Free Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharpe Page A

huge unruly pile of every single book in that room except the one that Skip was staring down into. Then I put the books back on the shelves in no particular order, as if I had not already left my smudge of randomness on Skip Hartman’s life.
    “Ooh, this is fantastic,” Tommy cooed in the entrance foyer. He was looking at a tall, ancient, rectangular mirror with a mahogany frame, to which a pair of coat hooks was attached on either side of the reflecting glass. His pale red silk shirt, his lavender cravat, and his delicate, smoothed-out-baklava skin looked patrician in the tarnished surface of the old mirror. Myra was still wearing the hard rough white-plaster shell that the doctor had put on her forearm the day I felled her on her driveway. She was dressed in a brown cloth in which fragile produce might have been wrapped to be shipped overseas.
    Tommy gazed at that mild narcotic, the image of his own face in the mirror. “Oh,” he said. Myra looked at an area of the white wall in the foyer that had no mirror or window or painting.
    “Would you like to see the rest of the house?” Skip asked.
    It was the end of August and the ostensible purpose of this, the first visit from my aunt and uncle, was to discuss plans for my education, but nobody seemed to want to do that, except possibly Myra, but then one has to invent virtually all intentions and attributes of Myra.
    Tommy checked his collar and cuffs in the mirror. He was not quite ready to leave the mirror. He stepped away from the mirror and rushed back to it. “I forgot the cape!”
    “As lovely as your cape is, Thomas,” Skip said, “it seems tome more of a winter cape. Perhaps an autumn cape is in order.”
    Now Tommy could safely turn away from the mirror, having found another place that reflected him—Skip Hartman—and the tour of the house could begin.
    “I want books,” he said, when we reached the book room. Skip had not returned the books to their previous arrangement but, by using a mnemonic technique she had learned from the Roman orator Cicero, she had asserted the ordering principle of her own mind on the chaos of book placement.
    “Perhaps I could lend you some,” she said. “What sort of books would you like to read?”
    “I don’t necessarily want to read them, at least not right away. I just want to have them around. I don’t want you to lend them to me. I’ll go out and get some. I’ll build a nice bookshelf in maybe Paul and Mary’s room so it can be the room where the books are, the way you have this room. Do you know where I could get some books like this?”
    “In a bookstore, I imagine.”
    “I don’t want the kind of books they have in bookstores. I want this kind. Old books that are about things most people don’t know about. I want to read but I’m easily distracted. I want to know things. I think I could work up to reading books by first owning them.”
    Skip Hartman stood tall in the center of the book room while the rest of us stood around her. She cocked her head to the side to consider Tommy, which gave me the opportunity to consider her long, curved, graceful neck. “I own many more books,” she said. “Some of them I keep in the basement. Some are quite rare.”
    “
Rare
—the word alone gives me a feeling,” he said.
    “Rare and juicy,” I said.
    “Succulent,” Skip added.
    “
Succulent
doesn’t give me the feeling,” Tommy said.
    “Why don’t I box up a couple gross of books and have them carted up to you,” Skip said, with the faintest Brooklyn inflection waxing and waning in the course of that sentence.
    Tommy was too intoxicated with the aura of the rare books in the room to notice the irreverence. In the chair on which Skip had wept for a month, Myra sat looking at the floor, while the fingertips of her left hand grazed the cast on her right arm.
    “Further, let me simply hand over some cash to you,” Skip said. “Here.” She removed several hundred-dollar bills from her wallet and handed