He would stand up tall enough to see the cars coming from the other direction and then, just as they vanished under the overpass, he would whip around and try to time his drops so the falling blocks would hit the center of the van’s metal roof.
—Not the windshield. I didn’t want to kill anyone. Apparently.
Over a period of five minutes, Joey hit two vans with his cinder blocks; both thunked straight into the roof. There was something special, he decided, about the way he dangled the heavy blocks high above the highway, then just opened his hand and let gravity take over. The sound of those massive blocks thunking the tops of the vans—the sound was immense, like a shotgun blast directly below his feet, only it was accompanied by bright green and blue lights. A side window shattered on the second one. Both vans skidded but regained control and just kept going, and from Joey’s vantage on the overpass they appeared to be crawling away from him in defeat. Maybe the drivers were too scared to turn around. Most likely they went straight to the cops. Joey never found out because—
—The third one, he said. The third minivan. I leaned with the cinder block over the railing and opened my hand to release it and watched it disappear straight through the top of the van. A perfect hit. But there were no sound effects this time. No lights. Nothing. It was freaky at first, like I’d imagined the whole thing, hallucinated it, a ghost van, a wormhole van—but then I realized the cinder block had sailed straight through the van’s open sunroof. Swish.
Inside the van, a one-year-old girl eating Cheerios from a plastic bag in a car seat had been sitting directly behind the sunroof. Joey’s dropped block appeared before her eyes out of thin air and tagged her left knee, then bounced and flattened her diaper bag. The van lost control and skidded into the guardrail and the airbag released and broke her mother’s nose. Outside of a fractured kneecap and some cuts and bruises the toddler was fine, at least physically.
—Everyone survived, Joey said, even me. Though I shouldn’t have.
Joey was arrested in the middle of the interstate. Because of his sleep deprivation there was some discussion of temporary insanity, but the crime was so reckless and his juvenile record was so spotty that in the end he was charged as an adult. He pleaded down from first-degree felony assault and felony criminal mischief, and was eventually sentenced to forty months in an adult state prison. Because of his demeanor, and because all he did in jail all day was read and avoid even a whiff of conflict, he served just over two years.
—I almost killed a baby. How do you undo that one, you know?
Lydia tried to swallow but couldn’t. Her eyes felt dry and when she blinked she saw a silhouette of a man looming above her, holding a hammer in the dark. She tasted blood.
—You don’t, she finally said.
—And the irony of the whole thing? After all that sleep deprivation, most nights in my cell I couldn’t sleep. Serves me right.
—Hence all the reading.
The air between them felt suddenly cold. Lydia wondered what would happen if she were to share the horrors of her past the way Joey just had.
Maybe he sensed the intensity of her discomfort, because he put a dollar on the counter and pressed the wrinkles out of it.
—I would like to purchase this book, he said with faux formality, sliding it before her.
Lydia had never heard Joey speak so freely. She rang up the book and stuck a bookmark inside, and then, maybe out of her own nervousness, she did something she’d never done to a BookFrog before: she reached forward and ruffled Joey’s hair. He froze and his eyes went wide, then he grabbed his book and stumbled away. As soon as he rounded the counter, he broke into a little trot, but Lydia couldn’t tell if he was happy or horrified.
Her fingers smelled like cat food. She thought absently of her father.
A Universal History of the Destruction of—
Joey.
The smell of old smoke left a prickly itch in Lydia’s nose as she leaned over Joey’s desk. She wondered why he’d piled all of his other books into a milk crate, while this one he’d left on display. In the tiny tin trash can alongside the desk Lydia expected another cauldron of ash, but instead found a dozen or so wads of tissue, each spotty with small dark drops of blood, as if he’d been suffering from bloody noses or shaving cuts. She recalled the night he died, and the masking tape that had been wrapped around three or four of his fingertips, and she realized that those cuts had happened right here, at this desk. She lifted the can and stirred aside some of the Kleenex, and discovered, at the bottom of the trash can, a few tabs of paper, tiny and white, just like the one she’d found the other day in the alcove where he’d hanged himself. One tab was stuck to a pink knot of bubble gum on the bottom of the can, but the rest were sprinkled around, and when she pinched them into her fingers and looked at them in the light, she saw that these also didn’t hold any words, per se, at least not whole words—more like pieces of words and letters, bisected and trimmed until they’d lost their meaning. Lydia brushed them back into the trash and sat silently at the desk.
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books.
She opened the book and flipped through, and soon came across a page that held exactly what she’d been looking for: little holes, little windows, cut randomly into the paper. She began to read.
Nine or so tiny rectangles and squares had been sliced out of the paper, so that when she held the open book up to the light the page resembled a child’s cutout of a skyscraper. Because of the size and dimensions of the cuts, she first assumed that words had been sliced out, that Joey had been cutting and pasting sentences together for some anonymous project, like—good god—a ransom note, or maybe some kind of magnetic-poetry collage. Or a suicide note. But as she looked closer at the holes she saw that there were no missing words at all: the cuts intersected white space and words with no discrimination, so that the words themselves had been largely bisected out of comprehension.
And she noticed something else on the page as well: ink. Rusty red ink, smudged in the periphery of the holes. Only this wasn’t ink, she realized as she tilted the book under the light: this was blood. From Joey’s fingers.
In something close to panic, Lydia set aside A Universal History of the Destruction of Books and grabbed the first title she could from the milk crate. It too was peppered with little windows, as was the next book, and the next book, and the rest—
Little windows, she thought as she clicked off Joey’s light and dragged his crate of books with her to the door. Little windows through which Joey was inviting her to climb.
CHAPTER SIX