Pinned
Back in March, I found this book at the back of my bookshelf. I don't know how it got there. I didn't remember ever buying it, much less reading it. It had the most ornate cover, as if someone had done an oil painting on an old hard-cover book. In fact, that seemed to be what it was exactly. Just like an oil painting, it had bumps and ridges, and if I had the heart to do it, I probably could have picked at it and flicked little chips of colour off with my fingers. The cover depicted several different images, but was sufficiently abstract to make me doubt my interpretation. It reminded me of a smouldering firepit set against a twisting whirlwind of leaves and strange debris: splinters of wood, the bits of plastic that connect 6-packs, old shoelaces, chunks of a gilded picture frame, and even something that looked like the severed legs of some poor creature. If you saw it, you’d probably see something else. I spent a fair bit of time staring at that cover. With the book splayed out it made for a beautiful but disturbing landscape. It was actually a few days before I even looked at the pages, I was so taken with the cover. When I finally got around to looking inside , I was surprised to find that the pages were blank. I flipped through them a few times, incredulous. My first thought was, this is a journal, or a sketchbook . But it wasn't. The book had an ISBN number, a bar code, and a bunch of information on the inside page. On the other side of the cover was the following: Of course, there were a few other things on the page. But the thing that shocked me, what made my stomach throw itself down into the basement of my body, was the line Thank you, Acton . It really struck me. Because my name is Acton. I've never met another Acton. What can I tell you about my name? It’s uncommon. It’s usually the first on any list of names. What else? People have a hard time making fun of it. Your standard school-yard bully wasn’t clever enough to come up with a quip for Acton . So, I was surprised to see my name, being thanked from this very personal, empty book. And as you might guess, my next move was to go over to the computer and look this thing up. I searched for the book's title online and plunged into reading all about it. Here's what I learned: That was about it. I found the regular stuff, you know, people sharing their reviews and ratings and whatnot. But here's what was odd. The photos I saw of the book's cover looked different than the one I had before me. And of course, the pages of mine were blank. I re-checked the cover of the book to make sure, yet again, that it wasn't just some kind of wrapper around another book. It wasn't. It was a hardcover book that someone had painted . I ran my fingers over the paint. It was paint, no doubt about it. And open the cover, and there was that first page with my name staring back at me. But I'm rambling at this point. That was back in March. Let’s fast-forward a few weeks to when the book started to talk to me. Things got weird in early April. I had the book open on my desk. I wasn't sure why I opened it. I think I had been admiring the cover in the morning sunlight coming through the wide window above my desk. When I opened the book, the pages smelled of a newness I hadn't noticed before: starchy and pleasingly rough to the touch, like the high-quality pages of paper in an artist's sketchbook. It seemed to hold the promise of possibility. I felt compelled to take a photo of the book. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone. Then, with the blank pages before me, in a rush, the book slurped up my phone. It slurped it right out of my hands and collected it onto the first empty page. Don't misunderstand me—this book very literally liquefied my phone, sucking it up and rearranging its physical form into a two-dimensional representation of my phone—right down to the small crack in the bottom-right corner. I stared at the miniature picture on the page: it was a rather painterly depiction, not unlike the cover of the book. I spent some time admiring the rendering. Entranced, I almost moved to take a photo of it but, of course, my phone was gone. That's when things got interesting. It was hard to operate without my phone. I knew I was addicted to it, sure, but I didn't realize how dependent I was on it. It immediately caused a fuss for my job. I worked part-time for a distress hotline for teenagers who are in a bad way. Employees of the hotline have a special application on their phone ensuring the calls can be encrypted and recorded safely while retaining anonymity. So, when I didn't "show-up" online for my job that day not only did I likely miss showing up for people who needed help, but I wasn't going to get my measly pay for the shift. I felt worse about not being there for the teens, of course. I had enough money to get by for the immediate future. But the thought of some youths calling the hotline and being on hold when I could have been there to answer made me feel terrible. But not terrible enough to tear myself away from the strange situation I found myself in. It was through the blank pages that Myriam was able to reach me. It happened a few days after my phone had been slurped up into a page of the book. That morning, I came back to the book at my desk with my morning tea in hand. I sat down, and stared once more at the painted cover, before slowly opening it to the page with the little image of my phone in the corner. Slowly, words began to appear on the left page of the book, beautifully typeset, as if punched in by a typewriter, one letter at a time. I knew in an instant that it was Myriam. In my shock of seeing this happen for the first time, I could barely register that as her writing got to the end of the page, the whole thing cleared and started again. I don't remember the exact words of our first conversation, but I think it went something like this: Then the words began to disappear. I grabbed a scrap of paper and wrote down Hoke Scripter and Able-Archive Pigmented Blue Ink . And then the words were gone. Now I had something else to do. A week passed before I found the ink. Right after I got that message from Myriam, I went online and looked up Able-Archive Pigmented Blue . I wasn't surprised to find that the ink was no longer in production. It would be too easy to click "Add to cart" on a bottle of ink, and wait a few days for it to show up at my door. Instead, I found myself on forums for pen-and-ink fanatics, reading, reading, reading about this ink. Often, I saw that people had inherited a bottle from an older relative (along with some old, fancy pens to boot). Other people wrote posts online to laud this ink as a workhorse ink and that not many people made them like this anymore . I found myself enjoying going through these posts. After a day or two of looking, I found a post of someone selling a bottle of Able-Archive Pigmented Blue . They were across the country but it seemed they would ship it my way. I sent them a direct message and inquired about purchasing the ink: And that was it. Soon I would have some Able-Archival Pigmented Blue ink, along with its contractual-binding-powers. Whatever that meant. Waiting for the ink made for a strange week. I had to pause work entirely. After missing my first shift, I sent an e-mail to my coordinator letting them know I would be taking some time off. I didn't tell them the part about my phone getting sucked into a book, of course. That would be too weird. Instead, I told them I needed to take a break from work—and in this line of work they get it. So I sent off that e-mail, apologizing again for the shift I missed, and saying I would reach out when I was ready to return to work. My schedule was full of empty slots. I almost felt like I had just finished school and was at the beginning of summer vacation. I had all the time in the world to hunt down stationery and whatever other obscure things I felt like searching for. Next up, of course, was a Hoke Scripter — the pen Myriam had requested I use. This turned out to be no trouble at all. There are a few stationary shops in town. I went out to three before I was able to track down the Hoke Scripter over at Infinite Inkwell . I had never been in before. The shop was basically a large stone room. Along the rounded walls were recessed cubbies of various sizes and shapes, holding all kinds of objects. There was one portion of the wall that held rows and rows of inks, while others had glass drawers that pulled out of the cubbies, displaying pens, pencils and other writing implements of all kinds. In the center of the room was a large round table where you could sit, perhaps for testing pens or paper. There was only one person at the table, hunched over. They had a huge stack of paper and they were furiously writing. After finishing a page they would, without looking, add it to the growing stack to their left before pulling a new page from a pile of crisp sheets to their right. I wasn’t sure if they were an employee, another customer, or something more random and bizarre. My staring was interrupted by a staff member, who offered me some assistance. They led me over to the cubbies with the glass drawers, specifically pointing out a row of pens in deep blue, green, and red hues. "These are the Hoke Scripters. They’ve got a classic appeal, perhaps you can see." "I do see a certain classic air to them," I agreed. "And what might you be looking for in a pen, may I ask?" "Oh well," I began, unsure what to say. "I’m looking for a pen that my grandmother mentioned she used to use in her youth. I think it was this one." I felt strange lying to the employee, who was just looking to help me. "Well, The Hoke Scripter is a model from Hoke that has existed for many years. It is likely that your grandmother could have used an earlier incarnation of one of these." "Cool," I said flatly. "Would you like to try it?" the staff asked. "Why not." I said, flatter than flat. Flatter than a pancake. Flat enough to write on. The staff member disappeared for a moment and reappeared with a tester Hoke Scripter. She passed me the pen. I held it in my hand, lifting and lowering it experimentally. It felt pretty sturdy. It certainly wasn’t cheap plastic. Too heavy, and too elegant for plastic. Aluminum? I would have to look it up later. The staff gestured for me to grab a seat at the large round table, to test the pen out. I joined the strange character, still writing furiously at the big table, and I did exactly that. I wrote a few lines. Then a few squiggles. What can I say? The Hoke Scripter moved like a pen does, leaving a trail of itself wherever my hand moved. I suppose I was perhaps expecting something more majestic from a pen with such a history. But there was nothing majestic about it. It was just a pen. It felt sturdy in my hands, and it did have a nice pattern on the barrel, and I supposed a person could customize it with whatever ink they liked. But what else was there to say? "What do you think?" The staff member reappeared after a few minutes of my scribbling and scratching with the pen. "Um, it’s nice." "The scripter can be a bit underwhelming, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. It’s not our most flashy or popular pen, but I think the people who come to buy this pen always have a certain, well, intentionality to them. Let me know if you need any other help or have any other questions." The staff member disappeared, leaving me to write some more. I didn’t spend much more time in the shop. I bought the pen, and it cost me a whopping $55. I could hardly believe it. That price included something called a converter which I was told I needed: it would hold the ink I wanted to use with the pen. I walked away from the shop to get into my car to go home. I grumbled under my breath. Oh, the intentionality of dropping $55 on a pen. The weekend arrived without much fanfare. I was feeling a bit naked and aimless. Without my phone, my fingers fidgeted with the accumulated bits and bobs of things around the kitchen counter and table: a magazine that had been sitting there for weeks, some dirty cutlery, a notepad from the dollar store, and a rubber band. I sat there, with the sun rising around me, spinning that rubber band about my index finger, waiting for life to wake up around me. Eventually, I got up and I poured some cereal into a bowl, made myself a coffee, and sat back down to eat. I grabbed a pen and flipped open the cheap notepad. One of the spiral ones that could fit in a shirt or pants pocket. It had already had a few pages ripped out of it. Then I remembered I had gotten it out when I had a few friends over to play cards last week. I briefly looked at the tally marks of our scores. I ripped out the page and noted that the tally marks had imprinted on the cheap paper below. I turned to my cereal. If I left it any longer it would get soggy. What would I do with my day? It would be another few days before the ink would arrive, and this strange episode in my life was on hiatus until it appeared. I poured myself another cup of coffee and threw myself down on the couch. I stared into the old fireplace in the corner of the room, long since used. Outside, cars were idling in the street, and traffic was already picking up. I could tell by the exhaust rising up to the window. The exhaust of a home fireplace had been replaced with the exhaust of cars. I moved closer to the window and looked at the traffic. They were stuck, too, waiting in line. All of us waiting for some kind of ink, something permanent to arrive. I stood there and took a sip of my coffee. Just watching. I didn’t want to open the book. If I did, there was a chance that Myriam would speak to me again. Perhaps I should say she would write to me again. And if I couldn’t write back without the correct ink, she might lose interest. Perhaps she only had so much strength with which to communicate with the outside world. I figured that if I didn’t open the book, she would stay in some kind of stasis; her life frozen in the permanency of the page. In that sense, I supposed I had time. I sighed, finished my breakfast and got up. I wasn’t going to get anywhere sitting around thinking. My hands reached for my phone, only to find it missing from my pocket for the fiftieth time today. I thought about e-mailing a friend and seeing if they wanted to get together over a coffee, or maybe go for a drink later tonight. I popped open my computer, opened my e-mail and stared at the empty draft. I started to write without addressing the message to anyone yet. I looked at the "To" field of the e-mail. I clicked the "plus" button and a pop-up appeared with a list of some of my most frequent e-mail recipients. I started adding all the people I thought might reach out. Before long I had sent the e-mail to some fourteen people. Some of them I had spoken with as recently as last week and some I had not seen in years. Then, I moved all the e-mail addresses into the BCC field so that the recipients wouldn’t know who else had been e-mailed. That’s the decent way to do it, in case you were wondering how e-mail works. I hit Send , shut the laptop, and started cleaning up. I decided that I should go for a walk. It was still early, and there wouldn’t be many people out. Never mind that it was the dead of winter. I watched the cars on the road from my apartment. They always seemed to be perpetually lined up, exhaust rising into my view. What a view. I always go back and forth in my mind whether I should have taken the apartment at the top of the building. When I moved into this place it was either this, the second floor where I am now, or the top floor. All the units on the first and third floor had been occupied. I eventually chose the second floor because I thought I wouldn’t want to move everything up four floors (there’s no elevator). But from here, I was a bit too close to the action. After having lived here for a year or so, I think being on the fourth floor would have been better. A bit more removed from the commotion, the exhaust, the closeness to the ground. Besides, I figure I could use the exercise of an extra two flights of stairs each day. I pulled on my hoodie and tossed a thin jacket over top, shoved on my boots and stepped into the hall. It would only be a short walk, so I wouldn’t need any more layers. I didn’t even have my gloves. Outside, I stepped between the idling cars with their anonymous drivers, and took the back alley behind Jason’s Grocer out toward Delmont Ave. It was still early and the alley was quiet, as I expected. I passed a few piles of garbage outside the backs of the commercial buildings and kept walking. The alley narrowed past the point cars could reach and I kept walking. I took a left at Montrain and walked the ten minutes to Gaston park. A few more minutes of walking, past the fountains, shut off for the winter, until I was on one of the trails. Despite its confusing mess of criss-crossing trails, it made for a great escape from the city. I walked through the park, listening to my feet occasionally deviate from their regular cadence, kicking and tripping over bits and pieces of trail. A few runners passed, and even one cross-country skiier, although it seemed the snow was a bit thin for it. All these people had headphones in, plugged into a world of their devising. I had nothing to listen to but the sounds of crunching snow, birds in the barren trees, and the far off sounds of cars starting and stopping and occasional honking. I reached the end of the trail and then turned around. I was growing restless and feeling disconnected. I had seen people IRL, sure, but I could feel myself growing increasingly uneasy. I knew this was likely due in part, if not entirely, to my phone being sucked into a book. I knew this because my hands still kept patting at my pants or jacket pocket, thinking my phone was there, within reach and ready to soothe whatever restless thought came my way. I walked back home in a funk. I had not anticipated that I would feel this sort of withdrawal. When my phone had been liquefied and sucked into the page of that book, well, you could say I was somewhere between amused and bemused. But now I was starting to feel agitated. I took a few deep breaths and tried to tune into the sounds of the world again, but, instead, my ears just pounded as if they were trying to tell me to plug something into them, shove anything in: a podcast, some music, anything but this overly-present, disgusting excuse-for-nature around me. I picked up my pace to a point where I was almost running. I exited the trail where I came in. There were more people now: some of them sledding down the large hill facing east, others with their dogs, families with kids running after each other. I walked a few more paces and then looked back at the entrance of the trail. It looked light and entreating. I found a bench to sit down on and looked over at the people in the park. I was sweating underneath my two layers. The sounds of the children laughing ricocheted through the air and slammed into my eardrums. Cars passed by with a roar I had hardly noticed before. I put my face in my hands and pulled at my skin, as if I had a tight mask on that needed to come off. No such luck. Instead, I rested my chin in the palm of my hand, my elbow on my knee. I looked down at the ground before me. There were a few spare bits of garbage before me, empty weed canisters, a pop bottle that someone had peeled the label off of, and a large ribbon that looked like it belonged on a kite. I just didn’t care enough to pick up any of it and throw it away. Why should I, I thought miserably, when I felt like this? When I got home, I immediately threw open my computer to see if anyone had responded to my email. Not a word. I shut it in frustration, slid it away from me on the coffee table, and slumped back into the couch until I was lying horizontally. I didn’t know what time it was, but it was probably close to lunch. My phone was also my watch, like for most people. Without a clock in the room, I resigned myself to not knowing what time it was. I simply closed my eyes and lay there. I imagined the fumes of the cars, still lined up outside waiting for their turn to go somewhere , rising up and lulling me into a noxious sleep. And I did fall asleep. And I started to dream. In my dream, I was walking with someone. Not in the park this time, and not in the city either, really. It seemed we were walking across a bridge. It was foggy all around us. I could not tell if the bridge was going over water, or if it was going over a highway, or something else entirely. Looking over the edge of the bridge, it could be spanning a valley full of turtles, or lava, or a great black emptiness. I walked on, my eyes periodically darting to the side of the bridge, wondering at the mist below. All this time, my walking partner had been talking, but I had not listened to a single word. I turned to look at them. It was Myriam. I knew it immediately, there in the dream. She was exactly as I had pictured her, based on our first conversation. She had a sad wilt to her, like flowers left in the sun on a kitchen table too long. She looked back at me, perhaps wondering if I had heard anything I had said. I said I was sorry, but this didn’t seem to reset anything between us. "Will you ever respond to me? I’ve been wondering this every day, Acton." "I will, I’m just not ready yet," I replied. My words clumsily escaped from me. I watched them tumble over the bridge into the mass of fog. "I hope you do," she said. "You have the ink and the pen, right?" "I do." I said, which was strange because I knew the ink had not yet arrived. We walked in silence for a few minutes. The bridge was the only concrete thing within the fog and seemed to go on forever, disappearing into the misty distance. "I just need some time to get my thoughts into place," I said, facing forward so my words would come out right in front of us, and not get swept away into the abyss. Myriam’s hair was a steely gray, and she wore it loose, down to her shoulders. Every now and then, a muggy breeze would come and push it beyond her shoulders, like the swinging doors of a saloon in an old Western film. I imagined foggy, unseen spectres passing through the doors of her shoulders into a place I couldn’t go. "Whenever you’re ready," I heard her say. We walked some more. Then she began to shrink, and I began to grow. With each step, she got smaller and I got larger. Before long, I was trying to avoid crushing her with my feet. I couldn’t continue walking beside her and instead had to step out of the bridge and into the unknown fog. My first step came down unsteadily, but with such grandiosity that the fog cleared and was swept away, the weight of my footstep pushing it outward. All around my foot, I saw a verdant greenness, twisting vines, lush ferns, and tall grasses. All this I saw for only a moment before the fog returned to surround my foot. I grew larger still, and the following step with my left foot required straddling the bridge. By now, Myriam was long gone, and I was so tall I couldn’t see what the displaced fog would reveal. Despite not being able to see that far down, I knew that my next step would not yield the previously lush green ground; for a hundred, or maybe a thousand years had passed since my previous step, and things had surely changed for the worse. So I stopped in my tracks, afraid of advancing time any farther or growing any larger, of stomping out any other life in my next movements. I knew the next movements I would make would decide the fate of all of life. My next step would be like a thousand atom bombs, and there would be nothing left of this world. I took a step, and I was right. It all ended. And then I woke up. I sat up on the couch and groggily mused over my dream. It was starting to fade already. I didn’t feel like writing it down, but I tried to remain with the feeling of being a giant. Of a being so large that they can’t even see what their giant steps are obliterating, the world so far below them. I made myself a coffee and lay down on the couch, the cup just within my reach. Periodically, I pulled it to my face, and carefully sipped it from my lying down position. A most precarious way of drinking a coffee. I looked at my laptop on the couch. It was calling to me. A silent notification, ringing in my ears. I wanted to hear from someone. Anyone. I set my coffee on the table next to the couch and pulled it onto my lap and opened my e-mail client. Before me was a single unread message in my e-mail inbox: I looked at the e-mail. It took me a moment to register the name. Casey. Casey was a friend from high school. We hadn’t talked in quite some time. The last time we had gotten together, she and I had indeed gone for dinner. It had been a patio brunch in the middle of summer. I looked over the list of people I had sent my original e-mail to. Casey was my oldest friend among the list. The two of us had met in the school wrestling club, two odd ducks who had picked the wrong club to join. We had bonded over discussing mechanical magazines, web forums for Arkendo’s Binding , a game we both loved, and the fact that neither of us actually wanted to be in wrestling club. All this talking we did over the slam of teenage bodies against thinly padded mats. I can almost hear it now. I responded quickly, and effortlessly—the kind of correspondence that happens with people you really just click with. Short and sweet. Save the questions for when we get together. I snapped my laptop closed and thought about this making of plans without a phone. I wouldn’t be able to check in with her leading up to the dinner. I felt a sweet anticipation already growing in me. I got up and busied myself with making some lunch. I chewed my food, staring out the kitchen window. I tidied up. I started putting away dishes that had piled up over the previous few days when the buzzer rang for my apartment. I pressed the intercom and asked who it was. In response I simply heard a muted thump . My apartment not having a camera to watch approaching people, I had no choice but to go see what it was. I clomped down the stairs to the lobby to where people leave packages outside the rickety, old door that served as the gateway to the lobby. I poked my head out and felt a blast of cold wind and snow hit me right in the face. I looked down. There was a small package, clumsily wrapped. I picked it up. It didn’t weigh much. My name was on it. There was no return address, but beside a simple "from:" label I saw a familiar name: NibTuner79. The ink was here. I took the package inside and brought it up to my apartment. I clumsily picked away at several layers of clear tape with my fingernails before giving up and cutting open the brown parcel paper to reveal the ink. The inkwell was round with a square neck, ice blue. It was filled 3/4 full with the ink. I turned it in my hands, taking in its shape and the rich blue colour swirling with the movement of the inkwell. I stopped so that the label faced me: a simple white label with a black border and the serif text: Able-Archive Pigmented Blue. There was no logo, no insignia, no brand to speak of. For all I knew, NibTuner79 could have filled any old empty bottle of ink with some random, cheap blue ink. But it seemed unlikely. I wasn’t exactly a collector of these sorts of things, but as far as I could tell, honesty went fairly far in the world of nerds and gearheads. I chuckled to myself, because I felt quite honest thinking that. I was on my way to becoming one of them. I put the ink down on the desk next to Myriam's Codebreakers and the Hoke Scripter. I had all three. The trifecta. I could crack open the book and write something. I stared down at the book and its painted cover. To my right was a freshly inked pen. To my left, a quickly cooling cup of tea. I drummed my ink-stained fingers on my desk—I had quickly learned that filling a pen could be a very messy job. I wondered how staining archival ink was. I would find out soon enough, I supposed. I picked up the inked pen in my hand. Despite now having just a few millilitres of ink in it, it seemed to feel heavier. Potent. No longer an inert stick, but a poised snake. I could feel my hesitation mounting, but I knew it was time to act. I opened the book with the fingers that had remained unstained by the act of filling the pen. I flipped to the page where Myriam’s text had first appeared and where there was still the image of my phone on the page. I wrote underneath the depiction of my phone: I could feel myself running out of things to say. I looked down at the pen in my hand. I looked down at my writing. It was messy and seemed to switch between cursive and printing at random. I had hoped I would have come up with something more meaningful or interesting to say. I leaned back in my chair. I was uninteresting. I was offline. Were the two interchangeable for me? I was a spectator of myself, watching my events unfold in a terrible synchronicity that had me simultaneously bored and amused. Despite all the separation anxiety of being without my phone, of not working my regular shifts, of what felt like just wandering around aimlessly, I was becoming a subject of my own life. My old life, my digital life, was in the hands of Myriam, a woman, I presumed, in a book by an author named Solah J. Trek. I rotated and twirled the Hoke Scripter in my fingers and stared at my paragraph, re-reading it for the second time. As I read, the words began to disappear into the page. It seemed that as soon as I finished reading a sentence, one by one, the words of it would sink into the nothingness of the page. By the time I got to the end of my second paragraph it was all but gone. I stared in astonishment at the empty page. The painted image of my phone was still there in the corner. I shifted uneasily in my chair, breaking a silence that had settled in the room. Then, a voice appeared in my head, and I realized it was from myself reading words on the page—Myriam was responding. I pounded down the apartment stairs, my messenger bag banging against my back. Every moment an eternity . Every step, the thump of my bag against me—muffled and extinguished by the muted stairwell. I threw open the front door, nearly hitting another resident of the apartment on the way in. I took hardly any notice of them. I was back outside again. I was to meet Casey at 7pm at Deep Blue, a gastrobar about a fifteen minute walk from my apartment. On my wrist: an old watch I had found in my bedside table. In my bag: a strange book, slung on my back. I walked quickly, trying to make sense of things. After seeing Myriam’s message I had stared blankly at it, shut the book, and got up in a daze. At first I felt unsafe, the target of some kind of operation that was beyond my comprehension, beyond my plane of existence, even. The message in the book had disappeared within minutes, maybe seconds after my reading it, and had left me staring at an empty page. Somehow, Myriam had known about my rendezvous with Casey. At first, I was confounded. I walked and mulled. The questions in my mind turned over and over, scratching at an imagined blank page. I turned onto Range Ave and crossed over to the other side, stepping around parked cars and stopped at the curb. I stood on the cobblestone walk that marked the beginning of the old downtown. I studied my shoes against the unevenly placed stones. I stood hunched there, losing my gaze to the ground while the world spun around me. I wasn’t sure why I had stopped. It was as if I was frozen—I couldn’t move my body save for the clenching and unclenching of my hands. All the while that I stood like this, I felt an eerie sixth sense, as if a great wave was going to crash over me. I stood wanting to look back but resolving not to. Eventually, I broke free. I could move again. I didn’t look back. Everything clicked in that first footstep out of that immobile state. My questions answered: Myriam had read the message from Casey through my phone—my phone that was still somehow working in another ethereal realm. It was clear to me now. Myriam was reading my e-mails. She was in a real-time lock-step with me. She was stuck in her own eternity, watching the stream of data of my life move past her, watching and absorbing it as she liked. I continued down the cobblestone path at a reasonable rate, minding my step for the occasional uneven stone, until the sign of Deep Blue came into view. The downtown was bustling with people, despite the cold weather and snow. Half of them could well be tourists, periodically stopping to find their way with maps on their phones, or to send a message to someone out of view, out of picture, someone who might be at the other end of the world—and it seemed they had to do this in the middle of the sidewalk. I found myself grumbling. I had become moodier in the preceding days. I reached the door to Deep Blue and stopped, feeling an impulse to message Casey and say I had arrived. I couldn’t, of course. Instead, one of us would have to go into the restaurant and be there waiting for the other. We hadn’t agreed to stand outside and wait to go in together. But there I was, standing outside, surveying the landscape of downtown, searching for a familiar face in a crowd of strangers. I stood staring for a minute. I wanted to shake myself out of this slump I was sliding into. I hadn’t seen Casey in years and this wasn’t the disposition I wanted to show up with. I had nothing to prove to her, of course, but it would have been nice to let her know that I wasn’t losing my mind. Which I might have been. I headed into Deep Blue. "Acton!" I was stomping through Deep Blue when I heard my name called out. Casey’s voice pulled me out of the mud. You might even say my heart soared at the sound of her voice. That’s what the voice of an old friend can do to you. I had been in my own head too much—and it was only her voice cutting through the bog of my thoughts that made me realize it. I made my way to her table. She had gotten a small booth at the back of the restaurant. I looked at my watch. It was 7:02. The restaurant was bustling. She jumped up, arms outstretched for a hug as I approached. She was wearing a colourful knit sweater, loose and baggy. I sank into her arms and found myself breathing in deeply. In her arms, I felt something stirring in me. In a friend, even one you hadn’t seen in some time: support, meaning, connection, a feeling of being grounded. I could have stood in her arms, in the way of the staff and the customers in the middle of that restaurant for the rest of the night. Instead, I grew self-conscious that I would be the one holding on longer than her. I let go. I sat down, tossing my bag haphazardly (forgetting what was in it) into the corner of my side of the booth. As soon as I sat down we were immediately swarmed by the staff. We both held our tongues, not wishing to begin the business of our catching-up in the immediate presence of others. We put in an order for some appetizers. As promised, Casey put in an order for two drinks, the same for the both of us. Then, we were left to ourselves. I checked my watch again, expecting it to be 8pm already. It was 7:09. "This is a pleasant surprise," I found myself saying. Between us, there was a small center-piece with a lit candle. The flame of it danced under the whims of my opening remarks. "Agreed." Casey took a sip of her water and I watched her. "You’re the only person who e-mailed me back. I didn’t expect anything from anyone, I suppose, but I was surprised that you were up for it." "Why’s that?" "I don’t know, it’s been some time since we got together. People get in their head about that sort of thing," I said. "Which is funny, don’t you think? Maybe you were surprised I was interested, when most people would think old friends from the past make for awkward communications. But I’ve never really felt that way. People weave in and out of each others lives over the years. It’s normal. Something to be grateful for, really." "That’s insightful," I said, pausing to sip my water, "I suppose I’m also a little surprised—I would have thought that the people I had been messaging with over my phone just weeks ago would get back to me when I e-mailed them, but instead it was the opposite." "How many people did you send your message to?" "Thirteen or fourteen," I said. "E-mail is old, now. It’s a dumping ground." "I guess." "So the phone is gone. And it pushed you to reach out to some old friends." I tasted my drink, which had appeared moments ago. I had already forgotten what she had ordered. It definitely had some gin in it, but maybe some lemon and honey, too. "Gone…" I echoed back to her. "Yes, temporarily." "What do you mean?" She asked. "Well, it’s a bit of an odd story," I said. My eyes shot to my bag in the corner. Casey’s look followed my eyes to the bag, slumping in its seat of the booth. "This is a really good drink." I said. "Acton, quit being so vague. What happened to your phone? What’s in your bag?" This is what I liked about Casey. She was to the point, and she sometimes made herself laugh in that way. She wasn’t laughing now, though. "Well, my phone…" I said, trailing off again. How much did I actually want to share about this? I looked at my bag again and reached for it. "Well, it would be easier to just show you." Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see Casey watching me as I opened my messenger bag, and pulled out the book that had started all of this. "What’s that?" "Well, it’s supposed to be a novel, but look—" I opened the page to where the image of my phone resided and passed it over to her. "When I opened this book—" Casey received the book in her hands, when I realized what I had just done. I lurched across the table to take it back, but it was already too late. Myriam, the book, whatever it was in there, had slurped up Casey’s phone too. Before Casey could even cry out, her phone appeared next to mine in the corner of the page in the very same painterly style as mine. "Fuck." Casey looked up at me in disbelief, while simultaneously patting the table where her phone had been seconds ago. "It’s gone," I said flatly. "What the hell, Acton! What just happened?" "I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was going to happen again. I—I was going to show you. Look—that’s my phone. It slurped up my phone." I paused, "And there’s yours," I pointed dumbly. "I can see that, Acton, now show me the trick to return them back!" "Ah-ha," I laughed weakly. "There isn’t one." Casey lifted herself out of her seat and looked around the restaurant wildly, as if she was expecting to see cameras from a reality TV show pop out of nowhere. She sat back down and took a deep breath, followed by a large gulp of her drink. "Explain yourself." I figured this was not going to turn out to be the dinner I had hoped for. Casey looked at me for a good minute before she spoke. I had just finished explaining everything: from the moment I had picked up the book to right before I had left my apartment after communicating with Myriam for the second time. I hadn’t told her about the dream I had had, though. "This is insane." "It is insane," I confirmed. Her eyes drilled into me. Mostly, she looked furious. But eventually, that fury gave way to an uneasy look. "So, if I were to take this book, walk over to that table over there," she nodded to her right, "and plop it in front of that bald dude, it would slurp up his phone." "I’m pretty sure," I said. "It has only happened twice, and there might be other conditions necessary for it to happen. Maybe the phone needs to be within a certain distance from the page, or maybe the person had to be holding the book open. I don’t know." "Well, I don’t know, either," Casey sounded exasperated. "But I’m really tempted to try." "He might not take it as well as you did," I said uneasily. I looked over at the guy Casey had gestured to. He didn’t look like the thumping type, but who knows, he could probably beat us to kingdom come. "This is fucked up. What about this bitch in the book?" "Hey, I don’t know that you need to call her a bitch." "She certainly seems like a manipulative bitch! She used you to steal all my information. By what you told me, right now she’s scanning all my messages, pictures, and e-mails." "She could be," I said, putting my head into my hands. "Sounds like a real bi–" "—Look, call her what you want," I said, cutting off Casey, "but I believe what she said about being stuck in the book." Casey picked up the book and nervously opened it, as if it might suck her entire self right into its empty pages. Hey, it might as well have. It turned out that the impossible was possible. Or maybe I should say, the very strange and unreal had been made real. "Solah J. Trek," Casey muttered. "That’s the author," I said, just catching Casey’s words. "I know," Casey said, her eyes widening in annoyance. "I’d look her up if I had my phone, " Casey said curtly. "Look—you can be mad about this all you want, but like it or not—huh," I paused. "What?" "I never looked up the author. And she told me to. 'Take it up with my author,' Myriam had said, or something like that. I never did. I must have been too shocked by what had happened." "Or were you too busy cooing over your new love Myriam, " Casey snapped at me. Underneath the anger I could see she was still able to tease me. Maybe she was feeling a bit better. I blushed, thinking about the dream I had in which I had walked, shoulders side by side, with Myriam—until I had grown too big, and her too small. "She’s too old for me," I muttered. "From 1955, by the looks of it," Casey said smartly, and snapped the book shut. She paused and looked at me again. I could see her fingers moving absently across the painted cover of the book. "Let’s go back to your place. You’re still on Hatchet Ave, yeah?" "Yeah." "Well, let’s go look her up. I’m not leaving until we get to the bottom of this. After all, I use my phone to unlock the door to my apartment." "You do?" "And guess what else," she said, tapping the table. "The bill?" "That’s right." "Well, I owed you a dinner anyway, didn’t I?" I asked, as I waved the waiter down to order. We trudged back through the snow to my place. With Casey there, there was none of that walking and stopping to feel like I was about to get hit by an invisible wave. Sure, I felt uneasy, but at least with Casey beside me I had someone to shoot the breeze with. We ended up catching up more on the walk home than we did over dinner. I was surprised she didn’t want to drill me with more questions about Myriam. I patted the book, tucked away in my messenger bag at my side as we walked. It was still there. My compulsive checking to make sure my phone was in my pocket had been replaced by something else. I learned plenty about Casey as we walked. In the years since we had last gotten together, she had gone through some life changes that made my life look as plain and untroubled as a bulletin board in an elementary school. Her Mom had died just months after we had last met up. She had had a terrible job during that time that had treated her like shit while her mother was in the hospital. I had only met her Mom twice—both times at school. I remember her watching in the bleachers at one of our painful intracity wrestling competitions. Her mom actually saw me and called me over to watch Casey wrestle in her first match in the girls tournament. I remember there weren’t many girls into wrestling and so there were only a few matches to get to the top of the ladder. Casey’s mom and I had talked about that a little. I hadn’t stayed to watch Casey’s match to the end. I had come up with some excuse about having to talk to my coach, or something, when really, I was avoiding having to be next to her if Casey lost the match. Something about that had been too painful to imagine, and so I politely excused myself after our brief conversation. With this memory before me, I felt ashamed of my behaviour, hearing that Casey’s mom had since died. I know neither of them would have held it against me, but when you find out someone’s gone, sometimes the first thing your mind does is think about the last dumb thing you did in front of them. It wasn’t just that Casey’s mom had died. She shared a little about trying out a secondary community college program that was a complete miss. Then she went on to say that her high school boyfriend had broken up with her while she was trying to make sense of all these huge life changes. I vaguely remembered the guy. He was one of the quiet, inconspicuous types in high school. I know the type because I had been the type. I probably still was. We walked and talked, though it was more me listening. I hesitate to say much about my life, because it didn’t feel like I had really had a life in comparison to what Casey had been through. On top of that, I was realizing that for me, what was almost a farcical experience of having my phone sucked up into a book, was probably not the same for this other person walking beside me. We stepped through the snow together abreast. I was half-listening now, because I was reminded of my dream where I walked beside Myriam. In it, I had seen myself grow bigger and bigger. But now, beside Casey, that was the last thing I felt. I felt like I wanted to shrink into non-existence with each step. It was with that sense of shame that we arrived at my apartment entry. By this time we had been walking in, what I hoped was, a comfortable silence. We walked up the stairs, gripping the railing: the apartment super still hadn’t set up any anti-slip devices for the winter, and the stairs were as slippery as wet marble (I assure you, there wasn’t a lick of marble anywhere in this dingy old apartment building). We entered my apartment and I put my bag on the kitchen table. I went to the fridge. "Tea? Beer?" "A beer would be great," said Casey’s voice from around the corner. I heard the distinct sounds of my messenger bag’s buckles unbuckling. I leaned around the corner: Casey throwing herself down on the couch with the book. I turned back to the fridge and grabbed the last two beers. I joined Casey on the couch, handing her one. "Thanks," she said absentmindedly. "I hope no one needed to get in touch with you tonight," I said glumly, looking over at the page with our phones on it. Casey was running her thumb over the images. "No, but we’ll solve this tonight." "How do you figure." "Well, you’re going to give me a pen, and I’m going to tear Myriam a new one." I shrugged. I got up and got the pen and the ink and showed them to Casey. She glared at them. "You spent how much on this hokum?" "Don’t worry about it," I said gruffly. I had spent over $50, was the answer, and I wasn’t working right now, thank you very much. Casey pulled the table in front of the couch closer and put the book, the ink, and the pen down in front of her. She took out the pen, and hovered it over the page. "Wait—what are you going to write?" "I don’t think you get to ask me that. Your little book here sucked up my phone without asking, and now I’m going to write. Either get out of the way, or watch quietly." I sighed. She had every right to say that. I inched closer to her on the couch. I could smell the pub on both of us. I watched as she wrote. Her handwriting was far nicer than mine. And that was what Casey wrote. We both sat back on the couch, as if we had done a workout. Then, the words began to slowly disappear in to the page as before. We watched, expectantly. We paused waiting for more words to appear but there were none. "The audacity!" Casey crowed. "This bitch barely acknowledged me!" "Wow," I said, dumbly. "Well, you better write something. At least she’ll talk to you ," Casey pushed the pen into my hands and I received it clumsily. I began to write. "I was thinking more, give us back our phones ," Casey said. My eyes bulged and I held my palms up defensively. "It’s fine it’s fine, she’s writing back," Casey said hurriedly. We both stared dumbly at this response, until it faded away into the page. "We are dealing with a very strange entity, here, Acton." "I know," I said. "What do we do?" "I don’t know." " Know , don’t know , whatever state we’re in, we can’t keep continuing like this. I think she’s on a mission to absorb more information—she probably wants us to expose this book to other people so that it sucks up their phones too." "I suppose," I said slowly. "We need to destroy it!" "Destroy it!" I gasped. "What about our phones?" I cried out feebly. "They’re gone, and everything in them. There’s no way she’s going to give it back," Casey snorted, eyeing the book. I grabbed at the book automatically and clasped it to my chest. "We can’t destroy it!" My heart was racing. I felt the invisible wave about to crash over me again. What had changed in me to make me this way? Why did I want to protect this book, protect Myriam? Casey wanted to destroy her. Burn the book, or rip it to shreds. But she was inside it. I knew I couldn’t let her do it. It was true that something had changed in me the moment Myriam had sucked up my phone. My life had slowed down considerably, but I also was seeing things differently. I looked at the world differently. Everyone around me appeared less real than Myriam! All of them were sucked into their phones, while mine had been sucked away. My relationships with the people of this world were hardly meaningful, I saw that now. They were facile and fragile things—like something a child had made with glue and popsicle sticks: sloppy, brittle, ready to break at a moment’s notice. I felt a warmth in my chest where the book was. Across from me, Casey appeared venemous, her face angular and snake-like—ready to strike. I inched back on the couch. "Acton," my name floated out of her mouth, wrapped in a warning tone. Her lips hardly seemed to move. She moved toward me slowly, her eyes locked on mine. I was stuck, caught in her gaze. She moved closer still, her upper body hovering over the couch where we sat. Then, she pounced. I couldn’t help but release the book: she pounced on me, not it . She struck me like a shot from a cannon and together we fell back into the couch. I heard the book fall from the couch to the floor with a muffled thump. My face was awash in her hair. Behind the smell of the pub was a fragrance from earlier in her day. She reached for the book. I writhed underneath her and rolled off the couch, hitting the floor—slap against the mats. I got up onto my hands and knees and grabbed for the book but she was already behind me. I knew I was done for. Wrestling between boys and girls in high school was forbidden, but it all came back to me the same—and evidently for Casey too. I felt her arm cross under my chin and her other arm snake through my legs. Click , went the padlock of her hands. She pulled me back and we both rolled backward. It was over before it started. "You still wrestle?" I gasped out. "No," she laughed, "but a champion doesn’t forget her moves." A champion doesn’t forget her moves. I had never actually watched Casey’s matches, that day I sat with her Mom. Now it was sounding like she had taken home the trophy. I lay there, pinned by her, her hair brushing into my face. She smelled nice. The promise of spring. She must have sensed that I was giving up whatever fight was in me because I felt her grip loosen. I relaxed into her body, my head unlocked and leaning back into her shoulder. "I thought you hated wrestling." "I did, sometimes," she said distantly. I couldn’t look at her face from where I lay. "Now are you going to stand in the way of burning this book or not?" "No," I sighed. "Get some kindling, then." I wandered through my apartment, grabbing a newspaper from my recycling. I had a wooden box that a few clementines had come in. I moved them to the fridge. I found some matches and brought some rubbing alcohol from the bathroom. I returned to Casey and picked the book off the floor. It felt heavier. I walked over to the fireplace and kneeled down. I looked back at Casey. She stared back at me. My fingers ran back and forth absentmindedly along the strange impasto cover. I turned back to the book, looked at it once more, and then ripped off the cover. I poured the alcohol on it, tossed it in the fireplace, and threw the small crate on top. I lit a match, stepped back, and threw it in. The alcohol burned off quickly with a whoof but the book still caught. It did not take long to burn. There was not much smoke, and what little there was sent some creature who had taken up residence in the chimney scuttling up and out into the night air. I returned to the couch and we watched the book burn until it was no more than a blackened crisp. Neither of us said anything. Finally, when it was over, Casey turned to me. "I still won’t be able to get into my apartment, at least until I can get ahold of the Super." "Right," I said tiredly, "take my bed. I’ll sleep on the couch." "Thanks," she patted me on the leg as she stood up. I remained on the couch to watch the last few embers in the fireplace. I listened as Casey roamed around my apartment, finding whatever she needed to get situated to sleep over. I pulled the couch blanket over me, a comfortable weariness settling over me. I lay there listening to the apartment and the neighbourhood. I imagined Casey pressed against me. She had pinned me fair and square, not that I had had much fight in me in the first place. It had all happened in a matter of seconds. In light of that, I felt a competitive spark growing within me. Something tonight had lit it, and I imagined it would grow just as the embers in the fireplace would diminish into nothing. I fell asleep hoping to dream about a bridge. The book was originally published in 1955 The author had written several books Myriam's Codebreakers was the last book that Solah J. Trek wrote; she died shortly after it was published A plot summary online told me the book was mostly a love story that involved a woman in a post-World-War-Two workplace early computers feature prominently in the book, specifically, ones that were developed based on the machines built and used for war-time decryption.
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