Once he started, once he got fairly well into it, he simply could not put it down. He stayed up the whole night to finish. He couldn't help himself, he couldn't stop. It was tough in one go like that, long and densely written, but he did it. It was sort of his superpower, reading like that, and this time especially. This time he was not just interested, not simply engaged, he was riveted, he was driven. He couldn't be a moment without her, he just couldn't. He had to, had to know how she ended, and then, of course, she didn't. Finishing her first book left him frantic, raging, caged. He'd surely known she went on into the other books, but he certainly hadn't foreseen any problem with that. They were, after all, merely books, and he was, after all, a great reader. Reading was his passion, a passion he cultivated and nurtured, not a passion which mastered him. Certainly he read his share of current fiction; certainly he had read books in series before; certainly he had felt eagerness to reach the end of a long and involved story. Often. He was, after all, human, even if, he admitted it modestly to himself, even if he were a superhuman reader.
And yet.
Before this, before this very moment, his feelings towards books written in a series had been, at best, passive; if he had accidentally read a book that turned out to be the first of several, if he had liked it, he had casually picked up the later books as he found them in stores, at friends' houses, at the library; at worst he had felt contempt toward them. Real books, he had thought privately and smugly to himself, stood alone. It was an unexamined prejudice, and a strong one, but it had fled in the night and he was naked in his need. Now he was bereft and left hanging at five in the morning. Now he felt nearly frantic with wonder at her, with worry for her. Now he cursed himself for a fool to so casually undertake her having laid no plan, given no thought to in any way securing her to himself. He could not have slept even if his headlong reading had not filled the entire night. At breakfast he began her book again, to be near her while he ate. He carried her book on the train and read it in the taxi. He thought about her, brooded on her every moment he was not actually reading about her. The next day he skipped a meeting and went out eagerly to buy the rest of the books in her series, going to three bookstores to finally get them all because they were sold out everywhere.
By the end of the week he had read all her books through twice.
By the end of the week he knew her through and through.
By the end of the week he could have told you anything her author had decided about her, anything he had himself extrapolated about her and any of the things about her he had, in the last week, carefully and lovingly made up out of the clear blue sky.
By the end of the week he knew her, all and more than all there was to know.
By the end of the week she was so nearly his he could almost taste her.
And by the end of the week he had had a nasty shock.
The series was not complete.
Her last book, the volume which would answer all his questions, lay to rest all his concerns, set a capstone to mark and to celebrate all his longing, had yet to be published. Sometime next year, the website said, sometime next year. That posting was already more than a year old.
Two days later he phoned her author at home, having by that time already sent thirty-seven inquires to the publishing company, forty-one to her author's agent and ninety-six emails to her author's fan page, Facebook account and private mail account. Carbon copies. He phoned out of sheer frustration because, having gotten no response to his storm of electronic and paper pleadings, he assumed no one was listening. He got no answer at her author's home so he left messages. He left eighty-three voice messages over the next five days. He decided her author wasn't at his home. How could he be home and not answer a simple phone call, respond to a simple message making a simple request. Publication date? Plot summary? Story overview? Yes or no answers to three questions that were killing him, sucking the marrow from his bones and leaving him wide awake and staring at his ceiling night after night? Answers, that was all he needed. He had to have them, had to get them, had to know. Had to. Had to know how she would end. He had a right, after all. After all this time he had a right.
By the end of the next week he not only felt he had a right, he felt he had a claim, and a few days later he had a right, a claim and a stake. He also had her ending worked out in his head. It came out wonderfully well, tied up all her loose ends, resolved all her untamed bits and pieces. It was so clear to him, so obvious. Surely this was how it was, what she would herself want. He was sure, so sure he called her author to tell him. He told him, over the phone, into her author's message box. It took two hours. Then he sat back to wait. To await her coming to him, perfect and whole and complete.
As it turned out, everyone was listening to his missives. Even the police, even the FBI. Lots of people were very aware, but none more keenly aware than her author, who loved her for herself, who had found her in his head fully grown and fully realized and had loved her in her fullness and in her wild state. Her author turned over the pleadings on paper with shaky hands. Her author listened again and again to those hours of instruction, teaching him how to end her, to bring it all to a close. He read and he listened and he, too, did not sleep. This was it, this was it, his irrational fear come home to him and to her. He turned over and over in his bed and turned over in his mind what he had known he would have to do. In the end it was very painful for him, but he did it. He had to, he loved her so.
He wrote it all out, his own style, but following the bones, the route taken by the words spoken for those hours into his answering machine. He wrote it out, and he changed her. He changed her in the words and in the letters and in the pauses and in the marks to mark the pauses. He altered her until the woman in this story, this last story, was not at all, not in any way, the woman he knew, and loved. He wrote this new woman into an ending story, and then he sent to the crazed man who did not love her but thought of her til he thought he would die of it, a letter, genuinely expressed and gorgeously worked. He was an author, after all. The letter told the crazed reader that her author was old, too old to see her last book through publication, but that he, the author, had recognized in him, the reader, a fellow and a brother. Her author wrote that he was entrusting her final chapters to her most ardent, her one true reader on condition the reader never reveal her to the world. The secret would die between the two of them. If the reader could abide by these conditions, the author would send her to her most passionate reader for safe keeping til the end of all things. The letter stated her author would die content knowing she was in such careful hands.
Her reader truly nearly died of joy at this. He eagerly sent back his acceptance, his assurances of strict compliance. Let it be here stated that he did in fact comply, all his life, that he took the draft with the woman who was altered past recognition but who was so exactly what he had thought he wanted her to become that he never at all noticed, and hid her up to himself forever and for always. He consumed her stories again and again, filling himself with the idea that she was his alone. He died a long many years later, utterly convinced.
Her author, having sent off the draft directed to the return address on the piles of mail he had received in the last troubling weeks, sat down thoughtfully, and lovingly edited and amended the last story as he had written it over the eight months previous to these events. He marked her and mended his words of her and held her as he brought her through the end he had seen and hoped for all those years and years. He read her manuscript; it pleased him greatly. He held her to him then, proud of her; he wavered, his heart was torn, he was sad almost to death. But he knew, had known even before she acquired this stalker, this tormented lover, that he could not leave her an orphan. He set his heart, sealed up her story, wrote upon it instructions, and lay down that night to become very sick, never, in fact, to rise again from his bed a well man. He died not so long after, and when he did, his instructions were followed exactly, for the people he left behind had loved him well, and her sealed story was laid with him in his wooden box and she slept with him til the end of all things. She was, after all, a person of paper, as he had made her, and very comfortable in his last wooden home.
If you really read the fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.
-G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered, 1908
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