The email arrived with the sound an electronic goldfish might make as it surfaces to feed.

Malcolm turned and told Teddy, "Read it later."

The apartment into which the email had buh-looped was the home-office and shipping hub of Malcolm's new internet store, FantiqueShop.com, whose 6,300-item inventory had recently been hauled up from the old brick-and-mortar Fantiques storefront downstairs.

Squatting under the Myrtle Avenue El, on the treeless corner of Palmetto and Seneca, the old store had never done any real walk-in business. Most people in the Brooklyn-Queens border town of Ridgewood weren't interested in what Fantique had to offer. It sold no food or cigarettes for the adults; no candy, comic books or video games for the kids; and for everyone in between, no prophylactics or pornography. Fantique offered merchandise nobody in the neighborhood could use or, in some cases, pronounce. It sold memorabilia. Old stuff. Junk.

And not banged-up tools or toasters that could be tinkered back to life after you got home from driving your bus or digging holes for Con Ed. Fantiques sold, on the rare occasion it sold anyting, the most useless junk of all. Movie junk. TV junk. Showbiz junk. From Shirley Temple to Predator.

Among all this moldy and immobile merchandise was one item that could be considered memorabilia only to Malcolm and Teddy themselves, because only they remembered it.  Five bookcases facing the cash register sagged under 2,500 copies of Malcolm's 15-year-old, self-published, un-distributed, unread novel, "Blood Is Sicker Than Water." And while the stickers on everything else in the store were scribbled over with steadily deflating prices, Malcolm's novel was never discounted. The original $15.95 tag never budged and neither did a single copy.

Maybe this kind of store would clean up in Manhattan, where collectors could afford their ironic attachment to pop culture. But here on the corner of Palmetto Street and Seneca Avenue, nobody was spending good money on some Howdy Doody cookie jar; even if it was signed on the bottom by ClaraBel and was from the last batch ever mass-produced back in 1958, back when Malcolm and Teddy were kids. Besides, every apartment in Ridgewood was already filled with that kind of junk, because nobody ever threw anything out.

For a while, Fantique had been kept out of the red—if not in the pink—thanks to Spielberg, Lucas and Stallone. The endless Jaws, Star Wars and Rambo sequels had disgorged enough merchandise to attract a few kids who had a little money to buy a couple of light sabers—"vintage" light sabers—and help keep the doors open.

McDonald's hadn't hurt in the staying-afloat department, either. Those movie tie-in giveaways enabled Fantique to stuff the shelves without spending an extra penny, as long as 45-year-old Teddy didn't mind ordering himself a kid's Happy Meal when he picked up Malcolm's Super-sized Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Meal. And Teddy didn't mind at all. A Kid’s Happy Meal was plenty. If his mother had still been around, she'd still be calling him String Bean. And she'd still be looking at Malcolm and shaking her head. Malcolm was no String Bean. Malcolm was a whole different story...

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