“I think that’s a really, really questionable policy you have,” he said. “You can’t just lock up people in a store!
“It’s against fire code, for Chrissakes!”
His voice was rising.
Wearing jogging clothes and still slightly sweaty, the man was slim and vaguely thirty. He stood with a cup of Starbucks, teetering on the precipice between the the safety of the city’s sidewalk and the fiery deathtrap that is Happy Dusty Books. My parents had just flown in from Iowa. I didn’t want to be here at work, let alone incarcerating anyone with 50,000 books–err, several thousand cubic feet of inert — yet highly combustible — energy.
I was growing vulnerable like a five-year-old; I wanted grab the seat of my trousers and do the I-have-to-pee-dance. Instead, I explained the following to Smokey the Square:
I work evening shifts here at Happy Dusty Books. We’re thinly staffed, so that means I’m the sole employee from five to ten p.m. As a result, when I have to use the bathroom (let me say I drink coffee emphatically), I abide by the following protocol established by our manager:
1.) I walk around and let each customer know I have to “go to the back room.” This is a euphemism for “bathroom.” (Everyone understand this; no has ever had a problem with this.)
2.) I let them know I’ll be there for just a minute (this is the nice-person way of informing them I only intend to urinate.)
3.) I inform them that, in the meantime, the front door will be locked.
4.) I repeat, with polite emphasize, that this will take just a minute.
Assuming I don’t mumble or something, two things either happen: they nod agreeably or they ask to be let out.
This evening stood like any other. The usual before-dinner crowd came in a rush and then ebbed away. Two browsing customers remained. Despite going to the “back room” before my shift, I was again feeling very splashy. So, with the shop key in hand, I approached the first customer in the cooking section. I said my sch-peal. She nodded. I continued to the second customer, standing in the math theory section, to whom I recited the same. His eyebrows arched to attention.
Back to the top.
Smokey the Square is standing half-inside the store, and half-outside. My arm is getting tired from holding the door open. I can almost taste the lactic acid. It’s awkward. He stands there, reddened by his recent run and by his rising concern. Little bits of saliva have coagulated on his lower lip, and the way it’s slightly quivering, I’m afraid the froth might land on my face. He spews forth like a fire hydrant:
“Can you imagine the pandemonium you’d have on your hands if this place went up in blazes!”
I accept his invitation. In my head, the pandemonium goes like this:
I pull off my sweatshirt before locking up. It’s hot in the store, I notice, a dry hot heat like the kind you get from a space heater (which I probably left on full-blast upstairs next to a bin of scrap paper hours ago.) I’m rearranging my damped t-shirt as I navigate a store full of customers, several baby strollers and a one particularly loud teenager with Down’s Syndrome. Finally I reach the back room. I close the door. As I unzip my fly, I’m humming some bit of Classical I caught from NPR. Here we have a close-range shot — framed by my legs — of the stream splashing into the toilet bowl. The shot cuts to wisps of smoke that seep through cracks in the store’s stucco ceiling. An ashen wreath, like a particle snake, winds through the Used Literature aisle, just above the heads of several browsers, before receding — much quicker than it had escaped — through a ventilation shaft. Classic back draft effect. Shelves of used paperback editions beginning to tan and crinkle. Cut to a shot of an employee-less front counter: a remarkably thick, very whitish haze settles above the cash register. A sign on the “back room” door reads: Employees Only. We hear the dribble of liquid. I’m shaking out the last drops while, with a permanent marker, I deface the Da Vinci Code poster behind the toilet. The caption above the head of Mona Lisa reads: “Why is this man smiling? The answer is in this book.” I scratch out the noun of the last preposition and write “your hands.” I chuckle as I zip up. At this precise moment we hear a great snapping roar as the store’s leaden vault crashes through the ceiling — its resting place in the attic having succumbed to the transformative properties of intense heat – and crushes me. I die instantly. The Employees Only door caves in on itself and is sucked up by the great vacuum created by a sooty, oxygen-starved attic drawing a giant’s breath of air. Paperbacks flutter like felled doves. Customers scream and heave.
Pandemonium.
From the sidewalk outside we see great walls of flame leaping from the tops of bookshelves onto the huddled mass. A man is smashed against the glass door by the blind force of the mob. He looks a lot like Smokey the Square, and the way his mouth is smooshed up against the glass makes him resemble a puffer fish. He blinks at a few very concerned passerby.
Do the sprinklers go off?
No.
Have shiny red trucks arrived and unloaded men in yellow coats who attach white hoses to hydrants who are ready to douse the bookshop with gallons upon gallons of life-saving water and chop into the windows with shiny new axes?
No.
Things look bleak. People are trampling each other while choking on smoke. One man doesn’t know his hair has caught fire. The teenager with Down’s Syndrome steals a baby carriage and lobs it at a plate-glass window. The window heaves; it doesn’t break.
The store goes up in a fireball.
Everybody fuckin’ dies.
Imagined pandemonium over. I look at the guy.
“Fine. But what do I do in the meantime? Pee my pants?”
I really wanted to know.
