“Any idea why Joey would do that?”
“Because even dead he’s a pain in my ass,” the woman said, brushing past Lydia. She pursed her face and reached into her shirt and jangled a necklace of keys out of nowhere. With a click Joey’s door opened.
“Joey overall seemed decent,” the woman continued. “He was like a kicked dog, untrusting, so you must’ve done something for him.”
Lydia felt herself blushing.
The woman smiled. “You know, you think they have what it takes to pull it together, and then they go and rob a liquor store or have public sex in a mattress shop or hang themselves in a bookstore. I really thought Joey was different.”
Lydia peered into Joey’s apartment. The woman let go of her elbow.
“All yours,” the woman said, clinging to the railing, heading back down the stairs. “Like it or not, Lydia-from-the-bookstore, the kid chose you.”
Inside Joey’s apartment Lydia wasn’t surprised by the scarcity of furniture—a kitchen island with a single stool, a simple wooden folding chair parked against a simple wooden desk—but she was surprised by how bland his home was. Walls all bare. No photographs on the fridge or desk, no hampers or baskets in the bedroom. And tidy, especially for a guy in his early twenties. She peered into his drawers and cabinets and found them empty except for some folded clothes and basic spices and cleaning supplies. The only thing in his bedroom closet was a black wool suit in a dry-cleaning bag, hanging next to a pressed white shirt and a red tie. She couldn’t imagine any occasion for which Joey would need a suit, except perhaps a court date, but it looked brand-new, so she hung it from the front door to drop at a thrift store or pass along to a BookFrog in need.
Next to the door was a small stack of newspapers bound by twine and waiting to be recycled, and on top of the pile was a slim, spiral-bound book with a blue cover and gilded lettering. From the cheap format and the painful title—The Birds and the Beakers: Forty Years in a Biology Classroom—she could tell it had been self-published, an educational autobiography, which might explain why Joey had left it in his recycling pile. Her heart sank as she tossed it to the floor below the suit to take with her.
In the bathroom she smelled Joey’s pear-shaped soap, felt the scuffed texture of his bath towel, waiting for something to stand out. Hanging on the wall behind the bathroom door was a framed certificate of completion for some state program called Rebuilding Ourselves, and she was surprised by the tidiness of his signature: Joseph Edward Molina. A few knotted garbage bags were piled in the kitchen, and when she unknotted one and peered inside, feeling as if she were dunking her head into a stagnant pond, she found an unfinished box of Life cereal, a dented tomato soup can, a mealwormed bag of buckwheat, a brick of Velveeta, and partial containers of coffee and ketchup and lemon juice and curdled chocolate milk—all thoughtfully prepared for the dumpster, all reinforcing how ready to die Joey had been.
Joey’s landlady had left his windows open in an attempt to air out the place, but everything still reeked of a soggy barbecue. Out on the fire escape, Lydia found a small metal trash can holding fragments of ash. Joey’s charred papers, she thought, maybe Joey’s charred books. She stirred the brittle burnings with a butter knife, but the closest she came to anything legible was the corner of a scorched manila envelope that revealed an emblem of faint letters, discolored but intact: a triangular logo showing a green mountain capped with snow, similar to the one on Colorado license plates and state regalia, along with the faint letters CODVR. When she reached into the can to try to pick it up for a closer look it disintegrated into pieces, leaving a gray smudge on her fingertips.
Whatever Joey was burning here, he’d wanted it gone.
From the depths of her satchel, Lydia pulled out the pocket-sized notebook with a sunflower on its cover that David had bought for her birthday last year, after he’d grown tired of finding little scraps of paper on her nightstand, filled with a title, an author, a page number, or a quote. On a blank page, she wrote down the single cluster of letters followed by a big fat question mark: CODVR?
As she continued to move through the apartment, it occurred to Lydia that, outside of his favorite authors, she knew practically nothing about Joey. And outside of the certificate he’d left hanging on the bathroom wall, Joey had left nothing behind that might signal his identity. She may as well have been searching through an empty hotel room in any city in any country on the planet.
Joey—a young, invisible, singular kid—had erased himself from the world.
Except for his books, she thought. Which were where?
When Lydia had first stepped into this apartment, she’d been expecting a cavernous personal library, but in fact Joey’s entire collection amounted to the single milk crate of a dozen or so titles sitting on top of his desk—that was all. Most of them seemed fitting for Joey (a book on Virgin Mary sightings and another on Sasquatch sightings, one history of Hasidism, three Penguin Classics, a Victorian-era Child’s Story Primer, a few Vonnegut novels, biographies of J. D. Salinger and Jerzy Kosinski) but a few of them gave her pause, including a dubious collection of pastel poetry, a motivational business bible, and a biography of the Osmond family. She also noticed more than a few favorites that he’d bought based on her recommendation—Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, freshly annotated; Alice Munro’s Open Secrets; Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man; Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy—and the sight of each made her sigh.
Just as she finished going through them, she saw another book—one she remembered Joey buying—only it wasn’t in the crate at all, but rather leaning against the wall that flanked the back of his desk. The neck of his desk lamp was craned toward the wall, and when she clicked its switch the light shone precisely upon the book, as if he’d placed it on display.
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.
She recalled the day a few months ago when Joey had staggered up to the bookstore counter with this very book in hand, looking exceptionally wispy in his black windbreaker and black dress slacks cut off at the shins. His black hair had been tucked inside a knit hat, but a few strands still clung to his tawny cheeks.
—Can I ask? he said.
Hearing Joey’s voice was rare, and when he did speak he sounded hushed, almost stonerly, and often ended his sentences with an inquisitive lilt, as if even he was surprised to hear himself speaking.
—Sure, she said.
Joey pulled a small hardback out from the crook of his arm and placed it between them on the counter: A Universal History of the Destruction of Books. A title that had been relegated to the depths of the bargain shelves, where most of Joey’s books came from.