The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“That was different.”


Doyle shakes his head and octopi glide across his throat. “Man, I don’t know. My family’s all pipe fitters.” He laughs and cracks his neck. Impossible as it should be, I’m starting to like him.

Creaking comes through the window, the sound of someone sitting down at a half-rotten picnic table. We both look. Enola is cross-legged on the table my father built, not the bench—never proper—facing away from us, bent-backed.

“I’m worried about her,” Doyle says quietly. “She’s getting a little strange on the cards.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Okay, man.”

The concrete on the back stoop is broken, so she hears me coming and picks up whatever cards were on the table. The paper looks tattered and yellow, very old, the colors faded. I can make out the shape of a skeletal arm, half worn away, before she snatches the cards and stuffs them in her hoodie. She twists around to look at me. I sit on one of the benches and feel the old wood sag under me.

“Is that a Marseille deck?” That’s what’s in The Tenets. I’ve seen Waite decks, too, illustrated in the 1900s. Delicate pictures. This is not that.

“No. And I’m not talking about it,” she says.

“Sure.”

She stretches her legs and leans back across the table. “Why did Dad build this? It’s not like we ever ate outside.”

“We did once or twice.”

“Not after Mom died, right?”

“No.” Everything stopped after Mom died. “Doyle’s nice,” I say.

She scrapes a small patch of lichen that’s grown on the table. “He likes me. I know that’s hard to do sometimes.”

“You’re not so terrible. He’s weird-looking, though. Even for you.”

“I know,” she smiles. “It’s kind of why I’m with him.”

“Where do you guys travel?” I want her to talk. It’s been so long since I’ve spent time with her that it feels good to listen to her. The thing I don’t miss about the library is the silence—the middle of winter days when there’s nothing to listen to but the hissing heaters, the hum of computers, and pages turning. Why did I never just pull Alice aside to talk?

“Winter last year Rose’s went deep into Georgia. Cards can be slow there. Churchy people.” She rolls her eyes. “The houses down there are gorgeous. You’d like them,” she says. “I took a ghost tour of an old brick place on this river that feeds into the ocean. It’s got oysters on each bank, piled up like ruffles on panties.” She stretches slowly. “Never seen anything so pretty.”

Manuscripts aren’t so different from ruffles; both need a light touch. I think about the job in Savannah. This morning Liz sent an email saying that the Sanders-Beecher Archive called her for a reference. She chided me for laying it on too thick with them, but said she corroborated my credentials. I’d do the same for her. Liz and I have always understood each other. I look at my sister, Enola, who I don’t understand at all. “What’s your show like?”

“Basic. Boring. The carnival is what you’d think, mostly. Swings, whack-a-mole, everything. Freak show.”

“Is that where Doyle is?”

“Yeah. There’s a maze with a Cyclops lamb and bouncers. We’ve got taxidermy monkey babies made into Siamese twins. It’s like stumbling across an enormous dog shit—you need to stare. I mean how the hell do you get monkey carcasses shipped to you?” She looks at the kitchen window, perhaps at Doyle. “We’ve got a swallower, Leo. Does swords and flames. He’s okay and he’s almost normal. Wife, kids, middle-aged spread. We’ve got a piercer, too, kind of an asshole, but he knows a lot about anatomy.” She digs a bit of grime from under her fingernail. “He hangs cannonballs from his nipples, pokes needles through his arms, that sort of stuff. At night shows if you pay extra you can see him lift stuff with his dick. George—he’s the fat man—handles the cash. Doyle works mostly nights.”

It makes sense. “The lights play better in full dark, I guess.”

“Yeah. In daylight he moves well, but it’s different at night. You get why he did the tattoos. In the dark he’s not really human. You see the bulbs but the light comes from him, like he’s part stars, part water. You look and think maybe you could be on that skin, move like that, and light would come from you, too. Sometimes I think the ink holds the light in so I can look at him, like maybe he did it because he wanted me, someone like me, to see him.”

She drags her fingers through her hair, scratching her scalp. I remember cutting out a chunk of her glue-and glitter-matted hair.

“He’s really good. He’s better than me,” she says.

My phone buzzes in my pocket.

It’s Alice; her voice is flat. “I need you to explain something.”

“Hey, what’s wrong?” I get up from the table and Enola follows, listening in. She mouths, Alice? I put up a hand, but she hangs over my shoulder.

“Why exactly would you steal from the library?”