Magic for Beginners: Stories (2 page)

This man had a tattoo of a mermaid coiled around his meaty
forearm, and even this mermaid had an unpleasant look to her:
scaly, corseted bottom; tiny black dot eyes; a sour, fangy smile.
Charley said it was as if even the mermaid were telling her to bite
the arm, and so she did. When she did, the dog went nuts. The guy
dropped its leash. He was trying to get Charley off his arm. The
dog, misunderstanding the situation, or rather, understanding the
situation, but not the larger situation, had grabbed Charley by her
leg, sticking its teeth into her calf.

Both Charley and the dog’s owner had needed stitches. But it was
the dog who was doomed. Nothing had changed that.

Charley’s boss at the shelter was going to fire her, anytime
soon—in fact, he had fired her. But they hadn’t found someone to
take her shift yet, and so she was working there, for a few more
days, under a different name. Everyone at the shelter understood
why she’d had to bite the man.

Charley said she was going to drive all the way across Canada.
Maybe keep on going, up into Alaska. Go watch bears pick through
garbage.

“When a bear hibernates,” she told Batu and Eric, “it sleeps all
winter and never goes to the bathroom. So when she wakes up in
spring, she’s really constipated. The first thing she does is take
this really painful shit. And then she goes and jumps in a river.
She’s really pissed off now, about everything. When she comes out
of the river, she’s covered in ice. It’s like armor. She goes on a
rampage and she’s wearing armor. Isn’t that great? That bear can
take a bite out of anything it wants.”

Uykum geldi.

My sleep has come.

The snow kept falling. Sometimes it stopped. Charley came by.
Eric had bad dreams. Batu did not go to bed. When the zombies came
in, he followed them around the store, taking notes. The zombies
didn’t care at all. They were done with all that.

Batu was wearing Eric’s favorite pajamas. These were blue, and
had towering Hokusai-style white-blue waves, and up on the waves,
there were boats with owls looking owlish. If you looked closely,
you could see that the owls were gripping newspapers in their
wings, and if you looked even closer, you could read the date and
the headline:

“Tsunami Tsweeps Pussy

Overboard, All is Lots.”

Batu had spent a lot of time reorganizing the candy aisle
according to chewiness and meltiness. The week before, he had
arranged it so that if you took the first letter of every candy,
reading across from left to right, and then down, it had spelled
out the first sentence of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and then
also a line of Turkish poetry. Something about the moon.

The zombies came and went, and Batu put his notebook away. He
said, “I’m going to go ahead and put jerky with Sugar Daddies. It’s
almost a candy. It’s very chewy. About as chewy as you can get.
Chewy Meat gum.”

“Frothy Meat Drink,” Eric said automatically. They were always
thinking of products that no one would ever want to buy, and that
no one would ever try to sell.

“Squeezable Pork.
It’s on your mind, it’s in your mouth,
it’s pork.
Remember that ad campaign? She can come live with
us,” Batu said. It was the same old speech, only a little more
urgent each time he gave it. “The All-Night needs women, especially
women like Charley. She falls in love with you, I don’t mind one
bit.”

“What about you?” Eric said.

“What about me?” Batu said. “Charley and I have the Turkish
language. That’s enough. Tell me something I need. I don’t even
need sleep!”

“What are you talking about?” Eric said. He hated when Batu
talked about Charley, except that he loved hearing her name.

Batu said, “The All-Night is a great place to raise a family.
Everything you need, right here. Diapers, Vienna sausages,
grape-scented Magic Markers, Moon Pies—kids like Moon Pies—and then
one day, when they’re tall enough, we teach them how to operate the
register.”

“There are laws against that,” Eric said. “Mars needs women. Not
the All-Night. And we’re running out of Moon Pies.” He turned his
back on Batu.

Some of Batu’s pajamas worry Eric. He won’t wear these, although
Batu has told him that he may wear any pajamas he likes.

For example, ocean liners navigating icebergs on a pair of
pajama bottoms. A man with an enormous pair of scissors, running
after women whose long hair whips out behind them like red and
yellow flags, they are moving so fast. Spiderwebs with houses stuck
to them.

A few nights ago, about two or three in the morning, a woman
came into the store. Batu was over by the magazines, and the woman
went and stood next to Batu.

Batu’s eyes were closed, although that doesn’t necessarily mean
he was asleep. The woman stood and flicked through magazines, and
then at some point she realized that the man standing there with
his eyes closed was wearing pajamas. She stopped reading through
People
magazine and started reading Batu’s pajamas
instead. Then she gasped, and poked Batu with a skinny finger.

“Where did you get those?” she said. “How on earth did you get
those?”

Batu opened his eyes. “Excuse me,” he said. “May I help you find
something?”

“You’re wearing my diary,” the woman said. Her voice went up and
up in a wail. “That’s my handwriting! That’s the diary that I kept
when I was fourteen! But it had a lock on it, and I hid it under my
mattress, and I never let anyone read it. Nobody ever read it!”

Batu held out his arm. “That’s not true,” he said. “I’ve read
it. You have very nice handwriting. Very distinctive. My favorite
part is when—”

The woman screamed. She put her hands over her ears and walked
backwards, down the aisle, and still screaming, turned around and
ran out of the store.

“What was that about?” Eric said. “What was up with her?”

“I don’t know,” Batu said. “The thing is, I thought she looked
familiar! And I was right. Hah! What are the odds, you think, the
woman who kept that diary coming in the store like that?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t wear those anymore,” Eric said. “Just in
case she comes back.”

Gelebilirmiyim?

Can I come?

Batu had originally worked Tuesday through Saturday, second
shift. Now he was all day, every day. Eric worked all night, all
nights. They didn’t need anyone else, except maybe Charley.

What had happened was this. One of the managers had left,
supposedly to have a baby, although she had not looked in the least
bit pregnant, Batu said, and besides, it was clearly not Batu’s
kid, because of the vasectomy. Then, shortly after the incident
with the man in the trench coat, the other manager had quit,
claiming to be sick of that kind of shit. No one was sent to
replace him, so Batu had stepped in.

The door rang and a customer came into the store. Canadian. Not
a zombie. Eric turned around in time to see Batu duck down,
slipping around the corner of the candy aisle, and heading towards
the storage closet.

The customer bought a Mountain Dew, Eric too disheartened to
explain that cash was no longer necessary. He could feel Batu,
fretting, in the storage closet, listening to this old-style retail
transaction. When the customer was gone, Batu came out again.

“Do you ever wonder,” Eric said, “if the company will ever send
another manager?” He saw again the dream-Batu, the dream-managers,
the cartoonish, unbridgeable gape of the Ausible Chasm.

“They won’t,” Batu said.

“They might,” Eric said.

“They won’t,” Batu said.

“How do you know for sure?” Eric said. “What if they do?”

“It was a bad idea in the first place,” Batu said. He gestured
towards the parking lot and the Ausible Chasm. “Not enough steady
business.”

“So why do we stay here?” Eric said. “How do we change the face
of retail if nobody ever comes in here except joggers and truckers
and zombies and Canadians? I mean, I tried to explain about how
new-style retail worked, the other night—to this woman—and she told
me to fuck off. She acted like I was insane.”

“The customer isn’t always right. Sometimes the customer is an
asshole. That’s the first rule of retail,” Batu said. “But it’s not
like anywhere else is better. I used to work for the CIA. Believe
me, this is better.”

“Were you really in the CIA?” Eric said.

“We used to go to this bar, sometimes, me and the people I
worked with,” Batu said. “Only we have to pretend that we don’t
know each other. No fraternizing. So we all sit there, along the
bar, and don’t say a word to each other. All these guys, all of us,
we could speak maybe five hundred languages, dialects, whatever,
between us. But we don’t talk in this bar. Just sit and drink and
sit and drink. Used to drive the bartender crazy. We used to leave
nice tips. Didn’t matter to him.”

“So did you ever kill people?” Eric said. He never knew whether
or not Batu was joking about the CIA thing.

“Do I look like a killer?” Batu said, standing there in his
pajamas, rumpled and red-eyed. When Eric burst out laughing, he
smiled and yawned and scratched his head.

When other employees had quit the All-Night, for various reasons
of their own, Batu had not replaced them.

Around this same time, Batu’s girlfriend had kicked him out, and
with Eric’s permission, he had moved into the storage closet. That
had been just
before
Christmas, and it was a few days
after
Christmas when Eric’s mother lost her job as a
security guard at the mall and decided she was going to go find
Eric’s father. She’d gone hunting online, and made a list of names
she thought he might be going under. She had addresses as well.

Eric wasn’t sure what she was going to do if she found his
father, and he didn’t think she knew, either. She said she just
wanted to talk, but Eric knew she kept a gun in the glove
compartment of her car. Before she left, Eric had copied down her
list of names and addresses, and sent out Christmas cards to all of
them. It was the first time he’d ever had a reason to send out
Christmas cards, and it had been difficult, finding the right
things to say in them, especially since they probably weren’t his
father, no matter what his mother thought. Not all of them,
anyway.

Before she left, Eric’s mother had put most of the furniture in
storage. She’d sold everything else, including Eric’s guitar and
his books, at a yard sale one Saturday morning while Eric was
working an extra shift at the All-Night.

The rent was still paid through the end of January, but after
his mother left, Eric had worked longer and longer hours at the
store, and then, one morning, he didn’t bother going home. The
All-Night, and Batu, they needed him. Batu said this attitude
showed Eric was destined for great things at the All-Night.

Every night Batu sent off faxes to the
World Weekly
News
, and to the
National Enquirer
, and to the
New York Times
. These faxes concerned the Ausible Chasm
and the zombies. Someday someone would send reporters. It was all
part of the plan, which was going to change the way retail worked.
It was going to be a whole different world, and Eric and Batu were
going to be right there at the beginning. They were going to be
famous heroes. Revolutionaries. Heroes of the revolution. Batu said
that Eric didn’t need to understand that part of the plan yet. It
was essential to the plan that Eric didn’t ask questions.

Ne zaman geri geleceksiniz?

When will you come back?

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like
real people at first, to fool you. But when you looked closer, you
saw they were from some other place, where things were different:
where even the same things, the things that went on everywhere,
were just a little bit different.

The zombies didn’t talk at all, or they said things that didn’t
make sense. “Wooden hat,” one zombie said to Eric, “Glass leg.
Drove around all day in my wife. Did you ever hear me on the
radio?” They tried to pay Eric for things that the All-Night didn’t
sell.

Real people, the ones who weren’t heading towards Canada or away
from Canada, mostly had better things to do than drive out to the
All-Night at 3 a.m. So real people, in a way, were even weirder,
when they came in. Eric kept a close eye on the real people. Once a
guy had pulled a gun on him—there was no way to understand that,
but, on the other hand, you knew exactly what was going on. With
the zombies, who knew?

Not even Batu knew what the zombies were up to. Sometimes he
said that they were just another thing you had to deal with in
retail. They were the kind of customer that you couldn’t ever
satisfy, the kind of customer who wanted something you couldn’t
give them, who had no other currency, except currency that was
sinister, unwholesome, confusing, and probably dangerous.

Meanwhile, the things that the zombies tried to purchase were
plainly things that they had brought with them into the
store—things that had fallen, or been thrown into the Ausible
Chasm, like pieces of safety glass. Rocks from the bottom of
Ausible Chasm. Beetles. The zombies liked shiny things, broken
things, trash like empty soda bottles, handfuls of leaves, sticky
dirt, dirty sticks.

Eric thought maybe Batu had it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t supposed
to be a transaction. Maybe the zombies just wanted to give Eric
something. But what was he going to do with their leaves? Why him?
What was he supposed to give them in return?

Eventually, when it was clear Eric didn’t understand, the
zombies drifted off, away from the counter and around the aisles
again, or out the doors, making their way like raccoons, scuttling
back across the road, still clutching their leaves. Batu would put
away his notebook, go into the storage closet, and send off his
faxes.