Left No Forwarding Address

by Gerald J. Davis

  I had brought a cheese sandwich from the Korean grocery store across the street from the hotel and I sat on the bed eating it with a glass of water. I turned on the television. This would probably be the last time I would watch television. There would be no more evenings wasted on mind-numbing emptiness wondering, when the evening was over, what you had actually watched. It was possible, you know, to flip through the channels for hours in an alpha state, without really paying attention to what was being broadcast. This evening would be the final tribute to wretched excess. I would watch newsmagazines with segments on something else that could go wrong and ruin your life. I would watch celebrity interviews of girls with fortunate cheekbones and large breasts who spewed inanities. I would watch vapid sitcoms with forced situations and any honest laughter drained from them.

  It would be the moment to say goodbye to Barbara and Oprah and Diane and Stone and Bryant and all the other pleasant-faced purveyors of false optimism to the American viewers. From now on, my mentors would be stony-faced dead white males who warned that existence was painful and difficult. Men like Melville and Dostoevsky and Hemingway, those old scolds.

  My wife would have been expecting a call by now. One of those reassuring but short conversations to allay her fears that the Amtrak train I was riding on had been derailed in a fiery collision with a fuel truck, which the TV news shows loved to broadcast in all its flaming and audience-grabbing glory. The phone call would be impersonal and perfunctory, just to let her know that the universe was still in perfect working order. Let her think, instead, that I was out drinking and carousing with my fellow misunderstood and under-appreciated label writers from the four corners of the English-speaking world. Label writers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your despair.

  It was at that moment that I began to cry. I had never expected this. I’d thought I’d be able to sail through the departure without any feelings of remorse or sadness, but I was wrong. My chest heaved with deep sobs. It was actually painful to breathe. I couldn’t see the TV through my tears. I put my hands to my face and was overtaken by the surprise of the emotion. My God, I hadn’t cried in forty years and the sensation was so unusual to me. I thought I couldn’t cry – that I couldn’t feel anything. And now I was weeping like a child. It was strange because the knowledge that I could cry somehow made me happy. But why was I crying? Was I distraught about leaving my wife and our home? About leaving my son? Was it fear of the life I was about to embark on? I just didn’t know. But, in a way, it wasn’t an unwelcome feeling. I was alive, after all. I could feel something, not just an empty leaden dullness.

  I must have cried for fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally, the tears gave out. There was nothing left to grieve for. I took short, shallow breaths and allowed myself to turn my attention back to the TV.

  After a while I nodded off in the middle of the channel four NBC local news stories of murder and mayhem, robbery and rape, Acts of God, police brutality and riots in the inner city. Maybe my consciousness simply shut down in protest against the assaults upon humanity or maybe I was really just sleepy.

  The next morning I checked out of the hotel at six. I carried my bag over to Fifth Avenue and took the bus downtown to Washington Square Park. The weather was sunny and cool, an auspicious start for a moving day. I walked under that magnificent arch, so reminiscent of Paris, and strolled through the park to my new abode. It was early enough that the park was still relatively uncrowded. There were a few chess players and a few skateboarders and a few desultory lovers, worn out from a long night of fluid lubricity.

  The key worked perfectly. I stepped into my new apartment and dropped my bag in the middle of the room. This was my place. My refuge from storm-tossed seas. The Sage of the Garden had said that the prescription for happiness was to live unknown and make your wants few. It was my intention to swallow that prescription.

  I had a breakfast of granola and strawberries in a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue and then strolled about the streets searching for a second-hand furniture shop. When I finally found one, I asked if they could deliver the furniture today and they said, for an extra fifty bucks, they could guarantee it. I bought a bed, a folding table, a couple of folding chairs, a lamp and an armchair. It was a beginning.

  Then I looked for a used book store. There were some books I had always wanted to read but never got around to starting, for many reasons. Too many easy distractions, too much unproductive socializing, the seductive call of the cathode ray tube, the overwhelming desire for sleep. I continued walking until I finally came across a small book store on Christopher Street that appeared dirty and disorganized.

  This would certainly be an adventure. The books were old and haphazardly scattered about like autumn leaves on a lawn. There didn’t seem to be any logical system of organization. Fiction was mixed with non-fiction. Architecture was next to cooking. Travel was all over the store.

  I wandered between the counters for half an hour, breathing in the dust until my nose was almost stopped up and my eyes felt like they were filled with sand, when I realized what the proprietor was attempting to do.

  He had tried to arrange the books by geographical location. That is, all the books that had to do with England, either directly or tangentially, were in one section. They might be travel books on England, biographies of Englishmen, English cook books (God forbid), English history and historical novels, architecture in England. All these books were in piles on the counter, on the floor and stacked in shelves on the wall behind the piles.

  The English section was next to the French, which was next to the Spanish. The Russian section was on the far side of the shop, next to the Japanese. There was a large section on Latin America, which was in front of the United States.

  This book store was better than the whorehouse of all nations. You could browse for hours and take a world tour at the same time.

  While I strolled around the store, a man with closely-cropped hair and a thin beard and moustache glanced at me from time to time. Finally, he came over to me.

  “Is there a book you’re looking for?” he asked. His voice was sweet and sibilant.

  “Are you the proprietor?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Very clever,” I said.

  He gave me a soft smile. “You mean the arrangement of the books?”

  I nodded. “It took me a while to figure it out.”

  “Most people never do. They simply think there is no rhyme or reason to the way the books are organized.”

  “Doesn’t that hurt your marketing efforts?” I was angry with myself for using the corporate jargon, but it was too late to take back the words once they had left my mouth. I vowed that, from now on, no more buzzwords would issue forth from my thought processes. The business world was behind me and would stay there.

  He shrugged. He was a tall, thin man with stooped shoulders. His eyes bulged and he had a protruding Adam’s apple. There was a sadness in his aspect and in the way he spoke.

  “Sales aren’t everything,” he said. “Customers enjoy coming here because they’re always surprised. Isn’t it fun to find the unexpected?”

  “It must be frustrating not to find the book you’re looking for.”

  “Maybe, but then you’ll find a book that interests you more.” He looked at me and waved his hand in an effeminate way. “Don’t you agree that the element of surprise is missing from our lives today? Everything is so homogenized and programmed. For example, political conventions. When I was growing up, they were raucous, unpredictable events. Anything could happen and the unforeseen usually did. Now political conventions are so finely choreographed, they’re as predictable as the passage of the stars in the sky. Where’s the surprise?”

  “Well, if I was looking for A Tale of Two Cities, where would I look?” I said.

  “Yes, I understand what you’re getting at. I have a copy in England and a copy in France.”

  “And what about For Whom the Bell Tolls?”

  “That
’s in Spain,” he said.

  “And where do you have The Old Man and the Sea?”

  He nodded. “That should be in Cuba, but I don’t have a specific section for Cuba, so it’s in Latin America.” His eyes darted about the store. “I suppose I should break down Latin America into individual countries, but I just haven’t been able to get started on that yet,” he said.

  I was beginning to enjoy this game. “Where did you put The English Patient?”

  “That’s a good question. I had a hard time deciding, but I finally put it in Egypt.”

  “Together with Ancient Evenings?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And what about Lord Jim?” I asked him. “Where did you put that?”

  “That’s in Southeast Asia.”

  “You have a Southeast Asian section?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. It’s in the Orient. I haven’t delineated it any more precisely than that, although I suppose I should.”

  “And the rest of Conrad? Where did you place them?”

  He ticked them off in a monotonous tone of voice. “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is in India. Typhoon is in China, Nostromo is in Latin America, The Heart of Darkness is in Africa, The Secret Agent is in England.”

  I was almost jumping with delight. This game was more fun than Make Your Own Sundae. I wanted to try to trick him. But then another customer came into the store and he left me to attend to the newcomer. They conversed in hushed tones, their heads huddled together. I picked up several dusty books and thumbed through them.

  Another prissy man entered the store and the three of them carried on an extended conversation that I couldn’t hear. There was no sound in the shop except for their occasional sibilant whispering. The hum of the air-conditioning provided a muted background to their fricatives. I started reading a copy of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which was in the German section. My mind began to speculate.

  What if this was not a book store, after all, but a front for the Homintern? What if there was a vast international conspiracy or, at least, a city-wide conspiracy? The store didn’t appear to sell many books. What if the store was simply a meeting place for the locals to push their agenda? The notion flitted in and out of my mind like a midnight reverie. Idle speculation, it was.

  The proprietor finished talking to his fellow co-conspirators and walked back toward me. The other two men left the shop together without buying any books, waving goodbye as they did. There seemed to be an unmentionable bond among all three of them.

  “Please forgive me for interrupting our enjoyable conversation,” the proprietor said. “You were asking a question.”

  I extended my hand. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Julian,” he said. He shook my hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. What’s yours?”

  “Tony. Tony Mendes.”

  “Welcome, Tony,” he said. “A lover of books, I see. A man after my own heart.”

  I wasn’t sure that I was a man after his own heart and I hoped he didn’t think so. I could be friends with him but I didn’t want to be a man after his own heart.

  “I’m not what you think I am,” I hastened to say. He couldn’t know this was true in more ways than one. I didn’t want him to get the wrong impression. There was something I wanted to get very clear. I would be a patron, but that was all. There wasn’t going to be any bodily contact or exchange of bodily fluids in any form, other than shaking hands.

  He nodded slowly. “I know that. But you are one of us. A lover of books. Here, it doesn’t matter what you are. You’re still welcome.”

  “I’m glad of that,” I said. “I like this place. It’s like The Library of Babel.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have that story here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not set in a real place. I don’t have any fantasy here,” he explained. “Everything I have in the store is grounded in a real geographic location.”

  I had him now. “What about Lost Horizon?”

  “Yes, that’s in the Orient section.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” I informed him.

  He blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Shangri-La isn’t a real place. It’s a fantasy. By your own rules, it doesn’t belong in your store.”

  He shrugged. “No one’s perfect. Occasionally we make a mistake. The book will be discarded. That’s why we need people like you to come in and correct us.” He smiled at me. “I hope you will come in and correct us from time to time.”

  “I’ll consider it my duty,” I said. I was thrilled that I’d found a place like this. It almost seemed to be an otherworldly fantasy. A book store with its own set of rules. To the devil with the Dewey Decimal System. I had made up my own rules for my new life and now I had found a place to complement it.

  I bought an old paperback copy of Invisible Man (U.S. section) for a dollar and a beat-up copy of Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde (I was informed there was no longer a Great Britain) for two dollars. At this rate, I would have enough cash to continue my Lifetime Reading Program for at least two lifetimes.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Armed with my two books, I ambled over to Washington Square Park and settled down on one of the benches to begin reading. The weather was splendid. Sunny, cool and breezy. And the expanse of green was good for my spirit. I would have to return to my flat later in the afternoon so the moving men could deliver my furniture but, for now, there were several hours of free time and nothing to distract me.

  I’d been reading Invisible Man for about a quarter of an hour, when a large black man sauntered by and seated himself on my bench. At first, I didn’t pay him any attention. But then, using my well-developed peripheral vision, I noticed that he kept stealing glances at me. It was disconcerting, to say the least, but I continued to ignore him.

  Finally, he broke the silence.

  “I’m always happy to see white people readin’ Invisible Man,” he said. He had a deep, booming voice. Almost an operatic voice.

  It was difficult to read his intent. “That a fact?” I said noncommittally. I didn’t know if he was an ax murderer or a Jehovah’s Witness. It was well-known that black people could be very angry. Maybe this man was angry and wanted to rip out my heart and eat it raw to give himself courage for the next lion hunt. I knew they did that.

  “That’s a fact, man,” he said. His tone was pleasant, but that could be deceptive. He might be planning to make me his next victim. “You like the book?”

  This could be a trap for the unsuspecting. “Yes, I do, as far as I’ve read. It’s well-written. He has a good style.”

  He swiveled to stare me right in the face. He looked to be about fifty, but you never could tell with black people. He had longish graying hair and a beard that was halfway to gray. “It’s not like a ordinary book because it’s called a broken-back novel. I don’t want to spoil your pleasure, man, so I won’t tell you no more.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I didn’t know how to respond to that. And I didn’t know what he wanted from me.

  He didn’t say anything else for a few minutes. He just sat quietly staring at the skateboarders. You know how people have a Kirilian aura about them. They give off sort of an essence that either attracts or repels you. For example, when you sit on a train and the passenger next to you makes you feel uncomfortable or, conversely, makes you want to draw closer. Well, this man had a peaceful essence about him. He seemed at ease with himself and his surroundings.

  After a while, he opened a brown paper bag and took out a sandwich and started eating it. The sandwich smelled like egg salad, but I didn’t dare take a look. It could have been chopped-up hearts of victims. Then he seemed to remember that I was sitting next to him, because he turned and offered me half the sandwich.

  “Care for some?” he said. “It’s egg salad. Made it myself, man.”

  It seemed like a friendly gesture, but I wasn’t sure. I might be paranoid, bu
t when someone comes over to you and starts speaking to you without provocation and comments on your reading matter and offers you a sandwich, that seems like grounds for concern.

  “Thanks very much, but I just had breakfast,” I said.

  “Suit yourself, brother. No problem.”

  Now I was his brother. How quickly people formed relationships. It was emblematic of the times. It used to take years to establish a relationship. Now he was sitting next to me on a park bench and I was suddenly his brother.

  He finished his sandwich and wiped his mouth and hands with a paper napkin. Then he got up from the bench and tossed the brown paper bag into a garbage pail. He returned to the bench and sat down without saying anything.

  I continued to read. I was enjoying the book and I hoped he wouldn’t try to engage me in conversation. But why is there an immutable law that your wishes never come true?

  “I got to go to work in a couple hours,” he said. “But I like to come to the park to mellow out first, you know what I mean.”

  I didn’t look up from the book. “I suppose I do.”

  He nodded to himself and sat silently for a while. Then he said, “You play chess?”

  It seemed like an innocuous question. I mean, he wasn’t asking for my credit report or blood type. There didn’t seem to be any harm in answering him. “Not very well,” I admitted.

  “Prob’ly play better than me. It’s a white man’s game, you know, so you got the advantage. Your brain prob’ly wired with all those old chess gambits.”

  There it was again. That white man business. Did this guy have a vendetta against whites and was he planning mischief against me? I felt a chill of fear. But if I got up and started to leave, would he whip out a long, thin knife and slice me into neat sections?

  I sighed. “I hardly think so. I told you I’m not a very good player.”

  “Well, let’s play a game then. You got some time?”

  I didn’t tell him that time was all I had.