This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Ishaan Barrett
Content Warning: mentions of death
Next to the funeral parlor on West 72nd, there is a store with clean windows and a concrete exterior. The owner, its only employee, sells records, CDs, VCR tapes, and books that have been rescued from basements and purchased from estate sales. People come and go from the shop throughout the day: girls carrying linen tote bags, men carrying nothing but keys, and grandmothers searching for songs that they cannot remember the names of though the melodies play in their heads. Tourists will occasionally wander in, take pictures of the vintage posters, touch things, and then leave without buying anything. Exiting the store, they cleanse themselves of the dust that has gathered on their fingertips by wiping them on their pants and head downtown.
There are many days when the shop is mostly empty. On those days, Maximillian Applebaum rests his head on a wooden table that functions as his desk, his dinner table, a storage surface, and a check-out and naps until some concerned soul shakes his shoulder to make sure that he is alive. He awakes perturbed.
For ten years, Max has spent most of his waking hours at this desk, looking out at the passersby with feigned indifference. He likes that he can see them without being seen, and he likes most of all to see the same people repeatedly. There is the woman who works at the cheap deli across the street. He has never seen her take the trash out without gloves on or noticed her skipping her smoke break. The most reliable figure would have to be Arawn, the mortician who owns the funeral parlor where Max laid his mother to rest. Every Wednesday, Arawn heads to the deli to pick up lunch for himself before he slathers some beloved corpse in makeup with his unskilled hands. When Max spots him, he remembers how he applied too much eyeshadow on his mother’s left eyelid, making her face look uneven. Max can still recall the smell of the funeral parlor. It had a strong floral scent that smelled nothing like real flowers.
Staring out the window, Max feels free to pretend that the world has not changed in the last twenty years. There is not a chain restaurant or Starbucks in sight. The only gimmicky things that can be found in this corner of the city are green fliers, posted to bus stops and vacant buildings, advertising the deli: QUICK AND DELICIOUS, NEVER MORE THAN A TEN-MINUTE WAIT, MADE JUST FOR YOU. Max has never entered the deli. It unnerves him to see a storefront offering itself up to just any customer like that.
When he is not observing the street, Max is deeply engaged in rituals. Such acts of piety include shelving and making one last book fit into the crammed oak triptych. Nothing is placed anywhere by mistake, as any steady patron of The Final Shelf: Records and Books would know. And nothing is alphabetized or categorized. You might find a VCR tape of Rear Window placed next to a tape of Bambi and that is because Max has decided that it will be so. This is partially because he likes to find connections between disparate things and partially because he enjoys confusing people. If someone were to ask him why he put this there and that there he would happily explain, though few make such inquiries anymore. He misses the days when people were eager to engage him with their questions.
Thirty years ago, in 1980, Max was in his third year of running the store when a regular customer who would become his wife walked up to him holding three books in her hands.
“I don’t get it. A Moveable Feast, A Guide to Running Your First Marathon, and The Life of Leonardo da Vinci. Why would you put these next to each other on the top shelf of the bookcase.”
“The running book is about movement, and da Vinci painted The Last Supper. Putting them together made me think of a moving feast.”
The woman rolled her eyes, though there was a sparkle behind them.
“That’s tenuous, at best, Max.”
He shrugged. “I never said that I was clever.”
Now, the top shelf of the bookcase is filled only with yellowing cookbooks. Their ink has been smeared by the oily fingers of chefs and mothers and husbands cooking to flatter their wives before divorce papers hit the table. Every evening, Max stands on top of a stool and takes one of them down, tucking it under his armpit as he slowly lowers himself to the floor. He then selects a recipe that he has not before tried and prepares it. The kitchen of his apartment is quite small and thus his dining table is covered in pots, pans, and plates. He usually eats at the table in the store, surrounded by his possessions as he gazes out the window.
Though Max enjoys cooking, he despises going to the grocery store. He tries his hardest to ignore the pitiful stares of couples and families as they watch him fill his cart by himself with shaking, arthritic hands. Max has lived on his own since his divorce. This does not bother him; there are many men his age who lose their wives and then realize that they don’t know how to cook, clean, or take care of themselves. He will never have this problem, and he will never have to grieve again.
Tonight, he eats fresh tomato soup with a silver spoon that his mother gifted him for his wedding as part of a silverware set. He washes it by hand and shines it with a bit of polish every evening to prevent it from tarnishing. The other pieces of the set were sold one by one many years ago as it became clear to him that Sandra would not change her mind. At first, he’d sold them out of anger, but once his money from the divorce settlement dwindled, he’d found himself out of options. When he cleaned the remaining spoon, he thought of his mother beaming with pride as she handed him the only expensive gift that she would ever give him.
It is Friday night, so he spends the evening organizing the store. Saturday morning often prompts a rush of regular customers. As he takes the kitchen garbage from his small apartment above the store to the street, the scent emanating from the funeral parlor overwhelms him. For the last ten years, Max has slowly been losing his sense of smell, and he would happily lose the remainder of it if he never had to experience the scent again. Max has not once spoken to the mortician since his mother’s funeral.
At ten p.m. Max puts on a night shirt and goes to bed. The gray stripes of the shirt are disrupted by colorful patches sewn to the fabric by his mother to mend holes. As a young woman during the Depression, she learned how to render any scrap of fabric into a shirt. He remembers her hands cupped together as she entreated the clouds to fill them with rain. Standing in the open field with Mother, he waited for her hands to rest at her sides and then gently touch the top of his head. She would rub his skull and play with his curly, brown hair. As Max tries to fall asleep, he runs his hands over the worn patches.
That night he dreams of dust. It rains from the air like snow, settling on the landscape, covering his childhood home, a precariously balanced collection of discarded wood. It moves through the air like pollen, causing tears to well in the brown eyes of hungry children, then toward the east, settling on the books, records, and tapes that fill his shop. The wind batters the door. The air smells of flowers and corpses as it forms a current and bursts into the store like a soldier with orders. Pages rip from their spines, records spin like wheels before breaking in pieces, and tapes unwind themselves. By the end of the windstorm, there is only dust. He stands in it up to his eyes, a man who has given up struggling against the quicksand.
Max rubs his eyes hard when he awakes. It is 9 a.m., and he hurries out of bed to brush his teeth and finishes his preparations. Beginning around 10 a.m., a stream of customers enters the store. They drink coffee from cardboard cups and talk like people who know each other.
“How are you doing, Max?” A woman in her early thirties asks him, smiling with white, crooked teeth.
“Oh, the same as always, Aubrey. Have you found anything today?”
“I’ll get this copy of Go Tell It on the Mountain,” she said.
“That’s a good choice. I read that exact copy.”
“I know, Max. You don’t sell them until you’ve read them.”
Max nods.
Forbidden items are spread unmarked throughout the store. He has mentally categorized each item in the shop and thus has no need for labels. There are forbidden items that will not be sold under any circumstance, treasured items that he might give up if he suspects he will never watch, listen, or read them, items for sale, and merchandise he must sell to make ends meet. This last category fills Max with indignation. He never thought he’d be the type of man to make a spectacle of himself by putting the name of his store on a sweatshirt. He recalls a conversation with his financial advisor.
“Do you want to keep the store open?”
“Yes. I must.”
“Then you need to sell things people will buy, not just look at.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Books that people are reading. No one is going to buy a VCR tape. Maybe some people are looking for records.”
“I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to just bring in what people are going to buy.”
“You could sell merchandise. Kids these days love that kind of thing.”
“I’m not so sure.”
The financial advisor was right. Young people buy merchandise from the store. Max tries not to think of it as selling himself to the customer.
He enjoys listening to the conversations of his patrons as they wander the aisles.
“You know, Katherine, I wasn’t surprised at all when I saw this place on L’amante di Libri di New York’s blog. I’d been coming here for years already when that came out. I told you, this place is what would result from the merging of my grandfather’s basement with a collector’s storefront.”
“Nothing has really changed since then. Well, I guess Max sells some stuff now. I see the NYU kids carrying his stuff around the Village.”
At noon, he puts a record on the turntable, I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl, and sits with satisfaction as music fills the air. A few older women nod to the song. Though they are in their late sixties, they sway fluidly. Their gray hair makes him think of his mother and he wonders how someone can move with such ease one day and then be dead the next. At five p.m., he closes the shop and listens to the rain fall with his eyes closed.
Max passes the rest of the weekend by himself, cooking meals and arranging his things. He places a long, horizontal photo of the town where he grew up on the wall across from his table. He found it at an estate sale in Connecticut the previous Sunday. The photo was taken only three years ago and looks nothing like the place where he grew up. The lawns, while humble, are green, and the small houses look structurally sound. They probably house fathers and have security systems. It now seems like a happier place to grow up in than New York, he thinks. As a young man, he never would have imagined such a notion possible.
Looking at the photo reminds him of Sandra’s first visit to the town. Her disappointment. How she left dishes on the kitchen counter for his mother to clean without offering to rinse them herself. This was something that she continued to do once Max’s mother, suffering from arthritis and out of savings, moved into the two-bedroom apartment above the store with them. One night, when he and Sandra were having dinner together at a restaurant, the type where Manhattan-born people like Sandra congregated, she’d told him that she could barely understand a word that his mother said because of her thick Midwestern accent. He’d simply replied: “I speak like her.” That evening, Max stopped loving his wife, although it was she who served him divorce papers only weeks after his mother developed a persistent cough.
***
The store is empty this Wednesday at noon. Max naps at his table. When he wakes up, a young man, no older than twelve, is shaking his shoulder. He must have wandered in while Max was asleep. The child wears a mortified expression.
“Hello,” he says to Max.
“Hello.”
Max can barely find the words to greet the boy. He is startled to realize that he reeks of the funeral parlor’s scent. His first instinct is to tell him to get out of the store before his stench spoils the air and settles into the books. What prevents Max from doing so is the sight of the boy: he is dressed in a suit, eyes filled with tears.
“What is your name?” Max asks the boy.
“I am Achilles.”
“Now, that’s a name,” Max says.
“My mom was Greek,” he replies.
“Why don’t you look around?”
The boy nods. He wanders up and down the two narrow aisles, touching the covers of books and records as his tears dry and then accumulate into streams again. No one comes to look for him, or at least no one thinks to check for him in the store. The dust, stirred up by his movement, settles on Achilles’ freshly pressed suit.
The boy goes over to Max’s desk. He picks up the silver spoon and twirls it between his fingers. Max tenses.
“Do you like to read?” Max asks him.
“No, but my mother always wished that I did.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I just get bored. I wish that I didn’t, I wish so much, but I do, and I never finish any book that I start, not even comic books or manga.”
“Well, if you find something you like, I’ll give it to you.”
Max nods. “Thanks,” he says.
The boy turns around and looks up at the framed photograph of Salina, Kansas.
“I’m from a place that looks just like that,” he says.
“Are you from Salina?”
“No, but I’m from Kansas. Pittsburg.”
Max smiled to himself and nodded. “I know Pittsburg.”
“That’s where my dad lives. My mom lived here.”
“I see,” he says, “Do you like Pittsburg?”
“Yes, I don’t know why Mom wanted to live here. Dad always says she’s just bored and needs to get something out of her system. But I don’t know what. I don’t get what he means by that. There’s nothing to do here either. She must have never gotten it out.”
Max shrugs. “There’s not much to do anywhere.”
The child looks down at his shiny black shoes.
“I’ll look around. For something to read.”
Max tries to focus on the sights outside the window that so often capture his attention. But he can’t help but observe the boy as he walks up and down the aisles. He is no longer conscious of the funeral parlor scent.
The boy finally moves on from the books and finds himself drawn to Max’s table once more.
“Is there anything you’d like?” He asks Achilles.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
The boy looks at the door. Max can sense he is ready to leave. He imagines that the boy’s family is looking for him in the funeral parlor. The boy looks down at the table and picks up the spoon.
“Actually, can I have this?”
Max stares at his own shoes. They are old sneakers, scuffed and yellow, with Velcro straps.
“Of course,” he says. “I said you could have anything.”
The boy holds the spoon up to the light. He traces its delicate floral engraving with his fingertips.
“I should get going.”
Max opens the door for the boy as he leaves. He watches him enter the funeral parlor. He wonders when Achilles will return to Pittsburg. Max wonders if he himself will return to Salina before he dies.
People wearing black suits and dresses enter and exit the parlor as Max leans against the doorway to his store and watches. Once the group leaves for lunch, Max walks to the building, hoping that he will intercept the boy. Instead, he finds himself in the alleyway between his store and the parlor, face to face with the mortician, a man whose blue eyes are sunken deep into his face and shadowed by wrinkles
“Hello, Maximillian. Can I help you with something?” The mortician asks in his baritone voice.
“Oh, no, sir. I was just disoriented. I’m heading back to the store.”
“The last time I talked to you, you were a young man.”
“We were about the same age.”
“That’s true.”
“I can’t believe you are still working. Why don’t you retire?”
“Why don’t you close down that store?”
Max shakes his head. “If I closed my store, this entire street would smell like death.”
“Say what you will. I’m headed to the deli for lunch.”
Max turns to look at the storefront. The window cleaner will arrive in an hour. He brushes the dust from his black vest and removes his checkered cap from his head.
“I’ll join you,” he says, turning away.
Gwendolyn Davison (she/her) is a third-year at Columbia College majoring in history and concentrating in English. She likes to write poems for family and friends and learn about ancient history.