The Book of Exchange

There it sits, on the table as I observe it. I eye the leather cover as though I had seen it a thousand times before, the black tone mocking me as I feel its power surge over me once more; this little black notebook that had come into my possession spelled nothing but despair for me. Its small form felt so much bigger when I looked at it up close. Laying on the table without me disturbing it made it so much more unsettling. I look back to my first prize, which feels more like a nightmare than it would a reward, its form mocked me for wanting to reach out and grab it, so I could feel that it was actually there and not a mirage. I reach out to grab it but refrain from doing so, the temptation almost too great to try again. I feel like burning it all together to be free of this nightmare and move on with my life. But as of now, I am too far gone to return to that state. There they both sit, a black notebook without any wording on the front cover, and twenty thousand dollars stacked neatly as one hundred dollars bills banded together by tape.

I should probably clarify why I am saying all of this. To many of you, twenty thousand dollars sounds like a great deal. It's like a dream. But I didn't feel the same way, not at first. It all started when my aging father was admitted into a nursing home when my sister and I couldn't afford to take care of him. We both were stacked to the brim with our own problems. My sister was facing a nasty divorce from her soon-to-be ex-husband, along with keeping herself stable in an office job and caring for her five-year-old son. I was going through my own crisis, I was facing the end of my leasing in my apartment, and I was a little short on cash for a new one. Having to care for our father was something we could not handle, so we found the best place he could stay until we fixed both of our problems. It was irritating that it would cost a little more than caring for him, but we did what we had to so he could be looked after by professionals. As we finished signing the final papers, I looked over to my father as he looked out the front window, almost unphased by the new change. I felt bad for him. I'm sure this wasn't something he would want, but what other choice did we have? We couldn't handle him financially, and our mother had died three years prior after her battle with cancer. There wasn't going to be anyone to look after him. I had begun to worry that something would happen to him and his thoughts of us abandoning him to die was the worst thing I could imagine. I decided to say my goodbyes and tell him we would be back for him.

It was bittersweet but saying goodbye to him was all I could do to make the situation feel a little easier. His stone expression told me that he would hold out strongly but seeing that twinkle of despair in his eyes told me that he would feel like we were leaving him for good.

"Before you go, I need you to do something for me," he said. "I need you to go into the attic and find a small wooden box I've kept hidden from your mother." I was confused at this; never in my life has my father ever mentioned a box, and why hidden? Was there something he had been keeping from us that he didn't want us to know? And more importantly, why hide it from my mother?

"I made a mistake a long time ago with that box," he said with his expression starting to falter into one of resentment "the price was the life of your mother. I've come to regret what's inside of it".

The drive back from the nursing home left me in a bit of a stupor. My curiosity still picked away at my brain for wanting to know if he was actually telling the truth. When we arrived at the house, it felt so much emptier than it would ever be with only dad living by himself. I looked at the dozens of pictures of my family during various points of our lives; all of them were a nostalgic reminder of better times.

"You should look after the house until we figure out what to do," my sister said from across the living room. "I'm going to be busy the next couple of days. You don't mind, do you?"

"No, of course not," I replied. We both chatted about what to do until dad could come home. My sister embraced me in a loving hug and went on her way. I stayed in my spot for a few more minutes as I looked around to see all the things that reminded me of how much it meant to me. When I thought I was alone, I began my search.

The obvious place to look was the attic, but where was going to be a challenge since it was a maze in there the last time I came by. My parents had neglected to keep the attic cleaned, but I couldn't blame them. There was a lot of stuff in that old place that we stored away over the years, stuff we had forgotten about.

I scoured box after box, looked behind every nook and cranny, and even peeked my eyes between a few cracks, but I couldn't find what I was looking for. My original thoughts of my father's dementia setting in came back to me. I decided to end the search there and go back downstairs when I noticed something shining from the corner of my eye; it was in the far upper right corner of the attic. How did I miss that?

I reached into the corner and felt around the interior until my hand grasped something small and solid. I drew back my prize from the open space and brought it out to see that it was a small wooden box.

I came back downstairs and sat at the table, and I had to put my curiosity to rest once and for all. Without a second thought, I opened the box and inside was a black notebook with a pen lying next to it. I stared at the objects in front of me for a few moments before closing the box back up and pondered why my father was so wrapped up in a simple notebook.

I wanted to put the box back upstairs and be done with it, but I decided to take the notebook and pen out and see why it was important. I grabbed the tip and pried it open to the first page to see someone had already written in it.

"Hello, friend! So you've stumbled across the book of exchange, where something you desire can be exchanged with something you don't need. Now you can't go wild with what you write. The wish is to be something you greatly desire and nothing to cause harm or damage to another. Once you've written your wish, the exchange begins. What will be switched is up to fate, but the reward is worth the payoff."

I truly thought this was a prank. Was this some joke my father had created to wait and give to me? And if so, why did he wait so long? Obviously, this wasn't the case. I came to believe that this was some novelty gift he had bought a few years earlier and forgotten about. I stuck with that theory and chose to investigate further. I grabbed the pen and flipped a couple of pages ahead before stopping. If I was going to write something in this book, I wanted it to be something I could mess around with, and what better to think about than a whole bunch of money? Without hesitation, I wrote down that I wanted twenty-thousand dollars on the table the next morning. I laughed to myself at such a ridiculous notion and continued on the rest of my day until I went to bed.

I had a terrible dream that night; I dreamt that I was bound in a wheelchair with restraints holding my wrists down. I was in a dimly lit room resembling that of a patient care room. It was empty, save for the pieces of trash that littered the floor, I tried to break free, but I couldn't even move my wrists. Who made sure to keep me locked up? I started to panic; it felt real. As I tried my best to remain calm and break free, I could make out heavy footsteps pacing around outside the door before stopping. My stomach dropped when it slightly opened. I expected something to slam it open and come rushing in, but it never did. I could only feel my body tense up from the eerie scenery. I wanted to be out of there, away from this nightmare.

"You asked for the exchange, did you not?" a dry voice asked from the doorway, but from the volume, it was almost like it was behind me, "you wrote your desire, and now you shall receive. But what will I receive?", I didn't have a chance to talk when the voice spoke in a gleeful tone, "I know! I already have her; why not him?"

The next thing I could remember before waking up was that a hand grabbed my face and pulled me deeper into the shadows. I woke in a cold sweat and observed my surroundings to see I was still in my old room. I took a few minutes to calm myself down before getting up and going to the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror to see if there was anything on it, but I was clean. I returned to my bed but remained awake for some time, trying to remember the rest of my dream, but I couldn't. I spent the next hour lying awake until I finally fell back asleep.

The next morning I felt a strange tingling in the back of my head, almost like something had drastically changed overnight. As I showered and got dressed, the feeling wouldn't leave my head. Just as I had come downstairs to start a pot of coffee, I froze in my tracks when I spotted a small stack of dollar bills resting on the table. I raced over to examine the money, and to my surprise, it was a stack of one-thousand dollar bills rounding up to twenty-thousand dollars.

My mind raced at the sight of the money. I tried to think rationally about how the money showed up. I thought a random stranger broke into my house and left the money. I considered calling the police, but I would have to explain the money. They either thought I owned or stole.

I went through the stack one bill at a time and held them up to the ceiling light to see if they were fake. I once learned that people would try and slip fake dollar bills to the cashier if they're one hundred dollars or more, so they would lift them to a light to see if the color changes; if the color remains white, it would be a counterfeit. Each dollar bill passed the test. I took a minute to realize that I was suddenly in possession of twenty-thousand dollars. Remembering the night before, I turned my attention to see the notebook, and what I wrote down last night was now crossed out, and below it was a new sentence that sent chills down my spine.

"Your exchange has been met, and I have gotten what I want. Enjoy your prize".

Something about that didn't sit right with me. I thought back to the theory this was a prank set by my father. I knew that couldn't be even remotely close to the truth. If my previous assumption was that some lunatic broke into the house and left the money, they had also written in the notebook as part of their sick joke. I was left with more questions with answers; why waste all that time and effort to leave a wad of cash? I didn't think about it for too long when I went back to the money, and I decided to celebrate; the idea of a weirdo breaking in was the greatest stroke of luck I had ever received.

The sudden ringing of my phone brought me out of my joy and back to reality. I grabbed it and saw it was my sister trying to call me, perhaps to check and see how I was doing.

"Hey Laurel, how are you?"

"Henry, dad's dead," she cried, "they found him this morning. They said he passed away last night", she wailed louder than I ever heard her, but it sounded like a distant cry. I felt sick to my stomach. In the span of one night, our father had been taken from this world. The conversation was a hard one to bear; having to talk about our father's death while holding in tears was the hardest thing I could do. When it was over, I hung up and sat in silence.

When I looked back at the notebook, something inside me had clicked. The nightmare, the money, the notebook connected to my father but I didn't know-how. I stared at it and tried wrapping my head around it until I remembered what my father said before I left yesterday. The cost of my mother's life, he said this was what aided it, and it all suddenly came together.

When I was a child, my family was on the verge of losing our house after my father had lost his job. We were scraping by with whatever we had while my dad tried to get a new job. Weeks went by, and nothing was changing. We were almost on the streets until something that could only be described as a miracle appeared. My father had come into the possession of an enormous sum of money and purchased a new house where he got a new job that saved our future. But not long after, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. She passed away a few months later. Grief had struck my father like a heart attack; he became distant and refused to talk about her passing. He had shut everyone out from his life.

Something about her death didn't sit right with me; my mother was one of those cautious health types that took great care of herself, her family had no history of any illnesses, and she spent a great deal of her time in the outdoors. It didn't make any sense how she got sick out of the blue.

But now, I was starting to piece together the puzzle. My father's words echoed in my head repeatedly as I realized that he had used the notebook just as I had to save the family from financial ruin, and the price was my mother. The guilt had eaten away at my father and plagued him for years. At some point, that guilt took a form that riddled his dreams. It tried to convince him to pass down the notebook to one of us so he could be free.

I looked back at the black notebook. What was written inside was all the evidence I needed to understand that this was his only liberation from the terror that followed him. Whatever I had encountered in my dreams last night was sending a message. The person they had been chasing was finally in their possession. I was the one who foolishly wrote in the book and gave them the power to get what they wanted. I sat in silence for who knows how long. I looked back and forth at the notebook and money while the sick feeling in my stomach grew worse.

So now here I am, sitting at a table while weighing my options. On the one hand, I burn the notebook, but on the other, I have no idea if that will stop what I know is going to come next. I look at the money, deciding whether I want to take it and burn it too. On the other, I come to terms with reality and accept my oncoming fate. I can't decide; both would bring me nothing but misery. There's no escape from the pain my father went through. I can only sit while I wait for sleep to come, so the process can begin once again until I pass the book and the money to some other soul. It's nearly night-time. I grow weary, and I know that they're waiting for me.

The one who granted my exchange is waiting for me, and I know they're not alone.