Death of the Encyclopedia Salesman

On an unhurried stroll on an auburn autumn afternoon, I stumbled upon a most shocking sight. The murder had not been horrific, would never make headlines, and I harbored doubts whether or not John Q. Public would neither notice nor care. I exhaled with deep regret and bowed my head in deeper respect. With grim determination, he had once paced the pavement and stormed the streets, his unfailing dedication unhindered by the continual closing of door after door before him. I had never met this stalwart gent and had known only of his existence through the passed down tales of legend.

Or lore.

“What’s that, mommy?”

The voice of childlike innocence interrupted my heartfelt homage and I looked up in surprise.

“Just some old books, honey,” the young mother said distracted, one hand held tight to the girl, the other tighter to her Smartphone.

“Old books,” I commented from behind and sauntered alongside the pair. I turned down the collar of my khaki colored traditional trench coat and tilted up the brim of the umber fedora.

“Just. Some old. Books,” I repeated. I framed my mouth with thumb and forefinger, nodding in contemplation.

Contempt.

“C’mon, honey,” the woman urged, her voice pitched an octave higher as she ushered the child away.

“No lady,” I called after them. “This is not just a pile of mildewed, pseudo-leather encased pages,” I spat, my voice rising in volume to keep pace with the rapidly retreating pair. “These tomes are crammed full of information, data, answers to every question you can imagine.”

The little girl began to sob. My diatribe turned darker.

“Unfortunately, the only answer I seek does not reside within the withered pages of these discarded volumes,” I bellowed. “Go home to your Kindle, your iPhone, your Playstation. Better yet, take that child to the library. Let her feel the fine texture of a page. Papyrus in its earliest form. Look it up!”

The anguished cries of the little girl dwindled with distance.  My attention returned to the complete set of Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedias neatly tied in three piles at the curb, awaiting the next day’s trash pick-up.

Another important part of history erased.

All of it would disappear when the last of the bookstores, the last of the libraries, the last of papyrus dissolved into nonexistence. What would remain for archaeologists to unearth long after the physical remnants were gone and the last vestiges of humanity were stored only in a cloud somewhere?

The tremulous wail of an approaching police siren sent me hurriedly homeward, hoping to avoid an encounter with local law enforcement more interested in my recent harassment of mother and child rather than investigating the real crime here.

The Death of the Encyclopedia Salesman.

Who was he?

What had drawn him to this lonely calling?

Where had he perfected his craft?

Could it be called craft?

So many questions and with not a physical manifestation of his former subsistence in existence, I would be forced to conduct a bit of research online.

It’s a dirty place.

Online.

The encyclopedia salesman would concur.

Entrenched within my dimly lit dwelling, I raised a silent toast to him and all who followed, switched on the old CRT monitor, powered up the IBM, cracked the knuckles – for no other reason than to set the proper mood – grasped the mouse and directed the cursor to the curled orange fox always asleep on the taskbar below.

Nothing happened. The white arrow remained frozen on the screen pointing in a northwest trajectory, its latitude and longitude on the worldwide web I could not deduce. I turned the mouse over to inspect the undercarriage, the equivalent of looking stupid looking under the hood of an automobile that had simply stopped running. I was no mechanic. I wasn’t a vet either, but hadn’t needed to be to realize my mouse had died. I sighed, raised a silent toast to it as well, and drove off to the nearest electronics superstore.

“Can I help you?” asked a chipper clerk on welcome duty, adorned appropriately in company colors and bearing a nametag that read my name is Chip. Ask me about –

I ignored the suggestion and posed my own question. “Where do you keep the mice?” Purely preposterous my inquiry, I narrowed my eyes, warning off any quirky quips that might arise. With a single finger pointing roughly in the same direction my cursor had, he sent me on a long journey across the bustling landscape and while I ducked, dodged and veered, I considered a future investigation. The Death of the Old Mom and Pop Shop.
            The choices were staggering. My eyes darted left, right, up and down. There were mice everywhere.

“How can I help you?”

I whirled, and eyed this cheerful chap with the same derision, calculating just how genuine his disposition was, hiding behind a million-dollar smile on little more than minimum wage.

“I need a mouse.” I proposed.

He narrowed his eyes. “What kind of mouse?” he dealt.

I saw his play and raised him one.

“What kind of mice do you have?”
            He squinted further, trying to get a read. Behind his crafty brown eyes, I saw a slot machine spinning, stopped on two sevens already. The slightest hint of a smirk formed upon his lips. He reached for the top of the line rodent, resplendent in gold packaging. Mesmerized, my eyes widened with hypnotic fascination.

The world blurred bright.

 Immaculate.

White.

The scruffy sales clerk previously clad in trademark company garb had transformed into a sharp-dressed boy band wannabe. His hair now coifed in an impressive symmetric upsweep, he tiptoed towards me and tunefully intoned:

“Well this mouse is supersonic!”

An abrupt crash of brass accentuated his exuberance.

“Ergonomic!”

The horn section howled.

“Aero – dy - namic!”

The horns hit two times.

Salespeople to the right of me, salespeople to the left of me, all of them hyped and ready to dance.

“Why it could be Greased…”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I stopped the show, snapped from reverie right to reality with little time for revered musical numbers that would remain forever timeless.

Home at last, I marveled at the speed and fluidity of my new optical mouse, utilizing laser light rather than the old-fashioned trackball, another victim of technological advancement.

It does not take a crack detective to figure out what became of the encyclopedia salesman. He has simply become obsolete. Obsolescence not a criminal act, this case is officially closed. I am not finished yet however. Last night, unable to sleep on my sagging sofa, I caught the last moments of an infomercial while restlessly channel surfing. Another unfortunate soul has mysteriously gone missing under eerily similar circumstances. The vacuum cleaner salesman. This time there’s a trail. Someone called “The Shark,” with a particularly evil weapon at his side, a robot called the “Roomba.”

A sick play on words.

“Roomba.”

Rumba.

A dance.

The dance of life?

Or death!

TJM - Dec, 2018