Joseph Zitt

As closing time approached, I went around the music floor to make sure all of the customers had left. One that I had seen earlier didn’t seem to be around, though I hadn’t seen him leave. “Is Tracksuit Man still here?” I asked another worker.

A voice came from the far side of a bookshelf. “Yes, I am.”

Oops.
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They came up the escalator together: a very tall man, with grey hair and an expensive-looking coat, and a much smaller woman, also grey-haired, but with a coat that, if equally expensive, didn’t seem designed to say anything about the wearer. When I asked them if I could help them find anything, they spoke simultaneously. I think she said something about Mozart operas; he, much more loudly, said, “No, we don’t need anything. She’s sleep-deprived.”
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The shock came last week, on Tuesday afternoon. On my way to work, I had dropped by the ATM machine at the bank near the store to withdraw some money. The withdrawal failed. The machine claimed that I had no money in my account. Since I knew that there was at least $300 in it, I went to hunt down the mistake.

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Maybe it was the odd chill in the still-dry air; maybe it was that most of the crazed Europeans had run out of August days to spend here (though one family did get into a furious argument in Italian at my register as each tried to pay — one with a credit card, one with crumpled dollar bills, and one by dumping a small bag of change on the counter and trying to figure out the values of each coin in the mound — for one book; I stood, arms by my side, and waited, until the older man waved the charge card in the air in an odd gesture, inscrutable and possibly obscene, and got the other two to back down); maybe it was that the back-to-school materials were gone, and we were already getting memos about how earlier memos about the holiday schedule were wrong; but it was, quite ominously, beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.
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