by Dan Noble
“I love you, Millie. More than anything. You must know that. No matter what I tell you next, this is the truest thing of all. The circumstances surrounding our start may have been, well, questionable. And I’ve tried to make up for that by giving you everything I have to give. What you taught me is that none of it matters as much as you and Rose. I would do it all again.” His posture straightens at the last sentence, as if he’d just decided something.
I turn to him. “What do you mean, questionable?” No matter what answer he’s about to give, our connection is there between us, undeniable, no matter the circumstances—the cancer, the lies. I can’t help it. I respond to his kiss. I tremble at his touch. It’s never diminished. In fact, the drama only enhances it. Like in all good stories. It feels right that I should be so angry and so in love at the same time. It’s more dramatic that way. Still, there’s something that frightens me in his eye. I force myself to pull away.
He continues. “I, too, can go to the book world. I was young, like Rose, when I first paged-in. That’s what we call going over into the fictional realm. When you leave you page-out. You know how conventional my family is. They didn’t believe me when I tried to explain it to them. The first few times I paged-in and out before they even realized I was gone, so there wasn’t the panic over me missing. But eventually, they couldn’t deny I was disappearing somewhere. They simply pretended it wasn’t happening. My mom stopped checking on me so that she wouldn’t have to face it. Even now, they pretend it never happened.”
“Your family seems so normal. Anachronistic, judgmental, but normal. How is that possible?”
“The mind is a powerful thing. If you want to pretend there isn’t magic under your own nose, you just do. You of all people must understand that. Haven’t we been pretending for your benefit that nothing’s going on, while you cross over into the book world?”
I flinch. I don’t like pretending. And I don’t like being left in the dark. Besides, all this time, I thought this was my secret, my family’s curse doing this to Rose. All along Kennedy was complicit. No wonder he wasn’t concerned at her disappearance. He’d probably been waiting for this moment. Perhaps it had come before, when I wasn’t looking and he was? Maybe our whole life together was an elaborate plan to get to this moment.
“I was an early Reader, and all of this started happening when I learned to read. I read everything I could. If you hang out at book shops and libraries enough, you’ll run into another one. There’s the trembling you can spot from someone who’s recently paged-out.”
He grabs my hand. “Yes, I noticed,” he says, kissing each fingertip. “But there’s something else, an aura, I can’t tell you exactly what it is, but it’s something intangible that’s come back with us to the visible world; you recognize each other.” He said us. It is the first time anyone has acknowledged me as part of that world, and it’s overwhelming.
“It was terrifying, the first time I brought it up to another person. This would prove there really was another world. But my instinct was right. She was a Reader—that’s what we call people who can do it.”
She? Do I want to hear the rest of this story? I look down at my hand trembling. Kennedy smiles. “Ah, there it is, the mark of the special.”
27
MILLIE
Kennedy opens and shuts drawers, gathers his daily essentials, an evening ritual. I followed him into the kitchen from the living room. He places his small, neat pile on the counter by the door. I cannot believe he is being so normal after what he’s just told me. Jesus, Kennedy, do I mean so little to you? How could you let me live this lie, knowing all of this and never saying? Think of the things we could have done! Even as I think the accusations, my mind tries to reject it. This dying man loves me, or I have no idea what love is.
Right now, it’s a flood questions and doubts about the things he’s told me tonight, and for the entirety of our sham life, and about what I have and have not said. And of course, there’re all the old inadequacies poking their heads. He told me that he knew Mother. Emily, he called her. The first Reader he met. Not only did he know her, he was her arch rival. He used all the right words. This could not have been a lie. He knows too much. I’m shocked to the core.
Mostly, his experience of paging-in, as he described it, is similar to mine. But a bit of it diverges, which is understandable because if I’m meant to understand anything about paging in, it’s as different for everyone as the experience of reading is. It’s even different for each person each time they do it because we’re never the same person twice.
Though my anger is formidable, I have to keep a handle on it. I’ve been waiting so long to ask these questions. I must get all the answers I can. “I am going to ask you questions. And you are going to answer them,” I say.
“I will. But first I will tell you this,” He looks at me like he’s charming me, casting a spell. “I should have told you earlier, but you are exhibiting classic signs of a developing Reader. Waking to different realities. I watched how disoriented you were. I saw your hand trembling. I wanted so badly to comfort you. And then you remembered the other version of the debate. And that version of reality you remember from the other day, when I wasn’t ill, when you weren’t—” He can’t say it, just looks down at my bump.
I feel faint. So, I wasn’t imagining it. He doesn’t say why he didn’t tell me earlier. I’m too terrified to ask.
I have so many questions. A lifetime of questions. I don’t know where to start. “But why is the paging-in working now?”
“A lot of people think it’s about finding an important book. But all books are important if you connect to them. It can be any book, if the author’s done a good job suspending reality, pulling you into the world of the book. It’s connecting to the story in your mind, and that’s what really matters.
“In fact, sometimes it’s not about the content at all. Your mother is known for her connection to rhythms. The flow of the words, the cadences of the sentences are key to her page-ins.” I think of the heady novels Mother surrounded herself with. That all feels right. In fact, it feels like a natural detail I already know.
“The reason you’re so disoriented is because you aren’t strong enough yet. The changes you made in the book world didn’t stick completely. So you’re left with a residue of the old way of things. You will get stronger, but as you do, it gets more difficult. You’ll see. Working it out is just the beginning. Handling it, learning to work with it, and then, of course, struggling against those that don’t see its use the same way you do, hiding it from the general public—those are the parts that will drive you mad.”
“I don’t like that word,” I say.
“Understood,” he says.
Those answers are too large to wrap my head around at the moment. I decide to start smaller.
“Why did you take me out that first time?”
This time he can’t hold the gaze. I pretend not to notice. It isn’t hard. He doesn’t want me seeing that. We know what our partners need and we give it to them. That’s what love is. Just as I’m thinking that, I’m shocked at the next words out of his mouth.
“It’s love that makes it work. We—the Universalists, who use paging-in for the world’s benefit, rather than our own, like your mother’s group, the Individualists, we thought if we could take Emily’s love from her—the love she had from you—then she would lose her power. She didn’t deserve your love anyway. Not the way I do.”
I’m going to be sick. I knew it wasn’t a meaningless suicide. I knew it couldn’t be that. Here, finally, justification. Meanwhile, all my life was a lie, needlessly. Tragedy is what it is.
He shakes his head. “You loved her so much, but you have to understand what’s at stake, Millie. Your mother was a dangerous, powerful, incredibly careless and selfish woman. Think about it this way, would you want her to have power over the nuke button? Because that’s essentially what she had.”
“Did she give you cancer? Is that what this is all about?�
��
He nods, turns away.
“Are you just saying this so I’ll hate her?”
He shakes his head, manages to meet my gaze.
“But why did she do that to you? And how? You know, the ironic thing is that as soon as I found out about the cancer, that was my first thought: paging-in could fix this. But I couldn’t work out how to target it so specifically.”
Kennedy sighs hugely. I can’t believe this is all happening.
“Do you really want this life, murder, mayhem, manipulating the very yearnings that make us who we are, all for the unwinnable battle of taming man’s desires? It is ugly. Believe me. Look how amazingly we got on without all of this.” He scoots his chair close, grabs my hands, puts his face in close to mine. “We have it all—no fantasy, no fiction required. You’ve let all that go all these years. Maybe you can leave it behind again. For good this time.”
I feel my chin wobble, wet rivers down my face, gushing.
“Had it all.”
“But how can you go in with a specific goal of altering a specific reality outside the pages?”
“You have to be incredibly powerful to do that.”
“Like Mother.” I swallow. “And Rose.”
“Why don’t you tell me more of what you know?” he says.
“Well, there has to be an incredibly strong connection to the story.” Always carry a book with you to ground your reading in reality. “And a deep understanding of the way stories work, which elements will lead to changes down the line, a grasp of character, and the way readers connect to those characters, and why. Years and years of study. There are many schools—the methods are as varied as the amount of texts out there multiplied by the ways we can interpret them. But the person who can tug at those exact strings that stir the precise reaction they were after. Well, that person is what has come down the line to us as God.”
He looks at me again. My throat catches. I feel my eyes glass. Have I said too much? If so, I can’t seem to stop myself. I seem to speak for hours. Until he stops me.
“—What you said there, ‘to be desired, to be a hero, to be glorious, great, to take a life. That is life dramatized to its largest stakes. So easy to see right and wrong when the stakes are so great, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I say, but I’m not sure I agree. Taking a life: that is the bit that’s always caught me up.
“And what more beautiful way is there to save someone than to achieve the greatest stakes?”
It’s in that moment I know for sure I won’t tell Kennedy about seeing Pinocchio tomorrow. There’s something about his stance. Like maybe he doesn’t believe everything I’m saying, despite what he said about his own experiences.
Mother. Is this all your fault? Just another jab, perfectly delayed in the execution, to kick me down just when everything’s perfect? Now that’s much easier to believe. And yet, I have so many questions, I can’t leave it there.
“Readers are a dangerous bunch. The risks and rewards are always high in literature—that’s why it’s so powerful; it works on our desires, letting us see what it’s like to fuck or kill or please someone in the way we’ve always dreamed—”
“I still can’t believe you’ve lied to me all this time. How can that be?”
“I eased your life in so many ways, Millie. Don’t you dare tell me I didn’t. I gave you years of freedom from all this. I gave you love, a family, peace.”
“But at what cost? And was that really for my benefit, or to tick off the boxes on the ruination of Mother? Where does the one end and the other begin? At what point did you realize you loved me? At any point?”
“You know what Döblin said,” Kennedy says. “‘Omens and coincidences and signs flow into the visible world,’ from stories. A ‘softening’ of reality, he called it. It’s all so mixed up, I can barely recall what’s real.”
Now, this I can understand. As a matter of fact, I remember when I first read Döblin. I wrote that down on my Quelque Choses: Doblin, softening of reality. Some words scream out to you to make them your own, as if they always were and you’re now just getting reacquainted with them. I underlined it twice.
He always said he loved it when I jotted down my notes. Harriet the Spy, he called me. But that was long ago.
My mind is thrashing around for a way out. I can taste the memory of this feeling. I fear what I will do to satisfy the desire, to quell the discomfort. Anger rises.
“And so you see that while technically I can page in, why I can’t tinker with this cancer—can’t have you tinkering with it either. And besides, as a Universalist, it’s completely against everything we stand for, everything we fight your mother and her clan to protect. There’s an order to things, an oath for the good of man. And I’m the leader of the movement. We’re not supposed to use it for personal gain. So, please leave all that behind.”
This is the moment I can reassure him, if I want to.
“Doesn’t everyone fuck up the world every day, just more gradually?” I ask. “That’s the nature of life.” I’m not sure my reaction is genuine, but I think of all the times he’s helped me, soothed me, all those memories now mixed up in our new reality, and I can’t close the door on him just yet.
“I’m not surprised you see it that way, growing up with your mother. And I do have respect for that point of view. There are times I wish I’d taken it. It’s the only direction where supreme satisfaction lies.”
He seems to mean the words he says. “The problem with literature is that it poses more questions. The deeper you go, the more questions you have. We need to ask these questions, but mostly, we don’t have the answers. I think Universalists often take the stance that they do merely to play devil’s advocate, or because they wish they did have the answers, or wish others believed they did. Like politicians.”
He’s given an excellent argument. But I need to save him, if I can. He is Rose’s father, the father of my unborn child. As if he can read my mind, he stands, pulls me up, too.
“Where are we going?”
He doesn’t answer. Just walks me to his car and pops the trunk. In the back is the tackle box. “This is the most sacred of relics. It belongs with you.”
It belongs with me.
28
KENNEDY
She’s looking at the mountains of quelque chose sheets. But I know she’s seeing something completely different. Her imagined relics of another dimension that she deluded herself into thinking her selfish piece of shit mother could visit, all so she didn’t feel like she’d been neglected and abandoned for no good reason. It is the saddest thing I have ever seen. And I am so sorry it had to come to this.
God, I wish I’d never sold those notepads. But who knows, surely she would have found something else to pile all this significance onto? I speak her name, but she doesn’t respond. It’s like she doesn’t hear me. She lifts a sheet, looks at it for a very long time, then puts that one back and picks up another. She clearly thinks she’s looking at something other than the ordinary paper with her back-slanted writing all down it. It’s like she’s catatonic, except her lips are moving double time, forming incomprehensible sounds.
I can’t help the tears from flowing, watching her like this. All the pain has done this to her. And much of it has been at my own hand. I thought I was helping, but was I? I loved her, I wanted to help her, but I wanted to help her for myself. So I could have her, love her, because of the way it made me feel.
I know what’s on those sheets, memorized every single one so I could go along with the delusion, help her to feel comfortable, to stop fighting her confusion and do what feels good. But what is she looking at, there in her mind? It must be incredible, to layer so much meaning, such rich beauty to everyday ugliness and pain. Was I wrong to give it to her? I had to know what she made of all of it, to take us forward. Otherwise, I was sure she would crack. Better to have her this way, or no way at all. I couldn’t deal with that.
After forty-five minutes or so, she puts down a she
et and returns to me. As if she was never gone.
“What incredible relics,” she says.
Relics?
“A true treasure. I should never have buried it. People will be after us for this. It’s incredibly valuable.”
“To the Individualists?” I try. I think I’ve got the logic down.
“Of course, but also to the Universalists. And the rogues, Like Do—” She stops herself and I don’t force it. I don’t want her to feel pressured or shut down. That would be counterproductive.
She has no idea what she’s been doing—standing there, unresponsive, speaking gibberish and gesturing. I can’t leave Rose with her anymore. I swallow to keep the tears back. “Let’s go to bed,” I say. “It’s so late, and all those incredible treasures. It’s so much for one day.”
“You’re right,” she says. And we go up, take all our clothes off and sleep clutching each other. Because despite everything, we are two people in love, who would go to the greatest lengths for each other. And as we said earlier, what could be more romantic than that?
29
MILLIE
I don’t expect to sleep, but I drift into slumber immediately after our conversation, only briefly, though deeply, dreaming of chainsaws, weed whackers. There’s something in the mind that keeps us trying to make sense of everything, to find the code in the random. The secret center. And that’s what’s had me hooked on paging-in my whole life. Mother obsessed with such things, too, but I’m nothing like her. Our individualities could not be more divergent.
When I wake Kennedy’s out cold. His back to me. His breathing tight, compact, as if he can’t relax even in sleep. I touch his shoulder to make sure he isn’t awake. With everything Kennedy has told me, I can’t wait until tomorrow to go to Dr. P. In seconds, I’m up and in the car—terrified, and Kennedy’s right about the complexity of it all. Nothing is the way I recognize it.
