9:05am, April 15, a Wednesday

“M.O.D. to cash-wrap, please; M.O.D. to cash-wrap.”

The page came in Becky’s subdued, generic alto, and interrupted an impassioned, generic song by an artist named Keane. Nothing came of it at first; the bookstore moved slowly that day, and was empty save for a few dirty looking people—almost certainly bumpkins from a small town about 15 miles to the south—who had slouched in velvet chairs near the self-improvement section. The escalators whirred elegantly as they carried no one; near the computer books, an elderly worker, finding few to help and nearing desperation, decided he’d sequester himself in a back room and search the local directory for the addresses of area schools. In two months he would send them letters requesting their summer reading lists; he figured now it’d be best to get a head start and supplant his painful consciousness with a menial activity.

After two minutes, Jason, the only manager on duty, dutifully left the information desk, where he had been applying discount labels to copies of Shadow Divers, and headed toward the cash register. Despite himself, he moseyed to the beat of the music.

“What’s up?” he asked as he approached.

Becky, who had been watching Jason’s nonresponse in the minutes since paging him, cast a disdainful wince. It diffused into the cruddy air, and Jason was unaffected.

“Look,” she said, nodding outside. A portly Arab man wearing a tight tweed jacket, a green turtleneck, and a burgundy beret paced steadily in front of the entrance, smoking a cigarette. His knees didn’t bend. “He’s been there for an hour. I think he’s scaring people.”

“That’s Mohammed al-Habib,” Jason murmured as he squinted over the glare. “He’s been pissed off at us ever since we stopped carrying his book, like a year ago.” He looked down, shut his eyes, and clasped his forehead with his thumb and fingers. “The fuck.” He turned to Becky. “I told him it wasn’t selling, and then he started ranting about how this is becoming Wal-Mart and how the kids in the café are inarticulate.”

“At least he isn’t a philistine,” Becky said.

Silence.

“I think we should let him go,” Jason said. As he finished they faintly heard al-Habib yell something in Arabic at a wealthy-looking couple walking toward the store. The couple swiveled back, got into a Lexus sport-utility, and drove off angrily.

“But we’ve been behind on S.P.H. for the past two weeks, Jason. Tammy said that if we don’t tighten things up she’ll be cutting more people.”

Jason thought of the hellish times the store actually was busy. In recent months as few as four booksellers had been working every day; on Sunday nights that meant an oppressive stream of insipid, unanswerable questions from helpless, irate people. And, try as he might, he could never hope to escape: the only other prospect he had ever dared entertain was a managerial position at Hollywood Video, where, unfortunately, he had failed the psychology test on the application.

“I’ll get the broom,” he said.

Jason spirited himself past the bumpkins, the cookbooks, and the South Beach Diet display table, and into the staff lounge, where he encountered Joe, eating a bagel, and Bob, a young man recently graduated from college, writing in a journal. Bob complemented Jason well: his wiry, close-cropped black hair contrasted with Jason’s free-flowing postmullet tawn. His closely shaven, slightly pimpled face was a good match for Jason’s bearlike beard and pitted cheeks. His eyes were a shifty, bespectacled, suspicious alternative to Jason’s vague ambivalence, which tended toward effete disdain. He was lanky; Jason, fat.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the two regarded each other with interest and uncertainty. After acknowledging Jason, Bob immediately set about writing furiously.

“May I ask what you’re working on?” Jason asked nonchalantly as he grabbed the broom from a dusty corner. He cared more than he let on. If Bob were so much as attempting to advance himself, he might have to fire him.

Bob looked up and caressed his neck with his pen. “I’m writing in my journal,” he said. After an uncomfortable beat, he looked down to catch his place and continue.

“Anything unflattering about me?” Jason asked, shocked at the transparency of his jesting. Then he noted that Bob was holding open another book as he wrote.

“No, I just like writing in journals. I’ve filled up a lot of them with quotes from books like this,” he said, writing intently as he held up Funny Quotes for Everyday Life. “That way, if anyone ever opens one of my journals, they’ll find something funny on every page. Like this: ‘A horse may be coaxed to drink, but a pencil must be lead.' That’s Stan Laurel.”

“Heh,” Jason said, scoffing inwardly. “I like writing in journals, too.” He reached into his pocket for his aviator sunglasses. “So we share that.” He put them on and backed out the door. “And I’m better dressed,” he thought. (Jason had a penchant for rumpled monochrome oxfords, while Bob was partial to pressed flannel shirts.)

Jason walked past the South Beach Diet books, the cookbooks, and the bumpkins, and thought to himself as the pathetic image of Bob dissipated what a treat it was that he got to shoo someone. These things always seemed to happen while another, more popular manager was working.

“Hey there, beautiful,” he said to Becky, who stood motionless at the cash register. He opened the door. The morning light was harsh, and al-Habib paced as before. Beads of sweat had formed on his thick brown brow, and a police car sat and watched in the parking lot.

“What do you want?” al-Habib demanded.

“Nothing,” Jason said. He began to sweep.

2:55 PM, April 17th, a Friday

John had just put down his Chai tea latte when he noticed an open book of quotes laid out on a coffee table in the bookstore café. It was opened to page 153, which happened to feature sophisms from his favorite poet Robert Frost. John nodded in approval when he recognized the quote featured in the middle of the page: it read, “The mountain held the town as in a shadow.” The quote, as any aficionado experienced in his art would know, was culled from “The Mountain”. For a brief second, various snowy pastures perched on precipices flashed before John’s eyes, but he had to get back to work. The faint ringing in the background meant a customer beckoned him at the cash register.

The creaking of double-swing door to the front area morphed into a request, “Creeaaaaaadouble mocha?”

“Right on it.” John didn’t bother to ask the customer to repeat herself. As he turned around to fulfill the fat girl’s request, she pointed convulsively at the tall, dull whipped cream container. “Don’t forget the whipped cream!” He dutifully brought it closer to the mixing machine to show he had heard her.

The gurgling and the burbling disgusted John—not to mention the sickly vanilla, cinnamon, coffee smells—but what could he do? He had no other skills, and there was absolutely nothing better to do with his time. And the landlord threatened to raise the rent. Jesus.

“Here you are…”

“…Thank you!” She paused. “Um, could you add some chocolate sprinkles?”

John leaned far over the counter to angle his arm. “They’re over there,” he pointed. Then the girl added chocolate sprinkles to her god-damn double-mocha-whatever.

But before he slid back off the counter, his glance occasioned the quote book again, and to his surprise its owner had returned and it was not a customer. Bob the bookstacker was sitting there, pouring over the large-print pages and jotting something down into a notebook he clutched with his left hand. John momentarily balanced on his stomach on the countertop edge before scooting across to the other side. Due to his position, he had to perform a somersault to stand up in the customer area. John coiffed his hair and began his investigation.

“Hey, Bob, watcha doin’?” was the sound that John made as he shuffled back and forth insecurely.

“I’mm[scribble]mmm, writing in my journal.” He didn’t bother to look up, and page was now 155. St. Augustine and Other Catholic Sayings.

“Your journal?” A surge of air added an unintended emphasis on “jour” that had a somewhat less unintended patronizing tone.

“Yeah.” Bob put down his Papermate ball-point pen. “If somebody opens my journal, I want them to read something funny on every page.”

“Oh.” John stalled for a second. While he appreciated Bob’s logic, he himself couldn’t imagine bothering to open his journal. Still, he was curious. “Like what?”

“You know something like…” Bob’s head tilted to the side as he leafed through a couple hundred pages of his journal, “This.”

John read it aloud: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. Who wrote that?” The quote’s piquancy was lost on him.

Bob languished, “Oh, I don’t know.”

Bob returned to the page he was writing on before to recommence his frantic copying, but John’s eyes rolled around in his head. Then Bob’s writing quickened in a rush to finish this last fascinating sentence, and John, hoping this meant Bob was writing something original, strained to get a glimpse of it before he turned the page. To his disappointment, however, the sentence said, “Punishment is justice for the [turn the page] unjust.” There was an exact replica, though more finely printed, on page 155 of Awesome Quotes. Like eyes sunk into back into their cavities, John sunk back behind the café counter. “Oh my God,” he thought, letting the letter “d” linger silently on his tongue.

In less than 15 seconds the fat girl approached the counter again, and John had to snap his attention away from Bob’s dispiriting but ferocious writing. “Do you guys have any biscotti? My friend says you should.”

John looked down the counter and saw a large jar of them sitting out in plain sight. “Yeah, I’ll get one from the back.” As he used his bodily inertia to open the double-hinged door, he faintly heard underneath the loud creak the fat girl clarify that she really wanted two pieces of biscotti. But already the door swung back, and the effort required to open the door again to confirm was more than John cared to exert.

He found two stockpiles of biscotti labeled “Mother Mia’s Almond Vanilla Biscotti” on a storage shelf. Knowing no one would come back there and see him, John surreptitiously unscrewed a lid to extract two pieces of the biscotti. He then rubbed them, one-by-one, around his flaccid penis in his pants, sticking his wrist well below his belt buckle and the elastic strap of his underwear. He tried to pee a little on the first one, but only had success on the second one, so he re-inserted the first one again to finish the job. Taking the damp, though believably hard biscottis out of his pants, he brought them to the front counter.

“Here.” John batted his eyelashes. With a cavalier smile he put the off-white baked goods on a plate and handed it to the fat girl. He noticed his arms were darkly ruddy from mid-way along the forearm to his moistened fingertips, a consequence of having cut off the circulation when he jammed them so forcibly into his crotch. The girl happily paid.

Bob had already left the café with his journal and his quotebook, so John went to the sink to wash his hands. His back was turned when the fat girl and her friend munched down on their biscottis.

Epilogue

12:00 PM, April 16th, a Thursday

John and Jason were destined to meet that day; it was one of those fateful afternoons that simply demanded it. Jason had been secretly sabotaging John’s efforts to promote himself in the café business. Every morning, he had been sneaking into the café storage facility and misplacing items to frustrate poor John and make him look like a boob to the inspector who was coming in later today at three. But John had been no angel either. Perhaps it was merely an uninformed hunch, but he was certain that Jason had been up to something, as the following dialogue with Becky the day before suggested:

“Do you know why Jason won’t give me even the meager compliment of eye contact?” John’s dour appearance lent his question genuine gravity.

“I’d rather have that than, well, you know.”

Shock! “No, what?”

Becky leaned into John in a whisper. Her wispy voice tickled his ear, sending goose bumps down his back and up into his hair. “I think I’m going to file sexual harassment.”

“Oh.” Jason inwardly smiled.

There was more to John’s distrust than mere suspicion, however. For instance, on the morning of the 15th, Jason had come up to him and reprimanded him for, of all things, not smiling enough for the customer: “You’re kidding, right” John remembered in detail his concerned efforts to smile at every transaction for the last week. Every one.

“This is no kidding matter, John. You better not fuck up again.”

These interactions weighed so much on John’s mind that he was compelled to search out for Jason’s presence every few minutes or so. It was heartbreaking, and exhausting. Now Jason was walking past the Forever Thin Diet display in the self-help section. And John just turned into the isleway.

“Oh hey, Mr. Vandertramp.” John wanted nothing more than for Jason to just pass by and fail to acknowledge his existence.

“John, I see you’ve been stealing books from the reference section.”

Jason let the accusation drop on John’s ears like an anvil. Everyone in the store hushed. It was just too bizarre for John to defend himself. Instead, he stuttered on the word “I” for an interminable instant.

Jason snidely interrupted him. “Several of our quote books are missing, and you’ve been the only one commanding the reference section when they have been lost.”

John blanched so profoundly even his organs turned white. “I—I don—don’t un-n-nderstand.” It occurred to him that this was the first time he had ever stuttered in his life. However, his words were aptly chosen.

Jason stared into his eyes for a minute more; the wall he had put up was impenetrable. As he made a step to leave, John took hold of his shoulder and sternly addressed the matter.

“I have never stolen anything from this store, Mr. Vandertramp.”

John’s grip was loose, and Jason coolly pulled himself out of it. “There’s really nothing you can say to change the matter. I’m letting you go tomorrow afternoon and the price of those books will be deducted from your last paycheck, believe you me. And don’t you dare make a commotion about this.” Jason’s next statement was delivered with even more abhorrence: “Or I will crush you.” He brushed past John in a final gesture of hostility and walked back to the information desk.

Now that the problem of John’s hubris was out of the way, Jason would be able to repent this evening. He would show Hollywood Video that, despite their stupid psychology test, he wasn’t just a wimpy supplicant. Hell, he had just successfully detached himself from the emotional event of firing someone unjustly. All he needed was a position at Blockbuster to open up. But before he could indulge himself too much in that illusion, a fat girl showed up at the information desk. “Will you guys be open tomorrow?”

“Sure.” Jason imagined fucking her brains out.

Comments

This is a work of pure genius Written by Guest on 2004-09-19 10:46:09 I could do without the rape reference at the end.

I like it too Written by Guest on 2004-09-19 12:28:32 But it's so--detached. The characters are nothing more than hateable abstractions.

Written by Guest on 2004-09-20 13:39:06 Is it bad that I envisioned Mr. Weber for that?    Josh

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