Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “I’ve been here three years now.”

  “Really?” She glanced around again, taking another step closer to the counter as if stealing up nonchalantly on the seated man. As if stealing up on herself, hoping the rest of her wouldn’t notice what she was doing. “So, you’re the owner, then?”

  “I am.”

  “That’s great. I’ve always thought it must be nice owning a bookstore.”

  “Well, like anything, it has its headaches.”

  “Oh yeah, sure.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I work at the pharmacy counter for the Superdrugs on Polymer Street.”

  “Ahh. Well, you must have gone to school for that.”

  “Mm-hm.” She was near enough now to a book rack display to pluck up a paperback at random. “But books have always been my favorite drug,” she joked awkwardly.

  “I can relate to that.” He smiled.

  This close, she was no less impressed with his looks and figured him to be a few years older than herself. And now she’d noticed that on one side of his goggles there was a small knob and several keys, and on the other side a tiny glowing red light. So they weren’t sunglasses, then, or a stylish affectation...she guessed that they were a recording or enhancement device. Maybe he used them to scan and store his inventory, or perhaps even to read books, projected onto miniature screens.

  “I saw you in the restaurant down the street a little while ago,” she admitted. Then she regretted it. It made it seem as though she’d followed him here. Sounding to her own ears as though she were babbling, she hurried on as if to put her first comment in context. “Are you interested in Indian culture?”

  “Oh sure,” he said. Then: “Not that I...you know...really know much about it...”

  “Have you ever read Indian authors?”

  “No, I haven’t, sorry to say.”

  “Aww, really?” She took on a faintly teasing tone, found herself even a closer step to the low counter, still absently handling the paperback which she hadn’t even glanced at. “You aren’t familiar with classical stories like Ramayana? Shakuntala?”

  “Afraid not.” An apologetic shrug.

  “Writers like Kalidasa? Tagore?”

  “Sorry and sorry. But I’ll seek out their work, on your recommendation.”

  “Not that I only read ancient Indian authors, or modern ones...”

  “Well, I don’t just read Tikkihotto authors, either.”

  “Ahh,” Anoushka said, nodding. It was not so much a response to his comment, but a realization. Tikkihotto. He wasn’t a human. At least, not her kind of human. Now she understood what lay behind those impenetrable lenses. She had imagined lustrous eyes as dark as his hair. The idea that Medusa-like coils were bunched inside those cups repelled her. Repelled her because she had been so attracted to this man. Irrationally, it felt almost as if he’d deceived her...like stories she’d read about a trick finding out that a prosty he’d rented was really a man in drag.

  “Do you read Tikkihotto?” He gestured at the book in her hands.

  At last, she flipped the book open. She supposed the pretty purple cover with gold embossed lettering had peripherally caught her eye. Now, her fingertips resting on that embossed cover as though it were braille, she realized those foil letters had been in hieroglyphics. So was the entire text of the book. The characters and symbols were brightly and variously colored. She glanced at a few pages only...then, embarrassed, returned the book to its rack.

  “No,” she admitted, “I don’t.”

  “Don’t feel badly. Actually it can’t be read by Earth humans without special translating specs...sort of like these.” He tapped his goggles. “It’s the way we see. You know how the colored symbols intertwine, and make new colors where they overlap? That expresses various layers of meaning. Some characters must be read left to right as others are read right to left. The length of serifs, the space between symbols, the thickness and thinness and angles of symbols. All layers of meaning. And it all has to be taken in simultaneously.”

  “Wow,” was all Anoushka could think to say.

  “Your writing...well, I mean English...is so different, I had a hard time learning it,” he laughed. “I ended up using a direct brain feed to get most of it.” He tapped his temple.

  “That’s how most people learn it. But it must be a very simple language for you, comparatively.” There was less enthusiasm in her manner now. She found she wanted to go.

  “So do you speak...Indian?”

  “I can speak Bengali, yes.”

  He nodded. There was a long empty moment. Was he sensing that she had withdrawn something from the air between them? He said, “Um, don’t be afraid to look through my store, though. It isn’t all Tikkihotto books. About half, really.”

  “Thanks.” She’d do that. Why not? It was still a nice little bookstore. And this man was pleasant enough. Just not as enticing as the illusion she herself had created. She felt guilty suddenly for resenting him. She was acclimating to his revelation.

  “I’m Kress,” he introduced himself, extending his hand. “Kress Retku.”

  “Anoushka Roy.” She let him squeeze her warm, damp palm. “Well...I guess I will have a look around your store, then. Thanks, Mr. Retku.”

  “My pleasure, Anoushka.”

  * * *

  Half out of a sense of obligation, since she had engaged the store owner in conversation, Anoushka had purchased a single book the afternoon she discovered Retku’s Books. It had been two weeks ago. In the interim, she had tended the usual succession of surly, impatient customers queued up to her counter at Superdrugs. She had gone home to her small flat, alone now that her roommate had moved in with her boyfriend. Last weekend she had visited her parents in their miniature Indian colony in the suburbs. During the evenings she had lain in her bed reading from the novel she had bought two weekends before. And through it all, a figure would appear as if half glimpsed through the thick blinding fogs of dull routine. A figure in black with skin very white, and the feature that set him apart from her most hidden as if behind a mask.

  Anoushka pretended to herself that her return to the Indian restaurant for lunch (she looked for him to reappear there, in vain) was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and the return stroll to Retku’s Books even more so...though on a submerged level she had known before, had planned it during the grindingly slow hours of her work week.

  When she entered the store, grateful to leave that murky vacant ground floor behind her, a slight relief but a greater disappointment awaited her. Behind the long table that served as a counter near the door sat a middle-aged Tikkihotto woman, whose serpentine eye tendrils raised as if to sniff her out.

  “May I help you?” the woman asked, sensing Anoushka’s hovering conflict.

  “No,” she replied, “thank you. Just browsing.” And like a cat that pretends it meant to miss its ambitious jump, she headed straight into the narrow aisles of books.

  She was grazing through a home guide to pharmaceuticals and subliminally aware of another person in the aisle when she heard a familiar, unaccented voice. “Do you prefer nonfiction or fiction, then, Anoushka?”

  Lifting her eyes from the book, she saw Kress Retku standing a few paces away. She hadn’t recognized him peripherally because he had on a white T-shirt and green combat pants today. The shirt bore the cartoony logo for a band popular a few years ago, Tikkihottos playing their exaggeratedly long eye tendrils like guitar strings. He was, however, wearing those black goggles again.

  She smiled. “Hi. Um...I prefer fiction.”

  “Me, too. Sorry I haven’t looked into any of those authors you mentioned last time you were here...maybe you’d write their names down before you leave?”

  “Certainly. And...maybe you could write down the names of some Tikkihotto authors, whose works have been translated into English.”

  “Of course. Though naturally they lose a lot of their sense of layering.”

  She teased, “You’re a
bit of a snob about the Tikkihotto language. How lacking English is by comparison.”

  “No, I don’t mean to be. Something very complex and multi-leveled in English like Nabokov’s Pale Fire very much appeals to me...then you have some popular Tikkihotto authors like Jekee K’lenz who uses our layered language simply to fill her books with too many cardboard characters, too many garish soap opera plots interweaving.”

  “Is the Tikkihotto spoken language as complex as the written one?”

  “No...oddly, they’re quite different. We have multiple eyes, not multiple tongues.”

  Anoushka had heard a rumor whispered about the Tikkihotto, and the sensual possibilities of multiple tongues brought it back to her. She wondered if it might simply be like the myth of oriental women having horizontal vaginas. But word had it that a Tikkihotto man was inclined to insert his optical fibers into various orifices of his lover’s body...so as both to stimulate her and to stimulate himself by viewing her in an exceptionally intimate manner. The concept mostly horrified Anoushka. Mostly.

  “Have you had lunch yet?” he asked her, pushing his long hair behind one ear in a nervous gesture.

  “Yes, actually...”

  “Oh. I was, ah...do you think you might want to go for a coffee? If not today...some other time?”

  If he had asked her on the first day she came here, she would have made some excuse. Today, she averted her eyes shyly and shrugged, but showed her bright teeth and said, “Sure. That would be nice.”

  “Great. A little book talk, huh? And I have Oneek over there to mind the store for me. But look around first, Anoushka...I don’t mean to rush you.”

  “All right,” she told him. “I’ll come looking for you when I’m ready to go.”

  “Excellent,” he said. And grinned. “Thank you.”

  * * *

  They sat in a small greenhouse-like atrium structure that had been added onto the front of an old brick building whose ground floor had been converted to a café, sipping their coffee and barely noticing the variegated pedestrians beyond...darting about like colorful fish in a vast aquarium. They had moved onto the subject of mysticism, comparing the Earthly concept of the seven chakras to the Tikkihotto five inner wheels of life force. Kress enthused over a first edition he had once possessed of the Tikkihotto author Skretuu’s mystical and controversial The Veins of the Old Ones. But he had sold it to the proprietor of Dove Books, another book store Anoushka had not previously encountered, for five thousand munits in order to help finance Retku’s Books.

  “I worked so hard to open that store,” Kress said, turning his head at last to watch passing vehicles out the bubble-like enclosure around them. Anoushka saw the street activity reflected in the obsidian of his lenses, and wanted to ask him why he hadn’t taken them off...though she also didn’t want to ask. Didn’t want to see the ocular filaments that would prove him to be of an alien race. Kress went on, “I hate to imagine I may lose it...”

  “Why would you lose it? Is it hard to meet the rent? Are you not getting enough customers?” Her concern was genuine.

  “Soon I may not be able to manage it anymore. I have two employees to help me, but I’m not sure that would help me enough...”

  “You need more employees, but can’t afford it?”

  “No.” Kress faced her. Now she saw herself doubly reflected in the lenses. “I’m going blind.”

  “You’re...?” Anoushka sat back from the table a little, absorbing Kress in a new light. “I’m so sorry. I hadn’t known.”

  “That’s all right.” He smiled, shrugged as if it were a trivial topic, glanced around now at other patrons. Anywhere but at her. It was as though he were ashamed, had admitted impotence to her.

  “How well can you see now?” she asked. Was it vain to wonder how well he could see her?

  “I can see at least as well as you can. With the help of these.” He tapped the rim of one lens, near the knobs and keys of its adjustment controls. “I can still get most of the meaning of my written language. But not all of it. And it’s a degenerative disease...”

  “But someone must be able to do something! There has to be an operation...organic transplants...inorganic implants...localized cloning restoration...”

  “There are treatments for everything, pretty much. The issue is only whether you can pay for it. Any major treatments would be very involved and extremely costly, Anoushka. A lot of insurance companies would discourage it. And, in fact, I don’t even have health insurance.”

  “Oh God, Kress, I’m so sorry...it’s terrible...”

  “Such is fate.” Another shrug. She could see it was a bitter subject, and Kress’ good nature had been speedily eclipsed.

  “But it isn’t hopeless, right? If you can get the money together someday...or get the right insurance...”

  “I’ll never be wealthy, Anoushka. I manage to get by doing something I love. It’s the most a person can reasonably expect. To expect more is to torment yourself. I’m trying to make peace with my life, and with this condition.”

  “There’s a difference between making your peace and being fatalistic. Giving up.”

  “I didn’t work so hard to open that store to give up,” he fairly snapped. “I didn’t say I was giving up.”

  “I thought you had implied that,” Anoushka murmured.

  Kress sighed, wagged his head. “I’m sorry, Anoushka. I’m sorry I’m acting like this.”

  “I understand. I don’t blame you. It isn’t fair.”

  “I’m reading as much as I can now, while I can. In case I may never be able to change this.”

  “There are audio books,” Anoushka offered feebly, feeling stupid for saying it. Knowing how inadequate it sounded, she made a joke of it: “Though your written language being so wonderfully complex, I imagine they must need five narrators reading simultaneously to capture all those layers that English lacks.”

  He snorted a little laugh.

  “I’d read for you,” she said next, in a more serious tone.

  Kress lifted his head, the goggles looking like empty skull sockets in his head. “You would?”

  “Yes.” She swallowed bashfully, but held his gaze as best she could without seeing his eyes, which she had originally imagined to be lustrously black like her own.

  “Then I’ll read for you, too,” he said. “I’d like to read some Tikkihotto work for you. While I still can.”

  “That would be nice.”

  “I’m glad I met you now, Anoushka,” Kress said very softly. “While I can still see how beautiful you are.”

  She didn’t know what to say to that, so she only smiled gently.

  * * *

  Alone in her small flat, after a day in which a man at the pharmacy had called her a “stupid cow” because his prescription still wasn’t ready, Anoushka had a dream. She had ventured into the little Tikkihotto neighborhood to meet with Kress...but the bookstore was on the first floor in the dream, instead of the second. The door was still red and glossy, but when she opened it the room beyond was empty; gutted, stripped and lightless.

  She returned to the street, as if hoping to catch sight of Kress walking away in this direction or that, before he disappeared from sight altogether. Someone took her arm, and she whirled, startled. It was her tiny mother, looking grave, her father with a disapproving scowl just behind her.

  “Come home,” her mother said.

  * * *

  “I want to apply for a job,” said Anoushka, standing at the counter.

  “You’ll have to fill out an application,” chuckled Kress, not looking up from the book spread open in front of him.

  “Seriously, Kress.”

  His head lifted. “Noush...you can’t afford to leave your pharmacy job. I can’t afford to pay you what you make...”

  “I want to work part time. On the weekends. I can use a little extra money. And I can help you...”

  “When I can’t manage things myself?”

  “You said you needed more
help, to keep things running...”

  He stared at her for several suspended seconds. “I appreciate what you’re doing, but...”

  “It isn’t charity.”

  “But you feel sorry for me.”

  “I don’t pity you, Kress. But is it all right to be concerned about you?”

  “Anoushka...”

  “I don’t want to see your store have to shut down, and I don’t want to see you have to give up something so important to you.”

  Kress glanced across the room. There were only a few scattered patrons. She knew it was never very busy in here; he made just enough sales to squeak by. When he looked back to Anoushka his voice was a whisper. “I want to be involved with you.”

  Her nod was a nervous jiggle. “I want that, too.”

  “But you know your parents won’t want it.”

  “True.”

  “My parents won’t be too thrilled about it either, frankly.”

  “I guess they’ll just have to get used to it.”

  “And you haven’t seen me without my specs.”

  She didn’t have a ready reply for that.

  He hadn’t intentionally kept his being a Tikkihotto secret from her, but he had kept his encroaching blindness a secret. Still, Anoushka realized that she was having an easier time accepting the blindness than his being of an alien race. She had been dreading seeing him without his goggles. But she knew it couldn’t be postponed any longer.

  “Take them off,” she said. “I want to see you.”

  “It will be ugly for you.”

  “Are my eyes ugly for you?”

  “No. I find your eyes lovely.”

  “Then maybe I’ll find your eyes lovely.”

  “You say that, but I see fear in your face. I can read the layers in it, like I can read my language.”