Oh, delicious readers–because I am very busy, rather than giving you a typical short fiction piece, I am going to provide this excerpt from my second novel, The Life of Linus Feathersmith. This is a working title. I might not keep it. Anyway, enjoy.
The next day at the Border’s there was no mention of anything strange or untoward in town the night before. No one had heard anything about machinegun fire, there were no newspaper articles about strange battles with demonic monsters on anybody’s front lawns. It appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be a day exactly the same as any other day. I wondered, again, if maybe I had imagined the entire episode. The one piece of information that niggled my ordinarily quite practical brain was the fact that Ethan was scheduled to work that day, and he was inexplicably unaccounted for. He hadn’t even called in sick, and Ethan was a notoriously reliable employee in that regard.
However, what really made that day remarkable was the fact that it was the day when Ted finally flipped his shit. It was well known that flipping your shit happens to everyone that works at the bookstore, sooner or later. Statistically, every individual spin in Russian Roulette is its own event; I know that I shouldn’t be surprised if you spun it a thousand times and never landed on the loaded chamber. There’s really no such thing as sooner or later. But, I also know that, sooner or later, everyone flips their shit.
I was in the reference section, alphabetizing the dictionaries when it happened. It’s not as straightforward as it sounds; it turns out that anyone can make “Webster’s Dictionary” and sell it. So, Random House’s Webster’s Dictionary has to go after Harper-Collins’ Webster’s Dictionary, but before Webster’s New World Webster’s Dictionary. I admit that by the time I got to the illustrated Webster’s Dictionary, I’d stopped arranging them by publisher and just started arranging them by height.
One of the fluorescent bulbs that lit the reference section was wonky. It made a buzzing sound and blinked rapidly, like a strobe light. No one at the store was certified to change the bulb, and we couldn’t turn the light off because it was on the same circuit as the cappuccino machine in the café. I was mildly afraid of getting epilepsy, but management determined that that was a preferable outcome to being unable to serve foamy coffee drinks to irate book-browsers.
I could hear Ted talking to customers at the register while I worked. It was Children’s First Book month, and Ted was dutifully asking customers if they’d like to donate one, three, or five dollars to help promote children’s literacy. He said it exactly like that:
“Would you like to donate one, three, or five dollars to help promote children’s literacy?” I don’t know why people were only allowed to donate odd dollar amounts.
He asked every customer, even if they were just buying a two dollar magazine. Sometimes, people gave a dollar, once in a while three or five dollars. Usually, they just said “no.” Occasionally, they said, “No, thank you,” as if Ted had been offering them candy.
Ted had been at the register for hours by this point. He’d asked hundreds of customers if they wanted to give a dollar to help some poor inner-city kid buy a book, so he could learn to read and pull himself up by his bootstraps, and get a hand-up but not a hand-out, and other uplifting clichés.
“Would you like to donate one, three, or five dollars to help promote children’s literacy?”
“No, thank you.”
“Would you like to donate one—”
“No.”
“Would you like—”
“No, thank you.”
“Would—”
“No.”
“Well, why the fuck not?”
There was a moment of silence, then. I paused, a dictionary held painfully above my head, waiting to hear what would happen next. “Are you opposed to children’s literacy?” Ted asked, unexpectedly vicious. “Do you have some problem with helping kids learn how to read?”
The customer, a fat, upper-middle-class housewife with a faux-animal print coat and inordinately large sunglasses replied heatedly, “I pay my taxes—”
Ted was having none of it. “Oh, you pay your taxes? You pay your taxes! Hey,” he called, turning to the other customers in line, who stood to the last with their jaws dropped down to their chests. “Hey, everybody, did you hear that? She pays her taxes! She pays her taxes!” He turned back to the woman, and there was violence and vehemence in his voice, markedly uncharacteristic of Ted. “Are you going to tell me about taxes? Are you going to tell me? I make seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. I have to pay a fifth of that to taxes. I have to pay a federal tax and a state tax. I have to pay your stupid township’s stupid ‘privilege tax,’ a hundred dollars every year for the privilege to work in your town. And you’re telling me about taxes?
“You know what? You’re right. Fuck those kids. Fuck ‘em! Fuck ‘em, right? If they really wanted to read, they’d be stealing books. If they really wanted to get an education, they wouldn’t wait for a handout! If they were decent human beings then they wouldn’t expect some wealthy, lazy housewife to give them a leg up. Fuck ‘em!”
The woman had turned quite red in the face at this point. She touched the side of her sunglasses repeatedly, but did not remove them. “I don’t…I never…I’m never shopping here again!” She threw her purchase to the ground, and prepared to storm off.
“Oh no!” Ted shouted. Shouted, loud enough that people could hear it outside. “Oh, no! You’re not walking out of my store. Do you hear me? You’re banned! You are banned from this store. If I see you in here again, I swear to god I will break your god-damn jaw!” With that, Ted seized the scotch-tape dispenser with such sudden force that the woman shrieked in panic and fled.
For a slow, stupid time, no one said anything, struck dumb by the display of fury. Then, after a moment, a shaggy-haired man with a tweed coat—waiting in line to purchase a number of John Lescroart paperbacks—began to applaud. After a few seconds, Ted found himself on the receiving end of a standing ovation.
Later that day, Border’s Corporate came to get him. I think. I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t see it myself. I was in the inventory room when Barbara came back to tell me about it. I was opening boxes and sorting the product that I discovered therein.
“Did you hear about Ted?” She asked.
I opened a large, brown box, deftly cutting the packing tape with a razor blade. “No. What about him?” There were two more brown cardboard boxes inside.
“These guys came, right after lunch. They pulled up out front in a black van. They had suits and everything.” Barbara lowered her voice. “I think they were from Corporate.”
“And?” I asked, taking out one of the smaller boxes and opening it.
“They asked for Ted; they said they wanted to give him some kind of service award. They were going to take him out for lunch.”
“That’s crazy,” I told her. “He’s already eaten lunch.” Inside the smaller box was another cardboard box. This one was wrapped in plastic and had a price tag on it.
“I think it was a trick,” she told me. “I don’t think they were really taking him to lunch.”
“So, what happened?” I asked, taking out the plastic-wrapped box.
“He got in the van.” She said.
“And?”
“That’s it.”
I read the tag; the box sold for nine dollars and ninety-five cents, plus tax. I wanted to know what happened to Ted, but I knew that I would probably never find out. I never saw him again after that day, and no one else had as clear a memory of him as I did.
After a hundred conversations in which no one seemed to remember Ted, I was half-convinced that I’d made him up and forgotten about it, like I sometimes do. Until one day I thought to ask Michael how we dusted the tops of the shelves. Trapped and panicked, he admitted that Ted used to do it.
After saying the name, “Ted,” Michael immediately became shy and furtive, and refused to discuss the topic of dusting with me ever again, preferring to assign the task to someone that would ask fewer questions.
