The guy in the Hawaiian shirt had taken a seat on the far side of the passenger lounge. Tiring of his search for terrorists, he was staring, or pretending to stare, at the crisscross wakes of pleasure boats as they stormed around the glassy sea. If they had undercover marshals on planes — which Lucy thought was okay, even reassuring — why shouldn’t they put them on the ferries? Just because you saw the occasional plainclothesman with a concealed gun didn’t mean the country was turning into a police state. The trouble with Tad was he had no sense of proportion. Michael had been the one with common sense, and after he died poor Tad, more often out of work than in, had tried to lose himself in cyberspace, where he was natural prey to all the psychos out there with their hot little secrets and spurious insider dirt.
On I-5, traffic was backed up from the checkpoint for the best part of a mile. Stewing in gridlock, Lucy was reminded of another of Tad’s unlikely stories, expounded over dinner as if it were gospel. There was a huge program to renew reflective lane markers on highways, ostensibly the baby of the Department of Transportation but known by Tad to have originated in the National Security Agency. These weren’t just any old lane markers; they were clandestine — you might say clairvoyant — lane markers that would track the number, make, and color of your car as it went by. When the system was complete, they’d be able to track the exact movements of every vehicle in the U.S. It was, Tad said, all done by microchips and wireless technology.
“Microchips? How could microchips do that?”
Tad, wearing the lofty smile of the privileged initiate, said, “You’d better ask the NSA that question.”
The uniformed boys at the checkpoint, faces red with sunburn, were surprisingly polite, considering the tormenting weather. One asked Alida what she was listening to.
Alida removed an earphone to say, “Good Charlotte. ‘Young and Hopeless.’”
“Cool. Okay, ma’am. Drive safe.”
Definitely not the manners of a police state.
She took the Union Street exit and drove into the muggy haze of downtown.
“Temperature inversion,” Alida said, at last breaking the long silence of the ride.
“What?”
“When warm air gets trapped by even warmer air in the upper atmosphere, so it can’t rise and all the pollution has nowhere to go. You know that just living in Seattle’s like smoking twelve cigarettes a day? I bet today it’s like smoking thirty. Yuck!”
“I never heard the cigarette thing.”
“We did it in Science. It’s really, really scary.”
“I’m afraid science is scary now. It never used to be. When I was in junior high in Miles City, it was always about exploring the wonders of the world. It’s so different for you guys — exploring all the terrors.”
“Thirty cigarettes a day. It’s the particulates in the air. You know what?”
“What, Rabbit?”
“Tonight, can we get pizza?”
ENTERING THE APARTMENT, Lucy was immediately aware of something odd and wrong, though what that something was she couldn’t place. Then she saw that her wilted lilies in the vase on the table had been replaced by fresh tulips. That would be the ever-thoughtful Tad, who had a key to 701 as she had a key to 704. But it wasn’t just the tulips. She scanned the living room and fixed on the bookshelves: her small library was all out of order, with many of the books stuffed in backward, spine first. It looked like some ham-fisted ape had been at work, wrecking her careful alphabetizing, with Kathy Acker where Virginia Woolf should be. Outraged and bewildered by this weird invasion — violation — of her territory, she cast helplessly around for an explanation until she remembered the landlord’s promise to attach her shelves to the wall.
She pulled out an armful of books and saw the new screws, neatly countersunk into the wood of the Pepsi crates. How could anyone go to such trouble, yet show such blatant contempt for her books? It would take hours and hours to put them back in order.
He had no right…
Yet anger with the landlord contended with a wary lightening of the heart, for if he was really bent on eviction, why on earth would he bother to anchor his tenant’s possessions so securely to the building? Each crate was now attached to the wall by four big silver screws. Stolen night by night from outside the grocery store in Missoula, lightly sandpapered, and brushed with four coats of Varathane, the Pepsi crates had traveled with her since her sophomore year of college.
“Rabbit, what are four eighteens?”
“Seventy-two,” Alida called back from her room.
How long would that have taken him? More time than it was worth, surely. One screw per crate, two at most, would have done the job, but he’d created a structure of such rigidity and permanence that it would take the total collapse of the Acropolis to shake these shelves from the wall. If that was any indication of how her tenancy stood in his eyes, she ought to be delighted with his work, despite the shambles he’d made of her books.
“Are you busy, Rabbit? I’d love for you to come and help me in here if you can.”
“Oh my God, what happened?” Alida said when she saw the bookshelves.
“Our helpful landlord.”
“Oh, right — I remember, like earthquake retrofitting. He said he’d do it over the weekend.”
“I’d forgotten all about it.”
Admiring the exposed screw-heads, Alida said, “Cool.”
“You know what? I don’t think we’re going to have to live in the Spider. I think it’s a good sign. But he’s made one hell of a mess.”
Together they set to work, emptying the shelves and putting books back in order. The landlord’s indecent haste was everywhere in view: paperbacks with their covers creased back, torn dust jackets, here and there a broken spine. Filing Marge Piercy’s Braided Lives alongside Eleanor Pierce’s All You Need to Know About Living Abroad, Alida complained of the promiscuous mingling of fiction and nonfiction.
“You ought to use the Dewey decimal system.”
“What? All those numbers…943-point-blah-blah-blah? You have to be kidding.”
“It’s really logical. The thing about Dewey is like there’s a special space for every book that’s ever going to be written, and for subjects that nobody’s even dreamed up yet. It’s über. The Dewey system reaches to infinity.”
“Where did you learn all this, Rabbit?”
“Mrs. Markowitz, she’s the school librarian. What you have to remember about the Dewey decimal system is it always goes from the general to the particular.”
“Which is the exact opposite of how my mind works.”
“My favorites are the 500s and the 900s. Like 943 whatever? I know that’s history — the history of somewhere. Europe, maybe — I dunno.”
“The things you teach me.”
“It’s never too late to learn.” Alida’s voice was pure schoolmarm as, standing on a stool, she slotted Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution next to the now doubly unfortunate Ms. Acker.
Every book was back in place, and Alida on the phone to the pizza joint, when Tad made his one-two-three rap on the door. “I saw the car,” he said. “Don’t tell me — you had the weekend from hell.”
“Actually, no. We—”
“Tad!” Then, into the phone, “Wait!” then to Tad, “Goat Cheese Primo?” then back to the phone, “Can you make that a three-way large — with Original, Brooklyn Bridge, and Goat Cheese Primo?” In the last few weeks Alida had taken command of all telephone orders: she now dispatched them with the alarming authority of a career waitress hollering to a short-order cook.