A Convincing Love

It’s late morning on a Bangkok Saturday. People are out shopping, but the rush is out of the atmosphere. The air is torpid with weekend and rain. The BTS trains are only about half full. One year since the king’s death and everyone is in black; whole train cars, mothers, children, teenagers all in black, but its Saturday, so some of them have gotten creative with it. A girl with a pageboy is wearing black gladiator sandals that tie up to her knees, a few women wear sheer black scarves, spilling over their shoulders, falling over their hair; the guys are mostly in polos with the Thai numeral for nine: the number for the king.

Under the station, impervious to the impending rain, the symbol-shaped woks are sitting on gas-ring braziers, cupping opaque oil, shivering with bubbles. There are piles of spring rolls and fried tofu next to them and yellow and red paper flags for the Nine Emperor Gods Festival. The sidewalk tiles are loose and clatter with under the weight of pedestrians walking, pushing strollers, jogging, teetering.

A foggy music is playing somewhere. The sky is headache gray and piling up like comforters kicked to the foot of a bed. Motorcycles thrum by and focus my attention for a moment before it spills back over the scene, utterly bored.

I’ve got too much stuff awkwardly crammed in my pockets, as I often do when traveling. My cellphone snags on my passport as I take it from my pocket. A few coins fall out, catching on the lip of the phone’s protective case. I press the button, it’s already 10:40. I go in to the bookstore and put my books on the counter. I’m supposed to be in here to sell only, but while they’re totaling my buy-back price, I find a book and take it to the counter. I’m half-way through through a Dostoevsky. They always start to depress me a few hundred pages in when the protagonist’s mortal defense starts to crumble, pulled down by the unnecessarily, but implacably evil world.

I use my credit to buy the book and a coffee and still get about 3 dollars back. I sit at the table in the front of the store. It starts raining hard outside. I look up from the book and watch the rain.

When I was younger and very awkward with girls, my favorite place for a date was in the bookstore. The books gave me something serious to talk about. We could go to a bar and I’d flounder for conversation. If we went to the movies, I’d bitch through every cliché, rolling my eyes enough to look like a cartoon who’d just gotten off a roller coaster. In most restaurants, I’d only drink coffee and—before the ban in 2010—smoke like a chimney. I wasn’t really pleasant to be with anywhere, but, in bookstores, I felt I was at least tolerable.

I was always trying to get my dates--if you could call them that-- to read Calvino. It seemed like I never met anyone who’d read him. I’d wave If on a Winter’s Night...around and complain that it was better than Marquez, which, was only true because it didn’t get the credit Marquez did. I used to go nuts if I met anyone who liked Confederacy of the Dunces who hadn’t read the Quixote. “Who cares which translation it is?” I’d whisper-shout. “I’ll buy it for you now if you promise to stop reading whatever you’re reading now and start this.” And I’d jab at the book with my index finger like an itinerant preacher with his bible. Sometimes, I’d switch topics and take my ire out on the bookstore. “What? Only one Iris Murdoch? The hell kinda’ place is this?”

I felt confident without a drink in my hand. I didn’t even have to smoke. I’d pile my dates up with White Noises and Remains of the Days and, best of all, it was like a glimpse into the future. If they were amused or even tolerant of my bibliophile rants, they won me over. They didn’t even need to buy a book. No one I met had much money back then. But maybe they’d write a title down to check out at the library. Probably very few of these books ever even got checked out, but it was the patience that impressed me, that and the ability to spend an hour or two in a store buying nothing, just talking, or, for my dates, just listening.

A lot of the bookstores are gone now. Powell’s is still in Portland, but that place swallows me. I could never curate it. I was too amazed to do much more then gasp and plop down on the floor with a stack of books. The other independent bookstores have given over to a lot of what they used to call ‘sidelines’ which is all the crap which used to be secondary in bookstores—you know, Edgar Allen Poe action figures. ‘Emily Dickinson is my homegirl!’ t-shirts. Gifts non-readers buy for readers. These have gradually taken over as I guess most readers go online where the variety is.

Overseas, there are a few used bookstores left. In large cities like Bangkok, enough reading material has accumulated over the years to lead to some interesting collections and generally the prices at these places are reasonable enough. These places often serve as bastions of the more eccentric expats—the ones who’ve avoided the bars and spend their retirement looking through boxes of cast-off paperbacks with brittle yellow pages, trying to remember if they’re read Fathers and Sons before. Mostly they talk to whoever is at the counter.

I’m finishing my coffee, watching the greasy Bangkok rain, wondering what I’m going to do with the rest of the day before my flight home when the bell above the door rings and a guy comes in with a girl. Their voices carry above the rain, the espresso maker and the old soul music set to a perfect background level. “Oh, shit it’s gone!” The guys says. “Oh well. We’ll have to find something else.” The girl is speaking much quieter. I can’t hear her responses to his outbursts. From the corner of my eye, I see him grab a book. “This? This is Dan Fucking Brown! Yes, that Dan Brown! Well, Angels and Demons would be the place to start, but The Da Vinci Code is, well, the DA VINCI CODE." He says this like a cue for a high-five. "What’s it about? You know, Catholics mostly and, uh monks.”

My focus is still on the window, but I can’t hear the rain. I can’t even see it anymore, I can see only Tom Hanks, with a flashlight, in a tunnel, looking for, ‘uh, monks.’ I’m biting my tongue to keep from laughing when the guy suddenly yells out “David Baldacci” and goes tromping (there’s no other word for it—like through the pumpkin patch) to the other end of the bookcase. “He’s fucking brilliant! You don’t know Baldacci?” Alright, we’re gonna’ fix that.” but before the guy can say anything about Baldacci’s oeuvre he’s tromping off again, groping for another book, like someone pulling a box of cereal off the shelf at a supermarket. “Hey, what about Janet Evanovitch she writes these murder stories—scare the hell outta’ you! Like, you never know who’s going to die...” The girl says something in response to which he announces, “oh no, that’s someone else!”

The couple bounds to the back of the store and up the stairs to ‘mystery’ and ‘sci-fi’ and all I can think is that it was like watching some terrible spoof of me at my most earnest, years earlier. I try to reconcile myself to what I’ve just heard, but I keep thinking about his synopsis of Da Vinci code: ‘Catholics and, uh, monks,’ and I can’t avoid the conclusion that this guy is a fraud and this is some kind of ‘ways to pick up girls’ technique.’ As upsetting as it is to see this grotesque performance, it takes me back, for a moment, to a series of bookstores, back when I used to sleep in my clothes and never wash my hair, when I worked in a bookstore and spent most of my free time in the university library or the diner down the street.

I knew nothing of the world then, but earnestly believed books could furnish any information I needed. Maps did not impress me then; they weren't tangible the way stories were. If I could read about places, I didn't need to visit them. 

I finish my coffee, watching the rain, on the other side of the world from my memories, thinking of the snow, the cafes, the cigarettes, the watery American coffee I drank by the pot. I begin to feel thankful to the bastard and his Dan Brown for stirring up the memories which sometimes, I feel I am on the precipice of giving up forever.

When the couple comes back downstairs, the guy’s expostulating with the girl about movie version of the Da Vinci Code. And what’s this? The girl’s got a bag. She’s actually bought something. I never got anyone to buy anything!

Not long after the couple leaves, the rain is pulled back like a shower curtain, still flinging a few wild drops here and there, but ceasing as abruptly as it started. I leave the bookstore. The sky is still gray like a dead tooth and there’s nothing but malls all up and down the street. I go over to a 7-11, buy a snack and sit in the stairwell with my book. It starts raining again and from down in the stairwell, the spatter of the rain on the sidewalk tile hits me like a light mist, gradually dampening the book, leaving a dry imprint of my fingers on the page. I take out my phone and my passport comes out with it again. I press the button on the phone. It’s 12:50. I go back to the wet book and wish I still smoked.