by Ron Arias
So Sandra proposed a trip to London. Maybe the conference would ignite some fires.
“That’s it, sir.”
“Huh?”
“We’re ’ere . . . your address.”
Medina peered through the side window at a two-story brick building set back from the street behind a low, stone wall.
“Wouldda told you before but I wanted me practice.”
“It’s okay,” Medina said, running a hand over his scalp. He stepped out onto the sidewalk and was about to ask her what the fare was, since he hadn’t seen a meter, when the cab pulled away. Puzzled, he watched the boxy black shape turn the corner and disappear.
“Well, thanks for the rub,” he whispered to himself.
He crossed the sidewalk and stepped onto the U-shaped driveway. An assortment of cars, trucks and vans were parked on the grass on both sides of the asphalt all the way around the U to the exit side. Here and there men and women carried boxes, framed paintings, lamps, chairs, bundles of clothes and what looked like drapes.
At the front entrance, Medina waited behind a line of visitors filing past a white-haired man in faded jeans. Medina expected to see a brochure or at least a list of sale items tacked up somewhere.
“Welcome, ladies, gents,” the man said. “Everything’s marked. The clerk in the kitchen will be happy to take your money.”
Medina stepped into the crowded foyer. “Unless there’s nothing of value inside, why no auction, why no professionals? Seems more like a garage sale,” Medina thought.
“How about books?” he called back.
“In the library!” the greeter at the door shouted. “And the attic!”
Medina moved along with the current of bodies, first to the right, then to the left. He let himself be carried into the high-ceilinged dining room, through a long living room and finally into an eddy of people in the wood-paneled library. He glanced around, decided where to start and went to work.
In less than twenty minutes he had checked all the shelves without finding a book he might buy. A conventional collection, it included English standards from Shakespeare to Thackeray, novels, histories, some science, some untranslated Russian and French authors, volumes of Twain and several encyclopedia sets. There were also plenty of works by forgotten country preachers and moralists telling readers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries how to live.
Whoever died and left the estate obviously wasn’t too concerned about appearance or value. On one wall alone, rows of paperback potboilers were mixed in with a number of first-edition Huxleys and Greenes, an early Ulysses, an abridged Don Quixote in English, even a good-condition, first edition of Under the Volcano, unsigned.
Most of the people Medina saw around him seemed to be searching for bargains, not books. They resembled hunting dogs glancing about in quick, jerky motions until they spotted something and sprang forward. A Tiffany lampshade, a pair of brass sconces, a reading chair with claw feet, an end-table, ivory figurines of bearded men, oil paintings depicting sailing ships at sea, stone bookends, brocaded drapery and curtain rods. Amid the helter-skelter of grabbing, only a few people were holding books.
Medina left the room and followed the paper sign that pointed the way up two flights of stairs to the attic. Reaching the topmost landing, he entered a long, dimly lit room with sloped ceilings. In one corner, hidden behind several wicker chairs and a dismantled, four-poster bed, he found a wall of sagging shelves loaded with books and stacks of magazines. He brushed away cobwebs.
Under the light of a dangling, overhead bulb, he squinted to read the titles, now and then pulling something out, blowing off the dust and looking inside the cover. He did this methodically, moving along each shelf from left to right.
In earlier years, when he checked a collection he would concern himself with the tastes of his serious clients, trying to match their interests and requests with purchases made at trade fairs and auctions or through online searches and the booksellers’ grapevine. But with business sagging, his attention to customers had waned; he no longer hunted for treasures to buy and sell. Another impulse seemed to be urging him out of his gloom. Every day at home or at the store he would sit before the computer searching sites, reading articles and even entire books on the screen. He would read until someone roused him.
Medina told Sandra it wasn’t an addiction so much as a mental itch he couldn’t scratch because it wasn’t physical. Several years ago while both were in bed, he tried to explain it to her another way: “It’s like a yearning or craving, not constant but when it’s there, I get this thing . . . this . . . this need to know things, get answers . . . for . . . for . . . ”
“For?”
“Clarity.”
“For clarity.”
“Yes. I want to see it all.”
“All what?”
“You know, how it all happened.”
“Sweetie, I’m not following you.”
“Us! You, me, everybody.”
“Everybody?”
“Me, then. Why am I here?”
Sandra raised an eyebrow.
“Think about it,” Medina said. “Over the centuries millions of humans have lived and died so you and I could be here. We’re the result of everything that’s ever happened. There’s a reason why we’re here and others aren’t.”
“So?”
“Fate.”
“Correct.”
“Luck.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why are we who we are? Why are you you? Why am I me?”
“Not following you. Can this wait?”
“Why are we short, tall, smart, dumb, healthy, sickly, different skin color, different hair, different features?”
“Genes, evolution, how do I know?”
“How did we get where we are?”
“Go to sleep, Marty.”
“Individually, I mean.”
Sandra smacked her pillow with her right hand to puff it up on one side, then plopped her head down.
“Take our ancestors,” Medina said, eyes fixed on the ceiling glow from a night light in a wall socket.
“Marty, can this wait till tomorrow?”
“My ancestors in Mexico, the whole mixture—Indians, Spaniards, Africans, Chinese, even English . . . ”
“I’m sleepy.”
“Who were they?”
“Sweetie.”
“They had full lives–work, kids, dreams, names, thoughts!”
“Marty.”
“Thoughts! What were they?”
“Marty.”
“Imagine . . . ”
“Martin!”
“What?”
“Go to sleep.”
“Right.”
“Sleep.”
“Yeah . . . right.”
And Sandra, barely audible: “Good.”
Medina never got more specific about his itch. He felt the remedy would come to him like a message, like the sudden presence of someone or something long dead or destroyed but still alive. It would come to him if he only kept searching.
At the estate sale in Greenwich, he was on his creaky left knee when his hand reached for a dark brown folder in the middle of the bottom shelf. It wasn’t so much a folder as a collection of pages kept together between leather covers so stiff and cracked that they resembled brittle sheets of dry, thin wood.
He rose and moved to where the light was better and studied the crude, disintegrating threads of the binding as well as a name that had been jaggedly tooled into the surface. The name was Joseph Fields.
When he tried to lift the top cover with his left hand, it came off completely. Only his right hand and arm held the rest of the pages. Medina stared down, then felt the fragile paper with his thumb and forefinger, judging it was made of a rag material. He focused on the lopsided letters at the top of the page, the ink uneven, dark in some spots, light in others:
I Joseph Fields lived one and twenty yeeres as prisoner, slave, servaynt and seaman in Newe Spaine—I tell my storie as
a true record of such life—I am an orphan whose parents and sister died in the plague in Greenwich which I left for London where I was taken into Christ’s Hospital to live and continyud to reade and wryte as my father a scrivener taught me and at twelve yeeres I went to seeke worke at laste finding such in Chatham on Her Majesty’s ship Mynion where she was ankered and later in October 1567 where she departed the port of Plymouth in the Fleete of our generall Master John Hawkyns destyned for Africa and the Indies
Medina glanced up, staring blankly through the musty, dusty attic. A delicious anxiety arose from his stomach and chest. He moved to one of the wicker chairs, wiped off the seat with a handkerchief, sat down and began to read, slowly, growing used to the bumpy writing but accustomed to the old syntax and quirky spellings.
Hours later, he finished reading the fragile manuscript. For a long while he sat in a daze, knowing he had finally scratched the itch. The journal story of Joseph Fields gave Medina a shove toward the clarity he thought he might never have. Closing his eyes, he saw, heard and felt things from another time as alive and fresh as if he were the ship’s boy cast ashore with other starving shipmates.
I kept telling myself to move and keep a fix on the others and on the trees and not on the black muck holding and sucking at my feet and me thinking please God if only I can reach the beach and sand there by the trees where the others are stretched in the shade
“Hello?” a man’s voice called into the attic. “We’re closing.”
Medina opened his eyes and shouted, “Yes! Coming!”
He stood up, the manuscript held to his chest, and hurried to the doorway. At the top of the stairs, he breathed deeply and slowly descended.
Downstairs he found that most of the prospective buyers and the estate’s objects were gone. In the big living room, two women were collapsing foldup chairs and several men were fussing over whatever was in a large box. Medina headed to the kitchen, where an unusually thin, bespectacled man sat at a long wooden table with a receipt pad, metal box, pens and a machine for swiping credit cards. He was listening to a small radio, rooting for his team.
“What did you find?” the man asked in a voice that rattled in a gargling way, as if he’d had an operation on his vocal cords.
“Some old papers,” Medina said with a dismissive air.
“That so?” the man said, lowering the excited voice shrieking from the radio speaker.
Medina shrugged, and the sides of his mouth tilted downward.
The cashier extended a hand. “Let’s have a look.”
Medina hesitated, then set the manuscript on the table, remarking that it was falling apart, that it might be too much trouble to have it properly bound.
“I see that,” the man said.
Medina wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Seems to be some sort of personal journal.”
Just then a young couple entered the kitchen, the man holding two table lamps, the woman toting a child snugly on her hip.
The skeletal man rubbed his forehead. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know. What do you think it’s worth?”
Guessing the man was an antiquarian rube, Medina blurted, “Five pounds!”
The seller shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Medina waited while the seller pondered the matter. “Must be at least seven.”
“Six then,” Medina said.
“Fine,” the man replied, stretching a spectral arm to the radio and turning up the volume with his bony fingers. The young man stepped closer, lampshades raised like elephant ears.
Medina opened his wallet, plucked out the bills and set them on the table.
The old man coughed, stopped the rattle in his throat and then put the bills in the metal box. “Not my real job, you know,” he said. “Actually, I’m in security.”
Medina turned slightly and looked back as if his heist were about to be discovered. The man with the lamp ears focused on the radio.
“My cousin’s the book nut,” the seller continued. “He’s sick and I cover for him.” The man handed Medina a paper bag from a stack of bags behind him on the counter. “Here you go,” he said. “Put the lot in here.”
Medina carefully slipped his prize into the bag, said thank you and edged past the young couple practically on tiptoes. He hadn’t felt such a thrill over a purchase since he was ten and forked over his entire paper-route savings for an early edition of Treasure Island.
By the time he emerged into dusky light from the Hyde Park tube station, he was desperate to relieve himself. Still hugging the bag with the manuscript, he jogged on the sidewalk to a street corner with a public restroom sign. In minutes he stood at a urinal, blissful and oblivious. When he finished he tried zipping up his trousers with one hand while gripping the bag with the other hand. Then he heard footsteps. He started to turn around and then everything stopped.
The next morning he woke up in a brightly lit hospital room. Woozy, he looked up and slowly focused on Sandra’s face staring at him.
“Welcome back.”
“Wha . . . ?”
“Clunked on the head . . . robbed.”
Medina nodded and slowly gazed around the room. Sunlight filtered through partially closed blinds, a blank television screen hung from a wall. On the right side of his bed, wires attached to his chest led to a blipping heart monitor and screen.
Sandra said a jogger found him unconscious on the rest-room floor.
Medina tried to sit up, and she gently pushed him back. “Easy—you have a concussion,” Sandra said, adjusting the pillows behind his bandaged head. “They found your wallet in the bushes. No money, no credit cards.”
“What about a bag? Did they find a bag?”
“No, no bag.”
“A paper bag.”
“Nothing about a bag.”
Medina’s eyes glistened and his breathing turned short and shallow.
In moments, a nurse entered the room and glanced at the monitor. “Have a problem, do we?”
“Marty,” Sandra said, “calm down. I cancelled the cards. Nobody had used them.”
The nurse leaned over the bed and placed his hands in hers. “Mister Medina, you have to relax. Your heart’s racing.”
Medina looked at the ceiling, one tear dropping onto the sheet.
“Try closing your eyes,” the nurse said. “Think of a pretty place, somewhere you can stretch out and relax, somewhere beautiful, peaceful, a relaxing place, the perfect place to relax. Just imagine it . . . and relax, relax.”
Sandra frowned and stared at her husband, whose strained expression seemed to be softening.
“Go on,” the nurse said in a soft, sweet voice. “Try. Think of the perfect place, sweet and comfortable, a paradise just for you.”
Medina lowered his head onto the pillow, eyelids fluttering. The nurse repeated herself and soon the agitated patient stopped squeezing her hands. He could see the beach and then hear Joseph Fields crawling onto land: smooth sand on my face and hands and arms and then onto this soft warm place out of the muck and water and onto the beach and then dear god moving into the shade under the trees with the others.
Police searched trash bins and a wide area around the rest-room. They questioned the usual park denizens, from bird watchers to vagrants, and followed up on several reports of empty shopping bags found in the area. And a broken cell phone thought to be Medina’s was found in nearby bushes, but Medina had always been device-free, stubbornly vocal about being untethered from the digitized world.
The assault and theft briefly made the news, generating sympathetic letters and online comments, although several writers referred to the “alleged manuscript” of a middle-aged man who’d been bopped on the head.
Medina himself appeared uncertain about the specifics of the stolen item, which only fed the impression that he had invented the manuscript theft. In his first and only interview, he said, “It’s not worth much and maybe it’s only value is nostalgic, but all I ask is that the person who has it, please, I be
g you, give it back.”
A police spokesman explained that the manuscript could be returned anonymously by simply wrapping it in paper with the word Medina on the outside and depositing the item in a public post box. The Royal Mail would then forward it by special delivery to the Los Angeles book dealer.
Local antiquarians familiar with the eccentricities of the rare-book fringe, generally believed Medina was either delusional and invented the theft or had truly lost something of great value and didn’t want to tip his hand to the thief.
Sandra kept doubts to herself, although after her husband’s four-day hospital stay, she cheerfully helped him retrace his movements on the afternoon of the estate sale. But they could not find the cab-driving phrenologist, Mary Clear. The Dagenham address and telephone number on her card were bogus, and the London Taxi Driver’s Association had no record of such a driver. Medina spoke to a dozen or so Greenwich cab drivers, describing a freckle-faced young woman with wild red hair. “She’s a fake, mate,” one driver bluntly told him. Medina avoided mentioning that she had read his head; earlier when he’d told police about this, some detectives had chuckled, inferring something else.
Medina and Sandra also cruised the streets of Greenwich in a licensed cab until he finally spotted the place where he thought the sale was held. The old structure looked empty, ghostly. A kitchen window was broken and bits of paper and junk mail were scattered over the driveway and on the dry grass.
“This is it,” Medina said when they reached the entrance. He stepped around a patch of weedy rose bushes and peered into the kitchen through a dirty pane. “Right there. I bought it right there from a skinny old man who didn’t have a clue what he was selling me.”
“Marty, let’s go.”
“I was standing right there in the kitchen!”
“Come on,” Sandra said, turning toward the street. She waved an arm forward as if to pull him after her. “Nothing’s here.”
Martin Medina never did recover the manuscript. He and Sandra returned to Los Angeles, where their son helped them sell the bookstore to a coffee shop chain that needed classics and leather-bound volumes for decoration. Medina sold the rest, keeping only a few treasures.