“Consider it done,” said Culpepper. He rose and said, “Now I think you ought to go inside.”
Cardiff turned and pushed the great library doors and stepped in.
He read a sign above the front counter: CARPE DIEM. SEIZE THE DAY. It could have also read: SEIZE A BOOK. FIND A LIFE. BIRTH A METAPHOR.
His gaze drifted to find a large part of the town’s population seated at two dozen tables, books open, reading, and keeping the SILENCE that other signs suggested.
As if pulled by a single string, they turned, nodded at Cardiff, and turned back to their books.
The young woman behind the library front desk was an incredible beauty.
“My God,” he whispered. “Nef!”
She raised her hand and pointed, then beckoned for him to follow.
She walked ahead of him and she might well have had a lantern in her hand to light the dim stacks, for her face was illumination. Wherever she glanced, the darkness failed and a faint light touched the gold lettering along the shelves.
The first stack was labeled: ALEXANDRIA ONE.
And the second: ALEXANDRIA TWO.
And the last: ALEXANDRIA THREE.
“Don’t say it,” he said, quietly. “Let me. The libraries at Alexandria, five hundred or a thousand years before Christ, had three fires, maybe more, and everything burned.”
“Yes,” Nef said. “This first stack contains all or most of the books burned in the first fire, an accident.
“This second stack from the second burning, also an accident, has all the lost books and destroyed texts of that terrible year.
“And the last, the third, contains all the books from the third conflagration—a burning by mobs, the purposeful destruction of history, art, poetry, and plays in 455 B.C.
“In 455 B.C.,” she repeated quietly.
“My God,” he said, “how were they all saved, how did they get here?”
“We brought them.”
“How?!”
“We are tomb robbers.” Nef ran her finger along the stacks. “For the profit of the mind, the extension of the soul, whatever the soul is. We can only try to describe the mystery. Long before Schliemann, who found not one but twenty Troys, our ancestors played finders-keepers with the grandest library in time, one that would never burn, would live forever and allow those who entered to touch and scan, a chance to run after an extra piece of existence. This building is absolute proof against fire. In one form or another, it has traveled from Moses, Caesar, Christ, and will continue on toward the new Apollo and the Moon that the rocket chariot will reach.”
“But still,” he said. “Those libraries were ruined. Are these duplicates of duplicates? The lost are found, but how?”
Nef laughed quietly. “It was a hard task. Down through the centuries, a book here or there, a play one place, a poem another. A huge jigsaw, fitted in pieces.”
She moved on in the comfortable twilight spilling through the library’s tall windows, brushing her fingers over the names and titles.
“Remember when Hemingway’s wife left his novel manuscript on a train, lost forever?”
“Did he divorce or kill her?”
“The marriage survived for a while. But that manuscript is here.”
He looked at the worn typewriter box labeled: FOOTHILLS; KILIMANJARO.
“Have you read it?”
“We’re afraid to. If it is as fine as some of his work, it would break our hearts because it must remain lost. If it’s bad, we might feel worse. Perhaps Papa knew it was best for it to remain lost. He wrote another Kilimanjaro, with Snows instead.”
“How in hell did you find it?”
“The week it was lost we advertised. Which is more than Papa did. We sent him a copy. He never replied, and the Snows was published a year later.”
Again she moved to touch more volumes.
“Edgar Allan Poe’s final poem, rejected. Herman Melville’s last tale, unseen.”
“How?”
“We visited their deathbeds in their last hours. The dying sometimes speak in tongues. If you know the language of deliriums you can transcribe their strange sad truths. We tend them like special guardians late at night, and summon a last vital spark and listen closely and keep their words.
Why? Since we are the passengers of time, we thought it only proper to save what might be saved on our passage to eternity, to preserve what might be lost if neglected, and add some small bit of our far-traveling and long life.
We have guarded not only Troy and its ruins and sifted the Egyptian sands for wise stones to put beneath our tongues to clear our speech, but we have, like cats, inhaled the breaths of mortals, siphoned and published their whispers.
Since we have been gifted with long lives, the least we can do is pass that gift on in inanimate objects—novels, poems, plays—books that rouse to life when scanned by a living eye. You must never receive a gift, ever, without returning the gift twice over.
From Jesus of Nazareth to noon tomorrow, our baggage is the library and its silent speech. Each book is Lazarus, yes? And you the reader, by opening the covers, bid Lazarus to come forth. And he lives again, it lives again, the dead words warmed by your glance.”
“I never thought…,” Cardiff said.
“Think.” She smiled. “Now,” she said, “I believe it’s time for a picnic, to celebrate we don’t know what. But celebrate we must.”
CHAPTER 25
The picnic was spread waiting on the back lawn of the EGYPTIAN VIEW ARMS.
“Speech!” someone called.
“I don’t know how to begin,” Cardiff said.
“At the beginning!” There was a gentle laughter.
Cardiff took a deep breath and plunged in.
“As you may know, the State Department of Highways has been measuring string from Phoenix east and north and from Gallup north and west. The exact measurements of a new freeway will touch latitude 89 eighty miles west of longitude 40.”
Someone on the far side of the picnic let his sandwich fall and cried, “My God, that’s us!”
“No!” someone else cried, and a dozen others whispered, “No!”
“That’s not possible,” someone said.
“Anything,” said Cardiff, quietly, “in government, is possible.”
“They can’t do that,” one of the ladies cried.
“But they can. No freeway in any part of your state has ever been put on the ballot. The highway men, God listen to that, highway men, are their own conscience.”
“And you traveled here to warn us?” said Elias Culpepper.
Cardiff blushed. “No.”
“You were going to keep it secret!?”
“I wanted to see your town. I planned nothing. I assumed you all knew.”
“We know nothing,” said Elias Culpepper. “God almighty. You might as well say Vesuvius is threatening to erupt at our city limits!”
“I must admit,” said Cardiff, “that when I saw your faces, had breakfast, lunch, and dinner with you, I knew I couldn’t leave and not tell you.”
“Tell us again,” said Elias Culpepper.
Cardiff looked at Nef, who gave him the merest nod.
“The State Highway Commission…”
Lightning struck. Earthquakes shook. A comet hit the Earth. Cats leaped off roofs. Dogs bit their tails and died.
And the picnic ground, the sweet grass, was empty.
Sweet Jesus, thought Cardiff, have I done this?
“Fool, idiot, stupid dumb idiot fool,” he muttered.
He opened his eyes and saw Nef standing on a rise of green lawn calling over to him. “Come into the shade. You’ll die of sunstroke.”
And he went over into the shade.
CHAPTER 26
My God, Cardiff thought, even the sunflowers have turned away. He could not see their faces, but he was certain they fixed him with a fiery stare.
“I’m empty,” he said at last. “I’ve told all my secrets. Now, Nef, you must give me yours.”
“Well,” she said, and began to take sandwiches out of a hamper, to cut bread and butter it and offer it to him as she spoke.
“Everyone in this town was once somewhere else,” she said. “We came together one by one. Long, long ago, we knocked elbows in Rome or Paris or Athens or Dallas or Portland until, very late in time, we found out that there was a place where we might collect. Sanctuary, Arizona, was one of the names, but that was foolish. I imagine Summerton’s just as foolish, but it fits. It has to do with flowers and survival.
We all grew up in Madrid or Dublin or Milwaukee, some in France or Italy. In the very beginning, a long time ago, there were some children, but as time passed the children got fewer. It had nothing to do with wine or flowers, nothing to do with the environment or the families, even though it seems to have been genetic. I guess you’d call us ‘sports.’ That’s a scientific term for something that can’t be explained.
The Darwinians said the process was all jumps, hops, genetic leaps, with no links between. Suddenly, members of a family whose ancestors had lived to seventy years were living to ninety, a hundred. Others, even longer.
But the peculiar thing, of course, was that there were those of us—young men and women—who did not much change at all, and then simply did not change. While all our friends moved on to sickness and old age, we strange ones stayed behind.
It was one long picnic spread over the entire North American continent and Europe. And we, the lonely ones, were the exceptions to the rule of ‘Grow up, grow old, and certainly die.’ For a while, we hardly noticed this peculiar longevity ourselves, except to note that we felt fine and looked good while our friends jumped headlong into the grave. We peculiars lingered in mid-spring with summer always just around the corner, and autumn somewhere far down the road, not even a rumor. Does any of this make sense?”
Cardiff nodded, fascinated with what she was saying, the flow and beauty of her telling making it, somehow, believable.
“Most
