Read Online The Sea Beach Line by Ben Nadler - Free Book Online Page A

with your van?’ I said, ‘Al, is there a reason I shouldn’t trust you?’”
    â€œI see.” I remembered a van of his own that Al had owned when I was in high school. It was a white Astro van, and was always dirty and packed full of boxes. “Do you know . . . do you know where he’d been living?”
    â€œI don’t know if you could say he lived at any fixed place, exactly. But his, you could say, base of operations, where he kept his books, was a storage space down past SoHo. Where I do believe he slept sometimes, though he was very private about things like that. Very guarded.
    â€œHis space is in the same facility as mine, just down the hall. It’s the only facility downtown with twenty-four-hour access. I guess that’s another reason I think he died. It wouldn’t be like him to just abandon his stuff, to not try to sell it off or something before he left.”
    â€œSo his stuff is still there? You don’t think it’s been cleaned out?”
    â€œNo. No one’s been by to clean it out. I keep my eyes open.”
    â€œThey don’t throw stuff out, when a person dies? Or disappears?”
    â€œThey throw stuff out—or sell it, if they can—when someone stops paying the bill. Not that it’s my business, but I believe a man named Timur, who your father knew, took care of those details. He’s a rich guy . . . kind of a benefactor. I guess it’s paid up, because they haven’t cut the lock yet.
    â€œMatter of fact, I got the spare key to that lock in my own space there. Al had me hold on to a copy in a neighborly sort of way, in case of emergencies. If you come back with me in the evening, I can let you in.”

    I spent the rest of the day with Mendy. He said I could meet him down on Varick Street in the evening, but I wanted to see how Alojzy spent many of his days. Maybe I would meet someone who knew something about his disappearance. I wanted to know how it felt to work out on the street all day long, and see what the street looked like from this side of the table. The Yeshiva Bocher was in my pocket, but I was more interested in the street life than in a book.
    The book table was both part of and an oasis from the crowded sidewalk. Foot traffic passed by indifferently for the most part, but sometimes people detached themselves from the herd to come look at the books. Sometimes they browsed. Other times they looked for a specific title. Often, though, they seemed to be hungrily searching for something specific, but they didn’t know what it was. I watched their faces as they picked books up and responded to them with curiosity, confusion, disappointment, and excitement.
    I helped Mendy clean old price tags off newly acquired books. If they were left on, people would try to get the price on the tag, not the price Mendy had penciled in on the first page. He showed me how to clean the tags. First, you dissolved the glue by putting a drop of lighter fluid onto the tag, then you scraped the tag off with a razor blade. When that was done, you wiped off the tag residue, and any other grime, with a tissue and bit of rubbing alcohol. You had to be careful you didn’t use too much alcohol, or you’d end up wiping off the ink from the cover picture. I did this a couple times with old paperbacks, but Mendy didn’t seem to care too much.
    â€œThis,” he said, “is why I am not in the antique business.”
    When Asher, the dreadlocked bookseller I’d spoken to earlier, saw me sticking around, he came by and introduced himself properly. I was also introduced to Hafid, a skinny Moroccan guy who set up next to Mendy and spent his day quietly reading Sufi books underneath a sun umbrella, and Robertson, a rare-book man who did his selling on the Internet, but hung around the block to talk shop and see if any interesting volumes surfaced. They nodded with respect when theyheard who my father was. I didn’t