The Book (43 page)

With the crank of an angry handle, the doors gave way and the boy was ushered into an entirely new world. A secret world, like nothing he had ever seen. As he stepped out onto the filthied floor, the boy found that he had guessed right. He stood in the lofty expanse of an ancient, underground mall that had been taken over by the
Ex Libris
.

The serpentine pathways, once white and enticing and stretching over a chasm to the floors of shopping below, were now mangy and lined with cracked plastic bins of random shapes and colors. The undulating facades that led high to diamond cut skylights and sharply geometric ceilings were now cracked and boarded over, stripped with garlands of cobwebs and wire that provided electricity to the thousands of hanging light bulbs in the space above and beyond. Jane, looking suddenly more warm and happy to have him beside her, led the boy toward the end of a long shopping strip until they could reach a railing and look down upon the world below.

At the junction of so many pathways, the boy found himself at the main entrance to the mall and facing an immense wall of elevators that were stuck at odd heights and utilized as storage. As he approached the railing and the ramps to go down, he was immediately bombarded by the sounds of systems working all around him. The network of paths and shops, once covered in decorative glass awnings and digital advertisements, were now teeming with machinery and hundreds of grubby people carrying supplies. There were spindles and cranks, plates of metal that somersaulted over one another, gears and coils and rotating platforms that all seemed to be running off of a team of five workers riding stationary bicycles.

Behind this, in an area that appeared to have once served food, groups of people were reading under an enormous green board that was covered in lists of book titles in white, scratchy writing. It was a chalkboard. He had never seen one before. And he gradually came to the conclusion, through the stacks of fresh paper all around them, that the lists were of new books they had been printing like the one he still grasped in his hand. The machines were also running ingeniously off the water from the elderly waterfall to the right of the elevators. One of the water features that had been so popular when his grandfather was a boy. As he studied the massive apparatus, he decided that what he was seeing was a single, manual printing press. They didn’t work by scanning or ink jets like The Book had told him. Each letter was chosen very carefully and by a person that loved each word they spelled. The people were printing with blocks and paper that they had made by hand beside a waterfall that left puddles of cool water at their feet and a pleasant mist in the air. It was, perhaps, the most majestic sight he had ever seen.

When he was finished admiring it all, Jane walked him down the next alleyway, to where they passed countless miles of shops that stretched to the stories below and all of which were filled with furniture and families and toddlers. He would never have guessed that the mall would have been retrofitted in such a way. But it made sense. They needed to be protected. They needed a home, just like they once had at Winston Pratt’s. So all the stores in that wing had been converted into simple, small apartments.

Home again, home again
, the boy thought, as they continued on.

At the opposite end of the underground mall, where the clamor of the immense printing presses could never be heard, there came a delicate glow from a wide skylight above. Once he was under its delicate rays, the boy understood where it had come from. In the system above them was a great, rectangular art installation that stretched high, beyond the roof, and was covered in tiles of unreadable black and white script. It must have been hollow and installed only to provide light to that section of the underground.

And as the boy contemplated what could have been so important to warrant such effort, he came to a long string of chalkboards that wove in and out of every shop for a mile in each direction. Up close, he could see that they were all coated in lists of books. Stories that were still missing pages. Looking down excitedly to the four stories of old shopping below, lit delicately by the sun, he saw stacks upon stacks of bookshelves, hiding behind a vast configuration of empty stores. The moment he saw the spray painted genre titles above each of the doors, shadowing the ancient, illuminated signage, the boy’s dream was confirmed. An enormous library of printed paper books was directly below his feet. He couldn’t believe it. Even after staring for ten minutes and taking in all the hundreds of people who walked the network of roads that threaded across the chasm to the bottom, he still couldn’t believe his eyes. Even with the Library of Congress burned to the ground, the
Ex Libris
had found more books than anyone, in their wildest imaginations, could have dreamt possible.

“How?” he asked, his voice breathless.

“Finch.” Jane replied, referencing the man from the story who had sold books on the black market. “When they had a funeral service for my father, and they discussed burying his favorite book in his honor, Finch was reminded of something that happened all over the world during The Great Recycling. It was a thought that he, nor anyone else, had ever entertained, because it was disrespectful to disturb the deceased. But during that time, people who loved their books too much to see them mulched by the government asked their family to respect their wishes and, at their death, they were cremated and placed in an urn to make room in their coffin for something far more important than their body.”

“For books?”

“For love,” she corrected. “They loved their characters. Their authors. The writing. What the stories meant to them. And they simply couldn’t go to their graves knowing the pages they cried over…the ones that made them who were, would ever be destroyed. We discussed the idea for a long time, with many of the families, and decided to act in the best interest of the stories that were hidden and waiting in every county in the world. And it was almost as if those people, those lovers of words, knew that one day we would need their novels because we discovered that every grave stone with a book etched beside the name of the deceased from that time would be filled with literature. So it was, with deep respect and unending gratitude to those sensible enough to see their worth, that we retrieved this library from the readers that had been protecting it for us and then laid them respectfully back into the ground.”

“Where the books had been resting.”

Jane nodded, finished the thought for him. “Resting in peace.”

As a few people began to notice him, the new boy standing beside their famed leader, they stopped and lowered their books. More people noticed the hitch in their pace and stopped as well, turning to see what was so important. And then they saw him also. Whispers spread across the system of ancient stores and the machines slowed until all reading and all speech stopped mid-sentence. Below the boy, and under his smiling face, the librarians stopped shelving. The binders stopped binding. The teachers stopped teaching. Everyone stopped and stood and looked up at the boy that had just entered their home.

Nearby, in a room with many books, there stood a burly Hawaiian giant with tattoos across his neck and a thin chicken-legged old man who was rambling on to one of the younger children that they were supposed to ask permission before taking one of the books down from the shelves. The kid giggled and scurried back into the mall with the book. When Shane turned to chase him, he noticed the lines of people along the walkway, standing and staring up at the level above. He kicked Moby in the shin and waved him over. Something was going on.

As they approached the door, they noticed the child circling past groups of people who were holding stacks of books and gazing with grins on their tired faces. With even, arthritic steps, the once-great men stepped out onto the walkway and reached for the railing. Finally there, they squinted up at all the fuss.

In the still silence of the nation of readers, Holden’s daughter felt a tear escape her eyes for the first time since she was a child. They were clapping. The riot of applause was so loud; it could have brought the mall to the ground above them. But even if someone had heard them, it would not matter. Their freedom was alive. Jane reached into her pocket and took out a single set of silver fingernail clippers. She handed them to the boy who took them eagerly. He rotated the wing and prepared to cut, under the words
Ex Libris
, but found a different phrase etched into the metal. He pushed down on the sharpened nail of his pointer finger and felt the engraving on his thumb.

Don’t read The Book.

* * * * *

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

My book is a work of dystopian fiction. I do not presume to know what the ramifications of digital books will be on the future of traditional publishing. I am only, in good, old-fashioned, make-believe, assuming what route the next generations will take, based on the current state of recycling, sustainability, the disregard of the typed or printed word, and online information databases like Wikipedia – where anyone can edit the historical truth. I find it apropos that the completion of my story coincides (to the day) with the unfortunate passing of J.D. Salinger, the author of
The Catcher in the Rye
, and the poignant announcement of the
iPad
by Apple. If the progression of digital music is any indication, handheld electronic media devices (THE BOOK, in my novel) will become popular with younger generations and reading will be preferred through this new medium.  Of course, I do not wish for the e-book to fail. Everyone should rally behind such convenient innovation. My impetus for this story lies in the importance of the printed word and what it used to mean for us as human beings.

My hope is that not only would my book gain appreciation as a cautionary tale against abandoning the written or printed word, but that it could potentially revolutionize the thinking of readers across the world. Young readers that will one day run this country. That they would feel a duty to themselves and their future children to keep truth and freedom alive by continuing to read from printed books and passing laws to protect their digital content from censorship. And it is never too late to begin.

For those of you who bought this book for a 300 page escape, I thank you for choosing my novel and considering this story. I am honored. For the rest, the ones who hear ‘Ex Libris’ and want to stand, the remainder of this note is meant for you. I am a simple man. Not a ‘revolutionary’ in any sense of the word. But this story resonated with me as a lover of books and so I felt it was my duty to write it and distribute it to as many people as possible. I am proud to call myself a citizen of the United States and, if you are an American, you should be as well. For many reasons. One of which is that we are fortunate enough to have a government that listens to its people and cares. So let us open our mouths and raise our voices in unison.

On the following page, you’ll find a letter that I have written to the Senators of this great country. I ask you, dear reader, to join me in asking them to protect our books from future, digital censorship. After a few minutes on the internet, you can make a real difference. Carefully read the letter and, if you agree, go to www.congress.org and sign up to write a similar letter to the senators from your state.

I know that my request is irrational and that my dream to protect something that already seems protected is far fetched, but while we may never know the extent of our reach, we can at least raise our hands to their highest height and hope to catch the attention of the leaders we so trust. I’ll leave you with a quote from the famous playwright George Bernard Shaw who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Your Author,

M. Clifford

* * * * *

Dear Senator,

I am a constituent of yours and I am contacting you on behalf of Michael Clifford – an author who has written a dystopian novel, THE BOOK under the pen name M. Clifford. This is a page from his book. I urge you to carefully consider the fictitious topic of his novel and use your elected influence to ensure such actions never happen.

THE BOOK takes place in a future that looks similar to our own, where all paper has been recycled, including books, because all information is available on a digital format. As information is easily manipulated, the writing of our forefathers has been subtly altered, one word at a time, to appease the controlling agenda of a corrupted (albeit fictitious) government. There is only one information source. Since there is so much information and control is subtle, American citizens are unaware that their freedoms have been taken.

We live in an age when internet encyclopedias can be edited by anyone, at any time. Our documents can be easily manipulated by PDF software. We are on the crest of a digital renaissance and the time to protect ourselves from corruption is now. I specifically urge you reflect on the following:

Any published text, printed, digital or public domain, that had been approved by law during its inception, should not be altered on the basis of any present-day law of censorship, for any reason.

This text should also be protected against all alterations, minor or major, and any form of editing from any person not legally allowed to act out such edits.