Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else.
I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.
Was it yesterday, or even the day before—before that book?
But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?
His wife shook him gently. “You’re talking in your sleep,” she said.
She lay back down beside him and gently pulled his arm around her waist. It was her first night in their bed since the book had bitten her. She’d finally realized that the books weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And when, over the past few days, he’d begun to experience worrying symptoms at night—screaming, laughing, sleepwalking, even dancing—she knew she had to stay by his side in case something happened, and that the books had to accept her existence as reality. And reality was something that couldn’t be pushed aside, even by a million books. His wife believed that. He wasn’t sure anymore.
He hadn’t been talking in his sleep. He’d been reading! Line after line of the words that Alice pumped into his head, words that had become his own. Who am I? He took his wife’s hand and pressed it tightly to his chest. Could she snuff out this cursed thing waking up inside me? She thought he wanted to … “No. Not now. Go to sleep,” he breathed.
She rested her head on his chest. That was better. He needed the weight, something to keep him anchored. He’d been floating, floating around for such a very long time in that deep, deep hole. Why couldn’t he just glide through what he was reading? Why did he have to take every line to heart, allowing the words into the most intimate parts of his life, embedded in his panic attacks, his bed, even his daughter?
“Are you okay?” he heard his wife whisper. She was still awake. He hugged her closer, grateful to have her back. There was a gaping void in his chest that he knew his wife should’ve filled, but she was no match for it. It would swallow her up and send her off to the unknown. He didn’t want to have to worry about her as well.
His eyes got used to the dark and he looked for a long time at the ever-growing stacks of books in front of him. He stared at the books, and the books stared back. “What are you waiting for?” they asked him. He was waiting to find out who he was. He knew who he had been before that book, but now he knew nothing. Was he a book censor or a reader? A guardian of surfaces or the Guardian of the Library? He had to choose, and he had to tell the Secretary what he’d decided.
He’d been avoiding the old man ever since their last conversation, even though his daughter mentioned him almost every day. Every morning she begged him to take her “to the place where stories went.” According to her, the Secretary knew more stories than the grandma in the wolf’s stomach. Perhaps he was the only person who had not punished her for being different. He probably even rewarded her for it. At the end of that day in the office, when the new censor was about to leave, he glimpsed true fear in the old man’s eyes. “You must guard your ward well,” he’d said.
Had he meant the library or the child? She was in danger here, yes. But what could he do about it? Where could he run when she was so visible? Colorful, bright, full of stories, trailed by an endless string of imaginary creatures. The new censor had sighed, hunched over. “Things will get better,” he said. “She’ll learn to adapt.”
The Secretary pursed his lips and looked at the floor. “The worst thing that can happen to a child like this is to adapt.” He gently pinched the little one’s cheek. “Wait here for a quarter of an hour, then leave the storeroom. We shouldn’t be seen together.”
The new censor nodded. It was a sensible idea. They’d gone their separate ways. He no longer knew where he belonged. Who would tell him who he was? If he closed his eyes and dreamed that he was reading his thoughts, which were also Alice’s thoughts, and if the Cheshire Cat showed him the way to the hookah-smoking Caterpillar and it asked him, “Who are you?”—what would he say?
I know who I used to be before that book. I was a guardian of surfaces, then I fell down the rabbit hole, he might answer. Maybe the Caterpillar would tell him that he was going to turn into a chrysalis, and then after that into a butterfly, and then it would give him a bit of mushroom. He’d grow from a guardian of surfaces into the Guardian of the Library, from a government employee into a traitor, from a good citizen into a Cancer who would one day be arrested because the System always won. They would take his daughter to a rehabilitation center. They’d try him for treason. Happy endings had been quashed long ago, and he knew this game well enough to not want to play it.
He was thinking about hell again. The word had been purged from the Holy Books—as well as all commentaries, study guides, and prayer books—when the government decided that religion must be based in reality, that there would be no more heaven or hell. They deconstructed all the symbols: Heaven was happiness and hell was misery. After the Revolution, the Party formed a committee of forward-thinking religious men and gave them the task of religious reform. Their aim was to relieve the texts of their inner meanings. In the end, you could read a Holy Book the same way you’d read the phone book.
He closed his eyes. His mind was made up. In the morning, he would tell the Secretary that he wouldn’t become the Guardian of the Library, and that if the old man brought it up again, he would have no choice but to report him to the authorities. He would give Alice in Wonderland back, and he wouldn’t even ask for Zorba. He would tell the old man to stay out of his life, not to speak to him or look at him again. And then everything would go back to its comfortable place on the surface of the world. He would read books that didn’t say anything and fill libraries with them. And years from now, when he had received the required promotion and the necessary experience, and they’d officially allowed him to inspect novels, no book would affect him, even if it were Zorba. By then, he would have wrapped himself in a hard shell. He would be immune to meaning. His life would be normal, and he’d be a normal person, never wondering for a single second who he was.