Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

by Matthew Sullivan

  “Definitely prison,” Lyle said, and then his face fell apart. “But my god, how depressing. Finally getting out, and no one being there to meet him. It’s awful, Lydia. What a terrible thing. My heart goes out even now, you know?”

  “Hopeless,” she said. “And then to believe that his whole life would be like that?”

  “All he had to do was ask,” Lyle said, “and I would’ve been there.”

  Lydia dug inside her satchel. “This is the only other one I’ve figured out so far,” she said, then slid an oversized and butchered copy of A History of the Sect of the Hasidim she’d found in Joey’s apartment over an equally large copy of a fly-fishing book called Emergers she’d found shelved in the Sports section. She leaned forward enough for Lyle to see through the windows as she paged through the message:

  ids

  . W

  allows

  P

  I’d

  ers

  ch

  ew g

  Las

  s. Y

  an k

  . M ynai

  lst   ee

  Th

  . J

  us two

  be p

  ART.

  “I’d swallow spiders, chew glass, yank my nails and teeth . . . just to be part,” Lyle read. “Well, that’s very sweet of him. But where’s the rest of it? Just to be part of what? The Boy Scouts? The cast of The X-Files? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? I’m sorry. I just can’t help but feel insulted here. I gave that boy everything I could.”

  “Maybe this is about something you couldn’t possibly provide,” she said. “There’s a pattern here, like when he got out of prison. Needing to feel like he’s wanted. To feel not stranded—just to be part.”

  “But he was part,” Lyle said. “He was part of this bookstore. He was part of us.”

  Lyle flipped through the pages and shuddered.

  “Why do I feel like Joey is going to come waltzing up behind me at any moment?”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “This whole thing is freaking me out.”

  “Like he’s right here, in the space between us, trying to tell us something.”

  Both looked at the empty cushion between them, then quickly at the floor. Lydia rolled her shoulders and began to flip through the little notebook where she’d kept track of Joey’s books, misplaced labels, and transcribed messages. She came upon a page she’d scrawled the other night in Joey’s apartment: CODVR?

  Lyle leaned forward.

  “Codur? Was that one of Joey’s messages?”

  She held the notebook toward him. “C-O-D-V-R,” she said. “Not a message. It was printed on an envelope.”

  “Just any old envelope?”

  “One that Joey had burned in his apartment,” she said.

  “Of course Joey would burn his mail,” Lyle said. “He probably had a special mail burner, ordered from the back of Close Encounters magazine.”

  “Any idea what it stands for?”

  Lyle shook his head and grew serious. “C-O-D . . . it has to be Colorado Division of Something Something. Or Department. Something sponsored by the state. Which could be anything, knowing Joey, with his parole and prison time and his foster families and group homes and social programs.” He pointed to a nearby desk. “Phone book?”

  Within seconds, Lydia was sitting at the desk, thumbing through the blue pages of the phone book, the section reserved for government entries. Lyle stood behind her, hands behind his back, breathing loudly through his nose. He smelled like moldy lotion. It took her only a minute to find the right entry.

  “Colorado Department of Vital Records,” she said. “Any idea what they do?”

  “Keep records on things that are vital, apparently,” Lyle said with a shrug. “Things you can’t live without. Like books. Whiskey. Waffles. Film noir.”

  As Lydia scribbled down the address of the Vital Records office in her little notebook, she could hear Lyle wandering away from the desk and into the depths of the store.

  “Ice cream,” he said to no one in particular. “Trombones. Peter Falk.”

  And he continued to murmur his list of vital things—

  “Corn nuts. Hot lava. Hitchcock.”

  —even without Joey at his side.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The clerk behind the counter at the Colorado Department of Vital Records was in his late forties, a bald burnout with furry eyebrows and a handlebar mustache. A few Star Trek action figures sat atop his monitor, and a Koosh ball, and a sticker that said Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys. Off to the side of his keyboard sat a microwaved tray of mac ’n’ cheese, half-eaten.

  “If I give you someone’s name,” Lydia said, drumming her fingers on the counter, “can you tell me what records he’s requested?”

  The man looked up from his tray and sniffed. He folded his hands over his belly and bobbed in his swivel chair.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “He was a good friend.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He killed himself. I’m just trying to figure out why.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And he had some correspondence from this office. Only he burned it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re not kidding.” He leaned toward the button for the numbers board, ready to move on: Next.

  “Wait,” she said. “How about I give you my friend’s name, and you give me whatever records you have for him. Just whatever you’ve got. Can we do that?”

  “Just anything?”

  “Just anything.”

  “Listen,” he said. “Here’s what I can do. If you go up to Broadway, then head just a few blocks south, you’ll see the Denver Public Library. It’s under renovation, like everything else in this godforsaken city, so you can’t miss it. Go inside and ask at the reference desk if they can point you to a copy of the Constitution. The United States Constitution. That might be a good place to start.”

  Lydia slapped her hands on the counter. “I happen to own a Bill of Rights T-shirt!” she said.

  The man twirled his mustache. “You free for drinks later?”

  Lydia marched off in a huff, but when she reached the bulletin boards by the door his voice stopped her.

  “You have to be someone,” he said, so she turned and walked back to the counter with her hands at her sides. “Legally speaking. A relative or a spouse or his lawyer—but someone. You can’t just be you.” And then he mumbled, “Adorable though you are.”

  “What was that last part?” she said, eyes wide, leaning forward, past the point of being patronized.

  “Nothing,” he blurted, then he pointed at the board hanging from the ceiling behind him. In little plastic numbers and letters, the board listed the documents that the CODVR office could provide, as if they were milkshake flavors at a burger joint. “If you tell me what you want, I can tell you what paperwork you’ll need in order to get it. We’ve got all kinds of certificates and documents, cradle to the grave. Birth, death, adoption, marriage, divorce, dissolution, some immunization and genealogy. A few others too, but they’re pretty uncommon.”

  “My friend killed himself and left me all of his belongings,” she said.

  “Okay, so maybe a birth and death certificate will be a good start,” he said, nodding along, “because you need those for a lot of things. Bring in the paperwork—his will or a copy of his living trust to show you have a right to his records. If you have the notarized original it saves time.” He paused, nibbled his mustache. “From the way you’re looking at me I’m guessing you don’t have anything like that.”

  “I have a Post-it note with my first name on it, written in pencil,” she said. “His landlady pulled it out of her bra.”

  “Okay,” the clerk said, and bit his lips. “Probably not going to cut it.” Then he explained that she could always fill out the application request for, say, Joey’s birth and death certificates, and she could explain on the application why she needed
them, and if she didn’t have the right paperwork or legal credentials, then sometimes, rarely, one of the clerks would contact her and suggest a different avenue for finding out the information, or even encourage her to apply for a waiver.

  “But for a waiver you have to have a good reason,” he said, “and it helps to know what you want. And sorry about the whole—you know, earlier.”

  “You mean the whole asshole thing? Or the whole Kafka thing? Which one?”

  “Please,” he said, “just one drink.”

  “I’d prefer not to,” she said, then spun around and disappeared into the chilly Denver dusk. The clerk was right about one thing, she thought: it really does help to know what you want.

  When Lydia stepped into her empty apartment, the first thing she saw was Joey’s black suit hanging like a headless man from a hook on her bedroom door. She startled and nearly dropped her keys, but once she recovered, she found herself staring at the suit with fresh eyes, thinking differently about its presence.

  Lyle had mentioned buying this suit for Joey, but as far as he knew, Joey had never even worn the thing. Lydia realized that she was equally in the dark, and that she’d dragged it out of Joey’s apartment and brought it here without ever even inspecting it. Feeling queasy and invasive, she turned her head to the side and reached under the dry-cleaning plastic as if it were a hospital gown, then began to grope through the suit’s pockets. She was hoping for Bright Ideas labels or little cutout tabs, or maybe even a final note, but found only a single blue foil wrapper that had once held a small sphere of chocolate, probably the same kind she’d smelled melted in his jeans as he’d hanged. Nothing else. Even after throwing it out, she felt sick to her stomach.

  After stuffing the suit into her closet, she scrubbed her hands and climbed into a pair of David’s Broncos sweats and his ripped Thrasher hoodie. Before she’d even finished heating her rice and beans in the microwave, and before she’d even set out the bottle of Tabasco and glass of water on the table in the kitchen, and before she’d even picked out whatever novel would accompany her dinner—eating and reading in solitude being a pleasure she ranked just below sex with David, and just above deliveries of hot Chinese food on cold winter nights—before any such evening rituals took hold, Lydia settled herself at the kitchen table, unbuckled her satchel, and laid out the new pair of books that she’d borrowed earlier from work. If Joey’s misplaced labels were correct, these titles would allow her to hear a few more fragments of his disembodied voice.

  While Lydia was here dancing with the dead, David was down in Colorado Springs for a few days, manning a booth at a homeschooling convention. After more than a year working on the lowest rungs of the IT basement, he had recently been asked to represent the company on a trial basis at a few education conferences around the state. No one gets out of that basement alive, David sometimes said, so it was a big deal among his programming peers that a coding grunt had been recruited to meet with potential customers. Lydia had been reassuring him for days that he was just the person for the job, but she couldn’t help but feel a guilty pleasure tonight in knowing she’d have the apartment to herself.

  Lydia pulled her dinner from the microwave and began picking through Joey’s milk crate, looking for the cut-up books that she could pair with those she’d brought home from work. Finding the titles on the bookstore shelves earlier had been more difficult than she’d expected. In her sunflower notebook she’d created a list of all the titles printed on the labels on the back of Joey’s books, but during her search she learned that many were no longer on the shelves at all; they’d been sold or placed on hold, were missing or on order or lost in some inventory dead zone. Without those complementary titles there could be no messages, but she had enough to stay occupied. At least for the evening.

  Lydia picked one of the cut-up books from the crate—a trade paperback of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love that she’d personally sold to Joey—and double-checked the label he’d stuck to the back to make sure she was pairing the titles correctly: it belonged to Walker Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman, one of the books she’d borrowed earlier from the store. When she stacked them atop each other, the two were the exact same size, as expected. In the heart of Joey’s copy of Geek Love, she found little windows cut into four or so pages—34, 89, 144, 233—and one at a time, she began to slide them over the corresponding pages in The Last Gentleman until his words emerged:

  My D

  add

  Y

  wast

  , he   st

  . At

  emy

  mo

  mm    the

  Fo

  ood!” B    an

  ks

  and the

  “Me?”

  talc

  ots  and the

  L.A.

  under

  O’Ma

  at

  sand

  then

  came

  my

  on

  ly,

  . He

  r.

  Lydia flipped through the books to see if she’d missed any holes, and when she was sure she hadn’t, she looked at the fragments again—my daddy was the state . . . my momm the foood banks and the metal cots and the Laundromaats . . . and then came my only Her—and the last word hooked her sight: Her.

  She scooched her chair back on the linoleum and the scrape it made felt like fingers strumming her spine. Outside of his early years with the Molina family, Joey had been a ward of the state, she knew that already, and she knew that this was probably a big part of the reason he felt so totally alone in the world. But those last words, and then came my only Her, suggested a life after the state.

  A life with Her. This was new: Joey feeling rescued from that life, feeling saved, by a woman.

  Lydia allowed herself to conjure an image of Joey standing behind a twentysomething cutie-pie—flower barrettes and hair cropped short—and bobbing his head to a band at some dim venue, Lion’s Lair or 7-South; or both of them rubbing their hands over the bronze claws of the grizzly in front of the Denver Museum of Natural History; or even Joey standing at a courthouse counter in his cryptic black suit, mumbling his wedding vows with chocolate in his pocket. Maybe later, after this relationship had shattered and sent him into a spin, Joey had burned his marriage certificate and his divorce papers—

  But then wait, she thought: Her.

  Now Lydia found herself conjuring an image of the girl Joey had almost killed. Lydia pictured her sitting in her car seat with a mouthful of Cheerios as a cinder block emerged before her eyes and exploded on her knee. Joey’s victim was only one year old then, which meant she would be—what? In kindergarten? First grade? Was it possible that Joey had tracked her down after prison, sought her forgiveness, become something like an uncle or a big brother, leading her through the zoo?

  But then wait: Her.

  A sudden, unsettling thought sloshed through Lydia. What if she—Lydia—was Her? What if Joey had been secretly in love with her, and these messages, that photo (just how had he acquired that photo?), this whole hanging, was some sort of misbegotten attempt to declare his love? Joey’s version of a severed ear.

  “Oh, screw you, Joey,” she said out loud in the empty apartment. She shook her head and held her hands palm out. “Don’t let it be that, Joey, please don’t let it be—”

  A sudden knock caused Lydia to hop out of her seat. A second knock shifted her sight toward the door. Instinctively she tossed the books into the milk crate and slid it under the kitchen table. She suddenly longed to have David beside her.

  Another knock, harder this time.

  When she peeked through the peephole, holding a paring knife behind her back, she was startled to see Raj. He leaned against the hallway wall with a swoop of hair over one eye and a box of glazed doughnuts in his arms. With more than a little hesitation she opened the door but kept the chain clasped. She thought she smelled vodka.

  “Raj,” she said
, failing to sound strong. “It’s pretty late to just pop in.”

  Raj looked intensely into her eyes but didn’t speak. Since their reunion on the sidewalk the other day, he’d shown up at the bookstore a few times, a frequency that may have bordered on stalky except for the fact that he lived in the neighborhood and was, of course, her oldest friend.

  “Come back another time,” she said, and started to close the door. “Okay? Earlier.”

  “I wanted to see you,” he said, then added, almost as an afterthought, “and to show you something.” He shifted the doughnut box awkwardly in his hands so he could fish something out of his pocket. At the sight of his bumbling, Lydia felt a small glow inside, the spark of an old ember.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, reaching out to grab his arm. “It’s okay. Come in, come in.” Raj, she reminded herself, shouldn’t need a reason to visit her, even after dark. “I just get a little spooked when David’s out of town.”

  Lydia had no intention of cheating with Raj, yet as he crossed the threshold into her apartment, brushing accidentally against her chest, she found herself wondering whether David would ever cheat on her. She knew she didn’t have to worry about his blowing his paycheck at a strip club or a massage parlor—he wasn’t the type, as far as she knew—but she sometimes wondered what he would do if he connected with a woman who was more wholesome and cheery than she was, someone who was more his type. Maybe because of the education conference he was presently attending, she found herself imagining David sharing wheat-germ muffins with one of those nurturing homeschooler babes, the type who dressed like Laura Ingalls Wilder and chugged milk straight from the udder. She shared more with David than she ever had with anyone—her anxiety around crowds, the nibblings of sadness she often felt in her gut, her penchant for afternoon sex—yet she was fully aware of the one thing she could never reveal: her night with the Hammerman. She just hoped she wasn’t pushing him away.