Free Five Night Stand: A Novel by Richard J. Alley Page B

black man having a pattern shaved into the hair over his ear. A café spills its mismatched tables and chairs out onto the sidewalk, where several patrons huddle together against the cold and blow steam from oversized mugs. She closes her eyes for just a moment as she had in the subway and listens. The electricity in the air is thrumming and she can feel it against her and all around her. The city is alive and will be this way long after she is gone.
    The bookshop, tucked in between a Laundromat and a store devoted to chess sets, is deep and narrow with a high ceiling and shelves that strain to reach it. Before she even realizes she’s stepped in out of the brisk air, she is standing in fiction and inhaling the musty scent of old leather and yellowing pages. She thinks the bookstore might be a more beneficial environment than the hospitals she’s spent so much time in.
    She walks around the store beneath towering shelves and peruses titles. She isn’t looking for anything, but likes the familiarity she finds in any bookshop anywhere.
    The man behind this counter in New York is old and white haired and reminds Agnes of the piano tuner her father used to hire to tend to the family’s antique upright. The bookseller had greeted her when she entered with little more than a nod and a look in his eyes—over his small, rimless glasses—that said, “Let me know if I can help you with anything.” Other customers come in, the bell over the door announcing each arrival, and the old man calls many by name. Some pick up prepackaged parcels at the counter while others browse as Agnes is doing. Agnes has always heard terrible stories about brusque and rude northerners, but she is finding just the opposite to be true.
    She wanders through a section on architecture and picks her way among oversized coffee-table books with beautiful photos of buildings found around the world. Her hand lands on a small volume with a brown paper jacket and line drawing of the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a book of architectural drawings, elevations, and blueprints of well-known structures in New York. Agnes thinks of her mother, an artist, though not in any professional sense—she simply loves to create. From as early as Agnes can recall, she has kept a series of sketchbooks close at hand, filling them with landscapes and people, capturing a moment on paper the way some might with a camera. When she fills one, she puts it on a shelf with the others, a small library of her memories as seen through her eyes and rendered in her own hand. She always has a pencil or two with her, stuck in the crease of a novel, in a Moleskine notebook, or in the knot of hair rolled onto the back of her head.
    When Agnes was a little girl, she loved to watch her mother lose herself in her drawings. Back then, they just seemed to capture minor details of her life, mundane subjects such as the family cat lounging on the arm of a couch, the eaves of their house covered in snow, or Agnes sitting and watching television. The simplicity and narrow focus of the individual drawings, though, take on a grander scope when she thinks of entire books filled with those views, and whole shelves filled with books. Drawings of family reunions or her father’s back as he sat at his piano were the stuff of family albums, everyday moments of life, though without the glare of a lens or the harshness of a camera’s flash. Each sketch became a foundation of a book, of a year, of a decade.
    Agnes looks again through the architectural drawings, marveling at the simplicity of buildings and bridges and at how easy it must be to maintain and repair them with such detailed instructions. She wishes there were such a simple book of blueprints for neurons and synapses, for thousands of miles of nerves and concentrations of spinal fluid that might point out just where a defect might appear. An image as plain as an air shaft or stair so that Dr. Mundra could unfasten bolts and tweeze out the inferior parts to be