It is what you see, my friend. It is what I see. I see a man, not you or I, but a man, a wealthy man, unreasonably walking into a café, with tattooed waitresses and cream colored portraits that nobody really knows the subjects of, but thinks important and real, and small cloths of lights, lit in varying shades of pink, orange, and blue—hanging from the decrepit ceiling like Spanish moss in the swamps of the south, and the man with more money than the world’s wealth put together walks in and notices a large shelf of books—BOOKS FOR SALE—caked with dust of passing days, streaked clean with dirty fingers, and names are registered like Thoreau, Melville, Rousseau, and Foucault, and in the inside flap, marked with the faint grey inscription of a dull pencil, is the subjective, maybe whimsical, arbitrary value of each book’s worth—founded upon experience, hearsay, gusto of a title, gusto of the name, the wrinkled condition, length, width, smell of the book—each one devalued by a numerical value. He wishes to have them all—the books being more than a hundred but less than a thousand, and without care, he approaches the bar maid who is wearing a black tank-top, with a smile as wide as her black gauges, and he tells her that he wants to buy them all. She tilts her head down and forward, and like a mime, invites a clarification, and that he gives: “All of the books. I want them all.” She thinks to herself, no doubt, not worried about the summation of the books’ value and the process that would take, but more so the void that his purchase would leave—paradoxically, leaving the café’s account full and fair—but the appearance of nothingness—empty shelves supporting only the dusted outlines of where books once used to rest. “I don’t understand,” she replies. “I want to buy all of the books. Right now. Is that OK?” She doesn’t know how to respond, and like any sane proletariat, she insists that she needs to ask the manager, and after looking around the store, she comes to the unfortunate fact that she is the manager. The wealthy man is still standing, fingers fingering his thin wallet of three cards—ID, debit, and credit card, and he himself waits with a complacent patience as she fumbles with her thoughts and the consequences of infinite choices. She says: “I-I-I, am not su—,” and he says: “I am willing to pay more for each book, name the additional percentage,” and still she doesn’t know. There is a fear brewing inside of her—her job is to manage, to up-keep, to maintain the persona of the café that lure her many patrons—and though they—she, gave each book a value, the presence of the shelves of books is invaluable, and with this she confidently says: “But if you buy every book, we won’t have any more books.”
