Cotton doesn't think she's a (prophetes) wrote in repose, @ 2015-12-24 13:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | *log, cotton avery, daniel webster |
Daniel & Cotton: bookstore
Who: Daniel & Cotton
Where: Alexandria Books
What: Ransacking the book store.
When: Post-Sam & Cris & Iris's cat, sometime before Destiny-chomp
The windows of the small bookshop were starred with paper snowflakes and twined white lights lined the sill. The window was not broad enough to advertize exactly which books the store sold, but there was only one in town and the only other place to find books was the library. Evening had pressed in, cool and soft and dusty dark. Cotton liked evenings: they were quiet, and barely anyone wanted to buy books late on in the day and this close to Christmas, and she didn’t need to feel guilty about reading all the way through her shift.
It was warm on the inside of the store. The heat was wound higher on days Cotton was working, and it had been a number of hours now, so the heat was indolent and welcoming: Cotton had uncurled from her habitual huddle on the stool behind the counter, into a sprawl that was all unthinking indulgence in a really good book. She was sitting in the armchair, tucked near enough to the counter to pretend to have been working, rather than reading, if someone came in, and a pile of books were stacked nearly to her knee. Tights, and a pleated skirt, and she had folded her legs - skinny, and long - over one arm of the chair, and her head was comfortably pillowed on the other, with the rest of her folded in between.
This probably looked uncomfortable, but there wasn’t a lot of Cotton to fit into the gap. The white fluff of her hair was spread in a corolla around her head and it was easier to see the covers of the book than it was her face: Daniel Deronda. Her ankles were crossed, and her sweater was folded back from her wrists to her elbows, bare, bluish-white skin and bruised veins and long-fingered hands balancing the book above her head. A pile of classics, stacked neatly spine out, had been piled in a cone with a lopsided star balanced delicately on top. A Christmas tree.
The shop was completely abandoned otherwise.
Daniel forced himself to take a walk twenty minutes previous, and by the time he found the bookstore, a cold sweat was gathering on the back of his neck and the whites were showing at the edges of his eyes. He came in with a haste that he took from the edge with a bare edge of control, like he was the only one in the world that saw the hurricane outside. The coming dark would help him get home, and he tried to focus on the containment of the door and the welcoming rush of heat.
It was the scent of books that provided the best balm, a musty smell of withering paper, and Daniel knew enough of books to realize that all the heat and the dust wasn’t good for the glue, but he couldn’t bring himself to care just at the moment. The door banged shut behind him, and he let it, standing still in his black wool coat and letting the air seep through the fine shoes and the straight slacks first before threading through rapidly drying black curls. He heard a single heartbeat, a reassuring solo tap in the gloom ahead, and didn’t hasten in the direction of a person. By contrast, he stepped sideways, into the concealing shadow of the shelves, and focused on his breathing while he lifted a cold white hand to touch those spines nearest.
There wasn’t a bell. Cotton would, perhaps, have liked a bell. But there was none, there was only the solid thwack of the wood against the frame and she was buried inside a story and reluctant to emerge, like someone being nudged rather than shaken awake from that dreamy, warm and comfortable state and who woke with much desire to still be asleep. Cotton’s heartbeat was quicker than was usual, partly because of the myriad of medications and partly because the low lung-function meant the heart worked double-time, and that muscle fluttered at least double-time, even curled prone.
She let Deronda slide through her fingers, thick, soft paper pages and a folded ribbon for a bookmark, and uncurled, her head cocked toward the stacks to listen. Nothing: this was not unusual. Most people couldn’t begin to find what it was they were looking for here, even with the neat, handlettered signs in spidery writing that suggested biography or poetry. Cotton thought of the bookstore as like a church: conferring hushed awe on people who engrossed themselves in the ritual as much as the experience. She worked toes against the carpet, stood up and padded out toward the front-desk, with its overview of the stack.
A cough, thick and wet. The voice thereafter was papery-husky, not unpleasant. “Hello?”
Daniel appeared in her view as she moved, and her in his. He saw a small and spindly person, like a paper doll dressed in silk with porcelain eyes, and he heard the struggle of her heart. He found, to his intense relief, that he had no desire for her in any way, that she was too obviously fragile and without energy to come close to tempting him. His blue eyes relaxed, and the hint of haggard in his unshaven chin added to the humanity of otherwise invisible fatigue.
“Hello.” He moved farther into the successive layers of the store, taking his hand from the spines in full awareness of how bookkeepers felt about sticky fingers. “You must be Cotton. My friend Sam told me about you.” Daniel had an unremarkable voice, more high than low, more internal than external, more foreign than familiar.
Cotton would have argued strongly against the notion of no energy at all. It was a good day, and good days were strung through the bad ones often enough to be cheerful-ish about the bad ones coming around again. Good day had painted itself warm pink up her throat, beneath the thick, woolly sweater. There was a hole in the wrist, but Cotton expected most people in town who knew her to think her eccentric, and wasn’t that much bothered about the ones that didn’t know her, so the hole didn’t concern her the least. Good day had her standing on socked feet in the store, with the belching heat from behind the counter, and she watched him come over the floorboards towards her and studied him openly.
The man who loomed into her line of sight looked like he had been thrown down out of the pages of one of the musty books. There was something unhurried about the way he had been put together, as if plastic and florescent lighting and fast-food, and exorbitant, madcap color had been an afterthought instead of a constant, background hum. He had damp curls, and he was unthreatening, and Cotton’s gaze twitched from his face to where his fingers ran along the books.
“You can touch,” she said with equanimity. The voice was smoky, cigarettes and sandpaper and several tones lower than was probably natural. “There’s not many of us at the bookstore, so yes, I must be,” she agreed, and grinned. “Sam said she had a friend who liked books, and that if I had too many, you’d probably want them. I’ve too many, but you’re here now.” This was a lot of words and there was a pause in the middle, unconscious, to draw in more air to finish off the sentence and the thought.
He looked like someone who was hungry, interrupted before he’d even been allowed to pick up the cutlery. Cotton wavered: it was evident. New people in town, particularly bookish ones, were novel and she wanted to know which area of the bookshop he was most likely to move into.
Daniel was old. Age and health were relative, experience a majority understanding of normality. In this definition, he was more likely to meet someone sick than he was to meet one healthy, even if it was just allergies, or aches and pains. The girl in the bookstore had weaknesses that he could perceive, the kind that informed other senses she was both easy prey and hardly worth the effort. It made it easier to control himself, or so he reassured his bruised psyche. All the same, he didn't come anywhere near her, staying far back with the shelves between them.
For such a long speech offered, and all that effort to find the air to fuel it, and he barely responded. “That's me.”
Her literary analysis was little help to her, as Daniel barely glanced at the signs. He shot her a second glance when he was reassured that he could touch, and then went back to inspecting the spines, his head slightly tipped to read what writing he could make out. He was not expecting much from this place, paperbacks and coffee table books about wildflowers, perhaps. His hands came up again, and he moved his fingertips over the edge of the shelf, feeling more for thickness and quality more than true content.
Quiet. Cotton put this piece of knowing with the single other piece she had on the man; the woman in common who had been tearful but open in an honest, friendly way that made her likeable. She drifted fingertips over the spines of the Christmas-tree of books, and swayed into the solid wall of the end of the shelf.
Daniel was likely to be surprised. The books in the store were culled over by the staff, until the bland was boxed up at the back, ready for when there was such a run on the stock, they were needed out front. Instead, the popular-and-well-thumbed jostled with classics, that had someone been more on the ball with eBay or an interested collector, might have made more money. There were solid books, with heavy, carded covers and thin paperbacks, wrinkled from someone’s reading.
Daniel Deronda was one of the former, not the latter, but it was forgotten now, on the chair. Cotton liked people, and she liked novelty, and she leaned her shoulder comfortably against wood and observed, drawing a book down from the shelf herself - thinner, this time. Flimsier. 1984, and she palmed her hand over the back cover, and flipped to a random page. Known prose was like sliding back into a warm, pleasant bath. “Are you fiction, or facts?” Cool blue eyes, serious question above the book.
Daniel did a full circuit of the room, a path made more obvious because he avoided going anywhere near her, sometimes sacrificing a total picture of the available covers in order to do so. He laughed at her question, not an entirely kind laugh, one that started loud and went soft, a fast, soft explosion of sound. “Some of both. Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.”
And he started to demonstrate just that, pulling books off the shelf seemingly at random, starting a pile that he began with cloth-covered hardbacks. He glanced at the titles as he did so, checking for duplicates, avoiding legal treatises and philosophers, grabbing at anything that wasn’t in English and tossing back anything like dimestore romances or westerns. “I would fetch a pen and paper, were I you, petite.”
There was no one in town who liked books as much as Cotton did. There were worlds to be found in the spread of pages and the getting there was not inconvenienced by protracted bouts of being indoors, nor of needing to lie down until you were so itchy with the need to be up and moving that you needed distraction very badly. But half of the books on the shelves, she had never read. Nor, by the look of the ones in foreign languages, had anyone else. Great plumes of dust rose into the air, and Cotton coughed three times, before she retreated to the counter to retrieve (triumphant) pencil and paper.
“Do you speak all those languages?” Cotton hadn’t met anyone outside the school who could speak even one more than the current tongue, and rescued the wobbling tower of books from total collapse. He hadn’t come near her, but most people didn’t, “I’m not catching,” she said presently, with another cough into her fist, as she slid into the vacant space between he and her, with this by way of explanation.
“We’ve some things in the back,” she passed fingertips over the spine of one particularly handsome red-leather bound book, with a transparently wistful look of loss. “But it’s a lucky dip as to whether any of it’s any good.”
Daniel barely understood that, focused on his… shopping. Cotton was about to have some considerable competition for the title of “best booklover” in the city. Particularly if he cleaned her out. “No, I don’t. I only speak three. I’m terrible at the others, but it occupies the time.” Daniel peered down at one of them. “Except Latin. Nobody speaks Latin. No one wants to speak Latin. Except priests and lawyers. And I’m neither.” That book went back on the shelf. When he was done, the shelves would be the discard pile.
He stopped, turning back her way. “...Catching what?”
“Who is ‘we’? Sam said these were your books.” Daniel tossed another two titles onto his pile. He faded back around the shelf to send a look her way. It didn’t surprise him that she was fond of her charges, as all bookkeepers were. “I’ll get to the back.”
“They’re not mine.” Just a little, and a little was enough to feel possessive about the books Daniel was throwing around, like it didn’t matter what the books had in them except that it was new. Cotton sank down to the floor, knees hugged to chest, and the soft-shabby fabric of her skirt pooled around her. “I work here. I don’t own the store. Just lots of books.” Stores took money, lots and lots of it: enough for overheads and store employees, for the heat that pumped silently into the space and for the twinkle of the lights in the windows. Cotton knew exactly how much money she had at any particular moment, in smoothed-flat bills crammed into a box under the bed in the trailer that was home. She imagined owning a store meant enough money you forgot how much you had.
“You can’t take that one,” she snatched up the book that had just joined the pile, and hugged it tightly, smoothed the tooled leather spine with jealous, protective fingers. “I’ve wanted that one for ages.” The book slid into her lap, and Cotton guarded it with the rail of skinny arms and elbows. “My books are at home. So what are you, if you’re not a priest or a lawyer?” The question was an honest one, and naked, bare of anything pretending to be polite.
“The coughing. It’s dust, and me, not a cold. You’re missing the few books you’ve not ransacked because you’re scared of it.” Matter-of-fact.
It was true. Daniel had a general idea of how much money he had, but not clearly. It was diversified under quite a number of banks, in different names, in different countries. The majority of it was not in any electronic book, but in serviceable goods, land, antiques, even a patent or two. With a considerable amount to start with a couple hundred years to blackmail and threaten his way through an entire bloodline of bankers, Daniel made sure wealth wasn't a problem. He had absolutely no desire to own anything, bookstore or otherwise.
Daniel stopped accumulating purchases when she said he couldn't have something. He bristled like a child, narrowing his eyes and sweeping a little closer. He was still in his coat despite the heat, and the fear sweat of the trip here was long gone. “Why can't I have that one?” he demanded, angling to see the spine better and contemplating the little frump of a thing in the pile next to his books.
Daniel barked a laugh. “Scared of you? Hardly, little doll. I'm the man buying half this shop. That's all you need to know.”
Cotton didn’t desire ownership. She hadn’t had it to begin with, so she didn’t know what to want. Ownership she observed from corners, and it looked like a lot of work and a lot of responsibility. Wealth, in Cotton’s realm of knowledge, was a small, half-plumed affair. It was going for coffee whenever you wanted, or buying books that smelled like nothing, instead of dust. It was taxi-cabs to the hospital instead of bus-rides: but Cotton liked tea, and old books and bus-rides were full of people who were new.
She held the book tightly, as if Daniel might take it from her. “Because I’ve wanted it for months,” she said, and the husky, raspy voice was louder now. Cotton wasn’t a child, even if she hadn’t lived very much more than one, and she wasn’t bothered by rudeness. “You can buy all of the shop but this one, thanks.”
She curled fingers around the book, very obviously loathe to encourage interest in it. It was the complete works of F Scott Fitzgerald, and when she flashed the spine toward Daniel, it was a glimmer of gold script and heavily-tooled leather, and then it was hugged toward Cotton again.
“That can’t be the most interesting thing about you, or you’d be too boring for the books. So if you’re not scared of me, why did you look at every shelf but the one nearest me? Did you think I’d bite?” The smile lilted upward; it was more adult than the husky voice and the skinny wrists; it belonged to a woman who had been heavy-lidded eyes and the smell of jasmine and who moved with languid grace and who had bequeathed it without thinking to a daughter who was more dandelion fluff than grace but who smiled the same smile all the same.
If money was taking whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, then Daniel had plenty, but it brought him no joy and no true ownership. He would have the books, paper his home with them, make it more secure and familiar with the proper objects of his world, and it still would not give him either freedom or control.
Daniel was not fooled by the woman’s smile on the doll’s face, and he was not baited to think more kindly of her. He wanted to be sure he was aware of her humanity, that she mattered, even if she didn't matter specifically to him. He didn't want to know her. A quick spasm of irritation flooded through his face and sharpened the blue eyes.
He came down the aisle toward her, deliberate. It was several steps, and he didn't speak during them, concentrating on noticing anything he could besides her breath and pattering heart. He leaned over her. He smelled like the books: musty. His breath was coffee and copper. He reached out a set of pale fingers to grip the book in her grasp and he tugged at it. “Today is not a good day to test me, little doll. You would not be the one biting.”
Books, Cotton knew, were stable bedfellows. They promised open doors, and voyages, they conjured princes where there were none in a small town much given to gossiping, they were dependable and there was not a lot in Cotton’s life that had any of the above. She loved books, because they asked for nothing and they gave her everything. It didn’t even matter that they took nothing off the list.
She did not move. She was crammed against the bookshelf, so she couldn’t with any ease, but for a china doll, she did not look afraid or shrink or curl in-towards herself. Cotton observed his approach with thought, entirely calm and only the faint widening and then narrowing of the blue eyes to indicate she was unsettled by it. And she tugged her book back, defiant twist of wrist. It was the only complete Fitzgerald in the shop. Cotton knew all of the books upon the shelves out of sheer routine, and she knew that they had multiple copies of most of Fitzgerald in pieces, but not all. And not bound up together.
“I’ve teeth,” she informed him, and close to, she was mint and lavender and dust, “I wouldn’t write me off, just because I can’t bully you the way you’re trying. Why do you want it so badly?” She was intensely aware that the shop was quiet, empty of everything but the breath of the heater in back and that she heard nothing in the street outside.
Daniel snorted. “You do not have teeth. And if you could bully me, you probably would. That’s the way the world works.” Obviously he wasn’t talking about the blunt little things she was using to form her t’s, and he didn’t bother thinking through the logic of the statement. Daniel refused to give up the book entirely, and thereupon commenced a short tug of war that ultimately he let her win, with the excuse of twisting the book around so he could better view the spine. He released it abruptly a moment after, exclaiming in quick distaste, “Fitzgerald! He’s not worth it. There’s a dozen of him here.”
Daniel left her where she was sitting, returning to the place he had been before to resume his path of destruction through the available collection. He wasn’t sure why he was here, or really if he would be able to leave, and he began to slow his movements, taking more time with his decisions, returning back to previous choices and putting one or two back.
Cotton ran her tongue along the inside of her teeth without thinking, and looked at him, her eyes very blue and thoughtful and serious. She took the Fitzgerald gladly back into her arms when he was done pushing and pulling at it, until he’d assessed for himself he didn’t want it. But she did want to know about the teeth.
“There’s a dozen, but not all in the same volume. It adds up.” Each volume cost two dollars, but the book contained all seventeen together, and was only fifteen dollars. It wasn’t very economical to buy them all split out separately and anyone who cared about the cost would have decided it was cheaper to buy the book as a whole, instead of all split out like that. But it was weighty, and heavy and people, Cotton had found, liked books they could take on the bus or in the bath. Not that that was a pejorative, but Cotton didn’t limit herself to those kinds of books.
“What do you mean, it’s the way the world works?”
Daniel exhaled very slowly, watching the air stir the dust along the shelves. “It adds up, she says. Keep it. Start writing these down so I’m not here ‘til dawn.” Yet he wasn’t hurrying, not any more, slowing the time passing and even giving the nearest window a nervous glance as the coming night grew deeper along the street beyond. The darker it was, the better, and the colder it was the less likely he was to run into anyone.
He paused entirely as his thoughts went inward, watching his fingertips on the spine at the farthest end of the shelf. He was going to have to deal with this… whatever it was, this phobia of going out. It was going to get people killed--and then it was going to get him killed. He heard her question and turned his eyes blindly her direction. “What? Oh. Never mind that. It’s an off night, little doll. Just ignore me, and do your figures.” He rounded a shelf and started shuffling through books again with renewed vehemence.
Cotton tugged the paper and the pen into her lap, and began methodically working through the pile, flipping to the open inside cover with the pencil scrawled price, and stacking the books to her right - alphabetically; even if he was going to prowl the shelves and toss everything onto the floor, the floor could be as alphabetized as the shelves. Cotton wasn’t hurrying to go out either, but for different reasons. The shop closed when it closed but usually after eight. Outside was cold, and the dark was muddied with street-light but it still closed over her on the way out to the park. Cotton had no car, so the walk was long enough and cold enough that the dark just made it dreary. It was easier, here where there was heat and books and tea in the back.
He looked at her without really looking and she thought without conscious effort of books in which sour, angry men stormed in and out of places because nothing could be found that addressed it. “Are the books supposed to help?” Books resolved most of her off-days, because they could be run-away-into. “You’ll need a box.” She tipped the paper and pen out of her lap and rose, searching behind the counter and spluttered over dust on her way.
“It’s an off night, but you still think it’s the way the world works, everyone bullies everyone else.”
“The books help my new apartment be less new. A pretty simple purpose, when it comes down to it. They don’t even need to be something I’ve never read to accomplish it.” Daniel was tense and short on temper this evening, and he knew it. He was consciously pushing himself to go out and meet people but once he got there his usual charm deserted him, leaving a snarling thing desperate to go home. How are the mighty fallen, he thought to himself. It was something from his youth, something his grandfather had said. Damn that man; Daniel hoped his bones were nothing but soup in the soil by now.
“Once you have it all down and arrange it, then hire someone to bring it to me. Jude will do it, for a price. You can just send me the bill.” He finished the sorting, and ranged around the shop again, circulating around the edge of it and waiting for her to finish notating and piling. While he did so he looked for a display that held writing utensils and greeting cards. The end of the season was nearing and he thought Sam might like a card. Perhaps he should get something for Harper, too? The thought was simultaneously confounding and terrifying.
“Oh,” she said, at once understanding, and her voice warmed through, smoke in husky rasp. “Books are pretty good company, too.” And book-lovers, the kind who required books to be present to make a place home, could be forgiven rather more than people who bought books as a once-off, who would bring them back in the New Year, unloved for more than an evening.
“Where am I sending it?” She tilted her head, dandelion fluff silted with dust now, and caught his sideways look toward the display, and leaned forward. “They’re handmade.” He looked, the man with snow-damp curls, uncertain then and it was the first time in the shop he hadn’t looked like he was in an ill-humor that no amount of books could fix.
Daniel too liked booklovers, finding a general kinship with academic spectators in a way not unlike he felt a kinship with all creatures that watched the world instead of moving it. Daniel went to such people first, heckled them for their attention, and pushed them to their boundaries to make sure they remembered him. The town librarian had been the other recipient of this treatment, which was, admittedly, easy to confuse with Daniel’s usual bad temper with all but his favored few. Cotton also had the misfortune of being at the end of a long path with no ceiling.
“I have an apartment above the music store.” Daniel spent another five minutes going around and around the card display, looking at different options. Finally he used a theatrical curse under his breath, one that he had learned at the turn of the century in another country, and he picked two off the top. He kept those, and strode past her out the door in a cloud of cold air and delayed caution. “Send them there. Add the cards and your Fitzgerald to the bill.”
He all but ran past her, going wide to avoid any hands or potential introductions.