The Alphabet Cage
by Huntley Gibson Paton
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
They were awed, as they should have been. Kurt said stupidly, “Books!” and immediately began to explore. Samantha squeezed my hand and shook her head in wonder. I squeezed back and she turned to look up at me.
“You like?” I asked.
Of course she liked. This is what they had come to see. Books. Real ones: paper, ink and glue, as God intended. Books everywhere, covering all the walls, which have heavy metal shelves drilled into the brick, floor to ceiling. But also books on the floor, the coffee tables, the kitchen counter, hall closet, atop the toilet tank, surrounding the bed, inside all the cabinets, stuffed in the dresser. The apartment is, I suppose, too small.
“You are a madman, Stanley,” Samantha said with unfiltered veneration. “A maniac. A freak. You are a god. A book god.”
I admit that a great number of the books are stolen. My most impressive heist was getting The Complete Mark Twain and The Complete Mark Twain II in one trip. It was February. and I got both of them under my down coat and out the door without anyone having so much as a clue.
I once considered getting a single, hardbound volume of everything that Shakespeare had ever written, but it was too bulky, so I ended up taking out all of his plays and sonnets in individual paperbacks. the whole operation took about a day and a half. In the end, it was better to do it that way, one at a time, because the smaller books are better for reading in a crowded restaurant or bus stop, and certainly easier to carry around in a book bag. I am somewhat frail; the mobile librarian cannot risk anthology back strain.
The rest of the stolen books have come from professors and various libraries, though perhaps a dozen or two dozen — no more than six dozen, certainly — were pilfered from students who had their noses buried in their smart phones. I prefer to sell them books rather than deprive them of any words that might resuscitate their brains. But it is very difficult for me to leave an unattended book just sitting there.
I’ll say this about stealing: it’s not something I enjoy. It comes from necessity. I belong to four separate book clubs and subscribe to thirty-seven literary magazines, so my overhead is high. This is not to mention eBay and the Internet, always tempting me with first editions. I offset this a little by selling duplicates, but there is never enough money.
The cumulative effect of all my efforts — the buying, the pilfering — is salvific. I am not offended if one refers to my collection as a library, but it is more accurate to describe it as a hive. Always changing, always building, it provides for me, protects me. A hack reader will say that a good book transports him, but I say the great works adorn me, as I mentioned, like pure grace and armor. From them I draw succor — love, courage, tears, arousal.
In Cheever’s The Death of Justina, one little town banishes death simply by prohibiting it through zoning laws. Yes, it’s satire, so laugh if you will, but that is what I have done with my basement; I have banished earth’s cruel rotations. My hive is lamb’s blood on the door. You may see me on campus and snicker or mock, but I don’t need you. My immune system — paper and words — does not fail, and you may shove right off. You may not enter.
Ah, but I gave entry. Tonight, Kurt was taken with a section of 19th-century British poets in the kitchen and, while he read, Samantha and I sat down on the couch, easing aside stacks of magazines and science-fiction paperbacks.
She seemed more intent on soaking in the atmosphere than doing any actual browsing. She wore a strange smile of contentment, so I offered her a beer. My hand still tingled from her squeeze a moment before, and when I handed her the can, her hand brushed again over mine, lightly but intentionally, across the bristling hairs of my knuckles. I was electrified. She looked at me in such a way that, I was certain, ruled out any accidental reasons for her touch.
“Thank you,” she said in a low, conspiratorial voice. For the beer? For the tour? For everything.
Did I misinterpret the words? Did I give them more weight than they actually carried? I confess my confusion over the touching of hands. My body is my own and have never shared it with anyone. It was unreasonable to start with her. Samantha is, after all, impossible to stand next to without feeling claustrophobic — enormous, free-swinging breasts and that animalistic, topiary hairdo — but nonetheless, I lusted.
I looked down her shirt into the smiling canyon of her cleavage and, still excited by her touch, sighed. I sighed. Oh, drunken man!
Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but at the same moment I tottered on the brink of stealing a kiss (yes, I believe I had that very thing in mind), my father was barreling across some God-forsaken stretch of the New York Thruway in his mustard-colored Tesla, with tears on his face and a stomach full of liquid bread.
* * *
Then there was the laugh. Hers. She tried to suppress it, and it was a small one, hardly more than a breath, but I heard it. I looked up and she had her lips pressed together tightly. Her eyes danced on mine and then fell down to my lap. She looked away, one hand over her mouth.
Decency prohibits me from explaining further.
She got up and joined Kurt in the kitchen, and when I was able, I followed. Kurt had three volumes of poetry open in front of him on the table. “Would you look at all these books?” he asked. He bounced up and down on his feet as if he needed to urinate. “I mean, just look at all this crap!”
“Ahem,” I said.
“Oops,” Samantha told him. She punched him lightly on the arm and then rested her head drunkenly on his shoulder. “I think you just said a no-no. Stanley does not like you calling books ‘crap.’” They both laughed.
Did Stanley Dunaway steal his kiss on this night? He did not. While the two of them swayed in crapulence over my kitchen table, I opened my utensil drawer and rummaged beneath several back issues of The New Yorker, until I closed my hand over a pair of scissors. I then took these scissors and quickly snipped a strand of sticky, styling-gel-encased hair from the ferocious thatch of Samantha’s head.
She, turning on me, twirling for me, like a beautiful ballerina, said: “Stanley! What the hell are you doing?”
And Kurt. What an astute pupil he had become in that moment. His words, after a second of silence and observation: “What’s that for? A bookmark?”
Yes.
* * *
A screaming gust of wind pushed us through the front door of the church, once of the Presbyterian variety but now one of those Universalist types that are really not churches at all. Once there, we all went to the bathroom, finding facilities in the hallway behind the pulpit. This is probably the worst thing I have discovered about drinking; it sets the bladder haywire. No sooner had I gone than I felt like I had to go some more. I can feel it building in me now, here, yet again.
The church was crowded, and we had to sit in a pew near the back, where rude and non-serious people usually sit by choice. I always try to sit in the front row whenever I go to a reading, but our booze-laden bladders had wrecked that. I was indignant, flustered at myself mostly. Literature and alcohol do not mix.
I found a seat next to a group of women, some of whom I recognized from the meetings of campus Socialists above my apartment. The one closest to me, a fat, bespectacled brunette with tattoos, is their leader, and also is the prominent leader of the campus lesbian organization, a frequent writer of mangled Op-Eds for the student newspaper. As a rule, I hold only contempt for all political and special interest groups, comprised as they are of shrill, hysterical Neanderthals, but I had always had a certain amount of respect for this particular lesbian.
Whenever the Socialists met in my building, she tried to recruit me. I would hide in the steel rafters above my hallway and watch her knock on my door. When I failed to answer, she would leave propaganda leaflets on the mat. I never bothered to read them. Still, I had to admire her interest in me. Even the sign I hung on my door one night — “McCarthy Was Right: No Communists Allowed” — couldn’t sway her from making her weekly evangelical call to my apartment. I would sit above her like a gargoyle on those dusty gangplanks, and curse her silently, vowing to some night vex her with a plummeting dictionary.
This evening, sitting close to her for the first time, I realized why I had never gone ahead and brained her. She looked like my mother. She was much fatter, but she had the same deep brown eyes and the exact same small, insufficient nose. Her hair was the same color and length, her glasses similar to the ones I remember my mother wearing.
I am not without tender feelings for my mother. When I was five or six years old, I was playing in our backyard tree. I was hanging upside down from a sturdy branch, but my legs lost their grip, and I fell on some jagged rocks below. My memory of this is still vivid; blood seemed to gush from my hand, and I ran screaming into the house. I needed ten stitches. This ended for all time my interest in feats of physical skill but perhaps spawned my adoration of books. My mother brought me home and put me to bed, where she read to me from Dickens in a soothing voice.
“Quite a crowd tonight,” I said to the lesbian firebrand.
“Mmm,” she answered, “unfortunately.” She scooted an inch or two away from me. I suppose my breath was bad.
I turned and saw Kurt sitting next to me, with Samantha settling in on his right. I was hoping she would sit next to me, but I guess I confused her a bit with those scissors, especially after I refused to give her back the snipped lock.
When I was arrested, and the police took my clothes and rifled my pockets, one of them held up her sticky gob of hair in his fingers. “What’s this?” he said. “I think we’ve got ourselves some sort of pervert sex offender.” Then he asked me, “Is that what you are, buddy?”
Please!
* * *
Then the guest of honor came in and took the podium. There was an audible gasp and a great deal of whispering. Normally this would make my blood boil, but tonight there was just cause for the disruption. I have never seen an uglier man in all my life.
Charles Stansloski looked like a bulldog escaped from a collapsed building. His jowly face was covered in gray stubble. He had droopy, dark eyes, weedy eyebrows, and a nose as large as an apple, just as red, and pocked like an alley behind some liquor store. His hair was combed straight back with tonic, or shoe polish for all I know. He wore a sports jacket and tie, but they were filthy. His wrinkled shirt was untucked. The audience recovered from its initial shock and clapped. He smiled and raised his arms high above his head, making peace signs with both hands, like Richard Nixon used to do.
“Thank you,” he said into the microphone. “You look terrible.”
Then, I swear, he fell down. Ask anyone there. He disappeared like a rock behind the podium. Blake Sharpley, head of the writer’s workshop, helped him to his feet. Some of the audience members laughed, while others just gawked. But everyone clapped when he stood back up.
“I think the gravity is stronger here,” he said, when he had composed himself. “Your rotten New York beer feels like the Titanic in my stomach. Well, the hell with it. You’re all drunk, too.”
The crowd applauded.
The reading wasn’t what anyone expected. Stansloski told us that he had promised to read from Blind and Crazy in Santa Fe, but that he was broke and therefore busy on a new mystery novel so he could afford to eat and drink. He said he would read us two chapters from this novel-in-progress, which he called Gumshoe-A-Go-Go.
“I want you to hear this novel,” he told us, “because no one is buying Blind and Crazy in Santa Fe, and no one ever will, even though you would all have me believe that you read it. No one has read it.
“I know at least some of you will buy and read Gumshoe-A-Go-Go,” he said. “So I’m going to plug it. I know what butters my ass crack.”
Blake Sharpley, a dignified man of Yale, had his face in his hands.
* * *
If I had to listen, why shouldn’t you? The hero of Gumshoe-A-Go-Go is Brent Upright, a third-rate detective with finance companies breathing down his neck, threatening to repossess his car, furniture, gun, and so on. Desperate, he accepts a case from a female striptease artist suffering from some bizarre venereal disease. Somebody, the stripper tells Upright, is spreading this wretched disease to nearly everyone who walks into the club, and someone must identify the offender and put a stop to the spread of the plague. Simple enough, thinks Upright, until he learns that the club is run by a sleeper cell of Islamic terrorists secretly planning to hydrogen-bomb New York City on Christmas Eve.
The strip club, of course, is designated as Ground Zero.
So, it’s a desperate struggle against the clock for detective Upright, who not only has to find Patient Zero with the nasty STD but save the city as well. He starts his mission with a trip to the drug store and then begins to question the other dancers at the club. In the first chapter, Upright has sexual interviews with three of the strippers and goes through a whole economy pack of Durex Extra Strength condoms.
Incidentally, Stansloski told us, Upright has a tremendous love muscle.
“I don’t have to sit and listen to this filth,” the lesbian mumbled to herself. But she didn’t move to leave. She gritted her teeth and glared at the floor maliciously. I admired her then, not only for her accurate critique of Stansloski’s reading, but because her reaction was the same my mother would have had, if she were subjected to it. Mother was always railing against filth and things she did not have to take. Father, apparently, has become one of those things.
Samantha and Kurt seemed to enjoy the reading, as did most of the people there. They didn’t mind hearing about Upright’s love muscle or the dimpled, bare bottoms of strippers. They were glad to listen. I myself suddenly felt my bladder straining, until soon I was wiggling in my seat and locking my knees together. Never again, I swore, would I take another sip of alcohol. Never again would I sit in a house of the I’m-Ok-You’re-OK God pickled to my earlobes in convivial John Barleycorn.
I wanted to be home with the reassuring quiet of my books, to let them surround me with their greatness. But for now, the bathroom simply could not wait. The problem was, I had to pass by the Anti-Christ to get there.
I excused myself from Samantha and Kurt and walked, head bowed, past the podium and toward the back hallway. I knew everyone was watching me. Stansloski, that bastard, stopped reading the second he noticed me and stood mute until I had gotten around the corner, when I heard him say, “Anyone else need to throw up? If so, please go now.”
Then he went back to his story, which I could hear just fine over the speakers even as I wobbled at the urinal: Detective Upright, on his way to the drug store to replenish his condom cache, has to dive behind some trash cans to avoid a spray of machine gun fire from a passing car of jihadists. “Budda, budda, budda!” Stansloski read. “Budda, budda, budda!”
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Huntley Gibson Paton
