The Bookshop That Smells Like Rain

There were two places in the city where Iyla could be found if she could be found at all, and the café was only the second of them. The first was three blocks east, down a street the maps had given up on, behind a door that announced itself with a hand-lettered sign reading BEHR'S BOOKS in a font that suggested its maker had been interrupted partway through and never come back to finish. Underneath, in smaller letters, someone — possibly the same someone, possibly not — had added: We do not have what you want. We have what you need. Come in.

Iyla had read that sign on a Tuesday in October when she was fourteen, snorted, and gone in to argue. She had not, strictly speaking, left since.

The shop smelled, always and inexplicably, of rain. Not damp — damp was what cheap shops smelled of, mildew dressed up in a coat — but actual rain, the specific green-grey smell of a storm that had just passed over warm pavement. Iyla had once spent a whole afternoon trying to find the source. She had checked the ceiling for leaks, the walls for vents, the back room for a humidifier, the cat (there was a cat, named Footnote, who was the color of an overcast sky and equally unbothered by weather) for some kind of meteorological gland. She had found nothing. When she finally asked Mr. Behr, he had looked at her over the top of his glasses with the expression of a man being asked why water was wet, and said, "Books remember weather, Iyla. They were trees once. Trees remember everything."

She had written this down later, in the margin of a notebook, and underlined it twice.

Mr. Behr himself was a small, untidy man in a cardigan that had been beige in the seventies and was now a color philosophers would have to invent a word for. He was perhaps seventy, perhaps four hundred; it depended on the light and on whether he had eaten lunch. He sorted books by a system that no one, including possibly himself, fully understood — Iyla had spotted Marcus Aurelius next to a book on beekeeping next to a Georgette Heyer next to a thin volume of Tang Dynasty poetry — and when she had finally worked up the courage to ask him why, he had said, mildly, "They were having a conversation. I didn't want to interrupt."

This was, Iyla had come to realize, the whole of Mr. Behr's philosophy. He paid attention to his books the way other people paid attention to their children, or their stocks, or their grievances. He listened to them. He moved them when they seemed restless. He left the difficult ones on the front table for weeks until the right person came in, and when that person came in he watched them, very quietly, from behind the register, with the satisfied air of a man who had just successfully introduced two friends.

The first time Iyla had bought a book from him — a clothbound Persuasion with someone else's pencil notes already in the margins, which had thrilled her in a way she didn't yet have language for — he had taken her money, looked at her for a long moment, and said, "You'll come back."

"How do you know?"

"Because you read the notes," he had said. "Most people skip them. They want a clean book. They think the previous reader is in the way." He had handed her the bag with both hands, the way someone hands you a sleeping animal. "You read the notes. So you'll come back."

She had. For seven years now, she had. She came in on Saturdays and on bad Wednesdays and on any day that had behaved badly toward her, and she would drift through the shelves while Mr. Behr did not greet her, because greeting was for customers and she was something else, and Footnote would consider her from the windowsill with the resigned tolerance of a colleague. Sometimes she bought. Often she didn't. Mr. Behr did not seem to care which; he had once told her that a bookshop where every visitor bought was not a bookshop but a vending machine, and that the difference mattered.

What he charged for, instead, was attention. Not in money — his prices were laughable, pencilled inside the front cover in his shaky hand, and he had been known to lower them on the spot if he suspected a buyer of being broke and serious. He charged in noticing. He noticed which shelf you lingered at. He noticed if you opened a book at the front or the middle. He noticed whether you read the first sentence or the last one first (Iyla read the last one first, always, and he had once told her this was the mark either of a coward or a craftsman, and that he had not yet decided which she was). And he expected, in return, that you would notice him back. Notice the shop. Notice the books. Notice the rain-smell, and the cat, and the careful, lunatic arrangement of the shelves, and the fact that none of it was an accident.

"Attention," he had said to her once, apropos of nothing, while ringing up a stranger who had bought four thrillers without looking at any of them, "is the rarest currency. Everyone thinks it's time, or money, or love. It is not. Time you can waste and still have. Money comes back. Love, God help us, is everywhere — people are tripping over it. But attention." He had handed the stranger the bag. The stranger had not noticed. "Attention is finite, and it is yours, and most people will spend their entire lives never once paying it on purpose."

Iyla had been seventeen then. She had walked home very slowly, the sentence sitting in her chest like a swallowed coin.

She thought of him now, in the café, with her pen still pressed to the margin and the word telepathy? drying on the page. She thought of how he would have looked at the moment the room thinned — how he would not have blinked, or dismissed it, or rubbed his eyes. He would have noticed. He would have noted, with the small interior nod of a man cataloguing weather, that something had happened, and he would have waited, patiently, to see if it happened again.

So Iyla, who had been trained — without quite realizing she was being trained — by a small untidy man in a beige cardigan, put down her pen. She picked up her tea, which was now properly cold. She looked at the book. She looked at the café. She looked, mostly, at the place behind her own eyes where the thinning had been, the way you might look at a doorway someone had just walked through.

And she waited, with attention, to see if it would happen again.