Reading Manko

Entering a bookstore, I discovered all the books had been replaced with authors. Angered, I nearly left but decided to stay and have a look around. The store no longer smelled like books. It smelled aged—liquor and old cigarette smoke hanging around the authors. For the greater part, the authors—mostly white, mostly male, mostly older—wandered aimlessly throughout the store. Some of them sat in the cafe, sipping overpriced coffee and engaging in inane babble. Some of them played board games. Some played with stuffed animals and other things the bookstore still sold. Others spoke on their cell phones. I wondered if authors were especially good at text messaging. Or did they find it too confining? These people who had let their brains dribble out over countless pages.

Disheartened, I found myself in the fiction section. It was virtually empty except for one old man sitting in a comfortable-looking armchair. His faded blue eyes, below his wisp of thin white hair, stared vacantly into the distance. His suit was mostly brown. He twisted his gnarled hands in his lap. I noticed his withered-looking legs and it finally hit me who he was. This was Gregory Manko, an obscure writer from Otlatl, a small European island. I had read a book of his short stories a number of years ago. Only a handful of his books were still in print.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you Gregory Manko?”

“Yes.”

He looked resigned.

“Are you for sale?” I asked, not really intending to. Sometimes I just blurted things out.

“Yes,” he said with the same resignation.

I wondered how much an author like this would cost.

No matter. I had a credit card.

I looked around to see if he had a wheelchair nearby. I hadn’t known he was crippled. Had he been crippled when he wrote those beautiful stories? I’d have to go back and read them.

“I don’t have one,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“A wheelchair. That’s what you were looking for, wasn’t it? I don’t have one. You’ll have to carry me.”

“Oh. Sure.”

I bent down over the chair. I didn’t want to hurt him. He seemed so old and fragile.

“How do you …?”

“Probably easier if you just get down on your knees and I’ll scoot off onto your back.”

“Yeah. Okay. Right.” I figured he’d probably done this kind of thing before.

Turning so my back was to the chair, I crouched down in front of him. Grunting, he maneuvered himself onto my back, grabbing my shoulders with his gnarled hands. Getting a firm grip on the underside of each of his knees, I stood up.

“Easy,” he said.

“Sure. Right.”

I walked slowly to the front registers. A cute, intellectual-looking girl leaned against the counter, leafing through a magazine. Once I reached the counter, Manko on my back, the girl huffed and dropped her magazine on the floor. She had a nametag but whatever name had been printed on it was crossed out.

“Hi,” I said.

She gave me a look as if to say, “Please, spare me,” and held up the laser scanning gun. She opened Manko’s blazer and scanned a barcode on the inside of it. Turning her attention to the register, a look of surprise crossed her face and she said, “That’s way too much. Someone’s wandered out of the bargain section again.”

I didn’t know how Manko could wander anywhere but I wasn’t going to argue if it meant getting him on the cheap. Besides, I figured maybe he’d gotten one of the other authors to carry him there. She gave me the new total, which was nearly half the original price. I handed over my card, signed the receipt, and left the store to load Gregory Manko into my car, not really knowing what I was going to do with him once we got back to my apartment.

Things didn’t go very well. I was exhausted after the first day. I had to carry him to the restroom each time he had to go, which was a lot. Mainly because he ate and drank all the time. I didn’t see how anyone so thin and old could eat so much but it was like he was trying to pack it all in before he died which, from the look of him, could be any day. I began thinking about how much a funeral would cost and whether or not I would have to pay for it. Already, I had resolved to purchase a wheelchair—soon I would have to go back to work and I couldn’t just tell him to hold it all day. He was probably incontinent, anyway.

By the end of the first week, I didn’t know why I had purchased him in the first place. Honestly, what did I expect to do with an author? I didn’t even read very much. Maybe I thought he would be the stuff of drama—more thrilling than television. But thrilling he most certainly was not. He didn’t talk in anything other than monosyllabic answers to my questions so there wasn’t even any type of intellectual discussion to engage in.

Careful that I was out of Manko’s earshot, I called the bookstore.

“Do you take returns?” I asked.

“Depends,” a girl said in a bored voice. I wondered if it was the same girl who had sold Manko to me. I listened for the fluttering sound of magazine pages flipping but I couldn’t hear anything over the din in the background. They’d either gotten more authors in or they had livened up a bit since I was there.

“Depends on what?”

“Lots of things, really.”

I gritted my teeth. I most certainly would not be purchasing any more authors from this bookstore.

“Would you like to know what it is I want to return?” I helped her along.

“Not really but I imagine you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“Last week, I purchased Gregory Manko from your store and I’d like to return him.”

“Why?” she asked. “Already have one?” At this, she chuckled.

“No, I … I don’t already have one. I just didn’t … I guess I just didn’t realize how expensive it would be. And physically taxing.”

“It’s not his fault he has a handicap.”

“I know. I’m not blaming anyone for anything. I just don’t think I’ll be able to take care of him.”

“As I recall, he was a sale item.”

“Yes.”

“We don’t take returns on sale items.”

“What am I supposed to do with him?”

“That’s your problem.”

“But surely this isn’t the first time you’ve had this problem.”

“I don’t have the problem. I guess you could try donating him to the thrift store. Or selling him to the used bookstore if you need the cash although, quite frankly, I don’t think they’ll pay you very much for him.”

“Thanks. Maybe I’ll try that.” She had already hung up. I pressed the OFF button and walked into the living room. Manko sat on the couch, his hands resting on those withered legs, watching television. He hadn’t picked up a book since coming here. I thought that was odd. Shouldn’t an author read a lot? It seemed like I had read somewhere that an author was supposed to read twice as much as he wrote. For that matter, he hadn’t requested a single piece of paper or pen or typewriter or laptop or anything. Didn’t he write anymore? Sitting down next to him, I noticed his bottom lip was trembling. He blinked back tears.

“Say, you want to go for a drive?” I asked.

“Getting rid of me?” he said.

“This just isn’t what I expected,” I said.

“Not what you wanted, you mean?” He wiped a tear away with a knobby knuckle.

“Yeah. I guess you could say that.”

“You people don’t know what you want.”

“You people?”

“Readers.”

“I liked that book of short stories you did.”

“And you wanted something like that?”

“I guess.”

“And you got real life instead.”

A heavy silence hung between us. He sniffled. A phlegmy, wet-sounding thing. Then he spoke again. “People say they want to read about life but that’s not what they want at all. They want a version of life. Don’t you realize, someone else’s version of someone else’s life is still fiction? It’s still a story. But it has no imagination. That’s what you people have done. You’ve murdered imagination.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket, blew his hairy nose and farted, most probably involuntarily.

“This is life,” he said. “And it’s not what you want at all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else I could say.

“You want to help?”

“I can’t let you stay here. I would love to but I can’t afford it and I’ll have to go back to work soon.”

“I don’t mean that,” Manko said. “There is no help for me here. Look …” He reached into the inside pocket of his blazer and pulled out a wad of bright, exotic-looking foreign money. “Take me somewhere and buy me a wheelchair. I’d prefer one of the motorized kinds, if I have enough here, and then take me to the center of the city and drop me off. Just, please, don’t take me back to the bookstore. That’s where my dreams died.”

I folded his lumpy hand back over the money.

“Hang onto that,” I said. “You might need it. I’ll get the chair. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

He wiped away another tear and tried to force a smile.

The next morning I took him into the city square, full of pigeons and benches and people and statues and lights and noise. I settled him into his wheelchair and watched him burr into the thick of things. Selfishly, as I watched him, I wondered if he would find another story out there or if the imagination, once killed, remains dead for life.