The Secret of Lost Things

When I returned from walking, Lillian would ask what I’d been looking at, what I had found. Our tentative friendship grew as she used me as her emissary to the larger city. She did not want to go anywhere, except (on certain days) back to Argentina.

“Where my Spanish books, Rosemary? You said you’d find.”

“I’m sorry, Lillian, I’m still looking.”

“Pah, my brother say you can’t find nothing there in that place where you work.”

“I’m sure there’s something there for you, Lillian, I just have to find it. What did you read when you lived in Argentina?”

“I read Borges. Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him,” she said. “He was a blind man who see better than anyone.”

“I’ll look,” I promised. “Write his name down for me.”

“You never heard of him?” she scoffed. “What do they read there in Tasmania?”

“They read lots of things, Lillian. But everyone has gaps.”

She laughed out loud. Lillian had a warm, deep laugh, velvety with intimacy, with experience.

“Then you find Borges for me, but mostly for yourself. For your gaps. He will fill them, I promise!”

That Walter Geist was an albino was a distinction he could neither hide nor help. And he could be difficult. He was consistently unpleasant to both staff and all but a few select customers. He was even unpleasantly obsequious on the few occasions that called for mild pleasantness, mostly in his dealings with collectors whose large libraries Pike was trying to acquire.

But toward me he behaved differently.

I am ashamed now, when I remember how I shrank from him, and from his whiteness. Ashamed, too, of my fascination. Or perhaps just guilty that I longed to stare at him.

At first, Geist would not meet my eyes and spoke to me with such particularity that I became fixed upon his strange speech patterns and upon his lips with their sibilant consonants. He spoke to me very little in the beginning, addressing me only when he was called upon to give directions for the removal of Pike’s priced pile, to instruct me to wait at the rear door to help unload a delivery, or to tell me where to place the “new” books I’d brought down to him in the basement. I suppose a fascination with his appearance was not unusual; he seemed to almost have a dry expectation of it. He was sadly practiced at subjection to close inspection.

Walter Geist’s parents had been refugees from Germany; this much Oscar had told me, but he hadn’t gathered much more of Geist’s personal details, at least that he ever shared. Geist had not, as my imagination initially proposed, been born in the basement of the Arcade, but in Berlin, in the old Kreuzberg section of the city. He’d grown up in Pennsylvania after immigrating with his parents when very young. Walter Geist had never married, and lived a largely solitary life outside of the Arcade.

Geist’s slight lisp was not the result of any actual speech impediment but suggested the palimpsest of languages he had mastered, a hint of them all compressed and vaguely present in his whispered English. It wasn’t an accent like mine, broad and flat and, I feared, ignorant. His diction was subtle, exquisite in its way. According to Oscar, Geist spoke five languages fluently, his father having been a linguist at the university. What Oscar didn’t know of Walter Geist’s personal history, he supplemented with research on albinism. Oscar had his preoccupations and, briefly, Geist had been one, as he would become mine.

Inside the Arcade, Geist affected the use of a thick pair of pince-nez glasses that sat in his shirtfront pocket, attached to a silver chain around his neck. More often, though, they were miraculously affixed to the bridge of his nose, held in place by the folds of skin that his squint made about his eyes and forehead. Geist’s eyes were of an undetermined color, but in some lights, particularly bright sunlight, they appeared violet.

“Actually, Rosemary,” Oscar told me when I mentioned this odd fact to him, “Walter’s eyes are colorless. I looked it up. The violet color is caused by blood vessels in the retina. You can see the blood because his retina is without the color of an iris. I suppose you could say Walter’s eyes are transparent.”

“Transparent,” I repeated, fascinated. Oscar’s golden eyes were beautiful but opaque; the idea that Geist’s eyes were transparent was too whimsical, too curious, not to captivate me.

And yet, the wobbling movement of his eyes confused me as to where exactly to look—how to meet him. His eyes swam. Weak muscles caused this vacillation, and the constant motion gave the impression that his eyes were perpetually averted in a kind of deflection. I wanted to follow his shifting gaze into some other, quieter space—to see what he saw. He appeared particularly sensitive to light and shadow, and to scent.

“Yes, transparent. Interesting, isn’t it?” Oscar smiled, and took out his notebook to write down something that had occurred to him. “I have quite a bit of information about Walter’s condition.”

“Do you?” I asked, curious. “It seems as if Mr. Geist doesn’t want me to look at his eyes. They always move away. I want to look, though. It’s as if I’ll be able to stare right into his brain.”

“Really? How odd,” Oscar said, momentarily considering me.

“I imagine his thoughts might have color, even if his eyes don’t.” I could have added that he was entirely without color, but that would have sounded cruel. I did picture Geist’s thoughts, however, as bright and secret things, moving just behind the transparent plane of his retina like exotic fish.

“I saw him looking at my hair outside yesterday,” I told Oscar. “While we were waiting for that library. When I asked him if something was wrong, he cleared his throat and pretended he hadn’t been looking.”

“Well, Rosemary,” Oscar said matter-of-factly, “perhaps Walter thinks your hair is beautiful.”

Then, seeming to lose interest as quickly as he had found it, he continued to write in his notebook.

“Oscar,” I ventured, my heart hot in my chest. “Do you think so?”

But he didn’t answer or even acknowledge my question, absorbed as he was in his own note taking. I watched him, writing away, and felt ill with longing. His sculpted head bent over his task, his face expressionless.

Occasionally, I would come upon Geist in the stacks of Oscar’s section, holding books close to his face, his white fingers splayed against their covers like spread wings. The volumes he held at the tip of his nose had the compressed heft of textbooks, and their weight made him stoop with effort. Walter Geist was a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade, and as Pike’s designated other, he remained on the fringes of staff camaraderie. He was management, after all: George Pike’s pale avatar, some variation of a shadow. But he also held himself separate, certain that he would always be distinct and removed from that which defined the lives of others. In this respect, he knew better than any of us the condition of his life, and I suppose, like everyone else, I assumed he was reconciled to that condition. It wasn’t compassion on my part that made him so interesting to me. It was curiosity. My imagination was always overactive, and I made him a figure of significance in the fairy tale I was inventing, in the one I was living. Perhaps, as well, I just couldn’t reckon with his humanity.

The staff at the Arcade played a game to pass the time, a game prompted unwittingly when customers asked a question that was exceedingly difficult to answer. The game was called Who Knows? and it did make a long day pass more quickly, but it also served the practical purpose of sharpening the skills required to work in the Arcade. A sense of humor was necessary as well, particularly about the demands placed on one’s memory.

There were no reference guides, save Books in Print (the place most likely not to list a book sought by a customer at the Arcade), so the only reliable source of reference was the staff and their collective memory. Memory was the yardstick of achievement at the Arcade, the measure of one’s value to Pike. Memory housed the bookstore’s contents like a constantly expanding index, an interior, private library organized by some internal, fleshy variation on the Dewey decimal system.

There were customers who knew only the title but not the author, or only the author but not the title, or even only the color and size of the volume but neither its author’s name nor its title. A customer’s hands might move apart as if to say “It’s about this thick.” The game became a way to address how difficult it could be to find anything in the Arcade. For the staff, each obscure question seemed like another bead in a string of non sequiturs. These inquiries demanded an equally nonsensical response, the standard Arcade response. Hence the name of the game: Who Knows?

Jack Conway, his friend Bruno, along with the huge Arthur (Pike seemed to think it amusing to have hired an Art for the Art section), liked to shout out, sometimes with real belligerence, the name of the game. At first I thought they were really serious, and angry, but I caught on eventually.

“Who knows?” they would call out to each other across the heads of inquiring customers, and then, if no echo returned, call with greater rancor, with a full, open throat: “Who the FUCK knows?”

I learned that this was actually a challenge, a call for others to help, and could even draw Oscar from his stacks if he wasn’t already occupied. Oscar’s recall of his section was practically infallible, but if the book didn’t fall into the shapeless category of nonfiction, those with a slightly less remarkable memory needed to be found and consulted. Even Pike would participate, particularly as it often meant the certain sale of a book.

Where is the book I saw here once on the history and design of Russian nesting dolls? Can you tell me where I might begin to look for a monograph on Franz Boaz’s dissertation entitled “Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water”? Do you have the classic gay novel Der Puppenjunge by Sagitta in English? I must have William D’Avenant’s Gondibert—you know, it has fifteen hundred stanzas? Do you have a book of patterns for Redwork? Where are the decorative planispheres based on Mercator’s projection? Listen, I know you have Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns, but where is it?

Customer inquiries were like cartoon thought balloons making visible what was on the mind of the city. They were as random, as subjective, as experience itself, and our only defense against the arbitrariness of the questions was our game.

Who Knows? helped find the most obscure books, and after several months even I became blasé about the astonishing capacity of longtime employees to place their hand on a slim volume, seven shelves down, nine books in—miraculously pulling out just the book a confounded customer had been seeking. Occasionally, I had seen Chaps performing in this way in her tiny, tidy shop in Tasmania, but the scale of this game was entirely different, as was the range and variety of interest. At the Arcade, finding the improbable was an act best accomplished with an impassive air, a bland repudiation of the feat of memory it displayed. The magical act of finding anything, let alone a specifically requested book, within the Arcade’s repository was actually a point of pride. This rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick was the single exhibition the Arcade staff could perform that rivaled Pike’s mysterious pricing.

“I found this for you, Lillian. But it’s in English.”

I handed her a small paperback by Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, uncovered inadvertently while I waited at the paperback tables.

“Ah, I like this one. I read it a long time ago. You and me, Rosemary, we are like this, no? Imaginary beings, here, no?”

“What do you mean?”

“It is like we are made up, like these creatures in here. See?” She opened the paperback at random. “The Lunar Hare—this is the man in the moon, you see? The Mandrake, the Manticore…” She smiled. “We are like these things. No one knows we exist, except a few people. And if we disappear, there is no Borges to make a little story of us, to remember us. Who knows you are here? No mother, no father. And look at you, already so different. You do not look like the girl that came here weeks ago. A girl from Tasmania.” She screwed up her eyes, assessing me. “You look like a lion. Where is that other girl now, eh? Now she is imaginary being!”

I had changed. Tall, and long-boned, I’d become physically strong working at the Arcade, developing muscles in my arms and back for the first time in my largely sedentary life. Helping out in Remarkable Hats hadn’t required much physical effort. But the carting of boxes of books, mostly overpacked, strengthened me, as did my walking and the strictures of a diet confined to what could be bought cheaply, and eaten uncooked in my room at the Martha Washington.

“But we are real to each other, Lillian,” I told her. “We aren’t imaginary.”

“You not know anything about me,” Lillian said frankly, thumbing through the paperback.

“Nothing,” she added, with a finality that hurt me. “I might not even exist.”

“Well, it takes a while to know someone, Lillian, but I hope we will be friends.”