September 8, 2014 | Occasus | Issue 4 | Fiction

Xylophagia

Joel Rubens was a small child when he ate his first book. When the family copy of Everybody Poops went missing the day after she and Joel first read it through, Mrs Rubens had been too busy to think much of it. If she had only done as her son had asked and simply looked that day while the boy stood pointing at the toilet, had she not responded with a perfunctory “yes, dear” to his prophetic and innocent request that she “look!” she may have seen a piece of the book’s title-page floating among the other refuse in the bowl. But she did not look and Joel stood there smiling, his little fingers waving goodbye as the toilet flushed.

Joel quickly developed a strong interest in reading on a variety of subjects. With a mind to encourage, his parents bought him a subscription to a children’s general interest magazine that, to their astonishment, appeared to be quietly and diligently recycled every week. Mr and Mrs Rubens were proud of their voracious little reader. He had an uncanny ability to recall every detail of each book he read, down to the number of the page and the copyright information. He moved quickly and easily through the children’s canon, impressing his parents and their friends with his total recall, page for page, of Peter Cottontail’s struggle with Mr McGregor or of Charlotte’s construction of her webs – sometimes frightening them a little with his stunningly accurate recitation of Jim’s lines from Huckleberry Finn.

Initially, Joel would rip the pages out one by one, chewing and swallowing them individually, but this method had inherent drawbacks that were obvious even at his young age. It was time consuming, for one thing, and Joel’s parents quickly became suspicious. They were compelled to speak to him about the amount of time he was spending locked in his bedroom, fearing that the boy was at that point already a prodigious masturbator. The concept of masturbation was, in fact, news to Joel, who really just wanted to read and eat his books without being disturbed or forced to learn about his father’s adolescent masturbatory habits.

The nature of his technique also held Joel back from consuming larger, more ambitious works. He longed to dig in to the dense novels lining the family shelves, the grown-up books with Russian names and strange titles. Around age eight he realized that by soaking the pages in water before ingesting them he could consume them far more efficiently. This breakthrough led to his undertaking to read, first, The Hobbit, then the entirety of Tolkien’s oeuvre before his tenth birthday. For a period of months Joel would spontaneously break into fluent and impeccably accented Sindarin around the house and at school before growing tired of explaining to his teachers and peers the history and lore behind what Sindarin actually happened to be.

For his tenth birthday he was given a complete set of Harry Potter books. Drooling, he brought the books up to his room with a pitcher of water, locked the door, and set himself to reading. Within five days he had finished the entire series and was promptly hospitalized with an intestinal blockage. This was his first realization that his consumption was more than simply an activity other people chose not to engage in, and could, in fact, be to the detriment of his physical well-being. He also realized that doctors asked a lot of dangerous questions, particularly questions pertaining to his eating habits, which he assured them were in no way abnormal, as well as taking lot of tests and X-rays, which, besides being harder to dupe than his parents, just on a physical level he wasn’t really into. He resolved to make a change. After nearly a decade of consuming and the systematic regurgitation of facts and passages, quotations, directions, character names, and plot devices, Joel’s self-image was so tied in with his process of consumption and the resulting adoration he received from his family and teachers as a gifted person, as a whiz kid, that a life without books was not a life he could imagine himself living. And so, lying there in his hospital bed, Joel decided that if he were to get out of this thing unscathed he would establish a series of loose rules for himself.

The first rule was to govern pacing. He saw his current intestinal situation as fundamentally a problem with his own self-control. He had had a glimpse into a side of himself that he wasn’t sure he liked, a side with a raw animal craving. He was from then on to be wary of suspense, even, if necessary, to avoid it altogether. To this end, Joel resigned himself to never purchase an airport paperback as long as he lived. On trips with his family he could recall seeing those rows of indistinct books, shiny with the author’s name embossed in gold on the cover, and he could recall goosebumps and a loosening of his sphincter at the image, like a junkie seeing a bag of heroin. With his last undertaking he had had a taste of unbearable suspense and it scared him enough to swear it off altogether.

His situation had also focused his attention more acutely on the problem of his parents. As long as he wished to continue the practice of complete consumption he would have to keep Mr and Mrs Rubens in the dark. He decided that on his release he would acquire for himself a library card, with no intention, of course, of actually borrowing anything. The card would be a decoy, a way for Joel to continue reading at whatever pace he deemed healthy and appropriate while maintaining the illusion that he was not actually physically eating and digesting the books.

It so happened that after a few days of squirming around in awful pain Joel was indeed released from the hospital unscathed, and so he implemented his new guidelines to govern his consumption. He made a show of asking his mother to accompany him to their local library and on returning home he held up his card triumphantly for his father to admire. He even borrowed a few books to scatter about his bedroom in case his mother found herself in there tidying up. He asked for a raise in his allowance, which he got on the condition that he do a few more chores every week, which he did. The extra allowance money was to be spent on secret book-buying, first, week by week, on the decoy titles he’d borrowed from the library, the keeping-up of appearances being paramount, and then on whatever he liked

His new streak of literary asceticism, a direct result of his tiptoeing around suspense, led him to an awakening of sorts. He was finally able to consume the Russians he’d longed for and, finding their books were old and cheap, was sometimes able to read two per week. This turned out to be a little overzealous, not to mention a bad policy decision, as Joel found himself spending entirely too long on the toilet, more than once, cursing Tolstoy for not having had a better editor. He discovered the post-modernists and, in particular, became a hardcore Gaddis fan, The Recognitions being just dry enough for his palate.

He became a master of hiding his tracks, his parents, to his knowledge, never suspecting a thing. Mr and Mrs Rubens saw a polite and thoughtful young man who just happened to be a wunderkind, his applicable knowledge in nearly all schools of thought – technical, philosophical, and otherwise – far surpassing their own. His frequent trips to the Goodwill were a sign of his strong moral and ethical core, his willingness to help out with chores a sign of his solid work ethic.

So it was that when Joel Rubens set to applying to the English programs of prestigious universities his applications were roundly accepted. His entrance exams were perfect, his test scores high, his essay, “The Semiotics of Language and Consumption in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot,” displayed such a deep knowledge of the text that the admissions department found themselves smacking their foreheads in disbelief. He was a hot commodity. He accepted a full-ride at Brown and promptly immersed himself in academic life.     

While choosing classes for his third year, Joel found himself, to his horror, faced with the prospect of a mandatory detective fiction class. He spoke with both his academic counsellors and the Dean without any result. The look of terror on his face during those meetings was striking, both the Dean and the counsellors noting the sweat visibly dripping down his brow. But they would not budge. He could never explain to these men his situation. He’d read enough psychiatric material to know that aside from his own peculiar situation, there was an actual medical condition, a subset of Pica syndrome, wherein subjects cannot stop themselves from consuming paper – if he were found out he would surely be treated for this. But that was not his condition. Those people did not speak perfect Sindarin without any effort, let alone fluent Quenya. Those people ate toilet paper. Raymond Chandler frightened Joel, as did Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle. But the more he stared at the reading list the more he began to come around to the inevitable, and so, with a heavy heart, Joel began his third year enrolled in English 304 – Mystery Fiction, with professor Spade.

At first Joel found the readings dry enough. Murders of the Rue Morgue, for example, was not particularly suspenseful. But as the course progressed, and the 19th Century moved into the 20th, he grew more and more helpless. In what felt like an out of body experience, he found himself purchasing Agatha Christie’s collected works. The friends rapping on his door in the few days afterward would be turned away by an arrogant and theatrical French accent. After The Maltese Falcon and the subsequent Hammett collection, they found that he had taken up smoking and was only reachable at night. He would make uncomfortable passes at women he barely knew, once smacking a friend’s girlfriend across the face and telling her it was for her own good. Red-eyed and bloated, Joel walked around campus in a zombified haze, unsettling the bookstore employees who recommended that maybe he slow down a bit with the anthologies.

By midway through his third year of university Joel Rubens had completely lost control. When he wasn’t locked in his apartment dipping pages into a glass of whiskey, consuming any and all the detective fiction he could find, he could be spotted running around campus like a feral child, often on all fours, barking and grunting at anyone who approached him. His hair was matted and his clothes were ripped and filthy, if it happened that he were wearing any clothes at all. He was caught more than once attempting to run out of the campus bookstore with stacks of paperbacks under his arm, evading arrest only by biting a security guard so forcefully that a tetanus shot needed to be administered. Joel soon fell off the grid.

One day in early December a homeless man was found lying, close to death, in front of the local hospital with an anthology of Dean Koontz’s collected works under his arm that looked like a dog had gotten hold of it, half the pages ripped out and the cover gnawed on. He had no identification. When examined, it was discovered that the man had a mass of wood the size of a particularly swollen grapefruit lodged in his stomach. When the mass was removed and the man came to, he could recall neither his name nor his address, requesting, in a tongue that a specialist identified as Sindarin, only a copy of Everybody Poops.

ALEXANDER MARTIN is a fourth year student from Waterloo, Ontario, enrolled in the Honours Specialization in English Language and Literature and Creative Writing program. He is currently completing an Honours Thesis in Creative Writing.  He is the winner of the Lillian Kroll Prize for 2012-2013.  He plans to proceed to graduate school to earn an MFA in writing.