The Read
The Read
By Keir Graff
Booklist, May 15, 2009
(Illustration by Jim Lange)
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.
