The Plagiarist

Faithful husband to the same wife for 43 years, doting parent and grandparent, caring friend and neighbor, Scoutmaster and Little League Coach—retired civil engineer Carl Reif was in every way your model citizen. His only flaw—quirk might be a better word for it—was a compulsion for pilfering books.

Before enrolling in engineering school, after serving four years in the Army, he drifted around the country, working menial jobs and, when not at work, playing semi-pro baseball, centerfield, and reading every book he could get hold of.

He had never stolen a thing in his life, not even food when he was hungry, as was sometimes the case in those hard times, but once he became addicted to books, he was not loath to filch one now and then when he could not afford to buy it. From public libraries, hotel lobbies, coffee shops, anywhere he happened to see a book he wanted, he would walk off with it, the only exception being bookstores or any such establishment where the books were the proprietor’s means of livelihood.

From the reading room of a nursing home where he worked running errands he filched eight volumes of Harvard Classics. The residents of that particular nursing home, he rationalized, being all demented, anyway, and not allowed in the lobby where the reading room was located. Those books were part of the décor, props to impress visitors, so he took them without guilt, and no one missed them.

Through much practice, he became an accomplished and habitual thief of books. He continued stealing books and rationalizing the thefts to this day. His most recent acquisitions were from the “intellectual wasteland” of local public schools, where he had taken a post-retirement part-time as a substitute teacher, figuring that he was doing both students and teachers a favor by relieving them of their more challenging reading material, like a collection of Lincoln speeches he found under a stack of movie star magazines in an alternative education classroom and a rolled-up paperback edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass serving as a doorstop.

Aside from the real estate and vehicles co-owned with his wife, Ruth, his prized possessions consisted of a ten-gallon trash can full of used baseballs with which he taught his sons Tyrell and Alex to play the game, a set of second-hand tools, a left-handed baseball mitt, a set of dumbbells, a stack of artwork by Tyrell and Alex when they were toddlers, and books, hundreds of them, mostly stolen, on every conceivable subject—mathematics, history, physics, literature, economics, Latin, plumbing, gardening. You name it, Carl Reif owned one. And he didn’t just read those books. He perused them to the hilt, and not one at time, as most readers do, but as many as fifteen simultaneously, jumping from one to the other, a paragraph from one here, a paragraph from another there, making connections and drawing analogies between science, religion, history, sports, until all books were fully read and reread several times over.

Nearly every page of Reif's books was annotated with cross references and remarks, like: “See David Hume”--“Jack London says it better”—“Newton’s laws applied to art”--“So brilliant yet so wrong!”--“Bullshit!”—“Asshole!”

Then there was his first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Like Malcolm X while serving time in prison, Reif had studied the entire dictionary. But he went Malcolm X one better. Every single entry in the 1550 page tome was color coded: verbs, red; nouns, blue; adjectives, green; adverbs, yellow, and their definitions, illustrations and etymologies underlined in straight, wavy or dotted lines. In addition, he had filled the margins with hundreds of quotations illustrating the use of uncommon or troublesome words, and he recalled the exact source of each quotation. “This one I got from the Style section of the Washington Post” “This one from a friend of mine, a cook, in the Army.” “This one from a letter by Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson.”

Though his powers of reasoning were not much above average, the old engineer had been hard smitten by the philosopher’s futile quest for omniscience, always seeing or imagining connections between events past, present and future, between everything he read in books and witnessed in the real world, from the ridiculous and scatological to the sublime and sacred. He was the first to recognize his folly, yet he pressed on, casting light on nothing that had not already been ad nauseam illuminated, but learning much about many things in the process. His common sense and sanity may have been suspect, but not his erudition. When his son’s were in high school he could rely on their dad to help him with his physics and chemistry at a moment’s notice. Recently, he tutored a grandson and his neighbor’s daughter on the U.S. Constitution, without having to review the subject. A polymath, a person of great or varied learning, that’s what he told people he was when asked his occupation, leaving those who had no clue what the word meant thinking that it was some branch of mathematics.

As it often happens with voracious readers, over time he was inspired to try his hand at literature, and in this pursuit he took his pilfering to a higher level by lifting phrases and sometimes whole paragraphs from the classics and passing them off as his own. The two novels, three screen plays and mish-mash of short stories and essays that he had penned in his spare time over the years, all rejected out of hand by every publisher he submitted them to, were unabashedly chock-full of plagiarisms.

Every night the pedantic author manqué would put his wife to sleep with a bedside lecture on some boring subject. His lecture one night on plagiarism was particularly soporific. No sooner had he started, than she fell into a deep sleep, but he kept on lecturing, anyway. "Writers are not anal-retentive types. Say what they will, they don’t write for themselves, and certainly not for scholars. The worst fate that can befall a writer is to have his works embalmed in quotation marks and footnotes. The Shakespeare we study in school is but a mummy of the real Bard. Writers want their works assimilated by living readers, so through them they can live on after death. That’s how they achieve their measure of immorality. Their biographies, even their names, don’t matter. The anonymous author of Beowulf is no less immortal than the well documented Charles Dickens. So by plagiarizing great writers, I honor them, help keep them alive. They would thank me for it if they knew. And how about them? Didn’t they on occasion plagiarize from one another, or some middling writer, or maybe from a relative or a casual acquaintance nobody heard of, or from some illiterate laborer they met in some tavern? Was everything they wrote one-hundred percent original?”

Presuming that his wife was hanging on every word, he revved up his lecture. "Often, when I read a book, I come across a phrase so familiar that I wonder where I read it before. In another book by the same author? In a book by a different author? Or maybe it was something that I might have written myself but turned out to have already been written by some one else? If so, I see no reason why I shouldn’t use it as my own. Just because some great writer happens to beat me to a well-turned phrase or idea, I’m not going to give it up. Their words, their ideas, are my words and ideas as well. Not that I’m comparing myself to them, of course, but as the Hindu god Krishna teaches, we are all one with the cosmic universe. Everything that has ever been thought, uttered and written is public domain. So I plagiarize without reservations. Am I making any sense?” Then gazing down at his slumbering wife: “No, I guess not.”

As he approached the twilight of his life, Reif began to suspect that he might be losing his mind, if he hadn’t already, as had befallen most of his blood kin on both sides of the family. His suspicion was one day confirmed in a crumbling 1842 edition of a King James Bible he had found while foraging for curios of historical interest in the dumpster of an old Presbyterian church undergoing renovation. Folded in pages of the Bible was a handwritten manuscript, yellowed by time, but its ink still readable, of a short story titled “Cow Path Road.” Word for word, in every detail, the title included, the story was identical to the one he had finished a week earlier.

From that day on, duplicates of all his works —stories, essays, novels, screenplays and even marginal annotations—-began to surface, one by one, in every old book he filched picked or picked up at yard sales. Some written years or even centuries before he was born.

The old man realized that his genetic insanity had finally caught up with him, but rather than letting it destroy him, he rationalized it by assuming that he had been transformed into a timeless, mythological author. That, then, would explain his penchant for plagiarizing from the classics. Those lines he lifted from Shakespeare and Dickens could well have been his originally. And the fact no modern-day publisher took him seriously did not matter at all. If no one today read his works, then in the fullness of time, past or future, by the laws of probability, thousands of readers had already read them, or some day would. “They will look back on me because I looked forward to them.”

Of course, he never shared these thoughts with anyone, not even his wife. He may have been crazy, but not so crazy as to risk being committed to a psychiatric nursing home, though, in the fullness of time, that wouldn't have mattered, either.