The Sea Beach Line (25 page)

The next morning, Rayna seemed to have no memory of struggling or even waking up. She kissed my cheek, and smiled at me.

I wanted to talk to Rayna about what had happened, but I didn't have the words. Rayna had been fighting for her life. It was more than just a regular nightmare. I didn't know whether I had done something wrong or whether she'd remembered something from her past, from her family's home. Al used to dream about war, and scream in the apartment. When he closed his eyes, he was back in combat. I remembered this from both our family apartment in Manhattan and Al's apartment in Sheepshead Bay. Then again, there was the ever-present unanswered question about Rayna's appearance in the sketchbook. Her response to the book had clarified nothing. I couldn't rule out the role of the unseen.

“Rayna,” I said, while we ate our breakfast of crackers and jam, “do you believe in ghosts?” It was the most direct thing I felt comfortable saying.

“Oh yes,” she said.

“Really? Have you met any?”

“Many.” She wasn't teasing or telling a story, but relating her lived experience.

“What is it like for them?” I asked. Maybe she could tell me what it was like for her.

“They are in pain,” she said. “Deep pain. Because people are supposed to move on. They are supposed to live, and die, and live again. They are old, and then they are little babies. It is a good thing. It is said that Moses is with us in every generation.” I thought of the woman from Galuth's painting. Maybe Rayna was not her ghost, but her soul reborn again. How much of our faces were purely physical, and how much were they a reflection of our souls?

“However,” Rayna continued, looking sad, “some people can't move on. They are stuck. Maybe they did something bad, but more likely someone else did bad things to them. And they are in pain, and confusion. They can't find their way into a new life.”

“You've met people like this?” She nodded. “Back home?”

“A few. But even more when I came to the city. I'd wander around by myself, and meet so many of these spirits. One morning I met a woman spirit sitting on a bench in Union Square. She had a long white dress, and her eyes were only the white parts, no pupils. She told me she had been waiting on the bench for someone since 1946.” So Rayna sat and conversed with ghosts. And I sat and conversed with Rayna. I didn't know what to think or believe about all this. Akiva and Aher had shared the same experience but understood it differently. Neither interpretation was more true.

“Don't worry, Isaac.” Rayna's face brightened. “We won't become like that. We will help each other forward. Come, give me a little kiss. Then I'll plug in the electric pot, and make us some tea, and we'll get ready for the day.”

12

THE BOOK TRADE PICKED
up as the weather became warmer. Tourists and undergrads wandered the streets, looking to spend money. On weekends, every bookseller I knew came out to sell. Mendy was always out. Asher put less effort into his business since Milton's death, and Roberto was a pretty erratic seller, but they both rarely missed a sunny weekend day. Steve Lesser had not gone to California after all, and renewed his presence on West Fourth. Jersey Steve was working pretty consistently as well, and on weekends his wife came into the city with him, their van packed full of stock. Hafid was always set up in his usual spot, and his girlfriend, Soon-ok, would sometimes work with him, in addition to selling her own homemade political buttons.

There were no women who sold books by themselves on West Fourth Street, though I heard there were a few farther east, on Astor Place and on Avenue A. I only really knew what happened on West Fourth Street; the punky East Village booksellers had their own world, as did the exclusively African American booksellers on Sixth Avenue, and the art-book sellers in SoHo. There were bookselling strips in
Harlem and Williamsburg too, but I had never visited them. None of those places appeared in Al's sketchbooks. They weren't on my map.

A few others hung around West Fourth but didn't sell their own books. Eye, who still referred to me as either “Baby Edel” or “the boy,” often assisted Mendy. Sonya and Lionel hung around what everyone called “the plaza” drinking beer. The plaza was actually just a public alley running from Fourth to Bleecker that NYU had appropriated, bricked over, and filled with tables and chairs. The streets had parried the university's thrust, and the park inhabitants soon claimed the plaza as their turf too. Lionel in particular preferred the plaza to the park, because a punk-rock singer whose band he had roadied for in the '80s was now a fixture in the crackhead scene in the park's southeast corner, and Lionel said he had listened to enough of the man's bullshit for one lifetime. When Sonya was drunk—which was every afternoon—she was likely to do some singing herself, usually old hard-rock and hair-metal songs.

Lionel worked for most of the booksellers at one time or another—he had been in the Coast Guard, and was very good at tying knots—but it depended on how early in the day he got drunk on Steel Reserve. He could turn mean, but Sonya was always good company, no matter how drunk. She liked to brush and braid Rayna's hair while Rayna cleaned and priced books. We were selling a lot of books, and had to keep getting new stock ready to put out on the table. Rayna was shy about interacting with the customers, but she liked working with the books.

We picked up quite a few tricks from the other booksellers, to make the old books seem newer. Cleaning them with rubbing alcohol was only the first step. If the corner of the cover was separating, you could glue it back together. If part of the cover was bent or tearing, you could reinforce it from the inside with clear packing tape. Most paperbacks are perfect-bound, which means they are glued together at the spine, not sewn. When the pages started to fall out, you could just glue them back in. It was best to use a wide-gauge syringe to apply the glue. If any part of the cover was rubbed white, you could touch it up with a colored marker. This was Rayna's favorite task. Sometimes she went
beyond just a touch-up; I had started noticing small angels and birds hidden in the background on the covers of various books.

As consuming as the work was, I continued scanning the crowds for anyone else from Al's sketchbooks. No luck. My search needed to be more focused. Though I'd found Rayna on the streets while selling, that strategy wouldn't yield further results. I called Roman again, but he had no news and told me to have faith. He also asked if I was going to be out selling that Saturday, and if so could I do a favor for a friend. Of course I agreed.

Rayna and I were particularly busy on Saturday afternoon. We hadn't sold any of the expensive books I'd brought out in the morning—three different full translations of
Remembrance of Things Past
(or in one edition,
In Search of Lost Time
), Reich's
The Function of the Orgasm
, an Aleister Crowley tarot deck—but the West Fourth Street standards were flying off the table at a rate of twenty books an hour. Kerouac, Tom Robbins, Bukowski. Kids who were new to the city picked up
Bright Lights, Big City
and
Slaves of New York
. Suburban women picked up Jodi Picoult novels for the train ride back to Jersey. Many young NYU students believe there is a place for them in the theater; Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, and Lee Strasberg pranced off the table. Rayna worked as fast as she could to keep stock on the table. I even offered to pay Sonya to help, but she said she'd rather focus on her drinking. Later in the month she might relent, but for now she still had money on her EBT card.

“I'll give you ten dollars,” a professor type said in the early afternoon, tossing a bill on the table and gesturing to a stack of paperbacks he'd assembled, which was easily worth twenty.

“You'll give me?” I growled. I had spent most of my life listening to teachers, professors, and rabbis. But the street was not their domain. The street was my domain. I was earning my place and authority, day by day. They couldn't talk down to me here. “You'll give me?” I repeated. “It's not an issue of what you'll give me, but of what I'll take. And I ain't taking your shit. Get the hell out of here.”

“Don't you want to make a sale? Don't you want my money?”

“
Feh
,” I said. “I'll do without it.” Money was important in Al's world, but respect was more important.

“Damn,” Sonya said, after the professor had slunk off. “You sounded just like your old man.” I couldn't help but grin.

Sonya, Lionel, and Eye went off at two thirty to get a meal at the Jewish Center. Eye didn't like having to pass through a metal detector to get inside, but they all agreed it was the best free meal in the area, much better than the Methodist church or the soup kitchen on the West Side. I was happy to see Sonya leave. She was fun but distracting, and by that time of the afternoon, tourist traffic was in full swing. Rayna and I had books to sell.

Later in the afternoon, a woman pulled her BMW up by the table and jumped out, leaving the motor running. She wore a fancy cream-colored suit, and had short, spiky hair.

“You're Roman's man?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“I thought so. You actually look kind of like Al, the guy who used to handle these things.” She smiled when she said his name.

“Have you seen Al recently?” I asked. She shook her head.

“No. I was hoping I'd see him today, as a matter of fact, until Roman told me I would be dealing with a replacement.” So she didn't even know he was missing. “Anyway, here it is.” She pulled an envelope from inside her blazer, and handed it to me. The sealed white envelope was about a quarter-inch thick, and had no writing on the outside.

“Someone will come for this later this week. Thanks. I gotta go before I get a fucking ticket. Tell Al Dani says hey.” She hopped back in her car and drove off.

“Who was that?” Rayna asked.

“Just someone who knows my father,” I said. “But she doesn't know where he is either.”

That night, while Rayna was washing up, I inspected the envelope more closely. The contents were flexible, and felt like a stack of paper. It was a bit too wide to be cash. American cash, anyway. I held the envelope up to the lantern light, but couldn't see any words or images,
only a dark rectangle, and resisted the impulse to steam it open with the electric teakettle. I needed to pass these loyalty tests, and would hold on to the envelope until someone came for it.

I was proud to contribute, to earn my keep, to show that I could take care of business. Most importantly, Timur needed to know that I could keep my mouth shut. My goal was to understand about my father, about the way he lived. If he was loyal to Timur, then I would have to be loyal to Timur as well. Dani was another direct link to Al, even if she didn't have any information. I was making connections, but I needed to figure out how to use them to move forward.

A few days later, a man came by the table to retrieve the envelope. He said he'd never heard of Al.

When Rayna and I arrived on West Fourth Street early the following Sunday morning, we saw Mendy standing on a milk crate like a statue of Aegeus, his beard blowing in the wind, his eyes fixed on a distant point.

“Mendel,” said Rayna, “are you unwell?”

“What? Oh. Rayna. Izzy. Good morning.”

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“The police are destroying Roberto's books. See?” Down at the far corner, men in green sanitation uniforms were throwing Roberto's books into the back of a trash truck. Roberto had no storage space; in the evenings he wrapped a tarp over the table, fastened it with packing tape, and took his chances. The jaw of the truck came down and crushed six boxes' worth of paperbacks.

“His books!” said Rayna. “They can't do that to his books.”

“Yes, Raynele,” said Mendy. “I'm afraid they can. They shouldn't be able to, but they are.”

“But it's wrong.”

“Yes,” Mendy said. “But these people don't care. I mean, look, the Nazis in Germany. They burned all the books. Then they burned all the people. Guys I grew up with . . . the things they did in Vietnam,
they burned people too.” I pictured policemen tossing Al's body in the back of a garbage truck. “To sell books, that's a First Amendment thing. But the Constitution, that's more paper for the trash truck.”