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Come Get Some

Posted on March 27, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

He liked to read at every available opportunity. He enjoyed the worlds that were made available to him between the covers of a paperback and he seldom read a book with an eye for narrative style or descriptive content. Once he was gone, lost, in the book of the moment he wouldn’t register them as dark characters on a white page. He didn’t care about paper quality or typographic differences and the only thing that was likely to attract him to one book over others on a shelf was cover art. Once he’d turned a few pages he was so immersed in the environments, so busy imagining the people inhabiting them and so intent on hanging on to every word that he often forgot where he was. He had laughed out loud enough times in public places at something funny in the book he was reading. He missed bus stops and railway stations and he very often didn’t notice when someone was trying to get his attention.

He wasn’t a fan of television as much as he was a fan of cinema and that was nowhere close to how greatly he enjoyed playing computer games; the bloodier the better. He was so into gaming he sometimes suffered a condition called DIMS or Doom Induced Motion Sickness. In spite of the existence of so many different ways for him to distract himself, the printed word still ranked pretty high on his list of escapes. He hated nothing more than being interrupted in the middle of an interesting chapter and it broke his heart to put books away before he’d reached the last page. They were were his escape from the life of a young man who didn’t know where he was going and how long it would take to get there. He liked to think they made his life a little less ordinary.

As always he was riding an autorickshaw home and as usual he had his nose buried in a book. This was no ordinary tome, this was the Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy and he was enjoying the trip so far. He loved the descriptions of different places lost in the infinity of space and he kept stopping to marvel over how the author had managed to dream up that many worlds.

The rickshaw slowed to a halt and some part of his mind told him that he should be aware that the vehicle had stopped at a signal but before he had time to react, a shadow fell over the book and his vision blurred. The heavy hands of the eunuch patted his head and pushed against his face, slapped the open face of the book and the grating, phlegm-laden, guttural voice demanded money. Without his glasses all he could tell was that his tormentor was large. Normally too timid to raise his voice, he had been angered by the sudden interruption. Enough to demand his glasses back in a stern voice. As one hand reached out to return the glasses, the other one grabbed the book, roughly, so that he could see a blurred image of a page being bent out of shape. As the paper crinkled, cracked and curled irreversibly his vision was replaced by something that was very familiar yet completely alien in the situation. The blurred discomfort of sans-spectacles vision was replaced by the large pixels that indicated his presence inside the virtual environment of his favourite computer game, Duke Nukem 3D.

He was seeing everything from Duke’s point of view and just out of sight, blurred in a very pixel-ey manner were the different indicators that told him his health was good but his armoury was spent. In trying to look around (to check whether this was how the world looked all around) his vision focused on his denim-clad leg and steel-toed boot. The eunuch had long since transformed into a beast and while its roars threatened to split his ears he saw it reach forward for another swipe at the empty pistol in his hand. A part of his consciousness told him that in another world his pistol would have simply been his glasses while the rest of his mind screamed at him to kick the beast to death. Even before he realised it, his foot was lashing out at the beast and he had the satisfaction of seeing blood splatter off the distasteful creature before it fell away from sight.

He was falling back and some of the wind was knocked out of his lungs. He blinked and everything was as it should be except for the fact that he couldn’t see very clearly. He realised he was still holding his glasses in his hand. He placed them on his nose and leaned out of the autorickshaw as it quickly gathered speed and saw the eunuch waving a fist at him. He would have devoted some time to being scared by the look in the eunuch’s eyes if he hadn’t happened to notice his book lying by his feet. He picked it up, dusted it off, grimaced at the state of the page he’d been reading and resumed from where he’d left off.

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