by Cody Goodfellow

It’s not like he was a narc, Gary Wittkow explained to the sheriff’s deputies when he woke up in the holding cell that morning, but somebody had to do something. He’d been busted for sundry petty crimes since junior high, so his bona fides as a menace to society were beyond question, as was his repentance.

At his arrest the night before, Wittkow had jumped up on a chair and babbled in strange tongues until they knocked him down with tasers. Whatever some pusher had turned this kid onto, it was worse than PCP.

Gary liked to get stupid as much as any young person in this dead-end town, but he didn’t like to feel stupid, and something about last night drove him to make a clean breast of his sins.

• • •

In the narrow crack of time between dinner and curfew, the kids met up under the half-collapsed visitors’ bleachers behind Harding High to compare their offerings. Craig Collier wasn’t the oldest, but as the former first-string varsity quarterback—until he quit last week, citing “irreconcilable philosophical differences”—he was the authority on what would be accepted.

“A phonebook?” Scowling, he tossed it out, along with discontinued textbooks and a bunch of antique Playboys and High Times.

“It’s the only book in our house,” moaned the blushing offender.

“You plongeurs remember what the Professor said,” Craig growled. “No phonebooks, no Bibles, no skin mags, and no damned textbooks.” Anything from school was stained with the bitter mildew of compulsion and punishment, and lit textbooks were the worst. Even the finest selections of timeless poetry were like leftover chunks of filet mignon from a moldy fridge.

Gary, who’d brought the old Playboys, was too embarrassed to own up to them, let alone ask why everybody hadn’t brought skin mags. He’d been invited out here to get high, and didn’t like where this was headed.

Craig held up the latest outrage. “World Book Encyclopedia, circa 1959,” he read, to a chorus of jeers and hooting. Honest-to-god hooting. “Just U?”

The monobrowed linebacker who’d brought it said, “It’s had plenty of time to soak up the flavor of the whole set.”

“Sure, and ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Mr. Einhorn owes the bank.”

Once they’d gone through the submissions pile, they made out their wish list, and Gary began to think he’d inadvertently joined a cult.

Craig opted for the Pillow-book of Murasaki Shikibu. “Again?” Doug groaned.

“De gustibus non est disputandem,” Craig proclaimed.

What was wrong with them?

Not to be outdone, Doug said he’d go for Le Morte D’Arthur, but only if the Professor would let him try the Caxton edition in his trophy case. The others cackled at his pretension, but Doug said, “Barba non facit philosophum …”

“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni,” Craig said.

“And the sky is blue, and the cow says moo,” retorted the little old man nobody had noticed among them until now. Nor had they noticed the outlandish converted school bus now parked beside the bleachers, its flanks bristling with shelves unfolded to display waterfalls of old, antique and ancient books.

Gary was the only “virgin,” so he went first, proffering the scuffed, Perma-Bound copy of A Separate Peace he’d been assigned to read for English.

The Professor scoffed and asked who could condemn young minds to consume such trash. “They feed you pus and call it cream,” he growled, substituting another volume with creamy calfskin boards and tooled moroccan leather binding under the glass dome of the contraption.

Gary didn’t want to look stupid, but when they passed him the gas mask, he began to suspect that this was all some kind of hippie nerd game and they weren’t going to get wasted after all; but then the compressor in the contraption began to thud and Gary took a big hit of the musty vapor filling the mask, and he remembered nothing more, until he woke up in the cell.

• • •

Sheriff Fetterman couldn’t follow Gary’s story, but he recognized the description of the vagabond bus parked in the overgrown fields of the foreclosed Murchison farm on the edge of town, heralded in peeling calligraphy on its flanks as the Flying Parnassus. He sent two deputies to round up the other kids named by Wittkow, and took the rest of his force out to the Murchison place himself, directly after breakfast.

The raid on the vehicle went down without a hitch; the deputies encountered no resistance as they seized the bus, ransacked its contents and arrested the owner.

No illegal substances were found—only 3,289 books of dubious social merit but no obvious prurient or political bent, and a highly suspicious mechanical device. A routine NCIC search turned up no outstanding warrants, but immediately triggered a phone call from the nearest FBI field office. Within an hour, an agent arrived at the sheriff’s station.

The agent, aggressively nondescript in a drab suit the color of which no two people would agree on later, declined coffee and asked to review Wittkow’s official statement before interrogating the prisoner. Somehow in the hullabaloo of the unexpected visit, nobody thought to ask her name, let alone ask to see any official identification.

• • •

“Good morning, Professor,” the government agent said. The only ID the locals found in the truck was an expired Oregon driver’s license and vehicle registration in the name of “John Gooseflesh.”

The Professor looked like he’d selected the most egregious specimens of fake mustaches from a disguise kit and glued them to his face as eyebrows and a goatee. Otherwise, he was as stolidly unremarkable as the woman hoping to interrogate him.

“That kid who rolled over on you … he was speaking gibberish when they picked him up …”

Professor Gooseflesh watched the last wisps of steam fade away from his cooling coffee before he replied, “It wasn’t gibberish.”

“I know. It was Old English. Which is weird, because the kid’s flunking English. How’d you do that?”

“Beowulf. I thought it’d teach him something about heroism and responsibility. Clearly, it didn’t take.”

“I want to know how you did it. You’re in a world of trouble here.”

The Professor pinched his sinuses and emitted an uncannily piercing nasal whine. “I’m not saying another word without my snuff.”

“You’d be better off asking for a lawyer, Professor. Just tell us who you want called …”

“You heard me.” The Professor’s eyes drooped sleepily.

“You want this?” The agent tapped an old Altoids tin on the table. She didn’t push it over, even when one eye almost opened.

“You know it’s nothing illegal.”

“Maybe it should be … just like that contraption in your truck.”

“A damnable lie! It’s an old bookseller’s affectation, that’s all.”

That much was true. There was no law against snorting powdered Oxford Unabridged Dictionaries with trace amounts of Kentucky whole-leaf tobacco and Missouri trucker speed for heft, and any persistent rumors that a secretive cabal of booksellers and librarians had committed themselves to leavening the mixture with the cremains of celebrated authors and poets were merely a morbid strain of bibliophobic blood libel.

But that wasn’t why the agent let the Professor have the tin, or pause the recorder in her pocket until the suspect had discreetly taken a pinch up either nostril from it. If there was anything to the habit beyond the placebo effect, the agent could only hope the dictionary dust would make the suspect more eloquent in incriminating himself.

“Ah, there’s the old perspicacity,” Gooseflesh said. “Come off it, Torquemada. You’re not FBI. You may’ve got these yokels snowed, but the Bureau isn’t wasting its time with this.”

The agent sat back and crossed her arms. “So, tell me who I am.”

“You’re an ex-fed, maybe … a private contractor. You got the training and the headgame, but you’re not out here enforcing federal law. Your people are afraid of what I can do.”

“You may be right. Maybe we just want to shut you down and put your fabulous invention in the same vault as Tesla’s free broadcast energy and the car that runs on water. Or maybe we’re just the only people who recognize how very dangerous what you’re doing really is.”

Tickled, the Professor elaborately shrugged. “Please proceed, Inquisitor.”

“You’re hard to track down, it’s true. No cellphone, no computer, no credit cards. Just rumors and chatroom lies, a goat-rope only a retired civil servant with more experience than sense would see any worth in pursuing. The people I work for don’t believe a word of what I report to them, but they indulge me, because they’re forward-thinking, and I do deliver, from time to time.”

“Like now.”

The agent allowed herself a small, sour smile. “See, your little scheme isn’t exactly a victimless crime. For every fun new recreational drug, there’s a story about some stupid kid who took too much and thought he could fly, or heard God telling him to eat his own face.

“There’s one circulating among book nerds for years now, about some crazy guy who invented a machine that lets you smoke books. Had a clientele of true believers, too, until some dumb kid screwed up and smoked a whole used bookshop with it.”

Did the Professor shudder as he killed his cold coffee? “That is a crazy story. Another life tragically cut short by reading …”

“Sure is. When the dust settled … every page of every book in the place was blank, and the kid … he just vanished off the face of the earth. And so did the infernal machine.”

“If any of that were true, wouldn’t the real FBI be interested? Cops searched my van and didn’t find any drugs. Not even coffee.” Holding up the empty paper cup, he crumpled it and threw it into the corner. “Any responsible bookman is only slightly less mistrustful of coffee, than fire.”

“Maybe so … but an old contractor like me, she’s seen enough to wonder if maybe that dumb kid who smoked a whole bookshop just went nuts … I mean, imagine all that knowledge, culture and whatever being crammed into his brain at once, who wouldn’t crack? And absconded with the vaporizer, and maybe he went so nuts, he’s conning kids that his crazy book-bong is some kind of new drug …”

Professor Gooseflesh bounced in his chair. “Books are the original drug. An explosive more volatile than dynamite, for blowing up small minds! All I’m turning people onto, is knowledge, culture … and whatever.”

Absently stroking the lining of his coat, the Professor leaned across the table. “Lemme ask you something, Javert. What was the last book you read? Not some technical manual or political screed, but a real book … the last thing that really moved you, and showed you what life was for?”

“It wasn’t Les Miserables,” the agent shot back, “and you’re no Valjean.”

The Professor affected a bow, to which she replied, “I saw the movie.”

“Nothing gets you higher … but a wise man once explained the act of reading to me as like pulling a beautiful tapestry thread by thread through a keyhole. A book is less than nothing until it’s read; it’s just the instructions for assembling the experience of a second-hand dream in the reader’s mind and heart.”

“But nobody reads books, anymore.”

“That’s right! The people who killed them … the ones who took away our time and freedom and all the space in our heads, so there’s no room for anything but more commercials … Those people left us no choice but to devise some apparatus for taking in the whole thing at once.

“Every time one of my books is vaporized, the ink grows a little fainter, and the book is exactly three hundredths of a gram lighter. The reader’s brain is likewise three hundredths of a gram heavier, but they contain whole lives, entire worlds.”

“Even if we ignore the question of your device’s side effects—”

“Like enlightenment?”

“Assuming it actually works …”

“Then why are you here?”

“There’s the question of the collection itself.” Pawing through a loose stack of printed papers, she shook her head. “It hasn’t been catalogued …?”

“There’s a catalogue, but it’s in code. Cryptography section is the eighteenth shelf in the seventh bay …”

“I took a quick survey, and there’s a lot to answer for.”

“Indeed?”

“Much of your stock still bears the stamps of the libraries from which it was stolen.”

“Tragically, none of those libraries are still around. I get my stock from donations and estate sales, and there is no sadder windfall than the dispersal of a dead library.”

“But not all of your stock.” The agent held up an evidence bag. “A perfect copy of the Bay Psalm Book. Incunabula with marginal notes in pencil identifying them as part of the Thomas Prince Library … a Shakespeare folio containing three plays never definitively identified as his … Quite a rolling pirate’s den you’ve assembled. I imagine the rightful owners of these books would be thrilled to know you’ve taken such good care of them.”

The Professor’s eyebrows arched owlishly, and one of them came unglued. “Every book in my collection was acquired in fair trade. If a client wishes to ingest a book using my device, the price is always the same. I keep the leaves. No one’s complained.”

The agent took out a slim, weathered journal and set it on the table. “This duodecimo of Bacon’s Essayes is the oldest copy known on this continent. It was supposed to have been in the possession of Harry Widener when he went down with the Titanic.”

The agent riffled the yellowed vellum pages under her nose, then held it out to the Professor, who refused. He didn’t need to be reminded that it still smelled of brine.

“You know your stuff,” the Professor admitted, twiddling his thumbs. “What book ruined them for you? When did a book break your heart and make you despise them? Or was it the world, that told you lies you chose to listen to, and live in dimness?”

“If you must know …” The agent took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “It was people, who let me down. People fill books with the worst kind of lies … the kind that make you walk off a cliff, thinking you can fly.”

“Oh dear.” The Professor’s face almost cracked open, his hand stalled in the reflexive act of reaching out to take hers. “Maybe too much of the time, it’s as you say; but great books still find their way out of people and into the world. The least of them is truer than the news, and more real than you or I. Because sometimes, the people who believe those pretty lies can be tricked into trying to make the world a better place.”

“So you’ve entertained collectors and fleeced them of their most valuable books, and yet here you are, skulking around flyover states, helping teenagers huff old copies of Playboy.”

The Professor chuckled. “I go where I’m needed, and I send them where they want to go. They might hunt Moby Dick, or ride the Nautilus with Captain Nemo. I could send them to Treasure Island or the moon—the real one, with Selenites and moon-calves galore—or to sail the Martian canals and cross swords with Dejah Thoris and the Tharks. For those craving more down-to-earth adventures, I have Confessions Of A Highwayman, bound in the author’s own skin. I have William Blake’s illustrated edition of Paradise Lost and St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, and Erewhon and The Odyssey. Sadly for some, not even the precious ribaldry of Twain’s Fireside Conversation In The Age Of Queen Elizabeth will do, and so I have on occasion caved to the public weal and let them ‘vape’ elevated smut like the Kama Sutra or The Song Of Solomon. But I strive to keep adults and children alike from ingesting pornography.

“But perhaps they should! Indeed, the best thing for a young man with misbegotten notions about the opposite sex is to find himself inside the heads of all those lovely houris and know what they’re really thinking when they flutter their come-hither glances, at what all those articles and advertisements actually mean.”

The agent turned over another folder and sighed at what it contained. “I know of a number of parents in Wilkes-Barre who’d like to get their hands on you for introducing their sons to Naked Lunch—”

“You see? I’m helping.” Steepling his fingers, the Professor added, “There’s no laws on the books against freebasing enlightenment … yet. I would dearly love it, if more of my clients sincerely asked to ingest the Bible. Nothing cures a Christian of Christianity like spending a spot of eternity with their idea of God.”

The Professor availed himself of another pinch of dictionary dust and favored the agent with a supercilious grin. “So, I’m still waiting to hear what laws I’ve broken.”

“I think you may end up with a law named after you, once we’ve taken apart your little invention. To compound the ignominy … not everything in your truck is in the public domain …”

“So that’s it,” the Professor hissed. “That’s who you work for, isn’t it? The people who replaced books with movies and games and made art into commodities. You want to shackle people with the entertainment you sell them, when a true book should set them free. You want to trap them in their lonely, fearful heads, when a book could let them live entire lives with every breath. Small wonder you’d see me as an enemy.”

“You’re either a fraud or something worse,” the agent said, leaning across the table. “You’re a menace to decency. To sanity.”

“Lord, what fools these mortals be … I’m not your enemy, am I, with my little machine? It’s the books that keep you up at night, knowing there’s ideas and voices out there that anyone could uncover at any time and set themselves free from the maze you’ve made. You’ve done everything you can to make reading inefficient, uncool, elitist, to marginalize everyone who still does it. If it’s so dangerous, why didn’t a real cop show up? If it’s so dangerous …”

The agent stood up from the table and went to knock on the door. “Bring it in.”

When they unveiled it, the deputies—not a churchgoer among them—both touched their foreheads, shoulders and genitals in sequence, made that vestigial gesture that recalled faith as a dog kicking sand over its leavings recalls when they had to hide their waste from wary prey.

Hardly as volatile as the meth lab they busted in the old abandoned elementary school the month before, but something about it aroused an atavistic terror in them, as if this harmless crackpot contraption could somehow erase their essential selves more absolutely than a bullet from a gun.

Their fear would seem unwarranted to anyone who hadn’t interrogated the Wittkow kid. Resting on a rusty cook’s cart was a compressor and a tangle of corrugated hoses transplanted from old vacuum cleaners. These connected with a dusty glass isolation dome for working with hazardous chemicals, which in turn spouted more hoses which terminated in a Cold War-era gas mask.

“Show me how it works,” said the agent.

The Professor stood up, hesitating when the cops flinched at him, then moved over to the cart, clearing his throat and shooting his cuffs, getting into character. “Now, if you could go anywhere, be anyone and know anything … where, who and what?”

Pulling an orange crate of battered, unjacketed old library editions out of the lowest shelf on the cart, he squinted at the agent like a carny guessing her weight. “Such a question is, of course, too daunting to answer honestly, and as dangerous as helping oneself to the compounds of a pharmacist. Only the guidance of one skilled in diagnosing the soul-sickness of the reader can avert disaster.”

Finally, he selected a pale green volume with scuffed boards wrapped in what the trade liked to call “embossed toadskin,” and began to unscrew the seals on the isolation dome.

“Not so fast,” said the agent, grabbing the Professor’s wrist. “Let me see what you’ve got, there …”

The Professor threw up his hands. “You’re right to be suspicious, my good lady. Though I keep these specimens separate as an introduction to the habit, some of them are indeed dangerous.

“Take this King James pocket Bible,” he digressed, picking up a small, worn black leatherette edition. “Printed and distributed to servicemen in the 1930s, it’s harmless if you turn the pages from front to back, but the deckled edges, if flipped from back to front, reveal a hidden insertion of Smedley Butler’s War Is A Racket.”

“Goddamn commie propaganda,” one of the deputies muttered.

“Indeed,” said Professor Gooseflesh, “written by a general of the United States Marines, after being approached by a consortium of plutocrats who hoped he’d lead a fascist coup against Franklin Roosevelt.”

“Get on with it,” said the agent.

“Of course, Grand Inquisitor. I wouldn’t dream of trying to poison you, though any number of recent bestsellers would do the job. Had we world enough and time, I’d recommend The Brothers Karamazov, for obvious reasons … Thick books take no longer than thin ones, but I’ve watched a customer’s hair turn white with a waft of Steppenwolf, and seen the enlightenment of centuries come easier than a sneeze with one breath of Siddhartha. But if you truly want to understand why I do what I do …”

“Did,” corrected the agent.

“Sure, and to that end …” He held up the book in question.

The agent took the book and flipped through its pages frontward and backward, even sniffing it before handing it back.

The Professor slid it under the dome and winched down the seals, handed her the mask. Smiling wider at her momentary hesitation, the Professor nudged, “Well, go on. You wanted my confession … here it is. You decide for yourself how dangerous it really is.”

Feeling all eyes on her, the agent strapped on the mask and made a get-on-with-it gesture with her hands.

“Your wish is my command,” said the Professor. He powered up the compressor, flicking the jury-rigged gauges and adjusting the choke until the tubercular wheezing of the mechanism settled into a throbbing purr like a big, lazy cat.

“Brace yourself, madame,” the Professor said, and threw a switch. The agent clenched her chest against a blast of chloroform or smelling salts, but the tension slowly left her body in tiny tremors that abruptly became a bucking seizure which brought both deputies to her aid. They only managed to become entangled in the hoses until the mask was ripped off her face.

“Unhand me!” the agent shoved them back. Placing the mask beside the compressor, she wiped sweat from her face with a handkerchief.

“Well,” said the Professor, “I suppose now you’ll want to charge me with assault.”

The agent walked up to the Professor as if she meant to strike him across the face; but then she leaned in and did something still more upsetting to the deputies. In front of God and everyone, the agent planted a kiss on the befuddled Professor’s chapped, dry lips.

“That’s plagiarism!” Gooseflesh exclaimed.

“This device is a fraud,” the agent said, “but a harmless one. We’re declining to pursue this case any further.”

“But you said it yourself,” one of the deputies objected, “he’s a … menace to decency.”

“And the cow is blue, and the sky says moo,” the agent said as she pushed the cook’s cart out of the interrogation room.

The deputies looked dubiously at each other, confiscated the Professor’s dictionary dust, and escorted him back to his cell.

Presently, the entire sheriff’s force vacated the station as sirens converged on the parking lot immediately outside. A deputy came for the Professor and had him sign a form for the return of his personal effects, accompanied with a warning against dithering in town after sundown, lest the full force of the law find some other pretext to come down upon his head.

The Professor accepted his personal effects without comment until the last was passed into his hands. The toadskin edition of The Parnassus On Wheels was somewhat lighter, but none the worse for wear; even the “blank” endpapers, on which he’d inscribed the complete contents of his peculiar library in invisible ink, were still intact. Though relieved at his great good fortune, he was thunderstruck by the degree to which the sentimental bookseller’s romance had turned the Grand Inquisitor from Saul to Paul.

His nose wrinkled in distress at his first whiff of the afternoon breeze when he stepped outside; then he let out a cry like a soul escaping its mortal prison, and fell to his knees.

A pillar of gray-black smoke wafted into the sky from the blazing ruins of the Flying Parnassus. A gang of concerned citizens posed for pictures in front of the fire, while the brave men and women charged with putting out fires looked at their phones.

“By the bones of Tolstoy!” Gooseflesh roared, throwing his useless keys and empty Altoids tin to the tarmac. “Where is she? Where is my device?”

The Sheriff informed him that he was welcome to swear out a complaint about the damage to his vehicle as soon as he’d paid for it to be towed out of the parking lot, and that the evidence checked in as (for lack of a more precise designation) “Paraphernalia for the production/consumption of a controlled substance,” had been confiscated by the federal agent.

At the behest of the aggrieved Professor Gooseflesh, a deputy called the Bureau before dropping him off at the Greyhound bus stop. He was assured that no one from the FBI had visited their town; but impersonating an FBI agent was a very serious matter, so an agent would contact them soon regarding the ersatz agent and the infernal book vaporizer, but to this day, both of them remain at large.