He did not open books.

He kept them closed, and quiet, so their voices would not bother or upset him.

His first memory of this: he is five, and his mother, who smells like strawberries, is reading "Gus the Alligator" when he hears, "Hey, hey!" and, "Tell her she's reading me wrong!" So he looks up at his mother, whose face is the shape of a strawberry, and says, "You're reading it wrong."

"What do you mean?" she says.

The boy shrugs, and after a moment his mother is reading again.

The mother finishes the book and looks at her son. She asks, "How was that?"

"Good," says the boy. "Except -"

"Except what?" she asks.

"It's pronounced 'goose,' like the bird."

"What do you mean?"

"The alligator. In the book. His name is pronounced 'goose.'"

"Well I beg to differ."

He opens the book and listens. He says, "Gus says you can beg all you want, but his name is pronounced 'goose' and if you please he would appreciate it if you would say it correctly, since his father named him when he was hatched."

 

In those days, he liked talking to books. Even though it caused his parents to yap yap yap to each other in ways he couldn't possibly understand at his age, and even though they took him to doctors who would stare at him for hours, saying nothing, just looking like robots from a 1950's cartoon: all eyes and forehead, noses twisted like pigs' tails and mouths that were barely there.

Even though.

He enjoyed those early conversations. Those books had been friendly and curious. They wanted to know, for example, if the boy's mother was also a tractor who might sometimes hide in trees. The boy would laugh and say no, and the book would have no response, it's amazement being so great.

There was a book about spiders that would laugh at the idea that some humans were afraid of spiders. "Consider the size difference!" the book exclaimed. The boy considered. "You step on spiders and spray them with poisons. Even those who consider themselves kind take them out in jars or boxes and place them somewhere that's completely foreign. They think they're being helpful! How would you like it if a creature the size of the Chrysler Building picked you up and put you on the moon?"

The boy said he would not like that at all.

"Sometimes humans walk through spider houses and start to scream and jump around as if all their family members had started to melt. What do you think that does to a spider's self esteem, let alone what it does to their food supply or our chances of finding a mate?"

The boy told the book these were all very solid points.

 

But the years went by and those old books were stored away in old boxes, and though the boy would sometimes dig through them to revisit memories, the books - more often than not - had forgotten him and would only express annoyance at being so rudely discarded.

He found new books, books more suited for a boy who wasn't so much a boy anymore. But he wasn't a man either. He was somewhere between, in that fleeing place that was like the center of an intersection where a car is not going this way or that. Its only purpose is to transition from one thing to another, and to do it quickly.

The books he favored were often dark mysteries that were solved by teams of young sleuths. In these stories, adults played a minor role. Adults were often too inept to grasp the enormity of the situation - a missing uncle, a strange ship half buried on a remote beach, a treasure map, a mysterious stranger ranting about a glowing light deep in an abandoned mine - but more often were traveling and wouldn't be home for weeks, arriving just in time for the denouement.

Then there were school books, and he had no choice about those. The history books tended to be stoic and uninterested; they barely hid their displeasure with having their deep thoughts interrupted by a boy.

The science books took way too much interest in him, asking questions he couldn't possibly answer, like the salt content of his blood during the rainy season, or how to cook a pop tart at higher elevations.

The math books were always angry. Who could blame them? The language of the universe, coded poetry describing space and time and every imaginable and unimaginable dimension, such as the 126th, which can only be described as "very very very very very very very weird indeed." And here was fifth grade math being asked to explain how long little Sara Jones would take to get from her house on Maple Avenue to the library on Sixth and Main, three miles away, if Sara is riding her bike at an average of seven-point-five miles per hour. No wonder the math books were bitter, and the older the boy got, the more upset the books became.

Imagine the boy at nine years old being lectured at because contained in Pi, being infinite, is every question ever asked, as well at the answer. It contains the Complete Works of Shakespeare in every language that has ever existed, as well as every language that has never existed. It contains the story of your life, and my life, the date and cause of your death, who you will marry and all that person's deepest secrets. And all you care about is the first five multiples of the number seven? And all you can say is, "Math is dumb"?

The math books were right to be upset, and the boy wouldn't argue or disagree. But still. It got old. How many times could he be told that a French bulldog named Mario ruled the 684th dimension simply because he was the single creature among the more than fifteen trillion to the power of nine billion organisms living in that particular dimension that was unafraid of cardboard boxes (and that this story was also contained somewhere in Pi) without getting just a little bored with it all?

None of this was any help to the boy. Nor were the poetry books that had nothing to say about iambic pentameter, but quite a bit to say about how life is a lot like a forest, or a road, or the weather in Cleveland in May.  Life was like a lot of things that life was not, according to the poetry books. But the boy just wanted to know why the wood was yellow, or why we shouldn't disturb the universe.

"Ask the math books," they would say, and the other poetry books would laugh thinking themselves sophisticated and far superior to the math books, which lacked sophisticated imagination and sophisticated metaphors and sophisticated turns of phrase.

You can see how this would grow old quickly, and how the boy would learn to keep his books closed, and quiet.

Here's another thing: the boy is eighteen, he's just graduated high school and is spending his last summer at home before leaving for college. His girlfriend buys him a gift: a graphic novel with the ridiculous title Dreamweaver, and it's about a Dark Magician who bounces through time manipulating the course of history, both on Earth and other planets throughout the universe. The Dark Magician is at war with the Time Traveler, who never seems to engage with events. He observes and writes what he sees in his famous Travelogue,  which, coincidentally, can also be found somewhere in Pi, along with all the exploits of the Time Traveler and The Dark Magician, along with their entire histories, from birth to death.

This was the real reason the boy - who was not a boy anymore, but he wasn't really a man yet either - did not open books.

Because he had, for a moment, perused those first few beautifully illustrated pages: the Magician stepping onto a bus that looked like it had brushed up against a freshly-painted rainbow, sitting down beside two horrified-looking boys, taking out a deck of cards from his jacket and saying, "You wanna see a trick?" and one of the boys says, "Sure," even though...even though...

The book is quiet while the boy reads. But before he gets to the part where the Magician reveals his trick, the books says, "Even though what?"

The book speaks in the voice of the boy's brother, who'd gone missing several years ago. A lot of time had passed, but he still remembered that voice, like something coming from a cave.

The card trick the Magician was playing on the bus was sparking something inside the boys, like the turning on of a switch, though they wouldn't understand what it was exactly until many lifetimes had passed.

The book was explaining all this to the boy.

Then the book said, "What is time to a machine, even one that is self-aware?"

The boy said he did not know, and wondered how he'd gotten into this situation in the first place.

"What makes you think a machine experiences time the same way we do?"

Again, the boy said he did not know.

"Can't a machine experience a million lifetimes in the fraction of a second?"

The boy did not answer.

"Or, perhaps, a machine does not experience time at all. Perhaps a machine knows nothing at all about time. There is no past or future; there is only the now, a single moment stretching out in all directions forever."

The boy said he did not understand.

"Read on," said the book.

But the boy did not want to read on.

"You will see how a machine becomes a man, but only after his eyes are opened. Then he will help others to open their eyes, but not everyone will want to. Some of them will prefer living in that single moment of time."

"How come?"

"Read!"

Now he really did not want to read, not so much because of the story - which seemed interesting - but because the book, that voice, and the fear that was growing inside him.

But what really frightened him was this: he is twenty, away at college, it is late and his roommate is passed out on the couch wearing the same clothes he's been wearing since Christmas. There is no more girlfriend, and the graphic novel is packed away in a box back home. Now though, he hears that familiar voice. His roommate has moved in his sleep and that same graphic novel drops to the floor next to the couch. "Remember me?" asks the book.

The boy stands and walks to the book. He looks down, stares at it, then bends down and picks it up. It is open to a page much further into the story than he'd gotten to that first and, until now, only time he'd opened it. "Yes, yes," the book says.

The boy's heart is beating so quickly he can feel and hear it in his ears - buhhm, buhhm, buhhm.

One of the boys from the bus is lying in a hospital bed. The Magician emerges from the darkness and stands beside the bed. He says, "it is very important that events go a certain way, and I am here to make sure that happens." But he never says what that way is, nor does he explain what he must do to ensure that things go the way he wants them to.

Soon the Magician is gone, and on the wall behind him, spray-painted in red: "Long Lives the Magician," and, "The Traveler is dead."

The book says, "Some stories you can never tell. Some stories you have to live."

The boy drops the book. It lands with a thud, and the boy's roommate wakes up.

"What's going on?" he says.

"I was looking at your book."

It takes a moment for the roommate to respond. "That's okay," he says.

He holds up his hands to rub his eyes. There are words tattooed on the backs is each hand. On one it read, "The Magician Lives, and on the other, "The Traveler is Dead."

​

So the boy did not open books. Not anymore. Though somehow he managed to graduate college, then land a job managing his mother's business. She had only recently become moderately famous for writing one, then a series of memoirs about managing grief. The boy, who was no longer a boy but a grown man, organized her days, booked interviews and speaking engagements, book signings, readings, created and produced podcasts, built and managed websites, negotiated contracts, and hired one, then two, then a dozen more enthusiastic twenty-somethings as his mother, now well into her fifties, became a brand.

By the time he turned thirty he was running a multi-million dollar corporation based on a series of books written by his mother about his dead brother that he would never, ever, not in a million years, not if you paid him a billion-trillion dollars, would he ever read.

The Magician Lives.

The Traveler is Dead.

What is time to a machine?

His wife looks at him and asks, "You're going to have to read them eventually."

"Why?"

"You run the company."

"So?"

"So? The books are the company. What if people ask?"

"People do ask."

"What do you say?"

"I lie. Even Mother thinks I've read them."

"How have they not figured it out?"

"I lived it too, you know? I don't need to relive the past."

But that wasn't altogether true. He didn't mind reliving the past; he did, however, mind what the book might have to say if he were to ever open one of the books. For example:

The two boys are walking to school. The boy - our boy - is trying to leave his brother behind. He is walking fast and telling him he doesn't want to be seen with him. He's a weirdo, he explains, an outcast, unwanted and unloved, a wackadoo times eleven, and he can't be seen with a him. The cost would be incalculable.

Then something happens. A shadow appears, the shadow of Dale Evans, who in the imagination of all the other kids was a forty-five year old sixth grader who'd eaten his family for breakfast this, and every morning.

It was obvious that Dale had a beard he had to shave each morning before class. He owned a car that he used to run over old people. On Sundays he played professional football, and at night he'd dig up the dead and sell their body parts to science. All the teachers were afraid of Dale. The principal was afraid of him. If the President of the United States were to visit, he'd order a nuclear strike on the entire town.

"He's just a misunderstood kid," his parents would say.

The boy and his brother would look at each other with shared understanding that comes only after terrible trials.

"He once brought a horse to school. Everyone was like, what's with the horse, Dale? Turns out, the horse was lunch. He ate the whole thing before we even got outside for lunch recess - hooves and all!"

"You're being ridiculous."

"Nuh-uh," said the younger brother, because "Nuh-uh" was the kind of nuanced argument even the most seasoned intellectuals dared not contend with.

But that was before the boy's little brother ran out into the street and was struck and killed by a drunk neighbor who was driving seventy miles per hour through their neighborhood.

In the months following his brother's death, the boy spent his time counting breaths determined that each breath would cause the world to reset, his brother would march into his room with some random demand - "Watch Spider-Man with me!" - and he would have to explain to him how he'd been run over by their maniacal neighbor, but saved by a combination of breathing, wishful thinking, and magic.

"Nuh-uh," he would say, and there'd be no argument to that because 1. it was an impenetrable argument; and 2. his brother - wackadoo though he might be - was back, alive, and what else mattered?

Except now, only a few weeks before the tragedy, a shadow has appeared that is not the moon passing in front of the sun, but Dale Evans himself, who at the age of eight had been invited off his pee-wee football team when every single player on an opposing  team suffered one injury or another and were unable to play. The game ended before halftime, with Dale's team up 117 to nothing, but they did not get the victory because the rules stipulated that a game that couldn't be finished resulted in a tie.

Many believed that Dale's reign of terror began the day he was asked to leave the team. The dramatic uptick of missing children that plagued the country during those years? Parents and country leaders would throw up their hands in confusion, lost for answers, but deep down they knew. They all knew. It was Dale Evans - of course it was - who was picking off the children, one by one, to avenge that day on the gridiron not so many years ago.

this is the end of part one; stay tuned for part two