Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Ambit,” he said. “Good little bookstore. I almost feel bad for them.” He indicated the plastic bag, next to her on the bar, on which the store’s name was printed.

“Why would you feel bad for them?” she asked.

“Andy,” he responded, sticking out a hand.

“Why would you feel bad for them, Andy?”

“Because I’m here to put them out of business,” he said. He smiled. He had curly black hair and he wore a tattersall shirt, untucked and with the sleeves rolled up, over a pair of jeans that were a beautiful and expensive-looking shade of blue.

“How are you going to do that?”

He took his wallet from his back pocket and extracted a card from it that identified him as Andrew Meisler, Regional Director of Development for Shields & Fine, Booksellers. He put it on the bar between them.

“And so?” she asked.

“We’re leasing forty thousand square feet. I came out to finalize it yesterday. Neither rain nor snow.”

“At the mall?”

“Forget the mall. Let me get you another.” He ignored her protest as he signaled the bartender.

“Why forget the mall?”

“Nobody goes to a bookstore in a mall. They go to the movies. They sit in a vibrating chair. They, I don’t know, they eat nachos. We’re closing mall locations left and right. People come in to use the rest rooms. They pee on the toilet seats and then leave, empty-handed. They’re not serious about what we sell. They don’t even know what we sell. People have a different head in the mall. They go there to forget, not remember. New research shows that people prefer to buy things at malls that they consume there, on the spot. Failing that, they like things they can bring home in a pocket, that they can throw in a drawer and forget about, or, better yet, give away. What a shock, huh? Everybody has visions of these shopping sprees, unselfconsciously materialistic people laden with bags, trampling over each other to get to the cheap microwaves, but secretly they want to forget they were there, forget they threw away their money. You know what a flashbulb memory is?” He took her untouched glass of wine by the stem and slid it toward her. “A flashbulb memory is a memory that’s seared onto the mind in exquisite detail. Place, time, weather, smells, sounds, what the newscaster said, his bodily attitude. Where were you when you heard about the World Trade Center, I was eating a bowl of Cracklin’ Oat Bran when suddenly the phone rang, that kind of thing. New research shows that people have flashbulb memories about large purchases just as vivid as they do about historic events. You buy a bed, you buy a washing machine, you remember buying it the way old people remember the Kennedy assassination. Well, guess what? Sellers of durable goods are running from malls like the plague. You know why? For middle America, the mall is supposed to be a palace of sin. People go there to have fun wasting their money. They don’t go there to exchange their money for stuff they need, stuff that displaces other stuff that they’d rather have, stuff that reminds them of how much money they used to have before they bought it. Now, you could argue that a book isn’t exactly like a washing machine.”

“You could,” said Kat, beginning to grow amused.

“You could argue that, but I’d argue that it’s worse than a washing machine. Nobody ever buys a washing machine and then doesn’t wash clothes in it. Nobody goes down to the basement six months later and says God I can’t believe I haven’t gotten around to washing clothes yet, I had such high hopes, I swore I’d do laundry when I made my New Year’s resolutions. But every time you look at a book, it reminds you that you haven’t read it.”

“What if you have read it?”

“That’s super rare. What’s your name?”

“Becky.”

“Becky. Anyway, the point is that malls are bad news. They make people feel terrible. People’s relationship to shopping is at a low ebb. They get angry at the merchandise. This is bad. Retailers need specialized environments. Now, if you’re selling dishwashers and Blu-Ray players, you open a big bare space made out of cinderblocks where every exposed beam is covered with spray fire retardant. This says, ‘This ugly place makes you suffer a little; we’ll try to make it as quick and painless as possible, but we’re also going to make you see what goes into giving you your deep deep discount. But imagine how great your new dishwasher will look in your kitchen rather than in this hellish no-man’s-land.’ That one’s easy. But if you sell books, what’s the balance you need to strike, how do you make Malcolm Gladwell seem necessary while making him seem as frivolous and commitment-free as a popcorn movie at the same time? You don’t want people weighing the relative merits of Malcolm Gladwell versus an Auntie Anne’s pretzel. Things could get really ugly for Malcolm. And you definitely don’t want people comparing the untapped utility of an unread Malcolm Gladwell book with the endlessly tapped utility of a fifty-five-inch HDTV.”

Kat deadpanned, “Who’s Malcolm Gladwell?”

Andrew Meisler shook his head, chuckling. “Who’s Malcolm Gladwell. Do I like you or not?”

“You like me.” Kat started on wine #4. He patted her thigh, then let his hand light on it. She let it remain there, feeling an oncoming attack of what Justin liked to call acting out .

“We don’t call it a store,” he continued. “We call it a commons . It’s a template devised specifically for places like this, relatively sophisticated dots on the map that are miles from anything resembling a viable alternative to what we offer. We think of the commons as a place where an irresistible conversation is always happening. And there’s only one way to be part of it.”

“Buy something.”

“That’s a kind of reductive but basically accurate way of putting it.”

“Lots of luck.”

“Don’t be negative.” He patted her thigh, then gripped it lightly. “There’s a science behind this.”

“I don’t doubt it. So where, if not the mall?”

“We’re going to anchor the new development Morello’s doing out at the old loony bin. Called Fifty Commons, coincidentally enough. It’s perfect, really. It’s going to be the new center. Everything’s going to be happening there. New research shows that consumers think of reading as something that happens when they’re alone. They negatively associate it with something that’s isolating . At the Commons, visitors see that reading isn’t isolating at all. Most bookstores try either to be comprehensive or to broadly identify what their specific customer base might be interested in. Too chancy. The Commons is an entirely curated experience. We feature and promote a limited number of titles. We offer value-added content and activities germane to those titles. You’re not just reading what others are reading, you’re experiencing it with them. It’s happening . And it’s a liberating experience.”

She turned on her stool to face him. His hand slid off her thigh. She took the copy of Mulligan’s book that she’d been reading and held it up.

“How about this? Is it happening?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a book. Geezum.” She placed it in the hand he held out for it. He flipped it over, flipped it back. Opened it, riffled the pages, glanced at the copyright page, closed it.

“Well, it came out a couple years ago,” he said.

“So?” She emptied her glass in one long swallow.

“Publishers tend to be less enthusiastic about promoting their backlists. We’ll be depending a lot on synergy.”

She leaned forward. They stared at each other for a moment. She felt slightly hot. They had been moving closer and closer together as they spoke. It was one of those places where they turned the music up little by little over the course of the evening so that eventually you had to yell to be heard. She could smell his breath.