This was a complete re-write of the previous draft, trying to approach the subject matter from a different angle.
Several years ago, an old friend of mine came to me with a strange request. My friend, Alexander, was a man a few years my senior whom I’d met at a Christmas party back in Ridgeport, where I’d lived for a time when I was a young man. Alex taught literature there, at the university, but he was a worldly soul, and I’ve never felt that the title of professor really did him justice, when pressed to describe him. He’d spent his childhood with missionary parents in some far off corner of the world, and seemed to have a broad perspective on life.
It was late in the evening, a Thursday I think, and I’d started to prepare dinner for myself when Alex rung me on the phone. At this time, I hadn’t spoken to him in a handful of years, though we wrote to one another on occasion, and traded Christmas cards each year, as people do. He was brief— I imagine he was in the middle of something himself, and said “Frank, I need you to drive down here tomorrow” and I said what on earth for? Has somebody died? That is the assumption, you know, when an old friend calls you out of the blue in the evening on a Thursday. “What? God, no, no… I mean.” He paused for a moment, “Yes, someone has died, but that’s… that isn’t—“ I cut him off and asked him if it was his mother, because I knew— in that vague way you know things about your friends— I knew his mother was in poor health. At least she had been around Christmastime that year.
“Frank, no, it’s— I need to ask you a favor, it’s… personal? It’s hard to talk about on the phone. There’s money involved.” He said that last part in a somewhat more formal tone— perhaps assuming that mentioning money was keen tactic to perk my interest. Sure, I responded, after a moment. I assumed that it must be important. Alex wasn’t the sort to impose for no reason.
Despite my going on earlier about how unlike a professor Alexander is, in theory, I’ll tell you that his office certainly fit the bill of that title. It had that paradoxical combination of temporary lodging and a lived-in hominess. His desk was a clutter of ungraded papers and other assignments, which he hastily began to sort into random piles as I walked through his door. There was space for his desk, in front of the window, and a single chair in front of that, and little else besides. He had also managed to fit in a bookshelf, though curiously, for a literature professor, I can’t recall seeing a single book in his office. Rather the shelves of the book case were lined with tchotchkes and memorabilia.
“Frankie,” He said to me, as I sat down in the single chair “fuck, but it’s been too long” Alex had this way of always acting like every old friend was, at some hazy point in the past, his very closest friend, and you and he had simply fallen out of touch over the years. Alex and I had never been particularly close, but his enthusiasm for our imaginary bygone days was welcoming enough.
It has been awhile, I told him. He said “I’m sorry to impose on you like this, but I… look, hey, could you shut the door?” I reached back behind my lone chair and nudged the door closed with my elbow. When I turned back around to face Alex, I put on a face as if to say all right, get on with it.
Alex began to explain. One of his students, (or perhaps a former student, it doesn’t matter) had died. Not abruptly, he assured me, as if that mattered— it had apparently been at the hand of a debilitating disease, so he’d known the end was coming. After telling me this, Alex sat silently for a moment, looking down at nothing on his desk. He looked up, then, and said to me “Look, Frank, trust me here, this kid and I, we were close enough, but not that close, so this is as weird for you as it is for me.” What, I insisted, was so weird for the both of us? Again he paused, this time, staring at nothing on my face. “He wants… wanted to be made into a book. A book full of his poetry” So, I queried— squinting my eyes to establish confusion— so he wants a… biography? Or an anthology? “No no,” Said Alex “I mean, like, literally. His will was really very specific— and truth be told he’d talked to me about this, a year or so ago, and I’d just thought he was kidding. But nope.” Nope indeed. Alex then pulled out a folded sheet of paper from one of the random stacks he’d made, and presented it to me.
“Dear Professor Dawson,
Let me just say, first off, that I really hate to burden you like this. To you, I’m sure I was just another student, but you really made a big impact on me. I didn’t get to live as long as I’d have liked (though I don’t suppose anyone really does) But hearing your stories about the places you’ve been, and the people you’ve known, it always put a smile on my face. You said once, my sophomore year, that life can either be ‘a friend or an enemy, but it’s never an acquaintance’, and I’ve got to be honest with you, I thought you were full of shit at the time, and I still do, ha ha. But, I think that says a lot about your world view, that you see things that way, you know, and I respect the hell out of it. And it’s also why I’m asking you this favor, because I know if there’s anyone who can do it, it’s you.
You always used to tell me I rambled on too much in my writing, when I was in your class, so sorry if I’m doing that, even now! I want you to have my body turned into a book. I’ve arranged for my organs to be harvested and donated as soon as I’m declared dead. Some asshole will get to enjoy my spotless liver! Anyway, the rest of me will be held at the White Falls morgue until everything can be processed. I’ve set aside a good lump of money to pay for everything, my lawyer should get you the details on that.
None of this is binding, of course. You could have me cremated and take the money and do whatever you like. I won’t know. And if G-d has something to say about it, then maybe he shouldn’t have made me a fucking cripple! Ha!
Anyway. I want you to fill the book with my poetry. I know its garbage, you told me often enough in so many words, but it is part of me anyway. I want the book to be all me, the cover, the pages, the ink. I’ve read a lot about it, it shouldn’t be that hard.
It was cool being your student, take care!
-Ryan”
and wished for his body of work- poetry, to be collected,
and made into a book. Not published, rather he wanted, specifically, for a
single book to be written, and constructed.
This itself was not a strange request, but it was that
the student wished for his body- his actual body, not his poetry- to be
processed to make the materials needed for a traditional book binding.
Alexander said the letter was included as part of the young man’s will, and had been hand delivered by his lawyer earlier in the week. As for the request there in, the academic term for this is anthropodermic bibliopegy, and it isn’t, in itself, a novel idea. Though he wished to take it a step further than any historical examples I’d heard of. He specifically wished for the book to be ‘all him’, and so that would mean not just the leather cover of the book— He mentioned by name the pages and the ink, from parchment and bone char respectively, I’d think, but also by my imagining his tendons for the binding, and excess cartilage and bone to boiled into a glue.
What could possess a person to desire such a statement for their legacy I can only hope to imagine. Which is to say, I did imagine— this notion I can scarcely omit from my mind, not only because I was tasked with fulfilling it. Oh, certainly I could have denied, I owed Alex no favors, nor to his student, certainly, but I’ll tell you now that I did not. I didn’t deny the request. My reasoning isn’t important, but I’ll tell you; partially, it was the pride in saying I’d accomplished such a unique act. And, partially, it was from a respect I grew to recognize in myself, for the audacity of the request.
The process, for those curious, is not arcane. The production of parchment in particular from a human corpse is not wholly different from its procurement from a slaughtered calf- though, given I had but a single body to work with, some planning had to be done to get the necessary number of folios. I was in luck: the student was somewhat fat. To my understanding, he had a degenerative disease, and was mostly bedridden, near the end of his life. If your mind wanders down the same strange alleys as mine, you might consider that he plumped himself purposefully to give me more material to work with in the end, knowing that his end was fast approaching. And he must have considered this plan of his some time in advance. That is speculation on my part, none the less, but I cannot conceive of a soul deciding to be turned into a book after death on a whim.
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