Sheridan Hay - The Secret of Lost Things

I moved toward a laden table and placed my hand upon the closest stack, listening, waiting. I recall it exactly. An opening, a beginning. I must work here, I thought. I will. Less an act of confidence than of will. I surprised myself.

I looked around in the soft, faded light. I wasn’t startled by the Arcade’s shabby randomness, by the small areas of order within a more general chaos; by its filth, its quiet, and its occasional bursts of jarring sound. Or by the precariousness of book stacks which seemed to lean, without regard to gravity, toward some apprehended but unseen center. I was at home. Dust filtered what sunlight made its way through two dirty windows. Huge, dim lights hung by heavy chains above customers’ heads, bent in concentration.

Turning to the entrance, I checked that outside on the avenue it was actually a sunny, ordinary day in late June. Inside, it was cool and obscurely timeless.

I edged along goat-track passages winding between stacks, only navigable foot in front of foot, a few inches at a time, trying to avoid piles of titles stacked and leaning against spine-out-only shelves. I stopped before a raised platform, an oasis of space amid the clutter. A small man stood behind its oak railing, elevated higher than even the tallest customer. He was pricing old books, but his compelling gestures suggested a priest at a lectern. The brass name plate that faced the store from his oak desk shone: GEORGE PIKE, PROPRIETOR.

His gestures were practiced and repetitive. A stack of volumes sat to Pike’s left. He took a book from the top of that pile, frowned, ran his eyes over the binding, checking for rips or nicks. Then, quickly and elegantly, he flipped to the title page, his eyes scanned the copyright, his thumb fanned rapidly along the edges of the entire book. Reaching the end, he closed the volume, only to reopen it at the first page. He took a pencil from behind his ear and lightly scribbled in the upper-right-hand corner, tracing a looping filigree. He returned the pencil above his ear and rubbed his index finger beneath his nose. He then unfrowned his forehead, set the volume to his right and, having priced the book, immediately reached for another at his left.

He repeated these actions as a single gesture, without variation. It was unconscious; a rough magic. There seemed no moment for contemplation, for the weighing of competing possibilities. Pike alone appeared the arbiter, the heart of the enterprise.

I had made my pledge to work in the Arcade, Pike was evidently its captain. I wanted proximity to such mastery, such certainty. I seized upon the existence of the place like a buoy floating in the middle of the sea.

“Excuse me, sir. My name is Rosemary Savage,” I said to Pike, my own accent peculiar, nasal in my ears.

He was unaccustomed to interruption. I went on hurriedly, shocked at my own boldness, at how sharp was the desperation that prodded me forward.

“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Pike. And I must work here.”

He looked up from his task to register my temerity. Raised eyebrows were the only indication of affront on his rather unremarkable face. He was an anachronistic figure. His striped waistcoat, his shirt bunched above the elbows by arm bands, suggested a man that hadn’t altered his style of dress in decades. He wore a waxy-looking mustache, a darker shade than his whitish-gray hair, and he ran his finger over it before lowering his eyebrows to return his gaze to the book in his hand.

“You must work here?” he said in an odd, thin voice. He appeared to address the book in his hand rather than me, asking the cheeky thing if it really had the gall. “Do you imagine this an infrequent request?” he asked the book.

I didn’t know what to say. Too much was already at stake. I looked up at him and calculated that his platform was a good twenty-four inches higher than where I stood. It was designed to meet the floor at an angle, masking its height and disguising its purpose. It was a stage. I guessed Pike a full head shorter than my own five feet ten, but recognizing this didn’t reduce his stature. He loomed, flanked by books.

But I had given Pike my future, and I wonder now if he saw this himself. There was a long pause as he made his way through his litany of gestures. His movements seemed the process by which he could figure the book’s price, winding himself up to calculating its value.

He set the volume to his left.

I waited. He drew a long breath.

“What we want here is the mild boredom of order. Don’t try to be too interesting, girl.” He read me as easily as the book he had put down.

“Find the Poetry section and begin to shelve what remains on the floor.” He waved his hand in a shooing gesture. “You’re probably ripe for poetry,” he added, in a lower voice.

Was he hiring me on the spot?

“Order by poet, mind you. Only by poet. Don’t give a damn about editors and translators—that’s all a charade. You will shelve by poet or you will not be employed by George Pike. Remove all anthologies! Alphabetical, that is all. There are a few things that should be predictable.”

I had followed this breathlessly, even while it didn’t appear to be directed at me. Had he said “ripe”?

“Ah, yes, sir. Mr. Pike…ah, alphabetical, of course.”

“Find Poetry and my manager will assess your competency shortly.”

He picked up the next unvalued volume to his right.

I hurried deeper into the Arcade and found the Poetry section halfway down a tower that leaned dangerously toward the public toilet, in a far corner. Quickly I began the task of rearranging books that had apparently never been shelved in any order. The section began at eye level. Above it appeared to be books on Occult Practices. The juxtaposition of subjects struck me as deliberate, only accidentally alphabetical. To reach the shelf I had to lean across a tall pile of books on the floor, awkwardly moving volumes around, my arms stiffly extended. I decided to take handfuls off the shelf and sort them while sitting on the floor. This too proved pointless, as I had to constantly reorder each section, accomplishing only what amounted to tidying up. Was this a test of my patience, of my real interest, a practical lesson in the overwhelming nature of bringing even the slightest amount of order to the Arcade?

After half an hour I’d barely managed to complete a single shelf, and was standing with my back to the aisle, wresting another few volumes off the shelf, when I had the sensation of being watched. I heard a sibilant whisper and turned, promptly dropping the books in my hand.

An albino man of uncertain age was no more than two feet from me, his pale eyes moving involuntarily behind pince-nez glasses. From the first it was his eyes. His eyes could not be caught. He stepped back and knocked over several books I had set aside. Ignoring his clumsiness, he took in my surprise with practiced unsurprise. I had never seen anyone like him, nor any face more marked with defensive disdain.

“Walter Geist, the Arcade’s manager,” he whispered, turning. “Follow me, girl.”

I picked up the books I’d dropped, forced them onto the shelf, and caught up with him as his stooped shoulder disappeared around a corner stack.

As I trailed behind his quaint figure, I had the fleeting fantasy that this man was what someone would look like if he’d been born inside the Arcade, never having left its dim confines. Pigment would disappear and eyesight would be ruined beneath weak light, until one lay passively, like a flounder on the ocean floor.

In fact, as I walked behind him, Geist’s white ears reminded me of delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light, vulnerable and nude. There was a shrinking quality to him, a retraction from attention like an instinctual retreat from exposure. I was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure, a contradiction that was never to leave me. As I follow him there in my memory, I feel again that charge to his strangeness, a shock that compelled.