There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone.
You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.
Addie thinks of her father and his carvings, the way he peeled away the bark, whittled down the wood beneath to find the shapes that lived inside. Michelangelo called it the angel in the marble—though she’d not known that as a child. Her father had called it the secret in the wood. He knew how to reduce a thing, sliver by sliver, piece by piece, until he found its essence; knew, too, when he’d gone too far. One stroke too many, and the wood went from delicate to brittle in his hands.
Addie has had three hundred years to practice her father’s art, to whittle herself down to a few essential truths, to learn the things she cannot do without.
And this is what she’s settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). She can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.
What she needs are stories.
Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Two blocks up Flatbush, she sees the familiar green folding table on the sidewalk, covered in paperbacks, and Fred hunched in his rickety chair behind it, red nose buried in M is for Malice. The old man explained to her once, back when he was on K is for Killer, how he was determined to get through Grafton’s entire alphabet series before he dies. She hopes he makes it. He has a nagging cough, and sitting out here in the cold doesn’t help, but here he is, whenever Addie comes by.
Fred doesn’t smile, or make small talk. What Addie knows of him she has pried out word by word over the last two years, the progress slow and halting. She knows he is a widower who lives upstairs, knows the books belonged to his wife, Candace, knows that when she died, he packed up all her books and brought them down to sell, and it’s like letting her go in pieces. Selling off his grief. Addie knows that he sits down here because he’s afraid of dying in his apartment, of not being found—not being missed.
“I keel over out here,” he says, “at least someone will notice.”
He is a gruff old man, but Addie likes him. Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief.
Addie suspects he doesn’t really want the books to sell.
He doesn’t price them, hasn’t read more than a few, and sometimes his mood is so coarse, his tone so cold, he actually scares the customers away. Still, they come, and still, they buy, but every time the selection seems to thin a new box appears, the contents are unpacked to fill the gaps, and in the last few weeks, Addie has once more begun to spot new releases among the old, fresh covers and unbroken spines in with the battered paperbacks. She wonders if he is buying them, or if other people have begun donating to his strange collection.
Addie slows, now, her fingers dancing over the spines.
The selection is always a medley of discordant notes. Thrillers, biographies, romance, battered mass markets, mostly, interrupted by a few glossy hardcovers. She has stopped to study them a hundred times, but today she simply tips the book on the end into her hand, the gesture light and swift as a magician’s. A piece of legerdemain. Practice long given way to perfect. Addie tucks the book under her arm and keeps walking.
The old man never looks up.
