by Unknown
Whether Audrey the plant, or Tweety the Bird, the fire in the pot consumed the flyers with a throaty roar. The tide of smoke ebbed as healthy flames grew strong, leaping up above the rim. Irwin was a failure at growing plants, but apparently a wiz with potted bonfires. Already he could feel heat. He held out his palms like a cartoon hobo appreciating the reward of his ingenuity. His previously numb fingers, which had made removing the stubborn cap from the rubbing alcohol a ten minute process, were already stinging with pins-and-needles. A sore clamminess in his face indicated his cheeks were thawing out.
Meep! Meep! My ass.
In the face of the light from the exposed window it was hard to tell how bright the fire was. Abraham Lincoln—the non-vampire hunter version—reportedly read books by candlelight, and Irwin hoped to do something similar. His evenings as of late had been dull affairs, sitting in near absolute darkness, shivering and employing the only other sensory faculty left to him—listening to the wind howl. He was surprised to discover this was no metaphor, it actually howled. Howled and wailed, wailed and howled, speaking a language that took on sinister proportions in the black of night, threats shouted for intimidation’s sake. Irwin was not above being intimidated. Even when the wind wasn’t blowing hard, the gusts whispered conspiratorially to each other as if plotting some terrible crime, a crime Irwin was convinced was planned against him.
But now he had made fire, and a primordial sense of power surged through his being. Is this what ancient man felt when he declared war on nature? When Homo erectus flipped his middle finger at what-went-bump-in-the-night and stepped out of the fear-filled realm of the animal kingdom to take his place on the porcelain throne of the flush toilet, and bask in the glow of the computer screen? Irwin smiled at his creation, tapping the Mickey Mouse handles like a proud father. A shame there were no mastodons to slay, for he felt oddly up to the task.
He settled himself on stacks of sturdy hardbacks positioned where a recliner had once been, and looked down the crevasse that divided science fiction from fantasy, the two foot-wide space of worn carpet he still called his living room. This Mariana trench set between precipices of towering genius comprised a wealth of words, a compilation of ideas that transcended reality, the acme of human expression—a landscape of invented worlds. Of this too he was proud. He had saved it all.
For more than ten years the world had followed the wisdom of the digital word. How many books can you fit on the head of a pin? Infinitely storable, instantly searchable, and for a time believed to be indestructible. Electric numbers never age. Only what happens when the body electric suffers a coronary?
Irwin never trusted the ebook. Such trust was dangerous and all too easy; a gift left before the city gates by an army that had miraculously vanished. He refused to roll that giant horse inside, even though one e-reader possessed the capacity to return his living room, complete with chair. Using cloud technology would have made his storage infinite—but also infinitely precarious, as the Library of Congress had recently found out, when a decade after making the switch to digital, the lights went out and 32 million books disappeared. Besides, a Kindle, or a Nook wouldn’t have been able to solve all Irwin’s problems. A good third of his collection was no longer in print, much less digitized. And while the sleek trekkian device might have doubled his living space, it would have come at an emotional cost. Each book was a personal friend, and Irwin knew what it felt like to be abandoned, to be given away by someone who was supposed to love him forever. He could never do such a thing—not even to a used book, a torn shirt, or an empty pen. He had trouble throwing away used tissues.
Maybe that’s why he had suffered, why his mother gave him up. So that he could save the world’s knowledge-base as a modern dark age monk. It was Joseph Campbell’s classic hero’s journey. For from that pain grew his collection—what his step-brother Jimmy called The Obsession. Jimmy used to threaten to contact that reality television show that helped hoarders “fix their lives.” Old Jimmy said it was for Irwin’s own good, that living in a rat’s nest of rotting paper was a sickness, in addition to a fire hazard.
Jimmy was full of shit.
Jimmy just wanted the house that Irwin inherited. It irked him that Irwin got the house when he wasn’t a real son. But if Jimmy had acted like a real son, he wouldn’t have left home after college. He wouldn’t have abandoned Irwin and their mother, taken the bar, and gotten married. Jimmy had been his best friend—his only friend. Now Jimmy was just another lawyer.
Irwin felt cold.
The fire in the pot dwindled. Feed me Seymour!
Irwin remembered seeing the original B-movie version of Little Shop of Horrors starring Jonathan Haze and a very young Jack Nicholson. That was back before it was popular, before it was a musical, and before Jimmy was a prick.
Irwin who had been feeding the fire an envelope at a time looked for more mail, only the pile was gone. Audrey II had eaten everything the US government delivered.
He searched the narrow tracks, worming through the tunnels and fissures, but found nothing. What he needed was some wood. He thought of breaking down his recliner. He even took a step in that direction before he remember it was gone. His mind also suggested his bed frame. It was old and made of pine, but that too had been sacrificed long before the crisis. He had a small table, only it was just a bit of plastic patio furniture. He could have torn off the cabinet doors, but he’d removed them years ago as well, having no space to swing them open anymore. Besides they were plastic like the cabinets themselves.
Was there nothing burnable in the house?
Everything made over the last few decades came in plastic, or aluminum, and Irwin suspected much of the aluminum was actually plastic. Once they learned you could make it from corn, plastic boomed. There might be wood under the carpet, but he didn’t have anything to cut the carpet away, much less break and pry up the floor boards.
Bookshelves!
The idea rushed him with such excitement that he stood up, only to sit down again. He had bookshelves, old ones made from particle board with contact paper veneers, but they were buried like the foundations of a failed dam and lost just as completely as the walls—walls he hadn’t seen in so long he’d forgotten if they were wallpapered or paneled. All the visible books were stacked on top of each other now forming leaning towers.
Did he really have nothing to burn?
He had his blankets and clothes, but didn’t think burning either of them was such a good idea. The sun was going down but out the window everything was white, everything hidden under a record breaking snow fall. Any amount of snow in June would break records for Virginia, but Irwin was pretty sure the near five feet of white stuff outside was a record for any time of year. The snow was so high it covered the lower part of the window, making it look like an Eskimo’s ant farm. In the neighborhood where Irwin lived there had never been many trees and the houses were built of brick and aluminum siding. The best he could hope to find would be a picnic table, a rake or shovel handle, but those would be in garages, behind doors he had no chance of opening, and likely made of plastic. Come to think of it, his own door would be buried beneath a glacier size drift. At that moment he couldn’t even see his front door. He hadn’t been out of his house since the crisis began and he had needed the wall space to stack books out of his way.
Irwin’s eyes returned to the pot and the dying fire. He’d only had the one cotton ball and just a dribble of alcohol. He’d never had matches in the house and if he let it go out, he’d never start one again. With the now broken window, Irwin would freeze in the coming night. As if to emphasis this, he noticed how long the shadows had grown. He could feel the cold creeping up his body, sinking ice claws into his flesh. All the James Patterson and Michael Connelly in the world wouldn’t be enough to save him if things got colder than the night before.
He felt it unfair that he should die for lack of burnable fuel in a home filled with paper. He noticed a trade paperback sitting absently on top of the foremo
st tower, its title screaming out at him in three huge, condescending words: Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding. A Christmas gift from Jimmy. His brother thought that giving him a book would be like slipping a pill in a terrier’s hotdog. As much as his skin crawled at the thought of damaging any book, he could burn that.
Irwin tore pages out, crumpled them up and fed them to Audrey II, whose name he mentally changed to Audrey III for originality’s sake. The fire reawakened to its bright self once more spreading warmth and happiness in its glow. Feeding a page at a time, the book was not consumed nearly as fast as the junk mail. He was only up to chapter five, “Applying the Cognitive Strategies,” by the time the sun began to set. If he could make a short book last, how long could he survive on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? Not that he would burn that, but there had to be others he could sacrifice. In the immortal words of Spock, “The needs of the many out-weigh the needs of the few.”
He had another gift book. Bill Faber, his next door neighbor had once handed him a self-help publication, apparently not understanding the nature of his situation. Irwin had laughed when he read the title, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Irwin had always thought he was extremely effective at what he did—that was the problem. Jimmy could have told him that. So Irwin had two books then that he could sacrifice painlessly. The question was how many would he have to burn to survive?
With paper from books to use as kindling, he could let the fire die and reignite it whenever needed, so long as he had the sun and his magnifying glass. That meant he could let it go out after sunrise and rely on natural radiation to keep him alive. Sunlight passing through the window would greenhouse the place enough to keep him from freezing. He’d need to do something about the broken window. Irwin had some Ziplocks and duct tape. Breaking the glass was a good thing really. It would allow him to pack the toilet with snow, so when it melted he could flush. With his diet he wasn’t using it as often, but the accumulation was another reason why he didn’t regret the smoke and the open window. He could also sleep during the day so he didn’t need to worry about feeding Audrey III, and he could use her to heat meals. That brought a smile. He hadn’t had a hot meal in two weeks. His pot fire and shattered window was really a huge step forward. He might be able to ration his burning and get by with just a couple books a night. Only how long would the winter last?
It couldn’t stay this cold for too long. Not in Virginia. Not in June.
If normal temps returned in a few days, the snow would melt almost instantly and he’d be able to strike out in search of wood. Maybe he’d even find some stove piping and a grill allowing him to make a chimney and fireplace of sorts. If he went out he’d need to be careful. It was possible others survived and they would be after his food, his clothes, his books, his Mountain Dew, and think nothing of killing him. In post-apocalyptic times, life was always cheap; at least that’s what his books had told him. His best bet was to remain hidden.
Still, he could risk looting a few close houses, get some more food, blankets. Most of his neighbors likely migrated to greener pastures, or… died. Irwin grimaced as he imagined tip-toeing through Bill Faber’s house and finding him and his wife rotting like spoiled olive loaf, slick and oily, and covered in a mat of flies. Were they over there right now, wondering how he was faring, or were they already dead; husband and wife, huddled on the bed in winter coats like that scene from Titanic?
It was possible he was alone. Everyone might be dead.
Outside the darkness closed in and with it a greater sense of isolation. Just looking at the solid black of a window that reflected only Irwin, listening to the wind beginning its nightly howl, he wondered if he was the last. Not just in the neighborhood, or the city, or even the state, but the whole world. Maybe some still survived in remote places. It couldn’t be Jack London’s To Build A Fire, everywhere. Near the equator there had to be pockets that the oceans hadn’t swallowed, clusters of people not freezing to death. Barefoot free spirits dinning on bananas, papaya and pomegranates. Free of governments, free of international trade laws and unilateral arms treaties, they celebrated, dancing on beaches of white sand around bonfires of their own. But did they have books? Did anyone?
The digital invasion had extended even to the jungles and deep deserts with literacy programs based on dispensing lightweight, waterproof, solar powered e-readers, pre-packed with a thousand books – from novels by H. G Wells to manuals on digging wells. Charities handed out the equivalent of hand-held libraries to every village with sunlight. Gutenberg delivered the written word to the masses; ebooks delivered masses of written words. The age of wonder had arrived, but thousands of pounds of paper books had no place in a brave new world that still sported muddy roads. Fire and floods arrived. No one made an effort to save dying relics. Who could care about ink stamped on pulp, when they had devices that would speak books aloud in five different languages. It all seemed like a good idea at the time, but so had hauling that Greek horse inside Troy. As it turned out, in both cases, disaster occurred over night.
Irwin’s legs were going to sleep and he shifted his position on the floor. He shivered, inching closer to the pot. Something about looking outside into the unforgiving night chilled him. He turned away to face his massive stacks now illuminated by the flicker of his pot fire.
Irwin imagined he retained the greatest collection of literature in the world. He had all the classics, the books everyone wanted to have read but no one wanted to read. Mark Twain said that—Irwin had his works too. Plenty of non-fiction, history and science mostly—just the sort of knowledge a struggling new mankind would crave. Neil Degrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan being the new Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. He had vast collections of mysteries and crime novels that could assist in the foundation of a new code of law. In his kitchen he kept the horror: Lovecraft, the rest of King, Poe, Barker and Koontz—the parables of motivation and morality. In the grotto were the thrillers, lessons in individualism and tenacity, but it was in his living room that he kept his real treasures. No other room in his home could hold the two most significant branches of literary achievement, what Irwin understood to be the pinnacle of all man’s art—science fiction and fantasy.
The possible and the impossible.
What separated mankind from animals was not our opposable thumbs, or use of tools, but the prefrontal cortex that allowed humans to imagine – to envision within the limitless boundaries of the mind everything from mechanical flight, to new worlds, to gods. Building a pyramid was nothing compared to the construction of a whole universe. It took the Egyptians thousands of men, but Frank Herbert worked alone. This ability to see into the future, to imagine and anticipate – to dream the unreal – is what allowed a patchwork of apes to step into the sun and throw a femur into the air that would spin into a space station. Imagination lay at the basis of every great leap forward. Food, medicine, communication, power and transportation were all the results of mankind’s ability to conceive something from nothing. These annals of science fiction alone needed to be saved as the mystic books of the past, present, and future. Submarines, space travel, the atomic bomb had all been prophesized more accurately than any religious rumor. And if those were not enough, how many had predicted the end of the world? How many had foreseen Irwin’s very situation? Looking out upon the June snow from his little porthole, Irwin felt Revelations did not so aptly describe what he saw as Adam And No Eve, The Postman, Final Blackout, A Boy and His Dog, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Joseph E. Kelleam’s Rust, just to name a few – although that last one was about robots, rather than a man in a buried bunker of books. Still no purer form of man’s best talent existed than fantasy and science fiction literature.
No less than this did Irwin have before him. A treasure greater than any horde of gold. He had a wealth of knowledge, thousands of tiny doors to other worlds. If he could survive the new ice age, he would emerge as the man of Atlantis, a wizard in a land of forgotten words. But to survive he would need to
burn some of them.
Even as he dumped the last of Jimmy’s gift into the pot, he could not get by on waste alone. Yet how could he chose? With the fire well stoked, Irwin moved down the length of his trench peering at the tiny titled spines in the bright flickering light. Should Heinlein perish because he didn’t care nearly as much for Stranger in a Strange Land as he did for The Door into Summer, or did that latter title merely embody the hope he needed at that moment? Should Ender’s Game be sent to the furnace in favor of The Forever War? What about the Wheel of Time? That series alone could keep him alive for a week, but at what cost? Would Tolkien and Martin be enough? Solomon would not be up to such a task as this.
Could the value of Flowers for Algernon and the lessons taught by Mary Shelley be callously erased in favor of Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, or the rabbit world of Watership Down? Might he have to resort to a practical pound-for-pound measure? Along with Jordan would Erickson need to die? Discworld? Song of Ice and Fire? And how ironic and painful would it be to burn that title?
What if the winter failed to end? Would he burn them all to live? He never thought himself capable of even dog-earing a page, but now he had already burned a whole book, and he could tell that like any gateway drug, it made the idea of burning the next easier. After having cremated David Copperfield, how hard would it really be to burn Frankenstein?
Irwin laid his hand on the spines and let his fingertips slide gently down across the titles. He could almost feel their fear, hear them all begging for life. Smell…
Smoke.
Irwin had grown oblivious, his olfactory receptors as blanketed with the scent as his home was with snow. This and the darkness accounted for why he took so long to realize more was burning than what was in his pot.
Not so much burning as smoldering.
The pot!
Irwin realized with fear that he’d forgotten more than just ventilation. Metal conducted heat. The stainless steel of the pot was cooking the books it rested on. Like an iron left plugged in on a newspaper, the heat singed the glossy cover of Chicken Soup for the Soul, causing the laminate to melt and bubble like boiled brown sugar. Maybe that was it, the new industrial stench not as wholesome as crackling pulp and ink had finally caught his attention.