“The Girl Who Was Allergic To Paper” by David Burr Gerrard

I grew up across the street from Leah Dean, the girl who was allergic to paper. Books, newspaper, cardstock, looseleaf, paper money, anything that had once been a tree and now transmitted truth, lies, or promises: the slightest contact could cause her face to swell and, possibly, her heart to stop. Paper was everywhere in those days, so it was difficult for Leah to go anywhere. She tried a few times over the years to come to school, but school was by definition a place where you threw students and paper together and hoped that the mixture would produce, decades later, an only moderately disastrous administration of the world, so eliminating paper from the classroom was not an option and Leah had to wear what was essentially a hazmat suit, an outfit that tilted even the kindest kids towards mockery. A recess or two of “Space Girl!” taunts and sniggering questions about how she wiped her butt and Leah would be back in her bedroom, where her mother taught her reading, writing, and arithmetic using blackboard and chalk. (Her father, like both of my parents, was a lawyer, and telling a lawyer to live in a house without paper was like telling most kinds of animals to live in any kind of house at all, so her father left very early.)

Our bedrooms faced each other, and I often watched Leah’s lessons through our windows while I read the Hardy Boys or The Count of Monte Cristo, Leah with her dark eyes sharp and attentive, the sort of girl who would have taken diligent notes if only there were something she could take notes on that wouldn’t kill her. On the chalkboard she wrote with what looked like beautiful penmanship, though what she wrote was too small and too far away to decipher. Sometimes at night I scribbled stories in which I invented a cure for the paper allergy, allowing her to read and read and read. I never tried to call her and read these stories to her over the phone, or to go over to her house to play with her; I was already dreaming of becoming a writer, and I think I was afraid that Leah’s affliction would prove contagious in some figurative sort of way.

My mother occasionally suggested that I go over there, but I think that she, too, feared some sort of contamination, if not of me by Leah, then of herself by Leah’s mother. Adults were skeptical about the seriousness of Leah’s allergy—paper allergies were not unheard of, but there were no recorded cases involving anything like Leah’s severity, or at least the severity that her mother claimed, and it seemed plausible that Mrs. Dean was simply searching for an excuse to keep her daughter in a dependent, semi-feral state. Certainly, Leah was being punished, if not by her mother then by a God who expressed his power through heavy books and the destruction of women.

The older we got, the more time I spent alone in my room, reading books and, eventually, masturbating. Usually I closed my blinds for the latter activity, but every once in a while I forgot, sometimes on purpose. When we were fourteen, Mrs. Dean bought Leah a telescope so she could look at the stars. Because we were fourteen, she looked at me. I passed my eyes over the most famous classics, knowing that she could see the spines and might even be impressed, though I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was reading and was mostly thinking about how long I had to wait before jerking off again. I’m not sure I truly understood why I was reading; I saw my thoughts in the books that I loved, but then again I saw my thoughts everywhere, and when what I was reading didn’t mirror my thoughts precisely, my thoughts tended to crowd the words out, so that I might as well have been holding up a book written in a language I didn’t understand.

One night, Leah was watching me through her telescope when I saw beneath her window four kids who were about as unhappy at school as I was, tying their copies of To Kill a Mockingbird together with a rubber band. I could have waved to Leah, tried to warn her, but I didn’t. I wanted to see what would happen. I’ve often thought that I wanted her to suffer so that I could write about it—this might be part of some Unified Anti-Book Theory—but I might just as easily have been motivated by some obscurer form of cowardice or sadism. I don’t know. I think a great deal about myself but have come to no conclusions. At any rate, I watched and did nothing while below her window the kid with a good arm hurled the package through Leah’s window, sending a few shards of glass past Leah’s cheek and the books onto her forehead.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Leah’s lips were red and swollen, and there were red splotches all over her skin, and she was lying on her bed, obviously having trouble breathing. I could never forget any part of that night—except of course the great deal that I have already forgotten, or am misremembering—but what I think of most often is what a ragged, sobbing Mrs. Dean called out as the EMT guys wheeled her daughter down their front stoop on a stretcher: “Don’t worry, honey, books will die before you do.”

Leah survived, but she and her mother moved away just a few weeks later. I got a computer with a modem in my room, and I met people who said they were girls. I looked for Leah on AOL, but if she ever joined, I could never figure out her screenname.

More than fifteen years passed before I saw Leah again. This was in Manhattan, as we were crossing the street in opposite directions. We had no difficulty recognizing each other. I took her to the corporate coffee bar—not the richest or most famous one—where I had just spent the day typing gimpy sentences that gasped and writhed for all twenty or thirty seconds of their electronic lives before I extinguished them with a disgusted jabbing.

The city, she told me, was much safer for her now. Apps on her phone made it possible for her to live something approaching a normal life. One app warned her of bookstores with outside displays, but there were fewer and fewer of those. Bodegas and public transportation could be challenging, but as long as she was careful and carried an epi-pen she would be all right. It was difficult for her to see movies or plays since not every theater was accommodating with the ticket situation, and signing credit card receipts required humiliating gardening gloves, but really for the most part she was impressed with how eager people were to help her. Sometimes she considered herself the luckiest girl in the world: it was as though everyone had stopped reading just for her.

Everyone had stopped reading, that is, except for her. She pulled her Kindle out of her purse and told me that she was reading all the books that she had seen me reading all those years ago. She was excited to learn that I had become a writer, and did not even look at me with pity when I told her that I had not published anything. We discovered that the company where she now worked as a web developer—her mother had bought her a computer after they moved away, and she had proven a quick study—was one where I had briefly worked as a copyeditor before getting fired for writing my novel on Microsoft Word at work. (This is what I told her; the truth is I got fired for spending too much time on Facebook.) I had since been unable to find another job and was living on the sufferance of a roommate, ostensibly writing but in fact reading gossip websites and occasionally writing polite replies to rejections from agents I had met at parties. By this point I had not read a book for six months, having left my entire library at the apartment of my last girlfriend, who always complained about how much space my books took up. I did not leave them out of spite, or not solely out of spite; I left them because they suddenly struck me as horrible things, fat and heavy things, like coffins made of and containing only themselves. Better, they were like bedbugs. One book had made another, and another, and now they sapped my blood while I dreamed. Or maybe that isn’t better. I have read thousands of excellent metaphors, yet still struggle to devise a decent one of my own.

“I always thought,” Leah said, “that you would write something that would make me feel the way I did when I looked through your window. Like that, but, I don’t know, more intellectual or more intense or whatever it is that people who grew up touching books feel.”

Leah stood a safe distance away while I signed for the tab, and we headed back outside onto the sunny pavement crowded with white wires and earbuds and plastic rectangles that held many secrets of the universe. She invited me to join her book club—“everyone’s really cool and leaves the book at home.” I declined and said goodbye a little more gruffly than I intended before walking past my subway stop and on down the street. Running in the opposite direction were a man and a woman wearing matching black-and-green workout clothes, and occasionally looking at each other in the same way that a man and a woman might have looked at each other in a bog before the advent of language, or in a library in 1925. The final days of the book will last for a thousand years, but even if I were to live that long, I would never put the sort of things on paper that would find their way into Leah.

David Burr Gerrard’s debut novel, Short Century, will be published in March 2014 by Rare Bird Books. He is a contributing editor at Tottenville Review, and his work has also appeared in Full Stop, KGB Bar Lit, and Extract(s).