The Book with No Words

I saw the title. It looked interesting. I opened the book, but it was full of blank pages. I overheard a conversation about this book. I couple of young people that had mentioned they found a book with no words and just blank pages and curious to know what it was that they were talking about, I scanned the shelves to find this mysterious book. This had to be an obvious joke. Who would ever buy a book, let alone read a book that had no words in it? I placed the book back on the shelf and never gave it a second look. I left the store and went home.

Months later, having forgotten the nonsensical conversation of those two young people and having forgotten the incident with the book, I received a package in the mail. It was a square package wrapped in brown shopping bag paper with my name and address on it and with a return address. I thought it was some mistake because I had never ordered anything recently that I was expecting. I tore open the package and found a book with blank pages with a note contained inside. The note read, “You forgot your book.” The date of the note coincided with the date that I was at the mysterious bookstore and when I saw the return address, it was the same bookstore where I was many months ago where I overheard that conversation, saw the book and felt like my time was being wasted.

Becoming flustered on receiving a book that I had never ordered and further flustered that the book had no words, I went to the address where the package had come from and upon arriving at that address found that the building had completely vanished. I stopped a pedestrian on the sidewalk and asked her if she was from the area. She answered that she was and I had shone her the address of the bookstore and the note contained inside but she said that there was never a bookstore here and that I must have been mistaken. I asked her if this was the correct address, and she said yes but there was never a bookstore there. She walked off and I was left with a mystery that I could not solve. I walked back home more confused than I was before.

“I’m not crazy,” I said to myself. I distinctly remember having gone to a bookstore that was there some months ago, overhearing a conversation and picking up a book that has no words that has mysteriously now appeared at my apartment with a note inviting to go to the same address where I have come to discover that there was nothing there in the first place. I took out a pen to write my name in the book but to my astonishment no ink came out of the pen that was written on the paper. I thought that something about the pen was faulty. I tried with another pen, but the same thing happened and on and on until I went through eight pens that seemed defective. All eight pens couldn’t be defective. I tried writing with them on another piece of paper, and they worked but then when I tried writing in the book, the pens wouldn’t work.

I went to a payphone to call my brother. He was an amateur magician, and he liked to play practical jokes on me from time to time. “Are you at home?” I asked. He said that he was and I went by to visit him. I showed him the book and asked him if he had sent it to me as a joke, but he told me that he had never seen the book before. I didn’t believe him. I showed him the book and challenged him to write something in it with one of his pens. He put the pen to paper as I had but nothing really happened as had happened to me. He shook the pen thinking the ink had dried up but again no ink flowed onto the paper from his pen. He went through some more pens and again he failed to write any words. He tested the pen on other pieces of paper, and they worked but for some reason, the paper of this book resisted any attempts at writing. I went home more flustered than before thinking that there was nothing more that could be done. When I got home, I put the book on the shelf of my library and went to the kitchen to make myself some soup. I sat down on the couch and put on a movie. I fell asleep with the sound of the TV buzzing in my ear.

Suddenly, I was awakened by a sharp hissing sound, “SHHHHHHH!!!” I found myself in the middle of a room surrounded by an infinite number of bookshelves. It was my couch and in front of me there was my coffee table and my TV, but this place was not house and the books that were on the shelves were not my books. I got up from my couch disoriented and not knowing where I was. I walked over to one of the nearby shelves but a loud voice from above me yelled, “This section is off limits, and we are closing in ten minutes!” I looked around but I couldn’t see anyone around until I felt a hard hit on my head. I looked up and saw a man in a trench coat with a scarf around his neck, wearing a fedora hat and he was floating right above me. He adjusted his spectacles which were sitting on the bridge of his nose, studying me as if he were studying an insect under a microscope. “How did I get here?” I asked but he hissed at me loudly with a loud, “SHHHH!”

He handed me a book. It was the same book that I had seen in the bookstore, in my house and the same one that resisted any attempts to write in. I opened the book but there was nothing written inside. “I don’t understand!” I yelled back, “Why am I being given a book that has no words and in which no words can be written?” I leafed through the book and found an envelope addressed to me. In the envelope was a card which looked like a formal invitation. The card read

“To this machine that calls itself human, we extend an invitation which is no invitation to a place that is no place to write the book that is not a book and so discover the mystery of the universe wrapped up in a little box…”

There was an odor that emanated from the card and that odor made me feel dizzy. After a while I found myself floating as the man from above had but I had saw myself from high in the room sleeping on my couch. It was me, in my house sleeping and watching TV as I had been before this strange encounter with this person and this room. The mystery of this book ever so slightly getting deeper and deeper.

Suddenly, I woke up and found myself in my house again, but it was dark. I looked at my phone to check the time but found that the battery had run out. I charged my phone. I found my soup bowl, but it had a funky smell to it. I saw that it had mold in it. I opened the refrigerator door and found that all of my food had spoiled rotten. “Wait, this can’t be happening?” I said to myself, “I just bought this food yesterday.” When I looked at my phone, it showed a different date which was a year later than when I had fallen asleep. “Wait,” I said to myself, “this can’t be happening. I can’t have been asleep for a whole year?” I suddenly became conscious that I was not what I had appeared to be. I went to the bathroom and saw myself in the mirror and saw that my hair had grown to the length of my shoulders and my beard was all the way down to below the neckline. “This can’t be possible,” I said to myself, “I couldn’t have been asleep for over a year.”

“More like two years,” a voice said from beyond the darkness. It was the sound of the voice I had heard in the room on the shelves. I saw the book that I had seen in the bookstore and that had arrived to me in the mail and instead of blank pages, the pages were filled with words and images of a life I could not recognize. The main character of the book was me and the narrator was me and everything in that book contained everything that I had relayed in this story. It appeared that the book had written by itself and when I reached the last pages, I saw words magically appear as if they had been written by an unseen hand. There was no way I could stop the spontaneous writing. I tried to rip the pages out of the book, but the book resisted and kept on writing and writing and then I looked out of my window. Time seemed to be speeding up. Days were hours, hours were minutes, seconds were faster than a blink of an eye and the pages from the calendar seem to be flying off faster than they could pass.

“This can’t be happening to me,” I cried. I was spun around and suddenly I found myself in a darkened room with a bright light shining over a specific spot. I had found myself in a funeral parlor and I saw at the end of the room a casket with an open lid, and I found myself inside that open casket. I saw myself dead and my hands were holding tightly that book. It was the complete book. The book of my life, the book of everything that I had done, the book that wasted no time to judge a life that had not been lived. I wept and suddenly realized that I had lived and not lived, written without writing anything and all this time I had wasted asleep in a dream like state. “Now what?” I asked, “Do I get to wear chains for eternity like Jacob Marley and go wandering about the world seeing what my life could have been about?” The prospect of existing as a ghost seemed curious. I thought to myself of all of my literati friends which one I could get to pry his nose out of his books. I laughed because this seemed like the joke of all jokes. Here I was dedicated to knowledge, being judged on my love of books by a book that had not been written and yet with the greatest speed had been written before I had ever had a chance to write it. Was this a criticism of who I was as a person by someone unseen? Perhaps the greatest of all librarians?

I picked up the book that was sitting on my chest in my casket and started leafing through it. I saw my birth, my childhood, and everything I had done up until the moment I fell asleep and I read the dedication page, “To this machine that calls itself human…” I overheard some whispering in the corner, and it was the young couple that I had overheard speaking about this book in the bookstore that had not existed. I reached the last page of the book, and I looked down and saw my frail wrinkled hands. My hair had turned grey, and my hands were shaking. “I am ready to go,” I said, “wherever it is that you want me to go.” At that moment, I found myself young again and again at the mysterious bookstore. I was holding that book in my hand, the one that I had overheard the young couple talking about, the one that had appeared mysteriously in my house in the mail, the one that was writing words that I could not stop, the one that I had found in my casket. I picked up the book because I did not want whatever happened to me to happen again. At the cash register was the man I had seen in that room floating above me. He smiled and handed me the book with a special pen he said I would need. Now many years later, I have closed that chapter in my life, I reached the last page of that book. I closed it and started another one and that has made all the difference.