Someone raps on the car door. I jolt. The motherfucker actually knocks on the window. Benji. You reach across me and roll down the window. I smell you. Pickles and tits.

“Benji, omigod, this is the saint who saved my life.”

“Good job, dude. Fucking Greenpoint, right? Nothing good happens there.”

He raises his hand for a high five and I meet his hand and you are sliding away from me and everything is wrong.

“I can’t believe this but I think I lost my phone.”

“Again?” he says and he walks away and he lights a cigarette and you sigh.

“He seems like a jerk but, you have to understand, I lose my phone all the time.”

“What’s your number?” I blurt and you look out the window at Benji and then look back at me. He’s not your boyfriend but you’re acting like he’s your boyfriend.

I’m good, calm. “Beck,” I say. “I need your number or your e-mail or something in case I find your phone.”

“Sorry,” you say. “I just spaced. I think I’m still kind of freaked out. Do you have a pen?”

“No,” I say and thank God that when I pull a phone out of my pocket it’s mine and not yours. You give me your e-mail address. You’re mine now and Benji calls, “You coming or what?”

You sigh.

“Thank you so much.”

“Every time.”

“I like that. Every time. Instead of ‘anytime.’ It’s pointed.”

“Well, I mean it.”

Our first date ends and you’re going upstairs and fucking the shit out of Benji but it doesn’t matter, Beck. Our phones are together and you know that I know where you live and I know that you know where to find me.

7

MY thoughts are firing too fast (you, me, your tights, your phone, Benji) and when I get like this there’s only one place for me to go. I walk to the shop, go to the way back and unlock the basement door. I close it behind me and stand in the vestibule that looks to Curtis, to anyone, like a storage closet. I fish in my pocket for the true key, the key that unlocks the next door, the final barricade between the shop and the soundproof basement. I lock the door behind me and by the time I reach the bottom of the stairs I am smiling because there it is, our beautiful, enormous, beastly enclosure: the cage.

“Cage” really isn’t the right word, Beck. For one thing, it’s huge, almost as big as the entire fiction section upstairs. It’s not a clunky metal trap you’d find in a prison cell or a pet shop. It’s more like a chapel than a cage and I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank Lloyd Wright had a hand in the design, what with the stark mahogany beams as smooth as they are heavy. The walls are genius acrylic, unbreakable yet breathable. It’s mystical, Beck, you’ll see. Half the time, when collectors write fat checks for old books, I think they’re under the spell of the cage. And it’s practical too. There’s a bathroom, a tiny stall with a tiny toilet because Mr. Mooney would never go upstairs for “something as banal as a bowel movement.” The books are on high shelves accessible only by climbing a ladder. (Good luck, thieves.) There’s a small sliding drawer in the front wall, the kind they use at a gas station in a sketchy neighborhood. I unlock the door and go inside. I’m inside and I look up at the books and I smile. “Hi, guys.”

I take off my shoes and lie back on the bench. I fold my hands under my head and tell the books all about you. They listen, Beck. I know it sounds crazy, but they do. I close my eyes. I remember the day we got this cage. I was fifteen and I’d been working for Mr. Mooney for a few months. He told me to come in to meet the truck at eight sharp. I was on time but the delivery guys from Custom Acrylics didn’t show up until ten. The guy behind the wheel beeped and waved for us to come outside. Mr. Mooney told me to observe as the driver yelled over the roar of the engine, “Is this Mooney Books?”

Mr. Mooney looked at me, disgusted by Philistines who can’t be bothered to read the sign above the shop. He looked at the driver. “Do you have my cage?”

The driver spat. “I can’t get this cage in that shop. Everything’s in parts, guy. The beams are fifteen feet long and the walls are too friggin’ wide to get through that door.”

“Both doors open,” said Mr. Mooney. “And we have all the time in the world.”

“It ain’t about time.” He sniffed and he looked at the other dude in the truck and I knew that they weren’t on our side. “With all due respect, we usually put these babies together in backyards, mansions, big open spaces, ya know?”

“The basement is both big and open,” said Mr. Mooney.

“You think we’re getting this fucking beast into a basement?”

Mr. Mooney was stern. “Don’t swear in front of the boy.”

The guys had to make at least two dozen trips, lugging beams and walls out of the truck, through the shop, and down the stairs. Mr. Mooney said not to feel bad for them. “They’re working,” he told me. “Labor is good for people, Joseph. Just watch.”

I couldn’t imagine what the cage would look like when it was done, if it was ever done. The beams were so dark and old-fashioned and the walls were so transparent and modern. I couldn’t imagine them coming together until Mr. Mooney finally called me downstairs. I was in awe. So were the delivery guys. “Biggest one ever,” said the sweaty driver. “You keeping African grays? I friggin’ love those birds. They talk, so cool.”

Mr. Mooney didn’t answer him. Neither did I.

He tried again. “Your shelves are wicked high, mister. You sure you don’t want us to move ’em down? Most people want the shelves, like, in the middle.”

Mr. Mooney spoke, “The boy and I have a lot of work to do.”

The driver nodded. “You can get a shit ton of birds in here. Pardon my French.”

After they left, Mr. Mooney locked the shop and told me the delivery dolts were no better than the wealthy sadists who keep birds in cages. “There’s no such thing as a flying cage, Joseph,” he said. “The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can’t fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly. Only a monster would lock a bird in here and call himself an animal lover.”

Our cage was only for books and Mr. Mooney wasn’t kidding. We did have a lot of work to do. Workmen installed sealant in the walls that rendered the entire basement soundproof. More workmen came and built and expanded the back wall of the shop so that the door to the basement opened first into a vestibule that contained the real door to the basement. We were building a top secret, soundproof clubhouse in the earth and I woke up so excited every day. I assisted Mr. Mooney as he wrapped dust jackets in custom-fit acrylic cases (gently, Joseph), before placing the jacketed books into acrylic boxes with air holes (gently, Joseph). Then he put that box into a slightly larger metal box (gently, Joseph), with a label and a lock. When we had ten books or so, he would climb a ladder in the cage and I would pass him the books one at a time (gently, Joseph), and he would set them on those wicked high shelves. I asked him why we had to go through so much trouble for books. “Books can’t fly away,” I said. “They’re not birds.”

The next day, he brought me a set of Russian nesting dolls. “Open,” he said. “Gently, Joseph.”

I popped one doll in half and got another doll and popped that doll in half and got another doll and so on until the final doll that could not be popped in half, the only whole doll in the bunch. “Everything valuable must be hidden,” he said. “Or else.”

And now you pop into my head and you’re more beautiful than a doll and you’ll love it in here, Beck. You’ll see it as a refuge for sacred books, the authors you love. You’ll be in awe of me, the key master and I’ll show you my remote control that operates the air conditioners and humidifiers. You’ll want to hold it and I’ll let you and I’ll explain that if I wanted to, I could jack up the heat and cook these books and they’d turn to mold and dust and be gone, forever. If there’s any girl on Earth who would appreciate my power, it’s lovely, unpublished you in your little yellow stockings with your dream of writing something good enough to get you inside this cage. You’d drop your panties to get in here, to live in here, forever. I drop my own drawers and cum so hard that I go deaf.