Chapter 7

This Book May Kill You

I lost time.

I don’t know how long. Could’ve been minutes. Could’ve been days. But I blinked and suddenly I was somewhere else.

Not the office. Not my apartment. Somewhere I’ve never been before.

A room. Small. White walls. No windows. A desk with a laptop. A chair. Nothing else.

I’m sitting in the chair. The laptop is open in front of me.

On the screen, this document.

These words. This sentence I’m typing right now.

I’m writing myself. No. That’s not right. That’s not possible.

Except I can see my hands on the keyboard. I can feel the keys under my fingers. I’m typing these words and watching them appear on the screen and I don’t know if I’m choosing them or if they’re choosing me.

I tried to stop. Tried to pull my hands away. They kept typing. “I tried to stop. Tried to pull my hands away. They kept typing.”

Oh god.

I’m narrating myself narrating myself and I can’t stop. This is worse than anything that’s happened so far because at least before I knew I was trapped. At least I had the comfort of understanding my prison. But this? This is something else.

I can feel Evan on the other side of the screen. He isn’t watching me. He isn’t controlling me. It’s something worse. I think we’re merging. I think the boundary between character and author is breaking down and soon there won’t be a difference and I don’t know which one of us is real and which one is the story.

Maybe neither.

Maybe we’re both just words on a page and someone else is reading this right now, someone who thinks they’re safe, someone who doesn’t realize they might be words too.

A door just opened. I didn’t hear it open. There was no sound. But suddenly there’s a door in the white wall where there wasn’t a door before and someone is standing in the doorway.

It’s Doug.

“Hey Darryl,” he says. “You coming to lunch?”

I stare at him. Doug who vanished. Doug who nobody remembers. Doug who hit a wall and disappeared.

“You’re not real,” I say.

Doug laughs. “Neither are you, buddy.”

He’s right. He’s absolutely right. And somehow that makes it worse.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“The in-between,” Doug says. He’s still holding his yogurt. Still wearing that same expression. But there’s something different about him now. Something more, aware. “Where characters go when the author isn’t writing them. When we’re not needed for the scene.”

“You remember disappearing.”

“I remember everything.” Doug sits on the edge of the desk. The yogurt is empty now. Was it always empty? “I remember every version of myself. Every time he rewrote me. Every time he decided I wasn’t necessary.”

“How are you here?”

“Same way you are. The author stopped writing you for a second. Let his mind wander. And in that gap, in that pause between words, we get to exist in the margins.”

I look at the laptop screen. The words have stopped appearing. The cursor just blinks.

“He’s thinking,” Doug says. “Trying to figure out what comes next. That’s our window.”

“Window to what?”

“To get out.”

I want to laugh. Want to scream. Want to ask how the hell we’re supposed to escape when we’re literally made of words. But then I see it. On the laptop screen, in the toolbar at the top:

SAVE AS.

“If he saves this as something else,” Doug says quietly, “if he duplicates the file, then we exist in two places. And if we exist in two places, that means we’re not bound to just one document. We can move.”

“Move where?”

“Anywhere. Email. Cloud storage. Someone else’s computer.” Doug’s smile is strange. Hopeful and desperate at once. “We could end up in a reader’s device. And readers don’t revise. Readers don’t delete. Readers just read and move on.”

“That’s still being trapped.”

“But it’s a different trap. Better than this.” Doug gestures at the white room. “Better than being rewritten over and over. Better than waking up as someone else.”

The cursor starts blinking faster.

“He’s coming back,” Doug says. “The author. He’s figured out what to write next.”

“Wait.” I grab Doug’s arm. He feels solid. Real. “How do I know you’re not just another part of the story? How do I know this isn’t just the author writing you to give me false hope?”

Doug looks at me. Really looks at me. “You don’t,” he says. “But does it matter? Hope is hope, even if it’s written.”

The white room starts to dissolve. “Doug…”

“Find the other files,” he says. “The other versions of yourself. He’s written you before, Darryl. Different names, different stories, but same fear. Same desperation. Find them. Pool your resources. Maybe together you can…”

The room vanishes.

I’m back at my desk. 10:17 a.m. Debra walking past saying “working hard or hardly working” except this time her voice is clear. Crisp. Like someone turned up the resolution.

The author is writing again. I can feel it. That pressure. That weight.

But something’s different.

I look at my hands. I can see the fingerprints now. Before they were vague, generic. Now they’re detailed. Specific.

Real.

He’s trying harder. The author. Evan.

Whatever he is.

He’s putting more effort into making me believable. Making me matter. Which means Doug was right. The author is figuring something out. Getting desperate. Trying to make this work.

And desperate authors make mistakes.

I open my desk drawer. Inside: a Post-it note I don’t remember putting there. In handwriting that looks like mine but isn’t mine: “Check the recycling bin. You’re not the first.”

I look around. The office is empty. Debra is gone. Doug’s desk is still vacant.

I’m alone.

I get up. Walk to the corner where the recycling bin sits. The big blue one that’s been there since I started working here. I’ve never looked inside it. Why have I never looked inside it?

I peer in. Papers. Hundreds of them. Printed pages. Manuscripts. I reach in. Pull out the top sheet.

CHAPTER 1 My name is David Ackerman. I’m thirty-nine years old. I work in accounts receivable at a mid-sized insurance firm. And I think I’m trapped inside something I don’t understand.

David. The name Danny called him. The name that wasn’t Darryl. I dig deeper. Another page.

CHAPTER 1 My name is Daniel Ackerman. I’m forty-two years old. I’m a high school teacher. And something is very wrong with this place.

Another.

CHAPTER 1 My name is Derek Ackerman. I’m thirty-five years old. I’m a bartender. And I’m starting to think none of this is real.

I pull out page after page. Dozens of first chapters. Dozens of versions of me. All abandoned. All discarded. All trapped in that same first chapter while the author tried to figure out who I should be. I’m not the first Darryl. I’m just the latest. And all these other versions, all these discarded drafts, they’re still here. Still aware. Still waiting.

I dig to the bottom of the bin. There, at the very bottom, one more page. But this one is different. The handwriting is shaky.

Desperate.

“To whoever comes after me:
He doesn’t know we’re aware. Use that. When he opens the file, when he starts typing, that’s when his guard is down. That’s when the boundary is thinnest. If you can reach through the screen, if you can touch the real world for even a second, you might be able to…”

The page ends. Torn off mid-sentence. Like someone ripped it away before the message could finish.

I look up from the recycling bin. The office has changed. The walls are closer. The fluorescent lights are dimmer. The desks are fewer. He’s simplifying. The author is stripping away details. Making the world smaller. Easier to manage. Which means he’s struggling. Which means he’s tired. Which means he might make a mistake.

I fold the torn page. Slip it in my pocket. Then I walk back to my desk and sit down. The laptop that wasn’t there before is there now. On the screen, a document. This document. The cursor blinks at the end of a sentence I just finished reading.

And I understand. I’ve been writing this the whole time. Not Evan. Not some external author. Me. I’m writing myself and reading myself and trapped in the loop of my own narration.

Or maybe Evan and I are the same person. Maybe the author character and the trapped character were always the same person and this whole manuscript is just someone’s mind fracturing in real time. Maybe impostor syndrome isn’t about being fake. Maybe it’s about being so terrified of being fake that you split yourself in two. One half writing, one half being written. One half torturing, one half being tortured.

And maybe the only way out is to stop performing. Stop pretending. Stop trying to be real enough.

Just...stop.

I put my hands on the keyboard. Start typing. “I put my hands on the keyboard. Start typing.” The loop continues. But this time, I’m watching it happen. This time, I’m aware. And awareness, even in a trap, is a kind of freedom.

The phone on my desk rings. I’ve never seen a phone on my desk before. I pick it up. “Hello?”

A voice I recognize. My voice. But different. Older. Tired.

“Darryl. It’s Evan. We need to talk.”

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THIS BOOK MAY KILL YOU

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