My friend Carinthia, who has lived in the neighborhood for twenty-very-odd years, went to the Carnegie Library to get a book. Well, you would go to the library for a book, wouldn't you? She had in mind a particular translation of Cicero, the kind of thing that hasn't topped the best-seller lists in a couple of millennia. The kind of thing you expect to have to order from the West End, or the North Shore, but definitely not the kind of thing you think is readily available here on the Downtown EastSide.

She picked her way past the sixty or so drug dealers surrounding the building like a particularly saturnine ring, passed the needle exchange table, and went up the curving stairs into the round tower. Yes, the Carnegie Library had the translation she was looking for. You may not be surprised, but you haven't seen the Carnegie Centre or the Carnegie Library, a tiny subset of the Centre.

When the cafeteria is getting its food delivery they have to have one extra person to stay in the truck and guard everything or that delivery truck would be stripped to the rims in seconds. When it pulls up a crowd surrounds it immediately; exclusively big, burly guys who can lock onto a case of hotdog buns like a pit bull on a postie. They make no secret that they are there for whatever they can get, and if the guy in the truck is too dainty looking or without a 2×4 there could be real trouble.

The only time I've seen anything like it was in Indonesia, in Ambon, the part where they're killing the white people now. I was there just before they started, and as our ferry pulled up to the dock we saw thirty or forty would-be porters scrambling to get onto the staircase to the ship; it was the kind of stairs-on-wheels thing you see in old shots of the Queen. There were two port officials on those stairs, armed with bats, and every time a hand would grasp the rail over the dotted line they would whack it with the bats. We could hear the smack and clang over the throb of the engines. It's like those scenes on CNN when a truck with food pulls into a refugee camp and they try to rush it.

It's much the same outside the Carnegie Centre, except the delivery guys are quite big and they call out half the kitchen staff to help: they form a line like a bucket brigade, and pass the coleslaw and creamed corn or tofu whip or whatever it might be that day along into the kitchen.

Anyway, the Carnegie Centre. I wouldn't be surprised to hear there is a dressage outreach program in there, bringing German equestrianism to the Downtown EastSide. They have such a variety of amazing things inside this rundown, haunted and hunted building that it's like nothing so much as Mary Poppins' carpetbag. Reach in and pull out anything in the world. An art gallery? Sure. Martial Arts studio? Sure. Live nude drawing classes? Two-dollar meals? Gym? Computer labs? Symposiums? Meditation room? Senior's services? Youth services? Immigrant services? Sure, all that and the ghost of the old cleaner, too. If I needed a white rhino for any reason that's the first place I'd go, because if they didn't have it they would surely be on the White Rhino Network mailing list, and could give me a referral and probably some coupons to boot.

They also have a library, but perhaps I mentioned that. The library is about the size of a large bedroom, with special sections for books on the Downtown EastSide (quite a lot, actually; I guess we're famous) and for new immigrants and gender studies and other marginalized literature; here minorities are the majority, so this represents the majority of books in the library. Marginalization is standard; mainstreamers are outnumbered and so by definition also marginalized.

So the Carnegie had the Cicero, were in fact the only library around that had the Cicero. The Ancients are surely a marginalized group, if ever there was one, so the Cicero was bound to be there, since everyone on the Westside only reads Oprah's books. Only, it wasn't there.

There were six people on the waiting list for the Cicero.

So Carinthia put her name down for number seven and walked back home, past the largest open-air illegal drug market in the world, past the junkies tweeking on the sidewalks, past the hookers working all the angles of all the corners, past the empty park that smells like beer every morning, past the Chinese restaurant where OD's get locked in the bathroom until closing time whereupon the police are called, through her eight-foot high steel security gate and her deadbolted front door, and she made some tea and she sat down and she wondered what she really knew about her neighborhood.