Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

made Shane into a sort of hero over it, behind his back. Although, as I’ve stated, we didn’t like him. He was a good worker, and some even said he was a good supervisor, I’ll admit that—but no better than the rest of us. We’re all good workers.
    Sometimes, even early on in his employment with our bookstore, Shane had a far-off stare, which was strictly against bookstore policy. I cannot stress that enough: Shane often said or did things that were against corporate policy. Not explicitly against policy—not the formal policies—but still things no one else said or did.
    For example, once, during a slow day, we were both standing around the cash register, Shane staring out the window, when he said to me, “I’ll bet it’s not snowing in Sarajevo.” Now, the weirdest thing about what he said is that it wasn’t snowing here. So I don’t know why he would say that. It didn’t make sense. Besides, who’s to say it wasn’t snowing in Sarajevo at that moment? It might very well have been snowing in Sarajevo. Thee might have been a blizzard for all Shane knew. That bothered me for a long time, to tell the truth.
    Another time, Shane actually paid for a book for a customer, and it wasn’t even because he liked her, if you know what I mean. He felt sorry for her! Which also doesn’t make sense. When someone can’t afford groceries, that’s a tragedy. When they can’t afford a book, that’s just a shame. Maybe she told him it wasn’t snowing in Sarajevo. I have no idea.
    But all of this happened before the boat, and it was manageable, these little things he did that made him unlike the rest of us. (Although I think it’s all relevant. Even the kiss in the graveyard, which I may get back to later in this report; I was given no directions to follow in making this report, so I think it’s best if I just get it all down and let you guys in HQ worry about what should be in it and what shouldn’t be in it.)
    The boat was just like . . . like a physical manifestation of his strangeness. He’d been borrowing books about boats secretly for awhile before he asked our manager if he could build one on a lot not far from our bookstore.
    I still remember hearing our manager snort when Shane asked him. I was kneeling in the history section, facing copies of William Vollman’s latest, and they were in Politics, just one shelf over. He snorted and said something like, “What would you want to do that for?”
    And Shane replied, “I’m going to build the boat and then I’m going to leave for the ocean.”
    Our manager snorted again and said, “No, really. Is it some kind of hobby?”
    Slowly, Shane said, “I guess you could call it that.”
    And our manager was so amused—and bored, too, probably—that he told Shane that he could build a boat if he wanted to.
    That was eighteen months ago. Now that the boat is built and Shane is gone, it doesn’t seem funny anymore, even to those of us who are still bored. At first, it didn’t seem like he was serious. A boat? Near the bookstore? How could one man build a boat, anyway? It turned out he could, but very slowly. He started out by buying lumber for scaffolding. Then he bought lumber for the hull. One weekend, his friends must have come out and helped him, because when I got there on Monday (I don’t work weekends; that’s what seniority and an assistant manager badge can get you) about two months after he’d started, the scaffolding was all in place, along with ten long curved beams for the hull. I remember looking at it and thinking it was some abstract sculpture, like the stuff in the more boring books in our Art section. It didn’t look like a boat back then. It looked like a mess. A few of us stood out back at lunch time and we laughed as we watched Shane work on it. He’d get no more done than bolting something in place to something else in an hour—I can’t pretend to know enough about boat-building to give you the technical terms. To us it was clear: