Fond Memories

Monday 10-19-2020 , 2pm

Dear diary…?

Is that how this is meant to start off? I’ve never kept a diary before—it has simply not occurred to me that putting my musings down on paper would do anyone any sort of good, least of all me. But oddly enough, from the moment I saw you I felt strangely compelled to write in you. I figured at a minimum it couldn’t do any harm.

Tuesday 10-20-2020 , 11am

This morning I’ve been busy staring at the walls in a despondent malaise while packing up the shop. I suppose I should mention I own a shop. Or rather, for the time being I own a shop (I’ll get to that in a moment). It’s a rare books shop originally owned by my grandfather, who left it to me in his will when he died six years ago. Being that I’m not much of a writer myself, there is perhaps some small irony in the fact that I inherited a bookshop. It’s not that I don’t love books, I merely prefer to leave the writing of them to other people. The shop is a cozy place with lots of what some people generously call ‘character’ but what is actually my habit of never dusting or fixing anything (a habit shared by my grandfather before me). Above the shop is a small apartment where I live. The apartment also has lots of ‘character.’

Anyhow, I’ve been slowly boxing things up this past week because the bank is getting ready to kick me out. When I said I inherited the shop from my grandfather, perhaps what I should have said is I inherited the privilege of paying off my grandfather’s debt. It turns out he had developed quite a nasty gambling habit towards the end of his life, and shortly before his death he took out a second mortgage in order to help pay off his rather substantial losses. I only found out about the whole mess when I took over the business after he died.

Now, the rare books trade is obviously no cash cow, but between regular customers, various passersby stopping in on their various whims, and the occasional online sale, I’d been doing alright for myself and had put a good-sized dent in what was owed to the bank. But then 2020 started. I know you’re just a diary, so maybe you haven’t heard, but the past ten months have been somewhat of a disaster for us humans. To be fair, human goings-on are usually in some state of shambles, but 2020 has really turned the proverbial dial all the way to eleven on the shitstorm spectrum. What with people being out of work, or being afraid of becoming out of work, or spending all their money on toilet paper and baking supplies, rare book sales have been, to put it mildly, a tad sluggish. This is all to say I got behind on the mortgage payments, and then more behind, and then one Jared Anderson from the bank called to notify me that I was, in fact, $20,000 behind. Jared informed me that were I not able to pay the back mortgage within the next six weeks, the bank would take the shop from me (and of course the upstairs apartment as well). As it’s only been a week since my lovely tête-à-tête with Jared, I theoretically still have five more weeks to conjure up twenty large. However, seeing as there’s not even a pig’s chance in a bacon factory of that happening, I’ve resigned myself to the inevitable and started packing. And by packing I mean wrapping the occasional book between extended bouts of feeling sorry for myself while staring off into the middle distance.

The sole silver lining of this dreadful ordeal has been finding you, dear diary, wedged between a dusty misogynistic tome entitled ‘Everday Etiquette for the Fairer Sex’ and a thick 1950s cookbook filled entirely with meatloaf recipes. I’m not sure where you came from, or how long you’ve been in the shop, but you are obviously one of my grandfather’s acquisitions, although why on earth he had any interest in you I couldn’t say. I don’t mean any offense by this, it’s just that a small black notebook with entirely blank pages is a rather confounding choice for inclusion in a rare books shop. I figured you must be some misplaced, long-forgotten journal, and I might as well put you to use.

Wednesday 10-21-2020 , 9am

Boy do I have some news. Yesterday I went to the bank to have a chat with our dear friend Jared. I don’t have much of a head for finances, and I thought it would be better if I discussed the whole foreclosure business with him face-to-face, so as to avoid possibly getting myself in more hot water than I’m in already. At the bank I asked for Jared Anderson, to which the teller responded, “I’m sorry but we don’t have a Jared Anderson working here.” I was slightly perplexed by this response, and asked if she was absolutely sure, as Jared had been the only person I had spoken with thus far regarding my mortgage issues. The teller viewed me with a bewildered expression and said she would be happy to have a look at the account herself. After a minute or two of intermittent typing and peering into the computer monitor, she turned and in a halting monotone reported that there wasn’t any record on the account of phone communication with a Jared Anderson, or for that matter, with anyone else at the bank since mid-2019. By this point I was on the verge of disbelief, and stammered something about that being impossible because of the impending foreclosure. The teller narrowed her eyes at me, quite probably appraising my sanity, and replied, “Ma’am it says here you paid the final $20,000 on the property just yesterday.” After several long moments spent standing slack-jawed, I mumbled something about my head not being screwed on quite right lately, thanked her, and left.

Don’t get me wrong, this is all tremendously good news. It’s just I can’t figure out how I went from being $20K behind in rent to owing nothing, seemingly overnight. It feels like a windfall, almost like I’ve come into money somehow. I suppose in a way I have.

Thursday 10-22-2020 , 10am

I woke up this morning with the thought to do a bit of sleuthing into this Jared mystery. My primary theory is that perhaps my creeping anxiety has manifested in a hallucinatory way and I simply dreamt up my mortgage problems and the uncomfortable conversation with the enigmatic bank employee calling himself Jared. I started off my investigations with a quick google search…and astonishingly, incredibly, there were zero results. I don’t know what to make of it. It seems like Jared Anderson ought to be a rather common name, and at a minimum there should be at least one measly Jared Anderson in the world with an internet presence. I tried the search many times over on several different browsers, but the outcome was the same each time—Jared Anderson does not exist. Additionally, when I went to check the stack of unopened bank notices I had for some time been accumulating (and ignoring)…they were nowhere to be found. I tore apart my office looking for them, but they had vanished.

Friday 10-23-2020 , 8:30am

All this nonsense with Jared and the bank is beginning to make me worry I’ve lost entirely all of my marbles. Thirty-eight seems a bit young for that, so hopefully there’s still one or two rattling around in there. But for the sake of maintaining some crumb of mental health, I’ve decided to put the whole ordeal out of my head for the time being and run a few errands. Besides, Friday is the day I usually deliver groceries to my neighbor. The unfortunate soul moved from overseas at the beginning of the year and had barely settled in when the pandemic struck and all hell broke loose. She has an autoimmune disorder, which makes things pretty risky for her at present, and as a result she hardly leaves her house. So in the interest of flattening the curve and being neighborly I’d offered to drop off food and supplies every Friday. Though if I’m being completely honest, I don’t at all mind having an excuse to be in her company, even if only briefly, and I rather unsuavely leapt at the chance to volunteer my grocery-proffering services. She is, coincidentally, a writer, and jokes that while I am a rare book seller, she is a rare book author because the rarest book of all is the one that doesn’t exist (she hasn’t yet had any luck getting published). Clearly she has quite the modest and self-deprecating wit, but—and I say this with as much impartiality as I can muster—she does write quite brilliantly. Why no publisher has snapped her up is beyond me. Plus, she has the sort of name that clearly begs to be on a book cover: Madeleine Wolff.

Friday 10-23-2020 , 1pm

I’ve just returned from my attempted grocery delivery. I knocked on Madeleine’s door only to have the mail slot pop open and a pair of bulging gray eyes glare up at me suspiciously. Madeleine does not have bulging gray eyes. ‘What do you want?’ demanded a voice I presumed belonged to the owner of the eyes. I explained I had come by to drop off groceries for Madeleine and expressed surprise that she had a visitor, given the pandemic. At that the door banged open and a humorless man with the complexion of a stewed tomato stood in the entryway, arms crossed tightly over an unevenly yellowed undershirt. “Look,” he growled, “I know we’ve had our differences, but knocking on my door pretending I’m a visitor in my own home is just, just…” and he trailed off into a series of peeved exhalations. “I’m sorry,” I stammered, “you own this house? How long have you lived here?” “Young lady,” he hissed, “I have lived here since before you were born.”

I rushed back home feeling almost sick, a yawning dread worming its way into my consciousness. I thrust open the laptop and typed Madeleine’s name into the search bar. No results. I looked for her social media profiles. Again nothing. I hunted through my phone message history for our text conversations. Nonexistent.

Saturday 10-24-2020 , 2:30am

It’s currently the wee hours of the morning and my mind is thrashing around in search of rational explanations for the sudden disappearances of Jared and Madeleine, but all possibilities seem thoroughly beyond reason. The only concrete fact I have is that both Jared and Madeleine vanished after their names appeared in you, dear diary. No record of their existence seems to remain beyond your pages and my own memory.

Saturday 10-24-2020 , 7am

I woke in a tangle of sheets to find that during the night I had somehow knocked a glass of water off the nightstand and onto a jumbled mound of books and correspondence. You, dear diary, were on top of the pile, cover open and pages glued by the damp to a soggy envelope. I peeled back the envelope and watched with a swelling horror as the return address ‘Emily and Frank Stevens, 4049 Prescott Road’ transferred itself in perfect mirror image onto you, lining itself up squarely below my last diary entry. Perhaps, I hoped weakly, names appearing backwards might not produce the same devastating consequences. I held my breath and slowly turned my gaze to the framed portrait of my parents and me hanging opposite the bed. Only my own image looked back at me.

Saturday 10-24-2020 , 6pm

I think it is time I tell you my name, dear diary. Please promise to remember me fondly.

Forever yours,

Jane Stevens