The Book of Magellan Price




• THE BOOK OF MAGELLAN PRICE
  
  
  
  
  It took a near-death-experience before I finally started listening to Izuala’s Prophecies. Then, I was only 22, and my experience with death was almost as much of a disappointment as my life had been.
  
  I have been told, just moments before death takes you into her clutches, you’ll see your entire life flash before your eyes. I’ve heard people claim they’ve seen celestial beings or deceased relatives, imparting words of wisdom through a mysterious tunnel of light. I imagined I would see a tableau of my entire life flash before me like a shooting star, revealing every horrid mistake and every glorious moment.
  
  In my near-death-experience there was no tunnel of light, no landscape of all the horrid mistakes I had made, nor any panorama of these glorious moments.
  
  Instead, I apparently had tickets to some dark, underground, Gothic club scene. I had to feel my way through the crowd. It was dark and it had that heavy, damp, empty smell of a crowded room when all the oxygen has been spent. I blindly groped my way through the crowd. I was stumbling, trying to find a source of light, or an exit. My hands touched something soft. I expected it to be an angel of light that would impart word of wisdom to me. Instead I heard a voice yelling, "Get your hands off my tits!" And then, a masculine voice yelled, “Hey asshole, you’re standing on my foot!” Just moments later I was thrown out, arm in arm, by two bouncers. I was eighty-sixed from my own near-death-experience, right back into the alleyway of my life.
  
  Apparently, my near-death-experience was commensurate with the value of my life. I hadn’t done anything significant to earn a legitimate one. It was either that or all the good near-death-experiences had been sold out that day and I was just given excess stock. But I believe this NDE was indicative of my life: my dark, misdirected, impulsive, nowhere life. But that motorcycle accident and the Izuala Prophecies eventually caused my life to change.
  
  Izuala’s Prophecies was an incandescent, pebbled-leather book that gave me advice when I needed it the most. It was also the book that could stop my heartbeat in a second and turn my blood to slush. It caused me to question my sanity. I never imagined that some twenty years later I’d be “writing” my own book for another lost soul.
  
  When I first met the book that changed my life (soon enough you’ll know why I say ‘met’ instead of saw or read), I was a junior-high-school kid pilfering books from my local library in Akron, Ohio. This was a hobby I had discovered and cultivated at the age of eleven, partly because I’d been your typical juvenile delinquent and partly because I lived in the Midwest.
  
  There is a reason why Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in the Midwest, and why this part of the country is nicknamed the “little USSR”. The most exciting thing that happens here all year besides the 4th of July is the Indy 500. If New Jersey were hell and California heaven, then this area could be considered purgatory. Most of the people here, like the terrain, are flat and boring. In an area of the country where the winter never seems to end and summer never seems to last; it’s easy to get into a rut. Izuala’s Prophecies had changed all of that.
  
  I’d joined Kesling Middle School’s chess club out of boredom. I had been stealing books for the last couple of years already. Actually, I had been stealing things since I could open my fingers no matter how trivial; it could be a paper clip or a tampon from my mother’s bathroom cabinet. I figured this time I could at least steal something useful, a book that would transform me into a master and teach me all of the winning chess moves.
  
  Even though the library card only cost two dollars I didn’t want to burden my mother with it. Our family had always struggled financially; my father had left before I had even said my first two words. Besides that, stealing books was much more fun than checking them out like everybody else.
  
  My friend, Patrick Nelson, taught me to rip off the yellow sticker on the binding of the book and to tear the UPC code from the back, bottom corner to avoid triggering the electronic alarm hanging over the door. I still remember that rush, even thirty-something years later, just like it was yesterday. The way my heart pounded in my neck, walking through the exit with all of those books, just waiting for the alarm to go off and thinking how fast I would bolt if it did.
  
  But one day, as I was stuffing a Bobby Fischer paperback book down my drawers, a glowing book caught the corner of my eye. It sat lonely on the end of the shelf, just above the chess books. It was glowing a faint, orange-amber color. At first, I thought that the light from the dim library was causing this mild hallucination, or there was some blacklight dangling above.
  
  The cover bore the words: Izuala’s Prophecies, stamped in gold leaf. I remember that first time I held it in my hands. It was warm to the touch, as if someone had been handling the book just moments before I did, or as if they had left it above a heater. Other than the strange glow, which I dismissed at the time as a vision problem, and it’s unusual warmth, it seemed like any other leather-bound book. But then I opened it.
  
  There was no copyright, no author, no table of contents, nothing; there was nothing indicating a publishing company. The book was 144 pages, all blank except for the first one that read:
  
  You should give instead of take.
  
  And that was it. The whole rest of the book was blank. I put the book back where I found it and swore I saw it shimmer from the corner of my eye as I left the library with my Bobby Fischer tucked neatly in front of my crotch.
  
  
  My next thieving adventure took place a few days later. Patrick and I had been strolling through the aisles, looking for anything that would catch our eyes. Eventually, I found myself in the fantasy genre. A little green book, The Hobbit, caught my attention. I’d heard about it from our school’s recommended booklist. It went on my own recommended “to steal book list” shortly after.
  
  Patrick’s brown freckles seemed to turn bright red, almost violet, as he held up the Kama Sutra. That was another book on my recommended list, but I let him have it anyway. I usually deferred to most of his decisions since I played the role of his quasi-protégé.
  
  We ran under the little, black sensor through the exit and around the corner into the alley to unload our cache. His wide-open eyes gleamed as he held up the Kama Sutra; he ignored the rest of his book trove. I pulled out The Hobbit. But it wasn’t The Hobbit; it was Izuala’s Prophecies!
  
  I stood there, staring at the book in my hands. Patrick was also staring. He said, “Um, wow…I’ve never seen a book…glow like that.”
  
  I didn’t reply; I stood there motionless, trying to figure out how I grabbed that book by accident. It would have been something I would have noticed right away.
  
  “What is it? I’ve never heard of Izuala’s Prophecies.”
  
  “I’m not sure either. I saw it a few days ago but it was on a completely different shelf. Doesn’t it look like a witch’s Grimoire or something?”
  
  “I don’t know, never seen one. It is pretty creepy looking though. I wonder how they make it glow like that. I wonder if it’s got any batteries. Let me look.”
  
  I reluctantly gave him the book. When he first touched it he flinched a little, almost dropping it. “Damn, do you have an oven in your crotch or what?”
  
  He opened the book and began flipping through the pages, dropping his own coveted book to the littered, alleyway pavement. The pages seemed to glow gold in the dark alley. Again, the rest of the pages were blank except the first. This is what it said:
  
  It’s better to give than to take. Maybe if you spent more time reading the books instead of just stealing them you’d be better off. There is so much more to life, if you only took the time to discover it.
  
  My heart didn’t seem to beat for at least a minute. I just stared at the words, feeling my chest tense up. The only rational conclusion I had come to was that the library was on to our little scheme. They had made us. They had printed this book and put it in a section they assumed we would be stealing from. They even bound the book in some special kind of material that caused it to glow, grabbing our attention. Although I knew this explanation was bogus, it still sufficed to ease my mind a little at the time.
  
  “I wonder why they would go to all the trouble making this cool looking book and not print anything in it?” Patrick said.
  
  “Of course there is a reason, duh. They know what we’re doing. Isn’t it obvious?”
  
  “Maybe it’s supposed to be some kind of diary?” Patrick said.
  
  I slowly tilted my head, staring him in the eyes. Then I sighed. I wondered how he made it to the eighth grade.
  
  “What do you mean?” He finally asked.
  
  I sighed again. Then I pointed to the text and read it to him. He squinted and brought the book closer to his face. His freckles turned red again. Then he slowly turned his head to me. He blinked. Then he looked back at the page and laughed.
  
  “You must have some really good vision,” he said.
  
  “It’s right there are you blind?” I shouted in my squeaky voice, barely just broken from puberty. I snatched the book from him. His arms sank to his side and he had an expression that I couldn’t quite figure out. It was a medley of shock, confusion and embarrassment, I thought.
  
  “You’re really creeping me out man. You need to see a shrink.” Then he turned and walked out of the alley, every so often peering back at me over his shoulder.
  
  I grabbed the Kama Sutra and tossed Izuala’s Prophecies into the dumpster. I decided to have a lull in my shoplifting ventures. Over the week, with growling stomach pains, I managed to saved my lunch money and bought The Hobbit. During that month I read The Hobbit and the Kama Sutra, and I fell in love with both books. The Sutra is a dangerous book for a pubescent teenager. My mother can testify to this, as she walked in on me several times with my pants down to my ankles. At least the Hobbit had inspired me to start drawing comics and writing scripts, which were based largely on the book. But at least I was doing something creative, even if at the time I was only writing fan fiction, mimicking the great Tolkien.
  
  School was out for the summer by the time we decided to start our shoplifting sprees again. But there wouldn’t be another appearance of the book until High school, which would be starting at the end of that summer. We spent most of that summer fantasizing about what High School would be like. We watched The Breakfast Club in hopes that it would give us some vague idea of what we were up against.
  
  I gave up shoplifting in High school and searched for other outlets. During the summer I’d ride my little 180cc Yamaha scooter for kicks. It seemed like every year of High school was just an unbroken chain of new fixes, one after another. When one got boring I’d replace it with another. My freshman year it was the basketball team, which I failed miserably at, spending most of the season on the bench icing up the Gatorade for everyone. Next year it was soccer, which didn’t go any better. My junior year, I started drinking heavily and having occasional bouts with the police. By my senior year I think I’d played every sport offered at our High School and participated in every club, and I was none the wiser.
  
  The third appearance of the book happened my senior year, on prom night. A few of my friends wanted to climb the water tower after prom and watch the city. The plan was, we would lug up our little jam box to the top, smoke a few joints and listen to Led Zeppelin tapes. After we got good and high then we would lie on our backs and watch the stars twinkle red and blue with some girls.
  
  After prom I went home to change out of the tux and threw on some warm-up pants and a jersey that still fit from my freshman basketball days. But when I opened the closet, there was that book again! It was glowing like a spotlight. My limbs flushed ice cold. I winced and recoiled. I quickly turned around to see who would have put the book in my closet. Patrick had moved away our sophomore year with his father after his parents filed for a divorce.
  
  The only rational conclusion was that he had went back to the dumpster to get the book that day and now he was back in town. I figured he’d stopped by while I was out and left the book in my closet as a message to let me know he was back. But my mother was gone that night and the house was locked. And Patrick wasn’t the type to break into my house. He would have called and left a message.
  
  After slowly peering in my closet and searching the rest of the house I realized I was alone. I didn’t want to be around the book, but I knew I couldn’t just leave it there either. The book would be hanging over my head for the rest of the night if I did and it would ruin my pot high. So I slowly walked back to the room, half hoping it was gone. But it wasn’t. I finally forced myself to open it.
  
  This time the book was much warmer than before, almost too hot to touch. The first page read:
  
  Don’t go to the tower tonight, you’re in grave danger.
  
  That’s all it said. And like before, the rest of the pages were blank. I could feel my fists tighten up around the book. I could even see my heart beating in my paunch that I had been developing over the years. I gently put the book back in the closet on my gym shoe rack, as if not to anger it. I quickly snatched my duffel bag and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and ran out of the house.
  
  That night, we ascended ninety-something feet of rusty rails up to the top of Akron’s water tower. The city had three then, but this one, towards the outskirts of the city was the hot spot for us High School teen-agers. It was a legendary water tower, almost a rite-of-passage into graduation. It was rumored that countless children had been conceived here. This was a place of general teenage debauchery, the “cool” spot to hang out at.
  
  There were six of us: Chris, Tony, Beth, Mike, Jenny, and I. We were more than just acquaintances but not quite friends either. I’d met Chris during my sophomore year through soccer. He was suspended from the team for instigating our “shin kicking” tactics that we used to try and win the state championship. Tony was his right-hand man so we became friends by default. Mike was the crazy one in our group. He’d been in and out of institutions his entire life, so it was rumored. Either way it was very believable. I think Chris befriended him just because his father was the chemistry teacher. He figured it would help him get better grades to get into that IVY league University. We all vied for Beth’s favor. Just her touch could send you reeling for days. It was if her touch, by osmosis, spread her warmth to you.
  
  We had just burned a joint and started playing the tape. We were sitting on the catwalk that circled around the dome of the water tower, most of us clad in some black, rock band T-shirt. Led Zeppelin was screaming a whole lot of love. From our vista, the city looked like a Christmas tree. I remember thinking how much slower the city seemed to move looking down at it from that height. It was as if the water tower had some magical property that made everything tranquil. Or maybe it was just the pot.
  
  I tried to maneuver my way to Beth, but instead Jenny sat between us. Beth moved closer to Chris. I grabbed the bottle from the duffel bag and took a big swig. Then I passed it around. Like we were establishing some ritual, each person rambled angsty, teenage things when it was their turn to drink from bottle.
  
  Just minutes later, Mike was jumping up and down on the catwalk, causing it to vibrate and wobble slightly. He looked like an astronaut with that thick backpack wrapped around him. Like a broken record he continually repeated, “If a body catch a body…if a body catch a body.” Then he grinned, jumping higher and landing harder. Every thud from his heavy Doc Martin’s pounded my ears. I could feel the catwalk vibrating in my teeth. Then I heard a long, rusty squeak beneath us. I clutched the railing. Tony said something to Mike; I couldn’t tell what it was because of the ringing in my ears, but I’m sure it was something meant to calm him down. Beth grabbed Chris and held him tight, as if he were a lifeline. She whispered something to him. At that moment, the feeling of fright overwhelmed my jealous thoughts towards Chris.
  
  Chris shouted, “Stop!” Then everything was quiet. Mike turned to him, like a wounded puppy. Then he said, “What if Holden Caulfield’s job was to stand on top of the water tower to save the children instead of in the rye field?”
  
  “You’re really starting to creep me out,” Jenny said, in her annoying, but sometimes-cute, mini-mouse voice.
  
  “I’m going to climb to the top. If a body catch a body.”
  
  Chris stood up. “Mike, don’t try to climb the dome. It’s slippery and there is no railing up there. It’s just a polished, metal ball. You’re crazy.”
  
  Everyone turned to Mike, as he stepped on the circular railing for support. I don’t think anyone was breathing. We were stunned, watching this crazy guy ascend the thin, welded, metal ladder to the top.
  
  “Hey guys I found something up here. It’s got a handle on it. It’s like a manhole or something. Oh, did I tell you guys I brought up some bacteria cultures from the biology lab? That and I managed to steal some cases of mercury from my dad. I wonder what would happen if I opened this lid and dumped them in?”
  
  Beth and Jenny screamed. Chris yelled, “Mike, get down from there right now!”
  
  Tony stood up and stopped the tape.
  
  We heard the grinding of metal on metal. Mike was slowly turning the cover. “When a body meet a body, comin’ through the tower.”
  
  “Mike, stop! You’ll poison the entire city! What about your friends? Your dad?” Beth said.
  
  “Fuck them!”
  
  At that point everyone turned to Chris. Our gaze silently asked the question that he didn’t want to answer. His curly head sank. His long, wiry arms became fists. Then he began climbing that thin ladder.
  
  “When a body meet a body comin’ up the ladder,” Mike sang, repeating it like a mantra.
  
  We edged our way against the railing to get a view, but they were at the top in the center and we could only see the mops of their curly heads.
  
  “Mike, what the fuck’s wrong with you. You’re scaring the girls,” Chris said, his voice echoing slightly over the dome.
  
  “That’s all you can ever think about, girls, girls, girls! Don’t you care about anything else? The children? We have to save them.”
  
  We could hear the grinding of metal on metal again. Then I heard the clop of footsteps. “We’re not going to let you do this. You wanna spend the rest of your life in prison?”
  
  Then we heard one of them yelp. “I’m not gonna let-” Bang!
  We jumped. Then we heard a thud and saw a gun slide over the dome, and bounce off the catwalk railing to the ground. We heard a few more grunts and then a loud scream, “Noooooo…” Mike and Chris slid off the dome, still locked arm-in-arm and plunged over the edge of the catwalk.
  
  We stood silent. I wanted to believe I was still in my house, watching TV, or reading Izuala’s Prophecies. Instead, the image of the pool of blood and twisted carcasses of Mike and Chris at the foot of the tower replayed in my head, over and over.
  
  Later, the police told my mother that there was no case of mercury in the backpack. Instead, they had found duct tape, rope, a two-liter of Mountain Dew and some tranquilizers. They had also found some Ky jelly, and some .38 caliber bullets. I can only shudder as I imagine what he was planning to do. Fortunately these things were kept out of our local news. We never discussed the deaths and I never attended the funerals.
  
  After that harrowing episode I decided to go to the school psychologist since we couldn’t afford any other kind. Glowing, amber books don’t just magically appear and predict the future. My fear was that I was developing some form of schizophrenia, or my mother had taken LSD while I was still a fetus. The counselor told me I wasn’t schizophrenic because I knew that the book wasn’t real. According to professionals in the field, the difference between a psychosis and a neurosis is that with a psychosis you actually believe your hallucinations are real. If you have the ability to doubt them it makes all of the difference in such a diagnosis; you’re consider reasonably sane, a neurotic.
  
  She shook her head when I told her the book did predict the future and said, “This is stress related. You’re experiencing anxiety about your future and you have no father figure to give you the kind of support you need.” Then she told me about a state ran clinic that could prescribe anti-anxiety medication and I set up an appointment that week.
  
  
  After High School was over my life seemed to be in some kind of limbo. I was taking much more than my prescribed amount of Xanax, walking around in haze. I was still living with my mother, hopping from job to job. One week it was fast-food slavery with the manager screaming, “We need more fries in the vat now! The twelve o’ clock rush is here Magellan!” Next week I was sweeping floors and scrubbing toilets. I didn’t stick with any of the jobs for more than a few weeks.
  
  I’d thought about college, but I didn’t want to waste my time with it until I was positive what I would study. If worse came to worse, I figured, I’d muck around on my own time and not have tax payers paying the dole while I sat in some dorm, glued to my futon, smoking pot and staring at blacklight posters for four years. I didn’t want to be that college kid, who, 10,000 joints and a million bowls of Cap’n’Crunch later, stares up through a bong cloud at his diploma, worth no more than the empty ashtray basking under his lava lamp.
  
  The job I finally managed to stick with was Harley Rick’s. It took me four years from graduation day to finally settle into something I enjoyed. During the summers of High School I actually checked out some manuals from the library (instead of stealing them), to repair my own scooter. It passed the time and I seemed to have a proclivity for it and other things visual-spatially oriented, except for chess. After volunteering an hour of work Rick saw how much natural talent I had and hired me on the spot.
  
  It felt good to be able to finally pull my weight and help my mom. Her red hair was starting to turn a sandy gray, the same shade as our carpet. The wrinkles under her eyes were becoming more pronounced. Each new line was like a scar, little, deep tributaries that revealed how jaded her long life had made her. She had never found a new man. She seemed to just bide her time, inventing things to keep herself distracted. Some days she would clean the green mold on our white, aluminum siding outside. Other days she moped around through our tiny house with her head down, dusting the Chippendale knock-off furniture, over and over again. She existed rather than lived, but when I got the job I saw that sparkle in her golden eyes again.
  
  My next encounter with the book happened shortly after I was hired. I met a woman at the Harley shop. Her curly, blond hair reminded me of a poodle. Even the way she walked gave me that impression. All she needed was a cotton candy colored collar. She looked sort of like Marilyn Monroe turned-biker. She even had the same initials; her name was Marilyn Michaels. I figured she was about 10 years older, but I never did ask.
  
  I lied and told her I was renovating my apartment because I didn’t want her to know I was still living with my mother.
  
  We spent the night at a Super 8 in down town Akron. She was in the shower and I was watching the playboy channel, dressed in nothing but some plaid boxers. We had some cheap whiskey cooling in the fridge and a bag of coke on the nightstand next to the Gideon Bible. I was about to pour myself a shot to relieve my virgin fears. Then her cell phone started ringing. I looked at the ID box and I saw a Devin Michaels. Of course, I just let it ring and waited for her to come out of the shower. But she didn’t.
  
  As I stood up to finally pour myself that shot, I saw the book again. It was sitting where the Gideon Bible was supposed to be. I was so numb from the anti-anxiety medication that it I didn’t even frighten me. I was so high it didn’t occur to me that the medicine was supposed to stifle these book hallucinations. I just opened it to the first page like I was about to read the morning paper.
  
  Do not sleep with her; you are in grave danger.
  
  I thought, great, the magical nanny is back. But then of course, I remembered our water tower trip. I put the book inside the nightstand and grabbed a condom. She finally came out of the shower.
  
  “Someone called for you,” I said, handing her the phone.
  
  She looked at it for a second and her eyes twitched a little. I had guessed right at the time that she was trying to put on a poker face. The eyes that said, oh no, it’s not my husband who just called. It was my brother. Did I mention I had a brother? Oh, I was lying about not having one earlier.
  
  “Oh, it was nobody,” she said, turning bright pink. She quickly snapped it shut and hopped on the bed.
  
  I know this is wrong, but after seeing her big, round breasts and bullet nipples what I’d just read in Izuala’s Prophecies kind of sank down with the blood into my hambone.
  
  The next morning she disappeared without a trace. She never came back to Rick’s either and when I walked to her house she wasn’t there. She wouldn’t answer her cell either. Weeks had passed and there was no Marilyn. To forget about her I bought my first motorcycle. It was a black, 1990 Kawasaki Ninja.
  
  A month later she called me. “Magellan…we need to talk about something. I’m really sorry but I didn’t know…ugh, I don’t know how to say this…”
  
  I just stood there silent, waiting for an explanation. Finally she said, “I was just diagnosed a few weeks ago…I…I’m positive. I’m sorry I didn’t know. But I thought you should know.”
  
  My feet were ice. My blood felt like frozen ink flowing down to my knees. I couldn’t even feel the phone I was holding. Whether I even breathed for a minute I couldn’t tell. My life had changed. Nothing was the same for a long time after that phone call. Despite the medication I suffered nightmares and panic attacks. Even at Christmas dinner and every holiday, behind every feigned smile there was this invisible AIDS test hanging over my head like mistletoe.
  
  It wasn’t until eight months later that my fears had finally subsided. The test was negative. I chided myself for not listening to the prophecies and swore I would never be so stupid again. A month after the test I got another call. It was Marilyn.
  
  “Will you come see me, I’m downtown? I’m at St. Anthony’s room 23.”
  
  “Sure, give me a few minutes.”
  
  I went to put on my leather chaps and tied my hair back in a ponytail. When I opened the medicine cabinet I noticed the book down in the sink. It began glowing brighter than I had ever seen it glow before and it frightened me even through the armor of my dope. By this time I didn’t think; I just grabbed it by reflex.
  
  Don’t visit her; you are in grave danger.
  
  Shit, not again. What now? I put the book back in the sink, grabbed my helmet and headed out the door. I tried to subdue that voice in the back of my mind that said, please listen this time.
  
  But I didn’t. I was torn between wanting to believe it was just a hallucination resulting from my tolerance to the medication and that it was a legitimate warning. The book had never been wrong before. But I wanted to see Marilyn before she died. She deflowered me. Call it infatuation or call it love. I continued cruising through the rain on my Ninja, ignoring the voice in the back of my mind. Rain pelted my helmet and slowed traffic down to screeching halt. I pulled out of the jam to take an alternate route on the County Road. I kept the speedometer at or below 30, which was a perfect speed for the inclement weather. I was bopping along to some Rush song when the road and everything else vanished.
  
  There I was, in that damned underground club. Blind as could be and stumbling around, choking. I accidentally grabbed some woman’s breast and stepped on someone’s toe. Next thing I know I’d landed face first in the alley. Then I woke up.
  
  The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my right leg. It was up in the air, hanging in a stirrup. I was on so much dope that every little thing seemed so amazing and beautiful, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Everything seemed to take on this transcendental glow; even putting on deodorant seemed like some act of divinity. With the amount I was on, everything seemed to make so much sense. Why channel 43 was right above 42. Even the white snow on the TV was like a comedy routine. My arms were fine for some reason, but my jaw was wired shut and I had shattered pretty much every bone I could name from my ribs to my big toe.
  
  I’d hit a pothole on County Road 12 and flipped my bike several times. I’d done several cartwheels with my Ninja. I’d suffered a concussion. My mother told me that for the first three months my head was swollen as big as a watermelon. She also told me that she was suing the Highway department in case I was unable to work again. I still remember those words echoing through my head, the words: in case you can’t work again.
  
  This was a pivotal moment in my life, when I began to no longer fear the book and began trusting it, whether it was a hallucination or not. Izuala’s Prophecies was the father that I didn’t have.
  
  The accident had changed my life as much as the book. For the first four months I couldn’t really think straight. I was always dizzy and nothing seemed to make any sense. My mother even had to feed me and remind me when to go to the bathroom. By the fifth month I could walk again, though with a big limp. But once I was semi-ambulatory and able to feed myself, things started going a little better.
  
  The doctor said I had suffered some minor brain damage and that I would probably never function at the full capacity of my cognitive ability again. It wasn’t as if my brain was gone; I was only slowed down a bit and suffered minor memory impairment. He also said that I wouldn’t ever regain the full use of my legs and that I would always walk with a big limp. My mother drove me to the social security department to get disability. My life was over. I remember heading to that office that day, feeling like I was signing my own death certificate.
  
  A few years later I’d moved out, against the wishes of my mother. She didn’t want her poor, vulnerable, little boy to face the world on his own. But I needed to do it for my sanity. I yearned to have a sense of independence, so I rented an apartment just a few miles away. With my monthly SSD check and my little settlement with the city I managed to live comfortably.
  
  But what scared me the most is that I woke up one day and somehow five years had flown by. I was 30 years old and I hadn’t done a thing with my life except sue the city and become a big, lazy leech. I lived in a government subsidized apartment complex. I’d thought about committing suicide, but I forgot that I was already dead. That and I was too afraid to do it myself. I’d thought about putting an ad in the paper or online to hire somebody to poison me or shoot me in the back of the head when I wasn’t looking, kind of like guerrilla assisted-suicide. Hell, I didn’t even care if they used a crossbow as long as they got the job done without me being aware.
  
  Five years turned into ten years turned into fifteen turned into twenty. I woke up one day and I was 42. If you take a color wheel in art class, with all the primary and secondary colors on it and spin it really fast it turns into a gray blur. That’s exactly what the last 42 years of my life had been. I looked like a weather beaten hippy, my long hair was gray, and my stomach was much bigger. My light brown eyes became dark.
  
  I could have done something with my life. I could have even been the couple of brain cells attached to an electric guitar in a local band somewhere, but I didn’t even do that much. I just waited for that SSD check every month, sinking further into my grave with each one. The checks are printed on the same paper as income tax checks; they are a tan, yellow color that reminds me of a tombstone. I served less of a purpose in life than a skid mark in a pair of underwear does. I was nothing.
  
  The book didn’t make another appearance until later that year, just after my forty-second birthday. It visited me again when I’d become so lonely that I put an ad in the paper to find a roommate. I was asking $200, utilities included. Even if it was a small, one-bedroom apartment it was a steal and I knew it. That didn’t matter; I just wanted a warm body there to make me feel like I was still alive.
  
  I took the first person that called. “Magellan Price? Err, what kind of name is Magellan anyway? Ughhhhhhh, Was your mom in some traveling circus or something boy?”
  
  That was Sidney. He called everyone “boy”. And every other breath he made this really strange noise like he was groaning or grunting, maybe even gurgling. He was a 55-year-old biker junky. I put up with this crystal meth habit because I was desperate for company. His skinny, skeleton of a body shook all the time and when I looked into his sunken eyes to ask him a question, it was as if there was no conscience there, no one was home. After he moved in CD’s and old records turned up missing. A few antiques also came up missing. My house looked like a dusty, antique mall, so cluttered you could barely maneuver through any room. But I knew where to find anything and I kept track of every little knickknack I had.
  
  I also let him throw a few parties at the apartment. And I regretted it. Every lowlife in Akron was there, laughing at my apartment and the clutter of antique knickknacks as if it were some kind of circus sideshow. I went to the bathroom the morning after to shave and walked in on a woman with a needle in her arm. At that point I was tempted to ask him to leave but I didn’t, until the book appeared again.
  
  He was out to ‘work’ that day, which meant he was out scoring drugs. He didn’t think I knew but I did. He said he worked at a bar downtown. But I went to the bar looking for him one night and he wasn’t there. He had never worked there. I was formulating plans to evict him as I went to the fridge to grab a beer. But there was no beer, just that book staring at me, nearly blinding me and flooding the kitchen with that amber light.
  
  I opened it like a reflex again, as if books had always magically appeared in my refrigerator. It had been twenty years since I had seen it, and I could already feel that old, familiar swelling in my chest again. Lightening was going to strike any second. It said:
  
  You need to ask him to leave. Make up an excuse. Do anything to get rid of him; you are in grave danger.
  
  It took dying once just to get me to listen, but now I did unconditionally. I lied and told him the landlord was asking questions and that it would be better if he found a new place. I even offered to help him find one.
  
  That week I left the apartment for a few days. I didn’t want to be around when he packed his bags. I bought a room from the same Super 8 Hotel that I’d stayed with Mariliyn at, just to remind myself to keep listening to the book. When I came back a few days later he was gone, but his clothes and neon bar signs that he had stolen were still hanging up in the back bedroom. And the apartment stank, horribly. It smelled literally like the sewer had backed up right into my living room. But there was another smell I couldn’t identify. It was sharp and bitter.
  
  I surveyed the house, inspecting each room to make sure no damage was done. Some of my antique coke bottles had been smashed on the floor, turning my beige carpet the color of caramel. My Felix the Cat clock was smashed into pieces on the kitchen floor. That clock was 60 years old. Other things were missing. I figured he threw some kind of party while I was gone but I didn’t care. As long as he was leaving nothing else mattered. When I made it to the bathroom the unidentified odor was stronger. I flipped the shower curtain and there was the girl I caught shooting up before the morning after that party. She looked like a balloon.
  
  Her face and lips were swollen black and blue. Her bloated body looked like a blow-up raft. And there was a needle dangling from her arm. I quickly looked away. I gagged and choked a little, but managed not to puke. The sink had fresh shaving cream in it. I searched the house again but no one was there.
  
  Just when I had my hand on the phone to call the police the door swung open. It was Sidney, smoking a cigarette. His thinning, gray hair was tied back into a ponytail so tight, it looked as if his eyeballs were pulled back taut in their sockets with the same pressure. He went into the kitchen and opened the pantry.
  
  “Hey Sidney, what’s up?”
  
  “Not a whole lot,” he said, looking around the walk-in pantry. Little pieces of my clock crunched beneath his boots.
  
  “Um have you seen the bathroom yet?”
  
  “Yeah just shaved a few minutes ago…ughh.”
  
  “Sidney, why is there a dead body in my bathtub?”
  
  “Do you know how to make hash browns? I mean from scratch. Not those pre-made ones you can buy at Wal-Mart.”
  
  “Yeah, I can make them. Sidney, who is in the bathroom?”
  
  “They take olive oil or vegetable oil?”
  
  I didn’t respond. He wasn’t human and I questioned for a moment whether I should just wait until he left to call the police.
  
  “You don’t have a skillet do you?” he asked, rummaging through a lower kitchen cabinet, clanking dishes.
  
  I sighed. “Sidney, fuck the hash browns, fuck the olive oil. Why is there a dead, bloated body in my bathtub with a needle in her arm?”
  
  “Hmmm, must have had a slight case of death. You know how long to cook ’em? Ughhh.”
  
  “Jesus Christ, just get the fuck out of my house!”
  
  “Jeez Magellan, a little touchy today? I always clean up my messes you know. I do my dishes. I’m a good roommate,” he said, shaking uncontrollably.
  
  Finally he left and I called the police. I had to explain to them why there were syringes and little bags of crystal meth scattered throughout the house.
  
  He was arrested a few weeks later and as pathetic as this may be, I was actually sad. I had lost my only companion. The only thing good going in my life was Izuala’s Prophecies, but over the years I had learned to associate the book, like a Pavlovian dog, with danger.
  
  I had my final conversation with Izuala three weeks later. I had the barrel of a shotgun propped up in my mouth. I pulled the trigger and…click. Nothing happened. I forgot to load it. I couldn’t even commit suicide the right way. I cried. I strolled outside to get some shells from the shed. But the shells were gone. Instead, there was the glowing, amber book. This time it lit up the entire shed, and the back yard. It looked like my yard was full of tiki torches.
  
  I opened the book, which was blazing hot. It read:
  
  “You tired of sitting around and using yourself, waiting to die? Why don’t you become a teacher and help children not to fall into the same traps you did? I allowed your motorcycle accident to happen. I could have stopped it, but I didn’t. I did it to wake you up. You wouldn’t listen to me. You never did. It took death just to wake you up. Go to Akron Elementary. My job here is finished.”
  
  Then I screamed and cried, “Why me, why the fuck me? Why did you do this to me?” Then I closed the book and opened it again. This time it read:
  
  “Because you are important, much more than you know. But you were too pathetic to manage your own life. One day you will write your own book. You will create pitfalls and escape routes. You will help someone, who, like yourself, wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to make it in this world. It will be your job to wake them up as I have you. I am your book. But there are many books, some with leaves, others with wings and they are all trying to tell a story. They are trying desperately to reach out to the lost ones, if they could but recognize this.”
  
  I had to stop to catch my breath. My chest was heaving but I continued reading.
  
  “Do not worship me. Do not call me a god for I am not good. Do not call me a devil for I am not evil. Do not even cry. I am the universe balancing itself out, because Magellan wouldn’t have had the chance otherwise.”
  
  Maybe this book was never real. Perhaps it was just a hallucination caused by my motorcycle accident, or maybe I’ve always been schizophrenic. Maybe it was a subconscious survival mechanism kicking into gear and waking me up at the right moments. Or maybe it is real. I don’t expect anyone to believe me. Either way it doesn’t matter; the book will always be real to me. What really matters is it changed my life forever. It lifted me out of my nowhere life and planted me in firm soil.
  
  I’m a teacher now. My favorite student is a pigtailed, little girl named Elise. Sometimes she stays after class and asks me why her daddy hits her. She asks me why he is no longer home. For now, I can only tell her that it’s better that way, because I don’t have the answers. I can only love her and tell her that maybe he is gone because someone is looking out for her protection. Perhaps I will become her book soon, to intervene and save her from life.