The Book Giveth and Taketh

Transcript: Myrrha Miller

You know how sometimes things just go awry. They go sideways and ruin your life in the most ludicrous way. Well this is one of those stories. To most, finding a book that could instantly force something you desire into existence would be the stuff dreams are made of. But what most people fail to realise is that everything comes with a price, and the price I paid was far worse than anything I could have ever imagined…

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…What?...

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...Yeah I’m getting to that.

It was a loathsome day from the moment I woke up. It was raining so heavily I couldn’t even see the world outside my apartment. I started making my coffee and promptly burnt it, because my anxiety made it impossible to decide between fashionable and uncomfortable or comfortable and slightly drab thus causing me to forget it until my nose notified me. Ultimately I decided for fashionable discomfort, it was a job interview after all and you know, best foot forward and all that.

I grabbed a croissant from the packet and headed out. I couldn’t allow the abysmal weather to make me late. As I hurried down the stairs (because of course the elevator was broken again) I felt my heel go, and sure enough I looked down at my foot and…well suffice it to say that’s why I hate wearing heels. I debated whether or not to go back, I had…boots. Only boots, I lived in boots and they were my only ‘pretty’ shoes. Pretty useless shoes I thought. I was actually quite proud of myself for that quip. No one heard it of course. By this stage I’d wrenched off the offending shoes and run down the stairs in my bare feet.

As I neared the bottom of the stairs all I heard was ‘Behind!’ I hadn’t even had a chance to turn around before the businessman in number 16 ran in to me knocking me off balance. He made the customary ‘Sorry!’ as he barged past. That man was always late. He fought with his wife a lot and quite often I would see him drunk in the hallway late at night desperate to be allowed into his apartment. Not that it was any of my business of course…

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…Oh I don’t know…maybe...

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Now where was I? Oh yes. He bumps me, and as I grab the rail in a bid to steady myself, not only do I manage to spill my burnt coffee on what was once a clean white blouse, but my foot slips off the step below, putting me in a quasi-split. The tear was almost cartoonish, like the word “Riiiip” would appear above a panel of me looking shocked. So suffice it to say there goes the nice demure seam in my only pencil skirt.

As I collected myself and cursed my…um…rude neighbour, I realised he’d dropped a little black notebook. Seemed perfectly plain. I flicked through the pages in case it was an address book or had important information in it. It was mostly blank. There was the day’s date and a series of strange notes. Clear Skies, $20,000. No traffic. I blinked as I looked at it, because no sooner had I read it, but the words changed. Flooding, $20,000, Train Crash. I just thought my anxiety was in overdrive and closed the book. I figured I’d just give it back to him when I saw him later. I looked at my watch. Surely this was not my day and I could just go back upstairs, get out of all my ruined finery, climb in to bed, and forget today even existed. No such luck. I needed the job, there’s only so long that being a starving artist seems like a valid career choice. I had worked hard for the past seven years. I had worked myself until I was creatively bankrupt and emotionally void.

It was the last conversation with my mum that finally broke me. She always used words like, sensible, reasonable, permanent, paying. Perfectly innocuous words that felt like the final nails in my creative coffin. It had taken years for me to get to this point. All I wanted was for my little graphic novel to find its feet. But I guess some things are just not meant to be.

By the time I got outside and realised that my umbrella decided suicide was better than being out in the weather I was beyond caring. I was now behind schedule. My anxiety was in full swing, I was running through the streets soaking wet, I got to the subway and I put my shoes back on. The heel was still attached and functional, provided I only went in straight lines. I would just have to be careful and all would be well, or so I hoped. It had been pouring outside and I hadn’t thought much of it. You can often see full gutters when it rains, but this was different. When I saw the water beginning to pour down the stairs leading towards the platform I got a sudden sinking feeling.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I decided to look up. There was water pouring down the walls, and something inside me told me to get out. I hurried up the now torrential staircase and got above ground. I had barely made it out before I heard what sounded like steel girders bending. It all happened in the longest second I’d every experienced. The ground opened up and suddenly this sinkhole began to engulf everything around it. The world went mad. Horns screeched in the rain, the sound of the rain was deafening, and I could hear screams cut short and the sound of a train attempting to break suddenly. The crash was so forceful that the ground shook. I stepped back trying to avoid the carnage.

I could hear voices calling in pain. Something made me open the little black book. I looked at the page I’d seen and watched as it started writing a list of names. I had no idea who the names were but something in my gut told me those were the names of the people in the ground below me. I backed under the awning of a building nearby and grabbed out a pen. I didn’t know if it would work, but I had to try. If this cursed little book could make things happen then maybe I could at least adjust them. There was a blank space above the list and I just wrote. “Injured, but alive.” As soon as I wrote it my handwriting changed into the typeface the book was written in and kept listing names. I suddenly started hearing voices calling from below the ground. “Help! Is anyone out there. We have injured people down here.” I almost dropped the book.

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…Sorry?...

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…How did I get the money?...

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…Oh I suppose we can skip ahead. I did save those people though…

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…Yes I’m getting to that…I’d had the book for perhaps a month. In all honesty the money just appeared in my account. By the end of that first day, there was $20,000 just sitting in my account…

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…I didn’t recognise the sender and checked it with the bank, and they said everything was above board and turned out I had some long-lost relative who had left it to me as a part of their will. Honestly after the events of that day, that was the least of my worries. This little book. So insignificant a thing was a way to rewrite history as it happened. A way to influence the future. All I had to do was write what I wanted in the book and it did the rest…

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…The money just came to me. Sometimes I would be winning competitions I never entered, other times it would be random people all giving me money as I walked down the street….

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… It didn’t stop at money either. Want to meet a celebrity, done, want to get promoted, no problem. The power of the book…it was…consuming…addictive…and ahh...ultimately, damning.

Initially I couldn’t even look at the book. I kept it in my bag and only ever did little things, I felt like I had hacked the system and it wasn’t fair to everyone else…

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… I tried not to abuse the power of course, but after a while the temptation to see how far you can push grows. It starts with a little bit of money here, a celebrity encounter there. But the bigger your wishes the more the universe has to balance out around you. I didn’t even notice it at first. They were little things. A friend was in a minor car accident and hurt her arm. My boss’s account was hacked, and the exact amount wound up in my account. At first I just saw all these things as coincidences…

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… Actually…I’m not even sure that’s entirely true. I think I wanted them to be coincidences. That way, it couldn’t be my fault. It wasn’t until the book started editing my input that I realised what was happening…

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…Who? Oh The businessman at number 16. I didn’t even notice that the book had done it to be honest. It had adjusted all those in the crash to being injured but alive. But with him it made a separate column. Deceased. Michael Jacobson. I didn’t even know that was his name until I saw the police at his place telling his wife. She just crumpled. I remember she was wearing a lilac dressing gown with white stars on it and she had her fluffy pink slippers on. I’d never seen anyone go to pieces like that before, it was as if her whole world had collapsed. Of course little did I know I’d soon follow suit.

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…Oh I don't know. It's hard to say no. The book is a punishment in my opinion. It punishes those who covet what is not theirs…

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…Jeremy Harrison. He was a barista. I just wrote his name in the book and he fell in love with me immediately. I’d seen him almost everyday for two years and he never once remembered my name. But after that. He remembered my name and he loved me, and it was…perfect...for a while anyway. After a while you start to wonder if they would really love you if the book didn’t compel them to, and it eats you up. It destroys how you feel about yourself…so you wind up sabotaging everything about your relationship.

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…We’d had a fight. It was bad. He’d asked me to marry him and it…it broke me. How could I marry a man who needed a magic book to love me? That’s what I was thinking. He’d gotten the whole thing ready. Flowers, Candlelit dinner, Romantic Music. When he asked me I just felt this awful pain in my chest, like…I knew for the first time, conclusively I knew. None of it was real. I had the fancy apartment, the celebrity friends, the man of my dreams and it was all a lie. At the start all I’d wanted was the successful little graphic novel. I now had it. Did you now it was last year’s bestseller? Yeah. The old me would have been happy with that. But I just felt like a fake. So I did what I always did when I felt like things were tough or that I was somehow being cheated out of something I should have. I got my book and I wrote “He forgives me, and we get married.” Then all I could do was watch in horror as the typeface changed and rewrote my entry. “Jeremy is found dead on loungeroom floor.” The book giveth and the book taketh away.