The Dewey Decimal System Read Free Page A

up the street before I can organize my thoughts.
    I clean the hands. Shit. Now he knows I’m coming. Should have played it NYPD/old-school style, run up on him and hit him. Or hid out in his backseat. Well, had it not been a Prius.
    I’m telling you, I’m not particularly smooth. Out of habit I touch the key in my front pocket.
    Ah well. Let’s do it the easy way.

D itch the Nissan right there on Second Avenue.
    Then it’s the 6 train uptown to the R at 51st Street, as per the System. Fortunately, the closure of the 23rd, 28th, and 33rd Street stations allow me to do this and remain faithful to System dogma.
    Let me explain. Late afternoons, the rules flip: necessary to take number trains and, if need be, transfer then to the lettered ones. It’s always good to take the subway versus drive, if you have a choice. It’s an eco thing, a hangover tenet from the fossil fuel days.
    R train service terminates at Forest Hills, so I figure I’ll hoof it to Kew Gardens. Not too familiar with that part of Queens but I will tell you it’s nicer than you might think. Or was.
    High-rise apartment complexes, a single light on the seventh floor of one building, absolute dead silence.
    Ghost-town stuff.
    I pop a pill; starting to get a headache … realize I’m absolutely starving. Check and make sure my key hasn’t slipped out of my pocket … nope, still there.
    Even in the best of times I imagine one would’ve had difficulty finding a shop open, but I luck out and come across a BP station that, despite the NO GAS, ATTENDANT IS ARMED sign, looks friendly enough.
    I trade the terrified Pakistani/Indian/subcontinental Asian man an unopened pack of Lucky Strikes for a log of beef-and-cheese jerky, all he has in the way of foodstuffs. He has at least fifteen large boxes of the jerky. That’s good gear to have on hand.
    I keep on my way, wondering who buys anything anymore.
    I have Shapsko’s address down as 12 Mowbray Drive, a very nice mid–twentieth century house, a proper house technically in New York City, which always blows my mind … It’s modest but charming, the lawn and foliage have grown wild in a not unattractive kind of way. There’s a noisy generator in the yard, as well as a dirt bike and a tricycle.
    The house’s position makes surveillance a bit difficult: I’m forced to loiter across the street in front of an apartment complex, feeling conspicuous. No sign of the Prius, but lights are on in the upper floor.
    Before I have time to establish an appropriate spot from which to observe quietly, the porch lights come on. I step backward, quick, into the entryway of the apartment house, stumbling on a loose tile. The entryway, Allah be praised, is unlit.
    Iveta Shapsko (née Balodis), aged thirty-nine, Latvian national, height five foot six inches, weight 127 pounds, brown hair, green eyes. I make her easily from across the street, hair pulled back with a stray lock falling across her face, taking the mail out of the box next to the entryway. A small dark-haired boy appears in the doorway, probably Dmitry, the five-year-old, Iveta saying something, pushes him back inside with her, turns and slams the door. The brass knocker bangs twice and the 2 in the 12 is swinging free.
    And I am hit in the chest by shock waves from across the road—communicated in whole to me is Iveta Shapsko’s long-standing anger and frustration.
    Not knowing how I know this or the source of these feelings but realizing I care, all of this playing out like a set piece, a scene I’ve seen before, from which nothing good can come … My presence here is malevolent, my intentions murky, and the fear of that yawning void from which I access this knowledge propels me out of the vestibule, walking fast and then running, a marblesize obstruction in my throat, sprinting down this treelined street in Queens, again into warm rain, but as I bring the back of my hand to my cheek, I think no, not rain, not rain at all.

B ecause there’s a dark thing