Epistemology, Barry Rachin [classic novels to read .TXT] 📗

she went to bed.

* * * *

Friday morning Ronda found a message on her answering machine.

This is the last day we can hold
the Debbie Macomber book you
requested before making it readily
available to our general readership.

Respectfully,
The circulation desk
Brandenberg Public Library

At eleven o’clock an elderly lady slipped on a patch of black ice in the Supersaver parking lot. An ambulance had to be called and accident report filled out. After lunch, Ronda sat down – an impromptu meeting – with the New England regional buyer regarding a new distributor for cosmetics. Certain hair care products were being discontinued and a line of new items required shelf space.
The Debbie Macomber book. She made a mental note to swing by the library on her way home. Otherwise, the new release would go back on the shelves. At two in the afternoon, Dwight Epstein stuck his head in the door. “Got a minute?”
Ronda shoved a pile of invoices aside and stared frigidly at the youth. Even his appearance was offensive. Overly tall and disjointed, he seemed ill at ease in his ungainly body. The blond hair sat like a bushy mop on his massive head. Ronda doubted he owned a toothbrush much less a comb.
“Yes, Dwight?”
“I was pretty upset when you promoted Scotty. Not that he ain’t a nice enough guy, but, properly understood, I got seniority. What’s fair is fair.”
What’s fair is that you possess the maturity and innate intelligence to perform the entry-level job we originally hired you for. The previous week Dwight forgot to change the setting on his labeling machine and priced kiwi fruit at half the normal cost. Five hundred kiwi flew out the door before one of the girls at the checkout counter realized what was happening.
“As other management openings come available we will keep your name in the mix,” Ronda said. She didn’t bother to explain that placing someone’s name in the running didn’t mean the person received special consideration.
“When do you think that’ll be?”
“Don’t know, Dwight. But you have got to understand that promotions are based on merit. You have to bring certain personal skills to the workplace or it’s just the Peter Principle.”
His rheumy eyes clouded over. “Peter what?”
An unfortunate slip of the tongue. She wasn’t about to explain the facetious proposition that employees in an organization tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. “When we find a job that’s more suited to your particular talents,” Ronda parried the question, “we can sit down and talk.”
“Yeah, well I hope it ain’t too long. I sure as heck like produce, but I’m not gonna wait around twiddling my thumbs.” The youth shambled out the door. After Dwight was gone Ronda continued to stare morosely at the open doorway for a good half a minute longer.
No other employee at the Supersaver market would have dared talk to her in that tone. Ronda had slogged away ten solid years in the trenches before the promotion to assistant manager. And for that she was eternally grateful. Humbled! What was it with these addle-brained kids? They expected—no, demanded—a standing ovation for arriving to work on time. No need to serve apprenticeships, to work as journeymen perfecting skills. No, it was Dwight Epstein’s manifest destiny to start at the top!
The facetious proposition that employees in an organization tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At a Supersaver management seminar held the previous year in Boca Raton, the guest speaker discussed long term costs to businesses when key employees quit and went elsewhere. The company frittered away skill, talent, intelligence, leadership. Intangible assets to be sure, but ones that could mean the difference between a good store and a truly great place to work.
Democracy was the great equalizer. It leveled the playing field for dolts like Dwight Epstein threatening to dumb everyone down to a uniformed mediocrity. But that would never happen while Ronda was assistant manager. She viewed herself as a benevolent autocrat. Fair. Dispassionate. An unbiased decision maker. The Peter Principle be damned! She would make sure, that Dwight Epstein’s long-term future at Supersaver reflected the man’s intrinsic worth to the company.

* * * *

A scheduling glitch in the deli department kept Ronda at work till past seven. She drove straight for the library A massive building constructed of granite blocks, the Brandenberg Library was originally built in eighteen sixty-five. When it was renovated a few years back, the architect cleverly arranged to retain many of the building’s original features. The vestibule in the entryway sported an elaborate mosaic design, the tile imported from Genoa. Mahogany wainscoting wrapped around the walls with a matching gingerbread trim nearer the ceiling.
Only a few yards from the circulation desk, she pulled up dead in her tracks. In a reading room off the periodical section, Scotty Bergeron was hunkered down at an oak table. A hardcover book lay open in front of him. Half a minute passed. Reaching up with his right hand he flipped to the next page but only briefly before lowering it back where it originally lay.
Moving quietly forward, Ronda went directly to the circulation desk. “You’re holding a book for me.”
“Name please.” Before she could reply the front door flew open as though smashed by a battering ram and a bearded man in his early sixties staggered into the library. Disheveled with matted hair and glassy eyes, he spun about unsteadily. Almost from the moment the fellow appeared, the air reeked of cheap booze and rancid body odor.
“Excuse me.” The librarian stepped out from behind the counter. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.” She spoke in a papery-thin officious tone.
“That so?” The man’s mouth sagged open and his eyes gawked about the room without focusing on any particular object.
“You’re obviously drunk,” her voice rose to a strained falsetto, “and this is totally unacceptable.”
“I’m drunk and you’re a pain in the ass, but I don’t hold that against you.”
The drunk staggered off in the direction of the stairwell leading up to the second floor landing where the children’s’ books were located, but before he reached the first riser a sturdy hand snaked around the man’s shoulder pulling him back. “Hey, Frankie.”
The fellow blinked twice then draped both arms around Scotty Bergeron’s waist in a fierce bear hug. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“It’s getting late,” Scotty said, “and the library closing in fifteen minutes.” Propping the man upright, he coaxed the drunk back toward the foyer of the building. “Might as well head out together.”
When they were gone, the librarian noted, “That’s a sad case. The man served in Vietnam during the late sixties. Came back from the war all screwed up. Frankie Manning. His name shows up on the police blotter at least twice a month for disorderly conduct, drunkenness, loitering. He finds his way in here at least a couple of times each month. We just call the police and they swing by to collect him.”
“Does he live local?”
“The Veterans Administration got him a place over at Chelmsford Arms.”
Chelmsford Arms – a glamorous name for low-rent housing, mostly one bedroom efficiency apartments over on the east side of town that catered to welfare types, recovering alcoholics and younger people on disability pensions. Scotty Bergeron lived there, which would explain how he was on familiar terms with the bearded man. But Scotty certainly wasn’t a down-and-outer. So why was he renting in a crappy flophouse, consorting with mentally defectives and the likes of Frankie Manning? Nothing made any sense.
“I can help you now.” Having returned to her post behind the circulation desk, the receptionist was gesturing at Ronda.
She didn’t hear a word the woman said. Rather, her eyes were drawn to the quarter-sawn, white oak table in the reading room where a bulky text lay open. A woman with a toddler in tow pushed past her and deposited a load of children’s books on the polished counter. Ronda meandered unobtrusively into the reading room where she collected the abandoned text, tucking it in the crook of her left arm.
“Wittgenstein,” the librarian pressed a date stamp onto a paper flap pasted to the inside cover, “will be due back in three weeks.”
“Excuse me?” In her haste, she hadn’t even bothered to glance at the title.
The librarian pointed at the bulky tome Ronda was holding. “Your philosophy book.”

* * * *

Ronda rushed home, took a quick shower and brushed her teeth. Drip. Drip. Drip. The pitter-patter of tepid water even more insistent now, the leaky bathroom faucet had noticeably worsened. She’d call her plumber in the morning.
Ronda massaged an Oil of Olay moisturizer into the crow’s feet feathering the outer edges of her eyes. The woman first noticed the unflattering filigree when she hit the big three-0. In a mild panic, Ronda bought Frownies—packaged all-natural strips impregnated with a secret revitalizing emollient— that she plastered on either side of her face at night before going to bed. The rational was that the strips would ‘retrain’ the facial muscles, help the aging tissue regain its youthful vigor and firmness. One day in late August as she was driving to work, the assistant manager glanced in the rearview mirror and spied a beige strip of tape dangling from her right cheek. Later that evening, she threw the Frownies box along with a full three-week supply of rejuvenating strips in the trash.
In her prime, Ronda Wickford had always been reasonably attractive. High cheekbones and a dainty chin were framed by a swirl of jet black hair. It didn’t matter if she let the dense strands cascade down to the small of her back or nipped them in a jaunty pageboy. Either way, the effect was stunning. Now the aristocratic cheekbones had settled like a slightly tipsy structure searching for bedrock. And the irresistibly cute chin had a mate that Ronda air brushed away each morning with various shades of powdery cosmetics.


The book Scotty was hunched over in the reading room of the Brandenberg Public Library was a collection of essays discussing the linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Facts exist in what Wittgenstein calls "logical space" Logical space is effectively the realm of everything that is logically possible. For instance, though it is not true that Toronto is the capital of Canada, there is nothing illogical about supposing that it might be, so its possibility exists in logical space. Some items in logical space (for instance, "Ottawa is the capital of Canada") are true, while some items in logical space are false. True or false, everything in logical space is possible. "Love is purple" is not an item in logical space, because it is not logically possible (love is not the kind of thing to which we can ascribe a color).

“This is nuts!” Ronda fumed. “Pure and simple.”
Love was not something that could be assigned a color. Sure, that made sense. But in life, nothing was ever what it seemed to be. Love could make a jilted soul feel blue with misery or blood red with homicidal rage. So how did the human heart factor into the equation? Or did the illustrious Herr Professor Wittgenstein conveniently ignore that ephemeral organ?

The world is "the totality of facts, not of things", which is to say the world is the totality of lit light bulbs, not of power sources.

“Okay,” Ronda mused. “That’s a bit hard to digest but perfectly manageable.” Sitting alone in your comfy condo thinking about sex was not quite the same as what Wittgenstein might describe as “the