Post by Cy Skywalker on Sept 21, 2006 14:36:27 GMT -5
I don't like the very ending of this one. Inspired by Bradbury, a little. A social commentary?
At first it seemed that the book people spoke so slowly. As per rumor they elongated words...into rivulets or rivets of language that felt not offensive against the innate sense country,but which I had never experienced before.
U c? I dont spare ppl anymore.
After speaking to the so-slow contact I had no proof that the book people were inhuman, recluse, Gothic obsessives, g33k--anything which rumor made them. Nor did their dwelling on second, with its true facade of high turrets, black-brown stone, gargoyles and windows with either bars or stained glass, deny any talk. I ascended the steps looking up at the blackness, and wondered who would desire to live in such halls reminiscent of death with an unknown around each heavy corner. Nor did Charleston’s garb disappoint--whatever excuse for a business uniform he was wearing had an inordinate number of latched pockets and chains, and a dour spectrum of blacks.
He nodded to me and averted his eyes from the strip of light my entrance through one of the double doors had permitted in. I know now that his features only looked scowling because of the glimpse of the street outside which I offered him. Not all book people are like this, but Charleston considered constant commercialism a foul drug.
“Im the journl maj u spoke w/, sir ” I said, knowing or picturing the words as they are here spelled.
“The man from the newspaper, you mean?” His black hair stuck up randomly where it had not balded away, and his face in the dim light (after the door closed, that is, though fluorescent bulbs glowed, or perhaps glew, farther down the entrance hall) had the stern expression of a rolling boulder.
“Mm-hm.” I nodded.
He dipped his head and turned with the vague attitude that I was to follow him.
Not all of the book people wore coats like the fusion of a suit-jacket and a cloak, but quite a few did, including the girl who looked up from a rounded chair as Charleston opened the first thick door on our right. Pink probably would have insulted her, as would any hair color besides blue. In race she was African-American like half of my family; in age perhaps thirteen, therefor two schools inferior to me; and in mien catlike, ignoring every human around her while still managing to snub them.
The three-story gym-sized room housed books, floors and shelves and stacks of them. Natural light came in, but only from an alleyway where the blank side of a deli to the old edifice’s right had been built snugged up against its abstract stained-glass wall. The faded red carpet with kaleidoscopic reflections laying over it held a fine layer of gray dust, but the books shimmered in protective plastic.
“We are always willing,” said the ringleader Charleston, “to have the heart and soul of this organization, if not its individual members, interviewed by qualified personnel.”
I wondered if ‘personnel’ meant ‘employee’ and decided to take it as a compliment.
“Do you mind if first I show you some of our material?”
Some fearful sourness in my stomach presented itself. Books represented--u no they do 2 u--having to work to hard for sensations too easy to obtain in other ways, and that dangerous hazmat fiction obsessed a person with adventure and death-odds, with solitude and second-guessing and dressing in strange black coats.
Somewhen Charleston had taken a plastic-white brick-sized volume from the shelf nearby us. “This may be of some professional interest to you. One not unlike you wrote it during the second world war.”
This was what we called active reporting. It proposed a man standing on the sidelines as planes flew above a great city and fought for or against destroying it. Bombs burrowed into the orange-shadowed earth in plumes of city’s-guts-confetti, and I found myself supporting the Americans as if in current politics though this had happened so long ago, like my team at a football game, though death stalked these players. Only afterward did I see it as an overcarnal, obscure plight, and second-hand adventure as the cheap thrill the populace scorned it as...because it was also an escape, more thought-engaging than a film, and a noble relationship.
havnt u ever felt that? Perhaps it is a rare breed of people, and Charleston’s recruits or family know how to find them among the generic ones.
I looked up at him and said, “I don’t understand. How this...happens.” I didn’t have the words to say how different the prose-style felt, like a missing piece, and precise .
“I can explain some of it to you,” he said, and the next half hour was spent learning some new words, new spellings, old reasons--an eclectic mix of fascinating and boring topics.
At the end of the interview time I left and, having done no interview, arranged to come again the next day.
At that time I felt to be involved in no criminal activity, though merely a suggestion of sin. It was a deviant action I observed,, and a harmless, though slightly creepy, distraction-become-lifestyle. Like zombies the readers of fiction enjoyed the nearness of death, what they called suspense, to the stories’ characters’; perhaps in fact they were more like vampires. I did not get much practice using metaphor in writing up blurbs for the netnewsfeed.
Next day the chapel-like book-vault’s door stood open a crack, and I sidled in because we journl majes are allowed to go places once we get a job the gov has sanctioned . I knew the way, and now took a little time to look at the hangings on the walls. I saw them as dull, overlarge, and indistinct.
On to the library; no one awaited me there and the light fell metallicly from window to carpet. Do books absorb sound somehow, like auditory sponges?
A small clunk heralded a change in the light. Then another thud and something like a black garbage bag tumbled through a sudden opening in a hinged, salmon-colored windowpane. it unfolded to reveal the silent blue-haired girl I had seen yesterday, still dressed in the garbage-bag-like shiny trenchcoat. She stumbled toward me, more like a soldier than like my own preteen daughter whose height she matched, and there was an enormous red-bound book tucked up against her side in one shadowy hand. She saw me and stood against the nearby bookcase like birds startled off a telephone wire.
“Get out!” she said. “If you heard any real words yesterday help me save this book!”
She tossed the thing to me and its weight bowed my practiced arms. The girl slipped up a ladder lain over the bookshelves and began screaming like eagles, like bats, then like a shrill telephone--
A dozen panes of stained-glass shattered around the prearranged entrance hole. Gunshots with their sounds cut like shrapnel through the library air. Perhaps curiosity, not knowledge of what is important, propelled me away before the black silhouettes stepped through the hole they had made. I am not yet good at introspection.
Footsteps and silence--I had no idea how many people lived in the building--followed me down the dim hallway and toward the light. From my career I knew the city, and even some of its spots where cops would have more to deal with than a running bookthief--
Outside I sprinted down the left, toward the next block, not looking back nor knowing clearly where I was going. As the book got heavy under my arm, the police started shouting at me.
“Stop, thief!”, things like that, which drove into me the reality of a criminal act--luckily few people were on the sidewalk here. I could pick a door, an alley, or the street--
Right ahead, a pedestrian bright with a workers’ scaffold slung beside it, crossing over an offshoot of the highway. It felt like a running-nightmare, which through the terror said anything’s possible...
I reached and gripped the low concrete bridge-edge and clambered over onto the silver platform. radios crackled louder than the other, human noises of my persecution; had some never entered the book-filled room and come around at me from another direction?
As usual, this platform connected to another one on a winch, for safety, and than hung slightly lower. Breath became a low priority.
I stepped, reached, and the book’s odd shape messed with my balance. Falling--! The wire platform had dropped me a few notches only but I tipped and tried to catch on the wall under the bridge. The next feeling became of roller-coaster-dropping-pain along with the scrape and thump of concrete, impacts--! Road surface. Cars hissed by and ruffled my hair; for a few minutes or for however long I did not care where I was and in what likelihood of being run over.
When I looked the book was still in my bleeding hands and parking police cars were slowing down traffic.
The bleeding book didn’t feel worth it any more. Why did I want to save these rebels?
Something exploded in the distance off the side of the road, and a few cops who had appeared near me twitched for their walkie-talkies.
When I shifted, the book lolled open. A random list; why did it show words with elevated teardrops raining down between the last and second-to-last letters? Curiosity again, and the street was clear, with the police, just people more concerned for the continuing popping explosions and whatever, babbled over their phones.
I jogged across the road, forced back to breathing, and in the dirty normal streets ducked behind a picket-fence gate propped open in the barrier around a public play-park. I set my back against it; thought innocent, hidden thoughts.
The girl who had launched me into this lay on the gravel a few feet away, one knee up and boots angled toward me. Except for the bloody spot beneath her hands where they laced above her stomach, she could have been enjoying the sun.
I jumped and stupidly whispered, “I’ve got ur book.”
Her eyes closed. Her voice now came softer, more feminine than before. “This is such a coincidence.” I didn’t know what that meant, and thought she attempted to clarify with “It’s a dictionary,”, though that clarified nothing.
“R u ok?” I asked, again stupidly, “What’s go gr8 about this book?”
Slowly she said, “It explains words. It’s from 2008, so the old and new languages were just mixing. Library of Congress would have paid us in protection for it...but maybe this is better.” Her brown copper eyes opened, like a...firebird breaking out of its shell. “One recruit worth all our security and collection...there haven’t been any in a long time. Too little attention span. But you can see a story can’t you. They teach that all writing can engage the senses fully, and kids who can’t or don’t want to feel that identify reading lessons with lies. They never idolize word-smugglers...
Getting shot lets your mind go off on tangents.”
“What can I do?” I exclaimed.
“Keep your voice down. Only...get the book to Washington?”
Pause. “I can do that. My wife and I have clearances.” Pause. “Why is this so important?”
It is not that I was callous to suffering, but that she seemed so strong and peacefully sleepy, able to speak.
She grimaced. “I saw what the newspaper collection did to you. Promise me; read some science fiction. Some Lucas. You might not see it the same as news...but oh will you see it. Just get outta here. I’ll satisfy them; I’m wanted.” The firebird died as the bullet’s healing agent stopped its work under her hands.
Why had she gone into hiding before they could find her to keep her alive?
The same reason why I dashed toward the school next door, where the red brick of an old book would be slightly less conspicuous. Someone wanted, or wanted to ban like a drug, those books, because of their amazing effect that nothing of the typical consumer’s world can create.
I did not know how books had been commonplace once, though not everyone enjoyed them, and how the new popular English created our own. How you speak is how you think, so we thought shortly and, occasionally, in numbers.
I see my purpose now.
At first it seemed that the book people spoke so slowly. As per rumor they elongated words...into rivulets or rivets of language that felt not offensive against the innate sense country,but which I had never experienced before.
U c? I dont spare ppl anymore.
After speaking to the so-slow contact I had no proof that the book people were inhuman, recluse, Gothic obsessives, g33k--anything which rumor made them. Nor did their dwelling on second, with its true facade of high turrets, black-brown stone, gargoyles and windows with either bars or stained glass, deny any talk. I ascended the steps looking up at the blackness, and wondered who would desire to live in such halls reminiscent of death with an unknown around each heavy corner. Nor did Charleston’s garb disappoint--whatever excuse for a business uniform he was wearing had an inordinate number of latched pockets and chains, and a dour spectrum of blacks.
He nodded to me and averted his eyes from the strip of light my entrance through one of the double doors had permitted in. I know now that his features only looked scowling because of the glimpse of the street outside which I offered him. Not all book people are like this, but Charleston considered constant commercialism a foul drug.
“Im the journl maj u spoke w/, sir ” I said, knowing or picturing the words as they are here spelled.
“The man from the newspaper, you mean?” His black hair stuck up randomly where it had not balded away, and his face in the dim light (after the door closed, that is, though fluorescent bulbs glowed, or perhaps glew, farther down the entrance hall) had the stern expression of a rolling boulder.
“Mm-hm.” I nodded.
He dipped his head and turned with the vague attitude that I was to follow him.
Not all of the book people wore coats like the fusion of a suit-jacket and a cloak, but quite a few did, including the girl who looked up from a rounded chair as Charleston opened the first thick door on our right. Pink probably would have insulted her, as would any hair color besides blue. In race she was African-American like half of my family; in age perhaps thirteen, therefor two schools inferior to me; and in mien catlike, ignoring every human around her while still managing to snub them.
The three-story gym-sized room housed books, floors and shelves and stacks of them. Natural light came in, but only from an alleyway where the blank side of a deli to the old edifice’s right had been built snugged up against its abstract stained-glass wall. The faded red carpet with kaleidoscopic reflections laying over it held a fine layer of gray dust, but the books shimmered in protective plastic.
“We are always willing,” said the ringleader Charleston, “to have the heart and soul of this organization, if not its individual members, interviewed by qualified personnel.”
I wondered if ‘personnel’ meant ‘employee’ and decided to take it as a compliment.
“Do you mind if first I show you some of our material?”
Some fearful sourness in my stomach presented itself. Books represented--u no they do 2 u--having to work to hard for sensations too easy to obtain in other ways, and that dangerous hazmat fiction obsessed a person with adventure and death-odds, with solitude and second-guessing and dressing in strange black coats.
Somewhen Charleston had taken a plastic-white brick-sized volume from the shelf nearby us. “This may be of some professional interest to you. One not unlike you wrote it during the second world war.”
This was what we called active reporting. It proposed a man standing on the sidelines as planes flew above a great city and fought for or against destroying it. Bombs burrowed into the orange-shadowed earth in plumes of city’s-guts-confetti, and I found myself supporting the Americans as if in current politics though this had happened so long ago, like my team at a football game, though death stalked these players. Only afterward did I see it as an overcarnal, obscure plight, and second-hand adventure as the cheap thrill the populace scorned it as...because it was also an escape, more thought-engaging than a film, and a noble relationship.
havnt u ever felt that? Perhaps it is a rare breed of people, and Charleston’s recruits or family know how to find them among the generic ones.
I looked up at him and said, “I don’t understand. How this...happens.” I didn’t have the words to say how different the prose-style felt, like a missing piece, and precise .
“I can explain some of it to you,” he said, and the next half hour was spent learning some new words, new spellings, old reasons--an eclectic mix of fascinating and boring topics.
At the end of the interview time I left and, having done no interview, arranged to come again the next day.
At that time I felt to be involved in no criminal activity, though merely a suggestion of sin. It was a deviant action I observed,, and a harmless, though slightly creepy, distraction-become-lifestyle. Like zombies the readers of fiction enjoyed the nearness of death, what they called suspense, to the stories’ characters’; perhaps in fact they were more like vampires. I did not get much practice using metaphor in writing up blurbs for the netnewsfeed.
Next day the chapel-like book-vault’s door stood open a crack, and I sidled in because we journl majes are allowed to go places once we get a job the gov has sanctioned . I knew the way, and now took a little time to look at the hangings on the walls. I saw them as dull, overlarge, and indistinct.
On to the library; no one awaited me there and the light fell metallicly from window to carpet. Do books absorb sound somehow, like auditory sponges?
A small clunk heralded a change in the light. Then another thud and something like a black garbage bag tumbled through a sudden opening in a hinged, salmon-colored windowpane. it unfolded to reveal the silent blue-haired girl I had seen yesterday, still dressed in the garbage-bag-like shiny trenchcoat. She stumbled toward me, more like a soldier than like my own preteen daughter whose height she matched, and there was an enormous red-bound book tucked up against her side in one shadowy hand. She saw me and stood against the nearby bookcase like birds startled off a telephone wire.
“Get out!” she said. “If you heard any real words yesterday help me save this book!”
She tossed the thing to me and its weight bowed my practiced arms. The girl slipped up a ladder lain over the bookshelves and began screaming like eagles, like bats, then like a shrill telephone--
A dozen panes of stained-glass shattered around the prearranged entrance hole. Gunshots with their sounds cut like shrapnel through the library air. Perhaps curiosity, not knowledge of what is important, propelled me away before the black silhouettes stepped through the hole they had made. I am not yet good at introspection.
Footsteps and silence--I had no idea how many people lived in the building--followed me down the dim hallway and toward the light. From my career I knew the city, and even some of its spots where cops would have more to deal with than a running bookthief--
Outside I sprinted down the left, toward the next block, not looking back nor knowing clearly where I was going. As the book got heavy under my arm, the police started shouting at me.
“Stop, thief!”, things like that, which drove into me the reality of a criminal act--luckily few people were on the sidewalk here. I could pick a door, an alley, or the street--
Right ahead, a pedestrian bright with a workers’ scaffold slung beside it, crossing over an offshoot of the highway. It felt like a running-nightmare, which through the terror said anything’s possible...
I reached and gripped the low concrete bridge-edge and clambered over onto the silver platform. radios crackled louder than the other, human noises of my persecution; had some never entered the book-filled room and come around at me from another direction?
As usual, this platform connected to another one on a winch, for safety, and than hung slightly lower. Breath became a low priority.
I stepped, reached, and the book’s odd shape messed with my balance. Falling--! The wire platform had dropped me a few notches only but I tipped and tried to catch on the wall under the bridge. The next feeling became of roller-coaster-dropping-pain along with the scrape and thump of concrete, impacts--! Road surface. Cars hissed by and ruffled my hair; for a few minutes or for however long I did not care where I was and in what likelihood of being run over.
When I looked the book was still in my bleeding hands and parking police cars were slowing down traffic.
The bleeding book didn’t feel worth it any more. Why did I want to save these rebels?
Something exploded in the distance off the side of the road, and a few cops who had appeared near me twitched for their walkie-talkies.
When I shifted, the book lolled open. A random list; why did it show words with elevated teardrops raining down between the last and second-to-last letters? Curiosity again, and the street was clear, with the police, just people more concerned for the continuing popping explosions and whatever, babbled over their phones.
I jogged across the road, forced back to breathing, and in the dirty normal streets ducked behind a picket-fence gate propped open in the barrier around a public play-park. I set my back against it; thought innocent, hidden thoughts.
The girl who had launched me into this lay on the gravel a few feet away, one knee up and boots angled toward me. Except for the bloody spot beneath her hands where they laced above her stomach, she could have been enjoying the sun.
I jumped and stupidly whispered, “I’ve got ur book.”
Her eyes closed. Her voice now came softer, more feminine than before. “This is such a coincidence.” I didn’t know what that meant, and thought she attempted to clarify with “It’s a dictionary,”, though that clarified nothing.
“R u ok?” I asked, again stupidly, “What’s go gr8 about this book?”
Slowly she said, “It explains words. It’s from 2008, so the old and new languages were just mixing. Library of Congress would have paid us in protection for it...but maybe this is better.” Her brown copper eyes opened, like a...firebird breaking out of its shell. “One recruit worth all our security and collection...there haven’t been any in a long time. Too little attention span. But you can see a story can’t you. They teach that all writing can engage the senses fully, and kids who can’t or don’t want to feel that identify reading lessons with lies. They never idolize word-smugglers...
Getting shot lets your mind go off on tangents.”
“What can I do?” I exclaimed.
“Keep your voice down. Only...get the book to Washington?”
Pause. “I can do that. My wife and I have clearances.” Pause. “Why is this so important?”
It is not that I was callous to suffering, but that she seemed so strong and peacefully sleepy, able to speak.
She grimaced. “I saw what the newspaper collection did to you. Promise me; read some science fiction. Some Lucas. You might not see it the same as news...but oh will you see it. Just get outta here. I’ll satisfy them; I’m wanted.” The firebird died as the bullet’s healing agent stopped its work under her hands.
Why had she gone into hiding before they could find her to keep her alive?
The same reason why I dashed toward the school next door, where the red brick of an old book would be slightly less conspicuous. Someone wanted, or wanted to ban like a drug, those books, because of their amazing effect that nothing of the typical consumer’s world can create.
I did not know how books had been commonplace once, though not everyone enjoyed them, and how the new popular English created our own. How you speak is how you think, so we thought shortly and, occasionally, in numbers.
I see my purpose now.
