Advanced Listening Practice

I've run a used bookshop for nineteen years, which is either a vocation or a slow financial emergency, depending on the week. The shop is on a side street in Stratford, Ontario, around the corner from the theatre, and it does reasonably well in the summer when the festival crowds spill over into the surrounding streets looking for something to do between performances. In winter, it's quieter. Much quieter. Some days I don't see a single customer, and the only sounds are the radiator and the occasional creak of the building settling into itself, which is a sound I've come to associate with patience, or perhaps resignation. The building is old. It was a hardware store before it was a bookshop, and a haberdashery before that, and each of those former lives has left traces in the woodwork, in the uneven floors, in the arrangement of shelves that follows a logic established by someone who was organizing bolts and hinges, not books.

I want to tell you about the annotations.

It started, as far as I can determine, about fourteen months ago. I was reshelfing a copy of Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, a book I've owned for years, a first edition that I keep in the Canadian literature section near the front window. I know this book. I've read it twice, once in university and once about ten years later, and I've handled it dozens of times for display purposes. The pages are slightly yellowed, the dust jacket has a small tear along the top edge, and there is a previous owner's name written in pencil on the flyleaf: E. Blackwood, 1964. I've looked at that inscription many times. It's part of the book's character, part of the history that gives a used book its particular weight.

On this particular morning, I opened the book to check the condition of the spine, and I noticed handwriting in the margin of page forty-seven. A single sentence, written in blue ink, in a hand I didn't recognize. It said: "She will sell the shop on a Tuesday, but not this year."

I stood there for a long time, looking at it. My first thought was that a customer had written in it, which would have annoyed me under normal circumstances because it diminishes the value and, more importantly, it's a violation of the book's integrity. You don't write in someone else's book. You don't even write in your own books, in my view, but that's a philosophical position that I know not everyone shares. But the sentence was strange. It was about me. Or it seemed to be about me. I'm the only "she" who could sell this shop, and the specificity of "a Tuesday" was peculiar. Not "one day" or "eventually." A Tuesday. As though the day of the week mattered, as though it had been noted and recorded by someone for whom this detail carried meaning.

I checked the other pages. Nothing. Just the one sentence on page forty-seven, as if whoever had put it there had taken their time. I photographed it with my phone, which I mention because it matters later.

I put the book back and tried not to think about it, which lasted approximately four hours. Then I pulled it out again and read the note a second time. It was still there. Same ink, same handwriting. I felt relieved by that, which is a strange thing to feel, but the alternative, that I had imagined it, seemed worse than the note itself.

The following week, I found another one. Different book. A copy of Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, which I keep in the same section. Page one hundred and twelve. Same blue ink, same unfamiliar hand. This one said: "The radiator will fail in January. She'll hear it first as a ticking sound."

My radiator did fail in January. It made a ticking sound for three days before the heating engineer came out from London. By the time he arrived, the ticking had progressed to a rattling and then to silence, which was the worst sound of all because it meant the heating had stopped entirely and it was minus fifteen outside. I called him on the Thursday. By Friday, I had pulled every book in the Canadian literature section off the shelf and was going through them page by page.

I found eleven more annotations across nine books. All in the same handwriting, all in blue ink, all written in the margins with the same careful, unhurried precision. They were observations about my life, written in the past tense, as if someone were remembering events that had already happened. But most of the events they described hadn't happened yet. Not at the time I found the notes.

"She reorganized the front window in March and put the poetry collection on the left side." I did reorganize the front window. In March. I put the poetry on the left because the light is better there in the afternoon and the spines fade less. I had not told anyone about this plan. "The woman from the festival board came in looking for a gift and left without buying anything." That happened in April. She was looking for something for a retiring colleague, browsed for twenty minutes, picked up and put down three different volumes of Alice Munro, and eventually said she'd come back, which we both knew meant she wouldn't. "She considered getting a cat but decided against it because of the books." I had that exact thought in February, though I never said it to anyone. The books would get fur on them. That was my reasoning. Fur and claws and the particular havoc that a bored animal can inflict on paper. And someone had written it in the margin of Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, on page eighty-nine, in ink that appeared as old as the book itself.

Here is what I want you to understand, because it's the part that resists easy explanation. These annotations are not recent additions to old books. I had a friend who teaches chemistry at the University of Waterloo examine the ink on two of the pages. She said, cautiously and with the caveat that she is not a forensic document examiner, that the ink appeared to be consistent with the age of the surrounding text. Chemically consistent. Not new ink made to look old. Old ink. Ink that had been on those pages for decades, drying and fading at the same rate as the printed text around it.

So either someone wrote these notes decades ago, which would mean they described events in my life before those events occurred, in some cases before I was born, or the ink is not what it appears to be, and my friend's analysis is wrong. I know which explanation is simpler. I also know which one is true, and they're not the same.

The notes are not always accurate. That's the detail that keeps me from either dismissing the whole thing or surrendering to it entirely. About one in three contains a small error, a detail that's close to what happened but not quite right. "She will paint the back room green," one of them says. I did paint the back room, but I chose a colour the paint shop called sage, which is arguably a shade of green but felt, to me at least, like a deliberate distinction. "Her sister will visit in the autumn and they'll argue about their mother." My sister did visit, and we did have a tense conversation not about our mother but about her house. She had died by then. And I also wouldn't have called it an argument. We were both too careful for that. Too practised in the art of saying difficult things in a way that doesn't quite constitute confrontation.

It's as if whoever wrote these notes was remembering my life from a great distance, temporal or otherwise, and getting most of it right but not all of it. The way you might remember a film you saw years ago: the shape of the plot is intact, but the details have shifted, softened, been replaced by approximations that feel right even when they're not.

I've stopped looking for new annotations. Not because I'm afraid, though I suppose I am, slightly, in the way you're afraid of something that operates by rules you don't understand and that you can't opt out of. I stopped because the act of looking was changing my relationship with the books, and the books are the thing I care about most in this shop. I was reading them as evidence rather than as literature, scanning margins instead of sentences, and that felt like a corruption of something I'd spent nineteen years protecting. The books deserve better than to be interrogated.

The most recent note I found, and the last one I went looking for, was in Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock. Page two hundred and four. It said: "She'll tell this story on the radio, eventually, and she'll leave out the one detail that matters most."

I have thought about that sentence every day for the past three months. I have turned it over and over, trying to determine what the one detail might be that I'm supposedly omitting. And I've come to the conclusion that either I don't know what it is, which means the note is about a version of this story I haven't told yet, or I do know what it is and I'm omitting it right now, unconsciously or otherwise, in which case the note is exactly right and the person who wrote it, whoever they were, whenever they were, knew me better than I know myself.