The Secret of Lost Things. Sheridan Hay
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were no reference guides, save Books in Print (the place most likely not to list a book sought by a customer at the Arcade), so the only reliable source of reference was the staff and their collective memory. Memory was the yardstick of achievement at the Arcade, the measure of one’s value to Pike. Memory housed the bookstore’s contents like a constantly expanding index, an interior, private library organized by some internal, fleshy variation on the Dewey decimal system.
There were customers who knew only the title but not the author, or only the author but not the title, or even only the color and size of the volume but neither its author’s name nor its title. A customer’s hands might move apart as if to say “It’s about this thick.” The game became a way to address how difficult it could be to find anything in the Arcade. For the staff, each obscure question seemed like another bead in a string of non sequiturs. These inquiries demanded an equally nonsensical response, the standard Arcade response. Hence the name of the game: Who Knows?
Jack Conway, his friend Bruno, along with the huge Arthur (Pike seemed to think it amusing to have hired an Art for the Art section), liked to shout out, sometimes with real belligerence, the name of the game. At first I thought they were really serious, and angry, but I caught on eventually.
“Who knows?” they would call out to each other across the heads of inquiring customers, and then, if no echo returned, call with greater rancor, with a full, open throat: “Who the FUCK knows?”
I learned that this was actually a challenge, a call for others to help, and could even draw Oscar from his stacks if he wasn’t already occupied. Oscar’s recall of his section was practically infallible, but if the book didn’t fall into the shapeless category of nonfiction, those with a slightly less remarkable memory needed to be found and consulted. Even Pike would participate, particularly as it often meant the certain sale of a book.
Where is the book I saw here once on the history and design of Russian nesting dolls? Can you tell me where I might begin to look for a monograph on Franz Boaz’s dissertation entitled “Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water”? Do you have the classic gay novel Der Puppenjunge by Sagitta in English? I must have William D’Avenant’s Gondibert—you know, it has fifteen hundred stanzas? Do you have a book of patterns for Redwork? Where are the decorative planispheres based on Mercator’s projection? Listen, I know you have Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns, but where is it?
Customer inquiries were like cartoon thought balloons making visible what was on the mind of the city. They were as random, as subjective, as experience itself, and our only defense against the arbitrariness of the questions was our game.
Who Knows? helped find the most obscure books, and after several months even I became blasé about the astonishing capacity of longtime employees to place their hand on a slim volume, seven shelves down, nine books in—miraculously pulling out just the book a confounded customer had been seeking. Occasionally, I had seen Chaps performing in this way in her tiny, tidy shop in Tasmania, but the scale of this game was entirely different, as was the range and variety of interest. At the Arcade, finding the improbable was an act best accomplished with an impassive air, a bland repudiation of the feat of memory it displayed. The magical act of finding anything, let alone a specifically requested book, within the Arcade’s repository was actually a point of pride. This rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick was the single exhibition the Arcade staff could perform that rivaled Pike’s mysterious pricing.
“I found this for you, Lillian. But it’s in English.”
I handed her a small paperback by Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, uncovered inadvertently while I waited at the paperback tables.
“Ah, I like this one. I read it a long time ago. You and me, Rosemary, we are like this, no? Imaginary beings, here, no?”
“What do you mean?”
“It is like we are made up, like these creatures in here. See?” She opened the paperback at random. “The Lunar Hare—this is the man in the moon, you see? The Mandrake, the Manticore…” She smiled. “We are like these things. No one knows we exist, except a few people. And if we disappear, there is no Borges to make a little story of us, to remember us. Who knows you are here? No mother, no father. And look at you, already so different. You do not look like the girl that came here weeks ago. A girl from Tasmania.” She screwed up her eyes, assessing me. “You look like a lion. Where is that other girl now, eh? Now she is imaginary being!”
I had changed. Tall, and long-boned, I’d become physically strong working at the Arcade, developing muscles in my arms and back for the first time in my largely sedentary life. Helping out in Remarkable Hats hadn’t required much physical effort. But the carting of boxes of books, mostly overpacked, strengthened me, as did my walking and the strictures of a diet confined to what could be bought cheaply, and eaten uncooked in my room at the Martha Washington.
“But we are real to each other, Lillian,” I told her. “We aren’t imaginary.”
“You not know anything about me,” Lillian said frankly, thumbing through the paperback.
“Nothing,” she added, with a finality that hurt me. “I might not even exist.”
“Well, it takes a while to know someone, Lillian, but I hope we will be friends.”
“I am sorry, I don’t want to read this in English. Thank you for the book,” she said abruptly, and handed it back to me.
Perhaps reading the hurt on my face, she added, “You keep it. You read it for yourself. Fill up your gaps. I have no need of such things anymore.”
Turning away, she put the television plug back into her ear.
I went to my room feeling rejected. I wanted friends, something I’d never had at home. Mother had discouraged such connections; she was fiercely private and secretive about our life. Although I loved the Arcade and New York, the other side of a teeming city was relentless isolation. There was nothing I had been to anyone, no impression I had made, no one to remember me. People here were tricky, and odd—sometimes deceitful. I needed to be careful. I fingered the green amulet at my throat that Chaps had given me.
The exchange with Lillian reminded me that I really needed to live elsewhere, to properly establish myself. Although I had been managing at the hotel for months, I longed for somewhere that didn’t feel like a place of transition. The dirty park, my bellwether on the way to the Arcade, told me that fall was coming, and I knew little about the real winter that would follow. I wanted my own bathroom, free of grubby ghosts, and a stove to cook on, as well as a window I could open that didn’t tease my hunger with the promise of Indian food I couldn’t afford, despite its designation as cheapest cuisine in the city. The Martha Washington was also paralyzingly quiet, up until late evening. Then, the thump-thump of cars and taxis that failed to spot the large pothole directly outside the building’s entrance began. The synchronized double-banging of the front and then the rear of each car, as its tires sank momentarily up to their hubcaps, was repetitive and deadening.
That evening I lay in bed, in darkness, and measured the thump-thump of passing cars against the more predictable beat of my heart. I needed a place to make my own, and determined to ask around at the Arcade to see if anyone knew of an apartment to rent or to share.
Unable to sleep, I switched on the light and took up the Borges I’d found for Lillian, and which she insisted I keep. Why was Lillian so difficult to befriend? The little volume cheered me up. Lillian was right about Borges filling up gaps; he knew all about the lazy pleasure of useless and out-of-the-way erudition; all about the fertilizing quality of knowledge.
The book was arranged alphabetically, and so I started with Abtu and Anet, the Egyptian life-sized holy fish that swam on the lookout for danger before the prow of the sun god’s ship. Theirs was an eternal journey, sailing across the sky from dawn to dusk, and by night traveling underground in the opposite direction.
I lay reading the short entries with interest, and passed the hardest part of the night forgetting about my larger concerns.
Some