Dad came by at 8 o’clock the next morning to sign me out. As he was filling out the paperwork, I glanced at the book the woman was filling out and saw that Aaron had been checked out an hour earlier. Dad took me home, and I sat around drinking Mountain Dew and reading Harry Potter while the Science Channel played in the background. Dad went back to work around 9:30, leaving me alone. There were a few get well cards, including one from Marry with a p.s. asking for help on a science problem. There were also two gift baskets, one of which was full of Mountain Dew and books, and the other contained beef jerky and instant-coffee. The first one was from Charlie, but I couldn’t figure out who had sent the second one. There was no postage on it, so I figured they had dropped it off. But the same went for the one from Charlie, only he added a note. It was weird, but I appreciated it nonetheless. As I searched through the basket to try and find a card, my fingers felt the cover of a book. Picking it up, I gasped.
It was the gray book. Except it was new. The lettering, the strange hide-or-fabric cover, everything. Not quite new, but certainly not old. As if it were a notebook that had been used and then forgotten. I opened it. There were the technical writings, the random fragmented passages, everything seemed the same. I opened my backpack and took out the book. Page 44. The blood-like stain. The passage. Page 44. It was blank.
Now I was really confused.
I decided to try a different page. I opened to page 10 of the new book. It was a model of the solar system, but covered in words in the English alphabet arranged into words not meant for human tongues. I could barely keep steady enough to open the old book to page 10. Eventually, I did, and sat down on the floor with a solid thunk. The pages were identical. How in the heck... No, scratch that, who in the heck... Wait, what? Thoroughly confused, I opened one of the Mountain Dew bottles. Taking a gulp, I tried to figure out who could possibly have known about the book. Because it clearly was a copy of the book; there was no way it was the same book. There had to be other copies of the book. But why was this unfinished? Maybe it was a journal style, a massed produced diary that someone had partially filled in with the stuff from my book. But how would they know what the book was? How? How how how how how? And why?
Who the hell sent me this gift basket?
My brain was way too muddled to even attempt to grasp this concept. I picked up one of the books from Charlie’s basket. It was “The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.” Way to go, Charlie! Leave it to Charlie to pick one of the few books that I would willing reread time and time again. I had spent hours in the dusty back room of the library, just pouring over Lewis Carroll, mostly the poems, but sometimes “Alice and Wonderland” or “Through the Looking Glass.” I opened to page 700, which had my absolute favorite poem of all time written on it. “My Fairy.” He wrote it when he was 13 simply to entertain his siblings:
I have a fairy by my side
Which says I must not sleep,
When once in pain I loudly cried
It said "You must not weep"
If, full of mirth, I smile and grin,
It says "You must not laugh"
When once I wished to drink some gin
It said "You must not quaff".
When once a meal I wished to taste
It said "You must not bite"
When to the wars I went in haste
It said "You must not fight".
"What may I do?" at length I cried,
Tired of the painful task.
The fairy quietly replied,
