Thursday, October 7, 2010

Skins, Sticky and Seared - Part II

Read Part I first

Kabir walked into the book-store –he liked reading book titles in a book store whenever he had time to kill. There weren’t many people in the Almost Corner Book Store that late in the afternoon, so named because a grocery store separated it from the block’s corner. Piles of daily newspapers lay depleted to varying degrees by the entrance. The New York Times’ pile had suffered particularly in that Sunday’s weekly attack of the brunch-people. He ignored the piles of the morning papers, walking straight over to the Red Rack.

Books in the Almost Corner Book Store were primarily organized by spine colour and secondarily by height. If you didn’t know what the book looked like, you could end up spending a long time in the store. The owner, a silver-haired gentleman named Oscar Vasquez, was a retired dermatologist who’d grown up in an impoverished family in a hardscrabble town in small-town Mexico and who had taught himself to read English. Fascinated by English literature, he’d devoured every book of English fiction he could find starting from the Canterbury Tales to The Devil Wears Prada. Other people’s rather narrow-ranging reading habits constantly disappointed him. The legions of fellow book lovers he had met, who’d never read Walter Scott, or worse, hadn’t even heard of him, for example, shocked him. And so when he gave up his lucrative practice curing psoriasis by telling people to go vacation in Madeira, he decided to open a book-store that would help people expand their reading horizons. He told anyone who complained about the difficulty of finding books in his store – that the arrangement forced people to stumble across books and authors they would otherwise never even consider reading – and that if they couldn’t find the book they wanted, perhaps the universe was telling them to take a chance on a new writer, say for example Sir Walter Scott. Senor Vasquez knew every book’s colour and if you had a particular book in mind, usually the fastest way to find it in the store was to first ask him what colour it was. Several people left exasperated, never to come back. Others stayed, intrigued. And over time the Almost Corner Bookstore had acquired a cachet for the quirkiness of its experience in a city that treasured quirkiness – whether in its streets or its people.

Kabir liked the Almost Corner Bookstore –visiting it was a bit of a weekend routine for him. The rather unique method of organization actually helped his title-browsing hobby since it broke the monotony that could set in, in a traditionally organized book-store, if you ran into a prolific writer who liked following a theme in naming her books. Possession, he read. The Lost Language of Cranes. The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. Unicorns in the Heather. Perfect Music Match. Wait, he thought. That wasn’t his inner reading voice. He looked down at the iSkin wrapped around his wrist. Not for the first time, its ability to mimic his voice had interrupted his thoughts seamlessly. He called it his iVoice in jest – I have MyVoice but the one that matters most is my iVoice, he’d joked to a friend once. He tweaked the device into rectangularity. The graphic on the screen showed two trumpets joining together to form a heart shape. The message “94% music match” was emblazoned below the graphic. The device had detected someone in his vicinity with tastes in music very closely aligned with his. It didn’t mean they had the same songs just that they liked similar sounding stuff. Browsing book titles was a calming hobby for him. Discovering new music that he liked, was a joy. A thrill, even. He looked around. The other customer had shared some of her playlists publicly – just like he had. Kabir’s pulse quickened as he flicked through her song collection. Several of his favourites were there but there were many more that he’d never heard. He looked around to see if he could spot the owner, who had to be within a few dozen meters because he’d set a distance limit on his playlist-sharing. There was no sense finding a treasure trove only to not know who had it and being able to talk to them. He turned around and caught his breath. There was only one other customer in the store. And she was beautiful. She was a vision. And she had Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun on her iSkin. That was such a guy song. (In fact, hardly any of his mates in the City knew the band let alone the song.) She was also looking at him – alerted, doubtless, by her iVoice about a kindred spirit being in proximity.

Not remembering to be his normal shy self, he walked over to her – blushing a little as she raised a delicious eyebrow at his approach. He noticed that her transluscent blue ear-studs were actually the Dot ear-phones from her Skin. She’d stuck them to her earlobes. He’d never seen anyone do that before. His were the regular silver ones and he wore them stuck inside each ear from where he rarely ever had to take them out. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous.” he said as he came to a stop before her. “But, ummm, I just wanted to tell you, that you have a beautiful…”, at this he found himself unable to prevent his eyes from scanning her from toe to top, where he saw that both her eyebrows were now arched. He stumbled over his words, “uh…a beautiful song collection.”

She smiled, amused.

Defying maybe eight different laws of physics, the sun suddenly shone through the store’s ceiling.

Read Skins, Sticky and Seared Part III


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is the only way to organize books - your techno porn is great reading - you're a very good writer keep it up - when's part III