The Book (2 page)

The train jerked to a stop and the doors opened with a familiar chime. The girl growled beside him, closed her Book and ambled off the train with a few others. Holden watched her dive for shelter from the rain as the car sealed its doors and rolled on to the next stop.

Seeking to be withdrawn from the rest of the commute, he flipped back the leather binding of his Book and watched as the inside screen flickered away from its black slumber and shifted to green. No, not green. More of an eerie white that pretended to be blameless and clean. There were some who preferred to read from a crisp white background in the comforts of their home computer, but those people weren’t true Book lovers. Those with a sharpened pointer finger found the murky green filter soothing and would always prefer to go green even if a white version had been available.

Black text swam to the surface, interrupting his story with the Gratis Press digital newspaper - a bonus for buying the latest edition of The Book. Holden longed to return to his story, but the scrolling headline drew him in.
The Free Thinkers
, terrorists against knowledge and history, had attacked another city.

That afternoon, city politicians mourned a once impeccable monument to twentieth century architecture. At street level, the north face of the Sears Tower had been branded with the emblem of
The Free Thinkers
. Holden swooped his fingernail around the photograph in the article and it enlarged to the width of the screen. Police surrounded the tower’s jet black aluminum facing, studying the trivial design. Upon a stately crest was the ornamental script of their motto: Think Again. Above this, Holden noticed the delicately etched icons of a bow and arrow and a revolver. Although the insignia was exquisitely drawn, the brand scarred the building in a violent technique, eating away at the seamless material.

Holden skimmed the article, but it was the same old news. Nothing much was known about the group other than the obvious; they were a syndicate of anarchists linked to the destruction of major historical monuments and meaningful pieces of our global history. When he reached the bottom of the article, a video began streaming of a man at a press conference. In the top right corner was the graphic of an American flag swimming in windless air beside the words:
Gallantly Streaming
. The man at the press conference behind a podium that carried the seal of the United States was sharp, attractive and, despite a similarity in age, was in an entirely different category than Holden. His name was Martin Trust. As the video continued within the brackets of unprinted text, Trust announced his commission as the head of a new sector of Homeland Security. He continued by affirming that it was the job of the Department of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration to protect and rehabilitate the nation’s most cherished antiquities. Trust comforted the press by declaring his passion for tracking down
The Free Thinkers
and Holden felt himself nod. He wasn’t the type to care much about history, but he also disliked people that rocked the boat.

Holden was bored with the images of demolished buildings that begged him to read on, so he found the recycling emblem for the Book and swirled his finger around it. The triangled arrows of the icon animated slowly before vanishing in a velvet haze of green.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
bled back to the screen with an invitation to learn more about the author. He denied the request and sat back in his seat, quickly enveloped in the digital universe of his mind.

* * * * *

002-2007

Holden stepped off the train, instantly bombarded by a repeat offense of regret. Living eight blocks from the tracks was still a bad idea. He tried to shelter himself under the awnings of shops along Montrose Avenue, but the jog home from the station was muculent and wet. The gravel driveway to his historic, but not preserved, residence was like tar in the downpour that sucked onto his boots from below dark puddles. Gripping his duffle bag, Holden climbed the unbalanced steps to the covered porch, shook himself free from the rain and went inside.

He tugged the cord that hung from the ceiling and a florescent glow reminded him of why he hated living there.
Home again, home again. Jiggety Jig
, Holden thought, as he searched his forever-empty mailbox before heading to the second floor. Every surface in the narrow stairwell was coated in the same thick, mint green paint as the exterior. When he first rented the place, he envisioned the house being dipped in fresh-smelling toothpaste. Unfortunately, the preventative act hadn’t killed the moist bacteria or cleared the grime from the corners or overtaken the stench from the many molding crevices. Like most historical buildings, the house where Holden lived was falling apart. It cost too much to restore and it was against the law to tear down. At least the rent was cheap. Holden often dreamed that the house would collapse one winter night under a tide of snow and swallow him while he slept.

The striped bamboo door to his apartment closed with significance. Holden lowered his eyes as he dropped his duffle bag to the floorboards, rolled his shoulders and cracked the top of his spine with a long, exhaled breath. He was home and it was time for the ritual to begin. Leave work at the door, take off the boots and break the seal of a richly deserved, locally brewed beer.
Jiggety Jig.
Yes, his family life was non-existent. But Holden was content with his small story. Most days he strolled directly to his easy chair and picked up where he left off on the train. On special days, he went back to his father’s copy of The Book that sat by the window and returned to his favorite story. Today, there was a kink. The phone on the wall was blinking.

Sweaty beer in hand, he closed the fridge and approached the answering machine, already knowing what he was about to hear and already regretting his actions of the past forty minutes. The two messages were from, or about, his two favorite people in the world. Shane and Jane.

Shane was his best friend. In fact, they had the All-American relationship. They grew up in the same neighborhood, dated the same girls, fought over the same girls and spent every moment they could together to this day. Like Holden, Shane worked for General Fire Protection. His message was typical and to the point.

“Meet me at The Library, man. Maybe we can reignite what happened last month with the librarian,” Shane’s charred, confident voice chuckled before he continued. “I know it’s raining, but don’t spend the weekend at home, bro. I’m buying and the game starts at six. Don’t be late.”

He clicked to the next message and looked at his watch, hoping the call would be from Jane. It wasn’t. Jane was Holden’s eleven-year-old daughter. Their relationship could be summed up in two conflicting words: simple and complicated. They barely saw one another. On the off chance that Holden pulled himself from his nothingness to see her, it was under the discretion of his militant ex-wife, Eve. Jane loved her father, but life kept them separate. That, and Holden’s unwavering forgetfulness.

Eve’s message was blunt.

“How many times is this going to happen, Hold? You were supposed to pick up Jane an hour ago. What a surprise!” Her stringent, acid-laced tone curdled in his ears. He cracked his beer open. “Why don’t you just enjoy that drink I’m sure you’re holding and I’ll make something up again. I can’t watch her sit by the phone waiting for your call. So don’t call.”

He took a swig from his beer and laughed. Despite being disappointed in himself for abandoning his daughter again, this was the first time in years that Eve hadn’t finished a conversation by calling him ‘predictably unreliable’ or mentioning that pipe fitters shouldn’t have pipe dreams they couldn’t finish.
Maybe that wasn’t a good thing
, Holden thought, as he reached for the picture frame on the shelf beside the phone. The digital frame held thirty pictures from Jane’s ninth birthday. Eve looked miserable in every over-exposed shot. What made Holden put it down and reach for his beer was that he realized these were the only photos of Jane in the whole house and they were two years old. He felt so suddenly guilty. What kind of a father didn’t have a recent picture of his kid?

In a glance, Holden’s reflection in the frame spoke a thousand words. The brown fuzz of his hair was coarse and his long, ragged, unshaven face was four days past socially acceptable. His notched nose, broken by a young Shane during one of their many childish arguments, carried a slight twist that most women found markedly attractive. Eve had been one of those, long ago. Holden stared into his dull brown eyes. Once young and gleaming with lightness and hope, they now drooped from his face, empty. He was thirty-three going on fifty and felt more lost than ever.

Holden eyed the phone’s dusty receiver and debated if he should call Jane. With a twisted lip, he ran a hand through his hair, used his middle finger to carry the beer from inside the bottle neck and tugged his duffle bag to the window with the oversized easy chair that beckoned him to relax in its downy, plush embrace. Maybe later he would watch the game. For now, escaping into the written world of his favorite story was an easier way to ignore his inadequacies.

Resting on the windowsill was his father’s copy of The Book. It was a first edition, passed down from his grandfather. It had a linen-wrapped, hard cover binding with a thick screen, so that it mimicked a printed book. The antique device reminded him that there had once been a time when people needed an easy transition to such technology. For Holden, there was something romantic about the archaic device. He got settled into the chair and picked up The Book, rubbing the front cover with his thumb. The recycling imprint of the Publishing House was missing from the binding. It hadn’t been mandatory at that time. Holden lifted the cover to reveal the darkened screen. By design, current day Books revived themselves when the cover was lifted. With his father’s Book he had to press the oval button in the corner to ignite the power. He always found a simple joy in that. The worn screen awoke to a plain list of options. Holden felt the thin arrow key on the right side of the device and used it to scroll down to the only author listed.

The name was J.D. Salinger.

The preliminary version of The Book stored an unremarkable one thousand mid-sized novels. That didn’t matter to Holden. There was only one story loaded onto the ancient appliance. The same story that had been there when Holden got The Book from their family’s estate lawyer. Apparently, it had been his father’s favorite novel and the origin of Holden’s unique name. After receiving The Book in his father’s will, Holden read it repeatedly, hoping to understand some unknown part of the man. Quickly,
The Catcher in the Rye
became the standard; the novel by which he judged all others, and the one he always ran to when there was a need to forget the present. He knew those pixels of narrative like the arrangement of tiny, white hexagon tiles on his monotonous bathroom floor. There was an unyielding order to it all and he found comfort knowing what came next.

Holden switched on the lamp beside his chair and nestled into the worn, single pillow. He sipped gently from his beer and flipped the page, exhaling instantaneous relaxation. And just as he began to read the words he had read so many times before, the screen went from dull green to black. The relic had powered down.

Aggravated, Holden rose from his comfort, snatched the adapter cord from the wall and plugged it into the binding. No light. No response. The battery was acting up again. He closed his eyes to calm himself and gulped a fifth of his beer before grabbing his new copy of The Book from his duffle bag. But when Holden returned to his seat in search of rest, he noticed that the small, rectangular display built into the leather cover above the recycling icon was breathing a phrase that drove him to toss The Book onto the windowsill, reach for his jacket and leave the apartment in heated frustration.

That phrase was:
Update in Progress
.

* * * * *

003-3533

Cold rain nagged the window of the cab with a constant, maddening rhythm that seemed to disagree with the swiping wipers. Holden watched them glide silently along the glass as the driver clicked her turning signal and pulled over below the elevated tracks of the Uptown train station.

Holden paid the woman and stepped into the irrelevant rain. The red door he had opened and walked through so many times before stood ominous beside the shadow of a nearby alley. For John Q. Passerby, there were no windows to shed light on the character of the business. In fact, the building would have appeared vacant if it weren’t for the single neon image of an open book hanging unsteadily over the doorway. Holden shook the water from his coat, scraped it over the rough fuzz of hair on his cold head and ran for the door. He reached the wide, curling handle and saw the thick carving at the center of the rotting wood. His eyes traced the remnants of two words, once engraved in ornate script and framed in baroque molding. It was difficult to discern, but Holden had frequented the bar often enough to know that it read, The Library. He tugged the handle and the door gave way, blasting him with a puff of warm, stale air and muffled voices.

Throughout Chicago, boutique bars blinked the corners of many elite intersections while a multitude of sports bars lingered nearby like cockroaches. The Library was one of the oldest bars in the once trendy neighborhood of Uptown that wouldn’t fit into a singular category. Decades before the neighborhood was overrun with musicians and artists, the bar had established its presence. Which meant that the crowd was always an older one. That began to change once the owner retired and left the business to his daughter. Marion Tabor, commonly known by regulars as
the librarian
, began hosting music acts and themed sports nights every week until she eventually drew a younger crowd. That group included Holden and Shane, who would have normally avoided such an eccentric venue for controlled inebriation.