and the city smelled of wet dust and diesel and something frying in oil.

Her body remembered the table when she sat on the bus. The ache was a fact. The fact made her sit up straighter. She watched the streets pass and did not open a book.

On Monday the contractors would pump the stacks full of poison for insects that ate glue and paper. The west bay would be sealed. The inner room would keep its dehumidifier and its humming light and a memory that no register would hold.

Anjali put her forehead against the bus window and smiled at her own reflection, a small private smile that did not need an audience.

She had thought silence was the safest thing she owned. It turned out silence had only been a waiting room. The scores would go back on their shelves. She would go back to her desk. And when the archive opened again she would know, every time she passed the inner door, that some pages are turned with the hands, and some are turned with the rest of the body, and both kinds of turning can be true at once.