“August 9th Top of the Old River Motel
Goodbye, Lily.”
My vision darkened over the fat, red pen strokes.
“Bye, Ev,” I whispered.
My fingers shot out for the last red volume and felt around blindly. I could see nothing through the distortion of my tears. The book was heavy, and when I dropped to my knees and lay it on the floor, it almost refused to open. I turned the pages as if looking for an emergency phone number, until I realized that the blurry images there were neat and tidy, unlike anything else I had seen from her. Row after row, stanzas like poems, but none of it made any sense. It rhymed in some places, had a definite rhythm, but some of the words were gibberish and not a single line was a complete sentence. It was the same all the way through, until I found the symbol.
Scrawled in the same red sharpie as her appointment with Death was the neon sign from above the nightclub door.
I looked at it closely for some time, trying to pick out what language it might be. It looked as if it was some kind of Middle Eastern dialect. I looked around the room blankly and recalled that my sister had no computer.
I grabbed the four books I had pulled from the shelves and threw them into a backpack I found in her closet. I raced down the stairs to the street and jumped into my car. After the push of a button on its dash, now thankful they had been out of plain old Hondas, I barked orders at the friendly lady who happened to pick up my signal.
“Directions to an Internet Café.”
She helpfully stuffed them into an electronic envelope and before long I was driving through dark streets toward an answer. When I had paid the exorbitant fee and logged onto a terminal, I rifled through servers until I found what I was looking for, a dictionary of Sanskrit. When I found it, though, I didn’t know where to start. I couldn’t search by the symbol on the paperweight I was using and I couldn’t go by the Sanskrit word itself, because I couldn’t actually read it. Annoyed, I went through the lists of words, just looking for anything I recognized. Letter by letter, I searched, muttering to myself as I scrolled, but when I came to “M” everything changed.
“Moksha,” I read aloud, “liberation from Samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth.” With an aggravated hiss, I sat back. “That arrogant, stuck up prick.”
I wondered if it was his real name. He certainly didn’t look like he was someone who might speak Sanskrit; after all, as the webpage told me, it was the root language of the Indian dialects and an ancient cousin of Latin.
I reached into the pack and pulled out the red volume. On the marked page, I examined the stanzas. It had to be some kind of code, but I didn’t know anything about codes. I could connect one or two of the words together by counting every fifth word, or second word, but nothing made complete thoughts.
All too quickly, the time ticked by and before I could stop it, the computer logged off.
The punk sitting at the counter eyed me from behind his square glasses, until at last I felt uncomfortable and began gathering my things together. Still a little shaky from my adrenalin high, I made to lift the heavy volume and accidentally knocked it to the floor. Cursing, I dropped to pick it up by the back cover, but froze when I saw a watermark.
“You wanna buy more time?” he asked when I got to the counter. The way he spat it at me clearly told me that if I did, he’d slit my throat with his lip stud, so I shook my head and smiled sweetly.
“Do you know where this place is?”
He leaned over the book. “Armchair Philosopher?”
Given that my finger was pointing at the words, I felt I didn’t need to be any more specific, but he stared at me until I nodded.
Annoyed, he turned to his computer and spoke to it in the clicks and clatters that always seemed the mechanical equivalent of whistling.
The printer kicked into life and hummed out a map.
“There,” he grunted. “Ten cents for the copy.”
“You’re kidding.”
He stared.
“Fine!” Digging through the bag, I found my wallet and handed him the dime. “Thanks!”
“Come again,” he dismissed.
Shaking my head, I dashed out to the car and nearly killed five college kids with linked arms standing idly in the crosswalk. It was getting late; the night creatures were rolling out of bed, fluffing their hair, digging for shirts that didn’t smell like ass, and preparing themselves for the usual business of a Friday night: attempting to fornicate. That’s what single people did, after all.
I parked across the street and approached the storefront slowly. It wasn’t what I’d expected. I had pictured a hole in the wall on a side street, but this was in the middle of the charming downtown’s cultural center, right next to a GAP and across from a Bath & Body. It was made up to look old, like a saloon crossed with a Victorian gentleman’s club.
Behind the glass, comfortable couches and armchairs sat around little round tables in nooks made to look like living room or library corners. The walls were lined with a vast collection of books and the coffee bar looked like it had been ripped from a saloon. A few people sat, using laptops, chatting, or reading. Curious, I walked in and was greeted by a bell hung over my head.
At the bar, I did the dance of the impatient customer until a haggard man in a white button-up shirt and black suspenders decided to wait on me. At the edge of his rolled up sleeve, I spotted the black outline of what appeared to be a military tattoo.
Not going to ask him to put tiny marshmallows on it, I thought, it might be code for something.
I put the book on the counter and showed him the watermark.
“Did this book come from here?” I asked amiably enough, but as I looked up, noted the startled expression on his face. Vaguely, I wondered if it was directed at me or the fact that I couldn’t compare the watermark to the sign on the front door, but it wasn’t my fault. The place didn’t look like a bookstore.
He jerked a thumb to the back of the shop.
Feeling out of place, I looked around. “I’ll have . . . a . . . whatever’s most popular,” I said in an overly cheerful voice, though I could have kicked myself for being such a spaz.
He turned away from me almost gratefully and went to work without a sound. While I looked, but didn’t look, at his gaunt face in the bar mirror, he clamped his jaw shut and refused to look back. Taking the hint, I wandered down the long bar until it curved out its end. Beyond it were several more seating nooks, the ubiquitous books, and what seemed to be a Dutch door split in half, its upper part open to another room.
Feeling like a kid about to look through the glass of the confectionery and find out where the fudge came from, I put my hands on the tiny counter and tried to see in the low light. Volumes were piled high in stacks, some with covers and some without. Machines of unknown use lined the walls, a swatch booklet lay open on the work table, and a single silver stool glinted.
A book bindery.
Eva hadn’t bought the volumes there; she’d had them created out of her scraps of paper and discarded notebooks. But no one was manning the counter. I would have to come back earlier in the day.
Distraught, I ambled back to nearest reading nook and looked over the titles. Reference books, history books, and various fictions, none of it organized, and all covers torn or well-loved. It was as if the person who ran the bindery drew a distinction between the outside world and their own books, which needed no covers to tempt them.
I collapsed into the fluffy chair and laid the red book on the table, turned to the symbol. In the light from the green library lamp, it almost looked fresh.
“Trishna,” a nearby man murmured.
I only pulled myself from my own world because something in me was still capable of salivating to the bell of social obligation. I looked up, about to tell the poor man that I was not his blind date, but found a white coffee cup and saucer directly in front of my gaze. It clattered as I took it and clumsily set it down.
“Thanks.” I reached into my bag for th
e wallet. “You didn’t have to bring it to me.”
I lifted the bill up to his hand, and long, caramel-colored fingers waved it aside. I looked up to the face and instantly recognized it.
The man from the cemetery smiled warmly. “You found me.”
While I stared at him in shock, he sat down in the chair across from me, gracefully leaned back, and crossed his long legs.
“You?” I said, feeling my mouth drop open.
He nodded slowly. “The most popular.”
I glanced at the cup. “What?”
“Cappuccino. It’s what you ordered, yes?”
I blinked. “So you did know her!”
“Of course,” he said. “Though I am sure they would appreciate the sentiment, I don’t often attend the funerals of those I have not met.”
“You . . .” I looked back at the half-door. “You bound her journals?”
“That is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
I nodded and with a shaking hand, picked the cup back up to sip, if only to do something with my mouth besides catch flies. I watched him over its rim and he looked back without a hint of discomfiture or nervousness.
Finally, I managed to piece a few words together. “So she came here a lot?”
“Often.”
“How did you know about her funeral? I didn’t announce it.”
He said nothing. After a moment or two, I realized he wasn’t planning on answering the question. At first, I wanted to rave at him, demand an answer, but I realized that I already knew the answer and he was waiting to hear me say it.
“She was suicidal.”
He tilted his head and for the first time, looked away.
“I always knew she was troubled, but I thought . . .” I mumbled. “I thought she was past the worst of it.”
He looked at me again. “And perhaps it had nothing to do with sorrow.”
I set down the cup, confused. “Then you talked to her?”
“Yes.”
“And she didn’t seem depressed?”
“If anything, she was focused.”
“On killing herself?” I raised my voice.
He shrugged and I could see his sympathy.
I calmed myself. “Did you meet her here?”
His head gave a slow shake. “We met in the park. She was writing in a spiral notebook she bought at the local drugstore.”
That sounded like her. The image took me back to her childhood, when I would look up from my toys on the back lawn and find her in a tree, her legs dangling as she drew pictures of birds.
“We live in the information age,” he continued, glancing at the bookshelves near our circle of yellow light. “Inundated with words, even in our breakfast cereal. Any person, anywhere, can write their thoughts, and instantly they are mine. No one takes the time anymore to think about what it all means.”
“It’s just noise,” I grumbled and took another sip.
His eyes found mine again and locked them into a gravitational pull of the greatest force. “‘Every word written is a victory against death.’ It isn’t noise, but because we cannot filter it, it sounds like noise.”
“I’m sorry,” I said with my hand up. “I just meant that it feels overwhelming.”
He smiled and it was that same smile from the cemetery. “No you didn’t. You are nothing if not pessimistic, and you meant what you said, but that’s fine.”
Absolved, but feeling as if that was a different type of crime, I sat mute, uncertain what could possibly be said to that.
He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees and meshing his fingers in the air between us. Without intending to, I fantasized about placing my hands over his and smoothing my fingertips over the details I found there.
“History is composed of major events and, in some cases, a few characters, because humans cannot recall all those tiny moments in between. In that immense context, Einstein’s letters, the drawings of an old man from Florence, even John Hancock’s John Hancock are all priceless, but by themselves, without any significance granted by history, a lone man’s words are simply discarded as noise. They are sounds not Zeitgeist, but the only thing that makes them less valuable is either that we, as his fellow men, find others who represent those things more perfectly or can only listen to so much of the same before we shut our ears. Such attitudes breed reckless disregard, and though it is easy to become overwhelmed, we should fight that at any cost.”
I began to see his point. If a person could float in the sea of knowledge and not drown, if they could be universally accepting and receptive, then every word was important, and though he seemed to be just that sort of person, I was most definitely not. I needed filtering. For me, it all needed some kind of vast organization. Just thinking about the Herculean effort of such a task, sent my OCD twitching.
“Your sister told me I sounded like a librarian, but I gave her my card and told her to give her own words the respect they deserved. A few days later, she called me and brought me her first shoebox.”
Without meaning to, I laughed and was pleased to see him smile.
“Now she has brought me you,” he said with a wave.
When I didn’t say anything out of mild embarrassment, his blue eyes sparkled in play.
“You need to hear someone say it, don’t you?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but his soft voice was almost mesmerizing. I knew he knew what he meant, and that it was probably completely accurate.
“They all say they knew her, but you need to hear someone say that they knew the same Eva you knew. Isn’t that right, Lilith?”
I froze, and as I stared at him with eyes as big as saucers, he remained calm.
“You need to know you were right, that you saw her clearly, but why?”
My eyes faltered, fell to his shoes, stuttered around the rug on the floor. I shook my head, because in that moment, my voice had vanished.
“Your parents, Howard, and now her,” he whispered.
Frantically, I looked up and was trapped in his fixed gaze. I felt like I was falling into those sky-colored eyes; my heart sped up, the coffee burned in my stomach, and I lost feeling in my legs.
“Your world is chaotic, filled with shattered possibilities.”
Tears spilled down my cheeks.
“You spend all your time organizing, don’t you? Mending the parts of yourself that crash to the ground by learning what can be pushed away without any personal sacrifice. You simplify it to preserve your own sanity. Isn’t that true?”
My hand flew to my mouth and drops began to tickle the back of it. He watched me cry for a great while, but did not offer to comfort me, and why should he? It was exactly as he had said. It was my wayward method of compensating for things outside my control, and because of that, when I recalled her words, something in my soul had grasped for them with such tenacity that I could not let go.
Everything means something.
He stretched out an arm and pointed to the book. “Trishna,” he repeated.
“Trishna?” I looked after his finger and found the red symbol. “What does that mean?”
He sat back in the chair. “It is a Sanskrit word.”
“For what?”
“Craving. Things perceived to be valuable that only end up robbing us of what matters.”
For long moments, I frowned at him, wondering if that was all there was.
“There’s a nightclub by the river,” I began, but he was already shaking his head.
“Don’t, Lilith. You will regret it.”
“Why?” I demanded, suddenly absurdly angry that he would insert himself into my quest. If that was how I grieved, who was he to say otherwise? “Something’s not right about her boss, and this woman at the club knew who I was. If anyone can tell me about her, then I have to talk to them.”
“For what purpose?” he asked softly.
“Didn’t we just discuss that? I need to have the key, the filter. I need to be able to see her wor
ds the way she wanted me to see them.”
He looked at me with real concern. “How do you know that you don’t already see them the way she intended?”
“If that were true, I wouldn’t have found this.”
He sighed in apparent disappointment. “Her words speak for themselves and anyone reading them would see her clearly. What you are seeking is the context that would make you feel better. You’re creating a fiction that turns her death into a mystery you can solve.”
“No, it’s here,” I insisted. I dug through the bag and produced the blue journal, opened it to the last page, set it on the red volume and handed them off to him. He considered them distantly and passed the journal back without a word.
“She wrote that the day she killed herself. I’ve looked through these books, and nowhere was there a red sharpie anywhere inside them. It’s a hidden message. She wasn’t just some suffering girl, she was someone else with a secret life.”
“So you don’t want your sister back, you want to expose her as a different person, someone unknown to you who has gone away. Will it make grieving easier, do you think?”
I denied it with a fierce shake of my head though his words had the ring of profound truth. As smeared and adamant as I was, I needed him to look past it and see the real me. I needed someone, anyone to hear my words as more than noise, and he just happened to be the man who enjoyed listening.
“You said that every word meant something if a person could listen. Well, I want to listen. I realize now that I never knew her and I never listened. I don’t want a specific context, an outcome I understand. I’m ready to accept anything that will help me know.”
“Know what?”
I heaved a sigh and it slipped out of me, as selfish as it had sounded in my head, but the greatest piece of honesty I had ever conceived. “The part of me that’s gone now.”
That confession seemed to impress him. “A very astute observation. You are a sister no more. Your duty to her is finished.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said quietly. “I owe her.”
“How could you?” He was the very picture of compassion. “You were exactly what you needed to be. She always spoke very highly of you.”
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