Through the Bookstore Window

by Bill Petrocelli

  The future was just another encroaching wall, squeezing in on him like the others. He was face-to-face with the realization that he had nothing to offer anyone. His current job was a hopeless joke, and he could see nothing beyond it.

  And he couldn’t escape into the past. That had been walled off as well, closing the box around him. In some ways, that was the hardest wall to deal with. As lonely as he was in San Francisco, it was nothing compared to the emptiness that had invaded his apartment in Indianapolis. His pictures, his memories, his artifacts—everything about his past was starting to suffocate him. If he was ever going to breathe, he had to get out of there.

  His past life had been a fantasy that had deluded him for over forty years. Jimmy was…Jimmy was what? He was someone different from what he had thought. He would have loved him just as much if he had known. But he didn’t know. And he couldn’t blame his ignorance on those who hadn’t told him. It wasn’t Jimmy’s fault. And it wasn’t Carolyn’s fault either. It pained him to see that poor woman going through such anguish over something he should have already known. What hurt the most was that he hadn’t seen it himself. He’d missed every opportunity to know Jimmy in the way that he really was. Now, there was just a big empty space inside him where everything had disappeared.

  www

  “Did you ever find a book you wanted?”

  It took a second to realize that someone was standing beside him talking. He turned and saw a man standing at the bar who was almost his own age. He struggled for a second to recognize him.

  “You probably don’t remember, but I’m the one who tried to sell you that book the other day over at the bookstore.”

  He suddenly remembered the face.

  “I never did get anything to read. I probably should have.”

  “My name’s Morrie, by the way. What’s yours?”

  “Davey.”

  He thought for a second about giving him a phony name, but why bother? The Perini woman already knew his name. Why keep it from this guy?

  “Are you from around here?”

  Was this guy coming on to him? Anything was possible. But maybe he just wanted to talk.

  “No, I’m from Indiana.”

  Morrie laughed. “That’s kind of a coincidence. We just brought on a young girl from Indiana who is working for us part-time at the store. Her name’s Alexi—I love her enthusiasm.”

  “Did she tell you anything about herself before she came out here?”

  Morrie shook his head. “No, and I didn’t ask her. I figure it was none of my business. I think she’s a niece of our manager, Gina.”

  That little bit of information caught Davey’s attention for a second, but then he realized it must have been a cover story that Gina had concocted.

  “Did you meet Gina when you were in the store?”

  “I think I saw her.”

  Morrie wanted to make chitchat. That was fine. He didn’t mind talking.

  “Are you from around here?”

  “Yeah, I have a house out on the avenues. My wife and I lived there for twenty-three years before she died a few years back. I thought about moving after that, but I just never got around to it. It’s convenient, though, for my bookselling job. I just take the N-Judah train on the Muni line, and I’m right here. I get to work with the younger kids at the bookstore, and I love it. Gina has me organizing reading groups for children. Do you have any children or grandchildren?” Morrie asked.

  The question hit a bit of a nerve. “Yeah, I have a daughter. She’s pregnant, so I guess I’m about to be a grandfather.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  He didn’t feel lucky. The idea of Mandy having a child was just an abstraction—something from another world. He wondered if she would even bother to tell him when the baby was born.

  “I didn’t mean to be too personal, but these kinds of things mean a lot to me. Our only child, Eric, was killed in Iraq by a sniper’s bullet about eight years ago, so Brenda and I missed the entire experience of grandchildren. Now, with her being gone, too, I’m a little envious of people who have that opportunity.”

  “I guess it’s good that you’re able to work with children.”

  Was that the right thing to say? He didn’t know if anyone in Morrie’s situation would want to hear something like that. The conversation had meant nothing to him at first, but as they kept talking, he couldn’t help admiring Morrie’s determination to move on despite the bad luck he’d been dealt. He was beginning to like the guy.

  “Let me buy you another beer.” He reached around to catch the bartender’s attention, but when he looked back, Morrie had a look of shock on his face.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “There,” he pointed at his chest, “inside your coat. Is that a gun you’re carrying?”

  He winced a little, not wanting to make too big a thing of it. Obviously, his shoulder holster and gun had taken this guy by surprise—and not in a good way.

  “Yeah, it’s the pistol that I carried years ago when I was a cop. It’s no big deal. I’ve just gotten into the habit of wearing it. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  But Morrie was up off his stool, his hands in front of him in a defensive position.

  “I’m sorry, but I just can’t be anywhere if there’s a gun around.”

  “Look, I’m sorry.” He tried to tone things down a bit so the others in the bar wouldn’t overhear what they were saying. “I’m not planning…”

  “It doesn’t make any difference what you’re planning,”

  Morrie’s voice wasn’t loud, but his words had a soft, intense bite.

  “If there’s a gun somewhere, sooner or later it will go off. Somebody will be hurt or killed. It may be me—it may be you—it may be someone else. But that doesn’t make any difference. It will kill someone.”

  “It’s just a form of protection.”

  He repeated that line almost by rote. Did he mean that? He tried never to think about why he carried the gun, but he knew it was something more than just warding off attacks.

  “My son was killed by gunfire.” The emotional level in Morrie’s voice was building. “I think I already told you that.”

  He nodded.

  “But you also need to know what happened to my wife.”

  He didn’t expect that, and it hit him like a slap to the face.

  “Four years ago, the ex-husband of one of Brenda’s coworkers walked into the insurance office where she worked and shot his wife. But he didn’t stop at that. He shot three other women in the office, and then he shot himself. Everyone knew he was mentally disturbed. He shouldn’t have been released from the hospital, and he shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near a gun. Nevertheless, he went to a gun show and bought an assault rifle. No questions were asked, nobody did a background check—he just gave the seller his credit card and walked out the door with his killing machine. The man who sold it to him had some remorse, but not very much. He later told the police that ‘gun owners have rights.’”

  Morrie paused for a second.

  “But what I think he really meant to say is that guns have rights. When that attack was over, there were five bodies lying on the floor of the office. They were all dead, but the gun lying next to them was still working fine. It was full of life, probably ready for its next appointment.”

  There was nothing more to say. Morrie was already at the door, heading out into the street. There was a sudden chill in the spot where he had been standing.

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  He didn’t look at the clock, because he might never get back to sleep. But he knew he was in the dead zone—too early to wake up but too late for his heart to stop pounding. He was sticky with sweat. He threw off the wet sheet and blanket and then flipped over the pillow to find a drier side. His T-shirt was drenched. But he knew he’d have to cover himself with something wa
rmer in a few minutes when the sweating began to turn into shivers.

  Would it be life or would it be death? The dark thoughts were building up inside him, trying to grab a foothold. What did he have to fight with? His pistol was over on the dresser where he’d left it. Was it still his faithful companion? When he unstrapped the holster from his shoulder, he’d been afraid to touch the weapon itself. Morrie’s words had shaken him. Did the pistol have an existence of its own? Had it been following him around all these years, ready to spring to life at a moment of its own choosing? Maybe it was capable of creating death on its own terms and then lying amidst its handiwork, getting ready to serve—or be served by—another owner.

  What was it to be? His underpants were as wet as everything else from his midnight battles, but he kept them on. The moistness suddenly felt good, as he let his hand roam around on its own for a few moments, feeling whatever it wanted. It wouldn’t last; it never did. But for the moment that sad bit of pulsing life diverted his attention from the fears that were trying to force their way into his head.

  Was he flirting with life or with death? The pills that almost killed him warned that he had to be “healthy enough to engage in sexual activity.” Was he “healthy”—or maybe “healthy enough”—to do what he was doing? And could anything that lonely and pathetic be thought of as “sexual activity?” And if it was going to kill him, so what? Whatever it was that was going on, he found himself in a place where he hadn’t been for a long time, and he was frightened.

  His fumblings had somehow become longer and more sustained. But after each pang of pleasure, he checked his body for signs of an impending disaster. The threat to his heart would probably be greater as he got closer, but at a certain point he ceased to care. He needed to get there. Memories emerged and were discarded. Faces came and went. Some images—like the pictures back in his apartment—were too toxic to touch. But he kept going. As he got deeper into the almost forgotten rhythms of his body, he kept searching for something. Finally, he seemed to find it, as a pair of long, gentle hands emerged from his subconscious and pushed his own hands aside. And seconds later, there was a voice that was talking to him and urging him to follow the rhythm of those hands. It was a low, melodious voice that he found intoxicating until…until he began to recognize it. Sadly, he wished he hadn’t heard that voice at all. After a twinge of regret, he drifted back to the empty place where he had started.

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  He heard one sharp crack and then another. It sounded like a pair of gunshots, but he wasn’t awake enough to be sure. The noises could have come from the tail end of a dream, but he worried they might have come from outside the building. Light was pouring in around the edges of the blackout curtains in the hotel room. He could tell that he had overslept, but he didn’t realize how late it was until he looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was 10:30 a.m. My God, he thought, I haven’t slept that late since I was a teenager.

  Then he heard a siren. It seemed to be the distant wailing of an ambulance that was several blocks away, but then he realized it was heading north in his direction. It was followed by another siren—this one had a different pitch that he recognized as a police car. The two sounds seemed to be converging about a block to the south of his hotel room.

  His body started moving before his mind was fully engaged. He was sure the sirens were coming somewhere in the vicinity of Hayes Street Books. The gunshots and the siren could have had nothing to do with the store, but his mind didn’t believe that for a minute. He pulled himself up from the bed, searching for the clothes he had scattered around the room. Within a few seconds, he was out the door heading down Gough Street toward the intersection with Hayes. He reached the corner, and all his fears came roaring to the surface.

  Two police cars were already blocking the street, and an EMT vehicle was parked in the middle of the block. The cops had put up a barricade across Hayes Street, forcing cars to turn down toward Market. The barrier at the other end of the block had been moved aside long enough to let an ambulance through, and it was easing its way down the street to where the EMT vehicle was parked. The police were holding people back on the other side of the street, while trying to get them to move in either direction away from the mid-block area. On the north side of Hayes Street—the side with the bookstore—the sidewalk had been cleared completely. Some of the people who had been there were walking toward him.

  He found a kid in his twenties who had just been pushed back into the intersection.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  The kid had a look of confusion on his face.

  “Everyone’s saying that there was shooting at the bookstore and that someone was killed.”

  Alexi

  Morrie wanted her to play a few children’s songs during the weekly story time, so she carried Gina’s guitar downstairs. She loved playing it again, and the chords for the children’s songs came back to her pretty quickly. She felt so good sitting with it in her lap that she convinced Gina to take a picture of her holding it and send it to her mother.

  Gina poked her head around the bookshelves and told her she need to talk to her. But the way she said it was odd. She had just been talking with Gina a few minutes earlier, and there was nothing unusual in her voice. But now there was a look on Gina’s face that she’d never seen before. The two of them walked outside and headed up to the apartment. Gina had a couple of sheets of paper in her hand that probably had something to do with what was bothering her.

  They never got all the way up the stairs. Gina stopped at the landing and said maybe they could talk there. She sat on the top step, thinking she wasn’t going to like whatever it was Gina was going to say.

  “I talked to your doctor this morning, as a follow-up to when we saw her. Something came up, and she wanted to double-check it. Anyway, I had her send me the report.” Gina hesitated for a second. “Alexi, this is going to be okay. We’ll deal with it just like we’ve dealt with everything else.”

  Gina read her the last part of the report, and then she looked back up at her. She thought there might have been a tear in Gina’s eye, but at that point she was crying so heavily herself that she couldn’t see much of anything.

  “We’ve got to talk about this and decide what to do. We’ll have to tell your mother.”

  She nodded yes to everything, but within moments she thought that the room and the hallway were starting to close in on her. She had to get out of there—if only for a few minutes.

  “Gina, can I have that?” She reached for the report that Gina had in her hand. “I’ve just got to take a walk or something. Would that be okay?”

  Gina nodded yes and gave it to her. As she started down the stairs, she was so unsure of her footing that she almost stumbled. When she reached the door to the street, she turned right and walked past the bookstore without going in. She couldn’t stand the idea of talking to any of her new bookseller friends at that moment. She kept going for several blocks, heading up Hayes Street past the point where it began climbing the hill. She stole a look at the medical report sticking out of her shoulder bag, thinking any moment it might burn a hole in the fabric.

  She felt stalked. For the first time since she left Indiana, she thought she could feel him behind her, gaining on her no matter how fast she climbed the hill. She could hear his voice, his phony prayers, his awful whisperings, and she couldn’t get away. She was panting heavily by the time she reached Alamo Square at the top of the hill. She sat down for a second on the cement wall around the park and just tried to think. The unfairness of it all threatened to overwhelm her.

  She started walking again, first down Steiner Street and then turning left on Haight Street, knowing that would take her back to where she started. She couldn’t run away from this, so she’d have to deal with it. Somehow it was going to work out. Five blocks later she was at Octavia Street, just a few blocks from the store. Some residents had installed a communi
ty garden near the spot where an old freeway had been demolished. It had become one of her favorite spots in the city. She found a bench near the sidewalk where she could sit down. She opened the report and tried as calmly as she could to read it.

  A van came screeching to a stop at the curb next to her.

  “Get in the back!”

  She was startled by his words. But the muscular man with the shaved head who had just jumped out of the passenger side of the van didn’t wait for her to respond. He grabbed her by the elbow and forced her into the back, slamming the door behind her. He got back quickly into the passenger’s side, as the van sped off. Her shoulder bag was thrown against the seat as she hit the floor. She got up as far her knees and started screaming as she tried to pull on the side-door handle.

  “Don’t bother trying,” the man in the front yelled at her. He turned around just enough to shove her back into the seat. “It’s locked from up here, so don’t waste your effort. Now shut the fuck up!”

  She squirmed out from under his arm and started to yell even more. She tried to reach down for her shoulder bag, but he grabbed it out of her hand before she could get a grip on it. Then he tossed it on the floor in front of him.

  “Let me out of here!”

  He had a weapon now—a gun with a long muzzle that he swung around and held up to her cheek. His eyes were staring right into hers.

  “I told you to shut up, and I mean it.”