The Impossible Passage of Page One

Not even a page, thought Clarence, as he slammed the book shut.

The black iPhone rattled and played its loop on the coffee table in front of him, next to a few old Vogue magazines and their decrepit TV remote. The phone number displayed was unfamiliar, though that wasn’t surprising. Unfamiliar numbers called him all the time, and over the years, he had gained some insight into guessing who was on the other side. As he liked to say: if it wasn’t 04, have some fun or ignore. This number started with a 07. With a sly grin, he pressed answer.

“Hello, Donald Duck speaking,” he said. He always got a kick out of that.

He listened thoughtfully as a foreign accent instructed him on his wrongdoings. According to this trustworthy voice, he wasn’t paying his phone bill and would quickly have to provide his credit card details to resolve this issue – as time, apparently, was running out.

“Oh, well, let me get that sorted,” Clarence replied.

The voice uttered a heartfelt thank you.

“One moment.”

Clarence pressed hold and placed the phone back on the table before grabbing his book. His eyes scanned over the words Chapter 1, the metaphor about birth and light (yes yes), and finally (ah-hah) reached the sentence before he was rudely interrupted by a dumb idiot imperson-

“Honey? Did you call Steven?”

Clarence tightened his grip on the book as if bracing for a strong wind. He held his breath and waited for that momentary phase of rage to pass. The voice came from afar. If he were to guess, the laundry.

“Yes,” he yelled. “He will be arriving this afternoon, no doubt with that new girl of his.”

“Oh, wonderful! It’s been such a long time.”

“Oh yes.”

“Did you ask what he wanted for dinner?”

Clarence sighed. “No, but you know how Steven is. He wouldn’t care if it was a vegetarian lasagne or buffalo wings.”

“And his girlfriend, Steven? What if she doesn-

“Then call him yourself, dear. He’s a phone away from you as he is me.”

Clarence awaited the return swing, the slamming backhand of his wife that he knew so well. If it came, then he would be picking up the phone. But it didn’t. Clarence felt the world start to turn again as the tension died. His eyes, hesitantly at first, dropped back to the first page.

“And what? You get to rest and read this Sunday while I do all the work. Look, you even have your phone right there, Clarence, but only God knows how hard it is to call your son.”

Cate stood there wearing her favourite green shirt as well as her wide-rim glasses and second-favourite pair of earrings, the smiling turtles. At her hip was evidence of her labour, a washing basket. Clarence considered himself at the mercy of some greater power here, for this was now the fourth interruption in maybe four minutes. He also considered the drastic consequences of talking back.

“Sorry,” he said and let his literary entertainment for the morning drop to his side (no need for a bookmark). “And look, book closed, hand reaching for phone.”

Cate acknowledged this with a cold stare. “Good.”

He concluded his call with his son with a half-hearted I love you. It wasn’t because he didn’t love Steven (he certainly did), but because he was still thinking about the divine interruption-like issues that were plaguing his ability to read a single bloody page. Perhaps if he did manage to read exactly one page, the Earth would promptly crack in two, vomiting great mounds of molten rock all over the populace. Or perhaps he was just having bad luck.

Then he had an idea. Maybe he had to read like it was a sprint, like there was a medal waiting at the start of the second page if he did it in under twenty seconds. The interruptions were merely a sign that his time was up, and he had to be quicker. This theory, however, would only lead to further issues. He was an unfortunately slow reader and had trouble focusing – both unwelcomed attributes of his old age. Reading quickly would leave him turning to the second page without a clue of what came before, which in turn would suggest that he had read no first page at all.

As irritating as it was, Clarence deemed the reading session over. At a younger age, when competitiveness still lingered in his bones, he would fight until he won. Nearing sixty induced a level of calmness. He’d have plenty of time to read another day, and when he retired, he’d soon be yearning for anything to interrupt his endless page-by-page existence.

So instead of reading and enjoying his day before another week of teaching kids about the enjoyment of reading, he washed the dishes, sprayed their asphalt driveway, dusted the furniture, gave mandatory pats for Lazy Norman (their old Corgi), fished dried leaves from the pool, and provided ample monosyllable responses to Doug (their talkative and lonely neighbour).

By the time he sat back down on the couch, it was a quarter to five. His knees offered their reflections of the day through a series of throbs and sharp pains, and Cate provided hers through a smile and a kiss to his perspired, stubbled cheek. He couldn’t tell if her intentions were of the condescending type or if she was genuinely happy.

The book sat on the lounge, its contents comedically unknown considering Clarence’s attempts. He still had an hour before Steven arrived. It wouldn’t be a Sunday without a (albeit small) dive into the world of literary tropes and analogies. Even Lazy Norman had given up following his mother and now lounged with his head on Clarence’s left foot. Clarence was, in every effect, unable to move from his position. Any pet owner would agree.

So, the English teacher grabbed the book for the fifth time, hoping the unfailing interruptions had subsided. He supposed nothing would avail itself until he began. One could not accurately predict a plane crash without first hearing the engines failing and seeing the oxygen masks falling.

Bracing for impact, he opened to the first page and let his eyes slowly meander down. Nothing so far. His eyes crept to the part by which he was torn away from last time. The word in question was predicament. A rare four-syllable word, and a rather ironic one considering the circumstances. But nothing strange with it. No reason for him to be jerked away after reading the second wor-

Norman’s loud, abrupt bark almost killed him. Filled with anticipation, Clarence had such a horrible jerk from the noise he really did think that was the end. His face had turned crimson as Norman sprinted to the window, barking and bellowing as a blue Honda Civic came down the superbly washed driveway.

“Steven’s early!” cried Cate as she walked past her red-faced husband.

“Oh yes,” Clarence stammered and let the cursed book drop to the floor. Norman continued to announce the arrival in his usual deafening fashion. Clarence always liked to think the old pooch was commanding them to their stations.

Old man, to the turrets! Woman, guard the entry! The enemy is nigh!

But then Norman would recognise the tall, broad figure of Steven and his little clump of fur (you couldn’t call it a tail) would start wagging. False alarm.

Soon, Clarence had his son’s arm wrapped tightly around him, and he even had an awkward hug from the new girl, named Sam. Her perfume was a wake-up call to the senses.

Clarence always enjoyed the fact that Steven was more or less Cate in twenty-five-year-old male form. He didn’t believe for a second his genes would’ve done Steven any good, being as he was narrow, short, and sporting a hairline he supposed was somewhere down near his ass crack. Alas, it did mean Steven had neither Clarence’s impeccable humour nor intellectual capacity, especially on the linguistic front. Not that it bothered Clarence. No…

Sam was a charming surprise. She was an English Lit student no less, currently forming a thesis intertwining Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Heller’s Catch-22 with the school warfare themes interwoven in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. Sam spoke clearly, and her ideas were well-formed and suitably subjective. Clarence had forgotten completely about his reading troubles. He had even forgotten to ask the conventional parent-to-child questions to Steven, though he was sure Cate could take up the mantle.

Through dinner, dessert and tea, it was a lovely affair. When the two younglings went off to bed (and he held his mind back from thinking whether they’d be apt to do anything), he and Cate talked. Discussions of the weather for the coming week, job shenanigans, and whether it was time to renovate the bathroom all led to a series of yawns and glances at the clock. Time for sweet, temporary oblivion.

“I’ll see you in bed soon,” she said, getting up and carrying the teacups into the kitchen. Clarence said he would, but with Norman’s head on his thigh, making cute little snoring noises, it seemed he was once again obliged to stay. And it just so happened that a simple, thin fictional novel lay by his feet. To think he’d forgotten.

With held breath, he opened to the first page. The living room was quiet. Even Norman’s snores had dropped in volume. Peace surrounded him like a protective shield. Surely, he’d be allowed a page. He felt the strange need to pray, but to what God, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps if this was the work of Satan himself, it would require Clarence not to pray but to perform a sacrifice. He looked around for anything perishable and noticed a fly making its rounds. Such was his fatigued state that even if the fly made it all the way over to him and landed on his thigh, it would still be an impossible task.

“Such is life,” he muttered, making Norman give an inquisitive stare up.

“You’ve got a good ten more minutes for napping yet, pal.”

Norman acknowledged this by letting his eye close and making a soft sigh.

Clarence returned his attention to the page. With gritted teeth and his hands firmly holding the edges, he started to read. His ears were tuned into anything unusual. His whole body seemed to be in a continuous near state of fight or flight mode. The interruption would come. He was sure of it. It was like a six-sided dice with the number one on every side. Down and down, he read, coming to the last sentence of page one with eerie ease.

With a satisfied ‘huh’, he finished reading the last word, ‘pure’. He could make no connection to the world pure and his predicament, so he continued forth, licking his fingers and turning the page.

It was blank, as was the third. Clarence frowned and felt a wave of nausea pass through him. It was brief but effective. It made him increasingly aware of everything in his periphery, so much so that he could see the lamp shaking on its stool. There was a rumbling under his feet. Framed photos dropped from their place on the wall, some shattering with eerie clarity.

“Clarence!”

He turned to see Cate in her dressing gown, wide-eyed and pale. “What’s going on!”

He was still holding his book. He tried to let it fall from his hands, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t move at all.

Steven and Sam ran into the room and cried out, but he couldn’t hear them anymore. Below, the grey carpet started to burn. Wisps of smoke rose up where the grey turned black, creating a circle around the coffee table. Its outline ended inches away from his wrinkled feet.

As it charred, he realised the whole house was creaking inwards, as if pulled by invisible chains. The carpet soon gave way to a hole of molten lava. The coffee table sank into this gaping mouth. Large bubbles popped and spewed flames around the room. Clarence felt the hairs on his eyebrows tinge and burn. He tried to pull away, but like the house, he continued to lean further in. Then the house snapped inwards, and Clarence was thrown headfirst into the depths.

When Clarence opened his eyes, Norman was sitting up on the couch, with his face cocked at an angle. For a good while, he let himself breathe the soft, cool air, letting his weight press into the couch. Gosh, he hated nightmares.

When he got a hold of himself, he finally acknowledged the book at his feet. He hadn’t picked it up. Clarence thought he never would again. He kicked the book under the coffee table, where he hoped only dust would touch it.

There were plenty more books in this house, and about a billion more outside of it. This particular one, he hoped, would be the first thing to disappear from his memory once the dementia kicked in, if it did. He reckoned, with a reasonable cynicism, that it was an eighty-percent chance.

Clarence then spent the next hour searching his house for a book he hadn’t read. When he returned with such a book in hand, Norman had assumed his indecent sleeping position on his back, with all limbs and balls in the air.

Clarence sat down and opened Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King. Back in his day, old mate King was the perfect recipe for a decent afternoon, along with a cup of tea. It did dawn on him that he probably had read this short story collection at some point in his twenties, but he’d find that out soon enough.

He flipped to the first page and started reading. He always loved King’s opening monologues; it was like reuniting with a (mildly pretentious) old friend. As he finished the second last sentence, it occurred to him that he had read this entry, and he found that he wasn’t bothered by that. One doesn’t drink a beer and think they need something different for the ne-

“You do realise you have work tomorrow.”

Clarence stared at his bedraggled wife, his hand at the precipice of turning the page.

“I’m aware,” he replied.

“It’s four am, Clarence. Not ten.”

For a moment, they merely looked at each other.

“Oh…” he muttered, and with a sigh, slowly closed his book.