postcard appeared. It came unmoored from the paper, and began to float off. The lines that Alojzy had used to draw the waves rearranged themselves into letters. Latin letters, Hebrew letters, Cyrillic letters. Diacritic marks. The ship sailed away from me, and I found myself pitched forward, thrashing in this Sea of Babble, struggling toward a life raft up ahead.
The sounds of Becca and Andrew getting ready for work woke me up at seven thirty the next morning. The pressure in my bladder was uncomfortable, but I would rather suffer a little discomfort than face my sister’s wrath if I got in the way in the morning. It was wisest to stay hidden as they put on their war paint and chomped their energy bars.
Finally, I heard Becca’s exasperated, “Are you coming or not? I’m late. I can’t wait,” and the answer of Andrew’s galloping loafers. I gave it a minute after the door slammed to make sure they weren’t coming back for anything, then made my way to the bathroom. Religious Jews said some prayer about being glad that all your pipes were in working order. I didn’t know the words, but was thankful I had been given another day on earth and eager to make the most of it. I was not great at making the most of my days. But now I had a purpose.
I looked out my sister’s huge living room windows, at the newly risen sun over the East River. It had been sunny for days. The booksellers would probably be getting out on the street around now. I was not up and out as early as the booksellers, or Becca for that matter. She had inherited more of Alojzy’s hustle than I had. It was something I needed to work on, to cultivate.
I wanted to lie down on the couch and sleep some more. After I stopped going to classes, I’d gotten into the habit of sleeping until noon or later. My time in New Mexico had helped break that habit. Even Solomon was rebuked for sleeping late, with the key to the Great Temple under his pillow.
Some Adderall or Dexedrine would have provided a good jump-start, but I was relying on myself now, on my own will and motivation. I put the teakettle on the stove to boil, and turned on the TV with no sound. The movement of the colors on the screen helped get me into a more mobile mind-set. I drank my tea and headed downtown.
AS SOON AS I turned the corner from Broadway onto West Fourth Street, I saw the booksellers. They were a feral element in the landscape, contrasting with the purple New York University flags and the attendant crowds of clean students. The booksellers were a black mold growing through the new paint. I admired the defiant role they played in the cityscape. Unlike all the people rushing off to offices—Becca and Andrew, for instance—these street vendors interacted with the metropolis on their own terms.
At the first table, a man wearing an old military jacket and a black beret was taking science-fiction paperbacks out of a Poland Spring box and arranging them on the edge of an already crowded card table. He lined the books up evenly with each other, letting as much of each one hang off the edge as he could without it falling onto the sidewalk.
“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up and shook his head. “No,” I said, “I just wanted to—” The man shook his head again, and pointed to another man, who had long black dreadlocks with pieces of seashell and wire tied into them, and wore a long coat that seemed too heavy for the tail end of a warm winter. He leaned against a large cement planter in which nothing grew, bent over in a halfhearted attempt to hide the wad of cash he was counting. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, but he neither drew nor ashed, and I waited to see if his bouncing dreadlocks would catch on fire. As I watched, a gust of wind dispersed the quarter inch of gray ash into the air.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Yeah? Could I help you? Could I?” His pupils—bits of charcoal floating in a glass of dirty water—darted up toward me for a moment before he resumed counting his money. It wasn’t a huge sum of money, but he kept getting confused and starting over.
“I was just wondering if you knew if there was a bookseller around here named Mendy?” The man stopped counting and looked up.
“Mendy? Mendy, Mendy. Mendy? There might be.” He turned and shouted at the man with the beret. “He wants to know is there a Mendy around here?” The man with the beret smiled warily, and clutched his box of books tighter. “Yeah, there’s a Mendy around here. What do you want with that asshole?”
“Nothing, it’s just that somebody told me I should talk to him.”
“Okay, okay.” He put his money in his pocket so he could gesture with his hands. “But look: if you got some textbooks to sell, you might as well go ahead and bring them to me first. Because I, frankly, will give you a better deal than that bastard.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think . . .”
“What do you mean, ‘no’? You can ask anybody out here on this street. It’s the truth. I can give you a better deal on your books. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t make you rich. Used books are worth very little. But compared to that stinker down there, well, let’s just say that he will not treat you so good as I will treat you.”
“No. I mean, I’ll keep that in mind.” I held out my empty hands, to show I didn’t have anything to sell. “It’s not about books, though, it’s about something personal.”
“Aw, hell. I don’t care about nothing like that. Mendy’s down that way.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. This man was a hustler, and if I wasn’t buying or selling, he had no use for me.
“Where?” I asked.
“Down there at the corner where the park starts. Old guy with a beard. That is to say, older than me, with a bigger beard than mine.” Our interview concluded, he went back to peering at his bills through his thick glasses.
I passed two more tables before I came to Mendy’s. His setup was by far the most expansive on the block, stretching along the sidewalk for a good twenty feet. Sheets of plywood spanned several card tables, and on top of them the books were packed tight in long, snaky rows, held at the end by the T-shaped metal bookends librarians use. Between the rows, other books stood upright, some encased in plastic slipcovers.
Debris was strewn underneath and behind the tables. Empty water boxes. The red-and-white woven plastic bags sold in Chinatown, weighted down with two-by-fours. A box of tissues. A shiny handcart. Stacks of books. Always, more books.
The whole setup gave me the impression of a kid’s clubhouse. I peeked, half expecting to find a twelve-year-old sneaking a smoke under the table. Someone was indeed hiding there, but he was a grown man well into his sixties. Though he was hunched down, busily cleaning book covers with rubbing alcohol and tissues, I had a clear profile view. There was something Hasidic in his lean face and long cloudy beard, but his soiled wifebeater and sinewy arms—surprisingly muscled for so old a man—betrayed more than a passing familiarity with the material world. He caught me staring and rose to an upright position. His eyes stayed locked on mine, as if he’d just discovered me inside his house, and couldn’t decide if I was a harmless sleepwalker or a burglar.
“Were you looking for something particular? Something I could maybe help you with?” Each word was a testing jab.
“No, I’m not looking for . . . I’m just looking.”
I picked up a thin book called The ABC of Anarchism and made myself read a few pages. The author was trying to convince somebody about something.
“The
