“That would be the question.”
“Unless there’s something to them,” he said, and drummed his fingers on Joey’s copy of The Turn of the Screw. “Because with words cut out it sounds like ransom notes.”
“It’s not words cut out exactly,” she said. “Just little random rectangles. They intersect the letters, so no chance of mining them for, say, a ransom note, or suicide note, or—”
“Or a valentine?”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, unsure if this was jealousy or a joke.
“But you’re sure the holes are random?” he said. “Maybe there’s a pattern somehow, an encryption.”
As David spoke, his voice was fading and she could sense him slipping away, quietly scrolling through his mental records of the Enigma device and Fortran punch cards and player-piano rolls and all things encoded.
“Have a look,” she said, then handed him the cut-up copy of A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.
“Whoa.”
“I know.”
“Are there others?”
“Cut up?” She rested her hand on the crate. “All of them.”
“All of them?” he said.
“Some more than others, but yeah, all of them have holes cut out. Rectangles.”
David slid the chair back, stepped to the sink, drank a glass of water, and sat back down. Apparently now he was ready.
“This is wild,” he said, and then, right to the point: “So why leave it all to you?”
“Exactly. Maybe for some kind of message. I don’t know.”
David leaned into the crate and shifted around some of the titles.
“Look at this one,” she said, and handed him the self-published, spiral-bound book called The Birds and the Beakers. Unlike all the others in the crate, this book was completely peppered with the cut-out windows, so it seemed as if its pages might simply disintegrate. In its own way this defacement made it beautiful, like a bound pile of paper snowflakes. “This one is definitely the anomaly. Way too many holes to follow any kind of order.”
“It looks so sloppy compared to the others,” he said, and after spending a few minutes skimming its holes he set it in an empty spot on the table and rested his hand atop it for a moment, as if processing by osmosis. “I have no idea what to make of that one. As for these . . .” He stirred through the crate, gently pushing the books around as if they were puppies in a whelping box. Occasionally he’d lift one out and open its pages and trace his fingers over its cut-out holes, and she realized he was seeking a pattern, as if it were a stack of data cards and not a book. “I should call in sick,” he said. “This is way better than work.”
She knew that if she asked him to, David would gladly bail on work, buckle into the chair next to her, and begin to sort through these piles. In a way, it would be his idea of the perfect date. He’d have a yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil and a lifetime of puzzles from which to draw his inspiration.
David spent a few minutes sorting through the titles, examining the books from all angles, objectively, as if he were studying an omelet pan or a bike crank. The spine, the cover, the little Bright Ideas label stuck to the back—all of it was worthy of David’s investigation.
At one point he looked up from the task and seemed surprised that Lydia was still there. “Are these all from the bookstore?”
“Most are,” she said. “All of the new ones I’m pretty sure he bought from me while I was working the register.” From the crate Lydia lifted a few books with yellowed pages and scuffed, outdated covers: The Osmond Family Story, the Victorian child’s primer, a collection of pastel poetry. “These are from thrift stores or yard sales or secondhand shops. Definitely used, anyway. Not from the store. We only sell new books.” David picked those up next, turned them in his hands.
“If these are used,” he said, “why do they have Bright Ideas labels on them?”
“They don’t.”
“They do.”
“They shouldn’t.”
“They do,” he said, turning them over, one by one. “All of them do.”
“Let me see,” she said, skeptical.
One title at a time, Lydia flipped over the books and saw that David was right. Not only did the lower corner of each back cover have a Bright Ideas label, but as she looked close enough to read the labels—the title, bar code, ISBN, shelving section, date of arrival, and price—she could see that the information crunched there in tiny type belonged to different books altogether.
Lydia grunted and held her forehead.
“What is it?” David said.
“The labels are all wrong,” she said. She lifted the copy of A Universal History of the Destruction of Books and tapped the label on the back: The Bed-Wetter’s Almanac. “This should be stuck on a different book altogether,” she said.
“On all of them?”
“On all of them. The new and the old: all have been mislabeled.”
Lydia closed her eyes. It was entirely possible, she thought, that one of Joey’s books could’ve been tagged with the wrong Bright Ideas label—she and her comrades were, after all, overworked and underpaid—but it was entirely impossible that all of them had been mislabeled. And swapping labels from book to book made no sense, unless Joey had been up to something really stupid, like exchanging labels in order to pay less at the register, the way teenagers sometimes traded price tags on clothes in department store dressing rooms in order to buy a prom dress for the cost of a thong. But more telling than any such speculations was the fact that she was the one who’d sold Joey most of these books, so she knew they hadn’t been mislabeled when he’d brought them to her at the counter. Zapping them into the inventory system, she would have noticed that the book on the screen didn’t match the book in her hand, which meant that something more than stupidity was happening here.
“You wanted to know what Joey was up to with the cut-up books?” David said. “There’s your answer.”
“What do you mean?” Lydia said.
David tapped one of the mismatched labels. “That’s not an accident. He’s pointing you to this book too. Joey is.”
“Why would he do that?”
“No idea,” David said with a shrug. “But if an answer exists, it’s probably in the other book.”
“So, what—follow the label?”
“Follow the label. Find the book it belongs to.” He looked up at the clock. “Do you want me to stay? I would love to stay. Tell me to stay.”
“You need to go.”
“Shit,” he said, smiling. “I know.”
He rushed into the bedroom to finish getting ready, then returned to the table and kissed her. As he gathered his laptop and his jacket and started to leave the apartment, David swirled his bad hand in the direction of the milk crate as if casting a spell on Joey’s books. “This is really messed up that he did this to you. I mean it’s cool, but—”
“Devious,” she said. “I know.”