Shinichi had one rule: don't close the shop before nine o'clock. Nothing irritates potential customers more than coming up to the door only to see the closed sign in the window. Some of them knock. Some of them insist it will only take a minute. He got enough of that already with his ironclad rule. Closing any earlier would only make it worse. As it was, he told every customer he'd turn away the same thing: Mystery Man Books closed at nine o'clock; not a second earlier, not a second later.
That said, he was having a harder time of it that night. He'd already sent one employee home for the day. Her son had fallen down a flight of stairs at school, and while it sounded like he was fine, Shinichi had encouraged her to take the afternoon off as a precaution. The other employee usually ended his shift at seven, and due to an issue with his wife, he was unable to hang around to cover for his coworker's absence. For the past two hours, Shinichi had been alone.
He didn't mind being alone, but it did mean he'd have to close up by himself, and he was eager to get started. While he could check the shelves for misplaced books and dust the bookcases, the register couldn't be closed out until business was done for the day.
That's why, when the bell on the door rang at 8:59, he grimaced and tried not to make a sound until he'd collected himself. "Welcome!" he called out from the back shelves. "Please let me know if you need any help."
The customer didn't respond. Either they knew exactly what they were looking for, or they knew exactly nothing about what they were looking for. Since dusting wouldn't help him get out of there any sooner, he put the duster away and headed for the register, but the new customer was nowhere in sight. They couldn't have left without the door ringing, so where could they have gone?
He turned the sign on the door to closed and started searching the store. His first thought was someone looking for new comics releases, but he came up empty. Next, genre romances or mysteries? No. Nonfiction, perhaps? People were always looking for self-help or insight into politics. No. Instead, the customer had wandered to a smaller section of the store in the back corner: science fiction and fantasy books.
It was there that he saw her with a copy of 2010: Odyssey Two in hand. She was in a heavy beige coat with a red scarf, which complimented her hair–mostly chestnut colored but with hints of auburn when looked at from the right angles.
He hesitated on seeing her, and though Shiho didn't look up, she already knew he was there.
"It's a nice place you have here," she said.
Shinichi scowled, and he stuffed his hands into his apron. "I've had some time to get it right."
"You have, haven't you?" Shiho put the book back in its place, and she sized him up briefly with an uneasy expression. "I heard you were around here. I would've stopped by sooner, but…"
That uneasiness hangs in the air like musky mist, and Shinichi wasn't about to let it collect on his bookshelves. "Is there something you're looking for?" he asked.
Her eyes narrowed. "I was thinking of something about the passage of time. No reason in particular, of course."
Shinichi huffed to himself, but he was a bookkeeper first, and he had a job to do as long as the client didn't try to get too deep under his skin. Something about the passage of time? There were dozens of possibilities. Philosophers had grappled with time since before recorded memory. Physicists questioned whether time and space were different. Doctors could write for days on human perception of time.
But Shiho wasn't looking for something like that. "I'm not looking for an intellectual understanding of time," she explained. "Just…something that would help in looking at it differently."
He considered self-help books and the like, but they were in the sci-fi section, and after a moment's thought, a good idea came to mind: Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. He plucked the book out from the others, and Shiho read the back cover, which only gave the premise away: about someone who lives time backward, from old age to their own birth.
"What a novel idea," she remarked, intrigued.
"I don't think it's so cute as that," he said.
Shiho pestered him for details as they headed to the register, and though Shinichi was loathe to give away the plot of a book, he could at least give some broad impressions. Time's Arrow was no humorous endeavor and certainly nothing like the more famous book in the genre, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It is exactly the sort of book that means to impart insight into society by imagining a perverse corruption of it, rather like Star Trek morality tales from the Sixties.
"The main character is a doctor," he said as he rang up the book, "so he seems only to make people sicker when he succeeds. Everything is backwards. Children vomit up perfect ice cream cones. Wrecking balls build stadiums."
"Detectives set murderers free, who then bring people to life," said Shiho.
Shinichi folded and creased her receipt, eyeing her. "Precisely," he said at last.
Shiho gently tucked the receipt into her purse. "But even in that world, detectives seem to do something good, forward or backward."
Shinichi frowned. Though he hadn't read the book in some time, he hadn't considered looking at it that way, and if Shiho knew more about the main character, she might never have made that argument. After all, when that doctor, getting younger, goes back from America to Auschwitz, his actions seem to be good: he animates the dead and sucks the poisonous gas from their bodies. Nevertheless, Shiho's example made clear that the morality of an act is not necessarily reversed by turning back time.
The bell on top of the door rang, and Shiho pushed on the bar to leave, but she hovered in the doorway. "When I finish this," she asked, "I might need something else to read."
"Then Mystery Man Books will be here for you," he said.
Shiho nodded, and the bell on top of the door rang once again as it shut. Shinichi closed out the register for the day and thought more about the passage of time. What if the day's sales were reversed, with patrons leaving their books for cash and Shinichi sending those books away to printers, who would deconstruct them into pulp? Either way, mutually satisfactory transactions would take place.
On the other hand, some things ended up the same in both directions, like her detective example. A book's story would be written by the elements and destroyed its author, and people–always moving on their paths through life–meet only to later part ways. In Amis, the first meeting was the end, and the last meeting was the beginning, and you'd know where a relationship would end before it even started.
In reality, Shinichi had thought he would never see Shiho again, but instead, with her wandering through his bookstore, their story had only come to a middle, with the end, unlike in Amis, yet to be seen.