“So the D codes are by far the most important. Any code starting with a D means the book requires destruction. This is your prime objective. Take your time. Obviously any book that contains the text of a false religion or is sympathetic to a false religion or asserts or even explains heretical teachings at odds with the truths of The Blessing—these are D-F. We have chosen letters you can remember—so think ‘F for false.’ Ridding the nation of false teaching or confusing untruth is one of our highest priorities. Understand?”
Again we nodded.
“Then you must also consider whether the book promotes so-called humanism, any basis for morality that is not based on God’s word or asserts the primacy of reason over faith. These are all D-H; here H is for humanism. Or perhaps the book promotes the theory of evolution or argues the existence of geological or biological evidence that contradicts the Bible; this is all D-S—anything that assumes that pure science can exist separately from revelation and other types of godly knowledge. Then we have D-D—you can probably guess, with D for deviancy. These we call ‘double D’s.’ Few of these escaped from the purges of three years ago, but you will be shocked how many are still floating around, and in places you would not expect. So everything written by a known or suspected homosexual that promotes, excuses, or justifies the homosexual lifestyle or includes homosexual characters is D-D. Similar to that is D-A, for adultery, which of course includes anything involving divorce, sex before marriage, or other sexual sins.”
Mr. Thornton looked both disgusted and exhilarated by this litany of enemy texts. He wanted us to understand the immense burden and responsibility that was his.
“Can you imagine, all those years, all those novels where characters casually dissolved marriages made by God, had affairs, committed adultery. Books where people flaunted homosexual lifestyles. They disrespected God, trashed Christians. What were children to think other than that it was all OK?”
He went on in a similar vein and then had us practice with a stack of twenty books. When he visited my table late on the second day to check my work, he looked skeptical. When it turned out that I was the only worker to index each of my test books exactly right, he stared at me with interest, and then spoke in a low voice, with his back to the two small cameras on the far wall of the room.
“I know who you are, you know. From before. They thought I should know. But they told me they were certain that your call to Christ was strong and deep. But I plan to watch you. More closely than the others. No one else has ever gotten a perfect score. Not the most devout and dedicated deacon. Only you saw the insidious undercurrents hidden beneath seemingly acceptable texts. That really takes … If He can open a heart like yours …” He stared at me again with a searching intensity. “Well, praise God is all I can say.”
On the second day at work, Lurlene casually mentioned at lunch that as much as she loathed filth, she found it sad that her grandchildren would never know what it was to hold and read a physical book. I then learned that all new books were required to be published only in electronic form, delivered through a Device and read on tablets or screens, or heard through readers.
“No big deal,” another indexer said when I asked how this had happened. “The industry went electronic years ago. The physical book was all but dead even before the all-digital rule. Who cares?”
And yet I was chilled by the obvious. Nothing now could be written or read in private. All digital text could be centrally edited, censored, or deleted. The written word no longer could be hidden behind walls or tucked away in the attic. With all new words in the maw of the Purity Web, no wonder they were obsessed with eradicating the old words on paper that conflicted with their version of history and truth.
Sanjay and I had understood the anger directed at intellectuals. We knew the deep resentment at the secular universities. But even after Sarah Palin’s Christian Nation resolution was celebrated with spontaneous book burnings around the country, we had not grasped the anger at the book itself. The book was the ultimate symbol of the great divide between faith, which depends on a single authoritative book, and reason, which challenges the very idea of revealed wisdom and celebrates books for their subversion of authority. And here I was. It was bad enough that I fraudulently pretended to their belief to save my life, but now I did their work, spending my days eradicating the only seeds from which a counterrevolution could emerge. I was slowly, a book at a time, eradicating both memory and hope.
The relief I initially felt upon leaving Governors Island alive was soon eclipsed by a sense of profound lethargy. I should have felt revulsion, anger, frustration, and despair at the new Christian Nation that I found. I did not. I mustered enough attention to my work to more than satisfy my bosses at the archives. I allowed Lurlene to mother me a bit. I ate lunch with some of the other indexers, but I trusted none of them. None trusted me. And if I had trusted them, what would I have said? The ubiquitous Purity Web listened and watched and knew everything.
Time passed slowly, but I was patient. No events of any meaning occurred to mark the passage of time. One of my housemates became engaged, and we had a dull party. He was almost thirty, approaching the time when any “yet-to-be-married Christians,” known colloquially as “YC’s,” needed to make the transition to “married Christians,” or “MC’s.” No man or woman risked turning thirty as a YC. At the party I watched him with his twenty-nine-year-old fiancée. I saw no signs of affection.
Sometime after the second anniversary of my release from the island, I was working as usual at the archives. Early on, I had disciplined myself to pick books from each day’s cart strictly in the order in which they were presented. I might spy an intriguing spine or from time to time a title that was familiar, but I resisted the temptation to pluck it from the cart and instead worked my way methodically from left to right and top shelf to bottom. That day, I noticed, first thing in the morning, the name “E. O. Wilson” on the spine of a small book on the middle shelf. I worked patiently all morning and then finally I retrieved the book and set it on my table. I instantly understood how this particular book, by a prominent entomologist, biologist, and environmentalist, could have survived the previous purges. Its title was
The Creation
, so those to whom the author’s name meant nothing would have mistaken it as a creationist screed and reshelved it with reverence. It was a book I had read twenty-three years before, after it had been given to me by Sanjay. E. O. Wilson was one of his heroes.
It was difficult for me to keep my composure as I read the first few pages of the book, which took the form of a letter written by the famous scientist to an imagined Southern Baptist pastor. Wilson was seeking to build a bridge across the great divide based on mutual reverence for the natural world that is the creation:
Dear Pastor: We have not met, yet I feel I know you well enough to call you friend. First of all, we grew up in the same faith. As a boy I too answered the altar call; I went under the water. Although I no longer belong to that faith, I am confident that if we met and spoke privately of our deepest beliefs, it would be in a spirit of mutual respect and good will. I know we share many precepts of moral behavior. Perhaps it also matters that we are both Americans and, insofar as it might still affect civility and good manners, we are both Southerners
.
There it was. Wilson, relying on shared American values, mutual respect, goodwill, civility, and good manners, reached across the divide, confident that common ground can be found. History’s verdict: a decent man betrayed and a magnificent gesture rebuffed. Unsettled, I pulled an A-C card out of the box, incorrectly coded the subversive text as “Approved Christian,” and placed it on the outgoing cart. I figured I could pull it off the cart later in the afternoon.
The rest of the day the book sat there, haunting me. If my work were checked, would I have any excuse or explanation, or would it mean the end? They must not check every book, I thought. Perhaps one in ten? So it was, probably, a roll of the dice. I would decide before the end of the day. But when I returned from a bathroom break at 3:30 p.m., my outgoing cart was gone and an empty one was in its place. I panicked. As casually as I could, I asked the indexer at the next table why the cart had been collected before the usual time of 5:00 p.m.
“Sam promised his wife he would be at his daughter’s birthday party. Lurlene said it was fine; he could make up the time next week. There a problem?”
“No, not at all. He’s such a creature of habit. I was just wondering what could have thrown him off his schedule.” I have become a smooth and accomplished liar.
There was nothing I could do. One month later, when there had been no consequence of my rash act, I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea that I could do it again. It was, I realized, within my power to save books by deliberately mis-indexing them. An A-C card was a free pass to the future. With one small act, I could guarantee that the logic, the passion, the poetry, or the conviction of an author could take a ride to immortality on the dusty shelves of the Christian Nation Archives. Once shelved in the permanent archives, my imposter books almost certainly would not be discovered. There, in the custody of the mighty COGA itself, would reside the seeds for the American culture that would subvert and succeed it. Tucked among novels of banal edification, expositions of intelligent design, and theology dense with its own self-referential illogic—I could plant these subversive gems.
In that still wide-open space of nighttime wakefulness, the act seemed to me to be enormously consequential. In the narrowing light of dawn, I was not so sure. How much can be asked of one person, my left brain protested while I brushed my teeth that morning. I had already walked away from my career to follow a friend and fight the Holies. I had already stood up in front of charging United States marines expecting to die. Wasn’t that enough? And who, my left brain insisted, who exactly would I do this thing for?
Two years passed. And then, only six months ago, a new indexer named Adam was greeted by Lurlene, instructed by Mr. Thornton, and settled in to work two rows behind me. He was the only African American in our group, and his glasses, dress, and speech suggested that he had been a teacher or scholar. For the first two weeks, he ignored me nearly to the point of rudeness. Then, during his second week, seeing that I was heading to Washington Square Park for lunch, Adam casually asked if he could join me.
“Let’s sit here instead,” he said, “I insist.” We walked to an out-of-the-way bench facing a large block of shrubs.
Adam asked me lots of questions about work. He dodged most of my questions about him. When we rose from the bench, he glanced to see that no one was near and then said simply, “Greg, you need to know that I am here because of you.” Before I could respond, he shook my hand, giving it that distinctive extra squeeze I had felt from a few others, and then turned to walk back to the library by himself. It was only six weeks after that day that the two of us, new friends, left for a vacation—my first in five years.
“You go, Honey,” said Lurlene. “You deserve it. Camping is good for the soul. My Dale loved to camp. ‘Outdoors,’ he said, ‘is the only place I can think.’ Think and pray. So have yourself some fun.”
And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
—Thomas Jefferson, April 11, 1823
But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes an historical event, is the supreme capacity of man.
—Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
I
HEARD A
SPLASH THROUGH
the open window and looked up to see two ducks that had just landed in the lake. They both lifted their heads, straightened their bodies with a front-to-back shake, and paddled forward, leaving a well-ordered wake, its ripples spreading gently toward the banks.
“You know,” Adam said during our conversation early yesterday morning, “this will probably get you killed. Or at least get you put back in prison for life. Maybe worse. You’re still a young man. You have a choice.”
“You didn’t give me that choice when you asked me to come up here. You didn’t give me that choice when I started to write. Why not?”
“It would have been a lot to ask,” he said.
I didn’t disagree. Since leaving Governors, I had not thought about my future. Honestly, not once. But now, with the past safety tucked into this book, my mind has once again started to drift into forward time. I imagine staying here, swimming every day in the summer, sitting on the big rock watching the ducks. Smelling the fallen leaves. Reveling in the blankness of the snow. That would be happiness of a sort. A natural coda to an eventful life.
Yesterday I finally learned what they are asking of me. Sitting at the small breakfast table, Adam raised the subject.
“The book is almost done. We should talk about what comes next.”
“Enlighten me,” I said a bit acidly.
“Free Minds works on the cell system. A cell is four people. Every cell has an originator, called the ‘point,’ and the others are members. Everyone is in two cells. You are recruited by the point of your first cell, and that becomes your base cell. Once that cell is established, each of the members—assuming the role of a new point—has to go out and organize his or her own cell. You get it? The point is the only link between cells. And all any one person knows is the members of two cells—the original base cell of which he is a member, and the new one that he has formed as point.”