Sunshine and War
Basically, I’m writing this in case something happens to me.
The address for the interview is halfway between Durham and Chapel Hill, and then north a ways. It’s a bright, clear day. There’s no neighborhood, just farms, and the house is in the middle of a huge lawn with fields on either side. One’s planted with corn, and the other I don’t know.
I knock and the most beautiful woman answers the door. No hair at all. Enormous brown eyes. Her name is Jane, she’s my prospective employer’s niece, and I decide right then and there that if I ever get a shot I’m asking her out.
“You’re the gopher,” she says. “Come in.” I follow her. She’s wearing a frilly skirt and galoshes.
My first indication that something is strange is when, on our way to her aunt’s office, she stops to get an umbrella from a row of pegs on the wall, and hands one to me too.
She opens the door to the basement, and I see the source of the sound I’ve been hearing this whole time: there’s a kind of waterfall just inside the door; or, that’s how it looks from outside. We open our umbrellas and start down the stairs. I stop halfway.
Imagine a big room, maybe 40 x 40 feet, with a ceiling at least fifteen feet high. The entire thing, floor, walls and ceiling, is covered in square green ceramic tiles like in a bathroom, and on the ceiling there are rows and rows of pipes with sprinklers every few inches that shower the entire room, wall to wall, with an even and constant rain.
In the center is a raised cement platform with a huge umbrella on a pole. Under it there’s a desk, and sitting at the desk is Samantha, my new boss. She’s wearing a purple floral print dress, her white hair is in a bun, and she’s reading when Jane brings me over and sets me in a chair on the platform. The niece’s skin is darker than the old lady’s, like she has some Asian parentage.
Samantha just wants me to call her ‘Samantha’, not Mrs. anything, and she doesn’t give a last name. (The W-2 says S Trust LTD, which was registered by Abernathy & Abernathy, Attorneys at Law, who have an office in Durham. So no help there on the name front.)
Jane used to do this for her, but she just graduated from nursing school and is starting full time at UNC Medical Center, so I’ll be taking over.
Odd jobs around Durham, better money than retail. I get a beeper and I get paid whether I have gopher tasks that day or not. No health insurance, but who has that anyway.
#
For three days I sit at home, shirt and tie, waiting. Then I buy a webcam and a microphone and start streaming Call of Duty—check it out, k1LL_spot_TV on Twitch—and I’m climbing the rankings pretty well on Tuesday of the next week when the beeper finally goes off.
I’m writing this that evening, the evening after the first task.
I call and Samantha tells me there’s a book she wants me to find. She thinks it’s somewhere around the Triangle. It’s a book of poems called Sunshine and War, and it’s bound in human skin.
“I’m sorry, human skin?” I say.
“Yes. Leather bound. It’s a book of poetry. Peter Pumpkin Press, 1973. Write this down.” She sounds exactly like somebody from Gone With the Wind.
“Is that legal?”
“Poetry?”
I look around my living room, like I’m on a hidden camera show. “Binding books in human skin.”
“The skin was donated. Start at The Book Exchange. They won’t have it, but they might know where to look. The manager is a very knowledgeable man. Last time I sent Jane there, they had quite a few Peter Pumpkin titles.”
I copy down her list of ten used or antiquarian bookstores, hop in my car and get underway. Feel like a bloodhound.
#
The human-skin edition of Sunshine and War hasn’t passed through the doors of The Book Exchange, Wentworth & Leggett, Nice Price or The Bookshop. Eventually, I find a lead in the labyrinthine corridors of Fifth Street Books in Mebane, which, I can tell you, is the middle of nowhere.
A woman with a cat perched on her shoulder pauses from shelving books just long enough to give me a detailed history of the store, a complete three-generation genealogy of the owner’s family, and the name and phone number of the man they sold the book to back in the 90s: George Palmer.
I thank her, use their restroom and go out into the sunny day. It’s about 12:30, so I decide to call Mr. Palmer after lunch.
I don’t know whether what happened next is the kind of thing that’s been going on all along. Maybe this is normal. But I think not, and it frightened me a great deal.
When I park at Biscuitville—I’ve got a hankering for sausage gravy—I get out of my car, look around and get right back in again, because there is a lion out there.
I know a female lion when I see one. I’ve been to the zoo.
An overweight white man in a pink polo shirt comes out of the restaurant, wiping at a stain on his pants with a napkin. The lion’s right there, standing on the asphalt, crouched down. Plain view.
Just like in a nature documentary. It jumps on him, bites his neck and drags him, twitching and bleeding, into the square manicured bushes they put around fast food restaurants.
It’s lunch time. There are people everywhere. Nobody sees. Like, nobody sees the lion at all, and 9-1-1 doesn’t pick up either. I blow my car horn a bunch, trying to signal danger, danger! and people definitely notice that, and shush me.
What are you supposed to do in that scenario? I get lunch at Bojangles instead.
#
George Palmer lives in Saxapahaw, not far from Mebane. I have a flashback to Samantha’s house when I get there, because Mr. Palmer’s house is also located in the middle of an expansive lawn, except that he has pine trees to either side instead of farms, and a broken fountain in the front yard.
I sit in the car until I stop trembling, then go and ring the doorbell.
The man himself is stooped and weathered, dressed in a red flannel shirt and gray slacks with suspenders. He looks like an old time fiddle player.
“Happy to talk turkey, young man, though I got out of the antiquarian books business a long time ago. Sunshine and War is in my personal collection. Not a favorite. Just thought it was worth holding on to.”
He leads me out through the back door and over a small rise, to where a huge dirty greenhouse stands, not visible from the front of the house. The panes of glass flash white fire as we approach, so that at one point I have to shield my eyes.
Inside, there are thousands of stacks of books, where you would expect plants to be. No shelves, and considerable amounts of dust. It’s already a hot day, and the inside of the greenhouse is almost unbearable. But I put up with it long enough to see that his copy of Sunshine and War is indeed bound in creepy pale human skin and was printed by Peter Pumpkin Press in 1973.
I call Samantha, and she walks me through the process of evaluating the book’s condition. When she’s satisfied, she has me hand the phone to Mr. Palmer and they, as he says, talk turkey.
#
“Jane,” I say, back at Samantha’s house and squeezing water from an umbrella into their kitchen sink, “I saw a man die today in a Biscuitville parking lot, and it made me think.”
It’s 6:30 pm and Samantha has her book, because a lady’s word is good enough for George Palmer.
“Mm-hmm?” she says. She’s a vision of paradise in watermelon-themed scrubs.
“I think you’re very beautiful. Let’s go see a movie tonight. What do you think?”
She laughs and says thanks but no thanks.
#
I’m looking this all over, now that it’s written, and a lot of it doesn’t seem as strange as it felt when it was happening. Except for the part with the lion. Maybe I’ll be okay; maybe no police detective will need to read this off my PC with my dismembered body lying in a heap in the corner.
But I’ll tell you one thing. It’s 2018 and I was doing some Googling to make sure the details I put in this story were accurate, and the Book Exchange closed down in 2009, after 75 years of business. It’s gone. Nice Price closed in 2016; the Edward McKay branch in Raleigh that I went to this morning was shuttered in April of last year, and The Bookshop, in Chapel Hill, went out of business last July.
Wentworth & Leggett is still there, though, as is Fifth Street Books. The ambulances—which must have come after I left—at the Mebane Biscuitville parking lot this afternoon were there, officially, for a stroke victim.
So I’m just going to save this in a folder on my desktop called READ IF I AM DEAD.
Matthew Talamini has an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where he taught fiction workshops. He lives in Providence, RI. Visit him at matthewtalamini.com.