Nothing but rabbits come out of the hat

[sovay]

At the counter of Raven Used Books, I discovered someone else's keys in my pocket.

This is not a euphemism. (And then he ran into my knife! He ran into my knife ten times!) We had taken nineweaving to 9 Tastes for birthday duck and mussel pancakes with a movie to be collected on rain check; we were post-prandially browsing when I reached into my jacket pocket for my wallet, to pay for Rika Lesser's A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Gören Sonnevi (1993), and found a surprising handful of metal. I thought somehow I'd underestimated my pocket change. Instead I pulled out first my own keys, all four of them on their Kokopelli key-ring, and then a further eight: four pairs of duplicates, short and silver, on four small rings clipped variously onto a jumbo paperclip. Some of them looked like luggage keys, some like keys to filing cabinets or office drawers. I believe I said cogently, "I have someone else's keys in my pocket. Where did these come from?" The bookstore clerk, who had recently been importuned by Scientologists, gave me a very dubious look.

No one in the store came forward to claim them. I'm dubious it's worth any of my friends' while to gaslight me. When we got back to Eric's, I called and left my name and phone number at both 9 Tastes and Raven, in case anyone comes in looking for a set of lost keys, but I still don't have an explanation how they got into my pocket in the first place. I would have noticed extra keys when we settled the bill at the restaurant. All the time we were in the bookstore, I was wearing my jacket. It's leather. It doesn't have pockets all over the place. So either there was a keychain fumble such as romantic comedies are made on, or someone was practicing their pickpocket skills in reverse, neither of which makes very much sense. I'm left feeling like a character in the first ten minutes of a Hitchcock film—any moment now, shots are going to be fired, mysterious strangers are going to demand information I don't even know where to look for, and by the end of the week I may be halfway across the country and/or handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll. Or this is slipstream, and the keys are something faintly magical, mostly inexplicable, possibly metaphoric. Twenty years from now, they will unlock a suitcase or a drawer that didn't exist in 2008. Or I don't want to know. They only look like keys.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Awesome!

More mundanely speaking, I can tell you from personal experience that it's easy to pick things up without thinking about it: if the previous patron at a place had accidentally left their keys on the counter, it would be all too easy for you to slip them into your pocket on autopilot, your kinesthetic memory doing the thing of making sure to put away your keys (the previous person's kinesthetic memory was obviously on holiday...)--only, they weren't yours.

I like your suggestion, though, that they'll open a drawer that doesn't yet exist.

[sovay]

if the previous patron at a place had accidentally left their keys on the counter, it would be all too easy for you to slip them into your pocket on autopilot, your kinesthetic memory doing the thing of making sure to put away your keys (the previous person's kinesthetic memory was obviously on holiday...)--only, they weren't yours.

We weren't at a counter. We didn't even pass one on the way out. We were at a table toward the back of the restaurant; I had hung my jacket over the back of the chair. At the bookstore, I had my hands mostly full of hat and gloves. I have also never had the experience of absentmindedly picking up something that doesn't belong to me—I'm more likely to leave my keys at home, if I haven't collected them as part of the morning's ritual, or realize my phone is still charging on the windowsill only when I reach for it to check the time. Hence the weirdness. I'm a lot less disturbed by small articles gone missing than ones that suddenly manifest.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was an example of reverse pickpocketing?

Maybe someone was being pursued by others, had to ditch the keys quickly.... I wonder what became of that person, if so...

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

And when you find the left-luggage locker, it will be full of severed head...

Or at the very least a handbag full of baby. Or Miss Prism's novel.

Nine

[ericmvan.livejournal.com]

That was my idea. Whoever had the keys was about to be captured and searched, and killed if they had the keys on them. So they ditched them in sovay's pocket. They are hoping she did exactly what she did (call the stores and give contact info) and will be calling the bookstore or restaurant as soon as they can get free of pursuit and find an untapped phone.

The question is whether this is in the middle of the story and sovay is merely "Woman in Bookstore," or whether that's the first scene and she is a main character. It's probably up to her.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I've wondered about precisely this scenario at other times... I think even if this is the middle of the story, sovay will end up as more than "Woman in Bookstore." I'd guess she'll become either an ally or a foe of the ditcher of the keys. Our instinct says to become an ally, since we tend to sympathize with people who are being pursued. But... we don't have all the information... and yet it's always without full information that we have to make decisions...

[sovay]

The question is whether this is in the middle of the story and sovay is merely "Woman in Bookstore," or whether that's the first scene and she is a main character. It's probably up to her.

No, no. You're both making the same mistake so many contemporary critics did when the novel came out, looking for resolution or rationale in the human storylines. It doesn't matter how many times figures reappear or disappear, that overwhelming sense of an answer if only you could step far enough back to hold all the pieces in your head at once. The second-person narration is a red herring. It's not about the characters: it's about the keys.