A Novel
by
M. Clifford
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
M. Clifford on Smashwords
The Book
Copyright © 2010 by M. Clifford
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
Paper Is Not A Crime
Words Are Not A Crime
Keep Freedom Alive
Do Not Lend This Book
* * * * *
Also by M. Clifford
PROPAGANDA FROM THE DESK OF MARTIN TRUST
* * * * *
For My Father
He was a sprinkler fitter
He was a simple man
To those few he loved more than himself,
He was a hero
* * * * *
* * * * *
“The one who tells the stories rules the world.”
– Hopi Indian proverb
“Young readers, you whose hearts are open, whose understandings are not yet hardened, and whose feelings are neither exhausted nor encrusted with the world, take from me a better rule than any professors of criticism will teach you. Would you know whether the tendency of a book is good or evil, examine in what state of mind you lay it down. Has it distracted the sense of right and wrong which the Creator has implanted in the human soul? If so – if you have felt that such were the effects it was intended to produce – throw the book into the fire, whatever name it may bear on the cover.”
– Southey
“It is sure to be dark if you close your eyes.”
– unknown
* * * * *
DON'T READ THE BOOK
* * * * *
000-0
Don’t read The Book.
That phrase has followed me my entire life.
I was never trained to tell stories. Most people these days aren’t born in that percentile. Those who are write passive sonnets about duty, honor and glory to the government. Complacency that breeds. This tale, however, has never been told and you are risking your life by continuing. We, the people, have learned that while there is danger in the printed word, so is there power. In the days of our ancestors, it stirred us to revolution. Words were honored and protected. They were spiritual and rehabilitating. But that was before recycling sustained the world and asphyxiated our minds. For the sake of clarity, I’ll save those details for another page.
If you are reading these words from a source other than a bound stack of printed paper, the following pages have been compromised. Including the sentences above, there are a total of 97,544 words in this story. You need to brand this number to your mind. If you reach the end of this book and the number is incorrect, the following pages have been compromised. Remember a single word can change the world. You must always keep track of the word count so it won’t happen again.
Before we begin, I would like to offer you a guarantee. This will be difficult and you will come to a point between paragraphs where you must choose one of two diverging roads – either continue and learn the truth or stop flipping the paper pages, suppress what you have read and tell Robert Frost that all the difference can go suck a grenade. Forgive the disjunction and my insensitive language, but I need your undivided attention so it won’t happen again. So the people we love most won’t die because we tried to fix things too quickly. If we have learned anything from the Editors, it is to be patient. Subtlety is the greatest weapon. Combined with truth, it is an unstoppable force. For that very reason, you are still holding this book. You want to learn the truth. To read the truth, unedited. Ex Libris. If you are willing to be patient, I’ll need to start from the beginning. Our beginning, at least. That way, despite how desperate things still are, you’ll be able to appreciate how far we’ve come and how bad it was, once upon a time.
I knew him. I am one of the few people, few fortunate people, who can say that. In fact, I loved him before any of this began. When he was a simple-minded journeyman. When he wasn’t hated by every single person in the world. No one knew him like I did. If they had, they wouldn’t have believed what they were told to believe. I tried to change their minds after he was gone, but people assumed I was disillusioned. Even those who should have known better. But I believed him. I knew he was telling the truth. Even before he told me, I knew that he had discovered something none of us lemmings knew. On that day, in that windowless Chicago bar, the truth of our deception was exposed. Before he knew it, our emancipation rested in his hands.
He’d say it was the best of times. Holden always did because he loved quoting Dickens. It was the best of times. Of course, by the end of the day it would feel like the opposite, but it was Friday and he was riding the elevated train home from work.
* * * * *
001-590
His fingernails were dirty. Of course they were.
He closed his Book and glared down at the notice that slithered across the screen, sealed into the black, leather binding. The words faded away and came back, breathing: Update in Progress. With an irritated huff, Holden Clifford glanced up from his seat to watch as everyone on the train closed their Books to search for something beyond the foggy windows. Something in the distortion of rain that could occupy their minds for the next two, exasperating minutes. For Holden, it was his fingernails.
His hands were generally caked in filth throughout the day. Why clean the grease and pipe dope when it would only resurface after lunch? A pant leg ordinarily did the trick until five o’clock, when he could expect the long train ride home. Holden would glide to the sink, tailored in grubby jeans and a torn flannel shirt, and scrub his arms like a cardiologist before surgery. The other sprinkler fitters were used to his ritualistic insanity, but they still poked a joke now and again. Not many water monkeys read novels. Especially pre-digital novels. If sprinkler fitters even used The Book for anything beyond studying blueprints, it was for the sports column. What frustrated Holden, as he took the nail file from his shirt pocket to scrape the grime from his forefinger, was that he even noticed his hands at all. He should have been lost in the final chapters of Edwin Drood, seeking to understand the lurking mystery. This was the third time in two days the Editors of The Book had interrupted him, and everyone else in the world, with another futile update. Of course, he couldn’t complain. The Book was the most significant device to come out of his grandfather’s selfish, unwilling generation. He really couldn’t complain.
Holden had been born into a world where The Book was a necessity. Everyone on the planet had at least one copy. There were many different versions available with almost infinite design possibilities, including hundreds of applications for deeper study and general convenience. Holden had two copies, but he’d say that, on average, most people had three.
It was understood that The Book was a part of life. The portable reading device was used to learn the alphabet, to study history in school, to develop your career and to eventually retire in your favorite story.
As one global society, they read.
Often.
With his hands as clean as they could be, Holden turned his attention to the sharpened nail on his pointer finger. It was duller than usual. He scraped at it with six long slashes, filing the tip to a fine, angled spear. Outlawing paper made writing utensils pointless and the stylus pen that once came with the touch-sensitive Book was replaced over time by a swirling pointer finger. The lack of a single sharpened fingernail was the scarlet flag of the non-reader and it waved itself to the society of Book lovers. That number was dwindling by the decade.
A rumble coursed through the elevated train. Holden was unsure if it was the decaying wooden tracks below or the impatient excitement of expectant readers. He was annoyed that he’d been interrupted, but the update was necessary. Perhaps a new book had been published today, or the first draft of a story was included in the superfluous addendums that accompanied every purchased novel. Holden didn’t need an explanation on the significant conditions surrounding every story to understand its purpose or relevance, but he respected those in the world that did. Two minutes a day was worth the benefit because, like everyone else in the world, Holden Clifford loved The Book.
The screen breathed Update Complete and Holden watched as the teenage girl on the seat beside him slipped back into her Book. Her device was blue, with generous detailing of thin, red and white stripes. It had been a popular model ten years ago and was obviously a hand-me-down, but she personalized it by lining the inside cover with a patchwork of neon stickers. On a normal day, Holden would engulf himself greedily in his story and ignore everyone during the train ride, but he couldn’t stop staring at her fingers as they swirled along the screen. Two of her dazzlingly gold nails were sharpened points and they danced an elegant minuet to a sonata unheard beyond the tiny, blue buds in her be-jeweled ears. Holden had never seen a ballet, but he imagined that the intoxication would return when watching women dance with such similar grace. She was clearly using the device to talk to a friend and it made Holden wonder about the times when she wasn’t talking. What stories filled her Book? Which one did she return to when life was disagreeing with her?
The train jerked to a stop and the doors opened with a familiar chime. The girl growled beside him, closed her Book and ambled off the train with a few others. Holden watched her dive for shelter from the rain as the car sealed its doors and rolled on to the next stop.
Seeking to be withdrawn from the rest of the commute, he flipped back the leather binding of his Book and watched as the inside screen flickered away from its black slumber and shifted to green. No, not green. More of an eerie white that pretended to be blameless and clean. There were some who preferred to read from a crisp white background in the comforts of their home computer, but those people weren’t true Book lovers. Those with a sharpened pointer finger found the murky green filter soothing and would always prefer to go green even if a white version had been available.
Black text swam to the surface, interrupting his story with the Gratis Press digital newspaper - a bonus for buying the latest edition of The Book. Holden longed to return to his story, but the scrolling headline drew him in. The Free Thinkers, terrorists against knowledge and history, had attacked another city.
That afternoon, city politicians mourned a once impeccable monument to twentieth century architecture. At street level, the north face of the Sears Tower had been branded with the emblem of The Free Thinkers. Holden swooped his fingernail around the photograph in the article and it enlarged to the width of the screen. Police surrounded the tower’s jet black aluminum facing, studying the trivial design. Upon a stately crest was the ornamental script of their motto: Think Again. Above this, Holden noticed the delicately etched icons of a bow and arrow and a revolver. Although the insignia was exquisitely drawn, the brand scarred the building in a violent technique, eating away at the seamless material.
Holden skimmed the article, but it was the same old news. Nothing much was known about the group other than the obvious; they were a syndicate of anarchists linked to the destruction of major historical monuments and meaningful pieces of our global history. When he reached the bottom of the article, a video began streaming of a man at a press conference. In the top right corner was the graphic of an American flag swimming in windless air beside the words: Gallantly Streaming. The man at the press conference behind a podium that carried the seal of the United States was sharp, attractive and, despite a similarity in age, was in an entirely different category than Holden. His name was Martin Trust. As the video continued within the brackets of unprinted text, Trust announced his commission as the head of a new sector of Homeland Security. He continued by affirming that it was the job of the Department of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration to protect and rehabilitate the nation’s most cherished antiquities. Trust comforted the press by declaring his passion for tracking down The Free Thinkers and Holden felt himself nod. He wasn’t the type to care much about history, but he also disliked people that rocked the boat.
Holden was bored with the images of demolished buildings that begged him to read on, so he found the recycling emblem for the Book and swirled his finger around it. The triangled arrows of the icon animated slowly before vanishing in a velvet haze of green. The Mystery of Edwin Drood bled back to the screen with an invitation to learn more about the author. He denied the request and sat back in his seat, quickly enveloped in the digital universe of his mind.
* * * * *
002-2007
Holden stepped off the train, instantly bombarded by a repeat offense of regret. Living eight blocks from the tracks was still a bad idea. He tried to shelter himself under the awnings of shops along Montrose Avenue, but the jog home from the station was muculent and wet. The gravel driveway to his historic, but not preserved, residence was like tar in the downpour that sucked onto his boots from below dark puddles. Gripping his duffle bag, Holden climbed the unbalanced steps to the covered porch, shook himself free from the rain and went inside.
He tugged the cord that hung from the ceiling and a florescent glow reminded him of why he hated living there. Home again, home again. Jiggety Jig, Holden thought, as he searched his forever-empty mailbox before heading to the second floor. Every surface in the narrow stairwell was coated in the same thick, mint green paint as the exterior. When he first rented the place, he envisioned the house being dipped in fresh-smelling toothpaste. Unfortunately, the preventative act hadn’t killed the moist bacteria or cleared the grime from the corners or overtaken the stench from the many molding crevices. Like most historical buildings, the house where Holden lived was falling apart. It cost too much to restore and it was against the law to tear down. At least the rent was cheap. Holden often dreamed that the house would collapse one winter night under a tide of snow and swallow him while he slept.
The striped bamboo door to his apartment closed with significance. Holden lowered his eyes as he dropped his duffle bag to the floorboards, rolled his shoulders and cracked the top of his spine with a long, exhaled breath. He was home and it was time for the ritual to begin. Leave work at the door, take off the boots and break the seal of a richly deserved, locally brewed beer. Jiggety Jig. Yes, his family life was non-existent. But Holden was content with his small story. Most days he strolled directly to his easy chair and picked up where he left off on the train. On special days, he went back to his father’s copy of The Book that sat by the window and returned to his favorite story. Today, there was a kink. The phone on the wall was blinking.
Sweaty beer in hand, he closed the fridge and approached the answering machine, already knowing what he was about to hear and already regretting his actions of the past forty minutes. The two messages were from, or about, his two favorite people in the world. Shane and Jane.
Shane was his best friend. In fact, they had the All-American relationship. They grew up in the same neighborhood, dated the same girls, fought over the same girls and spent every moment they could together to this day. Like Holden, Shane worked for General Fire Protection. His message was typical and to the point.
“Meet me at The Library, man. Maybe we can reignite what happened last month with the librarian,” Shane’s charred, confident voice chuckled before he continued. “I know it’s raining, but don’t spend the weekend at home, bro. I’m buying and the game starts at six. Don’t be late.”
He clicked to the next message and looked at his watch, hoping the call would be from Jane. It wasn’t. Jane was Holden’s eleven-year-old daughter. Their relationship could be summed up in two conflicting words: simple and complicated. They barely saw one another. On the off chance that Holden pulled himself from his nothingness to see her, it was under the discretion of his militant ex-wife, Eve. Jane loved her father, but life kept them separate. That, and Holden’s unwavering forgetfulness.
Eve’s message was blunt.
“How many times is this going to happen, Hold? You were supposed to pick up Jane an hour ago. What a surprise!” Her stringent, acid-laced tone curdled in his ears. He cracked his beer open. “Why don’t you just enjoy that drink I’m sure you’re holding and I’ll make something up again. I can’t watch her sit by the phone waiting for your call. So don’t call.”
He took a swig from his beer and laughed. Despite being disappointed in himself for abandoning his daughter again, this was the first time in years that Eve hadn’t finished a conversation by calling him ‘predictably unreliable’ or mentioning that pipe fitters shouldn’t have pipe dreams they couldn’t finish. Maybe that wasn’t a good thing, Holden thought, as he reached for the picture frame on the shelf beside the phone. The digital frame held thirty pictures from Jane’s ninth birthday. Eve looked miserable in every over-exposed shot. What made Holden put it down and reach for his beer was that he realized these were the only photos of Jane in the whole house and they were two years old. He felt so suddenly guilty. What kind of a father didn’t have a recent picture of his kid?
In a glance, Holden’s reflection in the frame spoke a thousand words. The brown fuzz of his hair was coarse and his long, ragged, unshaven face was four days past socially acceptable. His notched nose, broken by a young Shane during one of their many childish arguments, carried a slight twist that most women found markedly attractive. Eve had been one of those, long ago. Holden stared into his dull brown eyes. Once young and gleaming with lightness and hope, they now drooped from his face, empty. He was thirty-three going on fifty and felt more lost than ever.
Holden eyed the phone’s dusty receiver and debated if he should call Jane. With a twisted lip, he ran a hand through his hair, used his middle finger to carry the beer from inside the bottle neck and tugged his duffle bag to the window with the oversized easy chair that beckoned him to relax in its downy, plush embrace. Maybe later he would watch the game. For now, escaping into the written world of his favorite story was an easier way to ignore his inadequacies.
Resting on the windowsill was his father’s copy of The Book. It was a first edition, passed down from his grandfather. It had a linen-wrapped, hard cover binding with a thick screen, so that it mimicked a printed book. The antique device reminded him that there had once been a time when people needed an easy transition to such technology. For Holden, there was something romantic about the archaic device. He got settled into the chair and picked up The Book, rubbing the front cover with his thumb. The recycling imprint of the Publishing House was missing from the binding. It hadn’t been mandatory at that time. Holden lifted the cover to reveal the darkened screen. By design, current day Books revived themselves when the cover was lifted. With his father’s Book he had to press the oval button in the corner to ignite the power. He always found a simple joy in that. The worn screen awoke to a plain list of options. Holden felt the thin arrow key on the right side of the device and used it to scroll down to the only author listed.
The name was J.D. Salinger.
The preliminary version of The Book stored an unremarkable one thousand mid-sized novels. That didn’t matter to Holden. There was only one story loaded onto the ancient appliance. The same story that had been there when Holden got The Book from their family’s estate lawyer. Apparently, it had been his father’s favorite novel and the origin of Holden’s unique name. After receiving The Book in his father’s will, Holden read it repeatedly, hoping to understand some unknown part of the man. Quickly, The Catcher in the Rye became the standard; the novel by which he judged all others, and the one he always ran to when there was a need to forget the present. He knew those pixels of narrative like the arrangement of tiny, white hexagon tiles on his monotonous bathroom floor. There was an unyielding order to it all and he found comfort knowing what came next.
Holden switched on the lamp beside his chair and nestled into the worn, single pillow. He sipped gently from his beer and flipped the page, exhaling instantaneous relaxation. And just as he began to read the words he had read so many times before, the screen went from dull green to black. The relic had powered down.
Aggravated, Holden rose from his comfort, snatched the adapter cord from the wall and plugged it into the binding. No light. No response. The battery was acting up again. He closed his eyes to calm himself and gulped a fifth of his beer before grabbing his new copy of The Book from his duffle bag. But when Holden returned to his seat in search of rest, he noticed that the small, rectangular display built into the leather cover above the recycling icon was breathing a phrase that drove him to toss The Book onto the windowsill, reach for his jacket and leave the apartment in heated frustration.
That phrase was: Update in Progress.
* * * * *
003-3533
Cold rain nagged the window of the cab with a constant, maddening rhythm that seemed to disagree with the swiping wipers. Holden watched them glide silently along the glass as the driver clicked her turning signal and pulled over below the elevated tracks of the Uptown train station.
Holden paid the woman and stepped into the irrelevant rain. The red door he had opened and walked through so many times before stood ominous beside the shadow of a nearby alley. For John Q. Passerby, there were no windows to shed light on the character of the business. In fact, the building would have appeared vacant if it weren’t for the single neon image of an open book hanging unsteadily over the doorway. Holden shook the water from his coat, scraped it over the rough fuzz of hair on his cold head and ran for the door. He reached the wide, curling handle and saw the thick carving at the center of the rotting wood. His eyes traced the remnants of two words, once engraved in ornate script and framed in baroque molding. It was difficult to discern, but Holden had frequented the bar often enough to know that it read, The Library. He tugged the handle and the door gave way, blasting him with a puff of warm, stale air and muffled voices.
Throughout Chicago, boutique bars blinked the corners of many elite intersections while a multitude of sports bars lingered nearby like cockroaches. The Library was one of the oldest bars in the once trendy neighborhood of Uptown that wouldn’t fit into a singular category. Decades before the neighborhood was overrun with musicians and artists, the bar had established its presence. Which meant that the crowd was always an older one. That began to change once the owner retired and left the business to his daughter. Marion Tabor, commonly known by regulars as the librarian, began hosting music acts and themed sports nights every week until she eventually drew a younger crowd. That group included Holden and Shane, who would have normally avoided such an eccentric venue for controlled inebriation.
The Library got its name from its peculiar and controversial interior design. The windowless walls of the bar were clothed with pages from hundreds of recycled books. The building had broken ground during a vital junction in the history of the world, when the selfish ways of our forefathers were recognized and recycling was evolving into a powerful tool for allowing mother earth to thrive. Laws were being passed and using paper for recreational means was frowned upon, to say the least. Like the few creative minds of that decade, Marion’s grandfather searched for an innovative solution to the problem and chose to line the walls of his new bar with pages from recognizable books before recycling them for the sake of the planet. At a time when the words Reduce, Reuse and Recycle were fast becoming the mantra of the intellectual world, such innovative design made The Library a custodian for progress and environmentalism. But sadly, like most novelties, the bar was forgotten and its crumbling, fragile façade soon joined the landscape of deserted, but historically protected, buildings along Wilson Avenue.
Tonight, Holden entered the bar like the rest of those before him. He ignored the yellowing book pages that crusted the walls like rotting fish scales, hung his jacket on one of the tarnished brass hooks near the warm wood bar and searched for his best friend.
“There he is.”
The graveled voice came from the thick stone fireplace at the center of the large seating area. Shane was standing on a shelf of stone that circled the base of the column, half obscured by the flat screen television. He adjusted the volume, hopped down and threw an arm around Holden as if they hadn’t just spent every moment of the work week together.
“Glad you could make it out, bro!” he barked, tugging his old friend toward their usual booth. His brash attitude lit up the tiny eyes that were ever shadowed under his tattered baseball cap. The Blackhawks jersey he wore hung from his sloping, definitionless shoulders like a red garbage bag. Unlike Holden’s sturdy frame, Shane Dagget was as thin as they came and not the least bit aware of his shortcomings. “Thanks for getting all dolled up.”
Holden looked down at his raggedy work clothes. He had left the house so quickly, so agitated, that he had forgotten to change. “Didn’t realize this was a date,” he replied, squeezing into the varnished oak booth.
Shane took the cigarette from behind his ear and sparked his butane lighter. “Sweetheart, I thought Friday was date night.”
Holden grinned at his friend’s overt eye batting and attempted to pull the cigarette from his hand. “I just got here. Don’t get us kicked out.”
“Where have you been, Clifford? The ban on smoking was lifted last week,” Shane tugged his hand back, pulled a long drag from his cigarette and spat a laugh of smoke at the ceiling. “I swear, bro, I thought you’d be Mickey the Mope all weekend reading that stupid Book of yours.” Holden pursed his lips and nodded as a smirk curled the edge of Shane’s sly lips. “Don’t look now, but Marion’s been eyeing you like an empty glass. I told ya. That girl wants what you’re sellin’.”
Holden stole a glance over his shoulder and pretended to watch the pre-game arguments on the plasma screen before turning back. “She’s lookin’ at you, Dagget.”
“Not a chance, sailor,” he smirked, digging in with the nickname Holden would never live down. “I’ve been your wingman since we turned nineteen.” Shane paused to release another haze of glorious smoke, “I know when a girl is checking you out and she is check…ing…you…out.”
“Whatever.” Holden rolled his flannel sleeves and cracked his back again, trying to gather what crumbs of comfort were available in the cushionless booth.
Shane delighted in another slow drag before tilting his head curiously. “Hey, weren’t you supposed to have Jane this weekend?” In a glare of unspoken frustration, Shane knew what had happened. “It’s like that, huh? Man.” He slid an empty bottle across the table and clinked the glass with the edge of his full one. “A.D.A.D. right?”
Holden nodded sheepishly. “A.D.A.D.”
Another Day. Another Dollar. Where the phrase originated from, neither of them knew. They picked it up when they were young and somewhere between summer vacations and joining the pipe fitters union, the saying stuck. Eventually, it became the smartest, most carefree response to any situation in life.
Car breaks down? Another day. Another dollar.
Got promoted? Another day. Another dollar.
Wife leaves you? Another day. Another dollar.
Brother goes to jail? Another day. Another dollar.
If the situation wasn’t a big deal, or they didn’t want it to seem like a big deal, they abbreviated. It was hokey and nonsense to them now, but it was how they communicated and it worked.
Shane drank eagerly from the microbrewed lager and used the back of his hand to wipe the froth from his mouth, already searching for a subject to override the topic of Holden’s failed home life. “Numbskull has me pulling doubles tomorrow. I think it’s some new building on Wacker.”
Holden shrugged, uninterested, before glancing back at the television screen to watch the game begin. The opposing team snatched the puck and Holden stared as they glided delicately across the ice like a flock of geese until one of the men went sprawling into the wall. He was too engulfed in the game to notice Shane beckoning the bartender to their table.
“Think I’m gonna run off to the bathroom or something before your girlfriend gets here. Leave the love birds to the branch, ya know what I’m sayin’, bro?”
Yanked quickly back to reality, Holden reached for his friend’s jersey. “Come on, don’t do me like that. I told you…she just needed a ride back to her apartment. Shane.”
Holden collected himself and twisted casually away from the bar to admire the series of book pages that plastered the wall. The gloss that once glued the printed paper to the bar, bonding them together to create a seamless surface, had gradually degraded to a rough, clear texture. The recycled pages were flaking earnestly from the wall. Holden found this a pleasant distraction from the fact that Marion, the librarian, had already strolled up to the booth with her digital notepad in hand looking harmless and polite. He tried not to notice her, but the attempt was a failure from the start.
Marion was beautiful in the sense that she was unattainable and confusing to most of the men that vied constantly for her attention. She had strong features, but her face was still kind and elegant. Holden knew she was special. She had a rare personality and a look that could only be defined as grubby, but gorgeous. To Holden, Marion Tabor was a greasy, bohemian princess. The piece of her he liked best was the delicate Japanese floral tattoos that snuck a glance at him when she leaned to hand over a drink and her short sleeves grew shorter. There was an attraction there. One night it almost led to a here’s my place kiss. But Holden came with complications and any woman that didn’t mind adding complication to her life was someone to avoid. That rationalization was the only thing that kept him grounded when she would look deeply into his eyes or reach across the table to take his glass away.
“Hi Holden. Haven’t seen you here in a while.”
He turned absent-mindedly toward her as she swept a flirty tangle of dark brown hair over her ears and his breath cut short. “Work has been busy…” he grunted, clearing his throat. “Taking a lot out of me.” He tried to keep his cool, but instead his voice hung with passive, synthetic neutrality.
“Yeah. You look tired,” she mused, reaching for Shane’s empty glass. “What can I get you?”
“Whatever import you have on tap is fine.”
Marion swooped her pointer finger over the notepad screen and offered him a soft smile. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”
Holden flashed an adjourned expression as she returned to the bar and he tilted his head back to the quilt of overlapping pages. Having been so pulled away at home, so drawn out of his story when he needed it most, his eyes instantly scanned the pages for some form of fictitious freedom, only to discover that the text on the walls was neither literary nor inviting. Beyond the stacked condiments and laminated lists of drinks were a series of shadowed pages quite mathematic in nature with random equations that made no sense to Holden. He passed over them and many others with a glaze of dull consideration until he noticed something of interest.
He tilted in place to an awkward, acrobatic position in order to view a page behind him from a book entitled Little Women. He read the series of words and quickly discovered that nothing on the roughly 5 inch by 8 inch page, which was partially concealed beneath an historical account of the Incan empire, described the size of women, their height, their intellect or anything that would lend substance to the innocuous, yet intriguing, title. The mysterious story bore the signs of pre-digital fiction and it kept him enthralled for the few minutes before the librarian returned.
Marion stepped around the boundaries of the bar and walked the drink to his booth while Holden watched her approach with studying eyes. The amber liquid swayed with her hips and it absorbed him. Its ambient gracefulness recalling a sentence from the page he had just read.
“Why not? I’m neat and cool and comfortable, quite proper for a dusty walk on a warm day.”
Much like that language from another time, the approaching beer drew him in. Marion set the drink on the table and Holden nodded a thank you as he happily tipped the cold glass rim toward his welcoming lips.
“So, are you excited about the game?”
“Huh?”
“The game,” she repeated, arching her manicured eyebrows. “It’s supposed to be a good one.”
Small talk? Holden felt suddenly distant and spoke his reply through a dripping sip. “Is it?”
“You feeling all right? You’re acting strange.”
“Don’t I always?” He faked a charming smirk and pointed a thumb at the wall. “Did you know these pages are coming loose?”
“Yeah,” Marion nodded, wiping down the scraps of garbage Shane left on the table. “I’d just paint over the whole thing, but then the name of the bar wouldn’t make sense, would it?”
Holden snickered. “You’d have to buy new stationary and everything.”
“Right,” she laughed, brandishing a wide smile. “Stationary.”
Instead of leaving, Marion narrowed the space between them and traced a hand across his right arm, pulling aside the fine crop of brown hair. “What is that?” she asked, spotting a blotch of bluish-black ink. “It looks like skin cancer or something.”
Holden tugged his arm abruptly, almost too abruptly, away and unrolled his flannel sleeve to cover up his embarrassment. “Yeah, just kids being stupid.”
Before Marion could ask, Shane skipped his chicken legs back to the booth, just in time to sit and revel in his friend’s discomfort. “Showing off your tattoo there, sailor? Did he tell you it was an anchor or that he got it from his girlfriend in jail?”
Holden shot daggers at Shane Dagget and lowered his head in an understood look of one more of those and you’re going to get it. Shane tossed up his hands in innocence and puffed, “I wasn’t going to tell her that you stopped mid-way because it hurt too much…” A boot crashed into his flimsy ankle and a surge of pain shot through his loose tendons.
“You don’t seem the type to give up.”
Holden continued to stare angrily at Shane as he sputtered, “Talk to my ex-wife.”
Gently, Marion pulled back Holden’s sleeve and edged closer to the half-inch wide, geometric blemish. “It looks like the number four.”
“It was supposed to be an anchor but…it hurt. So I stopped. It’s my fourarm.” Holden’s attempt at a pathetic joke lost its charm on her, or at least he thought it had. Marion didn’t laugh; the hand she placed on his shoulder before walking back to the bar was tender and comforting. Shane rose his arms in defense the moment they were alone because it appeared that Holden was about to lay into him. The serendipitous arrival of a phone call gave him an escape from certain punishment.
The tacky ring tone ceased as Shane flicked his phone open and yanked himself away from the booth through a barrage of flying peanuts. Clutching the phone, he laughed in surprise with one of their mutual friends over the fact that Holden had actually shown up. The crowded bar swiftly filled with jeers and jubilation as the score on the screen shifted. Holden listened to the tumult and was glad he could no longer hear Shane’s opinion of him, no matter how right it was. He knew he was usually unavailable to his friends on the weekends. He liked it that way. In fact, he was debating an escape that moment so he could return home to where the Book was fully charged and waiting for him.
Home was comfortable. The Book was comfortable. It gave him everything he needed. Friends, like life, were unpredictable. In his stories, he knew what to expect. He understood the characters and they didn’t need to understand him. The Book provided him with a life he didn’t have the energy to live himself. The digital lines of text scrolling below his eyes gave him adventure and solidarity. Beyond any person, place or thing in existence, he trusted The Book. He trusted those who wrote the stories; that they had his best interests at heart. It was more than he could say for Shane, who stood by the television laughing into the newest smart phone, leaving his best friend to nurse a lukewarm beer. Holden nudged his drink aside, pushed away from the booth and navigated the crowded bar toward the bathroom to release what he could before trying to escape without notice.
When he reached the dark and dingy room, a line of tottering sports fans told Holden that finding a stall was the easier route. He shut to door gladly and completed the deed he came to do. Although Holden was ready to leave (the odor alone had urged him to), he found himself staring at the pages on the wall, yearning to be drawn away from the languid existence, from the emotionless mirth that encompassed him. Something felt wrong about life. There was a creeping distrust that he couldn’t quite put his sharpened pointer finger on. Sometimes, even the shadow that followed his feet felt irregular. But there, standing before a cacophony of pages that held order despite the disorder, he was freed from his incarceration of doubt. He lost himself and found himself in the thousands upon thousands of sandy pages and printed words that covered the five square feet of wall space behind the toilet. He scanned them slowly as if searching for truth. Searching for wisdom in a single word.
He saw so many. The word vertigo. The word triumph. The word bliss. The word infantile. He saw the words retraction and conglomerate, God and sacrilegious. He saw the word, finality. He saw the word -
Holden slipped on the floor and caught himself on the toilet paper holder. It tore free from the 100% post-consumer recycled content divider walls. Fragments of the composite plastic material rattled on the floor of the stall and the toilet flushed as his shadow passed over the fixture’s cyclopean eye. Inebriated men at the urinals were laughing, but he didn’t hear them. Holden pushed himself terribly close to the toilet until he could see it again. See the word that had his heart cycling in erratic disagreement. On the haphazard, paper-coated wall he found the word. Beside a modicum of sexually suggestive graffiti art, Holden Clifford had seen his name.
* * * * *
004-6584
Holden was not a popular name. He could never seem to find it anywhere else in the world. He had only seen his name in digital script; and yet there it was in all its rare splendor. A piece of his favorite story had been pasted to a most inconsequential wall. The Catcher in the Rye. When Holden finally found his name again, his heart leapt. He had never seen a page from that book in person. The printed words were like manna to him and he devoured all two-hundred and seventy-seven with fervor. Each line was sheer delight and he read over them again the instant his studying eyes reached the awkward end. After the second read, Holden knew he had to read it again, but not because he was so overjoyed to finally be reading his favorite story from an actual piece of paper, printed with ink and touched by oily fingers. He had to read it again because something about the page was wrong.
Whatever it was, he couldn’t define the source. It was like seeing a reflection in rippling water. It was right and at the same time it didn’t make sense. Then, in the middle of the third read, it hit him. The entire scene he was reading was new. That was why he needed so badly to read it again. It was new to him. There was something new on the page. He couldn’t tell if it was a phrase or a paragraph or a word or a sentence. No, it wasn’t something that small. It was the majority of it. The majority of the sentences on the wall he had never read before.
One of the overlapping pages was dry and crusted, breaching the excerpt of The Catcher in the Rye like a hang nail waiting to be gnawed off. He blew delicately at the overhanging sheet and found enough space between it to know that the page wouldn’t be harmed if it peeled free. A crinkling, crackle; a delicate tear; and he could swiftly see the title along the ridge of the page. There was no question now. He was reading from The Catcher in the Rye, page two-hundred and forty-seven.
they’re thinking and all. It really is. I kept trying not to yawn. It wasn’t that I was bored or anything – I wasn’t – but I was so damn sleepy all of a sudden.
“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”
Then, all of a sudden, I yawned. What a rude bastard, but I couldn’t help it!
Mr. Antolini just laughed, though. “C’mon, Holden,” he said, and got up. “We’ll fix up the couch for you.”
I followed him and he went over to this closet and tried to take down some sheets and blankets and stuff that was on the top shelf, but he couldn’t do it with this highball glass in his hand. So he drank it and then put the glass down on the floor and then he took the stuff down. I helped him bring it over to the couch. We both made the bed together. He wasn’t too hot at it. He didn’t tuck anything in very tight. I didn’t care, though. I could’ve slept standing up I was so tired.
“How’re all your women?”
“They’re okay.” I was being a lousy conversationalist, but I didn’t feel like it.
Holden exhaled a long breath, but he was no less confused. He backed out of the stall and stumbled toward the sink. He saw himself in the mirror, and yet there was a different person standing there. His forehead and eyebrows were knotted into a tangle of curls and wrinkles. His eyes were sharp and stunningly focused. Suddenly nothing else mattered. He didn’t know why, but nothing else mattered beyond the words he had just read. The page was prodigious. The very moment he had been thinking of his trust in The Book and faith in what was written between its digital pages, he was besieged by a sense of betrayal. There soon came a hollowness in his chest and Holden knew that none of what was happening would make sense until he could make sense of it all.
He left the bathroom imbalanced; his mind overflowing with indefinable possibilities. He stepped quickly toward the bar where Marion was laughing with a customer, drawing a long draft of vanilla white beer, and shoved his way through the giddy patrons watching the game on a small television that was integrated into the mirror behind her before spitting out to her, “Where did these book pages come from?” She noticed him and her eyes brightened. “Marion, where did these pages come from?”
She handed her customer his drink, pointed to her ear and mouthed the words, I can’t hear you.
Holden walked around to the side of the bar and ducked below the hinged countertop, joining her near the register. Marion couldn’t help blushing in his sudden presence. Holden closed his eyes and leaned close to her ear, repeating, “The pages on the wall…where did they come from?”
Marion shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d have to ask my mother. Why?”
“I can’t really explain. Find out for me, will ya?” Holden muttered, scurrying back to the legal side of the bar. Marion watched as he fought with his jacket, mumbled crazily to himself and left the bar. Shane looked as confused as she did, but he shook his head and assumed the same. Once again, Holden Clifford had to escape the reality of life.
In truth, the reality of life was becoming frighteningly clear for him. As each moment passed, Holden continued to fear the worst and told himself that what he was imaging was incorrect. What he thought he had just stumbled upon was too implausible to be true. He wouldn’t even consider it until he saw the text for himself. It was simply horrific; the connotations behind such a discovery were all together too frightening to accept. So he took a cab back to his neighborhood, walked slowly through the rain toward his apartment, stumbled absently to the darkened corner where he had left his father’s copy of The Book open and plugged in and fell to his knees before the greenish tint of the glowing screen.
With the excerpt from the bar in his mind, Holden scanned to the corresponding page. At once, he noticed it was different. Whatever scene he had read, it wasn’t on this page. He scanned two pages forward and two pages backward, and still nothing. For the sake of argument, he scanned back one more page and there it was. Or at least, there part of it was.
He was right. The majority of the scene was missing from The Book. He felt the smart of betrayal and didn’t even understand why. There was nothing overtly graphic or politically insensitive or anti-establishment enough to cause alarm to anyone. It didn’t seem important enough to be censored. In fact, he had never heard of such censorship. Censorship itself was extinct. He had been raised in a censor-free environment. The only occasion in which things were removed from society was when they could cause actual damage.
Or at least that was what he had been told.
He looked down at the page and realized that if what he was reading was three pages prior to wherever it had originally been, then more than just the scene from the bar had been removed. If that was right, what had it been? A word on each page? A phrase? Perhaps it was something larger. Maybe an entire character had been removed. There was no telling. The truth was, The Catcher in the Rye had been altered and the only reason Holden even caught it was because he had known the story well enough to recognize the difference. The question that remained in his heart, as he knelt on the floor of his decaying apartment in the green glow of The Book, hung heavy in his chest and pulled him down toward the digital screen.
What else had been altered?
* * * * *
005-8021
A shrill noise squawked from the invoice pad as Marion stuffed it into the back of her pants before wiping the sleep from her eyes. As the men continued to unload the shipment from the truck, the sound of clinking beer bottles and the perfume of stale alcohol created a dissonance of sensory overload. They so grabbed her attention that she didn’t notice Holden walking up to the truck looking frantic and confused.
“Hi, Hold. What happened to you last night?”
“I need to know where these book pages came from. I…I nee…I need to know. I…you don’t understand. I read the entire book last night. I read the whole thing through because I just couldn’t believe…myself. I just couldn’t believe. So, I read it all the way through. And…I mean…I think I know it by heart enough to notice…if I had the whole book. So, I need to know where the rest of that book is.”
“Hang on, tiger,” Marion responded in a soothing tone, “Why don’t you pick up one of these boxes and help me bring it inside.” Holden’s erratic breathing pulsed with the bobbing of his head as he bent to lift the case of beer and follow her into the darkened bar. She studied his irregular behavior and hollered back to the truck, “I’ll catch up with you guys in a minute.”
Without warning, Holden ran straight to the bathroom. Marion couldn’t help but laugh. What she liked most about Holden was that he was a mystery she just couldn’t seem to solve. He was a different sort of man than she was accustomed to. She could never figure out what he was thinking. Although he was solid and predictable overall, there was a lingering question that always hung behind his eyes - a question she wanted to answer.
Holden glided from the men’s bathroom with a torn scrap of paper and slammed it on the cold metal bar. It had come from the wall. Pieces of other books, torn and bent, bordered the single page. “Thanks for destroying my bar. Books don’t come too cheap these days. Oh wait, there aren’t any more books,” she spat sarcastically, reaching for the page. He swiped it back, blinking frantically. She dropped her hands to her sharply curved hips and bit her tongue. “What’s going on, wack jack? You’re acting crazy.”
“I am going crazy,” he agreed, continuing to blink rapidly. “Do you have a copy of The Book…with you?”
She shrugged absent mindedly and glanced down at the invoice pad the delivery guys were waiting for. “Um…somewhere. Why? I don’t really read, Holden.”
“Listen. I have a feeling that something terrible is going on all around us and I need you to trust me, okay?”
“You’re being a cuckoo bird, but...go ahead.”
“I need you to take your Book and search all the pages in this bar. Every single page. Most of the stories are public domain by now, so it should be free. Go to the corresponding page in The Book and check the writing on the wall. See if things match up. I know it sounds crazy, but I’m telling you that this page here,” Holden lifted the single sheet he had torn from the bathroom wall, “This is from my favorite book…and it’s different.”
“What do you mean it’s different?”
“It’s been edited. The Editors of the Publishing House have deleted things.”
“So? Maybe there was some racism in there.” Marion chuckled to herself and noticed instantly that Holden wasn’t amused. “I doubt this is as big as you’re making it. But even if you’re right, so what? To be honest, I couldn’t care less. So, they deleted some stuff. What’s the big deal?”
“What’s the big deal? Do you understand the implications of editing without approval? If an original printing is different than what we’re reading today, what does that mean? The Book is like…a hundred years old. When did the information change? And why? Who decided that something needed to be altered from the original? And that it was okay to do so…”
“Holden, I care about you. Maybe more than I should. I know it’s not a secret. But you’re not acting like yourself and it’s a little scary. Do you think that maybe you might be getting worked up about something that’s not that important?”
Holden exhaled and looked down at the torn page, realizing that she may be right. There were hundreds of reasons why the story could have been edited over time. What if the original copy of the book had been destroyed at some point and this page was from another draft? Maybe descendants of the author had decided to change some things.
“I guess you could be right. I’m sorry I’ve been acting so…weird. I just…” Holden couldn’t find the right way to explain how finding the inaccuracy had made him feel. “It seemed to make the world…understandable.”
Marion poured them a couple pints before bringing the invoice pad out to the delivery truck. Holden brewed in his thoughts as they sat silently at the bar for a half hour. He still felt a need to understand what had happened. Something was still incomplete and he was almost positive that if he could read the original manuscript, every question he couldn’t put into words would be answered.
“Did you have a chance to talk to your mother last night?”
She nodded through sips. “Could’ve gone without that. The conversation centered around all the men she’s been dating. How they’re half her age and yet I can’t find a decent man…da…da…da…”
“What about the pages?”
“It was my grandfather’s idea, I guess. He found all these books in the attic when he moved here and figured that he should recycle them because it was frowned upon not to. This was before the laws were changed, so everyone was lenient as long as you found a way to use the books for some higher purpose. He used a bunch of them on the walls of the bar. Rest of them he tossed. That’s it.”
“So there’s no more pages left?” Holden muttered, crashing onto the cushion of the bar stool as he realized that he may never fully understand why the page was different. Accepting this reality was going to be hard and if he needed to start accepting it now, he was going to need some air. “Thanks Marion, I’ll pay you back for the wall. Can I just hang onto the page for a little while? I don’t know…I just feel like I need to…look over it again.”