The Forbidden Integrity Project

Zachary Ryan

It was a novel idea for a shop in Lower Manhattan, that capital of the world. One room, four walls, one book. The book rested in the center of the room on a pedestal. A chain, bolted to the pedestal, ran through the book’s leather-bound spine, securing it there. One book, full of pages, full of words, chained and surrounded by four blank white walls. It was the only copy of the book that existed and would ever exist. All on hard paper, without a digital file. Never uploaded to the internet. A second single-print would never be made. A first and final edition, never passing through hands for either critique or consumption. It was unadulterated, un-prostituted work, that only existed on the pages, in the room, and in the imagination of whoever came into the room, opened its pages, and read its words. Unavailable for sale. Unavailable for distribution. Unable to imitate or assimilate by twenty-first century technology. The book was an island, disconnected from the connected world. A disembodied gap in the Manhattan hub. The only connection was the large window in the storefront, which showed the white walls, and the closed leather-bound book on the pedestal, as well as the writer, the artist, turned clerk, so that he could watch his voracious readers consume page by page his ultimate creation, a modern forbidden text, in the only holy storefront where a person could read it in the entire world.

It was punk, it was rebellion, it was iconoclast, it was integrity to stand so at the world’s center!

One room.

Four walls.

One book.

A stool would be provided if the reader asked.

Known by his pseudonym Neodelous, he’d been at work on the book for eleven years. What the book was about, he wouldn’t tell. Spoken words could only distort the text. Neodelous was simply to wait behind the counter, pat readers down, take their name, information, payment, phones, watches, special eye glasses; anything that could record, photograph, scan, or upload. He’d then lock away these devices for the duration of the appointment. On doing so, Neodelous would reveal a heavy brass key, which unlocked the leather-bound book on the pedestal.

He sat in a chair behind the counter, hands in lap, waiting for readers in a store empty by design. He had no books; to read another book in the vicinity of the forbidden work he’d created would make for a kind of sacrilegious image. Reduce him to a bored store clerk. But what store clerk sat behind the counter in a white suit? Back straight, shoulders square, brown hair combed back neatly, two loose strands dangling over both temples, hooked nose, inquisitive eyes, reading the window and its passing Manhattanites with the smile of Neodelous, that of an adult amused at the games of children.

They walk right past the holy realm of sacred art.

Their obliviousness tickled him.

Then around noon the forbidden door opened. A young woman entered, put together as well as a manikin in a designer window, almost cutting a fantastical figure in her coat; a rush of unusually perfumed air preceded her, as if an angel or demon had arrived to appraise his work, curious to know what exactly his forbidden text contained, what secrets Neodelous had uncovered.

“Do you take walk-ins?”

“For the moment. But I can’t guarantee it next time. Something to think about if you have to stop mid-page.”

“You wrote this?”

“I did, and this is the only place you can read it.”

With respectful hands, he patted her down. Locked away her phone in a drawer beneath the counter. Then he unlocked the book.

She stared at the cover a moment. Title-less. A series of odd symbols. She brushed over the engravings with a finger. Onto the first page, her eyes seemed to loop around the first sentence.

And Neodelous, knowing the pages by heart, read those eyes, his anticipated reward. The unfamiliarity, the strangeness of it, as revealed by the ponderous squint of her blue eyes. Then the joy, the epiphany, the young woman’s lips softly parting, her eyes refocusing. They returned to the top of the page; she was restarting with the new knowledge of a second paragraph detail. Blue eyes no longer squinting but instead were all light. Glowingly illuminated until a slight tilt of the head, another encounter with the strangeness. And then her eyes fell, having recognized sorrow in this thing so unfamiliar.

Neodelous smirked.

The young woman turned the page. Eyes bouncing along, line to line. Her eyebrows lifted. She closed the book.

“I don’t get it,” she said, and asked for her phone and walked out, leaving a trail of perfume.

For a brief instant, Neodelous shifted into real name, Alvin Brinkers, and nearly punched a wall.

He should have been fending off a heist by now! The book was chained to the pedestal. How had no one tried to run off with it yet? How was it that some influencer, soliciting donations for an ironman feat, hadn’t tried to read the whole work in one standing, to report back to their fans what exactly it was like to grace the forbidden pages? Already there should be someone obsessed with the book, mad and raving on a street corner, hawking bootlegged opening chapters that they’d transcribed from memory, to the best of their abilities, though certainly nowhere near the true word of Neodelous, but a filtered message, a spreading of the mispronounced word that most people would never hear or read. But no, he was only surrounded by the stunningly incurious!

Yet a few, suddenly interested, had stopped to stare through the forbidden window.

Neodelous again, he sat down behind the counter, and the pedestrians moved on.

He practiced meditation to reduce his blood pressure, and closed his eyes. Rather than becoming a blank slate, his mind wandered. But it was still helpful, because it was really a good thing that the fantastic woman understood nothing; if she’d understood all of it, really any of it, it could only confirm that he’d written nothing but a trifle, unworthy of this integrity. He maintained such justifying thoughts as he opened his eyes, staring ahead at the white wall. Yes, it was a good thing. Really a very good thing. While such thoughts rolled along, this informal meditation transitioned into an idle habit, one that Neodelous often found himself musing over while stuck on a particularly difficult passage of writing: he had slipped the silver ring from his index finger, and was spinning it on the countertop. Spinning, spinning, spinning, until it wobbled and vibrated to flat stillness. He picked it up and spun it again. A good one this time. Maybe a thirty second spin before the silver ring died on the counter. He spun it again, with such force that the ring bounced into its revolutions. It was burning a path across the counter, a silver ring on the move. Revolutions approaching what must be a record time for Neodelous.

The silver ring fell flat. Fists began beating on the forbidden window.

“Thirty-six seconds!” a young man shouted.

“Go again!” yelled another.

A small crowd watched from outside.

“Come on! Time to beat!”

Alvin Brinkers threw the ring at the window in a rage, much to the amusement of the crowd. A young man put his fist in his palm to initiate a game of rock, paper, scissors, “if you need help passing the time.”

Alvin opened the white door to hide in his private restroom.

They hadn’t yet destroyed the integrity of the work, he thought, as he sat on the toilet. Its importance was unblemished. Its word, uncorrupted.

“I am Neodelous. I am not here for their mockery, or entertainment.”

When he stepped back into the reading room, he faced overwhelming jeers from the window.

“You spent a long time in there.”

There grew a running commentary on Neodelous’s bathroom breaks.

If he went quick, questions were posed, such as, “Did you have a steady stream?”

And if gone more than a minute, “Did everything come out okay?”

It’d been over a week, barely a word had left the store, and was it really to be that he was to sit here behind this counter holding his bladder and bowels? Reduced to a maid, he took a duster to the cover of the leather-bound book, much to the delight of the onlookers on the other side of the glass. And despite being dust-free, Neodelous felt the exhibit’s integrity degrading. Hardly a holy breach into the realm of sacred art. More accurately, one book, chained and surrounded by four blank white walls as if locked in the madhouse! Where the people outside watched Alvin Brinkers nod off in his chair, get up to stretch, drink his coffee, eat his egg sandwich.

He took off his white jacket and they hooted.

He slipped the jacket over the back of the chair, and sat down.

A man on the other side of the glass, wearing sunglasses, a skin-tight, long-sleeved yellow shirt, and khaki shorts that stopped above his thigh, handed another man cash. This man, in a pink shirt and black pants, folded the cash, put it in his pocket, and whispered something to a tall woman in a sleeveless black dress. She laughed, hand over mouth, and looked at Alvin.

What were they exchanging money about?

With finger and thumb starting together at his forehead, Alvin rubbed them in a circle, fingertips going opposite down the temples, and rounding over the eyes.

A Manhattanite with outlandishly large headphones around his neck threw back his head in despair. A woman in a floral kerchief, wearing what looked like jeans slit into a dress that rode the open seam up her thigh to an exposed pocket, taunted the man in headphones, who pulled out a phone.

What were they doing out there? Taking bets? On if he scratched his head? If he picked his nose?

Alvin placed his hands on the counter. Placed them there and left them. At least they couldn’t see his restless leg making agitated sweeps side to side.

A person wearing an extra feathery maroon boa snapped a photo of him sitting so still.

Wait them out. Wait them out. The crowd will become bored and leave.

Hot, sweating, stifled, Alvin eventually had to unbutton the top of his shirt.

Half the crowd erupted.

His legs shook. He tried to hide his swallowing.

What is it they wanted? Cheering when he took off his jacket. Hooting at his unbuttoned shirt. Betting on his bathroom breaks.

Small fingers tapped on the forbidden window.

A prickling crawled through his body from his toes to the base of his scalp until Alvin Brinkers stood up and turned over his chair.

“Who had that one?” he screamed. He stepped around the counter, took center spotlight from the book on the pedestal. “Who had this one?” He unbuckled his belt. “Who has it?” he screamed.

He dropped his pants and squatted beside the pedestal.

Outside, recording phones completed the unholy breach.

Pants around his ankles, Alvin picked up his shit and smeared it across the forbidden window, as if rubbing feces over the crowd’s faces. He screamed, screamed, screamed at the philistines in a moment that would become frozen in time.

The exhibit closed that day but the event was taken as a grand piece of performance art and the window, left to dry and sealed by a protective coating, was framed and auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars.

Alvin Brinkers retired from embarrassment as the poop painter shortly after, living as a recluse for some time, the book now holding a place on his shelf among others, with never a word to leave his library.

AUTHOR BIO