He chortled, sprinkling his food with hair dust. “There are some horrible books out there, no question.”
“It’s not the fact that bad books exist,” I said. “That I can deal with. But there’s so much good out there, it breaks your heart when they just sit there on the shelf, all lonely and unwanted.”
Aubrey nodded as he scooped another suspicious morsel into his mouth. “Yeah, and meanwhile, you manage to sell three Star Wars novels and two Karen Robards. It’d be funny if it weren’t so goddamn tragic.”
“You think you got it bad, you have no idea,” said Warren, walking in behind me. He sat next to Aubrey, hoisting his size fifteens to rest on the tabletop. “Take a look at this.” He tossed a glossy paperback onto the table. The Love Market , written by Edward Miller, published under the imprint of Munroe Purvis himself. Aubrey gave a cry and shielded his Wallace from the unholy taint this book was sure to imbue on any literature within its strike zone. “I know, I’ve already finished the first fifty pages on my washroom break. Better than Pepto, two pages in and the shit just flowed out of me.” I daintily picked the book up by a corner and read the back cover, taking care to to touch as little of it as possible.
Once again, Munroe Purvis brings you a story guaranteed to tug at the heartstrings, a gut-wrenching tale of love gone awry, of beliefs displaced, and of the unbreakable bonds of family.
Freddy Conrad thought he married the woman of his dreams, when he one day awakes to the ugly truth of who his wife really is. Despite being pregnant with twin boys, Edith has turned away from Freddy and taken up a volunteer position with an abortion clinic. Torn between the woman he loves and the need to shield his unborn children from her insanity, Freddy takes a step that may lose him his wife, but may save his soul.
“Edward Miller’s The Love Market made me realize who I truly am, and I hope his extraordinary novel affects you as strongly as it has me.” — Munroe Purvis
I laid the object back down. “Wow, it just screams quality, doesn’t it?”
“Yes indeed, and it reads even worse, and now I ,” announced Warren as he brusquely slid the book off the table, “ I have to lead an evening seminar on the merits of this bestseller. I mean, what could I possibly say? What does Freddy represent? Does the novel function as both a story and as propaganda? Aubrey, you’ve done this before, got any pointers?”
“Cram their gullets with cake, and they’ll be satisfied. Believe me, they have no desire to talk of themes or subtext, they all just want to gush over how wonderful Munroe is for opening this world to them. Keep the coffee flowing, try to keep your nausea down, and you’ll be fine.”
“Is it always like this?” I asked the pair. My first day, and the despair over my choice of lifepath was already building.
“Well, you’ve kind of entered the store in a transition phase,” Aubrey said. “Page recently let someone go, and we’re all a bit upset over it. I think you’ll feel resentment from some around here, but it’ll pass. It’s not your fault, after all.” I nodded, remembering the blast of frosted air I received from others during the morning meeting when Emily’s name was mentioned. “You getting on all right, otherwise?” asked Aubrey.
I walked to the vending machine, opting for the least unhealthy chocolate bar and bag of chips available. “Otherwise, I’ve been lost all morning. This place is gargantuan. I don’t think I’ve seen one other employee since we’ve opened.”
“Oh, we exist, you just have to know where to look,” Warren said. “God, am I hot.” He began to take off his vest, which sat atop a sizable bulky black sweater.
“I’m not surprised,” I remarked as he pulled the sweater over his head. “Why are you wearing DEAR JESUS GOD WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOUR ARMS?”
I should say at this point, Eric et al, that I am not normally the sort of person who points out another person’s deformities in a deafening and ignorant fashion. Like most people, I downplay the physical limitations of others, taking pains to treat a person as an individual, composed of the same emotions and needs as the rest of humanity.
However, what Warren suffered from was so clearly not natural, not typical, not in any way a standard deviation from the norm that I blurted out my exclamation before realizing the possible offensiveness of its content. Nevertheless, I stand by my startled little-girlish scream. Warren was a freak. His sizable arms, now bare to the fluorescent lights, revealed an array of colours and ridges never conceived by the human body. The hands and wrists were pink and healthy, untouched; beyond the wrists, gangrenous green meshed with sickly black, while veins of red pulsed around scaly patches of scarlet. It all melded into a shade I shall charitably describe as ochre, until disappearing beneath his undershirt.
Aubrey looked stumped, but composed. “Jeez, dude, what was it this time?”
“A mixture of natural and artificial ingredients, including the distilled venom of the queen bee,” Warren said. He pirouetted his right arm in the air admiringly. How he kept from shrieking in pain is beyond me.
“You’re allergic to bees, aren’t you?” Aubrey asked. Warren drooped his head timidly, letting his arm dangle loosely beside him. “Jesus, bro. You could have been killed, idiot. Didn’t you think to ask beforehand?”
“Rent was due,” he said. “Besides, it’s not as bad as it looks.”
Aubrey’s eyes bulged. “Should it be so . . . bluish?”
“You should have seen it two days ago; it looked like an over-stuffed kielbasa. Black, too. But the hallucinations have subsided, that’s something.”
Aubrey turned to the corner of the room where I had busied myself with cowering in terror. “Mr. Krall here, you see, earns extra money offering up his body for science. I have offered counsel to him in this regard, even offered him a place to stay should eviction become imminent, but as you can plainly see . . .” He motioned toward Warren, who was now gaily waving his arms in my direction, visibly enjoying my discomfort.
I swallowed down my gorge. “I don’t mean to pass judgement, Warren, live and let live and all that, but good Christ that can’t be healthy.”
A mild shriek rose from the lounge doorway. “God, put those away before Page sees them!” said Danae as she entered, tut-tutting disapprovingly. Warren acquiesced, donning his sweater while muttering about the heat. “Well, you should have thought of that before you came to work, numb-nuts,” she scolded, retrieving a bag lunch from the fridge and plopping down next to Aubrey.
“Well, I’m sorry, Danae, but these things show through anything lighter than a parka,” Warren said, a wide grin on his mug. “They glow in the dark, too. But, good news, the company paid out to keep it quiet, so I’m set for a while.” His sweater on, he appeared more or less normal, for a seven-foot-tall giant.
Danae pulled a yogurt carton from her lunchbag. “What does this make, now, eight?”
“Nine,” Warren bragged. “I have been injected, swabbed, lathered, scrubbed, boiled, rubbed, and rolled in nine yet-to-be-released beauty and medicinal products.”
Aubrey rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I thought you had sworn off your crusade after your testicles retreated.”
“They dropped back out a few weeks later,” he groused. Warren’s gaze latched onto my potato chips, which I had all but ignored in the excitement. “You gonna eat all those, Thomas?”
I tossed the bag aloft. “Enjoy. I’m not as hungry as I thought.” Warren snagged it with one lengthy arm, shovelling its contents into his mouth with alarming speed and precision.
“Nice manners, buddy,” said Danae. “Oh, hey, let me ask you guys something. Is it more depressing that Britney Spears can get a book published, or that people actually want to read the damn thing?”
“Uch, don’t get me started,” said Aubrey. “Thomas, you have an opinion?”
“Well, much as I hate the fact that a person who has never read a book thinks she can write one, there’s no way she wrote it by herself, so I’m not so much depressed as annoyed by that. But someone wanting to
shell out thirty-five bucks plus tax for such drivel, well, that makes me weep for our species.”
“Fuckin’ A, dude,” said Warren.
“Nail on the head,” agreed Aubrey. “Oh, I got one. Who’s got it worse, Jane Austen for being shelved next to Jean Auel, or Steinbeck for having to share shelf space with Danielle Steel?”
“Steinbeck,” Danae said. “Not because Steel’s any worse than Auel, although that’s arguable, but because Steel’s fan base is so much larger. Both are popular, but Steel’s more prolific, so on average more people visit Steel’s area, and so there are that many more opportunities to see and ignore Steinbeck than Austen.”
“Steinbeck was selling pretty about a year ago,” Aubrey reminded us. “Oprah.”
“Well yeah, but until that, you couldn’t force people to read it. If Steinbeck were water, they would have died of thirst rather than take a sip, at least until Oprah came down from on high and ordered the acolytes to drink.”
“See, this is what I think,” I ventured, wanting to get in on the conversation and impress them with my insights. “You ever been inoculated?” All three nodded. “Okay, so what is an inoculation anyway? It’s a tiny virus. You’re intentionally making your body sick in order so that you can fight sickness later.”
“This isn’t going to be a government conspiracy thing, is it, Thomas?” Aubrey wondered. “Not that I have anything against that sort of obsession, I’m just wondering how we got on this topic.”
“No, follow me on this. This is why people cannot summon up the gumption to challenge themselves in their reading habits. Literature is a virus, see. For whatever reason, parental insistence, an attractive school librarian, no TV, whatever, we were inoculated at a young age against literature. Sure, it made us all cry at first, having to concentrate our fragile minds, but after a while the body adapted. My mom made me read Hop on Pop , and now I can read Pynchon without flinching. Others, however, the inoculation didn’t take, or they never got the shot and now they’re too old to survive the initial needle, and consequently they’ve remained allergic to literature, they have no built-up immunity. Sure, they can still take the low-grade fever viruses okay, they can survive a Mary Higgins Clark with no serious after-effects, and maybe they even like the thrill of pushing their tolerance by reading a Crichton or a Dan Brown, something that makes them feel like they’re smart. But dare to put a Pynchon or a Helprin or your Foster Wallace there under their noses and wham! Anaphylactic shock. The nervous system can’t take it and shuts down, and the victim is paralyzed, and must now suffer a Who’s the Boss? marathon on TBS to recharge their batteries.” I broke off my rant as the others seriously considered this.
“So that’s why the customers run from us,” Danae said. “It’s not from annoyance at our hyper selling techniques and eagerness to please, it’s a visceral, instinctual reaction to what we represent. We’re carriers of the plague.”
“I like it,” Warren said. “Makes perfect sense. Typhoid Warren, that’s me.”
“While it may make some sense logically,” Aubrey offered, “the analogy may serve to turn people off the art form further. ‘Literature is a virus’ is hardly the slogan you’d want to promote too actively, it might ensure that parents never introduce their children to the written word. Think of how it would look on a T-shirt, it’d be a relations disaster. We can’t change the world, much as we’d like to. All we can do is try and keep the good books out of the sales racks, try to keep the authors afloat.”
“It makes me cry, seeing good books get remaindered,” Danae said. “Kind of like watching a friend fail miserably at something.”
We looked at one another across the expanse of the table, a vague unhappiness permeating the spaces between us. I felt the sudden urge to link hands, form a circle, start chanting to ward off the encroaching darkness. Instinctively, I fingered the meds in my pocket.
Danae broke the silence. “Oh, since we’re on the subject, guys, I’ve got a perfect montag for the next meeting.”
“Oh, yeah, me too,” gushed Warren, suddenly perked up. “It’s a sweet ’tag, when’s the next meet?”
“Shut up, the both of you,” whispered Aubrey viciously. “Oh, man, sorry,” said Warren, glancing at me. “Wasn’t thinking.”
“Sorry, I forgot, sorry,” Danae said. She blushed as Aubrey scowled at her, lowering her head, a red stain appearing from her neck to hairline. A good colour on her. The three of them busied themselves with their food.
“What?” I asked. I was on the receiving end of a very cold front. “What’s up?”
“Nothing, friend,” said Aubrey. “Nothing at all. Just . . . stuff between us, that’s all. Right, guys?” Warren grunted into the chip bag. Danae pensively contemplated her yogurt cup.
“What stuff?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light. Aubrey studied a particularly vexing paragraph. Danae fished Patrick Ness’s The Crash of Hennington from her purse. Warren continued inhaling my bag of Old Dutch Bar-B-Q. I waited under an oppressive passive-aggressive umbrella of silence, feeling left out. “Well,” I started. Danae jumped at the noise. “Much as I’d love to continue this atmosphere of rejection, I guess I’ll go check the shelves, see if anything strikes my fancy.”
“What do you read, friend?” asked Aubrey, his face submerged in Wallace’s prose.
“Whatever strikes a nerve,” I said testily. I was ridiculously offended, somehow, that these strangers had secrets they didn’t want to share with me. “I’ll read whatever I choose. If, of course, that’s all right with the three of you.” I stalked out, immersing myself in the territory of words outside.
After work ended for the day, having been instructed by Danae on how to search for unavailable books and deal with difficult customers, i.e. keep agreeing with them until they’ve worn themselves out, and exhausted from the unending barrage of best-forgotten consumer questions (a highlight: “Where are the books where animals solve crimes?”) I fled into the night, an Auster wedged under my arm. I passed Aubrey on the way out, saw him nodding approvingly at my reading material, and decided to play the small-minded victim and snub him.
I walked home, curled up in my papasan, cracked open The Book of Illusions , and did my best to forget the day, forget the past, forget that this was undoubtedly the first day of the rest of a very long, dull, disappointing life. I should have quit then, but the lure of more free books brought me back the next day.
I think I’ll leave on a cliffhanger. My fingers are tired, and Detective Daimler is undoubtedly itching to get this letter to the shrinks down at Quantico to glean some fresh insights into my psychosis.
Yours truly,
Thomas
DOCUMENT INSERT: Verbatim FBI tape recorder transcript. Speaking: FBI Detective Amanda Daimler (primary), RCMP Detective Mel George, Doctor Barbara Carella, Munroe Purvis.
DAIMLER: Mr. Purvis, can you hear me? Can he hear me?
CARELLA: I’m sorry, he comes and goes, I told you.
DAIMLER: Can you give him something? Wake him up?
CARELLA: I’m afraid he’s very critical at the moment. I couldn’t risk it. I think you should come back. I’ll call if there’s any change in his condition.
DAIMLER: Yes, I guess — wait, his eyes are open.Mr. Purvis, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me. Mr. Purvis, my name is Detective Daimler, I’m an agent with the FBI. Detective George with the RCMP is also present. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you’re up to it.
PURVIS: Hurts.
DAIMLER: Doc?
CARELLA: I’m sorry, Mr. Purvis, I cannot increase the dosage. This is a bad idea, Detective, he’s in no condition —
DAIMLER: No, we need to do this now. Mr. Purvis, can you answer a few questions?
PURVIS: Yes.
DAIMLER: Good. We’ll go slow, okay? Can you tell me anything about what happened to you?
PURVIS: Where am I?
DAIMLER: You’re in Winnipeg, sir, St. Boniface
General Hospital.
PURVIS: What happened?
DAIMLER: Has no one told him anything?
CARELLA: No, I thought it best you tell him.I’ve had my hands full with the press.
DAIMLER: Right, keep them out of here, all right? We’re going to put an officer outside to keep people out. Can you do that, Mel?
GEORGE: No problem.
DAIMLER: Mr. Purvis, you’ve been in a coma for two weeks, do you remember anything?
PURVIS: Weeks?
DAIMLER: Yes, two weeks. After your program, your show in Winnipeg, do you remember what happened?
PURVIS: Yes.
DAIMLER: Afterward, your bodyguard, Mr., uh,
Daly, he said he took you straight to your hotel room. Is this correct?
PURVIS: Yes.
DAIMLER: You were last seen going into your room at approximately eleven-twenty or thereabouts. Is this accurate?
PURVIS: Yes.
DAIMLER: Mr. Daly says you were gone from the room when he checked in on you the next morning. Where were you, Sir?
PURVIS: Where?
DAIMLER: Mr. Purvis, you were discovered on the sidewalk in front of this hospital at approximately eight o’clock in the morning, the day after your show. We’re checking to see if there are tapes, can you tell us what happened?
PURVIS: Hospital?
DAILMER: Yes, sir, the hospital. Can you tell me where you were? Who did this to you?
PURVIS: Oh, that bitch.
DAILMER: What bitch, Sir? Sir? Mr. Munroe, who is the bitch? Sir? Doc?
CARELLA: He’s out again. I’m sorry, I should never have allowed this. He needs to be kept stable, please, I need you to leave now.
DAIMLER: Damn it, we need —
CARELLA: This man is in tremendous pain,Detective. He needs rest. I’m sorry, but you need to go. I will call you when he’s able.
DAIMLER: No need, I’m not leaving. I’ll be sitting in the corner until he wakes up.
TO: [email protected]
Shelf Monkey Page 8