Fortress

Bookstore

Bookstore We were clerks in a shop at the edge of America; people would come by but they were mostly asleep, even looking at the books they were asleep— books on the Book of the Dead, on reader response, on awakening— and we would not wake them because they needed their sleep so we stood very still and quiet as they passed; but the thin black lines kept blurring on the order forms we alphabetized as we talked to the people and drank the cappuccino with its collar of foam. They'd say the monarch butterflies were migrating again, taking their Halloween capes to Monterey while tourists stayed inside to watch the insects in their predicament, turning the field glasses on their dark-veined wings; the neo-Marxists came forward out of the sunlight, chattering, they'd go in pairs, in seedy sports jackets with tiny plaids, they'd stand for a long time before the hike into the hermeneutical air, a saffron glow rising from the theories flattened, like the butterflies— theories from France, theories with graphs and spaces, living theories, festschrifts for the dead— or whistling the Brandenburgs they'd plod back tOythe shipping room; not yet! we'd say,Another few weeks or so! 18 And they'd say O.K., I guess, disappointment mixed with resignation, like the eyes of addicts on the avenue— Rousseau's bastards, those souls rough as saddle blankets. Maybe they'd been drinking cafe au lait, staring nervously at the descent of sugar in the glass, like the lunatic who sucked his fingers in the corner, or the blind one by the bank, shaking his box, the one we called the czar's lost daughter who had hyphens in her name, bought boxed sets on the installment plan. Sometimes, when we'd start the day's procedures— metal clips, croissants, move the recalcitrant dead bolt's internal arm— there was a howler at the door, so J. would go out as St. Francis, and say, You'll have to go away, my friend, and the man would go away, tipping his head like a spaniel. Once I saw a kid stuff a book in his pants. Broad stone face: an Easter Island statue. He'd chosen a large book with maps, and he trembled as he did it, like a revolutionary— Why did I, grabbing it from him, think the book felt like a baby as he ran, that I who had seen was implicated? 19 Abject is the watcher. Abject. Having no lamp, you must not enter the churchyard . . . . Always to be subjective, like a book, that's what I wanted; to face inside, but also to turn out, to have a soul that would resemble paper, and be carried out into the alabaster street where, on the other side of order, there wasno suffering . . . . Friday afternoons in the pre-spring, C. to the right in black and red, her legs tapping time to the filament ofjazz, the fragments would blur together, and I was immensely comforted by this; the customers would stare inside as thought stares into meaning, cupping their hands around their eyes, the dime-sized relics of their breathing on the glass, and the last of them would enter, relinquishing their packs— Help you with something? Not really. No. They'd have some terrible title. The Female Universe. The Natural History of the So-and-So. Once I thought these books could talk, that they would, some nights, fall down from shelves onto their spines, and open up and read aloud to one another, 20 and all the cacophony of that shared reading made one voice, the voice of huge blue unforgiving knowledge that had judged my life. At 4:00 P.M., the secretaries would start to go, the mailman had been, eased the shipment from the dolly with his boot, and we'd settle in; a little rain had started, the customers would put on their gear, hunching their shoulders to bear up under historical time, holding the books like infants under their arms and we would stay on in this timelessness . . . . The great desire had been to join them. One step and we could join them but we would not take that step; they were so much like us, taking into the scratched night a few facts, and a longing which, because it was so real, sustained the life. 21 ...