David was an unusually beautiful man. The kind that made girls’ heads turn in surprised wonder. The kind that was predestined for a successful professional career without even trying. He was tall and athletic — although he’d never seen the inside of a gym-room. His strong jaw-line, Greek nose, deep-blue eyes, perfect teeth, and wavy blond hair were a white supremacist’s wet dream. David would have made the perfect news anchor or game show host. Instead, he chose to be a librarian. Books were what mattered most to him. They were doorways to strange, new worlds and undreamt lives. Why complicate your life, he always thought, when books allow you to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without budging from your comfy chair?

David’s ambition to lead an uneventful life was thwarted when he woke up one morning with a filthy taste in his mouth. As he passed his tongue along his teeth, nothing felt right. The bathroom mirror showed him that his once-pristine white teeth now stood crooked and yellowed. Some of them had even switched places during the night and leaned drunkenly against each other. David gaped dumbfounded at his new snaggle-toothed reflection. When he hesitantly explored the hecatomb in his mouth with his finger, he felt several of his decayed teeth crumble. His breath was a mixture of horse piss and pub gutter.

A visit to the dentist — David’s first one since he was a small child — brought no relief. The woman stared at him unbelievingly, suspecting she was on candid camera. However hard he brushed and flossed, a sticky slime kept clinging to his teeth and his bad breath degraded from revolting to health hazard. David’s co-workers gave him a wide berth. The head librarian commiserated but nevertheless banned him from physical customer contact. David’s social life never had been buoyant; after the incident, it dried up completely. He buried himself deeper in books.

Four weeks later, he woke up leaving most of his hair on the bed pillow. His scalp was covered in small carbuncles that were painful to the touch. After a couple of hours, they turned from vivid red into grey and David noticed that the colour of the rest of his skin was fading as well. Before he made up his mind to make an appointment with a dermatologist, David felt his joints stiffen and he stood rooted in the middle of his living room. His skin darkened and hardened until it looked and felt like slate.

“I’m turning into a rock,” David thought.

He tried to wave his arms or roll his shoulders. The exertion was met with an ominous cracking noise. A stinging pain warned him to cease his efforts. He was about to call out to the neighbours for help when he felt his jaw was locked shut. All he could move were his eyes. As he was peering at the pile of unread books on the coffee table, David had difficulties to focus. For a while, it seemed as if he was looking through a gauze, and then his eyesight was gone. The traffic noises through the open window suddenly shut down.

The sensory deprivation was complete. David’s mind rushed wildly. How long did he have before his brain turned into stone as well? After some reflection, the question struck him as stupid. All his organs had ceased to function. There was no blood supply to his brain, which meant he was no longer thinking with his brain. He was a piece of rock. A thinking piece of rock with no sense at all of what was going on outside of him.

He remembered Kafka’s novella Die Verwandlung where travelling salesman Gregor Samsa transforms into a giant bug overnight. His metamorphosis was nothing of the kind. Poor Samsa still had to interact with reality in his new form. He was harassed by his boss, depended on his sister to feed him, and made life miserable for his family by his needy presence. For David, the world simply had ceased to be. All his material needs had evaporated. His thoughts were all that remained. He was like God before Creation. He existed outside time and space. He had an eternity to reflect, philosophise, fantasise. He could compose in his mind the greatest literary masterpiece ever written. As time was no constraint, he could fill an entire library with his musings and stories. He’d never felt so peaceful as now.

Because David didn’t show up for work anymore, the head librarian tried to call him at home. When that didn’t work out, he came to David’s third-floor flat to check on him. He spoke to the neighbours, who declared they hadn’t seen David for days and hadn’t heard any sounds coming from his flat either. The head librarian grew concerned and informed the police.

The landlord unlocked the flat’s door for two constables. They found the place empty. The bed was unmade, which seemed to indicate that David was still living there, but the contents of the fridge had gone bad and a fine layer of dust wafting in through the open window had settled upon the furniture and floor. In the middle of the living room stood an ugly grey sculpture that vaguely looked like a crouching person. It was a strange place to put such a large object, but then again, the tenant clearly was no interior designer. The police officers declared they could not take any further action, except to inform the Missing Persons Unit of the National Crime Agency. That didn’t mean the MPU would actively search for David. They’d only register his name in a missing persons database they used to find a possible match whenever an unidentified dead body showed up.

When the landlord failed to receive any further rent payments, he started up the eviction procedure. After three months, the landlord donated David’s books to the local library, and his other belongings were collected by the British Heart Foundation to be re-sold through their charity shops. They didn’t want the lumpy sculpture, though. The landlord arranged for a container, which was placed directly beneath the apartment’s window. Three strong men picked up the sculpture and tossed it through the open window. It shattered into a million pieces in the container below, and that was the end of it.