contained more bookshelves, desks in disarray, special-order forms taped to the concrete walls with no apparent logic, bookstore employees on break, and a card table in the corner on which a carafe of coffee steamed and a tray of cucumber-and-cream-cheese finger sandwiches quietly wilted. A cartoon arrow pointed down at the table, beneath a mordant sign: GREEN ROOM . Despite not liking cucumbers, wilted or otherwise, Richard ate one, determined to enjoy the spoils of success, even if they were spoiled. He poured the coffee, which he also didn’t want, into a little Styrofoam cup and drank it with a shaking hand, and by the time what’s-her-name came back to tell him he was on, everything was gone.
———
Vance floated around the store in a dissociated fog. As long as he could remember, he’d wanted not only to lose himself in books but to build a physical fortress out of them, a citadel of words to keep the world at bay. And when he was younger, in fact, he’d done just that, building forts from his burgeoning collection. This store felt like an actual adult version of that impulse brought to life. The Russian literature section alone was the size of his bedroom. The nineteenth-century British section was the size of his house. To work at a place like this would be a dream come true—spending entire days here, being entrusted with a key and living here, making camp here at night among the endless, towering rows.
This was a substitute, he knew, for what he really wanted, which was to actually live inside a book. He’d always been a reader, but ever since his father had left and his mother had gotten sick shortly thereafter, he’d had a book in front of his face like a shield. It had worked, too, for better or worse. His brother, John, had spent his high school years in a constant, simmering rage and put that rage to use in the military as soon as he legally could. Vance had, instead, locked himself away in his lair and contented himself with his novels and fantasies.
He made his way through a circular maze of books, one that started with world history in the outer shelves and, as he walked, slowly morphed: to English history, then historical fiction, war crimes, true crime, and finally, in the middle of the shelves, a small alcove filled with paperback hard-boiled detective novels from the forties and fifties. A young woman sat cross-legged on a bench seat in the alcove, bent over the sleuthing of Spade or Marlowe, twisting a piece of hair by her ear. Each twisting pull seemed, in turn, to stab him through with a sharp, erotic pang. She looked up and registered his presence, and he hurried away. Back through the conch spiral he went, gathering acceleration until he was shot out into the depopulated environs of Great Literature.
Frowning, he thumbed through a dog-eared used paperback of
Lolita.
It felt leaden in his hand—not a repository of ideas, the best humanity has to offer, life distilled into words, but like a bunch of brittle pages glued together inside a cover that featured a jaundiced nymphet against a sickly pink background the color of raw liver. Dead weight. He put it back and shuffled on, waiting for something to catch his eye, but nothing did. As he had in his room the night before, he wondered if books were the problem. In books, something happens to a character, and they’re never the same. It may be something good or something bad, but whatever the case, it alters and propels them forward. The character changes and is unable to go back to their old life. He found himself idly expecting those moments in his own life—cruxes, hinges, thresholds, points of equilibrium, moments freighted with such transformative power and import that he might gaze into the darkness and, with his eyes burning, see himself as he really was.
The problem was, real life wasn’t like that. Real life passed without much event, and what event there was provided not epiphany but narcosis. A slow, deadening acceptance of
———
Vance floated around the store in a dissociated fog. As long as he could remember, he’d wanted not only to lose himself in books but to build a physical fortress out of them, a citadel of words to keep the world at bay. And when he was younger, in fact, he’d done just that, building forts from his burgeoning collection. This store felt like an actual adult version of that impulse brought to life. The Russian literature section alone was the size of his bedroom. The nineteenth-century British section was the size of his house. To work at a place like this would be a dream come true—spending entire days here, being entrusted with a key and living here, making camp here at night among the endless, towering rows.
This was a substitute, he knew, for what he really wanted, which was to actually live inside a book. He’d always been a reader, but ever since his father had left and his mother had gotten sick shortly thereafter, he’d had a book in front of his face like a shield. It had worked, too, for better or worse. His brother, John, had spent his high school years in a constant, simmering rage and put that rage to use in the military as soon as he legally could. Vance had, instead, locked himself away in his lair and contented himself with his novels and fantasies.
He made his way through a circular maze of books, one that started with world history in the outer shelves and, as he walked, slowly morphed: to English history, then historical fiction, war crimes, true crime, and finally, in the middle of the shelves, a small alcove filled with paperback hard-boiled detective novels from the forties and fifties. A young woman sat cross-legged on a bench seat in the alcove, bent over the sleuthing of Spade or Marlowe, twisting a piece of hair by her ear. Each twisting pull seemed, in turn, to stab him through with a sharp, erotic pang. She looked up and registered his presence, and he hurried away. Back through the conch spiral he went, gathering acceleration until he was shot out into the depopulated environs of Great Literature.
Frowning, he thumbed through a dog-eared used paperback of
Lolita.
It felt leaden in his hand—not a repository of ideas, the best humanity has to offer, life distilled into words, but like a bunch of brittle pages glued together inside a cover that featured a jaundiced nymphet against a sickly pink background the color of raw liver. Dead weight. He put it back and shuffled on, waiting for something to catch his eye, but nothing did. As he had in his room the night before, he wondered if books were the problem. In books, something happens to a character, and they’re never the same. It may be something good or something bad, but whatever the case, it alters and propels them forward. The character changes and is unable to go back to their old life. He found himself idly expecting those moments in his own life—cruxes, hinges, thresholds, points of equilibrium, moments freighted with such transformative power and import that he might gaze into the darkness and, with his eyes burning, see himself as he really was.
The problem was, real life wasn’t like that. Real life passed without much event, and what event there was provided not epiphany but narcosis. A slow, deadening acceptance of
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