* * * * *

 

 

010-23472

 

 

He had been to her apartment before. It was on a night when he and Shane had been at a popular north side restaurant celebrating the birthday of a mutual friend. They were lost in an immense dining room, mingling through a large group of Library regulars, when Marion pulled Holden aside and asked if he could drive her home. She had forgotten her present. They wouldn’t be missed, and knowing that she lived on Belmont, he was sure to find a much needed pack of cigarettes. Of course, that was before he had quit smoking for his daughter’s sake. Now, with all the stress that The Book had brought on, he thanked God that monkey was no longer digging its nails in his back. But because Shane had nabbed his last smoke that night, he had agreed to drive her and they snuck out with another party.

The thing Holden remembered most about her apartment was that it hadn’t looked at all like he’d expected. When she opened the door and let him in he noticed that the interior was subtle and calm, orderly and clean. For the first time, he saw her differently. If he had walked in to find three cats lounging about, incense burning on the television from the mouth of some angry, clay figurine and sheer orange fabric hanging between open doorways, he wouldn’t have thought twice. But the sight of such a fresh apartment gave Marion a new, unexpected dimension that made him notice her. So when she offered him a drink, his guard was down and he accepted (he was used to ordering drinks from her anyway). When she turned on the light to the kitchen, his mind awoke and he retracted.

A drink? No problem. If it was just a free drink, that would have been great. But, what Marion was offering had been: A drink…and.

It wasn’t that he didn’t find her attractive. It was that fear had overtaken him. Fear of what, he didn’t know. Fear of relationships? Maybe. Commitment? Hell, he screwed that up with Eve. Fear of women? Hello Freud. Fear of love? Yeah, maybe. What he realized, as they drew close to one another in her entryway without much space for Marion to put her jacket on while reaching for an umbrella (It was raining again. Why was it always raining?), was that it had been her lips. For some reason, he had a fear of her lips, as if kissing her would draw him deeply into some form of unrestrained existence. It was a mysterious feeling and there was no reason for it. Marion had never given off the impression that she could sustain such power over Holden. But the thought frightened him all the same because he knew he would succumb to it.

The van jostled to the right as Holden turned the wheel powerfully to the left, banking around a parked car in the lot across the street from her building. He rolled into the nearest spot and killed the engine. The continuous chatter of rain kept their eyes darting about and Holden had to take a few calm breaths before turning to her.

“Alright Marion, I probably don’t have too much time, so I need to know where your diary is, exactly.”

“It’s on my bedside table and looks identical to my Book, if you can remember what it looked like. It came as a companion to The Book when I got it on my eighth birthday.”

Holden drooped his head and looked down. “I’m sorry I broke your Book, Marion. And no…I don’t remember what it looked like.” She nodded and held up her hands, as if modeling the shape would somehow help him imagine the device.

“It’s dark green and orange with some thin, metal details. Like geometric shapes and things, I don’t know. There isn’t much on the table so it should be easy to find.”

Holden cranked the thick handle to the door and it swung open in the wind, scratching the car beside him. That didn’t matter. He tugged his jacket against his neck in preparation for the rain and heard the jingling of Marion’s keys. She had pulled them from her pocket and held them out for him. When their hands met, Marion reached across the wheel and grabbed the scruff of his neck, pulling him close to kiss him with all the shivering spirit she had. The kiss between them was fleeting and simple, but it spoke of her undying trust for Holden and the volumes of dread they both shared in that moment, completely unsure of the profoundness into which they were embarking.

“I have to go Marion.” he said, when she pulled back, embarrassed.

“I know. I’m just afraid I’ll never see you again.” She leaned toward the window. “It’s stupid.”

“I’ll be right back.” Holden glinted a delicate smile and closed the van door. He grabbed onto the truss work that was latched to the top of his van, hopped onto the thick, driver’s side tire and unfastened the rope that clung to the longest ladder. He pulled it free, threaded his arm through the middle rung and hoisted the ladder onto his shoulder before striding boldly toward the polished surface of the steel structure that was her apartment building.

The only information that Holden had to go off of was what Winston had fed him that morning. Any fear that gathered in his chest and moved his legs, fear that caused his heart to dash with dread, was born from the sense that they were in danger. Holden felt that the information he was holding, including the bags of pages in the van, were extremely important and hauntingly dangerous. If what Winston said was correct, he couldn’t assume he was safe. There were layers here. Layers of danger, where one element could be more dangerous than another and he was choosing, rather foolishly, to walk further into it once again. Willingly. By returning to the bar, he risked. By taking Marion and the garbage bags, he risked. And now, by going into her apartment, he risked. But wasn’t Marion his responsibility? She was innocent in this. He ripped the page off the wall; he learned the truth; he sought out the museum exhibit, the antique dealer and eventually Winston; she was innocent in this and he couldn’t allow her to suffer over his lust for the truth. He wouldn’t allow her to be harmed over his need for answers to questions that should have been left alone. The least he could do for ruining her life was attempt to retrieve her diary.

Thankfully, his fear was overpowering and it often forced him to think creatively. He assumed that, by entering her building as a common worker, someone with a job to do, he wouldn’t be bothered. What kind of guy would carry an enormous ladder into a building when he needed to look inconsequential or would need a quick getaway? He hoped that this attitude would give him looks of disregard if anyone involved with The Book were waiting for her to come home. Walking around with a badge of blamelessness was always a safer route.

As he entered her building, climbed the quiet stairs to her floor and walked down the empty hallway to her apartment, his mind began its cynical re-evaluation. When he pulled up to The Library, hadn’t one of the regulars been yanking on the door? Maybe it had been the same guy later, just searching for a drink to drown his Sunday sorrows. What if all this had been the ravings of a senile old man? What if they were fine? What if a lot of people were aware of the edits in The Book? Holden considered that maybe there had been a clear explanation online and if he had only taken a moment to review his curiosities on the internet, he would have found that they were perfectly safe. That this was a government sanctioned, socially accepted detail that he had stumbled onto and overreacted about; and some elderly man’s conspiracy theory made him yank Marion out of the business she had destroyed over some perplexing anxiety. It could have all been for nothing.

This attitude sustained Holden and strengthened him as he reached for her keys and drew close to the door to her apartment.

One of the interesting details about Marion’s building was that there were short, rectangular windows above each door that could be propped open a few inches to allow air to circulate. At times, it made the hallways stink of many different scents that should never circulate, but it remained an interesting architectural detail and Marion, it seemed, was one of the few people that took advantage of the window. It was by that small detail, that Holden was saved.

As he neared the door with the ladder balanced evenly on his shoulder, he stopped. There were noises. Faint, suspicious noises that could have been anything. If the window above her door had been closed, Holden would have ignored the noises and unlocked the deadbolt. With it open, he could tell that they were coming from her apartment. There was a scratching. A shuffling. Then footsteps followed by the cracking sound of a plastic bag being whipped open in hollow, suspicious air.

There were people inside her apartment and he was standing at the door, holding her keys. Holden quickly realized how foolish and dangerous it had been to go into that building. To think, for even a moment, that he was safe enough to risk entering her apartment. He holstered the keys and walked silently back to the staircase, being careful not to knock the walls with the ladder. He didn’t look back, didn’t act out of the ordinary and didn’t rush. He calmly returned to the lower level and exited the building, as if nothing had happened. Winston had been right. Marion’s simple act of searching The Book to confirm the writing on the pages from her walls had launched a chain of events that caused men to conceal themselves inside her apartment and search through her stuff. It made him appreciate how right he was to race back and rescue her, despite the improbability. If he hadn’t, she may have already been inside one of those bags that had been whipped frivolously open.

Holden could see through the rain and passing cars that Marion was sitting calmly in the front seat. Her eyes were closed and her hands were pressed together, as if she were praying. And he was right. She had been praying. In fact, it was the most intense time with God she had ever experience. But once she heard him reattaching the ladder to the roof, Marion swung her hands to the sides of the vinyl seat and gripped tight, staring intensely at the driver’s side window. He had come back quickly and she was certain of the reason – Holden had found her diary on the bedside table without a problem. When he opened the door looking frightened, his hair and shirt soaked in the rain, and tossed his jacket to her saying, “Cover up your face,” Marion guessed she was wrong.

Holden started the car and put it in reverse, waiting to move until she was completely covered. “What am I doing Holden? Why do I have to hide?”

“There are men in your apartment and, more than likely, they’ll review the traffic cameras out here at some point. We cannot have them trace you back to me because…right now I think my apartment is the only place we can go.”

Marion agreed with a frightened nod and pulled Holden’s thick work jacket over her head, all confidence, all strong self-confident sprit within her, stripped away. Holden couldn’t believe, as he drove calmly out of the parking lot and in the direction of Ashland Avenue, (Home again, home again. Jiggety Jig) that the actions of only a handful of hours could have altered their lives so dramatically. With life changing so fast, he was almost unable to imagine tomorrow or the next day or a week in the future. Marion couldn’t stay in his apartment without eventually being linked to him. And how long could Holden go before they, the men with the plastic bags, started combing secretively through his apartment. His small story, his small life, had become so suddenly immense.

And as Holden drove his van through the dismal, dreary street, he felt as if a wide, effervescent green light was radiating from his van, pulsing a warning in the rain to those who would be looking.

 

Alert: those within the green light know the truth.

Here’s where you can find them.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

011-25602

 

 

A thin needle of pain bore its way into Holden’s neck, stirring him from dreamless sleep. Without opening his eyes, he pushed himself to a sitting position and hung his head over his knees. Normally his neck and back accepted the discomfort of the couch, but with all he had gone through in twenty-four hours, even his body seemed unsure of itself. The boards beneath Holden’s bare feet knocked and groaned as he stood and walked to the toilet, trying to be as silent as possible. The door to his bedroom was half open, but he waited to peek in until he was finished with his morning duties. Marion was resting over the covers of his bed, the picture of tranquility, and Holden closed the door. Better if she were asleep while he determined what to do with her.

He dragged his feet toward the bay window where he normally sat to read each morning before work and felt his ritual calling to him in the item that sometimes gleamed in the morning sun. Not today, though. Weather sucked.

The Book was tilted out toward him, looking innocent and full of knowledge. It pulsed a beacon of desire and Holden smiled in fear at the device’s uncanny ability to draw him in like the landing lights of a runway despite the horrible truth he had learned. Holden glided toward it, inch by inch, until The Book was just below his hand. He flicked out his pointer finger and allowed the sharpened nail to trace the lines in the leather cover, almost helpless against its power over him. It was wrong, Holden knew that now, but he couldn’t help himself. For so long The Book had been his salvation against the monotony of life, an object of harmony in a world of uproarious boredom. The habit of losing himself in its pixels when life grew difficult was so ingrained in Holden that he found himself lifting the lie machine and flipping back the thin cover.

From the center of the dark screen, the recycling icon bled forward in the brightest green, sparkling and intense. It welcomed him with the gentlest animation and Holden fell further as the arrows followed one another on their triangular path. It throbbed as the darkened background turned the white of stagnant water and the recycling symbol faded away in a haze of greenish brown. The Gratis Press digital newspaper arrived at the center of the screen and Holden awoke fully in the shock of what he saw on the front page. For no reason, other than the bold black text of the headline, he hurried to his bedroom door to check on Marion before discarding The Book on his entryway table and racing to the television in the kitchen. On the plasma screen was a photograph of Marion. Holden glanced into the living room before raising the volume enough to make out what the news anchors were saying. The man’s cyborgian face read the news alert with a cold, expressionless tone. Holden inclined his ear closer to the speaker to hear it more clearly.

“…to the ground late last night. An icon of a generation long past that was struck down too close to home. The flames over The Library burned until two o’clock this morning when the Chicago Fire Department was finally able to gain control over the inferno. Marion Tabor, the proprietor, is now wanted for suspicion of terrorist activities linked to the anarchist group The Free Thinkers. If you have any information on her whereabouts or can provide assistance to the government in any way, please contact the number listed below.”

Holden blinked. It was much worse than he’d thought. He fought the urge to turn the television off and throw it out the window, but leaned closer instead. The newscasters broke to banter about how sad it was that these terrorists could be lurking anywhere and that this historical monument, this watchtower of environmentalism in the city, was now gone. All those wonderful walls, covered in book pages, were all burned in the fire. They were talking as if The Library had been their favorite bar and the disingenuous feelings made him sick.

An image of the charred and blackened bar came to the screen. The sidewalk, lined with police tape, was covered in shadowed flashes of the flames from the night’s blaze. Holden couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The Library was gone, and so perfectly. Not a brick on the businesses nearby, or a board on the elevated tracks above, had been harmed.

Old images of the interior fluttered to the screen, showing Marion’s grandfather shaking hands with the Mayor of Chicago. Another showed a billiard room that had eventually been replaced by handicap accessible bathrooms. The mug shot of Marion shrank to the bottom of the screen beside a phone number in bright white text. After adding that her picture and the information on how to contact the authorities would be up on the screen throughout the duration of the broadcast day, the newscasters moved on to the topic of a festival in Old Town. Holden backed away from the television, knowing exactly what the broadcast meant – it would be that much harder to get around with Marion. More than likely, she would be added to a Most Wanted list that covered every major news outlet in the world. Marion Tabor, the innocent woman in his bedroom, was now a wanted felon. A terrorist, apparently, to society with a face that would be published generously along the waves of the ever-ebbing internet.

Holden turned the television off, knowing their options were limited. He went to the refrigerator to pour a glass of orange juice and, after seeing her in the living room, spilled half the bottle on the floor. Marion was sitting on the chair in the bay window, holding his leather Book. Her face was drawn and out of place, with eyes that dragged, tired and confused. She was reading the article. And from her expression, the typed version was more detailed than the televised version. After cleaning up the floor, Holden poured two glasses from the rest of the orange juice and tiptoed into the living room, so as not to startle her, wishing he hadn’t left The Book open on the table.

Marion wouldn’t look up at him. She was a part of the article now and she wouldn’t allow herself to leave until she finished reading. Holden rested the glass on the window ledge and returned to the awkward discomfort of the couch. When she was done, Marion closed the cover and rested The Book silently on the window ledge. She looked out the window, through streaks of rain water that created asymmetrical patterns and stripes on the glass, and studied the life below. Children racing to school. People walking their dogs under multi-colored umbrellas. A jet plane cutting its way through ever-angry clouds. Holden didn’t need to ask Marion to know what she was feeling. Her freedom was gone. It was gone and, more than likely, forever.

“Marion. I know this has gotta be hard for you and I wish there was something I could say that could give you a sense of peace, but the fact is…we need to get out of here. Only the people who have seen or read the news this morning will be looking for you. I wish we could take a few days to mull things over, but you’re too exposed being here in the city and the time to leave is now.” Holden could see that Marion was ready to talk, so he took a nervous sip of his drink, rested it on the coffee table and waited.

“Holden,” Marion whispered, still staring out the window. “My life is over. There’s nothing I can do to defend myself. These people are…so powerful. This whole thing is so much larger than…I don’t think there is anything I can do except hide and live…long enough until they eventually catch me.” Her head tilted to her chest and Holden rose to place a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry about the bar, Marion. I know how much that meant to you and your family.”

Marion shrugged off his tenderness and turned to face him. “What have you gotten me into, Holden? I have nowhere to go.”

He frowned and sat on the footstool beside her. “I think I need to take you to the man who started all of this. He may welcome you in, based on the circumstances. His home is large. And he lives far enough away from the city that…you know. I just have to tell work that I’ll be late.”

Unable to deal with such intense emotions and not wanting to appear weak anymore in front of him, Marion turned back to the window and nodded.

By the time Holden walked over to the phone and left a message for Numbskull, Marion had already packed what little she’d brought with and they were soon outside the door to his apartment, sneaking around corners. Thankfully Holden had parked near the back entrance. He assumed they may need to avoid contact with the two other people renting space in the minty-fresh house. Holden opened the rear doors of the van, moved some debris aside and reversed it toward the back entrance. Other than sitting on the last remaining pieces of the bar in black garbage bags, there wasn’t much for Marion, in terms of comfort. But she climbed into the back without complaint and closed the doors.

As Holden turned the key and they drove off toward Wilmette, unseen by the eyes of the public, Marion had already accepted a horrifying truth. For the rest of her life, she would never again step foot within the city limits of Chicago.

And she was right.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

012-27248

 

 

The cold rain returned, insistent on soaking the Second City. It had been weeks of inclement weather, but finally, along Chicago’s sinful fringe, the clouds were breaking to extend a hand of photosynthetic peace. Marion poked her head out nervously from between the front seats to see the first sliver of blue sky in a lifetime. As they wove the snaking streets of Wilmette, that fragile moment of sunshine brightened her despair. The greens of the trees shone more saturated against the dark gray clouds. The multitude of branches and limbs flickered the light of life onto the glistening ladders and waterlogged windshield of the environmentally-impolite van. Kneeling uncomfortably on the filthy plywood floor, dreading the prospect of hiding away for the rest of her life, Marion was unexpectedly serene. The setting of where she would live now blessed her with a few crumbs of hope.

When the van slowed, Holden pointed toward the large Tudor estate, shocking Marion by its enormity. As they drew near, she could see that the home stepped back an acre from the main road. Pebbles knocked the side of the van as Holden navigated them along the curling path that cut through a pristine yard with trees that speckled the lawn’s thick green blades with intention. To Marion, it was as if the trees were so free that they could uproot and mingle where they pleased, as long as they shaded the leaded glass windows. Holden was already mumbling through the pitch he would deliver to Winston as he parked the van where it had been a day earlier and hopped out.

“Holden,” Marion began, as he wrenched the handle to the rusty side door, “How do you know you can trust this guy?”

He reached out for Marion and eased her gently to the gravel driveway. “I guess….it’s because he trusted me first.” She forced herself to nod in agreement as he dragged the garbage bags from the van. “I know you’re scared. I am too. But I promise I’ll keep you safe.” Holden turned to face her with an assuring grin. “This is much bigger than the both of us. I don’t know what we can do at this point. We need someone with answers.”

“How does he know so much?”

Holden slid the door closed and stared at rain-smattered gravel. “I have no idea.”

They shared an expression of strength and approached the door of the estate, gripping the tightly compacted garbage bags of old book pages. Within moments of their knocking, Winston was at the door, greeting his guests as if he had been waiting for them.

“Holden, I’m glad to see you again. And Marion…” his aged voice seemed to ask, “It’s a pleasure.” He held up his hand as they entered, halting her obvious question, “Yes, I know your name. I do own a television.”

“I was going to call. But I…well…”

“I’m certain you have an entertaining story waiting in the wings for me.” Winston closed his gray eyes and nodded. When he opened them again, there was a glint of admiration in them. The man was impressed. Holden had achieved far more than Winston had expected he could, and it gave him hope. “Might I borrow him, dear?”

Marion shrugged and looked to Holden for confirmation. “Yeah, I guess.”

“We’ll only be a moment.”

Winston took Holden by the arm and walked him into the sitting room off the foyer. Winston skidded his walker to a stop beside the piano. “I know why you brought her here, but what do you expect will happen? They will find her. There’s nothing you can do to stop them.”

“I know, but she needs help and it’s my fault. For some reason, you’re the only one in the world who knows anything about this.”

“Let’s hope that’s not true,” Winston whispered, pausing as he glanced back at Marion. She was perched quietly, like a lost puppy – innocent, hungry and wet from the rain. “You have courage Holden, but please tell me you weren’t stupid enough to bring her Book with you.”

“No. We ditched it right away.”

Winston bobbed his boney head, stroked the flock of hair on his chin and took a seat at the piano bench. “I’ve been watching the news all day. It’s too bad that the whole bar burned down. All those innocent pages…”

Marion couldn’t wait by the door another moment. She raced into the room with the two bags and took Winston by the hand, pleading, “I’m sorry. I don’t know you. But I have nowhere else to go and I need to understand why these lies are being spread about me when I’ve done nothing wrong.”

A small giggle escaped the many lines of Winston’s tightened lips as he ignored the bags and gave her his attention. “You have done nothing wrong, my dear. You have done everything right. And, I must say, it would be nice to have a female presence in this house. It has been a long time. And I have many, many rooms for you to choose from. You know…I love gardening,” he added, pointing to a beveled window beyond the dining room. Through the prism of glass, it revealed a breathtaking back yard with rolling foliage and manicured hedges leading off toward Lake Michigan, placid in the drizzling distance. “I never seem to know what to do with the vegetables once their grown. If you’re willing to give them a proper death in the kitchen, slice us up a nice salad now and again, I think we have a deal.”

“Oh, Sir. That would be fantastic.”

“Sir!” the elderly man spat, in mock aggravation. “Sir is my father. Call me Winston.”

“Thank you, Winston.”

“So tell me…what do we have here? I must know, because…as you will certainly discover, my patience is rivaled only by my child-like attention span.” Winston inquired, as his gaze traveled to the two garbage bags. Confused but interested, he shuffled his walker to the right and propped himself up dexterously to admire them.

“Hopefully this will grease the pan a bit.”

Winston fondled the many strands of goat hair on his chin. “Am I to assume then that you brought me the neighbor’s refuse in exchange for harboring this woman?” he queried, shooting his right eye up to Holden.

Marion lifted the bag and let it drop to the wood floor, allowing the crinkling sound of leaves to resonate in the piano’s hollow chamber. “This is what’s left.”

As realization set in, the wrinkles on Winston’s face were intensified with sharp definition and his eyebrows stood at attention. He scrambled for the twisted top of the bag and instantly released an exhalation of intense joy, like a child on Christmas morning. “You DO NOT have a page from this book! Oh…my goodness…oh…” He very carefully lifted a single page from the bag and rested it on the polished piano, switching between eyeglasses for a closer look.

Holden used this distraction as an opportunity to escape. He put his arm around Marion and said, “I need to run, but I’ll be back by three. You gonna be alright?” She nodded. “Winston, you have my cell number, right? Winston?”

“Yes…yes…I may be old, but I’m not deaf. We’ll be fine.” He waved Holden away in surprising adolescence while he regained his focus on the page in front of him. His tired eyes were more alive than they had been in years, scanning every letter in obvious delight.

Holden stood at the large oak door, granted Marion a simple grin and left the house. He knew he was leaving her in complete distress, but Numbskull had called on his way to Wilmette and told him to return to a job he had completed a few months earlier. Nothing serious. One of the apprentices would be there to do the work. All Holden had to do was supervise, instruct and switch out a few sprinkler heads. Thankfully, all the materials he needed for the job were in his van and he wouldn’t have to return to the city.

At the end of it all, the work day was much easier than usual. Beyond discovering a single book page in the rear of the van from a story entitled Jurassic Park by a man named Michael Crichton, which he quickly stashed into his pocket before the apprentice noticed, the normal drudgery of working in horrible weather was a bit of a relief. Going through the motions of carrying greasy pipe, walking through a busy job site, dealing with clients, eating lunch and feeling the cold surety of his wrench as he tightened sprinkler heads allowed Holden’s heart to slow and his mind to regain function. He was so tired and so tense with everything that had happened that consistent manual labor had become the perfect way for him to gather back what little of himself remained. An unforeseen blessing was that the apprentice hadn’t known Marion, like most of the other men at General Fire, so Holden wasn’t forced to talk about how she had turned against her country or why she had burned The Library down. That hour was coming like an owl to the night, but at least he knew he was safe for the day.

By the time Holden made it back to Winston’s home, he was refreshed and determined to learn precisely how deep the alterations in The Book went. Questions raked his mind during the drive as each mile brought him closer to his answers. Winston knew more than Holden could guess and this made him certain that by the end of the evening, this enormous life changing event would be explained. It had to be explained. Imagining the next twenty-four hours without understanding seemed impossible. He simply could not exist under the weight of such confusion.

When no one answered at Winston’s estate, he instantly expected the worst and opened the door. The ground floor, while decadent in its decoration, was totally empty. Eventually, Holden found Winston in the cellar, sitting in the reading nook beside a pile of the tiniest slivers of paper. The elderly man was spellbound in an innocent focus, very carefully separating the pages from the garbage bags and using whatever wisdom he had to devise some sort of plan for archiving them. On the cellar floor were rows of many crusty pages, ordered, it seemed, by title. Most of the thin stacks were one page thick, but a few had ten to fifteen pages.

Winston wouldn’t allow his eyes to move from the scraps below him to address the man standing quietly at the foot of the stairs. “Is it three o’clock already?”

“Actually, it’s five.”

“Wonderful,” he breathed, wrapped in smiles and satiated by long lost words. “Wonderful. I haven’t been this excited in years.” He tried to get up and a wince twisted his face.

“She has been resting since you brought her here. We were speaking on the couch in the great room one minute, and the next…it was lights out. To be completely honest, I was glad to see it. I’ve been looking forward to going through these bags. But, not to worry, I have been checking on her every hour or so. Her body must have gone very long without sleep. Makes sense, I suppose.” Winston gazed down at the cellar floor and to all the tousled paper Marion had peeled from the walls of her family business.

“It must be from the shock of what she discovered while looking up all these pages on The Book.”

Life returned to Winston like rowdy horses through the starting gate and he raised his arms in triumph. “Oh, and what pages, Holden. What pages! Marion’s grandfather was an oracle. It was as if his accidental arrangement of these pages was done intentionally to showcase the most controversial work of all.”

“Marion will be glad to hear that. At least something good could come out of this.”

“Oh, it is wonderful. I cannot explain to you just how wonderful yet, but you should be able to tell by my attitude that this is a find indeed. So many books, Holden. So many books gone. What you see here, in this cellar…all these shelves stocked with literature...this is quite unnatural. My knowledge comes from a high source and I can tell you for certain that libraries of this caliber don’t exist anymore. They simply don’t.”

“How do you know all this?” Holden asked, still wearing his work boots and jacket. “Honestly, that is the one thing I’m still in the dark about. Where is all your information coming from? I mean…you’re making me feel trapped…making Marion feel trapped...and I guess I just need some answers. I don’t sit well when things aren’t explained enough to me.”

“Right you are,” Winston agreed, stepping out from the reading nook. “I have neglected you in my haste to devour these works of art. I must remind myself that not everyone is like me and stewing on such bold information, especially when it’s new, is a difficult one.” He waddled forward and placed a hand on Holden’s shoulder to steady himself and apologize. “Forgive me. I’ve known about these errors since I was a young man. I would explain things to you now, but Marion has risked much and is as deep in the dark as any. First, let us wake her. And then dinner. No doubt she needs to eat. Answers will come, Holden. Tonight, you will understand everything. Now, be a good man and hand me my cane.”

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

013-29547

 

 

When Marion woke, she was relieved to see Holden on the couch beside her and wrapped herself around his neck. Her dreams had only increased the buoyancy of the building stress. Any calmness she exhibited had come from her enthusiasm over the details of the Pratt family estate. As Winston prepared their dinner, she took Holden by the arm and led him throughout the labyrinth of rooms. Holden recognized the hallways and much of the meticulously carved woodwork, but almost everything else seemed new to him. When he had installed the sprinkler system, Winston had most of the antique furnishings and paintings removed or covered in plastic so that nothing would get damaged. Now, walking through the house as a guest, with all the many detailed items displayed and free to the elements, it was quite amazing to absorb it all.

The numerous bedrooms were designed with an individual taste and walking past their doors was like silently stepping through a house museum with the red velvet ropes removed. Eras of furniture and accessories from the early 19^th century to their own greeted their eyes in a pristine, dust-free display. The only room unlike the rest was Winston’s. His bedroom was a mismatched collection of different styles, with bright colored furniture, animal print window coverings and post modern sculpture. But no matter how riotous the cacophony of color, print and shape had been to their eyes, none of this gathered their attention. What made them stop and accept that the bedroom had been Winston’s was the many books he had scattered throughout the space, like laundry in the room of a teenager. There were books on his bedside table; books on his sleek, black Voido rocking chair; books on his dresser and leaning against his lamp; books displayed proudly beside framed photographs and on shelves beside random items that no man would normally romanticize. The most beautiful of all was a single book filled with ten dollar bills that was encased in glass beside the cigar store statue of an over-dramatized Native American chief.

Holden edged into the room to see the book more closely. The dull brown cover had a blackened, print block image of a man standing over an open coffin with a lantern. It was curiously eerie. Although the rest of the cover was terribly worn, the structure held so strongly that the pages seemed almost unable to be torn from their binding. This seemingly precious book had the appearance of one that had been read often, and yet, Holden wondered if Winston even liked the story, since it was the only book in the house he couldn’t read. It made them wonder if Winston had meant to protect the book for a specific reason or to highlight it as a constant reminder of some larger purpose they would never comprehend. Holden and Marion attempted to garner some answers from the title, but it only confused them further.

The title of the book was Mr. Weston’s Good Wine and it was written by someone named T.F. Powys.

The rest of the second floor was divided into smaller reading rooms and short flights of stairs leading to even more reading rooms with books scattered on tables and shelves. After showing Holden the terrace and the conservatory, Marion brought him back to the room where she had been resting. It was the area of the estate that she most enjoyed. The great room. With its high ceilings and dark oak rafters that stood boldly upon the flattest white plaster, it provided the perfect shelter in a shelterless world. Her favorite detail was the thick stone wall that stretched to the chunky triangle support beam above. Carved into the stone was a craggy hearth with an immense railroad beam mantle, all darkened from years of warm fireside nights of reading and relaxation. Despite Marion’s utter fear of the outside world, she truly loved Winston’s home. If this was her jail, what a jail it would be.

When Winston finished cooking, they ate in the dining room, surrounded by conversations that were taking place in marvelous works of art. Painted people sitting in chairs across from one another, men and women eating a luncheon on the grass. Holden wasn’t a man of art, all those swaths of oil and varnish were a mystery to him, but he assumed that with the man’s wealth, the paintings hung around the table were priceless. And yet, they were beautiful to gaze at and, for Holden, it was a night of new experiences and stories yet to come.

Winston knew he had been testing their patience by choosing dinner as the time to discuss how Holden was able to find Marion, to gather the remaining bags of pages, and escape Chicago when she had been sought-after, but he couldn’t stop himself. At times, Marion had to remind the man to eat because he was so enraptured by the courage Holden had exhibited during the night. It recalled to Winston the long dormant character traits of his own and exposed what he had believed was no longer present in the hearts of men. He listened and ate with a constant, fancified smile.

When the deluxe dining experience of black cod and asparagus was finished they returned to the great room where, in the gloom of the consistent irritating rain, Winston asked Holden to start a fire and they sat around the gargantuan hearth drinking coffee and smoking – Winston with his pipe, Marion with her filter-free, thin-fabric cigarettes, and Holden, since he had recently quit, with nothing. The agitated sense of wishing he had a cigarette made Holden curb his manners and chuck his patience into the fire with the logs.

“Winston, I’ve been waiting a long time and I feel like I…”

“I know, Holden,” he responded in serene relaxation, “Ask me your first question.”

“Good. What I want to know is simple. What should I do now? Because from what I’ve gathered…it’s all controlled. Apparently, someone knows everything we do with The Book. Everyday it updates with new ways to suppress…something. Anyone who discovers the truth is seized. And Marion is stuck here for the rest of her life. The rest of your life, I guess. So, what should I do now? What can we do with all this information?”

Holden sat with his back to the growing fire and stared off into the dim light of his shadow. He had been expecting a solution. “How can I respond to that? You’ve given us a nice evening, but there’s so much hopelessness, man. How do you expect us to deal with such a harsh reality?”

“Just as I have. Through enjoying what elements of life they don’t have control over.”

“The government can’t just do this,” Holden declared to the gentle smoke at their faces. “Society won’t allow it if we go out and tell people.”

“I agree, Holden…but that time has passed. Maybe if we had caught the revisions within a few years, when independent publishers were still printing paper copies, when mankind still had a romantic obsession with the printed word. Maybe then we could have had a chance. But not now. Not after The Great Recycling.”

Marion swiveled on the leather couch to look at Winston. “Can’t you consider it for a moment, though? How could we convince people that they aren’t reading the truth?”

“That’s a good question. How do you convince the entire population of the world that the device they trust more than any other, the mechanized manuscript of propaganda they willingly enjoy on a daily basis, is false? Tell me, Holden. In fact, you don’t even have to answer this question. Have you been tempted to re-open The Book? Have you found yourself wanting to believe in it again, despite all I have told you and what you have been shown in the last twenty-four hours?” Winston paused to pack more tobacco into his pipe. “There are reasons we trust what we read, regardless of the source. And there are reasons we exist in a world that still shackles itself to The Book.”

Holden furled the skin on his nose as he looked down on Winston for the first time with disappointment. “I think you’re wrong. I think you’re a frightened old man who knows the truth, but hides away in his castle of books when the rest of the suffering world needs to read them. Well, I’m not hiding away. And you can’t stop me from telling people.”

“Holden,” Marion booed, attempting to correct his rudeness.

Winston seemed unaffected by the outburst, almost accustomed to such a response. After allowing Holden a chance to catch his breath and cool down, he replied. “You may be too young to remember this…well, I know you’re too young to remember the event, but I believe they may have been trying to erase this story from our memories as well. Thankfully, some things are a little harder to delete than others, but I guess we’ll find out. Do you recall the story of the British Prince?”

Holden shook his head and shrugged indifferently. Marion was nodding. “Yeah, there was some failed assassination on Prince John like fifty years ago or something.”

Winston cleared his throat as the rain began to fall harder and louder on the roof. The window panes around them were like the rocks below a waterfall, splashed and drenched in perpetual water, and it was difficult to hear his timid voice through the downpour. “That’s correct. I was your age when that happened. The man behind it all was named Dennis Wayne Conrad. He infiltrated Buckingham Palace in London with the sole task of capturing Prince John. The standoff was long, I believe. I would later find out that this was the intention. Conrad wanted that day to last as long as possible and for his deed to achieve the most media attention it could. The sheer planning that went into it is mind-boggling because he had entire sections of Buckingham Palace quarantined. It was obvious, although no one heard much after that day, that the man had been part of a much larger team. And yet, like so many other times in our history, it appeared, to the public eye, as one man with a grudge.”

“But he failed,” Marion protested, “They shot him from the window.”

“Yes. He failed, but not in the way you imagine. At the end of many hours, Conrad brought the prince to the window and spouted off a statement that grew more famous than ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis’. Standing in the windows of the White Drawing Room, he exclaimed…To breathe is to live, but to write unimpeded is to breathe eternal.”

“That’s beautiful.” Holden said, relishing the old language.

“More than you realize. More than any of us realized.”

Marion was bobbing the cigarette in her hand, looking confused. “See, I knew the story of Prince John from school, but…this is the first time I’ve ever heard about him standing at the window and speaking.”

“Then his failure, as you say, is complete,” Winston rose from his seat to stoke the fire and remained standing for the rest of the story. The shadows cast from the flickering flames created a moving statue of boldness that seemed to speak of the spirit inside Winston rather than the haggard old man hunched before them. “After his declaration, he allowed the prince to dodge away from the window. In the moments following, Conrad was shot and killed. What no one understood was that Conrad had gone there with the intention of being killed.”

“What?” Holden asked, scooting closer to Marion along the shag rug. “Why would he go through all that trouble just to die?”

“Because of words,” Winston answered with simple pride. “Conrad was quoting a line from the novel The Valiance of Raphael Petitto. Have you heard of it?” They both shook their heads. “In the story, which took place in the 16^th century, Raphael was part of a rebellion of commoners under the oppression of a prince in the King’s absence. The people of the town were surrounding the castle, restless and enslaved. Bent on revolution, Raphael Petitto infiltrated the castle surreptitiously and captured the prince. He then brought the frightened little man to the window, where all the commoners could see, before bellowing out his legendary phrase. Almost immediately an arrow runs him through and he plummets to his death. But, seeing this, the people of the town rise up and overthrow the kingdom.” Winston paused. “I can tell by the look on your faces that it still doesn’t make sense. That’s because I’m leaving out a key detail. In the story, when Raphael brings the prince to the window, he cries out…To breathe is to live, but to act unimpeded is to breathe eternal.”

“You said to write before,” Marion exclaimed. “To write unimpeded is to breathe eternal.”

“Correct. Although Raphael died in the story, he succeeded in defeating the powers that were enslaving them all. Conrad had hoped his death at the window would spur on the same revolution. Clearly it did not.” Winston struck a match along the stone wall and brought the flame to his pipe. “This makes sense when you take time to understand the common folk. They were so enlivened by Petitto’s courage and angered by his death that they stormed the castle. Never before had they realized that their sheer numbers could easily overtake any government fortification. Dennis Wayne Conrad went to London with the goal of getting the rest of the world to realize the same thing. He willingly sacrificed himself for the sake of this.” Winston took a book from the end table and held it high in the random luminance of the fire.

“Only the commoners didn’t react,” Marion finished with a grim expression.

“Exactly. Our ability to understand what happened and to spread the word to one another had been stunted…quickly confused by the government-sanctioned media. None of us knew that he wasn’t going there to assassinate an innocent prince. That he was going there to die in the hope of making people realize that what they were reading was a lie. To free the world from The Book. Soon after, as was just displayed by you Marion, his courageous words were lost upon society.”

In the pleasant crackling of the fireplace and the sober reality of someone else’s failure to stop The Book, Holden started shaking his head in confusion. “But someone must have known what he was doing. Known the quote from that story and realized what he was trying to say. Someone must have done something.”

“Yes. There were people who understood and, unfortunately…they were dealt with before they could organize.”

“What do you mean?” Marion asked, needing an answer.

“Well-read people who caught the source of the line before the media started pretending it wasn’t spoken, went directly to their Books and searched for the story. Those who did were quickly tracked by the Publishing House and…without knowing what happened after that, I can only tell you what I was told. They were recycled.”

Holden lost his balance and threw an elbow into the couch to steady himself. This was too much for him to take and he found himself eyeing the leftovers of Marion’s cigarette in Winston’s designer ashtray. Instead of breaking his vow to never smoke again he asked the question that was gnawing on his mind. “How could you possibly know all of this?”

Winston slid his hands to his knees and sat on the stone bench before the fire, a drawn expression on his face as he remembered things dear to his heart. “My mother. They worked together.”

“With Conrad?” Marion confirmed, as she pulled her legs up to the couch and sat on them in sudden interest. “You’re kidding. She knew him?”

“Where did they work?” Holden asked, feeling that this was the main constituent of the story.

As the thunder tumbled over the drenched world beyond the windows. Winston replied, “My mother, like Conrad, was one of twenty Editors for the Publishing House.”

“Your mother edited The Book?” Holden confirmed in shocked disgust.

“Yes, sadly. It was her job to erase information from valuable novels and update The Book with the corrections. Dennis Wayne Conrad was so discrete in his plan that my mother had never heard a whisper of what was going to happen. When Conrad was missing from work, she assumed he was quitting. And after the news storm hit, it started to make sense. She looked back at her interactions with Conrad over the past few years and recalled instances where he may have been trying to recruit her through random chit-chat. But my mother was smart. She always played it safe and never gave any inclination that she thought things were wrong. She simply did her job, kept her judgments to herself and came home. It was a good job, with excellent benefits. To my mother, the safety of our family was paramount, but the events that took place with Conrad were simply too much for her. I came home one day from work and found her on this very couch, crying her eyes out. And it was that day…a Thursday, I believe…when I came to learn about The Book and what my mother had done for a living.”

Winston paused, unexpectedly emotional, and Marion stood to put an arm around him. Holden went to the closet off the kitchen, where he knew Winston kept his liquor, and returned with a bottle of twenty-year-old whiskey and three glasses.

“That must have been hard for you.”

“Yes, but not anymore,” Winston replied, taking the glass with thanks and sipping from it happily. He knew they were confused by the glisten in his eyes. “I just miss my mother.”

When Marion felt enough time had passed, she asked, “So, is that where all these books came from? The Publishing House?”

“No. I suppose I should explain that.” He finished his drink and Holden poured him another as they found new seats around the shimmering glass of Winston’s Noguchi coffee table. “As the both of you, I grew up in a digital world. This home and everything in it is the result of greed in my family. My father was a reader, and while I would like to say that my collection of books were saved for their content and merit, the truth is that they were saved for their value. My father went to his death bed unaware of our government’s control over The Book. Before he passed away, he told me about the boxes of books he had hidden away. My inheritance. That is what you view in the cellar. See, when The Great Recycling was taking place, my family decided that they would keep their collection in hopes that the laws would be overturned one day and their unlawful library could be sold at a premium. Those books avoided destruction for selfish greed. Nothing more. Our joy and our future, born through the expectation of outrageous profit. How funny.”

“So what happened?” Holden asked, sipping his whiskey. “You started reading them all?”

“No. I only saw them as my retirement and kept them hidden, even from my mother. And on that day, when I found her weeping and she confessed everything to me…I did the same.” Winston stood, took a framed photograph from the mantle and handed it to Marion.

“This is your mother? She was beautiful.”

Winston smiled as he continued. “She kept repeating that she was going to quit. My mother was so ashamed of what she did for a living and wanted to tell others. That was when I told her about the secret collection of books my father had kept. That night, we left the house together and dug them up, right where my father told me they were. We pulled up so many waterproof boxes, there were almost too many to count. It was a night I knew I would never forget…and I haven’t. Covered in mud and carting a van full of illegal material back to our home, my mother and I made a silent pact that we would do something to fight back. We knew there was nothing we could do to stop the government ourselves. Conrad had gone to such extreme lengths and yet he had failed…but we knew we had to do something. We decided that she would stay at her job and gather as much information as she could until the day she retired. Throughout that time, we built the library you saw downstairs and read every single book that my father and his father and his father and his father had collected.”

“Every book?” Holden asked, surprised.

“We read every book…together. And each time we began a new story, my mother would gain access to the master files at work and search the contents for recorded alterations. Since money was the only item the guards didn’t check when she exited the building, she would write out the revisions on dollar bills using makeup as ink, then put them back in her purse. And, as you saw, sometimes all she had was a hundred dollar bill. But the information she gathered was always worth the money. We were marking these books for the sake of the future. At the same time, she began to keep a digital log book here at the house. Each day she came home from work, my mother would list out everything she had been forced to change. She memorized book pages and entire strings of words, just to record them into the log book without knowing at all how future generations would use them.”

“That’s how you knew to remove the chip from the back of my book.”

“That’s right, Holden. And when she retired, our link to information ceased. We realized that there was no use trying to stop anything and spent most of our time reading. When my mother passed, this was some years back, I resolved to fix things myself, if I could. I didn’t get very far before a group of people disappeared. The only reason I escaped intact was because I had spent quite a long time prior to that developing an alias for myself. I spent a fortune and no less than a decade of my life, and succeeded by barely denting the issue. All this effort makes me certain enough to say, as I stand before you, that all the feelings you have will pass. Over time, despite how depressing the reality is, that fact remains true. There is nothing we can do to stop them. You must bear your fate and enjoy what life you have left. Enjoy this world. Enjoy each other. This is a harsh reality, but it is the one we were born into. Accept it. We do not have a choice.”

Holden glanced over at Marion and she was nodding with admission. Unable to dam the waters of his own disappointment, he rose from his seat. “I’m gonna head out. I got work tomorrow.”

“Holden, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Nah…forget it, man. This is messed up, though. You know that, right? I don’t mean to be rude, but I can’t sit here and listen to this. You can’t expect me to just roll over and give up before we’ve even started.”

Holden agreed and waited by the front door, pacing in uncontrolled aggravation. Winston took his time. Once he reached the foyer, he turned and headed toward the cellar. Marion looked at Holden and put her arms around him again. He knew in his heart that he should comfort her, to leave her with something affirming and hopeful, but he was just too frustrated and selfish. It wasn’t his job to take care of Marion. It was his job to take care of himself. And right now, he felt that someone, somewhere was doing a number on him and he just couldn’t have that.

He released his hug abruptly and stepped back. “Marion, watch out for this guy. I know he’s got a good head on his shoulders, but something isn’t sitting right.”

“I’ll be fine, Holden,” she said. “Will you come here tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’ll stop over after work. We’re gonna figure everything out, okay?” Marion nodded, holding her emotions behind moist, tired eyes. Still stewing in disbelief, her whole body appeared exhausted and overwhelmed.

When Winston returned to the top of the stairs, he was holding a book. Marion assumed he would want privacy, so she hugged Holden once more and went to the dining room to clean up their dinner. Winston shuffled to the door and gently handed his guest a paperback book. But before Holden could read the title, a hand, speckled in age spots, flapped onto the cover.

“I knew,” his tired voice began, “when I first saw you in a café one spring morning that our meeting was destined.”

Holden shook his head, disbelieving. The senile old man was putting far too high an importance on their relationship. For the sake of courtesy and kindness he put it aside. “Is that right?”

“Yes. See, at birth…I too was named after quite a famous literary character, of whom I was supposed to emulate.”

“Is that character from the book you’re giving me, here?”

Winston removed his hand and Holden could see the title. “No…no. I’m afraid that book would be a little big for you at this point.” He could see his words were insulting, but he didn’t care because they were true. And truth was hurtful nowadays. “You need to slow down. And you also need to be reminded of our freedoms and how easily they can be taken away. To learn of the inevitability of certain things. The book you’re holding was written quite a long time ago. But the story within its pages will resonate with the situation at hand and, ironically, with you and your profession.”

Holden glanced down at the intriguing cover to see a man standing in an awkward, yet triumphant position. He was made of paper and there were flames coming off of his arms and his legs in striking shades, matching the title that blazed across the top. The book was called Fahrenheit 451 and had been written by a man named Ray Bradbury.

“It looks interesting,” Holden began, wishing the man had brought him The Catcher in the Rye instead. Winston knew he wanted to borrow it.

“What is most interesting is that you can’t find this story on The Book. It was completely banned about sixty years ago. Along with other priceless novels, the government destroyed the only remaining copy on route to The Library of Congress. They used a mock data corruption at the Publishing House to completely remove the story from The Book. Not something that happens often.”

“Why would they erase the whole thing?”

“You’ll see,” Winston said, with a smirk. He glimpsed as a new fascination came over Holden and it was a delight to witness. “Have you ever read a book like this before? From a bound stack of printed paper?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Well, enjoy it. The experience is a unique one. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.” Winston smiled and adjusted his weight on the cane he had been using that evening. “I know how hard this must be for you Holden. Just realize that, for right now, we have one another and we can get through this time together. You are quite strong. Your heart. Your will. Might I ask a personal question?”

“Well, I do. Age does that to a person. I believe in God and I also believe he has brought you into my life for a purpose. And I believe that purpose involves books like the one you are holding. I commend your ability to fight me on this. It’s a breath of fresh air. There is so much going on here Holden…things that will be revealed to you over time. But for now, I will leave you to your life. I look forward to speaking with you again.”

With that, Holden left. He returned to his van and to his simple life, only this time holding the full, unedited manuscript of an original book that the government didn’t want him to read. Holden was suddenly delighted to be leaving early because that night he would allow that book to take him away from everything. He was going to devour every page, leap into the chapters and discover all that they could reveal to him.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

014-34432

 

 

Holden drove to work the next morning more tired and more alive than he had ever been in his life. The clouds beyond the city were murky and the sky as foreboding as ever, but he couldn’t care less. He stuck true to his decision and read Fahrenheit 451 in its entirety. Beginning to glorious end. Paper page after paper page. Cover to brittle cover. After completing the book, he reviewed it again, leafing through each chapter in search of something that would explain the many feelings running through him. It would make him late for work again, two days in a row was a red flag, but it didn’t seem to matter to Holden. This was bigger. He needed to find whatever elements had been in the work that made him feel so free.

At the end, he couldn’t nail it down to a specific chapter or page and was left with a disturbingly new feeling. As he changed into his work clothes, he felt an overwhelming surety that the story he had just finished wasn’t controlled by anyone. It gave him a sense of strength and freedom that he had never before experienced and had not expected. A euphoric feeling that lasted the short drive to work. Never in his life had Holden felt so simultaneously frightened, that at any corner he could be taken by some government agent, and at the same time feel as if no one could control him. As if he were boundless on a calm sea.

Yearning to return to Winston’s home to discuss the book, Holden fought the urge to call-in sick to work and peeked at his duffle bag. He had been too frightened to leave the book at home, so he carefully wrapped it in a change of clothes and laid it delicately in his bag beside his lunch. It was a terrible risk, but it was one he had to take. If his landlord discovered the novel in his apartment, Holden would find himself in the same sinking boat as Marion. As long as he had a genuine book in his possession, it would have to stay on him.

The small parking lot beside General Fire Protection was unusually full, with several black Lincoln Town Cars crowding the loading dock. It was odd to find anyone else there in the morning because their first task was always loading up their vans with precut pipe and parts. Holden brushed it off, glad that no one had parked in his space. He turned the keys and dropped them into the grime-coated cup holder, reached for his duffle bag with satisfaction and closed the door to find Shane walking in a sprint toward his van, looking absurdly frightened. Before Holden could even question his appearance or wonder why his friend had been waiting for his arrival, one word escaped Shane’s lips. A single word that chilled Holden’s bones to the marrow, freezing and killing every fractured fragment of freedom he had just been experiencing.

“Run.”

Holden stepped back unexpectedly and bumped his shoulder into the large side-view mirror. With a pinched whisper, he responded, “What?”

Shane’s eyes were wide with an unspoken terror. “Run,” he breathed, with far more emphasis. “There are people here looking for you. They were here when I showed up, talking to Numbskull.” He swallowed. His eyes darted feverishly to his right. “Government, I think. I don’t know what you did, man. But you gotta get outta here. They’ve been asking a lot of questions about you and Marion. How ever you got involved in her burning down the bar…don’t say a word. I don’t like the look of this.”

Holden glanced back at the Lincoln Town Cars blocking the dock and said, “It’s too late. Forget it. What I need for you to do right now is take this bag.” Shane tried to protest, but Holden stopped him by shoving the duffle bag into his arms. “Take this. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t open it. Pretend it’s yours. I need you to do this for me. If you don’t, then…you may never see me again.”

“Yeah…fine. Okay.”

As the drooping duffle bag with the controversial book was transferred between best friends, the side door to General Fire Protection opened with a squeal of dented metal and three men walked out into the tender swath of rain. All three had short, blond hair cropped along the sides of their head, delicately outlining their ears. Their green eyes were the same shade as their matching, striped ties. They were striking to behold. Not just in looks. It was in the seamless integration of their movement – as if they were some sort of animatronic robots seeking out terrorists for the government. Holden could not begin to imagine just how much they knew. He thought all his tracks had been covered, so there must have been another reason. The best solution he could invent, in the flickering milliseconds, was to play dumb. He laughed absently at Shane, scratched his buzzed head and strutted toward the door, carefree. He almost made it.

“Whoa,” he responded in mock surprise. “Shane, you hear that? I’m gonna be published! Nice try, fellas. I got work to do and you can tell Numbskull to cut the crap. My book never left the ‘idea’ stage. My hero’s a sprinkler fitter for Pete’s sake.”

One of them flashed a badge so quickly that Holden was beginning to think they actually were robots. A different man stepped forward and spoke, with a blunt, mechanical impatience. “We assume, like most people, you have an honorable reputation here at your job that you would prefer to uphold. Please do not force us to make this...” he paused to choose the last word carefully, “…dishonorable.”

Holden blithely tossed his arms up. “Well, I don’t know what this is about, but you gotta do whatcha gotta do, right? Everyone’s got a boss. I hope you talked to mine, ‘cause I’m not gonna get in trouble here.” In their silence, Holden felt a deepness of disparity. Although he needed to be assured, he wouldn’t dare consider turning to look back at Shane in fear that they would notice. If they grew curious and searched through that duffle bag, he was as good as recycled. Whatever that meant.

Holden followed them toward the idling town cars with a singular string of hope pulling him closer. The truth was, these men had come to his workplace. It must have meant that they didn’t know everything. It had to. If they had known everything, they could have easily come to his home that morning to collect him. It must have meant that they didn’t know everything. Repeating that phrase to himself was the only thing that gave Holden strength enough to slip into the back seat of the car and not stare desperately out the tinted windows as they drove away without speaking a word.

His gut reaction to the entire scenario was typical: take out the guy in the back seat any way he could, then take out the driver and get out of town faster than Harry’s ghost can say “Cubs win.” He ignored his gut and chose instead to keep up the pretense of a stereotypical meat-head, water monkey that only cared about money, sports, food, women and sleep (and in that order) as he nestled comfortably into the perfectly detailed rear seat of the town car toward wherever they were taking him.

Most of the silent drive was crowded with stress, helped along by the two black Lincolns that bookended his own. To break the tension, Holden told a dirty joke from Shane’s file of the filthiest, in attempt to see the reaction it would bring to one of the androidian Agents. As he expected, the man didn’t react. Rather, he remained cold and emotionless, bolted to his seat. Stationary in standby mode.

The Lincoln Town Cars parked ironically in the immeasurably empty lot beside Lincoln Park. In perfect unison, the Agents emptied from the dark automobiles and unfurled their darker umbrellas. The rain was falling harder again, full and intense, and Holden waited for one of the men to open the door for him. They didn’t. They stood outside in the rain without talking, waiting for Holden to leave the car himself. He felt awkward and unsure of what was happening, but was certain he had to keep up the pretense that he had done nothing wrong in order to get out of that situation alive. He opened the car door and stepped bravely into the falling rain, realizing that none of the surrounding Agents would be handing him an umbrella, and cracked a curious smirk. The rain didn’t faze him. He was used to working in rough conditions. But as he was led into the Lincoln Park Zoo, Holden understood how intimidating this would be for someone who was unaccustomed to weathering a downpour. He stole a glance over his shoulder to see that two of the Agents were staying behind to keep an eye on things.

As they approached the empty zoo that remained open to the public despite the rain, Holden imagined some secret headquarters below the shallow, recreational pond where the plastic swan pedal boats swam empty, unaware of the hidden control center. The zoo had a haunting, unoccupied feeling and Holden continued to follow, as if they were trespassing on a day when nuclear testing was being done on the animals. The bomb dropped when he noticed the single umbrella at the bottom of a short hill and the man that was standing in front of the zebra habitat. He recognized the man instantly from the article he had read on the train only days before. The man, staring lazily at the two zebras below a green umbrella, was the head of a new division of Homeland Security. Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration, from what Holden could remember. He recalled the man’s name just as easily. It was memorable.

As Holden squinted through the rain and approached Martin Trust, he noticed that the director’s face was distant and preoccupied. Without looking at the four agents that had delivered Holden, Trust nodded and the robotic men retracted one hundred feet to a four-pronged perimeter. Without a clue of what was happening, and disturbed by the fact that no one was speaking, Holden turned to look at the zebras. They huddled from the rain under an outcropping of manufactured rock and he watched as their legs stumbled in the clumping mud.

He couldn’t run. Holden accepted that gem of a detail the moment the men, who were clearly working for more than one government Agency, had pulled him from work. It was obvious that he was in it, now. And deep. Why else would he be chaperoned to the zoo for a surreptitious meeting in the rain? Waiting in the irreducible silence, Holden understood that he was in more danger than he could imagine.

“I enjoy the zoo,” the director began with odd authenticity. Holden didn’t know at all how to respond. He nodded and hoped his sentiment could remain unspoken. After an unyielding minute passed, he knew he was playing a silent game of chicken. One of them would blink first and something told Holden to stay quiet. It took another full minute for Martin Trust to break the silence.

“I know you,” the man said, turning delicately in Holden’s direction without allowing their eyes to meet, “Do you know me?”

All Holden could do, all he knew to do, was play dumb. “Yeah, man. Your picture was in the paper the other day. You’re like…with the government or something. Didn’t read it. I’m not political. Anyway…what am I doing here?” he laughed, “I got bills to pay, bro. Gotta get back to work.” Holden prayed his dull-witted impersonation of Shane would not read as fake as it felt during the delivery.

The man pursed his lips and nodded very slowly, so slowly that it seemed as if his head wasn’t moving. Instead of answering, he stepped closer to the railing of the habitat below. “Do you know what I love about these zebras, Mister Clifford?”

Holden shrugged. “Their stripes?”

The man breathed a laugh before continuing. “I’ve been brought here for the weekend to handle the terrorism on the Sears Tower and I have visited this zoo many times. What I noticed, as the weather shifted, was how the zebras, these majestic animals, interacted with one another and with the people who watched them. When it began to rain and people left the zoo and they were alone, they changed. They changed, Mister Clifford. They were thinking.”

Holden stepped closer to the concave environment that, while completely fabricated and built to make the animals feel comfortable, only appeared false and manufactured from his perspective. The two animals were huddled beside one another, neck to neck, in an effort to stay warm in the driest corner.

“I guess I never knew zebras did that.”

“I don’t pretend to affix this trait on the species; rather, it’s just a feeling. While I’m here, when a lot of people are around and they are being watched, they seem to enjoy life. To enjoy being…zebras. And yet, on a day like today, when no one is in the park and it’s raining and they have to cower into the corner for shelter, I look beyond their eyes and I can see more. Today, they are looking at me and looking at you and they see our freedom. They look at their fences. They remember that they don’t want to be fenced. Like the color of their stripes, life is very black and white today. They want to be free and are, at this very moment, contemplating how they can be so. But that will change.” As he continued, the tenor in his voice harmonized with the chorus of the falling rain. “When all the people come back with the sun, the caged animals forget their troubled time and will, once again, enjoy being zebras.” Trust paused to step closer to the railing, reticent in his cold and studying gaze. His voice was a heated whisper. “But I fight to believe it. Because I wonder, for a moment, if they are only playing at appearances, hoping that the zookeeper doesn’t become suspicious of them. Because what they are doing, what they are actually doing is biding their time. They are memorizing traffic patterns, learning the system and developing a plan so that when the rain returns…and no one is watching…they can escape. But Mister Clifford,” the director broke, keeping his eyes hidden as he reached out to grip the cold railing. “You and I both know that the zebras aren’t going to escape. It doesn’t matter how much they scheme. Captivity is as much a part of their life as the cold water that won’t stop falling.” He shook the railing so vigorously that his wedding ring rattled the glistening metal. Holden glanced down at the noise and saw that the nail on the man’s pointer finger had been sharpened to a fine spear. This elected official, despite appearances, was a reader.

“Well,” Holden began, hoping to break the tension. “They just look cold to me.”

The director nodded and spoke in a dry, omnipotent tone. “Walk with me.”

Holden blinked in the rain as it poured a continuous shower onto his face. He wanted to wipe the excess away, but he felt that the pointless action would read as weak. An announcement that he wasn’t able to handle the pressure of the moment. If he wanted to get through this alive, Holden knew he had to keep up the pretense that he was doing just fine and simply wanted to get back to work. Walking steadily beside the director, he wondered if his choice to not clear the moistness from his cheeks was his final act of freedom. The thought gave Holden a little joy as he weathered the storm.

They continued their wordless walk as if there were some destination in mind beyond the sprinkling of old trees. The minutes dragged on like months. Alone in the empty park, where no one could hear him if he cried for help, a disheartening hollow submerged itself in Holden’s chest. It only grew worse as they came to a stop near a statue of a man sitting on a tree trunk, holding a book that was painted in a drippy, green patina. The expression on the man’s face was withdrawn and unsure, as if he couldn’t understand why the words he was reading seemed different.

“Mister Clifford, have you ever heard of this man?” the director asked, admiring the statue.

Holden inspected the inscription and read it aloud. “Hans Christen Anderson…I never knew ye,” he joked, trying desperately to release the tension. “Should I know this dude?”

Again the director remained silent, as if running through the remaining conversation before speaking a word. “He was an author. Mostly fables for children. Fairy tales. Mind you, this was before The Book was published.”

Holden nodded, uncaring. “Got it. Was he from Chicago or something?”

“This statue pays tribute to his accomplishments in the art of literature and was erected in his honor. One story he wrote is of particular interest to me. The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Have you heard of it?”

“Nope,” Holden spouted quickly, getting a better read on the man. The director was just as good at playing dumb. A question about an author and now a question about a story. The Agents wouldn’t have brought him to the park without searching his reading history on The Book. The director knew exactly what Holden liked to read and fairy tales weren’t on the list.

“It’s a rather short story about a small tin soldier with only one leg and how he fell in love with another toy. A paper ballerina, posed in an arabesque.”

“Arab what?” he interrupted, sounding as ignorant as possible.

“It is a dance position where the ballerina is bending on one leg.” The director studied the statue with striking appreciation. “Every minute he watched her and every minute his obsession with her grew stronger, until one day a goblin approached the tin soldier and warned him not to fall in love with the paper ballerina. He told him that there would be consequences. But the tin soldier ignored the goblin and continued to admire the paper ballerina, which eventually leads to him being dropped out the windowsill, down a gutter and swallowed by a fish.”

“The end. That’s depressing.”

“Oh, no. It’s not finished. This is where the moral reveals itself. The fish was caught, brought back to the house and ripped open, his guts spilling from between torn scales, and low and behold...out pops our little toy soldier. Once returned to his home, the tin soldier is reunited with his paper love. Most critics agree that this is where the tragedy of the story turns. I disagree. A rambunctious boy under the influence of the goblin decided to throw the soldier into the fire, where he began to melt with his eyes fixed on the ballerina. As the blaze ate away at his body, a gust of wind pulled the ballerina into the inferno where they were united in its unforgiving flame. The next day, the maid discovered the remains of the soldier and was amazed to find that it had melted into the shape of a heart.”

“That’s actually kind of beautiful,” Holden admitted, testing the waters.

His response made the director stop in his tracks. His jaw locked and he began walking away toward the parking lot. “Marion Tabor.” The director said her name with such arctic liquidity that his voice traced a chill along Holden’s eardrum. “We are aware that you two know each other and I assume you have seen the news.”

Holden responded robotically. “Yeah. Shame. I loved The Library, man.”

“I would like to express my regret that I didn’t clearly explain why I brought you here this morning.” He stopped to swat aggressively at a flock of gnats that were following them, growling mid-thought. “But I strive to get a feel for people these days and avoid my natural tendency of, well, shooting from the hip. See, Miss Tabor is deeply involved with The Free Thinkers. I’m assuming you’ve heard of them.”

Holden hesitated in his response and prayed that his emotions weren’t giving him away. “Freaks, man. Terrorists. Whatever they’re doing…it’s messed up.”

They reached the short tunnel that connected the stone walkway in the park to the empty parking lot and it was there that the director halted to ask Holden a final question before allowing him some minimal shelter from the rain. “Mister Clifford. Is there anything…anything at all that you would like to tell me about Miss Tabor? Keep in mind that we may already know.”

Those final words resonated from the moss laden stone of the tunnel’s vaulted ceiling and it made Holden, with his hands firmly in his pockets, grip the meat of his thighs. “Sorry, bro. Wish I could help you out.”

Still keeping his gaze fixed on the path in front of him, the director nodded before breaking out with an overwhelmingly bright smile. “Well, we are simply conducting a few interviews with those closest to her and we got your name from her diary. Seems you made more than a few appearances to catch the attention of our team.”

“Hey, we can’t help it if the ladies like us. Am I right?”

Once more, Martin Trust was absent of all reaction. They entered the tunnel. “This group, The Free Thinkers, they are a danger to society. All they care about is the destruction of what we hold most dear.” The director stepped from the shelter of the tunnel and stopped to look at a tree in the unwavering awareness of the rain. He soaked up every line and crinkle, admiring the ants that crawled along its sweating skin before moving on toward the parking lot.

When they reached the two idling automobiles that remained as black as the night is dark, he asked one final question before lowering his umbrella. “The moral. Do you know what it is?”

“From the tin soldier story? Uhm…I don’t know. It seemed like a love will overcome kinda thing.”

The director stepped toward the nearest town car and opened the rear door patiently. “I find it interesting, Mister Clifford, how you interpret such a tragedy. Because I've always seen it as more of a cautionary tale.” Finally they locked eyes, his piercing green shade overpowering the muddiness of Holden’s dull brown. “Listen to someone who knows more than you do and stop falling in love with paper.”

His words lingered in the falling rain like the burnished circle of white on a retina when someone is stupid enough to look directly at the sun. Holden couldn’t concentrate on anything longer than a millisecond; he was so overwhelmed by what he was experiencing. The director’s words seemed to follow his every thought. They wouldn’t leave him. The skin on Holden’s neck tightened in the fright of them as the man retracted his umbrella and stepped lightly into the warmth of the car.

The door closed and Holden was left to stand in the parking lot without a ride home, shaking in his work boots. Despite the strength and courage he normally wielded in situations like this, Holden wanted to make a joke; to keep things lighthearted and relaxed, because his entire being was cuffed in fright.

The cars pulled ever so slowly from their spaces and drove away. He stood in the park, another statue, knowing that every move he made from then on would leave a trace in the grass behind. Life, it seemed, was about to get much more difficult and he just couldn’t rationalize why they had let him go.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

015-38490

 

 

Jiggety Jig.

The cab driver dropped Holden at the door of the squat, square building of General Fire Protection. He stepped out, comfortable again in the rain. Everyone was gone on their assignments for the day, but Numbskull was waiting for him. The enormous man with the tinny, effervescent voice, stood by the receptionist’s desk, unable to resist asking the questions that had been racing through his numb skull since the men had come to question his fitters.

“Free Thinkers, huh? Man! Can’t believe that girl was a terrorist. She ever give you an idea that she was a terrorist, man? I tell ya, we’ve got more terrorists in this world than Carter’s got pills.”

Whatever that means, Holden thought as he walked past. He stopped at a box of green shop towels, pulled a few from the slot and dried himself off as best he could.

“So, talk ya’ sad sack. What did they do?”

“Just took me for a walk.”

“Walk, my rear end,” Numbskull’s womanly voice shrieked at the comment that only he found hilarious. “I bet they told you not to tell anyone. Whatever. I get it, man. Just back to work, right?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s kinda weird that all this would happen today, because the job I’m sending you to has a similar flare.” Holden could tell in a glance, through the fluttering of thin, green fabric, that Numbskull wasn’t about to elaborate. He dropped the shop towels in the recycling bin. “I need you to meet Jensen on Rush. Cakewalk, really. Just change out a standpipe.”

“Yeah, alright.”

“Call me when it’s done, ya Free Thinkin’ ape.”

Numbskull could tell that he wasn’t in the mood to talk, but in reality Holden was trying to calm his nerves.

It was as if the director knew, like he knew that Holden had found an enormous library and had just spent the night reading a book that technically didn’t exist. And Shane still had it, Holden recalled. Fahrenheit 451. What was he going to do about that? And what would Shane do if he looked in the bag? They were probably monitoring Holden’s phone, so he couldn’t rightly call Shane to arrange a pickup. He would have to just wait until they stumbled into one another. He wasn’t good with waiting.

From the stoplight on Rush, Holden could spot the building. It was a newer one. A flashy, glass edifice that touched the clouds with the trademark of some new, indolent architect. General Fire had finished the job six months back and changing out the standpipes didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But he did what he had to do. Jensen, the guy barking on the other end of the walkie-talkie as Holden parked the van and entered the rear of the building, worked as a liaison between the fire department and the pipe fitters. They met at the shaft of the main elevator bay where the man was shutting down the water supply to the building. Jensen was wafer thin and his little bug eyes popped from the drawn skin of his skull like a rotting cadaver. Holden was glad General didn’t use the man very often because he had a face that lodged itself in your brain and waited until you slept to eek out and frighten you. Funny thing was, Jensen had the disposition of an ice cream vendor and he was ever the ruin of first impressions.

“Holden, right?” Jensen confirmed, with a charming smile. He wiped his hand and extended it through the open elevator doors. Holden shook it firmly, wondering if he may accidentally break a few tiny bones in the man’s delicate wrist.

“The standpipe is outside. I’ll keep going here. I’ve already loosened the bolts for you. Change it out, holler back and I’ll turn the water on. Easy peasy.” Holden nodded as the man upheld his joyful character by bobbing his fearsome noggin as he spoke. “This is one of those political jobs. We’ve gotta finish, lickety split.”

Holden had no idea what the cherry-topped creep meant, but shrugged his shoulders and got to work. Finding his way back outside, he scanned the sparkling exterior until he noticed what Numbskull had meant by a similar flare. Branded into the side of the flawless building, partially obscured by the bright, silver standpipe, was the emblem of The Free Thinkers. The area had been partitioned from the rest of the sidewalk with police tape and an officer was standing nearby, keeping a surprisingly sharp watch on the scene. Apparently the fabled terrorist faction wanted to leave their mark on new architecture as well. Holden bent down, threw his weight below the plastic tape and lined himself up with the standpipe. The end of an arrow with its ornately drawn feathers flashed across the words: General Fire. Whatever machine they used to brand the buildings, it seemed to carve its molten design into the surface.

The standpipe was heavy and expensive, so Holden took his time removing it. He set the piece on the ground and was ready to pull the new one from its plastic container and thin, cellophane blanket, but he couldn’t help staring at the emblem emblazoned on the building.

Whoever controlled The Book had decided to link Marion with this anarchist movement. And according to the director’s demeanor during their walk, it wasn’t a fictitious group. Holden studied the emblem. There was some thought in his mind that he followed, but couldn’t quite catch, like chasing a feather in the wind. Then it came to him. This was the answer. The way they could fight back. This group probably knew about The Book. Hell, maybe that’s what they were all about. This had to be an answer, if not the answer.

As Holden replaced the ruined standpipe he felt a sense of purpose, once again. He may not need to live in fear the rest of his life. The answer he was searching for had come to find him. The new standpipe and its shiny bronze surface gleamed like the broken tusks of some golden idol and he kneeled before its supernal brilliance. He gazed up at the ornamental words Think Again and felt a swell of relief. They weren’t alone. There was something they could do.

Winston Pratt seemed to think no one else had been gathering to stop The Book. That no one else was trying to find a solution to the subtle mind control that was being updated daily. The Free Thinkers must have known about the editing process. Their name was a declaration of that very fact. Even their crest reassured him. The axis created between the revolver and the arrow had to symbolize the connection between the story of Raphael Petitto and the assassination attempt of Dennis Wayne Conrad. They knew about The Book. Why else would Marion and The Library be associated with such a group? Although they were branding buildings and destroying monuments to architectural history, at the heart of The Free Thinkers must have been a passion to overthrow the Publishing House.

Holden glanced once more at the scarred script of their motto and nodded. He was certain of it now. They were the answer and he needed to find them.

For hours, Holden worked in a daze as he planned the particulars of finding the group. But no matter what angle he came from, he kept returning to the same question: How could he succeed where the government had failed? Finding and joining their cause would be much more difficult than simply deciding to do so. Although they were apparently vast in number, Holden couldn’t simply contact them.

What were the mechanics of joining an anarchist collective? he thought, while tightening a patched coupling to the joint of an oversized pipe.

As he bounced from job to job, he imagined their purpose in choosing to brand the buildings with such violence and a far simpler reason began to present itself. Branding the buildings appeared on the surface as a way to defile the architecture, but what if they were really advertisements? It made sense, didn’t it? How else would a secret group recruit new members to their cause?

On his return to General Fire he stopped back at the building off Rush to inspect the brand. Something would be there - an address or a phone number entwining the details like vines across a trellis. From the road, he could see that the plastic police tape had been removed and that the granite had been ground back to reveal a stain of honed stone above the gleaming bronze standpipe. Although the brand had been erased, the corner was unguarded. Holden parked his van at the loading dock and jogged around the building to have a closer look.

It was raining again.

Or was it still?

He wasn’t sure if it had ever stopped.

Standing before the standpipe, he collected the water from his jacket and rubbed his hand along the smooth, open pores of the peppered gray granite. Like an ancient, architectural secret, the dry crest of The Free Thinkers gradually revealed itself in the swath of his dripping hand. He uncovered as much of it as he could before stopping to stare deeply at its details. Losing himself in its lines and folds. But it was a lost cause. After all that energy, nothing was there. At least nothing that his eyes or his limited intelligence could see.

Frustrated, Holden kicked the wall and limped away swearing. He thought he had found the answer but there was nothing he could do with it. Now what? The construction crews erased most of the imprint of their brand from the stone and he couldn’t rightly search the web for a detail of their seal. So what else is there? In the flash of sudden rainfall, he realized what he could do and returned swiftly to his soiled, sustainably-insolent, hybrid van.

He reached the Sears Tower before he had mentally walked through his exact reason for being there. From what he recalled of the article with Martin Trust, The Free Thinkers had branded their crest into the darkened steel of the building. Beyond lacquering the façade in some acid wash, there wasn’t much to be done in such a short time - which meant that the artistic work of The Free Thinkers should still be visible to John Q. Passerby. And it was.

“Hey Mister…twenty?”

Holden shielded his eyes from the rain to look down. A beached whale of a man was smoushed into the corner of the building holding out a warped, plastic cup from a fast food restaurant. He hadn’t been out of the van for more than a minute and already Holden was baited by a begging Unfortunate. The man (if you could call him a man), who was lounging directly under the wrinkled wounds of the brand that Holden came to study, held out his plastic cup and shook its contents loudly. “Can you spare a twenty?”

“What?” Holden couldn’t believe his ears. “No. What happened to asking for change, man?”

The Unfortunate adjusted his gargantuan frame and rolled from the corner, covering his shorn head with the shards of a broken umbrella. He inspected Holden with awkward intention before falling back and muttering, “A twenty is change for a fifty.”

“Leave me alone, please.”

“At least I got your attention, right?”

Holden shook his head, rose a hand to cover his eyes and leaned forward to study the brand, looking for some secret detail in the growing darkness of the cloud-coated sky. The slices and gashes that had been created in the stone of the other building looked like molten wax upon the tower’s black steel, hardened in its syrupy state. Holden lowered his hand and stepped back. Unless he could find another building where the text could be clearly visible, there was nothing he could safely do to find the group.

Failure. Again.

“I’m hungry, man,” the Unfortunate grumbled, shuffling in place. When Holden didn’t answer, the whale of a man grew more restless and soon splashes of wild mutterings began spouting from his blowhole. “What are you standing here for? Are you spying on me? Get out of here. Get away from me!”

Holden ducked as a plastic crate was launched powerfully at his head. Without bothering to respond (willfully engaging with an Unfortunate was like reasoning with an alley cat that wouldn’t cover its stool), Holden left the sidewalk and returned to his van, depressed and slighted by a barrage of judgment from a drifter that seemed oddly well-fed.

Holden wove into traffic, arguing with himself. What did he expect to find? Some secret passageway to a ruined corner of the city where writers lived in hiding behind a fortification of books that somehow avoided the churning machine of The Great Recycling? There was nothing special in the branded image and he needed to recognize that. Glancing down at his watch, he realized that he was supposed to be dropping in on Marion and Winston. But with the day he was having, and the fact that his every move was likely being monitored by Martin Trust and Agents of The Publishing House, going home to hit the hay seemed like a smarter move.

The next day Holden was in his element, or at least it appeared that way. He worked meticulously on each individual task he was called to accomplish. Removing leaking couplings, cutting and threading new pipe, adjusting fittings, spinning the main valves off and on like a gyroscopic top, replacing ancient sprinkler heads with the newest and shiniest models and, all the while, ignoring the self-righteous indignation from the upright society of Chicago’s gold coast about how his van was butchering and stealing the sacred virginity of the earth. He was focused more that day than he had been in years, because he wasn’t thinking about the Blackhawks or his daughter or the novel he was excited to get back to during lunch. Holden was thinking again. His irrepressible thoughts circumnavigated the illusive terrorism of The Free Thinkers.

Regardless of what his hands were doing or how unsuccessful he had been at tracking them down, his mind continued to imagine what the group would be like. He romanticized them living in an old, abandoned library in the deserted suburbs to the south. He heard them spouting quotes from Shakespeare before diving from the side of a building. He saw passionate chases on freight trains and helicopter crashes. Courage and love and retribution. The only reason Holden stopped thinking about them was because he found himself in the parking lot of General Fire Protection with the van idling. He was done for the day.

As he muscled the remnants of pipe from a renovated building into the shop and dumped them onto the recycling pile, Holden found himself faced with the fact that the work day was over and he still didn’t know how to make contact with The Free Thinkers. The only solution that seemed at all promising was to circle the city to study each of the brands and hope that something interesting would link them. Some clue that could tell him what to do next. The idea wasn’t a pearl, but it was something. Naturally, the brands would have all been removed or erased by the government – so, really, there was nothing to do but think about the arrangement of them and which buildings were chosen, hoping that a connection could be made.

On the way to the locker room, Holden recalled the locations he had heard of or seen throughout the last few years and was busy creating a mental map of the city when all thoughts of The Free Thinkers left him for the first time in thirty hours. Shane was standing motionless in the aisle of lockers, his skinny fist gripping the straps of Holden’s brown duffle bag.

It had been quite obvious that his best friend in the world, the only person he had ever really trusted, had been avoiding him. Shane had come in an hour early that morning and it was the first time in years that he hadn’t sent Holden a pointless text or called him with a filthy joke. But it made sense, didn’t it? Shane didn’t know, didn’t want to know, why Agents were asking questions. Terrorism was hitting too close to home and, just like Holden, Shane avoided trouble like fish to a sand box.

So he did what was right. Holden left the puck with Shane’s goalie. Rather than address the fact that his duffle bag was in the room, he walked to his locker and took his time with the padlock. The very moment it opened, Shane was beside him with the bag. He tossed it against the back of the locker and swung the door shut.

“I don’t know what you’re a part of, but I just want to tell you right now that I don’t want to be a part of it.” His voice was charged and his face showed a surprising degree of emotion that neither of them had ever seen in Shane before. “I know you, Holden. And I know the way you think. Do not include me in whatever is going on. Okay?”

“Bro, what are you talking about?”

“Don’t act stupid,” he spat, stepping close. He lowered his shoulders, readying himself to fight. “That stuff with Marion and those guys that came by…I can’t be involved in any of that, alright?”

Without reply, Shane stood straight and walked to the door of the locker room. Holden called after him, but the door swung closed and the silence of his friend’s absent response mingled with the noxious scent of perspiration to create an aura that was disheartening and deeply lonely.

What was that all about?

Shane’s reaction took Holden by surprise. It was completely unexpected. It had been years since his friend had come at him like that. And there was more behind his words than something as simple as fear. Shane didn’t like bad attention, but he was fearless in the eyes of battle. This was a side of Shane that Holden had never seen and it scared him. Everything normal in his world was changing so rapidly. Things were getting out of hand and he couldn’t regain his grip.

And then there was the bag.

Holden’s greed for its contents pushed thoughts of his only confidant in life aside. He unlatched the flimsy metal door and stared into the back of his locker. With a delicate hand, he reached into the dark void and thumbed the zipper head before pulling it back along the seam. His eyes rummaged through the contents until he saw the cover of the book Winston had imparted to him. The man made of paper was still on fire and the pages within carried the same rustled, well-read appearance. He released the breath he had been holding and drew the zipper closed. Although his friendship was in jeopardy, the book he had entrusted to Shane was safe.

To keep up appearances, Holden completed his regimen by scrubbing his hands vigorously in the sink before leaving with his leather-bound Book in hand. He wanted everyone around him to know that life for Holden Clifford, no matter how unhinged in reality, hadn’t changed in the slightest.

Amid the flurry of commuters hiding from the obnoxious and redundant downpour, he stepped onto the elevated train as he always had before the truth was exposed, sat in a quiet corner and found himself gripping his Book with eagerness. All around him passengers were swirling their pointed fingers in the green glow of bondage and Holden found himself longing to open his own. The warm leather felt so right in his hands. The hidden words invited him to partake and, before the next stop, Holden was searching its contents for the right story to alleviate his many disappointments.

The train completed a full circuit of the city and Holden stayed on, scanning names of authors and titles of books with a ravenous craving. But not one, not a single one, seemed to have enough flavor to slake the hunger within. That is, until The Book decided for him. Without his control, the screen darkened and bled back through the green pond scum to offer a suggestion.

 

Having trouble deciding? Why not try:

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS by John Wyndham

Click here to download.

This story was chosen for you by the Publishing House,

based on your own, unique reading record.

 

The temptation to click the glowing line below the title was more than he could have imagined. He knew it was wrong when he decided to download the book. He knew it was wrong to start reading it; but it took him three full pages to realize why he wouldn’t stop. Holden felt he had reached the end of a paragraph to find that the next one was identical in every word. To fight against the Publishing House was pointless. What could someone like him really do to stop them? Returning to his simple life was easy. There was no thought in the option. All he had to do was read. He loved to read. And then he remembered Marion and how she was still at Winston’s home, waiting. Wondering why he hadn’t come back to check on her like he promised. With her face upon his mind once more, Holden closed the cover to The Book and shoved it into his duffle bag before looking out the window.

The sight that met his eyes changed everything.

Scrawled into the glass of the windowpane beside him, inches from his face that whole time, was the emblem of The Free Thinkers. His mind quickly retracted from where it had been and he suddenly felt so very stupid. The Book was a lie. The Book was filled with lies and he had gone back to it. Although his daydreaming about The Free Thinkers made the work day go faster and brought him no closer to discovering how to find them, it was still the truth.

Holden got off the train and grabbed a taxi with a simple decision at his core. He was going to seek out the only location in the city where a historic landmark had been branded and the emblem had never been removed. It was there he knew he would find his answer. And it was there that he did.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

016-42319

 

 

It had been one of the first ornaments of architecture and one of the first monuments in Chicago marred by the work of The Free Thinkers. Eager to keep his actions clandestine, Holden coasted safely between buildings in the back of a taxi, beyond the radar of watchful eyes, until they reached the corner of State and Washington.

The Reliance Building stood as a testimony of faith from a time when the world didn’t fully trust its architects. The building had been launched to mass fear because the windows, quite small in comparison to today’s modern glass facades, had been too large for the people of that time. So much fear eventually gave the building clout and it became an enticement to the daring. Because of its avant garde nature, a rich appreciation grew for the structure in the years to come until it was eventually granted landmark status and adored by the city.

The architects of The Free Thinkers had a different view of the building. They decided that it was the perfect structure to receive their very first brand of molten graffiti. And it was left on the one spot the landmark committees would be unable to remove. The extinct rectangular tiles of polished white clay that lined the building were now interrupted above the State Street entrance with a small version of the soon-to-be-well-known emblem. At the time of its origination, the crest, with its arrow and revolver crossing over the puzzling words of Think Again, was odd and the newspapers were baffled. For months, journalists asked themselves where it had come from and what, if anything, was its purpose. Something told Holden, as he walked down the street toward the building, seeing the rain splash against the windows that had been so infamous in the past, that he would find himself at the end of the day with the exact same question burning his mind.

But then something unfortunate happened. Mister Twenty Dollar Bill.

The tremendously tall, rotund oaf from the Sears Tower was now camped out along the side of the Reliance Building, rattling a glass jar of coins at innocent people on their way home from work. This shrine to all that was still wrong with the world noticed Holden at the same time and puffed out his cheeks, adjusting his monumental weight on the plastic milk crate that was straining to keep its shape below his wide girth. Holden almost didn’t want to cross the street and force another confrontation just to inspect the emblem, but he had come all that way and there were little options left.

He approached the building from across the street and gazed up at the crest that was, once again, positioned directly above where the large man was stationed. In the brighter light, Holden could see that the man was a heavily tattooed, Polynesian whose shaven head looked a little clean for an Unfortunate. Holden neared the glass and looked up at the emblem, but he couldn’t avoid the dark eyes that were burning into him. In a fleeting look, Holden glanced down and it was just enough time.

“Can you spare a twenty?”

Holden laughed. That guy was pretty insistent. He looked him in the eyes and, in the lighter drizzle of the day, was able to see something else in them that hadn’t been there the night before. Or at least something he’d been unable to see in the dusk. “I’m a vet and I’m selling ribbons.” The whale-like man pointed to the light green ribbon on the lapel of his tattered jacket and then down to a coffee can beside him that was filled with them. “You got a twenty? Want to buy a ribbon?”

He saw it again. Something in the man’s eyes made Holden believe that he was saying something entirely different. Against his better judgment, he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. “Yeah,” Holden replied, taking out a twenty dollar bill. The man reached for it slowly, never removing his steadfast gaze. After placing the crisp bill into his shirt pocket, he unpinned a ribbon from the inside of his jacket and lowered his eyes before handing it over.

Suddenly the large man’s demeanor changed and he threw his entire jar of coins at Holden’s arm. The thick glass rebounded and shattered on the sidewalk with a triumphant crash. He rose like a giant over the crowd and began spouting random complaints and gibberish with a snarled, insane expression that frightened everyone outside the famous building. A wide-berthed grin lightened his face maddeningly and Holden had to remind himself that this was some sort of act before jogging to freedom like everyone else on the street. A faint thrill chased his shadow and a block away he slowed to glance back at the man who was swiping the shards of glass from his scattered change. He looked psychotic as he flailed his arms about and things magically made sense. Holden surmised that the only way such a group could recruit new members was to place beacons around the city and station someone near the beacon to guide the boats to shore.

He had done it. He had found The Free Thinkers.

With the smooth texture of the silky ribbon between his fingers, Holden felt his heart race. He needed to look at it without anyone seeing. Halfway down the block, he dodged a cavalcade of pedestrians and hid in the wide loading dock of Marshall Field’s before retracting his fingers and looking down into his palm. The green tone of the ribbon was bold against the gloomy background of dirty concrete. Along the rim of its edge were four black words stitched into the silk. Holden smirked as he quickly understood where he needed to go. On one of the ribbon’s crisscrossed wings were the words, The Spire; on the other were the words, Top Floor.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

017-43331

 

 

This was the first night in many that would see Holden wearing a sport coat. It was one of his father’s humdrum hand-me-downs and smelled a bit musty, but Holden wore it on special occasions and he felt the night called for a bit of poise. Of course, he had forgotten to shave which, with the accompanying rain and smattering of wetness on his shortly cropped hair, Holden knew that, to these people, he would likely resemble a greasy raccoon scurrying around their legendary building for scraps of food. Granted, he was given the invitation by an Unfortunate who stank and dressed far below par, so it was quite possible that he would find himself the diamond of the Emerald City.

Shoving the silken ribbon into his jacket pocket, Holden tilted his head toward the rain to follow the winding lines of the building to the topmost floor. It was magnificent to behold. The Calatrava Spire corkscrewed into the violet clouds like some mechanical edifice that controlled the weather one rotation at a time. Holden paused in the drizzle because he felt he should offer the building some note of respect before entering its holistic lobby. Once inside, he was instantly drawn to the back of the structure. Beside the north elevators was a full height mirror that spanned the decadence of space. Holden wiped some of the moisture from his sport coat and adjusted his appearance in the polished mirror before pressing the elevator button.

The journey to the top floor was long. A few people joined him along the way and each of them left before he reached the top. As he watched the numbers grow higher, Holden felt the elevator was reminding him that each floor they passed was another chance to bail. Each was a freedom untaken. He was haunted by the elevator’s continual chime as it rose to the highest floor because of a singular worry that had plagued him since the moment he received the ribbon. He could be walking directly into a government run militia meant to smoke out those interested in taking down The Book. Passing every floor was a risk.

Still, Holden was a believer. Along the rim of Lake Michigan, at the highest point for blocks around, with the most stunning views he had never seen, were all the answers. After that night, all his anxiety would cease. Everything would be resolved. He was a believer. Had to be.

When the elevator reached its destination, the doors opened to the immediate and surprising sound of joie de vivre. Large groups of people were laughing and drinking and sitting and flirting and listening to the quiet digital music that felt altogether abnormal and left Holden completely dislocated. He felt for the ribbon in his pocket to determine if he had read it correctly when a woman came to the elevator doors and hastily removed his jacket without explanation. The doors began to close. Holden stepped off and walked after the woman to find her sprucing up his coat. Unable to mentally accept all that was happening around him, Holden stared at the woman as she diligently toweled the moisture from the mostly-nylon fabric. The dark hair that had been slicked down to the contours of her head was bound into a tight braid that traced her back through her black, open-shouldered gown. Holden was entranced by her thick, unmoving braid because it latched onto her skin as if it were attached to her spine like some exoskeletal accessory. He tried to protest, but was too overtaken by the sheer chaos around him to even open his mouth. Once she returned his jacket, Holden felt more than underdressed. What he had walked in on was so much less of a gathering of anarchists and terrorists and people bent on secretive governmental overthrow and so much more of a dinner party for the upper echelon, mid-western socialite. Actually, there were a few people he recognized. A famous architect, an author that he knew had hailed from Chicago, an actor and a few men and women that he was certain were politicians.

Was this it? Holden thought. Could this actually be what he was looking for? If this were an outlet for change, why had he, a lowly pipe fitter who had come from nothing, been invited?

The moment the thought arrived, the enormous man that had given him the invitation, the man who Holden had deemed unworthy to speak to or even look at on the sidewalk of the Sears Tower, now approached with a wide grin, dressed to the nines.

Nervous, Holden laughed unnecessarily loud and stifled himself quickly. Moby got a kick out of this response and released his hand with a smirk. He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a crisp twenty dollar bill. “Welcome to The Free Thinkers.”

Holden couldn’t hide the grin on his face as he took back the money. This was really it. He couldn’t believe it.

As he stepped past the entry way, Holden was amazed at the space before him. Stretching out, covering the entire floor, was a wide room that extended to the wrapping corkscrew of windows. At the eastern end of the open room, with an awe-invoking view of the fog-lined lake, was a sunken oval seating area with a white, patent leather couch that ringed the circumference. The polished surface that was broken only by a short series of concrete steps grabbed his attention because it seemed to faintly reflect the life of the room around it.

There had to have been sixty people there, dressed elegantly and carrying on giddy conversations. The temperature of it all was electrifying, but somewhat irregular. Wrong, even. Choosing to remain within himself, safe behind a thin glass of sparkling water, Holden continued to study his surroundings. To the left of the sleek, open kitchen and oddly visible bedroom, with a bed that seemed to hover beyond its hidden base, was a slab of slate on legs with fire spilling from a square that wasn’t quite centered. Mirrored, on the opposite end of the room, was a table of turquoise glass. It rose four inches from its rough wooden feet and had a movement that bewildered Holden until he was standing beside it. The glass was hollow and within it swam a multitude of minuscule fish. Already, this evening had shown him so many things he had never seen and revealed a world he was never meant to enjoy.

Over the course of an hour, Holden mingled around intellectual conversations and introduced himself to many people who were more than entertained by his profession. A few times he had heard, I wonder how we’re going to use you. And other times he would hear, we certainly are taking in all different types these days, aren’t we? He was too excited by being there to recognize their comments as insulting. Everything that night was complimentary, especially to his eyes.

The luxurious furniture pieces, the shallow wading pool near the bathroom, the built-in art piece of thick, marbleized metal ribbons that took up far too much real estate, and the exquisite light fixtures that hung sporadically near the darkened ceiling like so many stars. Even the smells were heady and laced with enticement. The drinks and hors d’oeuvres being passed tasted so fantastic that, in a double bite, Holden forgot all the stress he had been feeling. He imagined Winston and Marion sitting by the fireplace playing chess and wished they could experience the joy and rapid acceptance he felt from such higher class people. Purpose and success played like music and he had finally joined the song. What they were up against in The Book was a power unseen and unquantifiable, but there were people in that room that carried an entirely different power.

More comfortable, despite the awkwardness of his appearance, Holden gladly replaced his water for a glass of wine from one of the women walking around the room with the same sleek, black hair and opalescent face, just as the man that Holden had recognized as a famous architect raised his hand and ushered for everyone to gather around the seating area.

He stepped down into the oval pit and stood at the center atop an artistically woven detail of their famous emblem. Its prominent lines stood strikingly dark against the white rug and appeared to give the man the heightened stature of importance.

As the architect began speaking, Holden was immediately calmed by the man’s dulcet, soothing tone. “I would like to welcome everyone,” he began, through his thin, wilted beard, “to the seventy-second meeting of the Chicago branch of The Free Thinkers.” A concord of clapping fringed the group and Holden sipped gratefully from his wine. “Let us ring in the new season by declaring our code of statutes to our most welcomed guests and newest members.”

In eerie unison, the group began announcing their beliefs in a low, chewing monotone. “To remove all limitations on our creativity by allowing one another a chance to rebuild what has once been. To form a new intellectual freedom over the next century by regressing society to a time when we didn’t have all the answers. When our fate was challenged because the computer didn’t find our mate. When our faith was challenged because we hadn’t found the cure. When our minds were challenged because our problems hadn’t already been answered. When our purpose was challenged because we didn’t have a god. We will bring freedom to thoughts. We will think again! We will think again!”

In the sudden, esoteric silence, the architect unwrapped a stick of gum, popped it coolly into his mouth and continued from behind a carefree, cosmopolitan chuckle. “So, let’s talk phase four. What do the next six months look like?”

Most of what was brought up throughout the next forty-five minutes was a cornucopia of bogus nonsense that ended on someone’s suggestion to try and disassemble the internet for a week. Others said it couldn’t be done, but their arrogant leader came up with a plan in half a minute that everyone supported and that seemed too ambitious to be possible. The man enjoyed imagining how society would react when boredom was forced upon them. When their television shows, movies and sports were unviewable. When their contact with others was limited to physical interaction. Could a week alone spur on a new renaissance of ideas? He heralded the possibilities and his followers swooned.

When all the pomp and speeches had ended and the lemmings scattered excitedly, Holden remained in the same place, unable to move – a mechanical piping system with locked joints, his ungalvanized mind rusting in the foiled acceptance of where he was and what The Free Thinkers were really about.

Holden had been wrong.

They had been the exact opposite of what he needed them to be. All he believed and hoped for had been a lie. The Free Thinkers were completely misguided, and yet exactly who they meant themselves to be. The newspapers were right. The Free Thinkers actually believed what everyone thought they believed.

Holden furled his eyebrows and cocked his head as he prepared himself for what was about to happen. Downing a glass of wine, he charged the architect as the man was completing a fanciful tale of how he had found his sunglasses at a shop in Haiti. “Excuse me, but you didn’t mention The Book or the Publishing House. I assume that’s part of your deal, right?”

The man eyed Holden’s sport coat and pursed his lips before tilting his head back over his shoulder in a moment of perplexing ecstasy. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be an Editor. How I would caress the delete key every day. Magical.”

“Are you joking?” Holden asked, stumbling back as if repulsed by the man’s breath. “They’re erasing our history, bro. You don’t think that’s messed up?”

“If only,” he booed, fluttering the fur of his salt and pepper beard. “Young man, that is a rumor started by people like us. People who want to start over. Think again!”

“But, I thought…”

“Apparently you didn’t. Take for instance, this chair.” The man vaulted adroitly from the sunken seating area and grabbed an antique wooden chair from his office. Its dimpled leather cushion reflected the flickering fire as the man brought it to the slate table. “This is an original Eames, circa nineteen fifty-one.”

Holden could hear a sudden eagerness in the fraction of whispers around the room. Everyone gradually began to turn and watch the action play out, which told Holden that the man’s haughty speech had been given before. “Now, there must be…what…thirty of these in the world?” He took the piece of furniture and toppled it gleefully onto the table where it was quickly charred in the flames. With a laugh that tinged the edge of his words, the man turned back to Holden and continued his speech while the wood sputtered and crackled amid the thunder of applause. “Boop. Gone. Just like that. If all of these were destroyed and all the information and images of it were removed from the internet…well...” He waited, but Holden didn’t respond. “Don’t you understand? Eventually, someone can be creative enough to design this chair again. See, we live in a world where there are no new musicians. No new artists. No new designers. No new thinkers.”

“Of course there are,” Holden disagreed. A multitude of digital magazines were advertised in The Book every day, with some new flashy face on the cover beside a lofty heading of how they were revolutionizing their industry. But the people in the room, all the stylish people with their neon drinks and puffed-up expressions, were laughing. What did that mean? Had the man been right?

As the laughter subsided, the architect reached for a glass of apricot wine. “Forgive our response. I understand that, if you are new, my words could come as somewhat of a shock. But what are words, really? I’m no big thinker. Even someone with half a brain can see that the only thing new about these revolutionaries is that they look different than those they are copying. Sorry…emulating.” A snicker coursed through the group and he fingered some quotation marks posthumously in the air around his head.

“There is nothing left to learn. The new and avant garde are simply regurgitation. And puke stinks! We have reached the limit of our ability to be creative. God isn’t making any new colors and we gotta start over. Thankfully, most of the people in this room,” he paused, glinting a grin as he snapped his gum, “are well-to-do enough to make a difference. I can buy a rare work of art and destroy it. If I want to. I could buy the rights to every song by The Beatles and destroy the original recordings and corrupt each and every digital file. But that won’t kill their music. A hundred years in the future, the band will re-emerge in some new form and create a revolution of songs that have never been heard. Our children will thank us. Our children’s children will thank us.”

A smart-looking woman raised her glass, pronouncing, “The next Beethoven will thank us.”

“Yes! Let’s give mankind a chance to be creative again! To THINK again!”

Holden remained still, powerless against the uprising of applause. After a respectful bow, the architect chief of their terrorist tribe motioned for Holden to come closer. They shared a heartless handshake and the man leaned in to whisper, “You’ll come around, soldier. We all have. This movement is happening whether you want it to or not.”

The clapping fluttered to silence as those who were eager to watch history burn huddled around the fire like Neanderthals reveling over the shredded carcass of a beast their leader had devoured. And Holden felt so suddenly sad. This was the exact opposite of what he had expected. He was assuming the news reports were wrong, but they weren’t. Everything these people were about…it was only to destroy. If they had it their way, they would destroy all the books ever written. Delete enough words at random until all semblance of structure and sense and poetry was stripped away, dulled down to a level of stupidity that would force humanity to thirst and cry out for something new and creative. People like this praised the invention of the typewriter that led to the computer keyboard that led to editless texting and editable encyclopedias. They encouraged internet ‘bogs’ and self-published drivel from make-believe minds. They praised the dishonor of words and disrespected the courage of history and accomplishment. These were things their ancestors had worked hard for and this rabble of overconfident egotists wanted to start over. To regress us back to a time before such wonderful triumphs existed. To unplug civilization and reboot before considering the loss. They were terrorists. And their viewpoint was a terror altogether too overwhelming for him to accept.

Small seating areas were being filled and Holden eventually found himself standing alone. He was offered a glass of expensive vodka and he passed it down. He was offered to pick an appetizer from a tray of oddly shaped cheeses and he took one simply so the person would walk away. He bit into it, hopeless. No one around him cared at all about The Book or about breaking the government control. Holden watched as the architect began throwing other priceless pieces onto the alter of fire and it made him instantly ill, as if the small cheese pyramid in his mouth was coated in a thin, hairy mold. He needed to leave. He couldn’t stomach another second in that building.

A piece of him, the piece that daydreamed about their group during work, wanted to proclaim a passage from something by Charles Dickens in the hope that it would spur them on to a new thinking. He wanted to convince them that what they believed was foolish. Instead, he turned his back on the members of The Free Thinkers and searched gladly for the elevator. Real substance from a classic story would be lost upon their feeble, delusional minds.

“Leaving early, friend?” Holden twisted to find Moby, the enormous man that had recruited him from the sidewalk, leaning casually against the wall beside a crystal coat rack. “Listen, I know they’re a bit eccentric, but…it’s my job to screen people when they want to leave.”

Holden spun, shocked by what he was hearing and came at the man who was three times his size with nothing less than enmity. “Seriously? Were you here? Did you see everything that just happened? I mean…how could anyone believe this extremist garbage?”

Moby shrugged and pointed a humungous thumb over his shoulder. “There are definitely a couple of crazies in there, but their heart is in the right place. I guess I just don’t like being controlled, is all.” Moby pushed the elevator button and waited by the door with Holden as the mingling minions behind them started cackling when someone tossed a vinyl record onto the fire. “You know…you’re the first person in years to catch the reference to my name. You must read The Book a lot. These people don’t read. At least not fiction.”

The elevator doors opened and Holden chuffed, “Isn’t everything in The Book fiction…”

“Did you just say what I think you said?” Moby stepped in front of the elevator door, his immense frame nearly taking up the entire width of space, dwarfing Holden who generally stood high among his friends. He glanced over his shoulder momentarily before shoving Holden into the elevator and allowing the doors to close. In the small chamber, the man seemed larger than ever and Holden was regretting his choice to get angry. But the man’s chestnut face was suddenly glazed with a new buttery color. Behind a sanguine expression and an aristocratic tone, he spoke three words that withered Holden’s necessity to escape.

“So you guys do know about The Book?”

The elevator doors opened on another floor and Moby blocked the entrance so no one could get on and interrupt them. They needed to be alone. The moment the doors closed, the giant of a man turned a child in the face of such overwhelming excitement. “I’ve been waiting for someone like you for over two years.”

“What? Someone like me?”

“My uncle told me it was being controlled. Told me about the prince. He was right, wasn’t he? Man! The Book is being controlled.” Moby didn’t wait for Holden to answer. He wove his gargantuan arms wildly and blurted out his wishes, regardless of if they were wanted. “Whatever you’re doing…I’m in. Sign me up.”

“Hang on a second. What about The Free Thinkers?”

“I’ve told them about the editing. They don’t seem to care. Or don’t believe me. You don’t understand…I’ve stuck around this whole time waiting for the day someone like you would show up. Two years, Holden. You have to let me come with you.”

Gnawing on his tongue as the elevator chimed each passing floor, he reached for Moby’s jacket and took the man’s cell phone from his inside pocket. Although Holden had no clue where it would lead him, he typed out Winston’s address. “Meet me here tomorrow. I…don’t really know…I mean…I have a few ideas about what we can do with the library in the cellar…but we should probably regroup with the others.”

“There are others? Great!” The elevator doors opened and a team of people carrying grimy reusable bags filled with fresh groceries crowded in around them. Holden squeezed through as Moby waved goodbye with a utopian smile that spread wide along the plains of his sandalwood skin. “I should head back upstairs, Holden. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

Holden Clifford swallowed with difficulty as the polished elevator doors closed. He was back in the decadent lobby. This time, much less excited about the rest of his life. He discovered an ally in the most unlikely of places and yet it left him feeling alone. Destitute. Discouraged. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one joining a group of others? There were no others, were there? What he found was a group of misguided rich people with nothing to do but turn destruction and chaos into the newest art form. It was over. If there was a group out there that could make a difference, a group that would exist to break the lies, Holden would have to start that group himself.

 

 

* * * * *

 

 

018-47217

 

 

The following day, Holden thoroughly reviled his work routine. He could no longer daydream about The Free Thinkers and Shane was avoiding him with a fierce dedication. He tried his best to get a grip on his state of mind, but it slipped away from him. During those hours it was trained to chug robotically along. Whether he wanted to be or not, Holden was a small, mechanical ape whose only job was to crash two cymbals together in a continuous rhythm. But at three o’clock, when the sprocket at his back had wound down, he scrubbed his hands to keep up appearances that reading The Book was his only concern and left the warehouse of General Fire in a surprisingly chipper mood. That reason was one hundred and sixty-five pages long.

At every stoplight on the road to Wilmette, Holden glanced secretively down at the open copy of Fahrenheit 451 that Winston had lent him. He wanted to arrive with a few lines memorized to test the old man’s ability to recall it word for word, which had been the claim. It was thrilling to read in the open, but at each intersection Holden was stirred awake from the earsplitting honk of those aggravated behind him. The light kept changing before he noticed. Each time he would glance up, Holden found an insistent green eye shining down on his van, detecting his every move, and it made him slam on the gas to get away from its curious gaze.

The persistence of the green light, watching him as he passed each set of its ocular traffic managers, brought to mind a memorable passage from a book he had read recently by a man named F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book’s title eluded him, but he knew the character’s name made an appearance and that, when seeing the title on his Book for the first time, Holden had been expecting to read a story about a magician.

 

 

Holden knew that his shade of green was quite different from that of Mister Gatsby. Holden’s light was evil. As he eluded his light at each intersection, the green eye was moving faster and stretching out farther for him. Because, for miles and miles and miles, perhaps across the county, he was the only person with a paper bound book concealed under a filthy jacket on his passenger seat. The fear was great, but Holden was greater and he wouldn’t allow his fear to devastate him. So, as he drove on, he simply prayed to catch the next stoplight.

Reading without The Book was an unexplainable joy. He found himself enamored with the simple act of it. How he would delicately run a finger along the trace of a single page, slipping it gently behind its chalky pelt as he waited to finish the words that had been stamped delicately onto the priceless surface. How he would pull a finger down toward the spine, ever so carefully tugging, like a breath of wind, until the single page flipped to the other side, joining the multitude of pages that had been given the same delicate caress. Moving, without choice, from the land of the unread pages to the land of the read. It was an act he had never before experienced and once again, it brought such a romance to reading that he had never thought was possible.

How the color of the pages called to him. From each of the many subtle blemishes on their blonde skin, he seemed to feel every person that had read that story before him. As if some of their soul had been what soiled the page.