Death is a Lonely Business

I read the name of the shack’s owner:

A. L. SHRANK.

And underneath the name, in pencil not quite so faint as canaries for sale, these words:

Practicing Psychologist.

A sextuple-threat man.

I put my ear to the door and listened.

In there, between precipice shelves of dusty books, did I hear Sigmund Freud whispering a penis is only a penis, but a good cigar is a smoke? Hamlet dying and taking everyone along? Virginia Woolf, like drowned Ophelia, stretched out to dry on that couch, telling her sad tale? Tarot cards being shuffled? Heads being felt like cantaloupes? Pens scratching?

“Let’s peek” I said.

Again, I stared through the window, but all I saw was the empty couch with the outline of many bodies in its middle. It was the only bed. Nights, A. L. Shrank slept there. Days, did strangers lie there, holding on to their insides as if they were broken glass? I could not believe.

But the books were the things that fascinated me. They not only brimmed the shelves but filled the bathtub which I could glimpse through a half-open door to one side. There was no kitchen. If there had been, the icebox would have been filled, no doubt, with copies of Peary at the North Pole or Byrd Alone in Antarctica. A. L. Shrank, it was obvious, bathed in the sea, like many others here, and had his banquets at Herman’s Hot-dogs, down the way.

But it was not so much the presence of nine hundred or a thousand books, as it was their titles, their subjects, their incredible dark and doomed and awful names.

On the high, always midnight shelves stood Thomas Hardy in all his gloom next to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which leaned on dread Nietzsche and hopeless Schopenhauer cheek by jowl with The Anatomy of Melancholy, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Freud, the tragedies of Shakespeare (no comedies visible), the Marquis de Sade, Thomas De Quincey, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Spengler’s Decline of the West … and on and on....