The Moment of Everything

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Books don’t change people’s lives, not like everyone thinks they do. Reading
The Razor’s Edge
while flying in first class to a meditation resort or
The Sheltering Sky
on a postdivorce hike to see what’s left of the snows of Kilimanjaro won’t make you any more enlightened than spinning in the teacups at Disneyland. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth of it. And the used books here at the Dragonfly aren’t infused with any more wisdom than the virginal new ones at Apollo Books & Music. Our books are just cheaper and more tattered. But people keep coming. They keep asking me for elixirs of paper and words to soothe their disappointments and revive their smothered passions. They come because they believe a book transformed my life. Not one of them understands. It wasn’t the book that did it.

Looking back, it’s hard for me to pinpoint the moment it all began. I could say it was the day I was laid off by ArGoNet Software, or when I first met Hugo, or even further back when I left South Carolina for Silicon Valley. But I guess the bare truth of it is that everything started on that Friday afternoon with me and Hugo sitting on those two springless armchairs on that creaky wood platform in the front window of Dragonfly Used Books, on Castro Street in Mountain View, the heart of Silicon Valley. The passersby, dressed in shirts with dangling Google, Yahoo!, and Intuit badges attached, saw Hugo, balding and with a long ponytail in back, reading a threadbare copy of the first Waverley novel, next to me, a thirty-four-year-old in terrible need of having her roots done, wearing an ex-boyfriend’s holey Rush T-shirt over a pair of jeans that had become too tight with unemployment pounds. It was an odd place to sit, right there on display in front of God and everybody. But it was also the only place in the Dragonfly with enough floor space to fit a couple of chairs. Everywhere else, Lord help us, there were only books.

In Silicon Valley, that summer of 2009 wasn’t like the one of 2001, when moaning zombies of dead dot-coms roamed the land. This time, companies didn’t fail. They just laid off half their employees, offering “involuntary separation from payroll” to give everyone the chance to “pursue new opportunities.” Me, I was hiding in Dragonfly Used Books reading historical romance novels and waiting for the Next Big Thing. I’d been through this before.

But it’d been six months since ArGoNet Software shipped my job to India. I’d given up pedicures, eating out, and, finally, cable TV. Hugo told me I was listening for the universe to present me with adventures I could never have imagined. My mother told me I was loafing.

I was reading
The Defiant
, just one of the romances I’d harvested off the Dragonfly’s stacks that week. There had also been
The Redemption
,
The Bandit
, and
The Pirate Queen’s Deceit
. No chick-litty books with cocktails and spiked heels on the cover for me. I wanted swashbucklers, with their virile chests and bursting bodices. I guess I was just old-fashioned that way.

When I’d arrived that morning, I’d picked up
The Defiant
out of a cardboard box full of books by the front counter.
ROMANCE, $2 A BAG
, read the sign. The cover showcased a stunning redhead with cleavage brimming over the top of an Elizabethan dress. A shirtless man with an ’86 Bon Jovi hairdo stood in the distance and glared at her menacingly. Or was it passionately? I swear I just couldn’t tell sometimes.

Sure, I read other kinds of books. Lots of them in just about every genre you can imagine. But I loved romances. There was something so comforting about knowing the whole story just from looking at the front cover. First, a political intrigue to keep the hero and heroine apart. Next, conflicting loyalties, hardened hearts, and possibly a forced engagement to an economically advantageous but physically and morally repulsive suitor. Several interrupted encounters, until finally they find themselves trapped in a cave, a barn, or a shepherd’s cottage during a violent rainstorm, and then you’d have your general bulging breeches, pink-tipped breasts, and primal rhythm as old as love. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it sure beat LinkedIn as a way to kill an afternoon.

I’d gotten to a climatic duel when I saw the owner of the card shop a block away stop in front of the Dragonfly’s window. She beamed at Hugo and knocked on the glass, but he didn’t move. I nudged him. He noticed Card Shop Lady, smiled, and blew her a kiss.

“Does she know you’re cooking Squid à la Hugo tonight for that real estate agent who was in here earlier?” I asked.

“Maggie, when you reach our age, you’ll find that ignorance is often liberating,” he said as he returned to the dramas of Sir Walter Scott, balanced on the soft pudge above the belt he’d loosened after a dim sum lunch. I’d never seen him in anything other than jeans and worn cotton shirts rolled up at the sleeves. In his late fifties, he peered through black-rimmed reading glasses that made him look like the headmaster at some faraway boarding school where children in English novels are sent. Mr. Chips in Birkenstocks.

I returned to
The Defiant.
The Dragonfly was an eager dealer for my romance novel habit. I found them everywhere: wedged between an owner’s manual for a ’61 Valiant and a guide to tantric sex. Under the front counter next to the wooden recipe box where Hugo kept index cards to keep track of customers’ accounts for books they’d traded in. In a paperback landslide created by Grendel, the Dragonfly’s cat, who didn’t maneuver between the shelves as deftly as he once did. The Dragonfly’s stacks were a labyrinth of L-shaped sections that curled in on themselves like the shells I used to hunt on the Carolina beaches as a child. You could spend hours, even days, searching the stacks trying to find the one specific book you were looking for. Generally, it was much easier to take what you found rather than to try to find what you wanted.

I could knock out two or three of these romances a day. Reaching the half-blank last page gave me that little meth-y thrill that’s the Holy Grail every software coder wants their user to feel, like killing it on “Sudden Death” in Guitar Hero or earning the strawberry cow in FarmVille. “At last,” your inner addict says, “I did it. I can stop now and spend my hours solving world hunger.” But you don’t. There’re more fake guitars to play or a neon henhouse to buy or, in my case, a pirate to seduce, and what in the real world can compete with that?

My habit drove my last boyfriend crazy. To Bryan, an iOS coder who wrote a barcode image-processing library that uploaded the nutritional info for packaged food that he sold to a bunch of different diet apps for a truckload of money, romance novels made about as much sense as a PlayStation did to a hummingbird. “You’ve got to make success a daily habit,” he’d say to me. “Finding a job is your new job.” That made it hard for me to tell him I was playing hooky from my “new job” at the Dragonfly. So I didn’t. Then we’d have sex. It’s near impossible for a man to concentrate enough to point out the inefficiencies in your time management when the two of you are going down the horizontal ski jump. We were together two years, until he moved to Austin a couple of months ago without ever bringing up me going with him. He was a nice guy. They’re always nice guys. But no one comes to Silicon Valley to fall in love.

I was getting on to my duel when I felt a kick in the back of my chair. I turned around the side to glare at Jason, his black
Babylon 5
T-shirt billowing around his toothpick arms, his finger holding his place in a paperback the size of a hay bale with futuristic knights on the cover. He seemed colorless to me—dark wiry hair, skin like the underbelly of a catfish—and his head looked as though it had been pressed by a vise. Barely five feet tall with a slight limp, his appendages sticking out at odd angles, he had the look of someone who’d been half-trampled by a runaway horse and buggy.

“Done yet?” Jason asked.

“What?”

“Chair. Are you done with the chair?” He overenunciated each word, letting me know exactly how much of a twit he considered me. There were only two chairs in the Dragonfly: the pea-green relic with the fabric worn through in spots on the arms that I sat in, and its partner, Hugo’s blue wingchair whose dropped bits of stuffing had become a part of the carpet.

“Three more pages in this chapter.” I turned back to my duel.

Jason came around the chair and hunched over me like a gargoyle.

“You’ve been here all day.”

I looked around him at Hugo, who sat focused on his book, pretending we weren’t in the same room.

“I’m a customer,” I said to Jason.

“Bullshit. You’ve got to buy something to be a customer.”

He had me there. Hugo let me sit around the Dragonfly all day without ever expecting me to buy anything. As my landlord in the small duplex a few blocks from the Dragonfly where we both lived, he had a right to worry that I’d traded in my job search for romance novels. Rent didn’t just pop out of pantaloons. But he never brought it up. All that might change after the first of the month if I couldn’t stretch out the last of my savings, and if this week’s unemployment check from the bankrupt state of California was late again.

“I’ll be done in a minute,” I told Jason and turned back to the duel I was enjoying at no charge.

Jason yanked
The Defiant
out of my hand, stomped over to the front counter, and held it out to a woman digging through the $2-a-bag Romance box.

“Got this one, Gloria?” he asked her.

Gloria pressed her armload of finds against the appliquéd cat on her sweatshirt while she read the back cover of my book.

I leaped from my chair and swung around the railing like Captain Blood on a masthead.

“You don’t want to read that,” I said, landing in front of Gloria. “Seriously, the heroine’s got acne and the hero’s short. The villain is only mildly disagreeable. I’d say just a bit grumpy really. Doesn’t make for a good read. Let me find you something in a surly Irish rebel who’s trying to avenge his father’s murder while resisting the temptation of his enemy’s beautiful daughter.”

She blinked at me, while Jason rushed past me and plopped into my chair. I turned back to Gloria in time to see her stuff
The Defiant
in an NPR tote bag already overflowing with other books. She slapped two dollars in dimes on the counter and trudged out the door onto Castro Street.

Hugo hoisted himself out of his chair and gave me a have-patience-and-the-universe-will-provide pat on my shoulder before heading to the counter to add Gloria’s change to the till. I grabbed
A Devil’s Heart
from the bargain box and scurried over to his vacant chair.

I’d gotten about fifty pages into
A Devil’s Heart
when my iPhone began to scream, “It’s judgment day! Sinners repent!” I slid the phone out of my pocket and saw Dizzy’s picture. The name over the picture was “God.” I kept forgetting to password-protect my phone when Dizzy was around.

“I’m not saying anything,” Hugo said. Having lost his chair, he was sorting through a box of thrillers a customer had brought in for trade that morning.

“Telling me you’re not saying something about the government listening in on my cell phone conversations is exactly the same as saying something.” I tapped the Sleep button on top of the phone to send Dizzy to voice mail.

“Actually,” Hugo said, “I was going to mention the brain cancer.”

“It’s judgment day! Sinners repent!” my phone screamed again. Dizzy wasn’t going to be ignored. Jason jabbed a finger in the direction of a sign he’d written and hung above the front counter:

Below those lines, Hugo had added in block letters:

I went outside to the sidewalk and growled to myself before I answered the phone.

“You’re at home, right? Drilling for jobs?” Dizzy asked.

I jumped out of the way of a skateboarder headed next door to Cuppa Joe. He popped the board into his hand and joined the Overly Tattooed & Pierced at the sidewalk tables.

“Yep,” I said. “Plugging away.”

“Snot waffle.”

“Puss bucket.”

Dizzy was my best friend. We’d grown up together in the lowlands of South Carolina. He was the youngest of five boys, the gay math genius son of a pig farmer. I was an only child, the chubby, freckled daughter of a beauty queen. We really had no other choice.

“According to Foursquare, you checked into Dragonfly Used Books two hours ago. Why are you the Mayor of Dragonfly Used Books?” he said. “Look across the street, sugarbritches.”

I turned my eyes to the café right outside Apollo Books & Music, where Dizzy sat with his phone to his ear, lifting a wineglass to toast me. Built like a fireplug with shaggy red hair down to his shoulders, he was a little shorter than my five foot six, though no one could ever get him to admit by how much. Today, he was wearing long cargo shorts—which on his stubby legs came halfway down his calves—and a Red Elvises T-shirt. He pointed to a tall coffee drink on the hubcap-size table where he sat.

“That better be a triple shot latte,” I said.

“With extra foam,” he purred into the phone.

I waited for a break in the slow-moving traffic down Castro Street and then scurried across to join him. For years, this Mexican-tiled courtyard led into an abandoned movie theater, but now it was the mandatory café that came with the chain bookstore. The town had gone all cattywampus when Apollo wanted to convert the closed theater to one of its stores, but all that fussing soon died down as Apollo won everyone over with its wide, well-lit aisles, where people in matching polo shirts looked up inventory and escorted you to your book like liverymen in a fairy tale. Hugo imagined himself to be in competition with Apollo, but I wondered if Apollo Books & Music even knew Hugo’s store existed. The Dragonfly had no advertising, no displays, and hardly even a sign to speak of. It would be fair to call it just a great big pile of books and a cash register. Yet Hugo insisted it was on the good side of the fight for the soul of a community that had no idea it was in peril. So we inhabitants of the Dragonfly stepped foot in Apollo only when in dire need, such as when the Dragonfly’s plumbing wasn’t working or when a friend had already paid for a latte. But I had to admit I wasn’t immune to Apollo’s appeal. I found a certain corporate comfort in the bags and mugs imprinted with the store’s name. They dovetailed nicely with my collection of clothes embroidered with logos of software from all the companies I’d worked for, companies with products that didn’t actually exist that were being sold to people who did not actually have money to buy them.