Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

by Matthew Sullivan

  “Used to call it a halfway house, but anymore it’s ‘reintegration something-or-other.’ Really, it’s a home for wayward boys who are all grown up.”

  “A home for felons.”

  “Ex-felons. So you can see the problem. If they get picked up again while they’re living here, I’m stuck with all their crap. That’s how I know about you.” The woman reached for the handle and stopped. “Smell it yet?”

  Lydia did: a burned pungent scent, soggy smelling, like a fire pit in the rain.

  “What is that?” Lydia said.

  “Joey,” she said, “in his infinite wisdom, decided to have a bonfire in his kitchen. He contained it inside a trash can, but still. Goddamned fire alarm goes off and he’s gone. And I mean gone: he never stepped foot inside this apartment again.”

  “Was that the day?”

  “That was the day. Good thing I had a master key and a fire extinguisher or we’d be standing on a pile of charred bricks right now. The handyman is supposed to try to get rid of the stench, but he’s waiting on you. To get your stuff. So today would be good. To get your stuff.”

  “Any idea why Joey would do that?”

  “Because even dead he’s a pain in my ass,” the woman said, brushing past Lydia. She pursed her face and reached into her shirt and jangled a necklace of keys out of nowhere. With a click Joey’s door opened.

  “Joey overall seemed decent,” the woman continued. “He was like a kicked dog, untrusting, so you must’ve done something for him.”

  Lydia felt herself blushing.

  The woman smiled. “You know, you think they have what it takes to pull it together, and then they go and rob a liquor store or have public sex in a mattress shop or hang themselves in a bookstore. I really thought Joey was different.”

  Lydia peered into Joey’s apartment. The woman let go of her elbow.

  “All yours,” the woman said, clinging to the railing, heading back down the stairs. “Like it or not, Lydia-from-the-bookstore, the kid chose you.”

  Inside Joey’s apartment Lydia wasn’t surprised by the scarcity of furniture—a kitchen island with a single stool, a simple wooden folding chair parked against a simple wooden desk—but she was surprised by how bland his home was. Walls all bare. No photographs on the fridge or desk, no hampers or baskets in the bedroom. And tidy, especially for a guy in his early twenties. She peered into his drawers and cabinets and found them empty except for some folded clothes and basic spices and cleaning supplies. The only thing in his bedroom closet was a black wool suit in a dry-cleaning bag, hanging next to a pressed white shirt and a red tie. She couldn’t imagine any occasion for which Joey would need a suit, except perhaps a court date, but it looked brand-new, so she hung it from the front door to drop at a thrift store or pass along to a BookFrog in need.

  Next to the door was a small stack of newspapers bound by twine and waiting to be recycled, and on top of the pile was a slim, spiral-bound book with a blue cover and gilded lettering. From the cheap format and the painful title—The Birds and the Beakers: Forty Years in a Biology Classroom—she could tell it had been self-published, an educational autobiography, which might explain why Joey had left it in his recycling pile. Her heart sank as she tossed it to the floor below the suit to take with her.

  In the bathroom she smelled Joey’s pear-shaped soap, felt the scuffed texture of his bath towel, waiting for something to stand out. Hanging on the wall behind the bathroom door was a framed certificate of completion for some state program called Rebuilding Ourselves, and she was surprised by the tidiness of his signature: Joseph Edward Molina. A few knotted garbage bags were piled in the kitchen, and when she unknotted one and peered inside, feeling as if she were dunking her head into a stagnant pond, she found an unfinished box of Life cereal, a dented tomato soup can, a mealwormed bag of buckwheat, a brick of Velveeta, and partial containers of coffee and ketchup and lemon juice and curdled chocolate milk—all thoughtfully prepared for the dumpster, all reinforcing how ready to die Joey had been.

  Joey’s landlady had left his windows open in an attempt to air out the place, but everything still reeked of a soggy barbecue. Out on the fire escape, Lydia found a small metal trash can holding fragments of ash. Joey’s charred papers, she thought, maybe Joey’s charred books. She stirred the brittle burnings with a butter knife, but the closest she came to anything legible was the corner of a scorched manila envelope that revealed an emblem of faint letters, discolored but intact: a triangular logo showing a green mountain capped with snow, similar to the one on Colorado license plates and state regalia, along with the faint letters CODVR. When she reached into the can to try to pick it up for a closer look it disintegrated into pieces, leaving a gray smudge on her fingertips.

  Whatever Joey was burning here, he’d wanted it gone.

  From the depths of her satchel, Lydia pulled out the pocket-sized notebook with a sunflower on its cover that David had bought for her birthday last year, after he’d grown tired of finding little scraps of paper on her nightstand, filled with a title, an author, a page number, or a quote. On a blank page, she wrote down the single cluster of letters followed by a big fat question mark: CODVR?

  As she continued to move through the apartment, it occurred to Lydia that, outside of his favorite authors, she knew practically nothing about Joey. And outside of the certificate he’d left hanging on the bathroom wall, Joey had left nothing behind that might signal his identity. She may as well have been searching through an empty hotel room in any city in any country on the planet.

  Joey—a young, invisible, singular kid—had erased himself from the world.

  Except for his books, she thought. Which were where?

  When Lydia had first stepped into this apartment, she’d been expecting a cavernous personal library, but in fact Joey’s entire collection amounted to the single milk crate of a dozen or so titles sitting on top of his desk—that was all. Most of them seemed fitting for Joey (a book on Virgin Mary sightings and another on Sasquatch sightings, one history of Hasidism, three Penguin Classics, a Victorian-era Child’s Story Primer, a few Vonnegut novels, biographies of J. D. Salinger and Jerzy Kosinski) but a few of them gave her pause, including a dubious collection of pastel poetry, a motivational business bible, and a biography of the Osmond family. She also noticed more than a few favorites that he’d bought based on her recommendation—Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, freshly annotated; Alice Munro’s Open Secrets; Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man; Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy—and the sight of each made her sigh.

  Just as she finished going through them, she saw another book—one she remembered Joey buying—only it wasn’t in the crate at all, but rather leaning against the wall that flanked the back of his desk. The neck of his desk lamp was craned toward the wall, and when she clicked its switch the light shone precisely upon the book, as if he’d placed it on display.

  A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.

  She recalled the day a few months ago when Joey had staggered up to the bookstore counter with this very book in hand, looking exceptionally wispy in his black windbreaker and black dress slacks cut off at the shins. His black hair had been tucked inside a knit hat, but a few strands still clung to his tawny cheeks.

  —Can I ask? he said.

  Hearing Joey’s voice was rare, and when he did speak he sounded hushed, almost stonerly, and often ended his sentences with an inquisitive lilt, as if even he was surprised to hear himself speaking.

  —Sure, she said.

  Joey pulled a small hardback out from the crook of his arm and placed it between them on the counter: A Universal History of the Destruction of Books. A title that had been relegated to the depths of the bargain shelves, where most of Joey’s books came from.

  —What do you think it’s worth, he said, a book like this?

  Lydia spun the book in her hand, quite expertly, and looked at the bar-coded label on the back. Though brand-n
ew, the book had been marked down and down and was now selling for a whopping forty-eight cents. Depressing.

  —Looks like a really good deal, she said.

  Joey flattened his palms on the wooden counter. His hands were long and skinny, scarred across the knuckles but soft.

  —I mean what’s it worth. Not what’s it cost.

  Lydia stared at him, trying to measure his intent. She took a tiny step back.

  —I guess it just bugs me to be paying so little, he added. Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet. Or a Coke. Values-wise.

  Lydia sighed in agreement. Joey touched the book between them, a gentle finger-tap.

  —These things saved my life, he said, in nearly a whisper. That’s no small thing.

  —You’re not alone there.

  —See, people say that all the time but for me they really did.

  Joey pulled off his hat and wrung it between his palms as if it were a washcloth. His eyes appeared so green against his bronze skin and dark eyebrows that they seemed to glow from behind, as if hollowed from jade. He was a beautiful boy.

  —I don’t know what I would have done without reading, he said. My whole life, really, but especially in prison. You know I was in prison, right?

  —I heard that.

  Joey looked to his left, then to his right, then gently tugged down the front of his black shirt until she could see the dark outline of a leafless tree tattooed up the center of his sternum.

  —Prison, he said. Do you know what they use for weapons in there? Candy. Seriously. They make knives out of Jolly Ranchers. And if you heat up a candy bar with caramel and chocolate you can basically burn someone’s face off. So I was told.

  Lydia nodded carefully but didn’t say anything. She wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, yet she was aware of how utterly odd this conversation was, in large part because of a silent agreement among the BookFrogs to never talk about their past—a quality that made her the perfect candidate to be their unspoken, unelected, unassuming ambassador. She was all about silencing the past.

  —How long were you in? she said.

  —Actual prison? From seventeen to nineteen, around two years.

  —Seventeen?

  —Sixteen, if you include all the time while I waited for my sentence. You know what the Pooh-Bah told me on the day of my intake? Tried as an adult, treated as an adult. I think he was trying to scare me. It worked.

  —Seventeen, she said.

  —I know I deserved it, I really did, but it was unbearable all the same. It does things to you, Lydia. Unrecommended things.

  —Enter books, she said.

  —Yeah. Enter books.

  Joey fiddled with the loose threads of his hat, and she thought she should hold on to the moment; she thought he was telling her all of this for a reason.

  —Do you want to tell me what you did? she said. It’s okay if you don’t.

  Joey was quiet, but he seemed ready to speak when a chubby businessman with a tie hanging out of his blazer pocket strolled through and bought a daily newspaper and offered Lydia a wink. Joey stepped aside and his eyes, so often buzzing about, went completely still until the man left. She could see his face warming up, growing pink beneath his cheeks. He hadn’t put his hat back on and his hair was tied in a knot in the back, and, she noticed for the first time, there were tiny pieces of leaf and paper clinging to its strands.

  —It wasn’t me, he said. I mean I did it, I’m responsible, but I was just a teenager, so it wasn’t really me.

  Joey leaned into the counter and began to speak, just above a whisper, and never once met her eye, as if he were talking to a ghost who was just behind her and slightly to the left.

  —I try to tell myself it didn’t count, he continued. Because I was so young.

  —I’m listening.

  When Joey was fifteen, he was placed in a vocational group home with about a dozen other teenage boys in North Denver. They lived together and did household chores and took classes to learn carpentry and mechanics, spatial relations, basic work skills. They kept themselves occupied by drinking cleaning products and huffing Wite-Out and computer duster and snorting nutmeg or cloves, most of which they would steal on trips to the grocery store and much of which was ineffective at inducing any state but nausea. And a few of them discovered that if they just didn’t sleep for days on end—if they lay in bed and poked themselves with needles or pulled their own hair or slapped their cheeks any time they were about to drift off—they could fight their way through the exhaustion and, after two or three days, climb over what Joey called the Wall of Tired and bring themselves beyond the brink and into hallucinations.

  One day in May a group of four of them started out and made it twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours without a wink. They went about their daily tasks, and at night they tried to read sci-fi novels or play video games or do what little they could to work on their certifications—but one by one they began to fall asleep. Except Joey. Joey had made it for almost four days without so much as a nap and soon felt like he was wearing a humongous costume, like a furry mascot stomping around an imaginary playland. He’d gotten so tired that he no longer could feel anything, including being tired, and in the middle of his woodworking class one afternoon he just started laughing uncontrollably and walked out by way of the fire escape and no one stopped him.

  The city was alive with things that were not there. Trees had eyes and cars had smiles and the sidewalk was a river of ash. He told himself that he was merely heading home, but of course he had no home, so in fact what he did was wander until dusk, seeking the next levels of his game. When he found a loose retaining wall behind a flower shop and, just below it, a fresh pallet of cinder blocks, he knew he’d found the next level.

  He carried the cinder blocks, two at a time, a few streets away to an overpass above the interstate. On the sidewalk he began accumulating the blocks like a kid amassing snowballs. Each move was accompanied by little buzzes and beeps.

  —For some reason I decided I hated minivans, Joey said. Minivans became the game.

  —Minivans?

  —I can’t explain it, really. When I was growing up there used to be vans and suddenly there were minivans instead. I don’t know. I established a point system based on the color of the van. Remember, I hadn’t slept in days.

  Joey stood up on the railing, sixteen feet over the interstate, and listened to cars whipping past straight below him, fifty-five, sixty-five miles per hour. And he began dropping cinder blocks on them.

  —But only on minivans, he said. As if there was a logic to it.

  He would stand up tall enough to see the cars coming from the other direction and then, just as they vanished under the overpass, he would whip around and try to time his drops so the falling blocks would hit the center of the van’s metal roof.

  —Not the windshield. I didn’t want to kill anyone. Apparently.

  Over a period of five minutes, Joey hit two vans with his cinder blocks; both thunked straight into the roof. There was something special, he decided, about the way he dangled the heavy blocks high above the highway, then just opened his hand and let gravity take over. The sound of those massive blocks thunking the tops of the vans—the sound was immense, like a shotgun blast directly below his feet, only it was accompanied by bright green and blue lights. A side window shattered on the second one. Both vans skidded but regained control and just kept going, and from Joey’s vantage on the overpass they appeared to be crawling away from him in defeat. Maybe the drivers were too scared to turn around. Most likely they went straight to the cops. Joey never found out because—

  —The third one, he said. The third minivan. I leaned with the cinder block over the railing and opened my hand to release it and watched it disappear straight through the top of the van. A perfect hit. But there were no sound effects this time. No lights. Nothing. It was freaky at first, like I’d imagined the whole thing, hallucinated it, a ghost van, a wormhole van—bu
t then I realized the cinder block had sailed straight through the van’s open sunroof. Swish.

  Inside the van, a one-year-old girl eating Cheerios from a plastic bag in a car seat had been sitting directly behind the sunroof. Joey’s dropped block appeared before her eyes out of thin air and tagged her left knee, then bounced and flattened her diaper bag. The van lost control and skidded into the guardrail and the airbag released and broke her mother’s nose. Outside of a fractured kneecap and some cuts and bruises the toddler was fine, at least physically.

  —Everyone survived, Joey said, even me. Though I shouldn’t have.

  Joey was arrested in the middle of the interstate. Because of his sleep deprivation there was some discussion of temporary insanity, but the crime was so reckless and his juvenile record was so spotty that in the end he was charged as an adult. He pleaded down from first-degree felony assault and felony criminal mischief, and was eventually sentenced to forty months in an adult state prison. Because of his demeanor, and because all he did in jail all day was read and avoid even a whiff of conflict, he served just over two years.

  —I almost killed a baby. How do you undo that one, you know?

  Lydia tried to swallow but couldn’t. Her eyes felt dry and when she blinked she saw a silhouette of a man looming above her, holding a hammer in the dark. She tasted blood.

  —You don’t, she finally said.

  —And the irony of the whole thing? After all that sleep deprivation, most nights in my cell I couldn’t sleep. Serves me right.

  —Hence all the reading.

  The air between them felt suddenly cold. Lydia wondered what would happen if she were to share the horrors of her past the way Joey just had.

  Maybe he sensed the intensity of her discomfort, because he put a dollar on the counter and pressed the wrinkles out of it.

  —I would like to purchase this book, he said with faux formality, sliding it before her.

  Lydia had never heard Joey speak so freely. She rang up the book and stuck a bookmark inside, and then, maybe out of her own nervousness, she did something she’d never done to a BookFrog before: she reached forward and ruffled Joey’s hair. He froze and his eyes went wide, then he grabbed his book and stumbled away. As soon as he rounded the counter, he broke into a little trot, but Lydia couldn’t tell if he was happy or horrified.