Chapter 2: Firing Offenses
Six weeks in, you start a list. You keep it taped inside the register drawer, where he can't reach it without learning to open the register, which means it's the safest document in Brooklyn.
THINGS LOKI HAS DONE THAT WOULD GET ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING FIRED:
1. Told a customer that the ending of Gone Girl is that the dog did it. (There is no dog.)
2. Told a different customer the ending of Gone Girl. (The real one. While she was still on page forty.)
3. Answered the shop phone, every single time, with "You have reached the court of Loki Odinson, state your petition."
4. Replaced every bookmark in the free-bookmark basket with tiny handwritten cards that say things like YOU WILL NOT FINISH THIS and HAVE YOU CONSIDERED A BETTER BOOK.
5. Sold a first-edition Agatha Christie from the locked case to a man in a cardigan for four dollars, because "he looked like he'd read it properly."
6. Refused, absolutely refused, to sell a copy of Twilight to a woman, on the grounds that "she has a good face and deserves better." The woman cried. She also came back the next day, bought Jane Eyre on his recommendation, and has been back every Saturday since with a full report.
7. Learned the register. Pretended he hadn't. Was caught using it at 8:15 on a Tuesday when he thought you were upstairs. When confronted, said, "This conversation never happened," with such conviction that for a full second you believed him.
8. Every single day, at exactly 3 p.m., wordlessly placed a cup of tea on the counter by your elbow. Earl Grey, a little milk, no sugar. You have never told him how you take your tea.
Number eight isn't a firing offense. You know that. You keep meaning to cross it off.
The Thursday book club has been meeting in the back of the shop for eleven years, longer than you've owned the place. Your aunt started it. It has six members, a combined age of roughly five hundred, and the collective energy of a pack of wolves that have discovered gossip.
You'd been dreading introducing them to Loki. You'd imagined him reading their copy of The Remains of the Day and announcing that Stevens should have overthrown his employer and claimed the house. You'd imagined Mrs. Gutierrez, who is eighty-three and fought in two labor strikes, hitting him with her cane.
Instead, by the third Thursday, they've adopted him.
"He has such posture," Mrs. Gutierrez tells you, while Loki is in the back fetching a second plate of rugelach for Mr. Feld. "You don't see posture like that anymore. My Hector had posture like that."
"He tried to take over the world, Mrs. Gutierrez."
"So did Hector. He wanted to run for city council." She pats your hand. "Ambition is very attractive in a man, mija."
The real problem is that he's good at it. That's what nobody warned you about. He sits in the cracked armchair in the back with his long legs crossed and his tea balanced on his knee, and when the conversation turns to whether Stevens ever loved Miss Kenton, he goes quiet in a way you've learned means he's actually thinking. Then he opens the book to a passage near the end, the one on the pier at Weymouth, and reads it aloud.
You've read that passage maybe fifteen times. You wrote an undergrad paper on it. You've never heard it like this.
His voice drops. It goes soft and plain and almost English, the accent smoothing out into something that could pass for a butler's, and he reads Stevens admitting, after a whole life of not admitting anything, that his heart is breaking. He doesn't perform it. He just reads it, steady and quiet, like he's reading something he wrote himself.
When he finishes, nobody says anything for a while. Mr. Feld, who is ninety-one, takes off his glasses and wipes them on his sweater. Mrs. Gutierrez reaches over and pats Loki's knee.
"You've been in love," she says. It isn't a question.
Loki looks at her. For a second something opens in his face, and then it shuts like a door.
"I'm a god, madam," he says lightly. "We don't fall in love. We descend upon it."
They all laugh. He laughs with them. But you're watching from the doorway with a box of new paperbacks in your arms, and you see the moment his eyes flick to you and then away, too fast.
Business is up.
You'd like to say this is because of your keen entrepreneurial instincts. It's because of a nineteen-year-old with forty thousand followers who came in for a copy of The Secret History, got told by Loki that she was "the sort of person who'd have been in the murder club and enjoyed it," and posted a blurry video of him shelving books with the caption: tall disdainful bookseller in park slope told me i'd be a good murderer and i've never felt so seen.
It got four million views. Now you have a line on Saturdays. Most of them buy something. Most of them buy whatever he hands them, and he hands every single one of them something strange and specific and perfect, and they leave clutching books they'd never have picked up in their lives and come back the next week wanting more.
"You're a natural," you tell him, counting the till after close on a Saturday that cleared more than you used to make in a fortnight.
He's lying on the floor of the poetry section, staring at the ceiling, because he says the floor in that corner is the only place in the building where the radiator can't be heard. "I'm not a natural. I've spent a thousand years reading people for weakness. It turns out the same skill sells paperbacks."
"That's very bleak."
"I'm a very bleak person." He folds his hands on his chest. "Your Mrs. Gutierrez has a granddaughter in Queens who works in a hedge fund and calls twice a year. She wants to be told she was a good mother. Mr. Feld's wife died in the spring and he hasn't changed her side of the bed. That girl with the camera is lonely enough that she films strangers so she can pretend they're friends. I find the wound and I put a book on it." He shrugs against the floorboards. "It's what I've always done. Find the wound. Before, I'd put a knife in it."
You put down the roll of twenties you were counting.
"That's not bleak," you say. "That's kind."
"Don't."
"It is, though. That's the definition of kindness. Seeing what someone needs and giving it to them."
"It's the definition of manipulation," he says, "with better customer reviews."
The lights go out.
Not just yours. The whole block, all at once, the streetlights and the bodega across the street and the laundromat's glowing sign. The radiator gives one last confused knock and goes silent. In the sudden total dark you hear him sit up.
"Did you do that?" you ask.
"I wish I had." His voice sounds strange. "I can't do anything."
You find the emergency candles under the register by feel, and the matches, and you light three of them and put them on the floor of the poetry section, because he's still sitting there and it seems rude to make him move. In the small gold light he looks different. Younger isn't the word, because he's a thousand years old. Less armored. His sleeves are rolled up and his hair's falling in his eyes and he's watching the candle flames like they're telling him something.
You sit down across from him on the floor. Your knees almost touch.
"What do you miss?" you ask. "From home."
You expect a joke. You expect something cutting.
He's quiet for so long you think he won't answer. Then he says, "My mother's garden."
You wait.
"In the evenings, the light comes through the trees at an angle. Everything goes gold and green. She used to walk there after supper, and I'd walk with her, and she'd teach me the names of the plants in every realm, which ones heal and which ones kill and which ones do both depending on the dose. Thor never came. He found it boring. So it was only ever the two of us." His voice is very even. "She taught me magic there. My first spell. I made a frog out of a leaf, and it hopped twice and turned back into a leaf, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down."
You don't say anything. You don't want to break it.
"I haven't seen her since before New York," he says. "She won't come. Or she isn't permitted. I don't know which, and I don't know which would be worse." He finally looks up from the candle. "I'd give the throne of every realm to walk in that garden one more evening. That's what I miss."
The candlelight is shaking. It takes you a moment to realize it's because your hand is shaking, where it's resting on the floor between you. He looks down at it. And slowly, very slowly, like he isn't sure if he's allowed, he puts his own hand over it.
His fingers are cold. They're always cold; you've noticed it handing him books, an odd chill at the fingertips that never warms up. You turn your hand over under his, palm up, and lace your fingers through his, and he goes completely still.
"For what it's worth," you say, "I think she'd be proud of you. The book club thing. The tea at three o'clock. She'd be proud."
"You don't know her."
"I know you. A little."
He looks at your joined hands for a long time. Then he says, very quietly, "You shouldn't."
"Shouldn't what?"
"Know me. Even a little. It never ends well for the people who do."
The lights come back on with a buzz and a clank, all at once, the radiator banging awake like a startled drunk. You both flinch. He takes his hand back. When you look at him again his face is smooth and amused and closed, the way it was on the first day.
"Saved by the electrical grid," he says. "How very Midgardian."
The letter is waiting on the mat when you come down the next morning. Heavy envelope, cream stock, a return address you recognize from your lease. You open it standing up, and you read it twice, and then you sit down on the bottom stair because your legs have stopped working.
The building's been sold. The new owner is a development company you've never heard of. Every commercial tenant has thirty days to vacate before demolition begins. The rest of the paragraph is legal words, but you don't need them. You understand the first line.
You don't hear him come in. You never do. You just look up and he's standing over you in his black coat, holding two cups of coffee from the place on 9th, looking down at the letter in your hands.
He takes it from you. He reads it once, fast. Something changes in his face, something old and cold and very, very interested.
"Ah," says the god of mischief, softly. "Now this I can work with."