The Secret of Lost Things

I had made my pledge to work in the Arcade, Pike was evidently its captain. I wanted proximity to such mastery, such certainty. I seized upon the existence of the place like a buoy floating in the middle of the sea.

“Excuse me, sir. My name is Rosemary Savage,” I said to Pike, my own accent peculiar, nasal in my ears.

He was unaccustomed to interruption. I went on hurriedly, shocked at my own boldness, at how sharp was the desperation that prodded me forward.

“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Pike. And I must work here.”

He looked up from his task to register my temerity. Raised eyebrows were the only indication of affront on his rather unremarkable face. He was an anachronistic figure. His striped waistcoat, his shirt bunched above the elbows by arm bands, suggested a man that hadn’t altered his style of dress in decades. He wore a waxy-looking mustache, a darker shade than his whitish-gray hair, and he ran his finger over it before lowering his eyebrows to return his gaze to the book in his hand.

“You must work here?” he said in an odd, thin voice. He appeared to address the book in his hand rather than me, asking the cheeky thing if it really had the gall. “Do you imagine this an infrequent request?” he asked the book.

I didn’t know what to say. Too much was already at stake. I looked up at him and calculated that his platform was a good twenty-four inches higher than where I stood. It was designed to meet the floor at an angle, masking its height and disguising its purpose. It was a stage. I guessed Pike a full head shorter than my own five feet ten, but recognizing this didn’t reduce his stature. He loomed, flanked by books.

But I had given Pike my future, and I wonder now if he saw this himself. There was a long pause as he made his way through his litany of gestures. His movements seemed the process by which he could figure the book’s price, winding himself up to calculating its value.

He set the volume to his left.

I waited. He drew a long breath.

“What we want here is the mild boredom of order. Don’t try to be too interesting, girl.” He read me as easily as the book he had put down.

“Find the Poetry section and begin to shelve what remains on the floor.” He waved his hand in a shooing gesture. “You’re probably ripe for poetry,” he added, in a lower voice.

Was he hiring me on the spot?

“Order by poet, mind you. Only by poet. Don’t give a damn about editors and translators—that’s all a charade. You will shelve by poet or you will not be employed by George Pike. Remove all anthologies! Alphabetical, that is all. There are a few things that should be predictable.”

I had followed this breathlessly, even while it didn’t appear to be directed at me. Had he said “ripe”?

“Ah, yes, sir. Mr. Pike…ah, alphabetical, of course.”

“Find Poetry and my manager will assess your competency shortly.”

He picked up the next unvalued volume to his right.

I hurried deeper into the Arcade and found the Poetry section halfway down a tower that leaned dangerously toward the public toilet, in a far corner. Quickly I began the task of rearranging books that had apparently never been shelved in any order. The section began at eye level. Above it appeared to be books on Occult Practices. The juxtaposition of subjects struck me as deliberate, only accidentally alphabetical. To reach the shelf I had to lean across a tall pile of books on the floor, awkwardly moving volumes around, my arms stiffly extended. I decided to take handfuls off the shelf and sort them while sitting on the floor. This too proved pointless, as I had to constantly reorder each section, accomplishing only what amounted to tidying up. Was this a test of my patience, of my real interest, a practical lesson in the overwhelming nature of bringing even the slightest amount of order to the Arcade?

After half an hour I’d barely managed to complete a single shelf, and was standing with my back to the aisle, wresting another few volumes off the shelf, when I had the sensation of being watched. I heard a sibilant whisper and turned, promptly dropping the books in my hand.

An albino man of uncertain age was no more than two feet from me, his pale eyes moving involuntarily behind pince-nez glasses. From the first it was his eyes. His eyes could not be caught. He stepped back and knocked over several books I had set aside. Ignoring his clumsiness, he took in my surprise with practiced unsurprise. I had never seen anyone like him, nor any face more marked with defensive disdain.

“Walter Geist, the Arcade’s manager,” he whispered, turning. “Follow me, girl.”

I picked up the books I’d dropped, forced them onto the shelf, and caught up with him as his stooped shoulder disappeared around a corner stack.

As I trailed behind his quaint figure, I had the fleeting fantasy that this man was what someone would look like if he’d been born inside the Arcade, never having left its dim confines. Pigment would disappear and eyesight would be ruined beneath weak light, until one lay passively, like a flounder on the ocean floor.

In fact, as I walked behind him, Geist’s white ears reminded me of delicate sea creatures suddenly exposed to light, vulnerable and nude. There was a shrinking quality to him, a retraction from attention like an instinctual retreat from exposure. I was fascinated and repulsed in equal measure, a contradiction that was never to leave me. As I follow him there in my memory, I feel again that charge to his strangeness, a shock that compelled.

He led me to a small office in the very rear of the store, built high into the corner of the vast ceiling like a reef. I followed him up a narrow flight of wooden stairs, the handrail loose and broken.

“Wait here, girl.”

He indicated the patch of landing at the entrance to the office.

“My name is Rosemary, Mr. Geist. Rosemary Savage,” I said, tired of his anonymous address. I extended my hand then, thinking it appropriate, brave even, as I had seen Americans do. His hands remained clasped behind his back. He entered the office and reemerged holding several forms.

“Please fill these out. Print only.”

He handed me a pen and stood examining the activity on the floor below. From that high landing the chaos of the Arcade was fully evident, with the exception of Pike’s platform, where he moved as if choreographed, a small flicker of concentrated activity. I leaned over the rail, following the inclination of Geist’s head, to see what drew his attention. An obese man sat on the floor in a cul-de-sac made by piles of books, his legs splayed out like a toddler’s. He was turning the pages of a large photography book with one hand, his other hidden beneath the heavy covers opened across his lap. Even from the landing I could tell the images in the book were nudes.

“What are you looking at?” Geist asked me.

“Ah, just looking down where you were,” I said nervously.

“I don’t mean that,” he said. “What do you see?”

I described the fat man studying the photographs.

“Arthur!” Geist called down from the landing. “You should be shelving.”

“Just familiarizing myself with my inventory, Walter,” Arthur returned sardonically, his accent British and articulate.

He looked up at me and put a thick finger to his lips, indicating silence. Had I informed on him? Couldn’t Geist see what I had seen? Arthur returned to his nudes, his hand beneath the book’s cover moved rhythmically.

Geist stomped his small foot with impatience, and I noticed he was wearing elegant, polished boots, their smooth black shape nosing from his pant legs like the shiny heads of tiny seals.

“Mr. Geist, could I have something to lean on?” I asked, finding it difficult to write legibly without the support of a desk, and wishing to distract him, and myself, from Arthur.

“No,” he replied, his shifting eyes still directed over the rickety railing. He removed his glasses, placed them in his breast pocket, and continued to wait for me to complete the forms, his manner uncanny as his appearance.

Now that I was closer to him I could see Geist was younger than I at first thought, perhaps twenty years Pike’s junior, in his late forties. He was an unfinished version, a poor copy, of the masterful Pike, yet equally a creature from another time. Every feature was pallid. His hair was white and fleecy, the sheepish outcome of his soft face. His clothes were not as fastidiously kept as his boots, his trousers slightly frayed along the pockets. I completed the forms and handed them back to him.

“You will begin work tomorrow morning at nine,” he instructed without seeming to actually address me, a tactic he perhaps learned from Pike.

“You will finish for the day at six. Your responsibilities at the Arcade will, for the time being, be that of a floater. This means you do not belong in a specific section, as you have no expertise, but will float between tasks that are assigned to you. Do not concern yourself with assisting customers, you will only frustrate them with your ignorance.”

“I have worked in a bookstore before, Mr. Geist,” I said, defensively.

He replaced his glasses, lodging them in the wrinkles of his forehead and frowning to keep them in place—or frowning because he thought me impudent. He leaned in toward my face, and his nostrils twitched as he appeared to take in my scent.

“Not in this one, Miss Savage,” he said. “Please do not interrupt. You will receive a salary of seventy dollars per week. There are no advances on wages. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” I said, afraid to lose the opportunity.

“Good. There is one more condition of employment you must understand.” Geist’s pink ears shifted back delicately. “George Pike will not tolerate the theft of money or books. Immediate termination of employment will result if theft is suspected.” This last admonition was said in an emphatic whisper.

Later, I saw the statement printed in placard capitals on a sign in the women’s bathroom, and again over the clock all employees punched when the day began and ended. Another sign was located directly in the line of vision on the wall in front of the staircase that descended to the cavernous basement. Reading these signs was like being regularly rebuked, and so they paradoxically served to remind patrons and staff alike that theft was in some sense assumed.