Lydia was wearing a silver pendant of the Monopoly dog that David had given her after they’d decided to wait a few years to get a pooch of their own, and as Lyle spoke she zipped it nervously up and down the chain. Lyle continued.
“By the time I met him, most of the damage was done. This would’ve been eight or more years ago now, when Joey was maybe twelve years old, and I’d come across him once in a while at this musty old bookshop near the basilica on Colfax. When I would try to say hello, he would ignore me. Not the most socialized teen, but he was born to read. He generally preferred little bookshops to the public library, maybe because he was trying to avoid truancy officers, or maybe because he just liked the vibe. A few times a week anyway our paths would intersect, and every time, just before he left, I noticed that he’d put the book he was reading back on the shelf, pull a black permanent marker from his pocket, and write something small on the back of his hand. After seeing him do this a few times, I asked him what he was writing, and maybe because I was familiar to him by then, he held up his hand and showed me. There, on the skin on the back of his hand, was a series of small black numbers, a dozen or two, most of them fading but a few fresh and dark, and the numbers were divided into four or five even columns with a letter or two up top. I was thinking it had to do with the lottery, or numerology, or some Fibonacci sequence—the type of mathematical illumination that I would later associate with Joey’s wonderful peculiarities—but alas, it was far more mundane, and far more sad: he was using the pen to keep track of his page numbers so that the next time he came to the store he would remember where he’d left off. The columns marked the different stores he visited, or possibly the different titles he was reading. Maybe both. I don’t recall. What I do recall is that Joey had no money to buy a book, even a used book. One dollar? Two dollars? Four? The boy had nothing.”
Lyle stared at the exposed brick wall that flanked their table.
“Is that when you—started?”
“Helping him out? Yes, I guess it was. He left the shop that day and I bought the book he’d been reading—Crime and Punishment, I believe—and chased him down the sidewalk to give it to him. Joey stood there for the longest time with his hands tucked into his black sweatshirt pockets, looking at me from inside his hood with those crazy green eyes of his, refusing to take it, as if whatever strings I’d attached to it were enough to strangle him. Of course there were no strings, but he obviously had issues with trusting me. So I placed it on the sidewalk by his feet and left. When I saw him again a few days later, reading a different book in the store—The Metamorphosis, I think—he didn’t exactly thank me, but he did smile, or at least showed me a tooth or two.
“From there, I began to see him around town. I assumed he was going to school somewhere but I had no proof. Once I helped him at the library because he was having some difficulty getting a card because of his age or address or something, maybe just lack of official identification. Sometimes in the spring I’d see him smoking by the lake at City Park, and once in a while I’d buy him a book, or if he wasn’t drunk or high I’d stick five bucks in his palm for lunch, or just ask him if he needed anything. We talked a little bit back then, usually about what he was reading, but for the most part we stood silently together, side by side, or roamed the streets with some half-assed destination in mind. An ice-cream cone or a bowl of chili or a pair of winter socks. I thought for a while that Joey had Tourette’s syndrome or some kind of involuntary tic because every so often he would release these little whimpering bursts that almost sounded like a neighing horse. At first I would ignore it, you know, or I’d ask him casually if he ever went to the community health clinic for a checkup, or if he had any prescriptions I could help him refill, and then one day I realized, with complete embarrassment, that when he made that sound he was crying. He had this way of covering it up, of making it seem nasal, or like a stuffy cough, but it was tears.”
“I know the sound,” Lydia said, thinking about the times she’d heard it while passing Joey slumped in a chair, his face buried in a book.
“Anyway, despite the four-plus decades between us, we began to spend more time together. He seemed to be between different group homes quite a lot, taking this bus or walking that way, in different parts of town. Sometimes I wouldn’t see him for a week or two, but when I did see him he’d come right up to me and catch me up on his recent finds. The kid drank too much, and I knew sometimes he was trying to score this or that hit, this or that fix, but he respected me enough to keep all of that separate from me. Then one day he just disappeared. I visited all of his haunts but the kid was just gone, and I realized that I had no one whom I could ask. I didn’t know where he lived, if he even went to school, whom he was reporting to, if anyone, and it occurred to me that if I knew so little about him, if he could disappear from me, then imagine how utterly absent he was from the rest of the world. It broke my heart, Lydia. He could’ve been facedown in the Platte or left for dead in a Five Points alley. I promised myself that if I saw him again I would take better care of him. I’d try to give the kid some self-worth, you know? Anyway, I didn’t see him for a long, long time.”
“About two years, I’m guessing,” Lydia said.
Lyle nodded. “A little over. So he told you about prison.”
“He did.”
“He was not a violent person,” Lyle said, somewhat defensively.
“I know.”
“He made a mistake,” Lyle said, arching his brow, “and he learned from it.”
“I know, Lyle.”
Lyle squeezed his hand into a fist. It took him a minute to gather himself.
“Joey found me within a week of getting out of prison. The first thing he did was ask me, in that awkward way of his, to buy him a suit. A suit! I thought, Great! I assumed it was for job interviews and parole meetings, but I never once saw him put it on. I was so glad he wasn’t dead in a dumpster somewhere that I gave him a wide berth but made a point of being present. He didn’t talk to me about his time behind bars, but he emerged with a whole new cluster of favorite authors. He seemed to have grown up some. He was more hopeful, to be sure. He spoke to me more than he ever had, which made me think that all that solitude in prison, all that silent self-protection, must have scraped away at him. He even began joining me on my daily walks. I thought I would introduce him to Bright Ideas, but it turned out he’d already discovered it on his own. I thought that if I bought him books he’d stay occupied, and he’d be less likely to drink a bottle of cough syrup or drop cinder blocks on the highway. Or—”
“I know, Lyle.”
“Or hang himself.”
“I know.”
Lydia waited for him to continue, but Lyle just sipped from his tea and shifted around his newspaper, as if trying to shake free those two words: hang himself.
“What happened that night, Lyle?”
Lyle fished inside his peacoat pocket and dumped its contents on the table. An American flag on a toothpick. A half-smoked cigar. A single nudie playing card. A cough drop stuck to its waxy wrapper. He unpeeled the cough drop and popped it into his mouth, then finally looked at Lydia.
“It’s not your fault he died,” she said. “I hope you don’t think that.”
“Joey was horrible to me,” Lyle said.
“This is on the day?”
“He was being such a brute. Meaner to me than anyone since the playground. Meaner to me than the jackass in the park who ripped out my earring and split my earlobe for being a fag. Joey had never been mean like that. I don’t want to remember him like that.”
“Tell me.”
A cough sparked in Lyle’s throat. “For weeks he’d been in the dumps. I kept thinking I’d done something to anger him. I tried to talk to him, but he’d barely give me the time of day. And then came the morning of.”
“What happened?”
“It got bad the morning of. I got tired of the way he was treating me, so I went to his group home, bracing myself for confrontation, and wh
en he came out and started walking toward downtown I walked right at his side, and when he shoved me away I was undeterred. He was often a quiet, dreamy guy, which was fine, but that day he was kind of groaning and muttering, hissing at passersby and cars, and acting—what? Indecipherably. Okay, fine. He was going through something, as we all do sometimes, and I was his friend, so I would stay at his side because that’s what you do. But then when we got here, when we got to Bright Ideas— I don’t really want to tell you this.”
“I found him hanging, Lyle.”
“When we got here,” he said, “Joey was wearing that baggy black sweatshirt he always had on, and he lifted it up and began pulling books out of his shirt, his waist. Five or six books, at least. I thought— Lydia, I thought Joey was stealing books. Only he was taking them out of his clothes and leaving them on couches, on shelves, sort of scattering them about the store like he was returning them. Like he was planting them. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I was furious on so many levels. If he was returning them, that meant that at some point he’d stolen them, right? Which meant he was betraying this place that we loved so much. And betraying me, too, because he knew full well that I’d buy the books for him, that all he had to do was ask. And of course there was the risk of him going back to jail over some stupidity. I got very upset, Lydia. Very upset. I made him come out to the alley behind the store and I laid it all out for him: He was a smart guy. He was beautiful. He had his whole life in front of him— You can imagine all I said. At some point I grabbed on to his shoulders and shook him a little, pleading with him. I offered to write him a check, as if I was his father. I told him I’d pay for him to get started in a little apartment if he wanted to try to get out of his group home. I told him I would help him go to counseling or college or move to a different city, but that I just wanted him to be smart and safe and stop doing things that hurt him. I told him I’d give him anything in the world that was within my power, but that he had to start opening up to me, otherwise how could I? He just stood there, Lydia, and I was so upset I quite literally started hugging him. I begged him, Lydia, to tell me what was happening. It’s so humiliating. It’s so—”
Lyle fought back tears. He forced himself to sit up straight.
“But the worst thing, Lydia? Do you know what he said to me? He called me an old queer and an old faggot. He said that all I really wanted was to suck him off, that his cock was the fountain of youth, that everything I did for him was a way to get some of that brown candy. I have to say, Lydia, that snapped me out of it. He humiliated me. Not just because what he said was untrue—it was so totally untrue—but, I’m ashamed to admit, it was something I worried about. Something he knew I worried about: I knew people looked at the two of us, this spinsterish old man with a bit of money and this poor street kid with hardly a change of clothes. I was aware that people thought I was manipulating him. But it wasn’t like that at all.”
“I know it wasn’t.”
“Anyway, I said some awful things to him in that alley, and maybe he deserved it. I called him street trash. I said that it was no wonder he was alone in the world if this was how he treated the people who loved him. He was such a beautiful kid, but the look I saw him wearing that day—he was so ugly.”
“He wasn’t in his right mind, Lyle.”
“I know,” he said, “but that’s exactly why it’s so awful, what I did. I’m a grown man. I should have taken the high road, but I didn’t. I took the lowest road. I stomped off and left him all alone, exactly as he’d wanted me to.”
“And that was the night—”
“The night he took his life. My dear Lydia, that is why I have not come back to the store.”
Lyle was breathing loudly and staring at an old coffee ring that stained the table. Lydia rested her hand atop his fist.
“Joey wasn’t stealing books,” she said. “He was cutting them up.”
“No. He wouldn’t do that.”
“He would. He did. Come with me.”
It only took a few minutes for Lydia to grab her satchel from the break room and to let the manager know she was taking an early lunch. Then she walked Lyle to a quiet alcove where the education books were shelved. They sat on a couch embroidered with leaves and berries that had been in the store for years and that carried the ghostly imprint of a thousand forgotten readers.
“What did you mean that Joey was cutting up books?” Lyle said in a quiet, cautious voice.
“He was defacing his own books, but borrowing others from the store as well. Taking their labels. Using them as a guide, I guess.”
“But why would he? A guide for what?”
“For me,” she said, and felt the hairs lift on the back of her neck. “He was doing it for me. He was leaving me messages.”
“Really, now?” Lyle shifted forward on the couch, rolling this thought around in his head and apparently accepting it. “I’m sufficiently intrigued. Go on.”
From her satchel she retrieved a hardcover copy of Denis Johnson’s noir novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and tossed it at Lyle’s lap.
“It was in Joey’s apartment,” she said. “One of the books he passed to me in death.”
“Dear god,” Lyle said, rotating it in his hands. “The title hits a bit close to home. Intentional?”
“Has to be.”
“And that’s the message you’re talking about—Resuscitation of a Hanged Man?”
“Actually, no. Keep looking.”
Lyle repositioned his glasses and licked his fingers. He traced his palm sensuously along the spine—the BookFrog equivalent of kicking the tires. He read the opening paragraphs and sighed with admiration, then flipped through the book until he came to the little rectangles, hardly bigger than a housefly, that had been cut from a number of pages.
“What’s with the holes?”
“Some kind of cipher,” she said.
There on the couch, Lyle studied the novel with renewed vigor, awestruck by the cuts in its pages. She’d thought he’d be more skeptical. “That does sound like Joey, with his New World Order talk and Illuminati leaflets. I hope you never made the mistake of asking him about the Federal Reserve. Or naked mole rats. Positively sinister. Go on.”
“I thought it was some kind of puzzle at first,” Lydia said, “cutting out the words to arrange into a collage or something.”
Lyle laughed through his hand. “Joey doing Dada? Über-freaky.” But suddenly he sat up and his smirk turned into a cringe. “The cuts on his fingers—they came from this?”
“As far as I can tell,” she said. “Look at the label on the back.”
Lyle flipped it over and read aloud. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?” he said. “It’s mislabeled. I don’t get it.”
His face went blank when Lydia extracted from her satchel the annotated copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that she’d found this morning on the shelf in Fiction. “The two books are the same size,” she said, then stacked them together and held them out for Lyle. Just as she had earlier on her own, Lydia opened the two books to page 34, folded back the cover of the Denis Johnson novel, then lined it up over the Lewis Carroll classic. Again, the little empty windows were now filled with words.
“Read the holes, Lyle. Where new words show through.”
Lyle cleared his throat of something phlegmy, then struggled to read aloud:
noon
ewa
. It ed
out
side The
, ga
tesi
was
rel
ease . D
fr
ee
“No one waited outside the gates . . . I was released . . . free . . . Is that what it says? Wait—is this real?”
“It’s real.”
“How do you even know these are messages, though? Couldn’t it be, I don’t know—something else? Something not Joey?”
Lydia explained how, as far as she could tell, Joey chos
e the second book because its font was bigger, which made it easier to read through the windows. Then she told him about the pair of books—on book destruction and bed-wetting—she’d deciphered yesterday on the sidewalk.
“He addressed me by name,” she said. “You found me again, Lydia. And he signed it J. And he kept that one separate from his other books, I think, so that I would discover it first, before these others.”
“What does that even mean, though—You found me again?”
“I found him once when he was hanging,” she said, “and again when I figured out his messages. I found his voice, I guess.”
“His last words,” Lyle said.
Lydia looked at her hands, feeling solemn. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“I know. But at least we know now what he was doing those last few days. What do the others say?”
“I’ve only managed to put together two more. This batch”—she gestured to the pair of books Lyle was holding and then tapped her satchel—“and one other. Go ahead. Line up the next pages.”
Lyle turned to page 89 of Resuscitation and Lydia had to help him fold it open so that only that page stuck out, then place it atop page 89 of Alice. Once it was aligned Lyle worked his way through the tiny windows there and on the pages after:
and
, J
us.
tas
Al
one
as
Al way
son
ly
mo
reg
row
nup
mores
c are
Dan
daw
. Are d
that
Li
few
ould
,” Al
way
be
Noon
eo
uts,
I’d
et.
He g
ate
. S
Lydia pulled out the pocket-sized sunflower notebook in which she’d scrawled her morning’s labors. “I think he’s talking about prison here: No one waited outside the gates . . . I was released . . . free . . . and just as alone as always . . . only more grown up . . . more scared and awared that life would always be . . . no one outside the gates.”
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Page 10
