The Book (42 page)

Before the boy could respond to the environment, the man said, “This is where I leave you. Just know that even at the bottom of the staircase you still have an opportunity to turn around. It’s important that you always recognize your freedom to choose. I may never see you again. So, allow me to be the one to congratulate you on making it through the first door.”

The boy named Moses removed his hat and stuffed it into his back pocket, as the man with the spiky blonde hair punched a code into the keypad beside the door, scanned his eye in front of a small glass spoon that seemed a part of the wall and turned away. A gust of treated air escaped the pressurized door as it cracked an inch. The boy was too nervous to notice that the man had already left him alone. But he’d had courage enough to come to the mall and courage enough to find the store. He didn’t think twice as he reached for the hefty metal handle, pulled the door wide and walked through.

The store he had been in was on the third floor of quite a wide and vast shopping system. But the staircase that he followed down had no exit for floors and floors. When he reached the single door at the bottom, there was a rectangular opening at the center at eye level and a series of keypads. He glanced up, tired and wondering how deep he had come. Because, without a doubt, he was stories below the main level.

He rapped his knuckles on the door and the rectangular window slid open to reveal a man’s eyes. A grungy, deep voice spoke, “The number?”

“Ninety-seven thousand, five hundred and forty-four.”

The door opened with a series of beeps and clamping. The African American man standing before him was immense in stature. His face was scarred and war-torn. His arms immense enough to tear the boy in half. And yet, a look of surprise and a tinge of fear took over him and he tripped over his own feet as he stumbled back to allow the boy entrance into the darkened room beyond. Again this was a reaction the boy was used to.

“You’re through door number two,” the man said before leaving through the staircase.

The door closed with determination and the boy was left alone once more. The space he found himself in was dim with a few florescent lights that glowed faintly from the ceiling. The room wasn’t very large. There were counters and rack systems, broken and lying unkempt around the room. Empty shelves lined the walls beside the disturbing presence of antique plasma television screens that flickered occasionally, as if trying desperately to welcome the visitor with advertising. The boy realized in an instant that he was inside a store from the shopping system that had once been the greatest feature in Illinois, before the rest of the world followed the idea.

It had been completely underground, below an enormous park with a small restaurant. After seventy years had passed, it was no longer a novelty and it fell into disrepair like so many other historical buildings. Apparently it had been preserved by someone. Purchased and covered with a new system in the very same spot so as to keep the lower system safe. Whatever the plan had been for the future of that space and whether or not it could be used for tourism, didn’t matter. At that moment it was being used by the group Moses was attempting to locate.

Now standing in what had previously been an early edition of the Book store, he realized that the front for the faction he was trying to reach had been surreptitiously hidden behind the very object they had been attempting to overthrow. The boy looked to the walls and saw vintage advertising from generations earlier, when The Book had first been published. The posters had old images of bulky digital devices with cumbersome cords and happy faces. People with stacks of old paper books, handing them over to a government official with a grin. A sign read,
Recycle your books for the sake of your planet
. On a separate poster was an image of the earth with the recycling symbol as a large land mass. Over this, the words said,
Make your Mother proud! Read The Book.

A fascinating series of posters were rolled together in a cubby hole and wrapped in a rubber band. The boy pulled them out carefully and unfurled the plastic material to find many images of famous movie stars posing by themselves in front of an empty book shelf with a copy of The Book in their perfectly manicured hands. Each of the posters was slightly different, but the subtle smirks on their doctored faces had the same arrogant, yet engaging manner. Along the base of the poster was a single word, running along in wide, bold lettering. A single word that captured all the haunting reality that had recently been revealed to him. The word was:

READ

The most intriguing of all, beside a life size cut out of some early advertising mascot, was a recognizable poster of Uncle Sam pointing to the reader. It was identical to the image he had seen so many times before, only now his clothes were white and green and the words below him said,
I Want YOU to Read the Book!
As the boy took in the rest of the darkened, decaying remnant of a once glorious champion of technology, he saw a frayed vinyl banner that read,
Save the Environment and Enlarge your Mind
in sans serif green.
ASPHYXIATE
was spray painted in wide swaths of black over the word:
Enlarge
. He was sure that whoever sprayed over the banner found a simple pleasure in editing the Editors.

Still alone, the boy inspected the rest of the room, but there wasn’t much to admire. Discarded graphic advertising and once-artistic furniture stacked over remnants of unusable technology. The only item he recognized that was still working was an ancient digital frame resting on the corner of a cobweb-crusted, green acrylic display counter. The boy approached the desk and turned the frame carefully. The screen was cracked and dusty. He wiped at it with the back of his thumb and could see the picture currently on display. It was similar to many he had seen in his lifetime. The photograph of someone standing in front of the bean in Chicago’s Millennium Park. The man wore simple clothes that were no longer in style and he stood with his hands down at his sides like a soldier at attention. But there was something odd about him. Different than so many of the photographs he had seen over time of friends or family in front of the bean. He was elated. Every pixel the camera captured seemed to confirm this. His smile was stretched from ear to ear and his eyes were bright and wide. The boy wondered what could make the man so overjoyed. And then he remembered the story he had just read, the printed book that was still warm in his jacket pocket. This was the man from the story. Holden Clifford, on the day he had branded the bean. Suddenly the grin made perfect sense. That was before everything changed. When their group was still simple and Martin Trust hadn’t told him about the Library of Congress.

The image darkened under his thumb and a new one arrived. A large group of people were standing around a fire near a lake. There were two rows of them, and many were arm in arm. Along the first row were many children and young adults. They were book ended by a heavy-set Hawaiian man and an elderly gentleman in a bow tie who gripped his walker like a gymnast on a pommel horse. His smile was faint and guarded. It was Winston and Moby.

The second row of friends were standing on a wooden pier that stretched to the faded arches of a distant gazebo. The boy noticed him at once. Holden was standing toward the middle with his arm latched firmly around the shoulder of the man next to him. They carried the smile of old friends and the boy knew it had to be Shane. To Holden’s left was a woman with strong features and tattoos on her shoulders. Marion. When the image dissolved to a candid of the same photo, the flames in the bonfire altered from the wind, the boy noticed that Marion had turned to look at Holden. The smile she carried was full of adoration and longing. Of course it was.

The boy heard footsteps and returned the frame to its place on the sleek, green surface.

From behind a half wall came a woman. She was tall and tired, with a face that didn’t face him, hidden behind loose curls of stringy, horse hair. The rest was drawn into a long pony tail. The woman wore a visage of conflict and courage. And when the boy could finally see her face, he noticed how the lines that gouged her forehead in asymmetrical streaks resembled a Japanese seascape painting, where thin, delicate waves of wrinkles stretched on toward the setting sun.

She glanced at the boy and took him in for a moment before pulling a chair out from the acrylic counter. Until the moment she showed him the double doors to freedom, there was a cold indifference to everything she did.

The boy reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a tattered edition of the printed story called
The Book
. The woman took it from him quickly and flipped to the inside cover before releasing an exasperated noise and slid it back to him through the dust, frustrated.

“This is an old copy number, which means you got this book from someone else. If you got it from someone else, that means they chose to remove it from their shelf and give it to you. When you leave here, give it back to them and get your own copy.”

“I’m sorry…I…” He didn’t know what to say. She had seen his face, hadn’t she? He was shocked that she was talking to him that way. No one talked to him that way. Oddly enough, he found it comforting.

“Everyone should have a copy of this book. Don’t recycle it. If people lend it to others, they are just as much to blame as those who may eventually destroy it. The more books exist, the more the truth I have written remains immortal. If there’s one thing we’ve learned through all of this, it’s that choosing to reuse items of power, handing them off to others without care and soon losing them, has been our ruin. We have the paper. We have the means. Everyone needs a copy of my book. The less copies out there, the fewer minds we’re reaching.”

Had he heard her right?

His words were slow and defenseless to someone who added little weight to them. “It was my brother’s.”

The woman shook her head and fiddled with the garbage at her feet. “I don’t need to know how you heard about us. So many people, when they first come here, want to tell me how they heard about the story. Who gave them
The Book
. How they got here. What they can do to help us. I don’t care about any of that. I just need to know that you’re ready to do whatever we ask of you and to allow your talents and abilities to be used to further our cause.”

She seemed slightly irritated as she continued. “We are at war. And with war come casualties. You’ve already walked through the first and second door. There’s only one more door…once you go through it…that’s it.”

“I told you that I don’t need to know,” she said, rising from her seat. With her back to him, the boy felt a certain confusion coursing through his mind.

Had she said what he thought she had said?

“Excuse me…but did I hear you say that this is
your
book? As in,
you
wrote it?” He lifted the dilapidated stack of printed pages, looked at it for a moment and returned his eyes to her, recalling the introduction. “So you knew him? You knew Holden?” The woman nodded in silence and he couldn’t help his need to understand. “How?”

She paced the room for a moment before approaching the boy and, without warning, began unbuttoning her tattered shirt. The boy, not of age to see such things, sat back embarrassed and shocked. What he saw in quick glances careened a flare of understanding through him and his jaw locked. The skin beyond the dirty white bra that hung loose on her flat chest was mangled from the stretching of skin and age, but he could still read the words that were branded across her chest:
Don’t Read The Book
. Such sudden realization made her next words unnecessary.

“Holden was my father. He was the greatest man who ever lived. If I hear you say anything different…I’ll feed you to the fire myself.”

The boy agreed. As he watched her button her shirt and stare down at the digital frame on the desk, he understood her obsessive response. In fact, the first time the boy had learned of Holden Clifford, the terrorist Holden Clifford, was in school, where he had been taught about the destruction of our world’s precious storage of printed books. Around his tenth birthday, when he received his first copy of The Book, he stumbled onto the story the government official Martin Trust had written years prior that described, in detail, the story of his friend, Holden Clifford and the anarchy of the misguided
The Free Thinkers
. The story was called Propaganda. Even at that age, the boy knew that what he had been reading was a lie. And that this woman before him, Jane Clifford, had written a story that told the truth no one believed.

“That will change,” she finished. Jane, now tousled by maturity and a conflict he had only read about, nodded and thumbed flippantly over her shoulder. “Are you ready to go through the final door?”

“Yes,” he replied too quickly. He rose from his seat and followed her toward the darkened glass doors of the prehistoric store. Ready for the biggest decision of his life.