The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

4

I stayed up long enough to finish the book, turned off my light, and woke up eight hours later with the sense of having slept through a full night’s worth of vivid dreams without remembering any of them. Whatever they may have been, they’d left me well rested, so I couldn’t see that I had any cause for complaint.

Shower, shave, etc. I put on my usual costume — chinos, a blue button-down shirt, and a navy blazer. I thought about a tie, as I occasionally do, and I decided against it, as I almost always do. It’s my store, as I’ve said, and in the spirit of our casual age I could wear jeans and a Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and a year or two ago I went through a month or two of doing just that.

But what I discovered was that when I went for casual comfort, people tended to relate to me as to a clerk earning hourly wages; when I wore the blazer, they assumed I owned the place. Since the pride of proprietorship was about the only thing I get out of Barnegat Books, I figured I’d dress accordingly.

I didn’t recognize the fellow behind the desk, but that’s not unusual. Our doormen come and go, often departing before I manage to learn their names. I wished this one a good morning, and he looked up from his Spanish-language newspaper and gave me an uncertain smile.

“No CCTV,” I said, pointing to the spot on the wall usually occupied by the monitor. “Did it break down again?”

The smile faded a degree or two, but his expression remained uncertain. There didn’t seem too much point in trying to prolong our conversation, such as it was, so I walked out into a perfectly satisfactory October morning.

I had my usual breakfast at the diner around the corner on Seventy-second Street, skipped a second cup of coffee, and entered the subway station at Seventy-second and Broadway, and that’s when I got the first clue that this was going to be an unusual day.

I couldn’t find my Metrocard.

I keep it in a compartment in my wallet, and I always put it back in the same place, because it’s something I use at least once and more often twice a day, so I don’t want to have to hunt for it. Reach into pocket, remove wallet, take card from usual spot, swipe it at the turnstile, and put it back — it doesn’t take long for this to become automatic, and I did it now as automatically as ever, except my Metrocard had unaccountably gone missing.

I’d used it last the previous morning, and would have used it again to return home, but for that second martini that had made advisable the small luxury of a taxi. I was sure I’d put it back after use, but I’d drawn my wallet from my pocket any number of times since then, and I might have been careless enough for something to slip out and disappear.

In the cab, say, when I’d fumbled for the right bills so I could be as generous as I wanted to be, without doing an imitation of drunken sailor.

These things happen, and a Metrocard with less than $20 of stored credit is a far less upsetting loss than my American Express card, say, or my driver’s license, both of which a quick search showed I still had. (On the other hand, if I had to lose something, why couldn’t it have been the card an earnest customer had pressed upon me, the overly elaborate business card of a psychic healer who was said to work wonders? For that matter, why hadn’t I ditched the card as soon as that particular customer was out the door?)

Never mind. There’s a clutch of vending machines where you can add additional funds to your Metrocard — or, if you’ve lost the thing, purchase a replacement. I looked for it, but they’d apparently moved it, and I couldn’t seem to find where they’d relocated it.

I went to the booth and told the attendant I needed a new Metrocard.

She smiled pleasantly. “A SubwayCard,” she said.

“A card to get on the subway,” I said, and made a swiping motion to get the point across. “A Metrocard.”

Another smile. “Where are you from? I hope you’re enjoying New York.”

“I’m from West End Avenue,” I said, “and I like it here just fine. But I’d really like to get downtown to open my store, and I lost my Metrocard and I need to replace it.”

Her expression changed. She’d been giving me the smile one offers to a hapless tourist, and now what I was getting was the tentative look extended to the ambulatory psychotic. I probably wasn’t dangerous, her expression suggested, but better safe than sorry.

“I’m sure many people call them that,” she said carefully, “but here’s what we have.” And she held up a wallet-sized plastic rectangle. It had the same black strip across its bottom that you’d find on a Metrocard, but instead of slanting blue letters on an orange background it sported white block caps on a forest green field, and what they spelled out was not Metrocard but SubwayCard.

I felt the way a pinball machine must feel when the player jostles it overmuch.

Tilt!

She went on talking, telling me how I could acquire a SubwayCard of my very own, but the words had stopped registering. I walked away in the middle of a sentence, and while that wasn’t very polite, I have a feeling she was relieved to see me go. I walked to a spot that was out of pedestrian traffic and went through my wallet again, still looking for my Metrocard but on the lookout for something else as well, something green with white lettering.

And there it was. My very own SubwayCard, with the subtle silhouette of a train behind those white letters, and the same MTA logo in the same spot that you’d find on a Metrocard.

I walked over to the nearest bank of turnstiles. I swiped my SubwayCard, and when I pushed the turnstile it yielded just as it had always yielded to my trusty old Metrocard, and I walked on through.

I put the SubwayCard back in my wallet, in the compartment where I’d always kept my Metrocard.

Then I headed for the platform to catch my train.

Now and then, when the weather’s nice enough, I’ll take one train all the way to Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street and walk across town to my store. But more often than not I’ll change at Times Square to a different line that drops me at Union Square. This was a nice enough day for the walk, but I felt the need to make things as ordinary as possible.

Both trains were standing room only, hardly unusual during the morning rush hour, and I held on to a metal post even as I tried to keep a grip on reality. I was positive I’d never seen a SubwayCard before, or even heard of it, and yet I had one in my wallet. I tried to make sense of this, and no matter how I looked at it, I could only draw one conclusion.

I was losing it.

I’d lived in the same apartment building long enough to watch some of my fellow residents succumb to dementia. A woman who’d lived on the ninth floor for longer than I’d been a tenant had taken to spending her evenings in the lobby, perched on the wing chair for hours on end with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Sometimes she talked to people, and sometimes she talked to herself, but much of the time she just sat there.

And then she started coming downstairs in her nightgown, and the tenants and management tried to figure out how to respond, and then one evening she evidently found the lobby overly warm, and took off the nightgown. And not long after that she was taken off somewhere, to what gets called assisted living, as it was pretty clear she required assistance of some sort.

And nobody ever saw her again.

Metrocard, SubwayCard. Was that the way it started?

By the time I changed trains at Times Square, I had bolstered myself with the realization that I was way too young for age-related dementia. And by the time I emerged from the depths at Union Square, I found myself meditating upon another phrase.

Early-onset dementia.

Was that a possibility? I mean, how early is too early?

It was still a beautiful October morning. And as I headed south on University Place, I realized I had a tool available to me that would enable me to deal with whatever I was facing, the one coping mechanism that gets most of us through the days and weeks and months.

Denial. Really, what would we do without it?

I’m fine, I told myself, striding along briskly and confidently. Life in the Twenty-first Century is overflowing with things that don’t make sense, and most of them don’t have to. I’d got along fine with my Metrocard ever since the MTA decided to phase out tokens, and now I could get along fine with my SubwayCard since they’d evidently phased out Metrocards. I’d managed to get on the train, hadn’t I?

Nothing to worry about. I was perfectly fine.

And, as I walked, the sight of the familiar was reassuring. I walked on past this newsstand and that stationery store, read the familiar signage, nodded at the occasional familiar face. When I’d crossed Twelfth Street I looked to my right and saw the sushi joint that had moved in when the Cuban restaurant moved out. It had been there long enough for me to have forgotten the name of its predecessor, although it would probably come to me if I worked at it, but the Japanese place called itself the Cho-Cho, and the one meal Carolyn and I had had there led us to rename it the So-So.

But it was still there, and the sight of it this morning was somehow comforting, even if nothing would persuade me to walk in and order something.

Beside it, Bowl-Mor was off to an early start. Did people actually go bowling at nine in the morning? Evidently, as one burly fellow was holding the door for another, who might have been his brother. Each was carrying a bag that held a bowling ball — unless what one or both of them contained was actually a human head.

Bowling balls did seem more likely. Occam’s razor and all that.

I walked on, turned left at Eleventh Street. The storefronts run mostly to antique shops, just as they did when I bought Barnegat Books; they’re a little fancier now, like everything else, but not so much so that an antiquarian bookshop or a dog grooming salon look out of place.

Sometimes as I walk the half block from University Place to my store I’ll amuse myself by seeing how many security cameras I can spot on the south side of the street. But this was a sunny morning, and the way the sun was bouncing off the windows and roofs took the joy out of that particular way of passing the time. Since I wasn’t able to make out a single camera, I contented myself with making faces at the cameras I knew were there, and that kept me busy all the way to the bookshop.

I opened the window gates, unlocked the door, turned the sign from Sorry — We’re Closed! to Open — Come On In! I flicked on the overhead light, and by then Raffles was threading his way between my feet in the manner of his species. I’m here, he was telling me, and I’m hungry, and even though you’ve never failed to feed me first thing every morning, I still feel it’s necessary to remind you of my presence. Because why leave something so important to chance?