by Amy Meyerson
“Maybe tonight I can take you to dinner, a thank-you for letting me stay?” I suggested. I still hadn’t gotten to tell her about any of the clues Billy had left for me.
“I have to help Jenny. She sold a painting or something.” Joanie’s other sister was named Jackie. Joanie, Jenny and Jackie. The similarity had no great significance. Their mom had simply been distracted, too uninspired to come up with three distinct names.
“Tomorrow, then?”
“Chris has the night off, so we’re going on a date.” She squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time to hang.” Joanie played hopscotch with the fig trees’ roots as she headed to her car. She stopped abruptly. “I forgot. I mean, I remember figuring out the bus route with you, but I forgot his bookstore was in Silver Lake.”
“Have you been to Prospero Books?”
She shook her head slowly. “If I’d remembered that was the name...”
“It’s not your fault, Joanie.”
She solemnly bowed her head before her slender figure disappeared behind the fig trees. It wasn’t her responsibility to remember Prospero Books. It wasn’t her responsibility to remember Billy, either.
The cloud cover had dissipated and the day was heating up. I gathered my things and walked toward the store. At the base of the hill, the reservoir glistened aqua. In the dog park beside the reservoir, men with geometric tattoos smoked cigarettes as their mutts wrestled in the open terrain. A concrete divide separated the traffic on Silver Lake Boulevard from the path around the reservoir. I leaned against it, letting the wind knot my hair as the cars raced past.
I took the riddle out of my pocket.
Science is at the root of all life but especially mine. Made of fibres, muscles and brains, eight-feet tall and strong with lustrous black hair and teeth of pearly white, but you would not find me attractive despite these luxuriances.
I tried to approach these words as if for the first time, emptying my mind of assumptions. Fibres, muscles and brains. That line meant something. I Googled famous anatomists and one name stood out: da Vinci. Was he leading me to The Da Vinci Code? It was certainly popular enough, but it didn’t fit with the other canonical novels.
One of the men in the dog park interrupted my musing, joking loudly as he crushed his cigarette under his canvas sneaker. I was overthinking it. I didn’t know how not to overthink it. I tucked the clue back into my wallet and continued the trek to Prospero Books.
* * *
As my days at Prospero Books unfolded into a week, I discovered the patterns of the store, none of which led me to the next title in Billy’s hunt. The store’s activity followed the sun: slow hours in the morning’s June Gloom, afternoons bustling with the day’s heat, the crowd dwindling as dusk darkened into the empty hours of night, lasting until the next morning when the cycle began again. It was a steady life, so unlike the one Billy had had when I’d known him.
Malcolm came to accept me like one does a stray cat, a feral but presumably harmless animal that won’t go away so eventually you give it some milk, hoping it won’t give you rabies. He’d wave hello, otherwise keeping his distance, saying little to me beyond one-to two-word sentences—See you. Thanks. Back soon—when I’d started covering the desk during his lunch break or meetings with publishers’ sales representatives. During those quiet hours without Malcolm, I perused Booklog, the store’s point of sale system, teaching myself how to search the inventory until I could locate memoirs I didn’t know, novels I hadn’t read. After a few blunders with the credit card machine, I managed to ring up customers all by myself. By the end of the week, I could take money in paper or electronic form, although the money was never enough. Malcolm and I didn’t talk about the store’s monetary troubles again, and I sensed that Malcolm wanted to remain in denial. But each day we didn’t talk about the finances, each day the doors stayed open, the lights remained on, the salaries were paid, we were amassing an even greater debt, one that at some point we wouldn’t be able to avoid any longer. The end of September was three and a half months away, which seemed longer than it was. It would sneak up on us, an assassin in waiting.
Each night, I would lie awake on Joanie’s soft couch, listening to helicopters in the distance and the occasional car huffing and puffing up Joanie’s steep block. I would try to picture those pearly whites, that lustrous hair. Joanie had plans most evenings at clubs with private memberships and bars where you weren’t allowed to use cell phones on account of the famous clientele. She always invited me, but I’d been to enough of those networking-slash-socializing-slash-ego-deflators with Joanie to know I would feel out of place. Late at night, I would hear her boyfriend, Chris, tiptoe in after his bar shift, having to eat dinner in the dark kitchen because his living room had become my bedroom. I was overstaying my welcome, but I couldn’t return to my parents’ home, breathing in their secrecy and skirting the conversations we couldn’t have. I couldn’t stay in Billy’s apartment with the ghosts of a woman I’d never met and the uncle I’d known so distantly I couldn’t even solve a riddle he’d written expressly for me.
And I was no closer to solving the riddle when I was in Prospero Books. I’d wander up and down the aisles, my fingers grazing hundreds of titles, without reaching for any of them. When Malcolm tried to convince two teenage girls to buy Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Girl, Interrupted, I listened as though their conversation might hold the answers I needed. The girls popped their gum and stared at him like he was speaking Ancient Greek.
“Don’t you have anything interesting?” one asked.
Malcolm made a valiant case for Joan Didion—did any of her essays discuss teeth?—for the manic ways of Susanna Kaysen—were any of the girls on her ward unattractive despite their luxuriances? I was grasping for anything—but they continued to look at him like he was some alien species until he handed them The Hunger Games.
“OMG I loved the movie,” the other smacked.
“You’ll like the books even better,” he promised.
“Baby steps,” I advised Malcolm after they left. “You want them to be people but they’re teenagers.”
When a deliveryman arrived with several boxes of books, Malcolm called me over to the front desk. “Might as well make yourself useful.”
He opened one of the boxes. It was filled with used hardbacks in good condition.
“Billy ordered them before... We don’t log used books into the system. We just file them.” He put the box behind the counter and waved me toward the art section. “Billy had a knack for knowing what was valuable.” Malcolm flipped through a hardback on art deco in Los Angeles. “He bought this for three dollars.” The book was on sale for twenty-five. In Malcolm’s tale of Billy’s business acumen, I saw that maybe he was beginning to trust me, at least with the trivial details of Billy’s life.
He grabbed a used copy of The Naked and the Dead. “Other used books he’d buy ’cause he liked the title or the person selling it. We’ll take books in near-mint condition, but not ones that are obviously new, nothing that seems like it was stolen from another bookstore. There are some stores that will do that. Not Prospero Books,” he said proudly.
I flipped through the Norman Mailer novel, searching for an eight-foot-tall character. The sale price of the novel was marked on the top corner of the copyright page.
“Over ten dollars for a used book?” I asked.
“With tax, it comes to $11.10. The day Mailer died, November 10. If the book had something to do with religion, Billy would make the price come to $6.66. Politics, $9.11. If the customer got it, he’d give them the book for free.”
We walked back to the front desk, where Malcolm pulled five hardbacks out of the box. He handed the box to me. “Most used stuff goes upstairs. If you’re looking for something to do, you can go through them, see if there are any titles we’ve sold out of new copies and bring them downstairs.”
“Do
esn’t that take forever?” I asked.
“It does.” He smiled, and in his invitation for my free labor, I thought that maybe he was willing to work with me. More likely, he was simply trying to keep me busy.
“No more free books,” I said as I carried the box upstairs.
I filed the used books in the storage closet with the other duplicate copies, none of which had been moved downstairs during my week at Prospero Books. It was a tough squeeze, filing more unwanted titles into the packed shelves. I didn’t spot any books about scientists. Nothing that made me go, Eureka!
I should have found the next clue already. I should have understood where science and fibres and eight-feet tall was supposed to lead me. The answer to Billy’s riddle had to be somewhere in Prospero Books, but that was the thing about the bookstore. There were too many books that didn’t sell, too many titles the next clue may have hid behind.
* * *
By the end of the week, it was time to move out of Joanie’s bungalow. While Joanie would never have asked me to leave, I sensed the tension between her and Chris, heard the hushed conversations behind their closed bedroom door. I still felt like I was being watched every time I stepped inside Billy’s apartment, like something might jump out from the shadows. Or someone. I tried to tell myself that staying there might make me less intimidated by his past. It might even help me solve his riddle. At least, I hoped it would. I’d run out of other options.
Joanie helped me lug my suitcase up the creaky stairs to Billy’s apartment. We stood outside the door catching our breath.
“You ready?” Joanie asked.
I opened the door. The humming of the overhead light echoed through the spacious living room.
“This place is incredible.” Joanie’s eyes danced across the leather couch and mahogany desk. “You made it sound like a crypt or something.”
“Will you stay with me tonight? I know that’s silly, but I don’t think I can do this alone.” I bit my lower lip, waiting for her to say yes.
Joanie squeezed my arm. “Wouldn’t you know, I just happen to have my overnight bag in the trunk.” She darted downstairs, returning moments later with an afghan her grandmother had crocheted, a small duffel bag and a jar of the volcanic mud mask we used to steal from her mom in high school.
I hugged her. “Have I told you you’re absolutely, positively my favorite person in the world?”
“Only for as long as I can remember.” Joanie spread the afghan over Billy’s leather sofa. The blanket’s green hues calmed the room. The space didn’t look like mine, but it looked less like Billy’s.
We sat on the couch in our pajamas, eating Thai food from the container. It felt like old times, before she moved in with Chris, before I moved in with Jay, when we would stay up all night talking about the small injustices of our jobs, the ways our bodies had and would continue to betray us, the people from high school who had become inexplicably successful, all the faraway parts of the world we planned to visit together, and it was almost enough to make me forget the bedroom hidden behind its closed door, the photograph on Billy’s dresser. Almost enough.
Joanie hummed as she mined the take-out container for pieces of chicken.
“You aren’t at all creeped out?” I asked her.
“Of what, the expensive furniture? It is a little too clean for my comfort but there aren’t any spirits here, I can sense it.”
“So, you’re Joanie the medium now?”
“More like Joanie the ingenue.” Joanie allowed the smile she’d been hiding to surface. She was happier than I’d seen her in a long time. “I got it. Irina.” Joanie beamed, talking all at once about the well-known actresses who had signed on to play Olga and Masha, the older sisters in The Three Sisters, the director who in her estimation was a visionary. “It’s going to be big.”
“Joanie, that’s amazing.” My tone was a little less enthusiastic than it should have been, so I tried again. “I’m so excited for you.” It still came out flat. It was an involuntary feeling I had every time Joanie shared good news with me—when she got into acting school, when she met Chris, when they moved in together, when she’d started spending more time with her sisters—a feeling it took me a long time to admit was jealousy that her life progressed without me.
Joanie dangled noodles into her mouth, lost in thoughts of the Prozorov sisters and Chekhov, her daydreams threatening to close her off from me completely when I wanted her here, in Billy’s apartment, in his quest, in the details of his life that were becoming known to me. I walked over to Billy’s closed bedroom door. My hand hovered over the doorknob. I inhaled deeply and twisted it open.
The room had been closed for a week and smelled mustier than I remembered. Muted light from streetlamps on Sunset outlined the furniture. In the almost-dark it looked like a bedroom, nondescript, impersonal, nothing to fear, yet I still felt a chill down my spine. I braved the distance to the dresser, grabbed the photo, and raced out as quickly as I could.
“This is Evelyn.” I showed Joanie the photograph and explained what little I knew about Evelyn, that she and Billy were married before I was born, that she’d died, that she was Mom’s childhood friend.
“She’s gorgeous,” Joanie said. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” There was an edge to her voice. It wasn’t just me. Joanie felt that she might be losing me, too. Only it was different. I wasn’t cocooned in my own world; at least, I didn’t want to be.
I found my wallet and handed Joanie the riddle. She unfolded it like she was unwrapping a present, careful not to tear the paper.
“‘Science is at the root of all life but especially mine. Made of fibres, muscles and brains, eight-feet tall and strong with lustrous black hair and teeth of pearly white, but you would not find me attractive despite these luxuriances.’” She looked at me quizzically.
“I got that from Billy’s doctor.” I expected her to ask again why I hadn’t wanted her help sooner, but she was lost in the mystery of the riddle.
Joanie paced the living room, hand on chin as though she was acting out a scene: young woman thinking. “Pearly white has got to mean something. And eight feet.” She held her arms straight above her head. “Is this eight feet? It’s superhuman.” She stumbled around the room with her hands raised, mimicking an impossibly tall person. Her legs were stiff, as though she walked without knees, and watching her plod across the room, it hit me—a person impossibly tall and superhuman, a person made of science, or rather, a creature made of science.
I sprinted downstairs and found the light switch. Joanie was right behind me. The store looked different at night, almost neon green without the natural light. I scanned S in Classics. Nothing there. Nothing in Literary, either.
“Miranda, what is it?” Joanie asked. “What’d you figure out?”
I dashed behind the desk and waited as the sluggish computer churned and sputtered, the screen waking from its slumber. My fingers were clumsy across the keyboard as I typed the title into Booklog’s search engine, adding extra letters, requiring me to delete and start again.
“Frankenstein. In science fiction,” I shouted to Joanie, and she rushed over to the section, pulling down a glossy black book, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in white across the cover. Joanie leaned over me as I opened the novel to peer inside.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Caltech was a twenty-minute drive from Silver Lake. Two students sat in the hallway outside Dr. Cook’s office, textbooks open in their laps.
“Is Dr. Cook in?” I asked the student nearest to the closed door.
“There’s a line,” he said without looking up from his textbook.
I took a seat at the end of the line behind the earnest, clean-shaven boys and reread Shelley’s masterpiece while I waited to see Dr. Cook. I hadn’t read Frankenstein since high school and had forgotten how dissimilar the novel was t
o Frankenstein in our popular imagination. We’d come to know the creature as Frankenstein, and perhaps that was fitting, since Victor Frankenstein was indeed the monster of the novel. But Frankenstein started as a son. A brother. A broken man, who was grieving his mother’s death, until he heard a lecture on the miracles of modern chemistry that inspired—nay, destroyed—the young scientist to experiment with the cycle of life.
I’d found Dr. Cook through a flyer left in chapter five when Victor Frankenstein first saw the results of his toiling, the beautiful creature of his imagination rendered horrifying in life. Billy had highlighted Victor Frankenstein’s words.
For this I had deprived myself of rest. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
The flyer advertised a lecture Dr. John Cook had given at the Aspen Center for Physics—Recent Advances in String Theory—during a convention February 17-20, 1986. Although I’d never heard of Dr. John Cook, Google certainly had. His name produced over sixty-five million hits. He’d been teaching particle physics at Caltech since the late ’80s and was class of ’71, which meant he’d completed his undergraduate degree the same year as Billy did. Something in Dr. Cook’s lecture must have inspired Billy. Something Dr. Cook said must have ruined him, too.
One student disappeared into Dr. Cook’s office, then another, until I sat alone in the hall. My body ached from leaning against the cold cement wall. I checked my phone. It was after one. I’d been waiting for over an hour. Jay was probably finished with soccer camp, winding his mother’s old Volvo through West Philadelphia in the shortcuts he liked to take home from school that were never any faster than the expressway. When the commute became our shared drive home from campus, I’d accused Jay of being lost. Just because I don’t know where I am doesn’t mean I’m lost, he’d said, backtracking across the street we’d recently turned off. That sounds like it belongs on a T-shirt, I’d said, and Jay had asked, Want to go into business with me? and I thought, I want to do anything with you, but we’d only been dating a few months. It wasn’t time to make that kind of promise to each other. For the rest of the school year, I loved getting lost in the car with Jay, jokingly accusing him of not knowing where he was, him insistent that he did. Even on days when he was forced to admit that he was turned around, he wouldn’t turn to his cell phone. He’d keep drifting through the streets until, somehow, we always ended up at home.