Lydia didn’t know if Lyle was talking about feeling cured by this distraction or hearing Joey’s voice again between the pages, but she was glad to see him perking up.
“At first I thought Joey may have been married,” she said, thinking of the Vital Records office with its menu of marriage and divorce documents. “Especially with the new suit in his closet and so much focus on this woman in the messages. Like that one about being saved by his only Her.”
“Joey the romantic,” Lyle said, then lifted his head toward the ceiling as if the idea were a balloon he’d just released into the air. “Brokenhearted Joey, killing himself over a girl. Twice she stole my heart. I buy it, but I don’t quite buy it.” He read the message again, flipping back and forth through the pages to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. “That’s not to say it isn’t genuine. It’s just not the Joey I knew.”
“But then I came across this,” she said, and pulled from her satchel a cut-up copy of Wise Blood followed by a recent reissue of The Crying of Lot 49.
Seeing the novels side by side, Lyle raised his brow.
“A deadly combination. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
It took some effort but Lydia opened the books to the cutouts and handed them over, and Lyle slid the novels together and began to read aloud:
Dr
op
Me
from the
Ask
y. Dr
op
,” Me
on??????th
, eh?”
igh
away
, so
1.
On
gas
I’l
and
inside
a.m.
. In
, I
Van
“That does not really say that,” he said. “Drop me from the sky . . . drop me on the highway . . . so long as I land . . . inside a minivan? Sounds like something Neil Young would hum in a bathroom stall. Joey and his minivans, my god. If he was still alive I’d encourage him to open a dealership.” Then Lyle held up his hand and closed his eyes, gently humming, as if he were watching Joey’s methodology fall into place, window by window, on the inside of his lids. “It’s very self-destructive,” he said after a minute. “But a minivan? Maybe Joey just wanted a family.”
“I think so,” Lydia said, unable to stop a small bounce of celebration. “It’s like he was obsessed. Remember the one about him eating spiders or glass or whatever just to be part? Maybe to be part of a family.”
“Or to start a family,” Lyle said, “since there’s a woman involved?”
“Sure.” Lydia flipped open her little notebook to a scribbled page and handed it to Lyle. “This pair I deciphered last night. Two novels. The Black Book and The Secret History.”
Lyle cleared his throat, then read her writing aloud. “Drowning in blood I may never breathe again. Well, that’s a bit dramatic.” He wiggled his fingertips and grimaced. “Drowning in blood? Spooky too.”
“Drowning in blood,” she said. “Again he seems to be pointing me toward family. Bloodlines.”
“Pointing you?” Lyle said.
“Pointing us.”
Lyle seemed pleased by the inclusion. As he flipped through Lydia’s notebook, seeking the other messages she’d transcribed, Lydia’s thoughts looped back to what Wilma had observed about Joey, the way he’d spend his Saturday mornings sitting in the rocking chair, staring at the families in the Kids section. Lydia imagined Joey silently projecting himself into their lives. He must have believed that the best he could do was to observe them from the outside, to press his fingers on the far side of their glass. It occurred to Lydia that he may have hanged himself because he’d spent his whole life trying in vain to find a place that, for him, was never allowed to exist.
“What’s that one there?” Lyle said, gesturing to the rolled-up copy of The Birds and the Beakers poking out of Lydia’s satchel.
“This would be the gem,” she said, “our Rosetta stone, if only it had a label.” She flipped through it for him, displaying pages peppered with so many holes that they resembled a shotgun target. “It was in his apartment, too. It’s so cut up I’m surprised it hasn’t dissolved in my hands.”
“So there’s no label on the back.”
“Which means no book to pair it with,” she said, handing it over for him to examine. “So now it’s indecipherable, a lock without a key.”
“Maybe try pairing it with Finnegans Wake or The Ursonate.”
“It was on top of a pile of newspapers by his front door,” she said. “I thought they were for recycling, but I’m thinking now I should have grabbed them. Maybe the newspapers held the answer, you know?”
“They wouldn’t have helped,” Lyle said. “This is what Joey used to practice with. Look at the first pages. They’re a real mess, rips and slices all over the place, not to mention little spots of blood where he’d cut his fingertips. Clearly impossible to decipher. But by the time he got to the end of the book, he was cutting out some pretty little windows. This was his practice round.”
Lydia looked at Lyle with admiration. “I’m glad I found you,” she said.
“Me, too,” he said. “All of this is pure Joey. It’s like he was attempting to become his books. His deepest self. His final act. Joey’s books were Joey’s solace, so doing this, inserting himself so personally into them, may have been the only way he could profess his burdens to the world. To you, Lydia. I mean the kid killed himself, and this was his way of—I don’t want to say justifying it, but maybe attempting to communicate the process that led him to such a hopeless state. Like windows into his soul. Pure Joey. Pure Joey.”
As Lyle hummed, Lydia found herself thinking about the dark tattoo of a tree on Joey’s chest, and about trees becoming wood and wood becoming paper and paper becoming pages—
“The question is,” Lyle added, leaning forward in the pew and peering over his spectacles, “what are we supposed to make of it all?”
“That he had a broken heart?” she said.
“Broken beyond healing,” Lyle said. “And family?” He got up from the pew. He slid out a book on angels and another on chakras. Then he pressed his palm against a row of spines.
“Family law,” Lydia said, nearly spontaneously.
Without turning around, Lyle’s head lifted.
“Family law,” he agreed.
Lyle clearly knew what Lydia was referring to: the period, within the past year or so, when Joey had become obsessed with books on family law. Joey’s obsessions would sometimes border on rude, such as when he’d waltz up to her while she was scanning books at the counter, or making a recommendation to a customer, and accost her with whatever subject he was presently interested in.
—Guatemalan textiles.
—Vaudeville fiddlers.
—Dominican plantations.
—Knitting with dog hair.
And Lydia would stop what she was doing and tell him where to go (“Second floor, Anthropology”) or, if she was free, join him in the hunt.
—Family law.