metamorphosis without end

i made a bed for myself of books and slept on it. it was 3 meters high and 2 meters wide and 2 meters long and i used

no sheets but slept on the books directly. i built a staircase of books to climb up and i learned to influence my dreams by the placement and relation of books, their proximity to different parts of my body. i let no one see my bed and no one slept with me for i had become tired of love.

i no longer read. after decades of voracious reading, after

being overcome by books so much the world in its dimensionality became ugly, clichéd, with neither grace nor vision, human society a risible heap of battling bugs insanely proclaiming its grandeur and supremacy, i stopped. i had lost the ability to absorb books through sight and reason, through the act of cognitively and imaginatively interpreting text – these weary servants of a wearier culture, of a sickened literacy. i needed a different way to bring books inside me, i wanted a new relation with them. what better way than having full bodily contact and absorbing them more directly, during sleep. for the best books are written as though in a dream and surely the best way to read them is to take them in through our skin as we’re dreaming. using our cognitive capacities while we’re awake is an obviously inferior method, a legacy from the primitive age of knowledge, and i grew excited again about encountering my favourite books in ways i never had before.

i dreamt new dreams – sprawling phantasmagoria. colours rewired and dripping down architectures that redefined

science. narratives so disturbing, coherent, irrational, seductive i woke up with the top layer of books drenched and would have to carefully dry the affected volumes out.

i began building a house of books to house my bed. a modest affair. bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, a common area for eating and hanging out and working, a sunroom for whatever. everything of books. the sinks, toilet, bathtub, furniture, trinkets and decorations, bookshelves. books are all.

in time – the reader will have expected it – i became a book.

like gregor. i lived by myself so there was no external drama. i lived grounded in the totality of books so there was no internal drama.  there was no story. this is the story.

THE STORY OF OF

THE STORY OF OF

of was waiting by the western window watering her wisteria when she spotted a naked man swatting his northern window with what appeared to be a book of sorts.  Both were inside, as being outside would have, under normal conditions, without having something directly underneath them, if by being outside we mean outside their windows, meant their deaths.  What piqued her inquisitiveness were not his almost absolute nudity (if it were not for the black glove on his left hand), not his exceptionally fine penis, which hung with a graceful and not entirely limp nobility from the usual places, not the obvious fact that he was exposing himself with seeming aplomb, nonchalance and (it must be confessed) a casual eroticism, not even what he was doing there, with his hanging and swattings, but if it was actually a book he was using and, if so, how thick, how long, if it had been wholly loved or simply fingered and under what conditions, the thoughts that might have grown under its tutelage, whether it was the kind of book about which we say, that was a fine book, that was a great book, that was a book to remember, or whether the remarks were more of the type—oh well, it held notable promise but, in the end, quite forgettable you know.


she had spent most of the remainder of the day regretting she had dropped the binoculars after rapidly having grabbed them from the cassone and examined in the available details their refined quality permitted (they had been a gift from Gili, her colleague at Burberry during the Bravo years, when affairs were like acrylics and masturbation like a well-used ellipsis) the glove, the nobility, though not necessarily in that order and without necessarily equal attention given to both.  As she was thinking about preparing to move to the book (or what appeared to be the book and, more accurately, move the binoculars to focus on the book rather than those ancillary things), her cat, Miflufalot, had, in one of its periodic and always entirely unexpected episodes of severe neuroticism, leapt from one of the nearby bookcases onto Of’s right shoulder, causing her (etiology, though, we must confess again, is said by certain people about whom it’s sometimes said they might be expected not to know better to be an inexact science) to scream, drop the binoculars, breaking them irreparably (for her floors were firm), and orgasm slightly, these activities roughly simultaneous.  (Incidentally, her eastern neighbor, a Mr. Razmoos Höggendötter, heard the scream, causing him, quite indirectly and with the usual caveats, to call his wife and admit to a fling he’d been having with a dental assistant, though not Of, though she was frequently his fantasy, for she was not a dental assistant.)


of whiffled.  She thought of the book.  She spoke aloud to herself, as she had been accustomed to do ever since she had received Mikal’s note from Bangalore.  Of, she said … oh.  Here we are, our binoculars broken … Gili will be so upset … can’t tell her, she’ll tell Anah … then it’ll all end.


she casually lifted her head and looked over and above, to the window that had been swatted.  There he was not there again.  Bungled.  Yet she had seen, or thought she had seen, before the intimate distance had snapped, before she had had a chance to focus on what was most important—the very nature of the instrument he was using to hit the window—somewhere between the furthest reaches of her now defunct field glasses and the two appendages she had mistakenly and momentarily permitted herself to be distracted by thin long smears resembling the colour of blood.  The slight orgasm obviously hadn’t been enough.  It was as if, with the binoculars gone and Miflufalot having concluded, once again, that the human world was supernaturally deficient in all imaginable and unimaginable aspects, Of’s labia became like the book she hadn’t seen, that she had so wanted to languorously leaf through and become absorbed in.  This growing necessity, spurred by strange and coalescent forces, drew her from the couch on which she had intended to read back to the wisteria and the western window, fumbling now almost desperately but still with a modicum of control in the chest that had been purchased instead of the trip to Nueva Gerona, that significant budgetary struggle which had stressed her unduly for weeks until she discovered she had actually missed the deadline of discounted tickets thus making the decision effectively made, for those kidskin black opera gloves that she had inherited from her mother who had most fortunately been run over by the dysfunctional tram in Prague during that one summer of blossoms and happiness, grapping the left one and wrenching it past her elbow—thank god she and her mother were both size 19!—ripping off her blouse and earrings and bra and bracelets and skirt and necklace and hose and thong and anklet and even rings—what work they were! she even had to run to the bathroom and use soap! but that wasn’t a bad thing! her hands now smelt like tea tree and lavender! the kidskin was wet though!—running, galloping, back to the wisteria and western window, on the way tearing a chair from the table, splaying herself on it like a dropped cat furiously going to work hoping the man had binoculars but not a cat oh something was missing she ran to the bookcase almost slipping on herself and yanked a book what should it be? oh fuck it didn’t matter back to the wisteria back to the window back to the splayed chair everything was ready now hallelujah she began frantically swatting the window with one hand and with the other … how many pages were down there!? what a tome! and one to remember! like those drenched books pressed on the rooftops of Sayat-Nova no no the images! the images! back to business … that he was using them … she was forgetting to swat but something was … still missing oh … fuck the smears the … smears she shoved one of her many hands into a drawer she hoped he was there the … book the glove the smears the tumescent … perfection gathering … like … doves on the ark of the … covenant that was the whole thing the … tongue of … the kernel … of … mystery the … finger of … doubt the long … leaves … of questions … was … it … Of … or … was … it …