The Read

IN THE DREAM HE KNELT beside a vast and craven crater. The crater filled with bookwrack. Boards. Paper. Words. The words unadhorn from the pages and falling to letters. Broken bookshelves. Card catalogs filled with dust. That not burned had been drowned. Stewy char. The shorelaps of the polluted waters a sickly susurrus. The world come unbooked and never to be read again.

 

IN THE COLD SCLEROTIC DAWN the book reviewer coughed himself awake. His coughs the sound of pamphlets ripping. Forgetting then remembering where he was. A branch library on the edge of the city. Its metal shelves like autopsy tables. Empty. Looted. The cold like a memory of heat forgotten.

Panicstricken he threw back the moulting sleeping bag. The reader lying still as death. The reader's face ashygray. The red eyeglass stamps bridging his nose an accusation. The book reviewer put his hand on the raftered chest and felt a stuttering tapping. Felt the chest's hesitant rise.

He shook the reader awake and they ate their meager breakfast. Library paste scooped from a grimy plastic tub with two fingers. Those before them had not found everything. Then they packed their booktruck with the blankets and the last of the food. The last books. Then they pushed it out onto the road. Cursing the one wheel which would not roll true.

 

HE HAD WATCHED THE END from his office on the third floor. Had seen the fluritic light in the east etch the skyscrapers like unspooling celluloid film. And then darkness. Then a deep sound like the tearing in half of the telephonebook of the world. At the watercooler in the hall he filled every travel mug from every office with water. He spent the rest of the night under his desk. His body covered in advance reader's copies against the cold. The shelves of his office were threedeep with books and protected him from what he did not know. All night he listened to the panicstricken voices on the street below. Wailing to wake the dead. And then unwaking death. If god is not deaf then he is dumb, he thought.

Also he thought, Why couldnt I have learned a practical trade?

 

THE NEXT MORNING HE CLIMBED down the stairs. On the first floor the glass was shattered in the door to the street. Its metal frame bowed as if from the charge of some great nameless beast. He tried to open it. Failing that he stepped through. The unopening door was like the past closed against the future. He stepped through it and into the death of everything.

The skyscraper canyons all dark. No sun to cast a shadow. Empty windows like dead eyes. Their glass upon the sidewalk broken teeth. Crumpled cars tossed on the street and sidewalk. Lampposts garroted on their own powerlines. No people.

He went up the middle of the street staying clear of the debris. He cupped his hands and helloed but there was no answer. The echoes sucked into the murk as if his voice fleeing his lungs forever.

Dust eddied around his feet. Ashes of concrete steel and brick. Glass twinkling like dying stars. Atomic pieces of the city and its people.

 

ON A BOULEVARD HE OPENED a newspaper box and a blackandwhite cloud billowed forth. Coughing he dropped the door and opened another. Another cloud. The ashes of the word and the printed world. Choking he stumbled on. There would be no souvenir edition to save this time.

 

HE CROSSED THE RIVER on a groaning bridge and walked into the dark heart of the dead city. He walked until he reached the library. A sootblack redbrick fortress. Its brass doors buckled shut. Straining he pulled one open. He felt his way in the dark to the frozen escalator and began climbing. On the fourth floor he found the stacks. The long shelves framed against morning twilight seeping through unglassed windows. The floor covered with bookwrack. Empty boards and the dirty snow that had been their pages. He lifted a book from a shelf and watched it fall to dust in his hands.

He saw footprints in the booksnow. He followed the footprints to the men's bathroom. He went inside. A flicker of yellow light in the pitchblack. He followed the footprints to the last stall and opened the door. A spitting candle melted to the toiletpaper dispenser. A man reading on the toiletseat. The book reviewer knew the book. He had given it a qualified recommendation. For historical fiction fans willing to overlook anachronistic dialogue. The reader lowered the book. His eyes rheumy behind smeared glasses.

It was the last book.

Okay.

I wouldnt normally read it but it was the last book.

I'll trade you for it. A book review.

What kind?

Anything you like.

Literary fiction then.

The book reviewer found his way to the reference desk. In a drawer he found a golfsized pencil and a goldenrod piece of scratchpaper. Cut from a list of readinggroup discussion questions. Using a windowsill as his poor desk he wrote the review from memory. The reader had come out of the bathroom. Slopeshouldered shambling. Careworn face and unkempt hair. He gave him the review and he gave him the book. The reader looked forsaken.

Now I dont have a book.

I have other books.

Okay.

I'll let you read them.

Okay.

 

HE KNEW ONLY THAT BOOKS WERE HIS WARRANT. If books were not the word of god then god never wrote a book.

 

THE BOOK REVIEWER WENT BACK TO HIS OFFICE. The reader following behind clutching the scrap of review like currency from a country from which he'd been exiled. The book reviewer tested all the booktrucks and settled on the one with only one balky wheel. He filled the booktruck with books. Working at a review journal he did not have at hand the classics but had saved some award winners and also those where his name had been reprinted with his words of praise. But it was mostly new and unproven books. In the end he had to fill out the bottom shelves with business books but they would come in handy for kindling.

He emptied out the shared refrigerator in the cafeteria kitchen. Then judiciously sniffed each item for freshness. Much of it spoiled long before the great tearing. There was a green salad turned to brown sludge and a desiccated lump of salmon. In the end he had enough provender to fill two promotional bookbags: half sandwiches in styrofoam clamshells and caloriecounter frozen dinners still sealed in their bright pictured boxes.

They took what water they could carry and set out on the road.

 

THEY WENT SOUTH FOLLOWING the slack curve of the lake. The lake deadblack and sere. As if water was a memory of a thing that slaked thirst. Ice made of ash. Waves made of trash.

They passed a manmade beach. Sand trucked one thousand miles from the gulf for citydwellers to lay their towels on. He remembered coming there. The water aquamarine. Green algae like lawn cuttings. Zebrastriped musselshells cutting his feet. The sky a blind thoughtless blue. His book a shield raised to the sun. When he closed his eyes the sun burned fiercely in the void of his lidded eyes. It had been his perfect day.

 

IN THE MEDIAN BETWEEN THE ROADS they saw a rabbit. Still plump from the leavings of the mayor's gardens. Unthinking he lifted a gobbet of broken asphalt and threw it in a clean strong arc. It struck the rabbit on the head and the animal fell and lay trembling. He went over and looked. It was a wellshaped dun rabbit the color of chipboard. The rabbit stopped trembling and lay still. The book reviewer looked at it. Wondering how to unseal its furry envelope.

Sometimes I wish I hadnt been an English major, he thought.

 

IN THE END HE PIERCED ITS SIDE with a sharp stick and cooked it over a fire built from three fat books. They were technothrillers but still it grieved him. The burning fur fell off and the fireblacked skin popped and split revealing pink rabbit meat. When the meat had cooked gray he cooled the animal on a flat stone and vivisected it with his fingers. He gave the reader a ragged haunch. At first they looked only for the tender meat but then they ate it all. Viscera and offal. Cracking the bones and greedily sucking the marrow.

This would make a good book for someone, he thought.

 

AFTER THEIR POOR SUPPER they nested in their stinking blankets and read until the light failed. When they had batteries for the flashlight or some cooking grease for the whorelamp they read under the covers. The reader reading books so fast he fanned the pages. The book reviewer reading with deliberation and making notes in the margins and endpapers. In case he should ever be called upon for a review. He read the same books again and again. Committing them to memory should the artifacts be lost. The paper filthy from his dirty hands and soft as cloth. With no one to tell him lights out he read until his eyes were redscratched and raw. One morning he cursed himself awake knowing he'd fallen asleep without turning the flashlight off. The batteries dead and gone. Coughing he woke the reader and took the blue plastic tarp off the booktruck and they set off again down the road. Tattered bookbags slung over their shoulders like Charon's own conventioneers.

 

THEIR SUPPLY OF BOOKS DWINDLING. Gone for tinder and kindling. Pages torn to wrap food and wounded fingers. An encyclopedia used for a doorstop and forgotten in their halfstarved delirium.

 

THE READER FALLING BEHIND. Complaining of nothing to read. The book reviewer tried soothing the reader by reciting reviews from memory.

But we dont have the books themselves, said the reader.

No.

What good is a review without a book to read?

If you've read a review you can always pretend you've read the book. People do it all the time.

You mean did.

Okay.

It's still not the same.

Maybe the review is all that's left of the book.

I guess I'd rather die, then.

You cant give up. We'll find other people. They'll have books. Real books. Not just reviews.

Okay.

Say it with me. We cant give up.

Okay.

 

IN SOME GODSCORNED EXURB he saw a man pushing a shopping cart heaped with paltry. Where a child would have sat had there been a child there was a holestricken bag of maimed produce. Apples. Leaving the reader with the booktruck the book reviewer went over.

Can you give me an apple.

No.

I'll trade you.

What is it?

A book review.

The man with the shopping cart shook his head.

A starred review, said the book reviewer.

The man with the shopping cart's eyes glinted. Like a prisoner looking out a window in a concrete wall.

What kind of book?

Whatever you like.

Science fiction, said the man with the shopping cart. I always liked sf. Especially the post-apocalyptic.

The book reviewer nodded and sat down in the ash. He took his careworn tablet and folded back the cover. Shaped a fine new point on his pencil with a boxcutter. Holding the paper down against the pleuritic breeze he began to write from memory. The words flowing like water shaping a creekbed. He'd written it before but there was no internet for the man with the shopping cart to check.

I'll want the book, too.

Read the review first.

I know I'll like it. You said it was a starred review.

Three apples then.

Two.

Okay.

He finished writing the review and the man with the shopping cart read it. Or maybe pretended to read. Nodding his head. Then he asked for the book. It was a book of probable greatness about the ashes of the fallen world. It would have been important for a library to have it but the apples had cheeks like maidens' kisses and the book reviewer was so hungry.

He gave him the book and he gave him the apples. He gave one apple to the reader and put one in his own pocket. Then all went on into the cold miasmitic twilight. As if the ashes at the hearth would be cold forever.

 

JUST SIX BOOKS LEFT. How many months had they traveled? And still not out of the state. The reader's cries for something new to read as constant as the keening wind. A hunger he could not sate. On every shelf in every house school and library every page turned to dust. At a Carnegie library in some decimaled town the reader stopped and would go no further.

At least I can die in a place that smells like books.

Dont quit. Somewhere there will be someone. A library. A store. A truck stop. Somewhere someone and we'll put our books together. We'll make a new library.

You dont know that.

You dont know that I dont know that.

What?

Dont quit.

But the reader had sat down and would go no further.

The book reviewer tried to make him comfortable. He gave him half of the remaining books.

But I already read those, said the reader.

 

THE DAYS GROWING SHORTER and the nights growing blacker. No books on the shelves. No people on the roads. Pushing the cart with only three books on it. With no other books to wedge them in the books always falling onto the road. The book reviewer knowing that there would be no more books to review ever. And what good to save even a single book with no one to read it?

 

TWO DAYS TO CROSS A WINDSCOURED PLAIN. The dry husks of the corn a taunting sound like turning pages. He wandered off the road looking for the books that were not there and it was a good three hours before he could find the booktruck again. Wild with hunger he began tearing out the pages and eating them. Thinking in his delirium, I am become a book. I am story.

His belly full of the last words he slept.

 

HE LEFT THE BOOKTRUCK AND WALKED ON. At a bend in the road he turned back and looked. The booktruck like an unclaimed corpse. Steeling himself he turned and kept going.

 

HE WALKED MORE DAYS. He found a river and crossed it on a rusting car ferry whose crippled engine coughed to life. On the other side a sign welcoming him to a new state. Rolling hills and rotting leaves. A broken wagon wheel like a revenant. Seeing a gabled house as if in some storybook he made his way through silent timber to its ructured porch. On the top step he collapsed opposite a scarecrow posed in patched denim overalls. The scarecrow was talking. Not the scarecrow. He sat up and saw a man wearing a cableknit sweater under an elbowpatched corduroy blazer. The man's blonde beard was trimmed and he wore blackplastic glasses mended with white tape. He was tamping tobacco into a pipebowl.

I had to watch you a while to be sure.

I know.

How did you find us?

I . . . saw the house.

You dont know?

No.

Okay.

Who are you?

Who are you?

I'm a book reviewer.

The man with the pipe nodded.

There are about two dozen of us. We're starting over. We're writing books. We're restoring an old printing press. We found a bunch of ISBNs nobody was using. We'll build a new civilization. With a library. Maybe even branch libraries.

Thank god.

All you need to join us is one book. Any book.

Okay.

The man with the pipe looked at him.

You don't have a book, do you?

He shook his head.

If you have books, I can tell you if they're good or bad.

The man with the pipe shook his head.

We're starting over. Every citizen can write his own review. If we can make electricity we'll have blogs.

The book reviewer looked around wildly. Somewhere, just out of sight, there were books. He had carried the torch so far but now it had been extinguished. Hopeless.

There must be something I can do, he said.

The man with the pipe lit his pipe with a Lucifer match. Puffed until he was wreathed with smoke. Sent runnels of smoke from the corners of his mouth.

We're starting a bookgroup, he said. Every Wednesday after scavenging. We'll need a leader. Do you know anything about bookgroups?

Yes, lied the book reviewer. Everything.

The man with the pipe nodded, puffing. He clapped him on the back.

Come on, then. Better get started on the discussion questions.

 

ONCE THERE WERE PEOPLE SITTING in wingbacked chairs in woodpaneled rooms. They smelled of tobacco and damp wool and mentholatum. You could see them reading literary journals and works in translation. Sometimes they ate secret food from their bookbags. On their brows were furrows that were contour maps of a world in its going. Of a thing that could not exist without paper. Their green reading lamps smelled of burning dust and the last mysteries.