“Yes, yes,” whispered the official.
“Carry me away, burn me up, let flames take me. Put me in a catacomb of books, brick me in with books, mortar me up with books and burn the whole of us together.”
“Rest easily,” whispered the official. “I’m dying,” said Mr. A.
“No, no.”
“Yes, I am. You’re carrying me.”
The stretcher was moving. His heart paled within him, fainter, fainter. “Dying. In a moment now—dead.”
“Rest, please.”
“All of it gone, forever, and nobody to know it ever lived, the dark nights, Poe, Bierce, the rest of us. Gone, all gone.”
“Yes,” said the official in the moving dark.
There was a crackle of flame. They were burning out the room scientifically, with controlled fire. There was a vast blowing wind of flame that tore away the interior of darkness. He could see the books explode like so many kernels of dark corn.
“For the love of God, Montresor!”
The sedge withered, the vast ancient lawn of the room sizzled and flumed.
“Yes, for the love of God,” murmured the official.
“A very good joke indeed—an excellent jest! We will have many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo—over our wine! Let us be gone—”
In the dimness, the health official: “Yes. Let us be gone.”
A. fell down in soft blackness. All black, all gone. He heard his own dry lips repeat, repeat the only thing thought of to repeat as he felt his old heart cease and grow cold within him:
“Requiescat in pace.”
He dreamed that he was walling himself in with bricks and more bricks of books.
For the love of god, Montresor!
Yes, for the love of God!
HE WENT DOWN into the soft blackness, and before it was all black and all gone he heard his own dry lips repeating and repeating the only thing he could think of to repeat as he felt his heart cease and desist within him.
“Requiescat in pace.”
Bright Phoenix
One day in april, 2022, the great library door slammed flat shut. Thunder. Hello, I thought.
AT THE BOTTOM STEP glowering up at my desk, in a United Legion uniform which no longer hung as neatly upon him as it had twenty years before, stood Jonathan Barnes.
Seeing his bravado momentarily in pause, I recalled ten thousand Veterans speeches sprayed from his mouth, the endless wind-whipped flag parades he had hustled, panted through, the grease-cold chicken and green-pea patriot banquets he had practically cooked himself; the civic drives stillborn in his hat.
Now Jonathan Barnes stomped up the creaking main library steps, giving each the full downthrust of his power, weight, and new authority. His echoes, rushed back from the vast ceilings, must have shocked even him into better manners, for when he reached my desk, I felt his warmly liquored breath stir mere whispers on my face.
“I’m here for the books, Tom.”
I turned casually to check some index cards. “When they’re ready, we’ll call you.”
“Hold on,” he said. “Wait—”
“You’re here to pick up the Veterans’ Salvage books for hospital distribution?”
“No, no,” he cried. “I’m here for all the books.”
I gazed at him.
“Well,” he said, “most of them.”
“Most?” I blinked once, then bent to riffle the files. “Only ten volumes to a person at a time. Let’s see. Here. Why, you let your card expire when you were twenty years old, thirty years ago. See?” I held it up.
Barnes put both hands on the desk and leaned his great bulk upon them. “I see you are interfering.” His face began to color, his breath to husk and rattle. “I don’t need a card for my work!”
So loud was his whisper that a myriad of white pages stopped butterflying under far green lamps in the big stone rooms. Faintly, a few books thudded shut.
Reading people lifted their serene faces. Their eyes, made antelope by the time and weather of this place, pleaded for silence to return, as it always must when a tiger has come and gone from a special freshwater spring, as this surely was. Looking at these upturned, gentle faces I thought of my forty years of living, working, even sleeping here among hidden lives and vellumed, silent, and imaginary people. Now, as always, I considered my library as a cool cavern or fresh, ever-growing forest into which men passed from the heat of the day and the fever of motion to refresh their limbs and bathe their minds an hour in the grass-shade illumination, in the sound of small breezes wandered out from the turning and turning of the pale soft book pages.
Then, better focused, their ideas rehung upon their frames, their flesh made easy on their bones, men might walk forth into the blast-furnace of reality, noon, mob-traffic, improbable senescence, inescapable death. I had seen thousands careen into my library starved and leave well-fed. I had watched lost people find themselves. I had known realists to dream and dreamers to come awake in this marble sanctuary where silence was a marker in each book.
“Yes,” I said at last. “But it will only take a moment to re-register you, this new card. Give two reliable references—”
“I don’t need references,” said Jonathan Barnes, “to burn books!”
“Contrarily,” said I. “You’ll need even more, to do that.”
“My men are my references. They’re waiting outside for the books. They’re dangerous.”
“Men like that always are.”
“No no, I mean the books, idiot. The books are dangerous. Good God, no two agree. All the damn double-talk. All the lousy Babel and slaver and spit. So, we’re out to simplify, clarify, hew to the line. We need—”
“To talk this over,” said I, taking up a copy of Demosthenes, tucking it under my arm. “It’s time for my dinner. Join me, please—”
I was halfway to the door when Barnes, wide-eyed, suddenly remembered the silver whistle hung from his blouse, jammed it to his wet lips, and gave it a piercing blast.
The library doors burst wide. A flood of black charcoal-burnt uniformed men collided boisterously upstairs.
I called, softly.
They stopped, surprised.
“Quietly,” I said.
Barnes seized my arm. “Are you opposing due process?”
“No,” I said, “I won’t even ask to see your property invasion permit. I only wish silence as you work.”
The readers at the tables had leapt up at the storm of feet. I patted the air. They sat back down and did not glance up again at these men crammed into their tight dark char-smeared suits who stared at my mouth now as if they disbelieved my cautions. Barnes nodded. The men moved softly, on tip-toe, through the big library rooms. With extra care, with proper stealth, they raised the windows. Soundlessly, whispering, they collected books from the shelves to toss down toward the evening yard below. Now and again they scowled at the readers who calmly went on leafing through their books, but made no move to seize these volumes, and continued emptying the shelves.
“Good,” said I.
“Good?” asked Barnes.
“Your men can work without you. Take five.”
And I was out in the twilight so quickly he could only follow, bursting with unvoiced questions. We crossed the green lawn where a huge portable Hell was drawn up hungrily, a fat black tar-daubed oven from which shot red-orange and gaseous blue flames into which men were shoveling the wild birds, the literary doves which soared crazily down to flop broken-winged, the precious flights poured from every window to thump the earth, to be kerosene-soaked and chucked in the gulping furnace. As we passed this destructive if colorful industry, Barnes mused.
“Funny. Should be crowds, a thing like this. But . . . no crowd. How do you figure?”
I left him. He had to run to catch up.
In the small café across the street we took a table and Barnes, irritable for no reason he could say, called out, “Service! I’ve got to get back to work!”
Walter, the Proprietor, strolled over, with some dog-eared menus. Walter looked at me. I winked.
Walter looked at Jonathan Barnes.
Walter said, “‘Come live with me and be my love; and we will all the pleasures prove.’”
“What?” Jonathan Barnes blinked.
“‘Call me Ishmael,’” said Walter.
“Ishmael,” I said. “We’ll have coffee to start.”
Walter came back with the coffee.
“‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,’” he said. “‘In the forests of the night.’” Barnes stared after the man who walked away casually. “What’s eating him? Is he nuts?”
“No,” I said. “But go on with what you were saying back at the library. Explain.”
“Explain?” said Barnes. “My God, you’re all sweet reason. All right, I will explain. This is a tremendous experiment. A test town. If the burning works here, it’ll work anywhere. We don’t burn everything, no no. You noticed, my men cleaned only certain shelves and categories? We’ll eviscerate about 49 point 2 percent. Then we’ll report our success to the overall government committee—”
“Excellent,” I said.
Barnes eyed me. “How can you be so cheerful?”
“Any library’s problem,” I said, “is where to put the books. You’ve helped me solve it.”
“I thought you’d be … afraid.”
“I’ve been around Trash Men all my life.”
“I beg pardon?”
“Burning is burning. Whoever does it is a Trash Man.”
“Chief Censor, Green Town, Illinois, damn it!”
A new man, a waiter, came with the coffee pot steaming.
“Hello, Keats,” I said.
“‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’” said the waiter.
“Keats?” said the Chief Censor. “His name isn’t Keats.”
“Silly
