Holly and Her Naughty eReader (21 page)

“What’s a Bezoface?” I said.

“You mix an interface with a
zuzzkoteer, shake it up in a giddly picket and pour it out again,” said Jeff.
“At one time, the Bezoface projected words onto the glass and the story was
told in your mind. But then…”

He turned to me, snapped his
fingers, and in a high-pitched sing-song voice said, “UPGRADE!”

“This is where the magic
happens, isn’t it?” I said. “We’re on the other side of the glass. This is
where the reader gets sucked in and becomes part of the story.”

“Amazing, isn’t it?” said Jeff.
“I mean...the book is not really the container for the book.”

“Huh?”

“The book itself is the
narrative. It's the thing that people create. It’s orange, apple, and
pear-ative. The fruits you eat on your plate!”

“What are you saying to me?”

“All the words you hear.”

Shaking my head in confusion, I
stepped closer to the ‘Bezoface’ and looked down into the light. As a beam of
light crossed my forehead, I heard thousands of separate conversations all at
once, and jumped back in surprise.

And then I saw it, propped on
the wall, right beneath the glass. A mirror. Large, golden, gilded, and beautiful,
it was the kind of mirror one might expect to find in a castle, or Victorian
Era estate.

“What’s that?” I said.

“An unexpected outcome of the
upgrade,” said Jeff. “The arrival of humans from the outside world into our
stories has introduced more variables than we are accustomed to.”

“What are you talking about?” I
said.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son.
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun. The
frumious Bandersnatch!”

Now he was quoting Lewis
Carroll? Although it was interesting to see what was down here, it was clear
that Jeff Bezos wasn’t going to help me get Max out of—

“Wait a minute,” I said, a bevy
of thoughts colliding in my mind. “Jabberwocky is a poem in Through the Looking
Glass. That mirror…”

I stepped closer to the mirror
that was sitting on the floor, propped against the wall just underneath the giant
pane of glass.

The floral pattern of the
gilding on the edges, the majestic size of it, the way it might hang above a
mantle in an old home, drawing in the attention of a little girl with an active
imagination…

“This is the mirror from Through
the Looking Glass, isn’t it?” I said.

“We are willing to go down a
bunch of dark passageways, and occasionally we find something that really
works,” Jeff said, quietly.

“Come on, Jeff. I could really
use a hand here. My friend Max is trapped inside this Kindle. I need to get him
out. How do I do it?”

Jeff smiled and walked towards
me.

“Ever drifting down the stream,”
he said.

“Oh boy. If you’re not going to
help me I’ll just leave.”

Jeff continued his approach, now
raising his right arm and slowly swinging it through the air. “Lingering in the
golden gleam,” he said. The air seemed to change as his arm moved through it,
like ripples in a pond. “Life, what is it but a dream?” he finished, then spun
away with ridiculous theatricality, leaving the disturbance in the air behind
him. Looking at the disturbance now, I saw something inside. It was like I was
looking through a window into a different world.

Or maybe the same world. Yes,
Jeff had opened a window in the air through which I could see a mirror image of
where I was standing now. But things were different on the other side. Jeff was
frolicking and twirling on his tiptoes, and he wasn’t with me. He was with
Christoph.

And outside the Kindle, the face
wasn’t mine. The giant behind the glass was Max.

I watched intently as Christoph
carried the mirror up to the picture window, placing it right on the glass. He
used magic to make it stay in place. Then he stepped
through
the mirror. Christoph had gone through the looking glass.

“That was when it happened,
right?” I said. “That was when Christoph and Max switched places. In the story,
the mirror leads to Wonderland, but in this room, the mirror leads to the real
world. And when Christoph went through, Max was standing there on the other
side, looking in the mirror from behind. That’s why Max can’t get out. He’s not
some reader who can decide to be done with the story. He’s totally here, inside
it. And Christoph is out there, inside him. They’ve switched places! Right?”

“Strip malls are history,” Jeff said.

“Jeff, you have to tell me how
to undo this. How do I get Max out and Christoph back in?”

“You flip it!” Jeff said,
channeling Devo. “Flip it good.”

“You’re saying I have to get
Christoph to read the Kindle, right? I have to get Christoph out there and Max
in here. Max has to hold the mirror to the glass just like Christoph did, and
they can switch back.”

“Yes, that's it!” Jeff said,
then added, “It's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between
whiles!”

“But how am I going to get
Christoph to read the Kindle?”

“Beats me,” said Jeff.

Great. The one time he chooses
to give a straight answer is the time he doesn’t know.

“You don’t know? How can you not
know?”

“My Dear, we have a saying
around here. What happens on the other side of the glass, stays on the other
side of the glass.”

“What does that even mean?”

“For people who are readers,
reading is important to them.”

“Are you going to help me or
not?”

“Of course I am. Serving readers
is my passion. That, and space travel. And clocks that keep perfect time for
10,000 years.”

“Forget it. I’ll figure out how
to get Christoph to look at the Kindle. When he does, I need to have Max here
to hold up the mirror right?”

“I believe you mean you’ll have
Max read the Kindle and Christoph here to hold up the mirror,” said Jeff.
“Since they’ve switched bodies and all. It raises an interesting question,
doesn’t it? Is it the body or the soul that matters? Who is the real Max? The
body out there with Christoph’s soul inside, or the soul in here with
Christoph’s body outside. You know, I like having the digital camera on my
smart phone, but I also like having a dedicated camera for when I want to take
real pictures.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” I
said. “Here’s another question. How does Max get here? How did Christoph leave
his story and end up here with the mirror in the first place?”

Shaking his head, Jeff said,
“Christoph broke down the walls. Terrible, terrible tragedy.”

“The walls,” I said. “You mean
the walls between books.”

“What other walls could I
possibly mean?”

“That’s why it’s such chaos out
there,” I said. “All the walls between the stories have broken. Characters are
free to roam wherever they want.”

“A giant bowl of literary soup,”
Jeff said.

“Can you help me get Max into
this place?” I asked. “Right now he’s in His Golden Shackles.”

“Retrieving your friend is a
simple operation,” Jeff said. “It’s just a matter of using your….”

“Your…what?”

A pregnant pause as I waited for
Jeff to speak.

“Your imagination,” he finally
said.

In a movement that made me think
of
Harold and The Purple Crayon
, Jeff
used his index finger to draw an upside down arc through the air. As his finger
moved, a thick black line trailed behind. When he was done, he had drawn a
familiar design in the air between us.

It was the Amazon logo. A black
arrow with a curve in the shape of a smiley face. Then, like Tron mounting his
light cycle, Jeff stepped over the arrow, straddling it with his legs.

“All aboard the Bezos Express!”
he called out.

I won’t describe in detail how
Jeff Bezos looked straddled across a big arrow, other than to say it was a bit
suggestive, in a cover of
God
Emperor of Dune
kind of way.

Noting the skeptical look on my
face, Jeff followed up with, “Madame, this train leaves in ten seconds whether
you’re on board or not. I suggest you take your seat.”

“Oh good grief,” I muttered. I
approached Jeff and his flying arrow motorcycle thing, but my first angle would
have had me mounting in front of him and that was, well….um…

“Just get behind me,” Jeff said.

“Yes, right,” I said, climbing
behind him and wrapping my arms around his waist.

Jeff lifted his left leg and
stamped down on an imaginary pedal. The arrow began to vibrate and hum, and
then, slowly, it floated off the ground.

I tightened my grip around
Jeff’s waist and closed my eyes, hoping to God that I wouldn’t regret this.

Jeff’s Lone Ranger-like battle
cry did little to sooth my nerves.

“And now, into the deepest
realms of our imagination….we ride!”

Chapter 25

It took minutes of flying on the
arrow before I had enough nerve to open my eyes. What I saw were walls of
books, flying past at super speed. The wind was roaring in my ears. My hair was
flapping behind me.

“Where are we?” I shouted.

“Where is anyone?” Jeff called
back. “Hold on tight. The transition can be a little jarring!”

“A little jarring?” I said.
“What do you mean a little--”

And then we were in empty white
space, or nearly empty white space. The wind had stopped blowing. It was like
we were floating in a vacuum. I looked behind me and saw the giant hall of
books fading in the distance.

“What’s this?” I said.

“Between paper and pen lays the
truth of the story,” said Jeff. “Here comes the next book!”

A blast of cold air in my face
and we were flying over New York City at night. The Empire State Building, the
Chrysler Tower, the Statue of Liberty—it was so beautiful.

“Would you like me to take you
to him?” Jeff asked.

“To who?”

“To whom,” Jeff corrected.

“Jeff Bezos would you stop it
and just tell me where we’re going!”

“Did you know the first draft of
the first television advertisement for the Kindle had a man reading his tablet
and swept away to another world, one where he was inside the books?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, and in one of the books, a
raging bull came running in, smacked him hard and threw him high,” Jeff said.
“It was funny and surprising, but I nixed it because I didn’t want to show the
customer getting hurt.”

“Jeff, what’s the point of all
this?”

“The point is that truth is
stranger than fiction!”

And with that he took a sudden
nosedive down 5
^th
Avenue. He had us making a straight line for the
concrete. I screamed my lungs out and closed my eyes. I kept on screaming
through a rapid pull-up, a jarring right turn, another nose dive, and a sudden
stop.

I opened my eyes to find us in
the basement of Greenworld Tower. We were floating in place, right in front of
the vault where I left Max. I banged on the door.

“Max, it’s me, Holly! Are you in
there?”

“Just a second,” Max called
back.

“We don’t have a second, Max.
We’ve got to go!”

“Okay, here I come!”

The key turned and the door
opened. Max came stumbling out. Even though he was trapped in Christoph’s body,
somehow he managed to be as un-Christoph as a guy could be. His hair was a
mess. His shirt was wrinkled and untucked, and—

“What happened to your buttons,
Max?” I said.

I knew his shirt wasn’t
misbuttoned when I left him. But now his collar was jutting out at an odd angle
because he had mismatched his buttons like a little kid.

And then Annabelle came out, her
hair also a mess, her clothes also disheveled, and I understood. When I left
the vault, I left Annabelle’s body behind. Max had made good use of his time there.

“Holly, you’re in your own body?”
Max said. “And you brought…Telly Savalas?”

“Come on, Max. I think I’ve
figured out a way to get you out of here. I’ll explain on the way.”

Chapter 26

Jeff took Max and me back to the
Gateway, where Max marveled at my giant face looking in on us.

“You look good at 200 times
normal size,” he said.

“Thanks, but when I look up at
my face, all I see are the giant pores in my cheeks. I could go swimming in
those things.”

I brought Max up to speed on all
that I knew, starting with the mirror from
Through
the Looking Glass
and ending with my plan to make the switch happen in
reverse.

“Stay here,” I said. “I’m going
to try to trick Christoph into reading the Kindle. Wait until you see your own
face out there on the other side, then hold the mirror up to the glass and step
through.”

“I’ll end up back in my own
body?” Max said.

“Yes, and Christoph will be back
in his. You got it?”

“I got it,” said Max.

“Good, I’ll see you soon.”

I left the Kindle and was back
in the Explorer wearing my Alex English jersey. I drove back to the Marriott
and, with Kindle in hand, I went straight to the door of Suite 702 and knocked
three times.

“I knew you’d be back,” he said
as he opened the door.

Looking at his face, I felt bad
for Max. If everything worked and he got back in his own body, he’d find
himself with a black eye courtesy of my elbow.

Christoph’s eyes drifted down to
the Kindle I held in my hand. He reached for it with the same swiftness I saw
when he snatched it from my hands before, but this time I was ready, and performed
the outside block as Dolph McDougal had taught me.

“You want me, Christoph?” I yelled.
“Come and get me.”

I pushed past him into the hotel
room and jumped for the bed, turning my body in the air. As I came to a landing
on my back I raised the Kindle in front of my face. By the time my head hit the
pillow, I had already read the first sentence on the screen, and was back
inside the Gateway, returning to the
About
Your Kindle
universe.