Uni-verses

There was something black and glossy under the bench. It looked like a book of the kind you write in. Jaydan was curious. This was not unusual – Jaydan was curious about shinny things, dull things, tiny things, huge things, common things, rare things, things that flew and things that didn’t move at all. He was curious about objects, about smells, about sounds; he could spend long stretches of time feeling a particularly smooth surface or a ticklishly rough one. Jaydan was curious about lots of things – people, not so much. He found them a bit boring. Certainly grown-ups with their silly questions about school and which this or that was his favorite – subject, teacher, friend, or superhero. Why did he have to have a favorite!? Kids were a bit better. At least some kids were.

- Jaydan! Let’s go, pumpkin.

Jaydan picked up the little black notebook and put it in his backpack together with the candy wrappers, the perfectly round pebbles, the desiccated spider in its plastic container, a squashed flower that had once been pretty, and a lunchbox now empty. He had got hungry while waiting for his mum to finish doing the weekly shopping.

Alone in his room, Jaydan fished the notebook out of his backpack. He took a moment to imagine what would happen if opening it released black magic, a genie who’d grant him at least one wish, a wormhole to travel to another room, another time, another universe… In other words, something extraordinary. He was sensible enough to know that wasn't likely, but anchoring the colorful stories on the tiniest, remotest, but actual probability was fun too. At the very least, he hoped it was not full of recipes or something equally dull.

It wasn’t.

“If I have been dumb enough to lose this notebook (again!) and you’ve found it, could you please send an SMS to 212-863-1104”

That was the first page. The rest were filled with poems, or what looked like poems even when there was no rhyme, or what did not look like but felt like poems because the lines seemed to swell and sink like waves even when they weren’t chopped in small chunks. They were handwritten and had bits crossed over and overwritten, and sometimes smaller text squeezed into what had been a blank space. He came across words that he didn’t know, like flummoxed, mellifluous and murmur, that sounded heavenly, and words that sounded completely made up, like bourgeois and angst. He saw a sick elephant being sycophantic and thought cacophony meant fake poop which was not a nice thing to say, surely. On some pages, he understood all the words but they didn’t make a whole lot of sense together somehow. Yet, even when he didn’t understand every word, even when he didn’t understand the meaning that all the words together were supposed to build, even when the verses didn’t rhyme, he seemed to get it. Every page left something behind – a tingling on his scalp; a feeling of doom or hope, sadness or happiness; a void or a fullness; and always an urge to continue reading. He was carried by the flow of sound in his head; sucked by the swirls of feeling; lost in the letters, the words, the spaces between them, the zigzagging of the lines; rocked by the toing and froing of impressions…

And then his mum called him to set the table for dinner and the bubble was popped. He slid the notebook under his pillow and entered ticking time again.

- What have you been doing all this while?

- Nothing.

- Nothing takes that much time!?

- Nothing can take all the time in the world!

- Right. Don’t forget the salad servers, smarty-pants.

When he got into bed again, his head bumping against a hard flat surface reminded him of the unfinished business under his pillow. He was too tired to give it the attention it deserved, but he couldn’t resist reading one more page before switching off for the day:

“`T was but a dream, yet in my heart I knew,

Beating so fiercely in the morning dew,

That more than little truth in it laid nested

Which was by itself the self disturbing

For the great thirst that it suggested.

Bring in the flood, bring in the bourbon!

Quench it before it unmolested

Becomes the thought that’s all absorbing,

Leaving me parched and wasted.”

He, too, had a dream. He dreamt of balloons so subtle they dissolved into an idea when you looked at them, letting the string that tied them fall to the ground in squiggles like foreign writing. When his mum woke him up, it took him longer than usual to step into the morning. The dream had left a sort of sleepy sand of the mind that distorted the everyday in funny ways, and he wanted to hang on to it for as long as he could.

He kept the poems to himself, hiding them under his mattress during the day and reading and re-reading them in the evenings to fill his dreams. There, words did amazing things like grabbing an s to start a s-word fight and finally falling backwards into a y, drows-y with exhaustion. He’d never imagined words could be so much fun. He wanted to play with them too but, when he tried, what came out were the sort of sentences that Miss MacPee, sorry, Miss MacPhee wanted them to use – all proper and stiff. He could make them rhyme alright, but they didn’t sing. In fact, they looked back at him from the page like fish left too long in the fridge – cold and hopelessly lifeless. Singing was out of the question.

He persevered. That was the only way to get better at something, according to his mum. Then, one day, he dreamt of worms racing each other – backs hunching, humps inching forwards. He woke up with a plan: he was going to write a poem that “rhymed” at the beginning instead of at the end. It would be about entering another world – the expectation of something wonderful ahead and the fear of disappointment. It wasn’t easy. He first collected the words he wanted to use, wrote them down on little pieces of paper, and then applied himself to the puzzle of putting them together. He first tried to arrange them like this, then like that; moving one word to the left, another to the right, a whole line up, and another one down; switching one word for another, twisting them around, and removing those that didn’t fit. The result sang! To a different rhythm than the poems in the notebook, though. Maybe it wasn’t a poem… It was a meop, of course!

He copied the final, singing version in very neat block letters onto a clean page.

The next morning, he read it again and again and again until he had to go to school. When he came back, the little black book was on top of the kitchen table. He’d forgotten to hide it.

- Where does this come from, Jaydan?

- I found it.

- Which means someone lost it... And that person is probably keen to get it back. So keen, in fact, that they left a phone number on the first page for people to be able to return it. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

- Please, mum?

- What do you mean “please, mum”?

- I… It… Can I at least copy what’s inside?

- I don’t think that will be right. This is someone’s work. They may or may not want others to read it. I’m sorry, pumpkin, but you need to respect other people’s property – both what you can touch and hold, and what you can’t.

A text to the number on the notebook left his mum’s phone. He felt slightly queasy with loss and longing churning in his belly.

When he and his unhappiness came back home from school the following day, the little black notebook was still on top of the kitchen table. No one had replied. His mum sent another text. Again, there was no reply a day later. Perhaps the owner had changed phones, or wrote down the wrong number… Maybe it would be ok in the end! Or maybe not: the third day, she decided to call instead, and someone answered right away. Jaydan listened to her side of the conversation. After the first few turns, his mum’s words started going in a weird direction and the silences became darker. He saw her gasp, saw her nod, saw her shake her head. There were more unplaceable words, more silences. Finally, she said ‘ok’ and gave their address.

He looked at her from the bottom of his anguish, she looked back at him long and kind. The suspense was killing him but, at the same time, he’d rather not hear what was coming. He lowered his eyes to the crumbs on the kitchen table.

- This notebook belongs… belonged to a poet – a well-known one, it seems.

- So who does it belong to now?

- It was her agent on the phone. That’s the person that used to help her with her work. He’s very eager to get hold of the notebook because it has her last poems. He wants to publish them as soon as possible.

- Did she stop writing when she lost her notebook? Couldn’t she write without it?

A very audible sigh filled the room. Jaydan looked up from the pile of crumbs he had been addressing his questions to.

- Jaydan, she’s no longer with us. She was pretty sick and passed away last week. The agent didn’t know about these poems and he’s very grateful we’re… you’re returning them to him. He’s going to give you a big reward: $20,000! A finder’s fee, he called it. I suppose he’ll get a lot of money out of it, so he’s being generous with you.

- Can I have the notebook back when they’ve published what’s inside?

- I don’t think so, pumpkin. It will probably become quite valuable now – you know, like the guitar of a famous singer after they die. But you can buy the published book when it comes out.

The most impatient Jaydan had ever waited for something was when once he overheard his parents taking about a bicycle a week before his birthday. His impatience now was ten times bigger, and the wait a gazillion times longer. The day “the posthumous poems of the greatest poet of our era” came out, he went straight from school to the bookstore where he had already ordered his copy, afraid to miss out if a fandom avalanche snatched every volume before 3 pm.

He found the poems were out of order. He didn’t like that. But they still twirled and swirled and whirled taking him along, making him happy even when they made him sad, which was hard for him to understand. The poems still hypnotized him like an evening by a pond – all buzzes, and breezes, and intriguing noises.

He paced his reading, savoring every word, every pause; the filled spaces and the empty ones. Then he reached the last page and there, unbelievably, was his moep looking up at him with all the seriousness of print. His moep had been considered “the culmination of the poet’s life work, her incursion into realms unexplored, strings untouched, melodies unheard”. He saw it was true – his moep was not all his; it was hers as well because she planted it in him and watered and trimmed it until it felt just right together with the rest.

He closed the notebook, switched off the light, and looked forward to the dreams.