Noah Leventhal
A Perfectly Normal Afternoon
The rag was in my hand and the dust clung to it thickly, transformed by accumulation into some new object, nearly cloth. People milled about here or there, picking books up off of shelves, or counters, or display tables. They opened them, peeled pages back individually or in great incoherent clumps and returned them to spaces not entirely unlike those from which they were taken. Light shifted. Sounds emerged from and faded into the day’s light murmur. The dust gave an ashy complexion to the air.
Over in the corner by the entrance, at the edge of a long desk that stretched nearly from one wall to another, but for two small swinging doors admitting – by implication – the employees alone, a phone began to ring. It rang once, twice, thrice, four times evenly before elevating in pitch to ring again once, twice, thrice, four times evenly in its nearly human wail, and I turned to find the front of the store as empty as I have ever seen it. Neither customer, nor colleague; just the books left slightly out of place and ever so slightly askew.
I walked to the phone as it continued its harshened singing and lifted it from its cradle.
Hello, I said into the microphone. A voice returned to me from the receiver.
Finally, it said.
My apologies, I replied, it was quite a walk.
How far? the voice asked, and I considered, not having counted steps along the way.
Well you know how it goes, I said, one foot follows another and eventually you either reach the place you were aiming for or you don’t.
It seemed the entity on the other end saw no need to contest the point.
I would like to complain about something if you can spare the moment, said the voice from the receiver. Would now be an appropriate time?
Well, yes. I suppose, I said in a voice I hope suggested a preparedness to contend with disappointment. There is no one else about. Things appear to have ground down to their baser elements.
I won’t bore you with the details. That is, unless you would like me too? she said.
I thought for a moment, but opted against the idea.
You know, we better not risk it, I said. Time is not extended so frivolously to everyone. I saw a man the other day with a nail driven through his hand and I’m not sure what I might be expected to carry. Let’s assume the details have been appropriately conveyed and get along to the complaint itself.
Well, if you insist, the voice replied. Though I assure you, you would have been suitably bored by my recounting. It would not have been exciting in the least.
I appreciate you candor ma’am, I said, for I had come to think of the speaker as an old woman and she did nothing to correct the assumption, and as much as a good dose of boredom might be a satisfying alternative to the ceaseless excitement of dusting shelves in an average sized bookshop in a small college town, I’m afraid I just don’t have the time.
Well, she said, to get down to the thick of it, earlier today a book was purchased by a man I know intimately – though that is the full extent of what I shall say about him – but it wasn’t the right book.
I see, I said, for I thought I did. So he was looking for a book of a different name.
Well, he was looking on my behalf, she said. He was my eyes and my hands, although I could not see or feel what he had done, and moreover it was not the title that differed, but the language.
And what was the name of the book?
“The Non-finite Compendium of Genocide, Spermicide, Herbicide and the Controversial Art of Erotic Crochet” by the esteemed warlock Geoffrey R. Beelzebub and published on tanned camel hide and papyrus, bound together with the beard hairs of a pregnant she-goat by May You Fester In Purgatory For A Thousand Centuries Before Ascending To An Underwhelming Enlightenment Ltd. I was searching for it in Aramaic but your tadpole-brained employee managed to mix it up with Ancient Sumerian instead.
And did your unmentionably intimate companion happen to look inside the book first to see in what language it was written?
I can’t say, she said. I wasn’t there.
Of course ma’am, I said, and what exactly would you like me to do about this?
Well, I’d like to return it, she said, to make an exchange for the book I intended to use him to buy, but the problem is I am absolutely decrepit, ancient if you will, in possession of a body in a perpetual state of decomposition and disrepair. I couldn’t vacate the coffin if there was a fire in the building and a wheelchair but a centimeter from the casket. And beyond that I’m blind as a bat, visually incoherent and utterly incapable of coming to make the exchange, and the man to whom I have before referred – but shall say no more about – is practically a ghost himself. He’ll need a week or two to recover from the voyage into town and we are stranded on a small island in the middle of a moat of piranha fish that haven’t been properly fed in several decades. Might it be possible for you to send your most expendable delivery person to traverse the moat and make the exchange at our location?
Well ma’am, I said, I would certainly like to help, but as I understand it there is a specific anti-piranha fish clause written into our contracts, and our only delivery driver is currently on vacation in the Galapagos in search of an especially ancient tortoise from whom he hopes to gain the wisdom of the earth.
Oh, how inconvenient, she said. Perhaps an exchange could be made via carrier pigeon.
All our current pigeons are on assignment, I replied, and unfortunately the anti-piranha fish clause applies to them as well.
Oh never mind, never mind, she said in exasperation. I’m out of ideas. What would you suggest?
Well, I said, it hasn’t been used in several generations, but I could check to see if the old delivery trebuchet is still functional. Of course you will have to provide me with an exact measurement of your home’s location by longitude and latitude, as well as elevation; and be precise as you can, mind you, as I would like to avoid dropping the package directly into the piranha moat if possible. Considering weather patterns and air currents, the humidity and the time of day, and the corresponding locations of sun, moon and stars, the calculations should take approximately a month to complete. And accounting for the angle of trajectory and the time the package might spend drifting in near earth orbit, it seems reasonable to assume it will come plummeting through your front window sometime in the middle of autumn.
Can’t you run the calculations on your computer? she asked.
Well, we’d like to ma’am, but the computers are down for the foreseeable future due to a catastrophic oversight on the part of Corporate. It’s not our preference either, but it is the situation at hand. And our resident expert in dynamics and medieval machinery is currently on holiday as well.
Couldn’t you ask the sun moon or stars to alter their trajectories a bit, she asked, just to speed things up?
Sorry ma’am but that isn’t my department, I said. Though you’ve got a better chance with them than with Corporate.
Fine, she said. I suppose it will have to do.
Now, I replied, as for the matter of payment, it appears the options available to you are: a million dollars cash paid in infinitesimal installments with an hourly increase in interest, your remaining life in indentured servitude – though as it stands I can’t imagine corporate finding that option too appealing, a drawing of the earth’s ley lines done with your weak hand, or a secret so shocking no one will ever look at you the same again.
For a moment there was silence on the line. A single mote of dust settled on the tip of my nose and I subtly flicked it away.
I think I’ll go with indentured servitude, she said.
I’ll pass it up the chain ma’am, but it may be shunted along to your descendants as a matter of inheritance should you expire before the package falls out of the sky.
What else is youth for? she asked.
An excellent question ma’am. I filled out the final boxes of the order form. We are almost finished now, but since this is a direct exchange you are planning to make, I must inquire, do you have a trebuchet of your own, or some comparable delivery system to convey the erroneously purchased item back to the store?
Well, we’ve been saving this for some time, she said, but we have a vial of blood of an ancient deity and a summoning circle I carved into the floor of the foyer after losing a bet on Christmas back in 1632. There should be just enough power left to open a one-way rift in spacetime between your place and ours. If my calculations are correct, my package should arrive at the very moment your package departs, though I won’t send it at all until it is received.
A most reasonable suggestion, ma’am. I’ll put a layer of salt around the delivery bay in anticipation of the arrival. But one last question, are you perhaps a paying member of our eternal and secret order of tome deliveries and artisanal lattes? If not, a membership might provide you with a ten percent reduction in years of servitude required to regain your family’s freedom.
I’m sorry, she said, I don’t give out that sort of personal information to anyone. If you insist on asking again, I shall introduce you to the piranhas.
Very well ma’am, I said. Everything seems to be in order. With all good fortune you shall die long before I have to hear your voice again.
Indeed, she said, and if the package misses its mark, I shall haunt you beyond the boundaries of this life and well into the next one.
A fair exchange as ever, I said.
Good day, she said.
And a good day to you as well, ma’am.
I hung up the phone in my normal mood. It was a typical phone order if ever I had completed one. I returned to the labyrinthine shelves and began again to dust, the softened rain from the vertiginous ceilings filling in the spaces I had just managed to wipe away.
Noah Leventhal is a graduate of the Great Books Program at St. John’s College, Santa Fe. He also earned an MFA in Poetry Writing from Boise State University. He was recently published in Red Ogre Review and has pieces forthcoming from Bending Genres, Eunoia Review and The Inflectionist Review.
