“What did you mean that Joey was cutting up books?” Lyle said in a quiet, cautious voice.
“He was defacing his own books, but borrowing others from the store as well. Taking their labels. Using them as a guide, I guess.”
“But why would he? A guide for what?”
“For me,” she said, and felt the hairs lift on the back of her neck. “He was doing it for me. He was leaving me messages.”
“Really, now?” Lyle shifted forward on the couch, rolling this thought around in his head and apparently accepting it. “I’m sufficiently intrigued. Go on.”
From her satchel she retrieved a hardcover copy of Denis Johnson’s noir novel Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and tossed it at Lyle’s lap.
“It was in Joey’s apartment,” she said. “One of the books he passed to me in death.”
“Dear god,” Lyle said, rotating it in his hands. “The title hits a bit close to home. Intentional?”
“Has to be.”
“And that’s the message you’re talking about—Resuscitation of a Hanged Man?”
“Actually, no. Keep looking.”
Lyle repositioned his glasses and licked his fingers. He traced his palm sensuously along the spine—the BookFrog equivalent of kicking the tires. He read the opening paragraphs and sighed with admiration, then flipped through the book until he came to the little rectangles, hardly bigger than a housefly, that had been cut from a number of pages.
“What’s with the holes?”
“Some kind of cipher,” she said.
There on the couch, Lyle studied the novel with renewed vigor, awestruck by the cuts in its pages. She’d thought he’d be more skeptical. “That does sound like Joey, with his New World Order talk and Illuminati leaflets. I hope you never made the mistake of asking him about the Federal Reserve. Or naked mole rats. Positively sinister. Go on.”
“I thought it was some kind of puzzle at first,” Lydia said, “cutting out the words to arrange into a collage or something.”
Lyle laughed through his hand. “Joey doing Dada? über-freaky.” But suddenly he sat up and his smirk turned into a cringe. “The cuts on his fingers—they came from this?”
“As far as I can tell,” she said. “Look at the label on the back.”
Lyle flipped it over and read aloud. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?” he said. “It’s mislabeled. I don’t get it.”
His face went blank when Lydia extracted from her satchel the annotated copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that she’d found this morning on the shelf in Fiction. “The two books are the same size,” she said, then stacked them together and held them out for Lyle. Just as she had earlier on her own, Lydia opened the two books to page 34, folded back the cover of the Denis Johnson novel, then lined it up over the Lewis Carroll classic. Again, the little empty windows were now filled with words.
“Read the holes, Lyle. Where new words show through.”
Lyle cleared his throat of something phlegmy, then struggled to read aloud:
noon
ewa
. It????ed
out
side ???The
, ga
tesi
was
rel
ease???. D
fr
ee
“No one waited outside the gates . . . I was released . . . free . . . Is that what it says? Wait—is this real?”
“It’s real.”
“How do you even know these are messages, though? Couldn’t it be, I don’t know—something else? Something not Joey?”
Lydia explained how, as far as she could tell, Joey chose the second book because its font was bigger, which made it easier to read through the windows. Then she told him about the pair of books—on book destruction and bed-wetting—she’d deciphered yesterday on the sidewalk.
“He addressed me by name,” she said. “You found me again, Lydia. And he signed it J. And he kept that one separate from his other books, I think, so that I would discover it first, before these others.”
“What does that even mean, though—You found me again?”
“I found him once when he was hanging,” she said, “and again when I figured out his messages. I found his voice, I guess.”
“His last words,” Lyle said.
Lydia looked at her hands, feeling solemn. “I didn’t ask for this.”
“I know. But at least we know now what he was doing those last few days. What do the others say?”
“I’ve only managed to put together two more. This batch”—she gestured to the pair of books Lyle was holding and then tapped her satchel—“and one other. Go ahead. Line up the next pages.”
Lyle turned to page 89 of Resuscitation and Lydia had to help him fold it open so that only that page stuck out, then place it atop page 89 of Alice. Once it was aligned Lyle worked his way through the tiny windows there and on the pages after:
and
, J
us.
tas
Al
one
as
Al????way
son
ly
mo
reg
row
nup
mores
c are
Dan
daw
. Are d
that
Li
few
ould
,” Al
way
be
Noon
eo
uts,
I’d
et.
He g
ate
. S
Lydia pulled out the pocket-sized sunflower notebook in which she’d scrawled her morning’s labors. “I think he’s talking about prison here: No one waited outside the gates . . . I was released . . . free . . . and just as alone as always . . . only more grown up . . . more scared and awared that life would always be . . . no one outside the gates.”
“Definitely prison,” Lyle said, and then his face fell apart. “But my god, how depressing. Finally getting out, and no one being there to meet him. It’s awful, Lydia. What a terrible thing. My heart goes out even now, you know?”
“Hopeless,” she said. “And then to believe that his whole life would be like that?”
“All he had to do was ask,” Lyle said, “and I would’ve been there.”
Lydia dug inside her satchel. “This is the only other one I’ve figured out so far,” she said, then slid an oversized and butchered copy of A History of the Sect of the Hasidim she’d found in Joey’s apartment over an equally large copy of a fly-fishing book called Emergers she’d found shelved in the Sports section. She leaned forward enough for Lyle to see through the windows as she paged through the message:
ids
. W
allows
P
I’d
ers
ch
ew g
Las
s. Y
an k
. M?ynai
lst???ee
Th
. J
us two
be p
ART.
“I’d swallow spiders, chew glass, yank my nails and teeth . . . just to be part,” Lyle read. “Well, that’s very sweet of him. But where’s the rest of it? Just to be part of what? The Boy Scouts? The cast of The X-Files? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? I’m sorry. I just can’t help but feel insulted here. I gave that boy everything I could.”
“Maybe this is about something you couldn’t possibly provide,” she said. “There’s a pattern here, like when he got out of prison. Needing to feel like he’s wanted. To feel not stranded—just to be part.”
“But he was part,” Lyle said. “He was part of this bookstore. He was part of us.”
Lyle flipped through the pages and shuddered.
“Why do I feel like Joey is going to come waltzing up behind me at any moment?”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “This whole thing is freaking me out.”