Man Accused of Threatening Librarians and Assaulting Officers Dies at Courthouse
The story was written in the news under the title of Man Accused of Threatening Librarians and Assaulting Officers Dies at Courthouse. There was no clear cause of death given and according to the police and court records, the man was still awaiting his scheduled arraignment when he died. The only other details given were that he was initially asked to leave the library after disturbing the peace, which he refused, and that when the police arrived he began threatening the librarians and assaulting the officers before being arrested.
That was the only story written about the man. I searched for weeks after trying to find more information about his death and how he was allowed to die in a cell, but the city and the world moved on from his death pretty quickly. I should have moved on as well. People die here all the time for every reason possible, but I feel a kind of responsibility to this man and to fill in certain details about that day, since I was at the library from the time that he came in to the moment that he was taken out by the police.
It was the middle of the day on Friday, and I was there at the library when the man came in and took a book off one of the shelves. He did it so casually that no one else seemed to notice at first. He sat down next to me and I recognized him as one of the library regulars. He was a man in his mid-30s who I often saw at different times of the day. Sometimes I saw him in the mornings, other times it was the middle of the day, and I’ve also been at the library with him as it closed. Those times at closing we would be hurried to finish up our sessions with the Library’s AI system — linked to each of the tablets that lined the long rectangular tables. It didn’t seem that he stayed at the library all day. I had seen him leave to go home or wherever else he went after leaving and when we would be chased out of the library as it closed, he didn’t fight or cause a commotion like some of the homeless people.
There was nothing particularly strange about him. If anything, the only strange thing about him was the same strange thing about me — the cosmic coincidence that we often ended up at the library at the same times, which led to us developing a kind of kinship from this shared experience. Our kinship wasn’t a friendship in the normal sense, since we barely spoke to each other outside of small talk, but it was a kind of acknowledgment which brought us closer than strangers without us developing any kind of real intimacy.
We saw each other so much that I started to see it as a sign of normality. The sun still rose in the east and set in the west. I saw him at the library whenever I went there. He was a steadying force. The world can often change and shift in the blink of an eye, and sometimes the speed at which things become different can be overwhelming and in my life I’ve found that it’s valuable to have some things remain consistent so that one doesn’t get pulled apart by these sudden shifts and changes. Whenever I saw him I would think, things have changed and are changing but this one thing has remained the same. I can still understand this world through this one thing, through this man and his presence at the library.
Since we knew each other at that close but not too close distance, it wasn’t a shock that he would sit next to me after grabbing the book. We often sat next to each other in comfortable silence, typing our prompts and questions to the AI system for hours. If either one of us was working on something entertaining enough, we would share it with the other before retreating back into our individual worlds within the machines. He was the kind that loved niche sports trivia, particularly in basketball, but he also loved literary puzzles. Passages from old books where it seemed that the language was in conflict with itself, intentionally.
That day, the man, whose name was Edward, took out Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks and Faces in the Crowd, sat next to me, and started reading. I knew that what he was doing was not allowed. It wasn’t necessarily illegal but it was prohibited, but I had no right or desire to police him. He knew that he wasn’t allowed to do what he was doing then. If he wanted to read the book and get in trouble for doing so, he would have to deal with the consequences on his own.
Edward read for about twenty minutes before a librarian came and informed him that he wasn’t allowed to do what he was doing. She said that he could search up the book in the AI system that was in front of him and ask it to summarize the chapters. He could even ask it to write a book inspired by and in the style of the book that he was reading but reading the book itself was not allowed. Edward answered that he was aware of everything that he could do with the AI system and he often did those things but that he wanted to read the book instead. He woke up that morning remembering how much he loved the book when he read it years ago and wanted to see if it was just as good as he remembered. The librarian said that she understood but reminded him again that reading physical — and digital books — was forbidden unless it was done through the AI system. She politely asked him to give her the book but he refused, dismissing her by saying that it wouldn’t take him long to finish, since the book was relatively short. He said he would be done in about two hours. Then he would put it back and leave. They kept going back and forth in this circle of tension until the librarian left frustrated and muttering that she didn’t need that kind of shit that day.
A few minutes later, the librarian came back with her supervisor. The supervisor was an older woman with lines around her mouth which made one naturally think that she was the kind of person who didn’t suffer anyone’s nonsense. She came up to Edward, leaned close to his face and said sternly that he was not allowed to read the book and his choices were to either give it up, follow the rules, or leave the library. Edward dismissed her just the same as he did the younger librarian. He said again that reading the book wouldn’t take him too long then he would put it back. It wasn’t a problem, he said. He wasn’t trying to take the book, he just wanted to read it for a few hours.
You can’t read it, the supervisor said. That’s the problem. Reading the book is against the rules. Yes, I can, he responded. I’m doing it right now. And it’s going to take longer if you keep bothering me. Once I finish, I will put the book back. I promise. His response pushed the supervisor beyond annoyance and into the kind of anger that makes veins show in one’s head. You can have the book interpreted for you book on our AI system like everyone else. That’s how things are done here. This isn’t new, I’ve seen you around her several times so you can’t pretend to be ignorant of the rules, she said. If you can’t or don’t want to do that, then you’re going to have to leave.
I don’t want to look up things about the book, I want to read the book, he said. I’ll leave right after I’m done. I’m not trying to stay here all day. I have things to do. If I could have gotten this book at a bookstore, I would have done that but they all have their own AI systems that need different subscriptions just to have the book interpreted for you, or to have the AI respond with passages or isolated chapters accompanied by reviews or explanations about what each chapter and passage means, which isn’t the same experience as reading the full book on your own. Thankfully you still have the book here, so I figured I can come and read it pretty quickly. I’ll be done soon, he said.
The supervisor was so visibly mad that if he hadn’t been a stranger, and had been someone like her child or a sibling, one could imagine her striking him at that moment. But she was a woman who kept her emotions under control, even if her face and its bulging veins gave away how enraged she was by a man who she found to be absolutely disrespectful. She walked away from him with her nails digging into her palm. The younger librarian walked away behind her.
Edward went back to his reading as if it was the most normal thing in the world. He even turned the book towards me and pointed out a short passage of three sentences that he thought were fascinating:
“In that apartment, there was nothing. There weren’t even ghosts. There were heaps of half-alive plants and a dead tree.”
He asked me what I thought about the conflict in the sentences. The author wrote that there was nothing in the apartment. So much nothing that there weren’t even ghosts. Yet, in the last sentence, she names the things that are there — half-alive plants and a dead tree. Were those things a refutation of the nothingness or were the half-dead and the dead nothing to the point that they were more nothing than ghosts, who may be dead but have gone so far into deadness and nothingness that they’ve come back as the contradiction of the living dead?
I liked the question and on any other day I would have given him an answer from my understanding of what the writer was trying to achieve, but it wasn’t an ordinary day, and wanting again not to be involved or be seen as involved, I simply smiled at him and then turned back to my tablet. He seemed satisfied enough with my smile. Maybe he realized that I was enforcing a new distance between the two of us and accepted it. He went back to reading his book.
About an hour passed and it seemed that the librarians had given up and were going to allow him to finish his reading. I could see from the corner of my eye that he was close to finishing the book. The book wasn’t long but he was also a fast reader. But then I saw two police officers, a woman and a man, walking up to our table. They approached Edward with that attitude of domination and authority that officers seem to carry to remind citizens of who is in charge. They are, and the attitude along with the gun and vests prove that.
The male officer — I couldn’t see the names on their badges — asked Edward for his ID, saying that they had been told that he was causing a disturbance. Without handing over the ID, Edward answered that he wasn’t causing any disturbance, he was only trying to read a book. Well, that’s against the rules, the officer said. You can’t read books in here. These books are only to be looked at, the same way you look at art at the museum and you wouldn’t take a painting off the wall. You can’t touch them or take these books off the shelves. Edward didn’t respond, either he was absorbed so much in the passage he was reading that he didn’t hear the officer or he didn’t care for what the officer was saying. He just flipped to the next page.
Alright, it’s time to go, the male officer said. He snatched the book out of Edward’s hands. Edwards shot up and asked the officer what the fuck his problem was. The female officer then stepped behind him and told him to calm down, and as he was saying that he was calm and as he reached out his hand, asking for the book back, the female officer grabbed his outstretched hand and pulled it back while attaching one end of a pair of handcuffs to it. She then tried to bring his other hand to the back to fully handcuff him but Edward snatched it away, telling her not to touch him. The male officer told Edward that he was being erratic and needed to calm down.
At this point, a crowd had formed close to them. I had gotten up and stepped away so that I wouldn’t be involved. After a few minutes of Edward arguing with the officers, they wrestled him to the ground with the female officer putting her knee on his back and the male officer helping to pin him down. The officer dropped the book to keep his hands free and the book landed near Edward’s face as he screamed in pain.
One short woman who had been a few tables behind us came up and tried to negotiate with the officers. She asked them if it was possible to just let Edward finish the book and then he could go peacefully. She said that it didn’t need to turn into such a big thing, he wasn’t harming anyone after all. She knew Edward as a regular and he had never caused any problems before. The officers refused. The male officer said that now it wasn’t just about the book but that Edward had also verbally abused the librarians and assaulted police officers. They had to take him to jail. They told her to step away unless she also wanted to be arrested. The short woman backed away and came and stood with us in the crowd.
Then a younger man went to the officers and Edward. He seemed to have had a relationship with Edward, one that was closer than the one Edward and I had because the young man knelt down, put his hand on Edward’s head and asked Edward, in the kind of way that one talked to a wayward sibling, to behave and maybe the officers would allow him to get off with a warning. There was no need for him to go to jail, the young man said. But Edward, in pain and in anger, started yelling about how the police were just assholes and bullies and that he didn’t do anything wrong. He thrashed about, which caused the officers to apply more pressure on him, and caused him more pain. And they further used his attempts to free himself as evidence that he was out of control.
Watching this scene unfold, I wondered if there was anything that I could do to intervene but after the short woman and the young man failed to resolve the situation, I couldn’t think of any benefit my presence and attempted intervention would have had and instead chose to simply watch from a distance.
Edward kept struggling and eventually the officers started kneeing and punching him in the head and face in response to the harm that they felt he was doing to them. A few voices from the crowd yelled that there was no need for what the officers were doing, and some people brought out their phones to record the incident but we all stayed a safe distance away.
After beating Edward for some minutes, Edward calmed down. The officers then stood him up. His face was now bloodied and cut. His spirit was crushed. He was no longer resisting or yelling. He didn’t fight back anymore but just kept his head and eyes down. As he was finally being walked out of the library, he raised his head to look at the librarian and her supervisor who were standing by the entrance like sentinels. He spat blood in their direction. The blood didn’t either but the younger woman dodged behind the older supervisor, who was unmoved by the bloodied saliva that landed in front of her.
Edward was taken out of the building and the sirens grew distant until the sound disappeared. Afterwards, everything went back to normal. People returned to their seats and tablets and went about their day. The supervisor walked over and grabbed the book, which was still on the floor, and inspected it. There was a little bit of blood on the cover, which disgusted her but not enough to stop her from holding the book up with her bare hands. The disgust seemed more aimed at the person who was no longer there and the memory of him than the residue that he had left behind. She took the book to the trashcan and threw it away.
I left the library for lunch. When I went outside, I looked around to see if the cop car would somehow still be around, even though I had listened to its sirens disappear into the distance. I also looked around to see if I could spot Edward in the crowd of people walking around outside, in the naive hope that after taking him outside, the cops had roughed him up some more and then released him and he was left to wander outside the library where he was no longer allowed to step inside of. The thought was naive and I knew it. I knew that he had been taken to jail and because it was Friday, he would spend the weekend, at least, locked up.
Days later I read the story that he had died in the courthouse. Those few details that I mentioned earlier were the only things that remained of his life. No cause of death. No investigation on why he didn’t receive medical attention and no attempt to inform the public of whether he had died suddenly or if his death was a prolonged one that happened due to some illness that he had and no one knew. The problem was that people died so regularly in jail and no one made a fuss over these people so the police and the courts don’t see a need to explain anything beyond announcing the deaths and giving small quotes about the individual’s criminal history to the news. He had been arrested for disturbing the peace, threatening librarians and assaulting police officers, and he died while awaiting his arraignment.
I haven’t returned to the library since that day. It would be strange to be there now without him. Not just because I watched the now-dead man get beat and dragged out by officers for trying to read a book, but as I said earlier, his presence had been a steadying force for me, something which remained unchanged in a chaotic world, and part of me has been scared since that day that if I showed up at the library and didn’t see him, then I would begin to lose my grip on reality.