Fantasy: The Best of 2001 Read online

  “Of course,” the clerk added as I turned away, “they’ll both be closed for the holiday.”

  I turned back to him and he smiled and said, “I doubt anyone will be open on Thanksgiving.”

  The word hit me like a rubber bullet for two reasons. Yes, I felt some guilt over my flight from my sister and the worry I must be have caused her. But, as cavalier and selfish as it will sound, more than any guilt was the fear that I faced a delay in locating Refugee or Klingman.

  I left the station and walked out onto the road, trying to think. If I turned right, I’d be headed in the direction of Quinsigamond and de Sale and the possibility of food and shelter from a pitying headmaster. The possibility, as well, of finding Klingman. He had, after all, like me, boarded the train at Gomper’s Station.

  But as you have already guessed, my friend, I turned left. And for the first, but certainly not the last time in my life, I began to hitchhike. You have to understand, I was obsessed. However lofty it might sound in retrospect, I can only tell you that at the time it felt as if I were on a kind of quest. And, as in the case of most quests, neither fatigue nor reason could dissuade me.

  There was little traffic and I decided that it would be best to walk as I hitched. Route 4 was a lazy two-laner that had recently been made obsolete by the interstate. And by the time I had my thumb out, most travelers had already arrived at their destinations and were sampling the cider and cheese. I’m sure I looked suspicious to the few cars and trucks that did roll by, what with my sleptin clothes and uncombed hair and vintage seaman’s duffel large enough to hold a small body.

  But I didn’t much mind. The day was brisk, but I was wearing my father’s old Navy pea coat. And I had time to think, once again, about the book. This time, however, I let myself extrapolate freely, taking the refugee into sideline adventures that his author had never considered.

  About two hours later, I rounded a bend in the road, looked out on a classic New England covered bridge and fell to my knees in near faint. The sensation of collapse vanished almost as quickly as it had come. But I sat on my duffel breathing through the aftershock of it. My legs and arms had gone numband, simultaneously, a chill had coursed through my body like a current.

  When I collected myself, I attributed the spell to hunger and sleeplessness and the general upsetting of the past week. I picked myself up and continued across the bridge and on the other side I saw a red-shingle cabin with a sign on the roof that announced

  SCHEHEREZADE’S

  RARE AND USED BOOKS

  There was a porch fronting the house and on the porch sat wheelbarrows filled with books.

  I confess that I ran across the road without looking, dropped my duffel in a pile of leaves and leapt up the three stairs to the porch. I began pawing through the offerings. It was a real mishmash—hardcovers and paperbacks, fiction and non-fiction and textbooks, atlases and magazines and even postcards. I went through it all like a man panning for gold. But I think I knew, as I looked, that I would not find Refugee.

  When I’d exhausted the offerings and confirmed my suspicion, I sat down on the stairs to decide my next move. And soon after that I heard a bell ring. I turned around to see a man standing behind me. He would have been my first choice to play a farmer in the local production of Oklahoma. He was gaunt and tall and serious looking, craggy-faced and with a head of thin steely hair that he combed straight back over his bulging dome of a skull.

  “Can I help you?” he said in a tone that implied I’d better have a good reason for sitting on his steps and I’d better deliver it fast.

  “I was looking for a book,” was all I could think to say.

  He squinted and said, “We’re closed. It’s Thanksgiving.”

  “I understand,” I said and stood up. “Sorry to bother you.”

  I got as far as the shoulder of the road when he yelled, “What book were you looking for?”

  I turned back and yelled the title. He was the kind of man who wore his thinking on his face. I watched his eyes glaze a little in concentration as he scratched at his chest through his flannel shirt.

  “I don’t know it,” he yelled. “Who’s the author?”

  I took a step back toward him and said, “I have no idea.”

  This seemed to surprise him and, after looking back into the shop, he said, “Come on in here for a minute.”

  His name was Albert Southard. And he lived like a monk in a back room of the store. In the years since we met, I’ve often wondered what became of him. And I’ve wondered what became of that unlikely store in the middle of nowhere. Inside, it proved bigger than it had looked from the road. It is, in my memory, a haven of cozy warmth, a honeycombof small shelf-lined rooms, each one fitted with an easy chair or a sofa, all of them draped with quilts and comforters and pillows. Of course, there were books everywhere, spilling off the shelves, forming pyramids in the middle of the corridors. I could see that a sense of order was not the shop’s chief virtue.

  Mr. Southard offered me a seat in front of his desk. On top of the desk, in the center of his blotter, steamed a TV dinner of turkey and mashed potatoes. Southard took his glasses from his shirt pocket and asked me to tell him about this book that I seemed to need so desperately. I gave the same details that I’ve given to you. (Over time, that description of the book became a kind of prayer, repeated so often that I could say it in my sleep.) At the end of my recitation, Southard shook his head. He began to walk to his piles of reference volumes, asking, over his shoulder, where I found my original copy of the novel. I started my story and when I mentioned Klingman’s name, Albert Southard stopped in his tracks.

  He returned to the desk and said, “Now that you mention it, I think I do know the book.” It was a rare volume, he said. The print run had been minimal. It could be a costly investment. What was the maximum I’d be willing to pay?

  The possibility that I couldn’t afford the book had not occurred to me. Mr. Southard must have seen the crestfallen look on my face because before I could respond, he added, “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First we’ll see if we can locate this Refugee.”

  He told me to make myself at home, to feel free to browse the store while he made some calls.

  I looked down at the aluminum tray organizing his Thanksgiving feast and said, “I don’t want to interrupt your meal.”

  He seemed confused for a second, then he said, “Have you eaten?”

  I admitted I had not. He said he had another Swanson’s in the freezer. Would I like to join him? I hadn’t had a bite since finishing a cheese sandwich somewhere in Smyrna. I thanked him for the hospitality and he went off to pop a tray into his toaster oven.

  I did as he advised, let myself ramble through the maze of the store, running my finger along rows of spines, silently reciting titles and author’s names as if they were train stops along an extended journey.

  Sometime later Mr. Southard found me in the rear of the place, sitting on the floor with a tower of books at my knee.

  “Dinner’s served,” he said and I looked up to see him holding my TV dinner in a oven-mitted hand.

  We ate on opposite sides of the desk. I devoured every scrap. Washed it all down with warm ginger ale.

  “I’ve got some leads,” he said to me as we ate.

  He spoke, quite knowledgeably, and, at times, quite humorously, about various used bookstores all over the country and their often eccentric proprietors. And by the time we got to our cherry cobbler desserts, he surprised me by asking, “By any chance are you looking for a place to stay?”

  I had imagined I would be sleeping in a train station, waiting until I got so cold and hungry that I had no choice but to call my sister.

  “It’s no shame to need a place to stay,” Southard said. “Come here.”

  I got up and followed him back to the front of the shop. He put my duffel on the largest couch and said, “It’s not four star, but it’s warm and the sofa is comfortable.”

  Before I could reply, before
I could argue or thank him, he slipped into his overcoat and said, “I have to visit my sister and her family. I’ll be back in the morning. We’ll have some breakfast and talk some more about this book of yours.” Then he was out the door and I was locked inside.

  You’re thinking what I thought: What kind of a man leaves a complete stranger alone in his home overnight? Let me tell you something. Southard was part of a tribe that is larger than you might expect.

  Can you begin to imagine the flood of doubt and fear and, yes, excitement and hope I experienced that night? Alone in an unknown town, without a dime to my name, I felt as if I were living someone else’s life, as if a mistake had been made and my mundane existence had been swapped for one of adventure and freedom and danger and absolute chance.

  Is it any surprise that I could not sleep that evening? I made some coffee. I ate the pear and the jar of nuts that I found on the desk. And I carried several armfuls of books, more books than I could read in a lifetime, to the couch and spent a delightful if hallucinatory night sampling all manner of story.

  Over hot oatmeal and bananas the next morning, Mr. Southard offered me a job. I knew, even at that tender age, that this was nothing but charity. That he had no need for an employee. But I was not in any position to be proud. I took the job and stayed for three months, saving up my money and learning the basics of the book trade. And more than this. I began that morning a dialogue that would continue the rest of my days. I entered into an exchange about books and writers and stories and what they can mean to a life.

  Every other week or so, Southard would make a vague comment about a lead he had on Refugee. But nothing ever came of them.

  When I finally left Scheherezade’s with the intention of moving, in general, westward, Albert Southard gave me the name of a bookstore in Milwaukee that had purportedly sold a copy of Refugee last year. He also mentioned that the proprietor might have work for me.

  And so I became a traveler, a traveling reader, staying briefly in some places, much longer in others. And devouring books as I went. My general purpose remained the search for my elusive paperback and the man who had given it to me. But as time passed, it became a passive quest. It was not that I gave up looking so much as I came to understand, to feel, that it would take years to conclude my search.

  I worked in libraries and bookshops mostly, referred from one owner or manager to another. But I can also claim employment as night watchman, parking lot attendant and house sitter. All jobs that allowed me to read for long, uninterrupted hours.

  I attempted to settle down once, in the exact middle of my life. It was an emotional time and I let a rare bout of loneliness influence me. I tried, very hard, please believe me, to make a family. But I was not suited to the role of patriarch and I hurt too many people for too many years. It was not that I did not love my wife and the twins. Never that. I loved them to my full capacity and to this day I ache with regret at the way I failed them. But I was driven, compelled—just as I’d been compelled to jump on the Seaboard Star and flee the Capital all those years ago—to live a different life than the one they required and deserved.

  Is it any wonder that so many religious traditions insist their priests remain celibate? It is a setting apart, is it not? It is a way to claim them as acolytes of another way, another tradition, separate from the satisfactions of the domestic world.

  I’m trying to say that on the day Klingman gave me that book, he claimed me for another way of life, initi­ated me into something wondrous and ruined me for the joys of the grounded.

  I’m saying that I followed the only road open to me. I continued my wandering, a kind of tin pan asceticism. I came to see most of my native land and much of the rest of the world. I traveled as often as possible by train because I found that, though I never attained the depth of intensity I’d known with Refugee, the rails always provided a heightened reading experience.

  It was early in the travels that I began to understand the phenomenon I titled, at some point, “the seizure,” the numbing faint and chill that would overcome me from time to time, just as it had on Route 4 when I first glimpsed that covered bridge on my way to Sheherezade’s.

  The second occurrence happened in Peru, Kansas, where I was working in a small shop called The Bookworm. I had not been long in the Prairie State but I’d already assisted a customer in securing a rare first edition of a C. Gus French novel. The collector, a pharmaceutical salesman who passed through our region every other month, was so thrilled that he invited me to join him for a night on the town. His cheer was so genuine that I accepted, not knowing that a night on the town meant sitting in on a longstanding game of draw poker in a Road King motel room. The other players were friendly but wary of the youngster. I soon replaced their wariness with surprise and then, annoyance, when, by 10 P.M., I was smirking behind most of the chips on the table.

  My experience at de Sale had taught me nothing, however, and I let my early good fortune make me cocky. Also, there was liquor present and while I only nursed a beer or two, I was new to the charms of alcohol and perhaps my play grew more sloppy than usual. Whatever the reason, my good fortune faded rapidly and by the end of the game I was busted. It was as I got up from the table and walked into the bathroom that the seizure hit me. I managed to close the door behind me and steady myself against the sink. There was a cold sensation throughout my body, particularly along my joints. This was followed by a near faint, which, in turn, was followed by the most vivid and powerful feeling of déjàvu I had ever known.

  Only it became apparent to me in seconds that it wasn’t déjàvu at all. It was an episode from the novel, from Refugee. On the Seaboard Star, I had read an almost-exact description of everything that took place in that motel room. Everything that had happened to the novel’s protagonist—the arrival in Kansas, the invitation to a private card game, the flush of early success and the subsequent loss of all the winnings—had been replayed in my life. I was the protagonist.

  It happened again two years later in East Texas where I was robbed at gunpoint while exiting a movie theater.

  It happened in Denio, Nevada, where I was arrested for vagrancy and through a series of miscommunications and bad luck, ended up serving thirty days of county jail time.

  And in Castile, New York, where I met a belly dancer named Glynnis and ended up in a hot air balloon celebrating her birthday.

  And in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I met my wife-to-be for the first time as she served up a sausage omelet at the Paradise Diner.

  In some strange way, for reasons that to this day I do not understand, my life was foretold in a forgotten, spine-cracked paperback novel titled Refugee.

  I last experienced a seizure on the day that we met, my friend, on that train to the Capital. (I’ve never told you, but I was heading to see my sister who was living in a nursing home not far from the National Station. One last visit to apologize and say good-bye.)

  I want to apologize to you as well. I know I appeared overbearing during our initial meeting, but when you reach my age you will see that sometimes one must dispense with manners when time is in short supply. And I hope my little gift made up for my rudeness.

  No need to track me down to say, “thank you.” Giving the right book to the right person is a joy I’ve long treasured. Beyond this, it is my duty.

  Which is why it’s no surprise that this is where I find myself in the end. On a train. Rattling and swaying, out of the world and into another story. But perhaps it will surprise you to learn that when I boarded this particular train and made my way to the last car (still traveling in the economy coach, of course), and located my seat, I found a large and shabby passenger in the adjoining chair.

  Klingman was reading Refugee. He’d left another, more slender volume on my seat. He lifted it, with one hand, without breaking off from his reading. And I took it from him as I squeezed into my place without a word. It has been over an hour now and still we have not spoken. I’ve stolen a few glimpses and he looks the same
as he did when I first met him. When my nose began to bleed at the start of this letter, he pulled his yellow handkerchief from his sleeve and offered it to me. It smelled like old paper.

  There is so much that I want to ask him but I don’t want to interrupt his joy, the beauty and wholeness of his moments enveloped in the story of my life. My guess is that he is anxious for me to put down this pen and pick up my last book.

  I’ll trust the porter to mail this for me.

  In case you’re wondering, the volume currently in my lap appears to be more short story than novel. There is no author’s name on the cover. And this time there is no title. Only a picture, a faded cover illustration of an old man sitting in a train car reading a book whose cover features an old man sitting in a train car reading a book.

  I have no idea where this engine is headed or if I’ll have time to finish the tale. I have no interest in knowing. The countryside passing me now looks like no land I’ve seen before. But then, my eyes are not what they once were. What is? Even my hands, once so strong and agile, capable of tricks that could make you distrust yourself, are, today, gnarled and stiff. By the time I finish turning the last page, they’ll be good for nothing.

  You, on the other hand, have much to do. Places to go, as they say, and people to see. I’m sentimental enough to ask that you think of me from time to time. Hopefully, in a favorable light. I ask that you try to understand why I did what I did. Why I chose you out of the world and initiated you. Why I made you into a reader.

  I ask, if possible, that you forgive me, my friend. Please know that I wish you all the best, despite any evidence to the contrary.

  And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to catch up on.

  Sincerely,

  DIVING THE COOLIDGE

  BRIAN A. HOPKINS

  THE WATER OF ESPIRITU Santo harbor was a thick, chalky cobalt against which our diving lights struggled in vain. At a depth of sixty feet, motes of tiny marine life hung like stars in the ethereal glare, vanishing toward the bottom where the U.S.S. President Coolidge reposed in the gloom. Except for the bubbles from our regulators, it was deathly quiet. The silence of a grave. The silence of a museum. The silence of half a century and more.