rayaso | CHANGES

2018 Mini-Season, Week 3
Topic: Tsundoku

CHANGES

“Where am I this time?” Dr. Griffin wondered as he started to wake up. The surroundings weren’t familiar, but they never were. Another cheap motel in another city with another name. The better question was, where was he? He couldn’t see his arm as he waved it in front of his face. He lifted the sheet to look under it. “I can’t see me!” he thought as his pulse started to race and he felt sweat break out on his face, as confusion collided with panic.

What was it he ate last night? “Oh yeah,” he thought, “it was The Invisible Man. I was afraid of this.” Dr. Griffin – it was Griffin, wasn’t it? – had been desperate, and H. G. Wells was all he could find. He’d hit town too late for his usual sources. The library was closed and there weren’t any bookstores. He’d checked into this dump to wait out the agony until the morning when he could get something, but he’d been in luck. Someone had left behind a copy of The Invisible Man and he’d devoured it, not even stopping to savor the pages.

So now he was Dr. Griffin, the main character, and he was invisible, at least until the next book, which would have to be soon. The Invisible Man wasn’t very long. He was a print junkie and he would need another fix soon.

Dr. Griffin wasn’t like other print junkies. He didn’t just need a constant supply of reading material. He had to eat the books. His system craved them and depended on them; without books, he would die, but not after going through the horrible agony of what he called the Hunger. But there was also the Change. Unfortunately, he became a character from the book. His life was an endless progression of identities.

Finding books as the Invisible Man was going to be a challenge. Did he go out wearing his clothes? If he did, people were going to see an empty suit bobbing along the sidewalk, which might concern them. If he went out nude, no one would see him, but if the invisibility wore off, they would see something else bobbing down the street.

In the movie, Claude Raines had swathed himself in white cloth. All Dr. Griffin had was toilet paper, which would have to work. “I’ll look like a cheap mummy,” he thought, “but I’ve been worse.”

One time he’d had to forage as H. P. Lovecraft’s monster Cthulu, complete with tiny wings. Fortunately, he was in New York and no one cared. Then there was Bethlehem Township in New Jersey. He’d eaten Yeats’ The Second Coming and gone slouching around as a rough beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man. Not easy to find books looking like that, but he’d still survived, and he would survive this.

This had been much easier at first. He’d had a house and he’d kept the rooms full of books. He had never read them, only eaten them. Captain Ahab or Juliet or Frankenstein would just stay indoors. But then the money and the books had finally run out and he’d taken to free range grazing in libraries and bookstores. The police had called it theft, so he’d had to move from city to city to avoid further complications.

There was no name for his condition and no medical explanation. It had started in college when he’d eaten ten pages of The Catcher in the Rye on a drunken dare. That night, he had turned into Holden Caulfield. Part of his consciousness remained, but over the years it mattered less and less, and now he couldn’t remember his own name. He only knew that he wasn’t really Sherlock Holmes or Alice in Wonderland and that he needed to eat books to live.

“If only it were Halloween,” Dr. Griffin thought, as he finished winding toilet paper around his head and hands. “The library should be open, so I’d better get moving.”

The local library didn’t have much to offer. It had been converted to a community center with public computers. Members could also check out Kindles and download books from the library’s e-collection. “I hate those gadgets,” thought Dr. Griffin. “They’re killing books and making it harder for me to find food.”

The remaining books had been relegated to the back of the library. “Not much of a crop,” thought Dr. Griffin, “but I only need one right now.” The best bet was usually adult fiction. He’d learned the hard way to avoid children’s books. Giant rabbits and unicorns just didn’t blend in.

The Kindles sparked Dr. Griffin’s imagination. “I’m a brilliant scientist. I created the invisibility potion. Why can’t I cure me?” But a mad scientist from the 19^th century was ill-equipped to handle such a complex problem. He needed current scientists, preferably sane, and probably more than one.

“I’ll need to eat some biographies,” he thought. He had never consumed more than one book at a time for fear of what would happen if he became several people at once. One was hard enough. But if it resulted in a cure?

The library had only one relevant book: The Best: 10 Doctors and Their Miracles. “If one is good, ten doctors have to be better,” thought Dr. Griffin. But for his idea, he needed more than medicine. A biography of Steve Jobs was perfect. He gathered up the books and walked out the door. People were too busy staring at the toilet paper on his head to notice the books stuffed under his shirt.

Back at the motel room, Dr. Griffin wrote out his idea and left it on the nightstand. He then began to eat the books carefully, one page at a time, to absorb all the contents. As he ate, he could feel his consciousness drifting and he could see his body gradually re-appear. When he was finished, Dr. Griffin fell asleep.

When he woke up, he was no longer Dr. Griffin. He was a collection of people, each trying to assert control. He had a massive headache, but he still saw the paper left by Dr. Griffin. The first item on the list was “Form a committee. Cooperate or die!”

Five hours later, the committee was ready to proceed with the second item: “What happens if I eat a Kindle? Can e-books substitute for the real thing?”

“Why not an iPad?” asked Steve Jobs. “Too big,” agreed the doctors, “but it doesn’t matter. Humans can’t digest all that plastic and metal. It would kill us.” This sent them into a collective depression and they started quarrelling with each other.

Finally, Jobs made himself heard above the cacophony of voices. “If high tech won’t work, what about low tech? What if we did this . . . ?”

After buying a notebook, the committee set to work. Led by Jobs, they wrote a story about a character named Jim, who had to eat books to live. It was an odd story, filled with diagrams, instructions, and warnings, but it was hopeful, even though there was no cure. In it, Jim invented a device which allowed him to live on electronic media, not just books, downloaded from a computer using a special interface. He still became a character, but he no longer had to drift from town to town stealing books to avoid the Hunger.

After the committee finished writing, they ate the story and went to bed. When Jim woke up, he knew how to build the interface and download his meals from a computer.

It took several days to find the parts and build the interface, but the library was open, and it had public computers. Jim hooked one end of the interface into the computer, placed the other end in his mouth, and went straight to Amazon for a download. He felt sleepy, so he put his head down for a nap.

When she got up from the table, Marian the Librarian burst into song from The Music Man.

Singing and dancing her way out of the library and down the street, Marian was happy. Free of the need to be constantly grubbing for books, she could go anywhere and be any character. And there was always the possibility that if she downloaded the right people, there could be a cure. For now, though, she had a song to sing and endless meals ahead of her, and that was enough.