A Genie in the Bookstore

The most common injury in a bookstore is a paper cut. Kaiza recognizes such an instance not by the series of sounds that follow—the yelp of pain, a book thudding on the ground, and perchance, multiple muttered expletives—but by the tang of iron, striking against his nostrils. Kaiza sets down his quill, raising his head from where he hunched over his scattered countertop.

“Miss, are you alright?” he calls out.

“Yes! Perfectly alright,” a woman’s voice returns, clear without a hint of distress.

Kaiza steps around stacks of books to reach the main library, where the tall shelves are marginally more organized than his workspace. Tomes fill them from end to end and top to bottom, with colorful, gilded bindings and worn paper covers alike. The heights of their spines varied down each shelf like the wiggles of a moth worm. Some books spill out onto the floors, winged pages rustling as he passed. To Kaiza, this is the source of his second favorite smell. The telling and knowing and remembering steam the air between shelves and dust motes, incensed by the golden light flooding through the windows. It is a rare day that he lets the blinds stay open, and the books are aglow with the light that burns and bleaches them in time.

He is first struck by two reds. In her hand is a streak of blood that glinted in that sunlight, even at a distance. The woman’s hair curls with a match-struck crimson, the fiery shade of the thing all bookkeepers fear most.

Her sharp eyes, dark and narrow like the tip of an inked quill, cut over to him. “I said I was alright.”

“And bleeding all the same.” His hands pat his robes, before he reveals a piece of paper, slightly scribbled upon. “I must apologize. I neglected my handkerchief somewhere, but I hope this may staunch the bleed.”

The woman takes it, bemused. “Thank you.”

She folds it and wraps it tightly around her palm like gauze. A ruddy-hued book still sits sadly on the ground where she had dropped it, and Kaiza bends down to pick it up. He dusts it off, happy to find that no corners were dented and no pages were harmed. In his hands is a nonfictional volume, A Detailed Guide to Botanicals of the Desert Climate, that he had possessed in his collection for quite a long time. It deserves a good home, to be well-studied under the canopy of an orangery, or at the very least, with an open window, and a curious mind.

“You can put it back,” the woman says.

Kaiza is scorned on the book’s behalf. “Uninterested?”

“Very interested, but I never have much time to read.” Makeshift bandage in place, she props her fist on her hip. “I have too many untouched books back home as is. Local testimony is more useful to me anyhow.”

“As a collector of tomes, I like to think there is a freedom in having books unread. It could be very boring knowing everything.”

The woman doesn’t say anything in return. It does not seem to be a contemptuous silence, although he gets the sense that she is holding back something particularly patronizing. Not that he minds. A decent bookseller must not only be skilled at reading books, but people as well. Unfortunately, he is a decent bookseller.

Kaiza smiles. “If not this, what else did you wish to find, miss?”

“I received a tip that there’s an ancient book hidden in these parts that might help me with my research. A bookshop seems the obvious place to start.” She raises her bandaged fist where the blood had started peeking through, bursting like little stars, and says, “I’m looking for something that could tell me how to turn this into ichor.”

“Ichor,” he repeats. That which flowed in the veins of the Ancient Greek deities. Kaiza is curious, but he doesn’t see much appeal in blood in the color of gold instead of red. He imagines that it would cause a person to appear rather jaundiced, like his restaurant owner neighbor who drank himself into a severe liver inflammation some years ago.

“I just arrived from a long stint along the northern half of the Mediterranean, studying its mythically aligned flora and horticulture. Most of the time was spent on collecting nectar samples, documenting rare mountain blossoms. Then it was the wild Cretan honey, Athena’s olive oil, centuries-aged Tuscan wines, hand-picked herbs and fungi. It never amounted to anything, to my disappointment, but I suppose I couldn’t exactly stumble on the recipe for ambrosia.”

“I’m sure whatever you made was delicious.”

“You should give honeyed wine a taste. I was never one for alcohol but that really grew on me. Also, rosemary poppyseed cakes made from olive oil?” She snaps her fingers. “Divine. Even if I didn’t inherit that particular quality upon ingestion.”

It is only then that he returns the red book to its original place on the shelf, and he does it all without looking away from the woman. “So broadly speaking, you’re searching for godhood?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m that ambitious. I would be satisfied with immortality.”

Kaiza chuckles. “What’s so lovely about your life that you would want it to last forever?”

He meant in jest, but the woman gives him a minuscule tilt of her head. Her eyes widen by a similar fraction, intense with a nearly physical weight.

“There isn’t, and that’s why,” she says.

He almost wants to look away. “I think I understand,” Kaiza says slowly. “Would you like to sit down for a cup of tea?”

In his many years at this bookshop, he had never extended such an offer before. For as many novels as he owned, he had disproportionately little novelty in this bookshop of his.

The woman cracks something close to a grin, and it makes her appear instantly younger. “Sure.”

Kaiza leads them through the maze to the back of the shop, where the kitchen is slightly less of a mess than everywhere else, and the used cups and teaspoons replace the clutter of his books. The woman soon introduces herself as Dr. Margarette Quintrell. “Outside of professional settings, I go by Agrette.”

She is a professor of archaeology and a Renaissance woman by all means. Agrette didn’t say the latter in any direct words, but Kaiza could gander from the sheer volume of her exploits before finding herself at his shop. Sailing, art restoration, diplomacy, anthropological research—she has done it all.

“I think you should author an autobiography,” Kaiza remarks as he sets a filled kettle on the burner. He spoons some green tea leaves into the heating water before he snaps the lid shut.

“I write enough papers as it is. My own self would make an uninteresting research topic.”

Kaiza leans back against his small kitchen top. “I doubt that. I have met some exceedingly uninteresting people. Once there was this gray-haired man with no hair who came in and told me he couldn’t read or write. He never learned!” It still causes him to shudder just thinking about him. Kaiza had gotten rid of him from the shop quickly.

At the table, Agrette props a chin up on one arm. “Under different circumstances, a woman like me wouldn’t have been taught either.”

“That’s what makes you interesting. What little in the world is not a product of chance?”

“What an uninteresting way of looking at it.”

But this line of thought somehow reminds Agrette of her brief residency in Transylvania that should have never happened at all. Why it did was a result of a different stay in Thailand, where she met a professor of the occult visiting a Buddhist temple in a village that was haunted, as she was then informed. With her life goals, she often avoided the risk of premature death, so after some discussion, they changed plans over a drink and collaborated on a trip to Romania. Agrette had a lovely time in Transylvanian woods, although she was not successfully bitten by a vampire.

“Back to the Buddhist temple,” Kaiza says as he sets two mugs of tea down on the table, “what about reincarnation?”

“No.”

“What? Why not?”

Agrette dissolves three sugar cubes and takes a sip, unaffected by the scalding temperature. “What if I get reincarnated as a sea cucumber? What is quality of life as a sea cucumber?”

“That’s not…”

She spent a few more breaths lamenting the philosophical questions of whether she would even be the same person, what being the same person even meant, and why she decided it would be existentially simpler if she just prolonged her current life. She was, however, very willing to return to the Asian continent for culinary reasons. It was around this time her interests took a long-lasting gastronomic turn. Agrette sailed up to Canton, where she was not able to disembark, but she was connected to a scholar studying monkey movement patterns. The scholar had heard whispers of where to find the seeds of the immortality peaches, preserved inside mountains that were hidden in the clouds. In the meantime, she traipsed across the Russian hinterlands and sought to learn how to split her soul in the fashion of Koshei the Deathless, neither of which were very good decisions for a currently mortal. She did develop a love for medovnik, a rare, honeyed treat during her travels. Then, for multiple weeks she sailed the fjords of Norway and the Swedish archipelago searching for the golden apples of Idunn. Agrette says she would have stayed in the Nordic countries longer if her funds hadn’t washed up as soon as she turned up to Finland, from where she returned with a 30-pound stock of suova, salted and smoked reindeer meat.

Kaiza wonders if that was why she ran out of funds.

By the end, Agrette had decided, “It’s another reason I must live longer. Imagine all the foods I have not tasted?”

Kaiza hums in response. He drinks from his mug, which had finally cooled down to a temperature that he could comfortably warm his hands around.

“The idea of ceasing existence. It’s so very inconvenient,” she says.

Kaiza hums a little more emphatically.

“Yours…” She stretches out the word across multiple unspoken questions. “I can guess. You plan to have a long, cozy life in this bookshop.”

“Of course! What else is there for me?”

Agrette seems to take it self-deprecatingly. “Everything, surely. You come across as a knowledgeable man.”

He stirs his tea thoughtfully. “I decided a long, long time ago what matters to me.” Kaiza’s lengthy sleeve flares toward the front of the bookstore. “It’s all right here. That’s what sets me apart, why I can afford to never like selling any of my books!”

Each one is as valuable to him as the limbs of his body, the arms that hold them and the eyes that behold them. Each one is special, a parchment-bound moment of memory and time. This collection is an archive of existence itself and millennia in the making.

“We can’t stay fed on passion, otherwise I would already be immortal.” Agrette sets down her finished tea. “At the very least, you can clean up your shop. Organize it all. Redecorate here and there. Have you ever thought about expanding?”

He thinks about it. “How would you go do it then?”

She talks at length about her ideas. Agrette is a little like him. An abundance, but perhaps of very different things. She is still talking when they put the mugs in the washbasin and walk back to the front of the store. She does wait patiently for Kaiza to navigate through the books strewn on the floor, until they stand across from each other on opposite sides of the counter.

“Are you absolutely certain though? You don’t want any books?” Kaiza asks.

“I am. Besides, I can always come back.” She shoots him a cheeky smile. “When I find the secret to immortality, I will have all the time in the world to read it.”

He laughs. “Also,” Kaiza says, “could I see that piece of parchment back?”

She holds up the hand still clutching it in place on her palm. “This?” she asks, incredulous even as she peels it from her skin.

The incision has already stopped bleeding. The dry parts of the parchment rustle as she hands it to him. “Here.”

Kaiza takes it carefully, avoiding the bloodstains. He unfolds it and pulls it flat, revealing the eye of dark crimson at the center surrounded by loose, red speckles. He whets his thumb and pointer along the edge of the parchment with a pinch, where he hones down toward an angled corner. With one arm, he swings it in a fast arc through the air in front of him.

“It bled so much for such a small—” she was saying, before her voice chokes off, and blood seeps out of the slit in her throat.

She grasps her neck. The words she attempts do not make it to her lips. They gurgle out in red rivulets, slipping between her fingers, and her free hand claws at the counter toward him. The blood is smearing upon its bronze surface and beading into jewels. Kaiza is still smiling when she falls. He sidesteps the books on the ground, careful as ever. Agrette was right. Kaiza needs to clean them up one of these days. He would hate to miss the last moments.

Kaiza squats down in front of Agrette, whose eyes are fixed on him with wide-eyed strain. Her mouth is sputtering blood, while her throat releases a steady bleed that has spread into the divots of the hardwood floor. They ink the ground in rectilinear patterns, bisecting the handprints that Agrette left when she was still writhing. In the time it took for him to walk around the counter, the parchment had almost soaked through both sides. It’s heavier. He raises the red edge of the parchment to his tongue.

“It tastes as decadent as it smelled. Never gets old.”

He gets a streaky sputter in response.

“That’s the thing about immortality. You spend an eternity losing things. Forgetting things. Constantly anew.” Kaiza drops the piece of paper, letting it soak entirely red. “That, however, gets old sometimes.”

When he stands up, there is a red book in his hands. It is a rather thin one, but the embossing and binding give it an understated sort of magnificence.

“You should be proud of yourself, Agrette. After all these centuries, I’ve found that only the ambitious ones ever turn out this fine.”

The door swings open. A woman with a broad-brimmed hat stumbles in through the door. She smiles when she sees him, and before Kaiza can say a word, she greets him. “Hello!”

“Welcome.” He sweeps out his robes and then takes a step back.

She walks toward the shelves, heeled shoes clinking over the clear floor. Then she pivots and approaches him with a prismatic smile, the kind that crinkles around the eyes and mouth. “Do you sell children’s books here?”

Before he can answer, she is patting her rounding stomach and saying, “We’re expecting. My husband and I love to read, and we’ve been talking about what first book we should read to this little one when they’re old enough!”

“That sounds lovely.” Kaiza is holding the book to his chest, but its weight is remarkably light. The lady gazes at him expectantly, and by then, all the warmth from the earlier tea had already left him. He hesitates. Then he thinks, granting the new generation the ability to read is an important endeavor.

“Actually, I may have just the thing right here.” He turns the golden lettering of the cover toward the woman. “This one is called A Genie in the Bookstore. A new arrival.”

“It sounds a tad too fanciful for a toddler.” She turns her head back toward the shelves. “I think we would rather read something else.”

Kaiza smiles without teeth. “Of course, ma’am. What do you wish to find instead?”