Shelf Monkey (13 page)

I rang the doorbell. The door opened, revealing Aubrey in jeans and T-shirt. “Thomas, you’re early! Well, come on in!” He was playing it cool, no question. He sped himself to the kitchen while I looked for a place to hang my jacket. “I’m just getting some nachos ready, have a look around!”

The house was a dream, Heaven in two stories and three bedrooms. Books lined the walls floor to ceiling, so closely packed an observer could be forgiven to think that the walls of the house were the books, a weird architectural attempt to recycle unwanted novels. Piles filled each corner, each book seemingly haphazardly placed, but on closer inspection revealed a great amount of care in their location. Many were scuffed, marred, bent, and dog-earred, but it was the natural erosion of good living and good reading, not mistreatment. These books were
loved
. Charlie Mingus cooed softly from corner speakers placed throughout the house, melting into a selection from the Lounge Lizards, giving the entire place the aura of a homey yet palatial used bookstore. I drooled in envy.

“You like?” Aubrey asked from behind me. “

I love. Tell me, is this a load-bearing stack of books?”

“I know, I know, I have a problem.” He handed me a Two Rivers in exchange for my coat. “I had one of those early-in-life moments when I had to choose an addiction, and heroin seemed so played out, y’know?” He led me to the living room, the one room that stood out for its lack of order. Unlike the fondly kept
stacks of other rooms, here the books lay everywhere. “Forgive the mess, brother,” he said, sweeping his arm around to indicate the house in its entirety. “You’ve caught me mid-bedlam. I’ve been reorganizing the collection.”

“How?” I could discern no pattern to the madness.

Aubrey lobbed my coat onto a pile of books by the couch. “Well, this room here is mostly just old books that have no real value to me, so I just throw them anywhere. Watch your step. But the other rooms, and against the walls here, I was bored with alphabetical, publisher wasn’t working, and size and colour never satisfied, too many variables. Drove me nuts. You see here the midpoint of my latest attempt, organization by font.”

“You’re kidding.” I walked out to the nearest room, his bedroom. I opened a few books at random from the nearest pile, then another one. Sure enough: Ehrhardt.

“My basement is mostly Cheltenham and variations. The kitchen is currently Arial and Bembo, the guest bedroom Bodoni. It’s not easy, a lot of fonts look alike.”

“No shit.” This was literary insanity beyond the par. Jealousy shivered through me.

The doorbell rang. “Man, everyone’s early tonight. Have a seat.” I made myself comfortable on his chequered sofa while he answered the door, the Lounge Lizards now being replaced by a jaunty Django Reinhardt. I was inspecting the books on the shelves behind me for font (Helvetica?), when I felt someone sit next to me, shifting the couch cushions. I glanced over, hoping it was Danae.

“Hey, handsome, come here often?” Yes!

“Almost never. Yourself?”

“Oh, only when I’m bored. I’m bored a lot.” She looked looser than she did at work, more free. Black jeans and loose hair was a terrific look for her. I wedged myself into the corner of the couch for a better vantage point. “Hey, Aubrey!” she shouted, “I love what you haven’t done with the place.”

“Thanks,” he yelled back from the kitchen. “Beer?”

“Lovely. Where’s Margarita?” Danae started looking about the room. “Have you seen her, Thomas?” I confessed ignorance, trying to figure out why she was looking for a cocktail among the
cushions and novels. “Is she here, Aubrey?”

He walked in, beers in each hand. “She’s somewhere around, she can’t go far, she was . . .” Aubrey stared intently at my lap. “Shit, Thomas, you’re sitting on her.”

“What?” I looked down and yelped, seeing a pair of furry legs sticking out from between my shirt and the arm of the couch. I leapt to my feet, revealing to light the ugliest thing I have ever seen crammed into the fabric. “Jesus, what is it?”

“Ubf!” it replied.

Danae leaned over and pried it loose from its fabric prison. Freed, it began to pant wildly, lying limply in her lap. “Ubf!” it said again.

“Oh, God, I killed it!”

Aubrey took the organism from Danae and began inspecting it for damage, casually flipping it over and over in his hands like pizza dough. “It’s okay, friend, she’s fine, happens all the time.” He righted the thing in his arms and scratched it absently, its hair slowly puffing out to reveal an extremely hairy Pomeranian. “She’s paralysed, can’t move her back legs, but she’s got a good sense of humour. Don’t you, girl?”

“Ubf!” Margarita said happily, squirming wildly in his arms, rapidly transmogrifying his black T-shirt into a camelhair sweater. “Ubf! Ubf! Ubf!”

I took a closer look. She seemed content, no ill effects suffered after close contact with my ass. With her fur and lack of mobility, I had inattentively assumed her to be a throw pillow. “Sorry, Margarita,” I said, scratching her where I approximated her ears might be. “So you’re the Master, I take it? Or are you a raging alcoholic?”

“Very good, most people don’t get the reference.”

“Ubf!”

I retook my seat on the couch next to Danae. Aubrey handed Margarita to her, whereupon Margarita commenced burrowing her nose into Danae’s thighs. I envied the dog. “So,” I began, then stopped, staring at Danae and Aubrey. I took a confident swig from my beer to gather my thoughts, and started again. “So.”

Danae giggled. “So.” She touched my arm in amusement. “I think you’d better fill him in, Aub. The suspense is killing him.”

Aubrey sipped his beer, gathering his thoughts. “From the beginning then?” he asked me.

“Worked for Shakespeare.”

“Have you ever read Bradbury, Thomas?”

“Of course I have,” I replied, more than mildly offended.
“Martian Chronicles, October Country, Something Wicked.
I’d be a pretty poor person if I hadn’t.”

“What about
Fahrenheit 451
?”

“Oh gosh, uh, duh?” Now I was definitely insulted. Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction classic of intolerance and insanity, where books are illegal and burned on sight. How could I
not
have read it?

Danae snorted. “Stop treating him like an idiot. You know he’s smarter than that.”

Aubrey dropped his head, the Gorgonian hair-snakes drooping in self-reproach. “You’re right, sorry. Just like to hear myself talk, I guess.”

“You guess?” Danae chided.

“Fine, I get it, consider me chastised,” he said, flustered. “I’m just feeling him out, Danae, is that all right with you?”

“Just get on with it, the others will be here soon.”

“Others?” I asked. “From the store?”

“Something like that.” Aubrey filched some rolling papers and a baggie from under the couch and began rolling a thick, lovely joint. “Thomas, what was Bradbury’s main point in
Fahrenheit
?”

I thought this over. “That books are more than ideas, more than paper and ink. That they are, in their way, people themselves, individuals. They affect you in the same way that a living person does. Our lives are emptier without such beings. Kill a book, kill a person, that sort of thing. That’s what I got out of it, anyway. I haven’t read it in a while.”

“Exactly, destroy a book, take a life.” Aubrey looked unreasonably proud of my answer. “That’s precisely how Danae and I, and a few others, that’s how we feel, right?” Danae nodded, also pleased with my answer, and shifted closer to me. I blushed despite myself.

“Now,” Aubrey continued, “if we take as a starting point our belief that books are more or less people, then it must follow, as with people, that there are both good books and bad books. Correct?”

“Er, sure, correct,” I acceded. I hoped this what was Danae wanted to hear.

“And, all things being equal, there are, let’s face it, some people this world could do without.”

“Right again.”

“So it is with books. Hate a person, hate a book. Evil book, evil person. Put it to death, no one cares, the world is better off without it. Take Charles Manson. Didn’t he forfeit his right to belong in society? Or
My Baby, My Love
. Trash, utter garbage. What’s the difference, really, between the two?”

“Absolutely. Wait, no, what?” I suddenly clued to in what Aubrey might be advocating. “Wait. No. Books are not people.”

“Not what you just said.”

“Hey, Manson harmed a lot of people.”

“So has Agnes Coleman.”

“Well, okay, yeah, but not in the same way, not physically. Manson had followers —”

“So does
My Baby, My Love
. People have —”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“You said it yourself, Thomas, kill a book, kill a person. You believe this, I know it.”

“Yeah, but only in Bradbury’s context, not real life. There is a difference.”

“There is no difference!” Aubrey shouted, standing at attention, his crimson tentacles lashing the air in anger. I shrank back, instantly ashamed of my cowardice in front of Danae. “Some books are simply a waste of paper, a waste of effort both to write and to read. These books are evil, and must be stopped!” He paused, panting slightly.

Danae placed her hand on my shoulder. Gooseflesh had prickled up my arms. “Jesus, Aubrey, calm down!” she ordered. “You’re freaking him out.” Aubrey nodded, his shoulders slumping. He dropped himself into his chair, a baleful look in his eyes. “Thomas,” Danae said, taking my hand. “Thomas, look at me.” I turned my attention from Aubrey, allowing Danae’s face to fill my vision. Damn, she was gorgeous. “Don’t mind him, Aubrey’s just passionate is all. Look, all we’re doing is having some fun. Every few weeks, a group of us gather together, like we’ll do later on
tonight. We light a bonfire, chant, sing, and have fun. Then, we burn a ’tag or two.”

“What?”

“It’s from
Fahrenheit
,” Aubrey said. “Warren’s idea. We call our choices montags, after Bradbury’s protagonist. We meet, we debate, we burn. It’s therapy, really. An incendiary biblioclasm of soul-soothing proportions.”

“You . . . wait. Oh my God, you burn books?”

“Uh huh.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“Nope.”

“For serious?”

“For real.”

“You guys are freaks.”

Danae put her hand to my mouth to shush me. I pretended to talk, trying to muffle out some words between her fingers, hoping she’d keep them on my lips. “No, it’s not like that, Thomas. We don’t burn based on content or ideas, like some crazed right-wing nutjobs. Well, not usually, anyway. Nobody’s perfect. I mean, it’s not like we’re burning
Huckleberry Finn
because we don’t appreciate the use of the word nigger, or
Harry Potter
because we’re afraid it promotes Satanism to our children, ignorant shit like that. We’re not like those southern senators wanting to ban Capote and
Heather Has Two Mommies
, anything with the slightest hint of homosexual content because it makes their loins tingle unpleasantly and they might go all
Queer as Folk
on their good ol’ redneck buddies. What we do is, we each bring one or two books that we feel the world is arguably better off without, a book lacking in style, originality, or artistic merit, a book with no purpose but profit, or just something that’s really, really bad. I brought a new Candace Bushnell tonight, God I hate her! She’s so fake, so facile. I know that’s what she’s trying to show, her characters are facile, but does her writing of them have to be as well? Hemingway wrote about the shallow and disenfranchised too, but he made them real, he made you care. Aubrey, what’s yours?”

“Well, I initially was going to bring a Bentley Little, but Brian Lumley just published another
Necroscope
novel that is so wearisome in its slavish worship of Lovecraft I just couldn’t resist.

I don’t know if I dislike him more for his lack of talent or his unabashed thievery of H.P.’s themes and characters. Either way, it’s a very bad thing indeed.”

My head was swimming, and not only because I could taste the delicate saltiness of her fingers. I grabbed her hand away and started shaking my head to clear it. “Look, this seems wrong, somehow. Book burning, it’s so . . . it’s just plain wrong! It’s sacrilegious somehow. Nazis burn books, fundamentalist morons burn books, not us. The Taliban burns books! The, the, the parents in
Footloose
burn books!”

“It’s just for fun, Thomas,” Aubrey jumped back in. “We’re not out to change the world here. There’s no grand ulterior motive, no wanton destruction of whatever pisses someone off. Checks and balances are in place. Everyone brings a book, and makes a case for its destruction. If anyone disagrees, we put it back, no arguments. Consider us a secret sect, if you like, like the Illuminati or the Freemasons, only far less influential.”

I sat there, letting this sink in. Of course, there were books I despised, and people associated with them. Assembly line cookie-cutter novels. The ridiculous stories written by religious extremists, fearful that the godforsaken combination of homosexuality, women’s rights, and common sense would somehow eradicate mankind. The diarrhea that was Bill O’Reilly.

“But everyone hates
something
,” I insisted. “Someone will always hate Charles Frazier, someone always loves Sydney Sheldon. What’s the cut-off? I mean, everyone writes for profit, in the end. They’re all trying to make a living. Some are just better than others.”

Aubrey clapped me on the shoulder. “Checks and balances, brother. It’s all in place, a system of rules we’ve pledged to honour. We keep each other honest, you’ll see.”

“It’s all symbolic anyway,” Danae said. “It’s a game. Some people bowl, some poke voodoo dolls, we burn. A game’s a game.”

The doorbell rang, interrupting my confusion. A moment later, Warren entered, noticeably limping. I guessed the feeling must be returning to his legs. “Hey, Tommy-gun, welcome to the club, man!” He looked at Aubrey elatedly. “Didn’t I tell you? I told you he was one of us. Hey, what’d you bring?” He waved a paperback
at me. “Look at this, a Robert Ludlum, see, only it’s not, he’s dead, it’s written by some hack and released under his name. He was never very good anyway, but this? Pure money grab. Let the dead R.I.P., am I right?” He hunkered down in front of me, wincing at the effort. “So, what’d you bring, huh? What you got?”