The Delivery

Dave and Dave had been living together since freshman year. Everyone in the dorm called them Little Dave and Big Dave because one was tall and thin and the other was short and thick. Even though they’d been assigned to each other by chance, it felt like fate from the beginning.

Little Dave had arrived on the last move-in day, and since his dad wasn’t the walk-you-to-the-door type, Little Dave had carried up his suitcase and box himself. As soon as he’d walked in, the smell of weed hit him and he saw his new roomate waving at the air frantically.

“It’s cool, man. It’s cool,” Little Dave said.

Big Dave was sitting on his unmade bed grinning.

“Aw man, and I just threw that joint out the window. Want me to roll another one?”

And that was that. After about a month or so, their room was deemed “The Cloud” by the other students on their floor, and word spread throughout their dorm and the surrounding slate gray towers that their room was the place to go to party.

Because their dorm was co-ed — half of the floor for boys and the other half for girls — there was no need to sneak girls in. Instead, there was a constant stream of undergrads going in and out of The Cloud from 1 p.m. through the night.

The Daves attended just enough classes and did just enough work to stay enrolled because once they found their supplier, they were able to make super easy money right from their room.

Not only were they renowned for the drugs they sold (besides weed, they also dabbled in peyote and hashish) and their smoke-filled room, but they also had filled their room with pizza boxes. Every room came with two beds and desks attached to the wall, but the Daves had assembled side tables and chairs from their empty boxes. Since they got pizza from both the cafeteria and Reggie’s, the boxes were two different sizes, allowing for more construction options.

Most evenings you could walk down the hall to the last door on the left, knock, confirm you weren’t an R.A., and step into The Cloud where you might find only the Daves or several more people passing a bong, playing Grand Theft Auto, and eating pizza.

And that’s exactly how it was on the night everything changed. Little Dave was playing GTA while two randos from the second floor talked about Radiohead albums, and Big Dave was getting ready to de-seed and stem some more weed. He grabbed a pizza box, put it on his lap, and noticed that it was too heavy to be empty. Also, it wasn’t from the cafeteria or Reggie’s. There was no name — just a picture of a pizza. Maybe they’d forgotten to eat one.

Big Dave opened the box. Instead of pizza, there was a book. It was about the size of a Bible, and covered in cracked, off-white leather. The cracks were stained brown, and there was no title anywhere on the cover or spine. The box was clean, like there’d never been a pizza inside of it — only the book.

He held the book up to the others and said, “Look at this shit! It was in this pizza box…”

But no one was listening. The video game was too loud, and the two randos had turned their backs to him and were watching Little Dave steal a police car.

Since he had nothing better to do, Big Dave cracked open the book to a random page. The light from the screen was dim, so he grabbed the lava lamp and held it close to the page. While the red globs pulsed and squeezed, he peered at the words. At first, it looked like total gibberish, like maybe it was written in another language. He looked harder. The language in the book didn’t seem to use any alphabet he’d seen before. It looked like a lot of smudges and cross hatches. At first. But the more he stared, the more he felt like he recognized it.

He paused to rub his eyes, look at the Smashing Pumpkins poster on his wall, and then look back. Like curtains slowly parting, the language in the book seemed to come into focus. He read a few lines, then a few more. After another minute, he climbed onto his bed and flipped to the beginning and started in earnest.

It must have been around 1 am when the randos got up to leave, and Little Dave finally put down the controller.

“Dude, have you been reading this whole time?”

Big Dave didn’t answer.

“Hey, man. How are you reading? It’s super dark in here.”

When Big Dave didn’t answer, Little Dave got up and flipped on the light. Big Dave shielded his eyes but didn’t look up.

“Alright, cool I guess. I’m gonna go to bed.” He flipped the light back off, took off his backwards Yankees hat, and flopped onto his balled-up blankets.

When he woke up the next morning about 9 am, the sun was peeking through the slits in the curtains. He looked over and Big Dave was still hunched over, reading, with dark circles under his eyes and his thumbnail between his teeth.

“What are you doing, man? Have you been reading all night?”

When Big Dave looked up, his eyes made Little Dave sit up in bed.

“What is wrong with you, man?”

Big Dave stared back, and then his lips curled up like he was trying to smile. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just a really interesting book.”

“Are you okay, dude? For real, did you do too much of something?”

“No, I’m fine. I just want to finish.” And he went back to reading.

More than anything, Little Dave wanted to get out of the room, so he lit up, took a hit, and grabbed his bathroom stuff. When he came back, Big Dave hadn’t moved.

“I’m gonna go get some food. You want something?” No answer. He took his key, the books he needed for the classes he absolutely had to go to, and left. He’ll come out of it, he thought. He’ll be crashed out by the time I come back.

But when he came back in the afternoon, Big Dave was still on his bed, still reading.

“Aren’t you done yet?” Little Dave was scared now, and being scared made him pissed.

Without looking up, Big Dave said, “I had to start over.”

“What are you even reading?”

“I…I’m…I don’t know the title,” and now Big Dave sounded pissed. “I can’t explain it all to you.”

“Is it a novel, is it for class, or what? What’s it even about?”

Big Dave looked up, and that scared Little Dave even worse. He didn’t just have dark circles under his eyes: Now his eyes looked black, like a shark’s.

“It’s not about anything. It’s just the truth of things. It’s how things are and how they’ll be and what we have to do about it.”

Little Dave was pretty sure he was going to have to tell Jamal, the R.A. on the boy’s side of the floor. He hated to do it, and he knew Big Dave would be mad at him when he snapped out of this, but something was really, really wrong.

“Okay, cool. That does sound good. Listen, I just gotta go out for a little bit, but I’ll be back soon.” No answer.

Little Dave did a quick once-over to make sure the stash was tucked out of sight and left for Jamal’s room. Tony was already in there, and since he was cool, he told them both about Big Dave and the book.

“Okay,” said Jamal. “Let’s all go together and see if we can get him to go to the medical office with us.”

Little Dave already felt a little better as they walked down the hall back to his room. Then he opened the door and heard Jamal say, “Oh shit” behind him.

Big Dave was lying on the floor with blood coming out of his mouth. His hands were up around his throat bent into claws, and there were scratch marks on his neck. The book was beside him.

Jamal pushed passed and kneeled down to check Big Dave’s pulse.

“Oh God, oh God,” he said over and over, and then turned to Tony. “There’s no pulse. Fuck. Fuck. Call 911.”

While Tony ran to the phone and Jamal ran to make a call in his own room, Little Dave knelt down by his friend. He felt like he was underwater. None of this made sense. Then his eyes fell on the book.

Some of the blood had gotten into the cracks in the leather somehow. Almost like it was soaking it up, drinking it in. But he didn’t want to think crazy shit right now. His friend had gone crazy, and he wasn’t going to follow him.

He had to know, though, didn’t he? If this book had made his friend go insane somehow — even if he took a bunch of bad shit which was really to blame — this book was still a part of it. He had to know.

Without touching the blood, Little Dave picked up the book and opened it to a random page.

“What the fuck?” he breathed. It was just weird marks. There was no way Big Dave had been reading this. No way. He flipped a few more pages, thinking he’d get to something he could actually read. But it was all the same.

And then, the more he looked, the more the marks seemed to come together somehow, like those Magic Eye posters. If he just kept staring, he could almost read it.

And for one moment, he saw secrets on the page. Secrets just for him, David. He knew if he read more, it would make sense. The most perfect sense and deepest understanding if only he would read it all.

Little Dave shut the book hard and threw it across the room where it slid under the bed. Tony, still on the phone, jumped and turned around to glare at him.

When Jamal came back, he shut the door, and the three of them sat on Little Dave’s bed while they listened to the sirens getting closer.

“Do you know what happened to him?” Jamal asked. “You think it was drugs or something?”

Little Dave shook his head. “No. I don’t…I don’t think it was drugs.” But what else could he say? He was just the stoner flunkie who lived in The Cloud, and even if he’d been Jamal, the perfect R.A., how could he ever tell anyone that a fucking book killed his friend. That couldn’t be the truth — he knew that — but the only other truth was in the book hiding under the bed, and even though there was a part of him desperate to read it, looking at the scratches on Big Dave’s throat stopped him.

“Could I have a minute before they all get here?”

“Sure, man,” Jamal said, and he and Tony left. He could hear them talking to people outside the door, explaining. He knew everyone would think O.D., even though Big Dave had never done a drug that could kill him. It wasn’t fair, but there was no way to explain.

It’s just the truth of things, he could hear Big Dave saying.

“Fuck that.”

Little Dave reached under the bed and grabbed the book. It was too warm in his hand.

“Fuck you,” he said.

He grabbed a pizza box, shoved the book inside, and slammed it shut. He figured they’d have clean out his room, have him move somewhere else. And that was just fine with him. The book would end up in a dumpster where it couldn’t hurt anyone else. That was the truth he clung to as he slid the box into the middle of a pile, turned, and opened the door.