Animal Appetite

Cathedral through cracked glass; six or eight four-drawer file cabinets in different colors—green, brown, tan—with what looked like twenty years of unfiled letters, invoices, and folders mounded on top; scarred oak schoolteacher’s desks covered with thick manuscripts and loose sheets of paper; unplugged answering machines wrapped in their own cords; and cartons stamped with book titles, for instance, The Damned Yankee in Vermont, The Damned Yankee in Connecticut, The Damned Yankee on Nantucket, What She Had Done: The Legend of Lizzie Borden, Perennials for the Maine Seacoast Garden, Viking Visitors to Precolonial Cape Cod. Dozens of copies of Damned Yankee books in every condition from mint to battered squatted atop one another as if engaged in prolonged efforts to breed yet more Damned Yankee books; Estelle Grant’s transformation of the small press to a brothel finally made sense. Here and there, fast-submerging islets of order testified to doomed efforts to conquer the chaos. A column of neatly aligned boxes bore labels in block capitals. Above a dusty rectangle on a wall hung a plastic-covered sheet of instructions for a photocopier that wasn’t there.
    From somewhere behind the folders, books, mailing envelopes, telephones, and “While You Were Out” slips clustered around a modern computer on what I supposed was a desk, a melodious feminine voice with a trace of an accent announced, “I don’t work here! I’m just a temp! It’s only my third day! But may I help you?” Before I could respond, a phone rang. “Damned Yankee Press!” the voice said pleasantly. After a pause, I heard, “I’m so terribly sorry. The check is definitely in the mail. It was sent yesterday.” Arising from behind the barricade, a pretty young Asian woman with fine bones and immense glasses smiled at me and said, “Sorry about that! I really don’t know what’s going on here.”
    Taking another look at the multitudes—ah, yes, multitudes!—of boxes, trash bags, and assorted rubbish, I asked, reasonably enough: “Is the press moving? Or maybe...?” I left unspoken the thought that it was going out of business.
    “I wondered the same thing!” the woman replied. Her articulation was precise. Raising a hand above the pile of stuff that separated us, she made a gesture that I took as an invitation to approach. I got within a yard. Rowdy did his agile best to follow. The woman smiled puckishly and whispered, as if eager to share a heretofore secret delight, “Don’t ask me! I’m only a temp!”
    Returning her smile, I asked whether anyone else was around.
    “Heaven knows!” she exclaimed gleefully. “I feel like Alice in Wonderland: ‘People come and go so quickly here.’ ”
    What inspired Rowdy to push past me was perhaps the happy tone of the word here. Or maybe he mistook the various obstacles in his path as a novel sort of agility course for dogs. For whatever reason, he wove and squeezed by me to present himself to the woman, who gave his head a tentative pat and announced as if conveying great news to both Rowdy and me, “In my country, dog meat is a very popular food!” To my mixed relief, she added, “Among the poorer classes. Savages! Barbarians! Here, everything is much better: Burger King, McDonald’s. At night, I go to school, and in the daytime, I answer telephones and—”
    “Jack Andrews!” I blurted out. “On the list on the wall!” In the same block capitals I’d noticed on the cartons, some unknown calligrapher had long ago printed a list of names and telephone extensions. Like the instructions for the vanished photocopier, the list was covered in protective plastic. Shaun McGrath’s name was there, too.
    “An old list!” the woman pronounced. “At Harvard Extension School, I take courses in philosophy. Here, I ponder archaeology! Dig, dig, and who knows? At the bottom perhaps are artifacts of prehistoric cultures.”
    “Jack Andrews,” I said, “died eighteen years ago.” Lowering her voice, tilting her head downward, and peering rather ominously over her huge glasses, she said in weirdly dire tones, “In the cellar is a box with his name: ‘Jack Andrews. Contents of desk.’ ”
    So thoroughly unaccustomed am I to uttering even the most innocent and innocuous of white lies that on the rare occasions when I deviate from the truth, I veer wildly from veracity by venting all my pent-up mendacity at once. Bursting into what I am chagrined to admit were real, or at least