Little Doors

by Paul Di Filippo

  Circulating among the shelves of fiction and nonfiction, the boxes of plastic-enveloped ephemera, Mamoulian dusted the familiar titles, many of which had sat on his shelves for so long that they had become more fixture than stock, foster children meant to be housed temporarily, yet now immovable graybeards ensconced in their rockers. He polished the glass front of the locked cabinet that held his unsold rare firsts, pausing as always to admire the spine of the gem of his stock. But today he felt a need to actually fondle his baby, and so he unlocked the cabinet and removed the priceless glassine-jacketed book.

  The entire print run of Doubleday’s edition of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition had supposedly been pulped before distribution, under orders from the morally offended publisher. Yet in his reverent hands, Mamoulian held a copy from that legendary printing. He had obtained it for a dollar from an anonymous street vendor on the Bowery during a New York City buying trip in 1979, but its authenticity was not in doubt. No one but a madman would have forged to utter perfection such a dubious title. No doubt some sticky-fingered pressman or warehouse employee had carelessly swiped it without anticipating its subsequent value. Mamoulian knew that he could sell the apocryphal book in an eyeblink, but he had never even done so much as hint at its existence to anyone else. Owning it somehow validated his whole crummy shop.

  Like a furtive Ali Baba, Mamoulian restored the treasure to its cave, and returned to his makework. He shuffled a stack of new orders—distressingly small—into ranking by date of receipt. He pencilled the price of one dollar into a couple of loser titles recently acquired in an auction-lot, modern self-help crap. Then Mamoulian opened the door to the corridor where he kept a shelf of cheap stuff designed to entice inside any hapless soul lost enough to end up here.

  Down the corridor, the antique elevator bonged and ratcheted open. Lev Mamoulian stepped off and turned to spot his brother Alex. Older than Alex, Lev resembled his brother enough to cause both of them the pain of being forced to confront one’s living semblance, a truth-telling fetch sent to embarrass and chastise.

  Mamoulian waited impatiently by the door to his store while his brother shambled closer. (A pane of frosted glass bore the store’s chipped gold-painted name). Surprisingly, despite Lev’s damaged gait, the older man seemed sober and halfway respectable looking, his rumpled clothes unpatched by vomit or blood.

  Lev held out his hand to shake Mamoulian’s, who responded warily.

  “Can I come inside?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  Behind the closed door, Lev scanned the interior of the store for potentially eavesdropping customers, then dropped wearily into the only chair, the one behind Mamoulian’s desk. He knuckled his temples and grimaced.

  “God, my head hurts.”

  “Sorry, I don’t have any booze in the store.”

  Lev dropped his fists into his lap but kept them clenched. “I don’t want any stinking booze. I’m checking into a clinic today. That is, if you’ll help.”

  Mamoulian balanced on the desk’s edge, near the cigar box that held his change-making cash. “I don’t believe you. What brought this immense change of life on?”

  “Roberta. She’s going to leave me this time, for real, and take Avram with her, unless I dry out. I can’t live without my wife and son. I’ve got to do it, no matter how hard it is.”

  “But you don’t have the cash.”

  “No, I don’t have the cash.”

  “And you want a loan from me. Another one.”

  Lev banged the desk. “Don’t make it sound so sleazy! I’m not pouring it down a rathole. This time’s different, damn it!” Lev’s bravado ebbed as swiftly as it had flared, and he slumped in his seat. Mamoulian considered his broken brother for some time, then spoke.

  “How much?”

  Lev lifted his head. “Two thousand for two weeks. After I get discharged, I keep right on with AA. Wilkins has promised me a job once I dry out. He said I was the best model-maker he ever saw, until my hands started to shake. Can you help me, Alex?”

  “Get out of my chair.”

  Lev rose in defeat and began to shuffle toward the door.

  “Where are you going? I just need to dig out my checkbook.”

  After Lev had folded the check into his pocket, he asked Mamoulian, “Is there anything I can do for you, Alex?”

  “Get sober.”

  “I’m doing that for myself. Nothing else?”

  “You don’t know any cheap computer guys who could set me up on the Web, do you?”

  Lev brightened. “Avram’s a whiz with that stuff. He’d do it for free just for the fun of it. He’s bored as hell sitting at home this summer.”

  Mamoulian pondered the offer. “I’ll pay him something. I don’t want him feeling like he’s working off his old man’s debt.”

  “There’s no danger of that.” Lev patted the pocketed check. “You’ll see this money back soon. You just made the best investment of your life.”

  “I’d like to believe that, Lev. I really would. Listen, you’d better get going now. I’ve got to try to earn the rent on this dump.”

  At the door, Lev said, “How are you and Mona doing these days?”

  “Mona and I are no longer an item. She claimed she could never envision signing her charge slips ‘Mona Mamoulian.’”

  “That’s one useful excuse for breaking up, I suppose. Well, thanks again, Alex. Good luck with your book hunting.”

  “Luck is only half of it, my friend. Only half of it.”

  * * *

  The quiet, underpopulated river valley spread lazily across three states. Once a hotbed of industry and commerce, its mills humming, its cities bustling, its casually polluted waterway boldly shouldering freight and travelers, the region now slumbered, generally ignored by cultural and business trendsetters, existing in a semi-detached fashion from the rest of the country. Pastures and farms had reverted to new forests. Cities had hollowed out, suffered for decades, then been either partially revived or left to rot, to greater or lesser degrees, by civic and private capital. Like collapsing stars, the area’s smaller towns had either compacted to denser matter or fallen entirely down black holes. The region’s roads were second-rate, the last in the tristate area to be plowed after winter storms, but its river was cleaner than it had been a century ago. The pace of life was easy, and the valley’s residents exhibited a certain despondent charm, having learned how to survive in such diminished circumstances. Overall, the forgotten land seemed not such a bad place to live. And from Mamoulian’s viewpoint, the place represented his secret seam of gold: a small, twisty lode hard to work, but just rich enough to sustain him.

  The junk shops and Salvation Army stores of the valley would often be salted with collectible books going for just cents on their real dollar value. The contents of the sleepy and musty used-book stores were hardly any more expensive, and frequently just as rare. Generally located in the most decrepit neighborhoods, run mostly by crotchety elderly men and women (half of them seemingly Libertarians, to judge by the piles of anti-government bumper stickers stacked on their counters), these stores usually rewarded Mamoulian’s searches, despite the annoying heaps of Harlequin romances and survivalist series novels he had to fight past. Then there were the antique-heaped barns and hastily arranged estate sales to consider, both of which often offered troves of books acquired by Victorian and Edwardian robber barons whose lineages had now gone extinct. (Once, Mamoulian had discovered dozens of Wodehouse first editions in the office of a machine shop undergoing a bankruptcy sale.)

  Taken all in all, the valley served as Mamoulian’s private preserve, continually restocked by fate and changing circumstances with exotic species.

  Yet for some reason, on this buying trip he kept coming up empty-handed. It had been six months since he had visited the region, plenty of time for its contents to churn in the mysterious fashion arranged by birth, death and economics. But they simply hadn’t. For some freak reason, from one store to anothe
r he encountered only trash. His biggest find so far, a week into the trip, a week of crummy motels and junk food, had been a complete run of The Spirit reissues done by Harvey Comics, purchased at a yard sale for a dime each from a pimply adolescent, and worth over twenty-five dollars apiece. Not too shabby, but Mamoulian hated dealing comics. They seemed declasse and louche, offensive to his sensibilities, not the kind of trade he wanted to conduct under the banner of Mamoulian Rare Books.

  If he hadn’t had someone minding the store, he would have cut this futile expedition short. But with Avram tending the premises, Mamoulian felt he could hold out a little while longer, in expectation of a big hit just around the next corner.

  As Lev had predicted, Mamoulian’s sixteen-year-old nephew had jumped at the offer to help his uncle establish a foothold in cyberspace. Together, man and boy had first gone computer shopping. The chosen hardware now bulked alienly on Mamoulian’s desk. Avram had chosen a host server for the Website, one that boasted the capacity for secure credit-card transactions. The kid had built a very handsome website, promising to add the bells and whistles later. To Mamoulian, the gleaming image on the screen looked just fine as it was. Now Avram sat daily in the shop doing the data-entry on Mamoulian’s stock and dealing quite competently with the odd walk-in customer.

  On the day of his departure, Mamoulian had given the kid a fifty-dollar bonus in cash. Avram exhibited a sheepish grin, raising a forefinger to push back nonexistent slipping eyeglasses, until he remembered that he now wore contacts (thanks to Roberta’s care; the boy would probably be in rags if his welfare had been left solely to Lev at his worst).

  “Gee, thanks, Uncle Alex.”

  “You earned it, boy. If I have a good trip, I’ll sweeten up your next paycheck too. Well, I gotta hit the road now, before traffic gets too bad. Hold the fort against the goddamn Indians for me.”

  Avram walked his uncle out to the rented van Mamoulian used on such trips.

  “Thanks for what you did for Dad, too, Uncle Alex.”

  “Purely selfish, kid. He owes me for loans back to ’eighty-six, and I figure this was my only chance to get repaid.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Driving down a stretch of crumbling asphalt, eyes shaded by drugstore sunglasses against the August glare, Mamoulian shook his head ruefully. What he had told Avram had been pure sugar frosting on an unpalatable cake. He might just as well have set fire to a pile of his hard-earned cash, for all the chance he had of seeing it again. After a few weeks of sobriety at most, his brother would go off on a binge, and the whole downward booze-lubricated spiral would commence again. Mamoulian chided himself for being such a witless soft touch. What had he been thinking that day in the office? Flush from the big Thompson score, face to face with his pathetic older brother, he had plunged two grand on a nag hobbled from birth. And now here he was, forced by the rotten circumstances of his own senseless life (had he actually made any more of his opportunities than his brother had?), out on the merciless road again, cadging a nickel of profit here, a dime there, just to stave off the human creditor wolves circling Mamoulian Rare Books as if it were a busted sleigh mired on the goddamn tundra.

  Despair and disgust washed over Mamoulian like slops thrown from a fishwife’s window, leaving him feeling weary and filled with bilious sludge. Suddenly, the prospect of arriving at the little down-at-the-heels city that was his immediate destination, of crossing the worn thresholds of the too-familiar stores and seeing the same hostile, ennui-engraved faces of the race of trolls that rolled up the steel shutters of such places, of spotting the same worthless titles he had seen in the last broken village — This scenario struck him as a veritable hell on earth. He just couldn’t face it.

  At the next junction of roads, Mamoulian took an arbitrary turn away from his abandoned destination. He did the same at the next three crossroads until, after forty-five minutes, he found himself in a part of the valley completely unknown to him. He paused by the side of the road to consult a map, but he could only locate himself within a vague circle of territory. He shrugged, stuffed the map into the glove-box, and drove onward.

  A shabby roadside diner beckoned ahead just as Mamoulian’s stomach was reminding him that another delivery was scheduled, the morning’s hash, eggs and toast being only partial payment for his continued existence. Mamoulian swung the van across the gravel lot, parked and locked it. Little chance that any larcenous rube would want the eccentric contents of this particular van, but why risk it?

  At the counter of the busy restaurant, Mamoulian ordered up coffee, a steak sandwich and fries. He latched onto a rumpled copy of the local paper—The Newbery Gazette—and scanned the classifieds for rummage sales and the like, but came up blank. Typical of this whole trip. Why had he imagined that a few impulsive gestures would be sufficient to change his bad luck? Might as well expect a copy of the Gutenberg Bible to drop out of the skies into his lap.…

  Working on a superlative piece of flaky cherry pie that went some small way toward brightening his mood, Mamoulian caught a stray phrase from one of his rural countermates:

  “—book sale.”

  Mamoulian turned to the local. Like so many of the valley’s residents, the man looked like some outdated funny-pages character, a homely archaic figure out of Gasoline Alley, Terry and the Pirates, Polly and Her Pals or The Katzenjammer Kids, as if the declining fortunes of the region had arrested the century’s transfiguring hand, leaving the natives in a pristine state of American innocence. Mamoulian’s prospective interlocutor resembled, of all people, Andy Gump.

  “Did someone mention a book sale?”

  “Sure did. Started a couple of hours ago, out at the Caxton Daye Academy. They’re looking to raise some money for renovations to the gym.”

  “Whereabouts is this school?”

  “Just head west when you leave here. You’ll see the sign.”

  Mamoulian instantly paid his bill and departed without finishing his pie or coffee.

  The road west of the diner trunked out into a leafy channel, and Mamoulian almost missed the shrubbery-concealed sign for the Caxton Daye Academy at the mouth of a badly paved drive. He swung a sharp left just in time, and motored up half a mile of degraded asphalt until a broad lawn opened up before him. The academy seemed to consist of a single large multistoried mansion at least a century and a half old, valiantly but ineffectively maintained, as well as several impoverished outbuildings. At this time of the year, no students roamed the grounds. Only three or four cars occupied the parking area. At least one of those had to belong to the person running the sale, making Mamoulian’s immediate competition look minimal—assuming some other dealer hadn’t arrived first thing and cleaned the place out.

  The odors inside the building twanged chords within Mamoulian long unstrummed: decades of paste, wet galoshes, chalk and construction paper, not to mention the signature scent of old books. Unerringly, Mamoulian nosed along the strengthening scent gradient straight to the room hosting the sale. Presiding over boxes and card tables full of orderly ranks of books, three locals sat behind a long folding table, sipping coffee, chatting and eating donuts. A hand-lettered sign announced the sale’s prices: hardcovers, one dollar; paperbacks, fifty cents or three for a dollar. A lone old lady with purple hair rummaged among the cookbooks. Otherwise, Mamoulian was the only customer.

  Mamoulian suppressed an impulse to chortle and rub his palms together like Snidely Whiplash. Jeez, a week in this Land That Time Forgot was starting to unhinge his mind! No matter what he found today, he’d have to head back home tonight, cut his losses and come up with some other money-making options.

  With an expert’s eye, Mamoulian began to filter through the offerings like a whale sieving krill. A lot of the books were ex-library, bearing the stamp of the Caxton Daye Academy, which lowered their values considerably, but he nonetheless found quite a few good items among these discards, including, astoundingly, a copy of the first UK printing of Ballard’s Empire of the Sun ($75 if
fine, half of that in this condition). This odd synchronicity with his prized volume back home confirmed Mamoulian’s initial sense of his luck turning. Maybe his spontaneous departure from routine had been inspired after all.

  A fair percentage of the volumes seemed to be donations unmarred by institutional stamps or card pockets. Among these, Mamoulian found a pleasing array of desirable stuff, including some Photoplays (but unfortunately not the King Kong one worth $1,500), the Armed Services paperback of Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror (at least $65), and—whoa, Nelly!—the Random House first edition of the John Holbrook mystery, The Man in the Cage ($400). Within half an hour, he had accumulated two boxes of material worth at least twelve hundred dollars. His retail cost: thirty-five smackers.

  Mamoulian lugged his purchases to the table where the organizers sat: two old gents wearing bowties and, despite the heat, sweater vests, flanking a trim middle-aged woman. His lust for books temporarily sated, Mamoulian spared some cursory attention for the woman. Despite her tightly pinned mousy hair, high-buttoned collar, Betty Crocker skirt and fuddy-duddy shoes, she wasn’t half bad-looking. Her pixyish face radiated a genuine pleasure in the simple act of reigning over this backwoods fundraiser. For a brief moment, Mamoulian actually envied her poise and serenity, her seeming happiness with her simple lot in life. Then he grimly pushed the feeling aside as she began to unpack the contents of his boxes in order to total his purchases. If she recognized any of these books as valuable and tried to jerk him around on the prices, she’d hear such a squawk about bait-and-switch tactics—