A Ghost Called Steinbeck

There were plenty of ghosts in the bookstore. The long expanses of dusty shelves brimming with novels and memoirs, poetry and essays, plays and histories, tended to attract ghosts like a magnet dropped into a bin of pins. The ghosts paged through large tombs off in the corner, they went in and out of the bathroom, checking to make sure they still had their purses, they silently ordered coffees again and again at the café, nodding their heads after their request and appearing once more at the end of the line. They shuffled down the aisles, their blue eyes scanning the spines as if each title were a sentence in one large story.            As the staff of a bookstore, we’d gotten used to the ghosts. We had all worked in one bookstore or another previously, so we knew what to expect on the first day. There were just more ghosts in bookstores than anywhere else. Take, for instance, the department store cattycorner to us with its huge sections of clothing and perfumes: Two ghosts.  The sporting goods store with the climbing wall and all the weight equipment? Six ghosts. The diner where they gave us free dessert if they knew we worked at the bookstore? Two waiter ghosts and three quiet, blue customers.  Our store had twenty-six individual hauntings.             As we said before, there was the bathroom lady, the coffee orderer, and a slew of aisle walkers. But there was also the little boy who played at the Thomas the Train table, the repeater who, over and over again, approached the customer service desk and asked if our store used to have a basement, and the former staff member who still wore his nametag and searched the history section, unable to find the World War II book for a customer who had left a decade earlier.            A ghostly UPS delivery man appeared just outside the receiving room door every day with a cart of books, a young kid handed out flyers protesting the Vietnam War which passed endlessly through people’s hands, and an old ghost with watery eyes browsed through a collectibles almanac, occasionally holding a coin up to the pages of the book to compare their likeness. The ghosts were fascinating, perhaps, if it was your first time in the store, but they were old hat to us. They blurred into the background as we helped the live customers and straightened the crooked books back into their alphabetical places. They became nothing more than another fixture, another poster on the wall of a famous book cover. All of them faded away with time, except, of course, for Steinbeck.            To be clear, this was not the ghost of John Steinbeck. Rather, it was an old grandfatherly man, broad of shoulder, with slicked hair and thick, blocky glasses. He was fat, yes, with big, pudgy fingers reminiscent of Babe Ruth or Santa Clause. He used these pudgy fingers to page through book after book of the cannon of John Steinbeck.            He was the only ghost in the store that could vocalize and if steel could be transformed into a sound, then that is what his voice sounded like. He read The Winter of our Discontent in its entirety and then set it down next to his chair, lifting Travels with Charlie from the stack next to him, opening to page one and booming out, “When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.” Steinbeck sat ten feet outside the café, near the Crafts and Woodworking section and, naturally, we lingered there as we straightened the knitting and whittling books, letting the wise Americana wash over us as we worked.            This peaceful era of the bookstore did not go on forever. As with all occupations, the livelihoods of booksellers was eventually compromised by the false idol called Progress. It was decided by the world at large that books should be digitized rather than printed and kept on flat little panels rather than in large, dust-allergy-causing stores. And, fair is fair, we supposed, if the customer wanted to keep all of their books in a little computer rather than in their homes, who were we to complain?            It was announced, after a few dismal holiday seasons, that the old bookstore would finally be closing up shop. We started looking for work in a frenzy of worry, and some of us found things and some of us didn’t. There were smaller specialty bookstores still and there would always be libraries. Some of us had experience editing or copywriting and we went back to those jobs. A few of us took the layoff and traveled and a few of us fell into a depression and a loneliness that was damn hard to shake.            The ghosts didn’t know the difference. They still walked in and out of the bathroom, ordered their coffees, asked about that basement level that we never had. They kept browsing the sections even after we removed all the books to return to the publishers, like beams of light flying back to their maker at the end of the world.            We like to think Steinbeck knew what was going on. Either he knew, or it was a cosmic coincidence to be chuckled about for years to come. As we shut off the lights for the last time, we heard Steinbeck, reading with his steely voice towards the end of East of Eden boom out—louder than normal, mind you—“A man without words is a man without thought!” We nodded in appreciation, coughed lightly into our hands because something had stuck in our throats, and locked the double doors.