The Book (30 page)

For some reason, Holden hadn’t noticed the door. Of course, it noticed him; it had been there the whole time. Molding. Doorknob. Hinges. Threshold. A gap on all sides that cut a black line into the seamless white walls. Perhaps he was too absorbed in the inevitability of his capture to truly accept the possibility of escape. But hadn’t he also missed the rubber floor? What about the desk? He hadn’t seen that either. But there was a door now, cracked open, as real as his nose is crooked. Before it opened completely, Holden thought it would be a smart move to scan the rest of the room to see if he had missed anything else.

He hadn’t. No windows. No cameras. Just the door.

When it swung open from the stark white walls in a full arc, a man stepped into the room wearing a casual expression, a gray blazer and a black turtleneck. Holden couldn’t believe his eyes (mostly because they had lied to him already), but the man who entered the room was none other than Martin Trust, the director of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration. The man who had told him a story about a little soldier that ignored the advice of a goblin and died because he fell in love with paper.

Trust closed the door with a little more effort than seemed necessary, kept his hand upon the handle as it rested in the closed position and, almost wholly unaware of Holden’s presence, turned to approach the desk. Holden glanced uneasily around the room to check again for other doors and noticed how the image of the recycling icon had morphed into the seal of the Department of Homeland Security. The man adjusted a few things on the desk’s digital screen and then, very simply, he stood and waited.

After ten seconds, he tilted his head up to his guest and said, “Mister Clifford, please have a seat.” His voice was frigid and oddly professional, as if Holden had stopped in to fill out a questionnaire for a free copy of The Book.

The polished, stainless steel seat, which Holden thought was left for someone of importance, had actually been meant for him. And once he was situated, it finally made sense why the computer screen that was built into the clear, green desktop had only been visible form a perpendicular angle – he was about to be questioned without seeing the questions. Martin Trust gazed down at Holden with an arrogant smile that spoke of many predetermined judgments. He released three short ticks and, in the stillness that followed, Holden pictured a school teacher shaking his head in reprimand at a student who hadn’t brought their stylus pen to class.

Tisk, tisk tisk, Mister Clifford. You started your own anarchist movement.

“So…” Holden breathed, “what’s the process man? Let’s get this going. If I’m done, I’m done. Let’s do it.”

“Well, you are not lacking in impatience, Holden. May I call you Holden, for the sake of this discussion?”

“Uh…” He paused for an unnecessarily long minute, as if not actually choosing sarcasm as a response. “No,” he decided, smartly. Holden wondered if he had just witnessed his final act of rebellion.

“Very well,” the director said, nodding his squared jaw. “Mister Clifford. I believe we may have gotten off on the wrong foot. See, the job that has been placed upon me is one of protection. It is important for me, as the head of a division of Homeland Security –” He pronounced
Homeland
as if it were two separate, unequal words and gave each a formidable weight as he released them from his plump-lipped mouth. “– that I ensure those above me that this country, if not this world, is protected. Its values protected. Its,” he delayed, “…interests. I’ll see if I can explain it with an age-old metaphor. Our government, along with the Publishing House, is a well-oiled machine. You, Mister Clifford, are a wrench that someone, somewhere, at some time, has dropped into that machine. My job is simple. I get rid of the wrench before it can do any further damage and then, from that point on, it’s all preventative maintenance. I find the other persons responsible for causing the problem and simply ensure that they will never cause problems again. Sometimes, to amuse myself with irony, I drop the wrench on them.”

The man’s calm, effortless description made the roots of Holden’s teeth curl. He swallowed and tried not to look as frightened as he felt inside, but the gesture carried less water than a wicker basket.

“I can tell by your expression, Mister Clifford, that what I’m saying doesn’t sit comfortably. Well, to be honest, it doesn’t matter at this point. The only thing you have going for you,” he drawled, putting his hands behind his back as he paced the room in a relaxed, regulatory rhythm, “is that we have a plan you can be involved in…involuntarily though it may be.” Trust leaned toward the bench where Holden had awoken moments ago and removed a piece of hair that floated along its cold, metal surface. He flaked it from his fingers. “You should be relieved, Mister Clifford. You have been obtained at quite an opportune time. See, most people who come into this room are given few options. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories, but, to grant you a blurb, our judge and jury are very swift in their declaration of guilty. These days, it’s more of an
automatic
thing. But, that’s neither here nor there. Doesn’t apply to you. And while you may be guilty in every single sense of the word, the task we require of you may change that. Especially in the eyes of history and in the
Free Thinking
group that is currently vilifying our country.”

“Get to the point,” Holden complained, staring rudely at death, impatient for the restful slash of its sharpened sickle.

The director pursed his lips, stepped onto the rubber floor and placed a hand on the desk. “I feel this could be better explained if I showed you instead of told you. This is a bit unorthodox, but if we’re being honest, I’ve found that I actually enjoy walking with you.”

The man turned suddenly and approached the door that had been invisible prior to his arrival. He knocked three times and, like Dorothy clicking her heels, assured salvation presented itself. Holden stood from his seat and followed, uncertain of where the Wizard’s balloon would take him, but glad to be heading anywhere other than the room of fake environments that seemed to bore a hole in his soft, little mind.

It took less than a minute for Holden to be amazed at the Kansas beyond the door. He was in an office. There were people bustling about, holding portfolios and sack lunches, talking on cell phones and tittering away on their handheld computers. Holden watched the activity around him with his mouth swinging low. The director walked him to an open lobby with windows looking down into an even larger lobby that held a feathery steel sculpture where a few worker bees were buzzing. The shimmering, white marble floors and security guards made Holden realize that he had actually been in a typical office building. There were people circling in and out of the rotating glass doors and he wondered if they were on their way to work, heading out for a meeting over lunch or going golfing. There was an eerie realism to it and Holden seemed to stick out, dressed in his blue-collar jeans and work shirt (that one that actually had a blue collar) and shoeless feet that needed new socks, like a handwritten book in a digital world.

That reality gave him no sense of comfort. What he wanted, what he longed for, as he glimpsed a sliver of sunlight through the lobby windows, was a single panoramic view that could show him the sky, all bluish and real. He had been so thwarted lately with clouds and gloom that just a rectangle of real sky would warm his heart.

Holden’s attention was yanked away as Martin Trust ushered him from the windows to lead him on a tour of the building. It was odd because it felt as if he weren’t some hostile prisoner of war, detained against his will among the digital files. Stumbling behind the director, tired, beaten and poorly dressed, he resembled an unemployed Unfortunate who had dropped by for a visit to guilt his relative into getting him a job in the mail room.

Like a younger brother. A little brother.

“The Publishing House is broken into three floors. You can see this clearly through the elevators in the atrium. Don’t you love how they glisten in the light? Real crystal.” Holden peeked around the corner and saw the large, well-lit seating area beside three glass elevators that brought employees to the two floors above them. It seemed a bit garish and unnecessary, but who was a prisoner to judge? Stretching to the highest point, below a multi-faceted glass roof, was an abominable, green wall that seemed to change its own hue in the shaft of light that cut through the office spaces above. Their affect on the remaining architecture provided Holden with an accurate assessment of how important the Publishing House was to the building.

“The first floor is the Department of
Reduction. On this level, you’ll find the offices of our Editors. We don’t have many, but their job is to reduce the information in The Book that goes against what we call
The Current Purpose
. Next level you’ll find the Department of Reusage, where we store a digital copy of all the adjustments we have made over time, in case a real copy is leaked by some pesky, unlawful group, present party included, or if another unpredictable problem arises where we would need to go back to the exact original. We have a record of everything we have ever altered and can, rather easily, make that happen in a simple, one-minute-forty-seven-second update. Then, above that, on the third floor, is the Department of Recycling. Where we recycle.”

That final, very simple sentence hung in the air around them like a cloud of so many souls, floating in the unwelcome din of purgatory. Without further explanation, the director of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration led Holden into the sitting room and toward the sun-kissed elevators. No one was watching them. No one cared who he was or why he was there. Holden felt his eyes scanning the room as if yearning for some sort of escape that his mind hadn’t been developing.

Where were they going? Was the man actually going to walk him on his own to the level of Recycling, whatever that meant?
Was he actually making the cold, shoeless stroll right now to everlasting life? He needed to get straight with God and, like, now. And what about these people? Were they so used to seeing a man walking toward certain recyclement that it hadn’t caused them to stir from their sack lunches and personalized website updates? ‘Twelve noon and another dead man walking. Me, I’m just riding that trusty escalator called Monday to the bottom and it’s slow as hell.’

Holden’s frantic panting stuttered as he pictured Jane again, fatherless and struggling through life, unable to get the guidance she always wanted and scrambling to find it in other ways without realizing how it was gradually destroying her life beyond repair. He pictured their cause crumbling, as fear was born like a cancer in the group, until they disbanded and hid inside themselves only to find their hand, years later, with a sharpened nail on the pointer finger. He thought of Marion. Lost, with no one there to help her get through. Winston, sad and descending. And poor, Unfortunate Moby. Hope had been reborn in Holden and now it was nowhere to be found. Everything he had done was for nothing.

But Martin Trust hadn’t stopped at the elevators. Holden just realized. The director was leading him down a separate hallway, past a cafeteria and into a quarantined field of cubicles that was surprisingly ordinary.

Men and women passed Martin Trust saying,
“Hello”
and
“Afternoon, Director”
.

The man replied each time with the oddest sentiment.
“Good to see you smiling again.”

At one point, Trust even poked one of the men that was walking by holding a digital folder, and stopped to joke about some recent football game and how the man owed him twenty bucks. It was so disturbing and fake and all together unbelievable. These people were ruining mankind one word at a time, with a smile on their face and egg salad on their breath. And then, Holden remembered the room he had found himself in only moments before and knew that there was a deep psychological control in the silent solitude of that building, among the desolate aisles of padded cubicle walls, and felt sorry for them.

Near one of the more organized cubicles, the director stopped, turned to face a frosted, green glass door along the wall and began punching a code into its unnumbered keypad. The woman in the cubicle smiled graciously at the director and Holden noticed that, for the slightest of seconds, her eyes faltered. In that millisecond of wavering, Holden wished that he could be free to call Winston. To tell him that he had found a counterpart to his mother: a well-placed knight among the editing staff. Holden witnessed in a glance that this woman either did not like what she was being forced to do or hadn’t been comfortable around Martin Trust, which meant that she didn’t believe in him. He could have done something with that before. But not now. Not as he was being led into this room.
Whatever this room was.
The only thought that granted Holden any degree of liberation was that he was still on the first floor, in the Department of Reduction.

“There we are,” the director proclaimed, as three notes of confirmation chirped from the keypad. The frosted glass door separated from the wall with a hissing of pressure. The director swung it open and walked merrily through.

Holden was met with surprise, once again.

It was just a conference room.

Another sleek, green acrylic table spanned the space, twelve feet long with nine thin, leather task chairs that swiveled, spun, and rolled on hidden casters. The floor was composed of some foreign, jet black material. It was seamless, unidentifiable and its shiny onyx wrapped the walls of the room, almost overbearing in its immeasurable darkness. And it would have been, if it weren’t for the wide ribbon of dark mahogany that ringed the floor to the wall to the ceiling, where it gradually estranged itself and hung a foot below the can lights. The room was exquisite, but what really captured Holden’s eye was outside the room – the scene beyond the single panoramic window. The sky was bright blue, the grass outside was green and luscious and all the buildings were the purest white he had ever seen.