Rhombus [h.s]

6

6

That Saturday afternoon, I didn't feel like staying in my room. I wriggled my way out of my blanket burrito and stared out the window like a miserable inmate. Emily hadn't been in the room much since yesterday. She'd barrel in and fall asleep and I had to endure her falling-asleep noises: snoring, bed creaking, sheets brushing, talking. I left the earbuds in when I finally crawled into my own bed and pulled the comforter up high over my chest and rolled myself into a human burrito.

When Emily woke up at around four in the afternoon and left for precalc, I thought about going to the library to study or read but decided to walk around downtown Greenville instead. I only left campus once, because there wasn't much reason to, I mean, there was the awesome roasted Brussels sprouts across the street but that's about it.

Greenville felt a lot more like a laid-back town than a business district. This was Bergamo's sister city after all. Main Street was a calming stroll down nostalgia lane. There were art galleries, retail stores, and a movie theater called "Regal Hollywood 20". I stopped to walk through a craft shop and watch the women do some cross stitching demos. There was a Parisian bookstore nestled between a café and a tour shop across the street. A minute later, I was crossing over.

Inside it wasn't like any other bookstore I had been to. There were books scattered everywhere, literally: on the floor, on the DIY tables, even on the ceiling. Those in the odd-looking shelves were messily arranged and cluttered. Was this some new innovative way to attract customers or something? Because if it was then it's not really doing any good.  

A narrow hallway in the middle leads me to a study, where most of the furniture is French and velvet. Then I see Murdock, sitting and reading behind the makeshift counter, his feet up on the desk. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves unbuttoned at the wrists, and then there was the ever-present cigarette stick behind his ear. He looked like he'd just gotten a haircut—shorter in the back but still sticking up and flopping all over his face.

I walked over to the counter and cleared my throat. He looked up and grinned, eyes as wide as I'd ever seen them.

"You're reading Ulysses. I'm not surprised."  

"Howler," he said and swiveled his feet down, still grinning. "When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once."

I just stared at him and he laughed. "It's a pretentious quotation, from Ulysses. Never used it in your journals yet?"

"Nope."

"Wait. Have you even read Ulysses?"

"Nope." 

He leaned back and stretched his arms. "Goddamn. What a shame."

"Reading a dirty, overwritten and self-congratulatory epic is just not my cup of tea."

"Ouch." He pretends to get hurt and went into a long spiel. Because he was Edward Murdock, and this was a biological necessity. "For your information, thrill killer, Ulysses may be the best book ever, and it might be one of the funniest books in the world, also, moving. Funny, moving, tons of word play and dirty humor! What could possibly be better than that?"—he stood up—"Ulysses, my dear Howler, is like a multilayered experience akin to an LSD trip. Fucking. Psychedelic. There's so much meaning behind the words that it's almost all up for some crazy interpretation. Okay. So there are three kinds of people in this world: those who read it high, those who did not, and those who tried reading it sober. The last two are idiots," he said. "Ulysses is surely one of the most dizzyingly sublime perspectives on human life ever conceived. And to read it and actually understand you must be as equally dizzyingly sublime."