A Novel
by
M. Clifford
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
M. Clifford on Smashwords
Propaganda from the desk of Martin Trust
Director of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration
Copyright © 2010 by M. Clifford
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Using Paper Is A Crime
Holden Clifford Is A Criminal
Keep The Planet Alive
Recycle Your Books
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Also by M. Clifford
* * * * *
For J.D. Salinger
A man who loved writing
A man who always wrote for himself
A man who said that publishing was an invasion of his privacy
* * * * *
* * * * *
“Cultivate literature and useful knowledge, for the purpose of qualifying the rising generation for patrons of good government, virtue and happiness.”
– George Washington
“When the press is free, and everyone is able to read, all is safe.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.”
– George Bernard Shaw
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THIS IS NOT PROPAGANDA
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RECYCLE 00 RECYCLE
This is not propaganda.
You’ve got my word on that.
Before I introduce myself to you, let me use these first thousand words to dispel a few lies.
Let’s start with what you already know. You are reading this story free of charge from a digital reading device called The Book that was constructed by your government over a hundred years ago for the sole purpose of saving the planet through recycling. You were born into a sustainable world where printed books no longer exist. Mother Earth adores you and is still indebted to your grandparents for surrendering their libraries in exchange for this handheld device. As I’m sure you have learned in school, our forefathers were greedy and insensitive. Trees were destroyed for paper. Paper was used for books. Thankfully, your government saw the evil in this act and developed a solution. Within a year, every story you could ever read was available in a digital format. This meant that we no longer had a need for the trillions of paper books that littered our world. You can thank the United States of America for the fresh air you breathe and the lush rainforests that blanket our fertile planet.
You’re welcome.
It is true that this government-issued device is the only mechanism from which you can read, but we do not profit from books. The price listed for your stories offsets the cost of production. The information itself is free. We want your mind to be strong, just as you do.
This next part is tricky, so I think I need to start with a handshake. Some of you may recognize my name. For those of you who don’t, there are two things you need to know about Martin Trust: I’m a straight shooter and I’m a God-fearing patriot. Sure there’s more to me, but I’ll fill in those gaps as the screen flips along. Listen, I’m an open book here – and not because it’s the policy of our government to supply all political information to its people. I have integrity and a need to be loyal with every word I speak. I guess, in this instance, that would be every ‘word I type’. To be completely honest, my hope in writing this today is that you will finally understand a little more about what has been happening lately in terms of The Book. The media is telling you one story (the correct story) and there are those out there, bent on anarchy and intolerance, that have written a much different one.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s talk finer details.
My title is the director of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration, which is a department of Homeland Security. God Bless America. I am also a liaison to the Publishing House and the Art and Music Index. Most importantly, I work for the Divisional government of the United States, which is a Tribe of the United Nations. I like to consider myself a man of many masks. I work very closely with museums and historic registers, with the Library of Congress (what’s left of it, that is) and rather closely with the for-profit subsidiary of the Publishing House, Indivisible Publishing and their visual media division, Gallantly Streaming. Needless to say, I’m a busy man and I’m proud of it.
While I want to jump right in and start rambling, I feel it’s necessary to apologize up front for my lack of poeticism. Normally, only memos or emails to family and friends come from my desk. I have never penned something of this nature and I’m not outlining ahead of time. The stuff that’s been going on lately needs to stop and I have been told that it’s time you all learned the truth. So, I ask that you be patient with me and my condescending style. My pedestrian, ungrammatical prose. Just take your time, America. We’ll get through this together.
Here’s a quick history lesson. Throughout the span of our nation’s history, there were those who helped us and those who chose to fight us. When we founded this country, we came upon groups of savage beasts, native to America. They couldn’t speak English. We were overjoyed to discover a new culture and society, but they attacked us without provocation. So many of our forefathers were slaughtered. So many minds and hearts, brutally murdered for no reason at all. But we turned the other cheek, as The Holy Book says, and reached out to these uncivilized, godless beings despite their actions. We called them Natives. As we built our country, we discovered that there were a total of ten thousand Natives across America. As you know, this land is large, divided into many states, enveloping many seasons, and we felt bad for these people. Somehow, they had been separated from one another. So our earliest government combed the countryside of this new world in search of these people and, with the purest intentions in our hearts, we brought them together again. We reunited their many tribes and gave them unique portions of land that would be reserved for them alone, for all time. These reservations have been untouched by non-Native hands and can still be seen on your maps today.
My point in telling you this at the start of my ‘story’ is because I need you to recognize that your government wants to help you. No matter how hard we try, and regardless of all our good intentions, we always find pockets of resistance. Factions of individuals that are focused on their own evils, devoted to creating chaos. It is a sad truth, but what can you do? God Bless America. This country is good and bountiful and everyone within it, even the bad seeds, has come from superior soil.
I know that there are some of you out there who are reading this with cynicism and we know exactly why. The name Holden Clifford elicits more than a pinch of conflicting emotions these days. Yes, he is the terrorist who destroyed every last printed book on earth (The Inferno of Tears, some have called it), but there are groups out there trying to convince you that he died a hero. There is a story called THE BOOK that has been printed on paper and distributed around this country in secret. Handed across dinner tables and hidden under pillows. You may even have one of these abominations yourself. But it is important for you to know that what you are reading is a lie. That is why I have stepped out to mix my business life with my personal. I need to quell a most certain rebellion that has been based on misinformation and fear.
You can have faith in the words that follow and not because my name is Martin Trust. The reason you can believe me is because I knew Holden Clifford. I knew him before he became the leader of The Free Thinkers. Before he went insane. Before his paranoid delusions caused the ruin of our most cherished daydreams, inscribed for eternity on flash drives that were cut off at the plastic (again, I extend an apology for moving so quickly and cryptically). Holden Clifford was not a random acquaintance. This may come as a shock, but he was my closest friend from childhood, until the day he died as the most hated man in the entire world.
There are 16,182 words in this digital book which should take approximately 65 minutes to finish, if read at a sub-average rate of 250 words a minute. This digital device works in accordance with your reading ability and will judge your eye movement, allowing the page to dim if it can see that you are not reading to your potential. Older versions of The Book do not have this function, are less reliable and should be replaced. See your local Book store for recycling.
I warn you that what I have typed may be confusing; knowing who Holden Clifford has become and from what you have heard about him all your life. I have seen the look on the faces of my colleagues as they learned the real truth. But I ask you to stay with me for the journey. To get in the passenger seat of my jeep, hang a flag on the window and buckle your seat belt. It will all make sense when we get to where we need to be. If you start to feel bad for him, it’s okay. I did to.
Trust me.
Trust your government.
This story is not propaganda.
Ignore what The Free Thinkers are saying.
Read your Book.
God Bless America.
From the desk of:
Martin Trust
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RECYCLE 01 RECYCLE
Holden Clifford, the man who would one day terrorize the fellowship of readers from every nation and tongue, was my best friend. We were as thick as thieves growing up.
We lived across the street from one another in a rustic neighborhood on the outskirts of Chicago called Northwoods and were known for getting into every scrap of trouble imaginable for kids under the age of thirteen. Nothing crazy, mind you. No laws broken; but enough to get our names known by the families along our silent street.
At a young age, between building forts and hunting imaginary beasts in the acres upon acres of forest preserve that surrounded our subdivision, Holden could be heard proclaiming the words, God Bless America. Covered in leaves and playing with bugs, Holden dreamt of one day helping his country. In fact, that young boy originated many of the ideas I find in my head today. Back then, I couldn’t have cared less about government. Not Holden, though. He came from a long line of flag-waving patriots. His dad was in the army. His grandfather was in the army. His grandfather’s father was in the army. His grandfather’s grandfather was in the army. I always knew, even before the third grade, that my best friend Holden would enlist the very moment he was allowed. And he did, God Bless America.
It was difficult seeing him leave the day after graduation. We communicated often and sent one another stories through The Book, not realizing that the electronic device would play a pivotal role in our future or the end of his life or the end of books as we know it. I was so proud of Holden, the way he climbed the ranks and the commendations he was given, that I decided to follow in his footsteps. To do what I could with my new college education. To serve the country in my own way.
God Bless America.
I always knew that we were cut from the same cloth, Holden and I, only with a different pair of scissors. Holden’s strip was more ragged and tough, with frayed edges that made him a fighter and a war hero. My sharp corners made me smart. I used my intelligence and my ability to speak clearly and honestly to get into politics. Mind you, I never wanted the spotlight that has been cast over me. I feel that I need to halt, about-face and affirm this point plainly to you. I accept that my name is well-known today, that my pixeled face graces the covers of People and Time and Read regularly, but that was never my purpose. When I moved from my local government office to the department of Homeland Security, I worked as an executive and climbed the ladder just as quickly as Holden had in the military – faster in five years than most do in twenty. To my surprise, the year that my best friend came back from the U.S.S.R. a highly decorated, highly different person, I was made Chief of Terrorist Activity.
Holden had received the Medal of Honor from president Fitzpatrick the Great and was discharged with a grand tribute to his valor on the battlefield. (It was even televised and can be seen by clicking the Gallantly Streaming link at the bottom of your screen. You can’t see his face very well, but trust me when I say that it’s him.) Holden’s proclivity for inattention was never as clear to me as the day I found the medal hiding in a box on his dresser. From then on, even while in uniform, Holden could never be seen wearing the medal. An obvious clue that I shouldn’t have overlooked.
Naturally, he got a kick out of my job and made it a point to goad me while I continued to rise as he leveled off. That’s what best friends do, right? We gave one another a hard time over beers, watched the game together and were soon spending every day talking on the phone or having dinner with my wife and son. We were enjoying our adult selves, but I wasn’t green about the fact that we had grown into different people. And I wasn’t blind either. I could see that Holden was jealous of the family I had built in my freedom. Freedom while he was defending our country (God Bless America). I noticed, in the streams of rambling that would escape his mouth between beers and commercials, that he had been betrayed overseas and wounded at some point during his many engagements.
It wasn’t physical, mind you. Holden was stronger than he had ever been. No. Something inside of him had been broken. Like a plastic straw that had lost its suction after a hairline fracture cracked its recycled plastic surface. No, it wasn’t even that simple. How can I explain this to someone who didn’t know Holden? I suppose that if you looked him in the eyes, even if he were a stranger on the street, you would notice that he seemed off. Unbalanced, like a picture frame on the wall that just wasn’t quite straight. No matter how much I fussed with him or how often I attended to his life, he just couldn’t seem to level out.
And it got worse.
Much worse.
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RECYCLE 02 RECYCLE
Over the course of the next year, Holden began to disappear. I wouldn’t see him or hear from him for weeks. When his phone stopped working, I dropped by his place to discover from his landlord that he had moved back to Chicago. I used a connection at work to track down a number where he could be reached. The number was for a company called General Fire Protection. Holden had earned quite a pension through the war and didn’t have to work, but apparently he needed to keep busy. He started an apprenticeship as a pipe fitter alongside men half his age. I couldn’t understand why he had wanted to move or why he hadn’t talked to me first. For a while, I thought that it was me. Maybe it was something about Washington D.C. that didn’t sit well in his stomach. I never asked. But we reconnected and sent stories to one another through The Book, like we used to, until he stopped responding.
It was the weekend of Halloween. I remember it well because my son was upset that I couldn’t be there to see his cowboy costume or drive him to the houses in the neighborhood to trick-or-treat when his leather-chapped legs grew tired. I was flying, on the wings of a whim, to Chicago. I needed to know that my best friend was okay. Half a day passed before I was able to find him. I didn’t know where Holden lived. Our correspondence was limited to the phone and our conversations were too short to withstand a trace if I went back to the record. When I met him at his apartment, I noticed right away that he was sad, more sad than I had ever seen him. In the years before the army, Holden had been active and vibrant. His mind always moving. He laughed and smiled like no one else. But this hollow shadow of Holden, swallowed by the brown barcalounger in the bay window, looked drained and disturbed.
It took a few drinks to get the lug nuts off.
Loose and relaxed, Holden told me about the entanglements he had experienced with the 88th in the U.S.S.R., after finishing a tour in East Germany. He was betrayed by people he trusted. He had been forced to do things he wasn’t proud of. Things he needed to do in order to gain control over those who were trying to control him. Many people died in the aftermath of his actions abroad. Many minds at home were lost in the insanity of it all. And many were still overseas as prisoners of war. I consoled him as best I could. Told him that what he had done was a service for our country god bless america and while no one may ever know the truth, I would know and I would always be proud of him.
That night, Holden drank more than I expected. I remember that detail vividly, because the last thing that came out of his mouth could only be chalked up to the slurred mutterings of a drunk. God was punishing him. That was what he told me. God was punishing him for not reaching the rest of his troop fast enough. Punishing him for all the lives that were lost. I tried to understand, but he wouldn’t let me. Not fully. There was a piece of himself that he wouldn’t even allow his best friend to know.
We watched the game, like we always did. Blackhawks. We laughed. Tried to forget the pain. It was fun. When I attempted to leave, he told me that friends didn’t sleep at hotels and that I had to crash on his couch. I did, but I couldn’t sleep a wink. Something about Holden was distorted. Skewed. And there was more to that opinion than the fact that his shirt was incorrectly buttoned. He had led me to believe that his sorrow derived from his experiences on the battlefield, but my name isn’t Martin Trust for nothing. I simply knew he was lying. The very moment I could hear Holden snoring, I searched his apartment. Covert searches are a part of my job. It is vital to our nation that I know how to protect people from terrorism, both foreign and domestic and, more often, to protect others from terrorizing themselves.
I found what I was looking for on his desk.
It was just an email. He had left it open on his digital desktop. It was simple, yet profoundly life-altering. A few lines from his doctor confirming that all the secondary tests had been run and that the same answer was coming back. This email, without capital letters or punctuation, answered all of the questions I had formulated during the plane ride. Holden had been distant and cold because he was going to die. Defeated by a war that was raging beneath his skin. A war he had never been trained to defend himself against. After allowing twelve years of his life to be consumed by proudly serving his country, Holden Clifford had returned to find that his body was being consumed by the single strain of cancer that we haven’t cured. In the dim light of the desktop, his statement about God began to make sense. You know why. A few of you may even have this strain. We still haven’t discovered the cure because this cancer is too dangerous to examine. Its home is the one place our doctors are too afraid to invade as it gradually, meticulously devastates its surroundings. Holden Clifford had been besieged by the Brain Famine.
In the morning, Holden woke to a big breakfast and a large cup of coffee and we sat in his kitchen, reliving many memories. It was a comfort to him, until I pulled up the email from his doctor on my tablet computer. Holden was upset, but he understood why I had read the letter and that I just wanted to help. When he dropped the nuke and told me that he had only a handful of years left, I broke down and cried. Those years wouldn’t be a walk in the park, either. The only hope he had of getting to his coffin with his sanity intact was to endure bi-weekly treatments of radiation.
I don’t know what you’ve heard about the treatments for this cancer, but constant radiation is integral to the process of sustaining a normal existence. And it isn’t easy. The disease affects the memory. A system of checks and balances have to be in place for the ones infected so the unavoidable side effects don’t worsen. With each forgotten treatment, the mind slips further. A steady progression toward madness that can easily be compared to someone losing their hair over the course of five years, one thin strand at a time. Or a vampire that takes a long stroll at sunrise, unaware that each step toward the Atlantic Ocean brings him closer to dust. Or an American flag whose rich, glorious colors gradually fade in the sun if left out and exposed to the elements by unpatriotic imbeciles that are too lazy to bring it in every night. The more treatments they missed, the more they could count on their minds being tossed into a pile of useless, unrecyclable refuse. And that was what happened to Holden, although we tried to avoid it. Although I tried to avoid it with most of my son’s college fund – an entire bank account that eventually financed the agenda of the paranoid mass of Chicago’s mindless, free-thinking, Kool-Aid-loving rabble of Unfortunates that are slowly, but oh, so surely, taking over the country god bless america through illegal, unsustainable printings of a misguided paper book that is filled with nonsense and make-believe and truth-twisting fluff about The Inferno of Tears that –
Sorry, America. I’ll get to that later.
My best friend was nearly broke with all his doctor bills and overwhelmed with the ones that were still resting in his digital mailbox, unopened. So, as I mentioned in the last paragraph, I decided to siphon every penny from my son’s college fund to help Holden get the treatment he needed. And his attitude changed. For about four months, I saw significant change in his character. He was so grateful for everything I was doing and we began to talk all the time. He even started dating. It was a move in the right direction down an unfortunately dead-end street, but it was progress nonetheless. While Holden’s love life was growing, mine was beginning to fracture. My wife had discovered that I drained most of our savings. That I had dumped thousands upon thousands into Holden, like gas into an automobile on cinder blocks that was collecting rust in the front yard.
I have to stop here to say that my wife is wonderful. She is splendid and beautiful in ways that cannot be seen or explained from the director’s desk at the department of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration God Bless America. Instead of reacting the way someone would expect, she enrolled us in counseling and told me that we needed to find a way to help Holden in case he were to live longer than the years our son’s college fund could support. Upon her suggestion, we planned to sell our house. As every day passed and we met with realtors and searched through new schools, neighborhoods and districts, I realized that I couldn’t do this to my family. That house was too important to my wife and I decided there was a better solution out there that we hadn’t considered. I needed to make more money.
For those who are climbing the ladder of their careers, grappling for the next rung before someone else can reach it, softball is often passed over as means to an end. A simple swing to the fences, a stolen base or two, a swift crash into the opponent’s catcher to score the winning point and you can really vault to the top rung. I approached the director of Homeland Security on a day when I was particularly invaluable to the team and he welcomed my request with excitement. By my current title, I’m sure you know where this story is headed. He told me over innings that there was a new division in the works called the Department of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration. Apparently, President Fitzpatrick the Great was concerned with the recent outbreaks of vandalism on historic monuments across the country by a group of anarchists who called themselves The Free Thinkers. He felt a new division needed to be installed in the capital. This group, The Free Thinkers, were scarring some of our most precious artifacts of architecture with their odd emblem – an ornamental crest with the seal of a revolver crossing over an arrow below decorative script. There were only two words scrawled into the stone and steel of so many buildings. Those words were: Think Again.
That afternoon, I loaded my bat and mit into my trunk believing that I had been given an upgrade. Not only a role in this new department, but with an expected raise in salary. My wife was swollen with pride and I called all my relatives with the good news. They soon discovered that I was pleasantly incorrect. When I was invited to an inaugural press conference at the site of the Sears Tower later that month, I was introduced as the new head of the department. Martin Trust: Director. I felt so secure that day, and for many reasons. I was given more responsibility. They believed in me. I would be making much more money. I could help my wife and my son. I could buy so many new things. And most of all, I could help Holden.
He told me he had seen a Gallantly Streaming video of me on the elevated train. He didn’t elaborate. Looking back, Holden didn’t seem interested at all. He always hung up the phone quickly. I’m surprised I didn’t notice. I guess I thought it was more jealousy. I’m not sure if I had made a silent decision to not let it bother me or if I simply didn’t care. I hadn’t dissected the faults in our conversation because I was so immediately thrust into work. My communication with Holden for the next few months was relegated to transferring funds from my bank account to his.
See, I had been flooded with work. That’s what people don’t seem to understand. I didn’t know how bad it was getting with Holden because Holden and I weren’t talking. What I didn’t realize was that the reason we were working so hard was because Holden was making everything bad. It’s a pretzel, I know, but it’ll make sense later, America. This group, The Free Thinkers, was growing quickly and I couldn’t believe the volume of destruction they had wrought in the short time they had been around. I was so buried in work, constantly meeting with government officials and having late night strategy sessions over Styrofoam-laced Chinese-flavored takeout with my team that, by Christmas, I hadn’t even arranged my office. Work was life and life was speeding past me unabashed, like an Unfortunate on Free Cheeseburger Day at MacDonny’s. Even with our counseling sessions, work was harming my marriage again. To the point that my wife drew a line and told me to pick a side. And I did. Over the holiday break, I regained control of my home. My wife and I took a spontaneous trip to Chile, I cut down a Christmas tree with my son, we watched It’s a God Bless America Life, drank in the new year and, by January first, I was back at work, refreshed and wearing a new attitude.
I made it my goal to smoke out The Free Thinkers with a manageable, yet highly aggressive, platform. And that started with discovering their leader.
* * * * *
RECYCLE 03 RECYCLE
Those days, when Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration was in its infancy, valid leads were like Natives beyond the boundaries of their reservations: hard to come by. Toward the end of my first year as acting director, the youngest in the history of Homeland Security, I might add, we finally got one. A lead. A jen-you-eye-n, bona fide, God Bless this Great Land lead!
A monument to the progress of environmentalism was burned to the ground. Burned to bits. To smithereens. The building was a Chicago bar called The Library and it was a cornerstone of the city’s foundational beliefs about recycling. I hadn’t heard of it before that day, but apparently the small, non-descript building on the north side was on the historic register. It had been designed during The Great Recycling and had gained a considerable reputation for its forward thinking. In an effort to keep paper books alive, the owner had ‘wallpapered’ the bar with pages from some of his favorite stories, earning The Library its long-standing name. The Free Thinkers had somehow recruited the owner, who subsequently char-grilled The Library, along with the thousands of paper artifacts housed along its walls. The loss of all that unknown history was a calamity, especially because, at the time of the incident, The Library wasn’t on our radar.
The owner-turned-bartender-turned-paranoid schizophrenic terrorist was named Marion Tabor. She was a plain and simple girl whose mind was flat and lacked carbonation. According to those closest to her, she could be easily manipulated. Although her record was as clean as The Book is trustworthy, we went on a mission to track her down and question her about the group. Your parents may recall her face from the news broadcasts in the months leading up to The Inferno of Tears. We did everything we could to find her and spent thousands of dollars on months of television advertising space, but it simply wasn’t working. The Free Thinkers had covered her tracks.
The lead I had been so ecstatic about presented itself when her apartment was searched by local law enforcement. A diary was discovered in her closet, half-demolished and sprinkling her discarded shoes in shards. Thankfully, our government-issued digital reading devices have a mind of their own. They keep their secrets hidden away in the recesses of their shadowed microchips and processors.
God Bless American Technology.
The day the diary was delivered to Washington D.C. is a day that resides in my memory and fights to be clearer to me than the day my son was born. I woke up. I took a shower. I read the morning paper from my leather-bound Book. I kissed my wife and son goodbye. I drove to work. Picked up a bagel on the way. Life was still normal. Life was good. Life was terror-free. Nothing horrifying had happened. The match that would ignite the war had yet to be struck.
It was a Wednesday, I believe, when we had a meeting about the digital diary. I wasn’t in the conference room when the diary of Miss Tabor was thoroughly sifted. Most of it was feathers and unicorns and butterflies and bubblegum and stickers and pink ribbons and – well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but you get my point. It was filled with useless girly garbage until a single name continued to appear on the screen –
I’ve always been told that dogs are best trained when you incorporate a shock to their system at the moment of delivering a message. It is cruel, but the shock brands the moment, and the message, more clearly. In our lives, and in the lives of heroes, the same sentiment can be applied. People recall life more clearly in times of tragedy. They adjust their purpose and recall those moments, and the fleeting decisions that followed, quite well in the years to come. This was one of those times. The shock was figuratively and literally burned into my memory. I still have a mark on my leg from the scalding cup of coffee that tumbled to my lap as I rose from my seat, not bothering to wipe it.
The name that came up most in her diary was HOLDEN CLIFFORD.
* * * * *
RECYCLE 04 RECYCLE
Just to be clear, I know I’m already surprising you by the way I’m writing this. The ‘style’ probably doesn’t make sense coming from someone of my position in the government. You have to know, although you see me on television all the time, I’m no different than you. I wasn’t born with anything special. I enjoy a day on the beach with my wife and kid just as much as the next guy. I thought I should explain this because my Editors (God Bless the Editorial staff) have told me that I tend to weave around the point and dabble in side-talk. Like I said already, I’m a straight shooter. I aim for my target, snap the trigger and let the hammer fall. I don’t really care what happens to the bullet on its way to the bull’s eye, I just want it to get there in the end.
Now, where were we?
Marion Tabor had inscribed in her diary, across pages and pages of detailed digital text, a complete and utter crush on Holden Clifford. She swooned over how he strolled into the bar every night after work smelling of pipe dope, grease and cigarette smoke. She romanticized what a mystery he had been to her – a mystery she longed to solve. There was much more, but it’s boring and I’m not going to waste my time typing it out. If I did, the Editors would just remove it anyway.
The final entry of her diary was short and frantic. Apparently she and Holden had been talking more often and, on one of these days, he had torn one of the pages from the wall of her bar in an unexpected rage and began ranting to Marion that it was a lie. He forced everyone to leave so he could confront her alone. He told her that The Library needed to be in ashes by the morning. He told her that all the pages were evil.
At the time of the meeting, I assumed that Holden was saying this because the book pages were made of unrecycled paper; that the bar should be burned because it was illegal to keep paper due to the Laws of Environmentalism. I was so wrong.
People around the onyx conference table, men and women I trusted, who had been hired because they had such sharp, logical minds and patriotic god bless america hearts, started forming opinions about my best friend. Not only was this man, Holden Clifford, a member of The Free Thinkers, but the activities that were detailed in the diary warranted a much deeper hypothesis. Holden was not simply a member of the terrorist group, but their leader.
I left early that day. Everyone had their individual orders. Orders I couldn’t hear or didn’t want to hear or didn’t want to be anywhere close to. I felt sick to my stomach and I needed to reach Holden. I was excited when the line picked up, but it was his voicemail. Close, but no cigar. I left him a message. I closed my phone. I drove home.
It was my job as the director of Historic Homeland Preservation and Restoration to tell my team that I knew Holden. To tell them about our history. Give them insight about where he lived and, more importantly, about his mind-crippling cancer. It was obvious now, from the way Miss Tabor had described him, that he had gotten far worse. I was struck dumb by the digital diary. That wasn’t Holden. Not the Holden I knew. The confident one that stole my first girlfriend and my first car, only to accidentally wreck them both with an innocent smirk. This man was deranged and I consciously fought to deny it.
My walk of disillusionment fluttered fast below my legs like clouds between the wings of a trusty, American-made biplane. My wife told me, time and again, that my friend might not be using our money for his treatments - and she was right. I hate when that happens. But, like always, her response to the situation surprised me. When I told her what had happened, she only felt sorry for him (as I’m sure you are all felling sorry for him now). Poor Holden, a decorated war hero, was sickened by the single, incurable cancer left on the planet, losing a war that occupied his own head, and there was nothing we could do to help him.
When I dragged my legs into work the following day, I didn’t recognize my reflection in the revolving glass doors. I hadn’t slept a daydream and I remember, later that day, seeing the same, unknown man in the bathroom mirror, pale and drawn. It only got worse, of course. Things like that often do. I didn’t eat for two days. No appetite whatsoever, Mister Clever. The historical significance of the burned bar was about to uncover a much more involved conspiracy to eradicate some of our more well-prized objects of literary art. At least, that was the assumption.
The destruction of The Library involved book pages. That was enough. I was met that afternoon, while taking my cigarette break, by a liaison from the Publishing House and a Lincoln Town Car that was allowing vaporous heat to escape from its single, open door. After that car ride, the rest of my day was spent in their building across the white plains of the District of Columbia. Without going into so much pointless detail, we arrived at a simple conclusion: tracking down Holden Clifford was the single most important item on our God Bless the Groceries list. The Publishers, who will forever remain anonymous, were rather concerned by his reaction to the book pages. They analyzed the diary and produced a scenario that neither I, nor anyone on my team, had considered. That Holden’s outburst had not been about the paper pages themselves, but about the information.
This scenario seemed far fetched to me, knowing my friend as I did (or as I thought I did before the cancer munched away his brain without leaving any leftovers for the doggy bag). But it was, and still is, my job to follow every lead. Although I take fear with a grain of salt, I agreed to dispatch Agents from the Publishing House to tail Holden and bring him in.
But I didn’t help them. A fact I type now with deepest regrets. God Bless America. The truth was, I was withholding information from our government. Information vital to the success of the mission to protect our nation’s historic documents (all this happened before The Inferno of Tears, mind you; I would never do such a thing now). I was certain that I was the only one who knew Holden’s exact whereabouts, but the guilt that filled me by not telling them had vanished the next morning. They found him. It only took the twilight hours for them to discover General Fire Protection.
Working against my feelings toward Holden, I left that day with more Agents and flew to Chicago. When we landed, I had them drop me off at Lincoln Park Zoo. I wouldn’t come with to pick him up from work because I didn’t want the Agents to see his reaction to me. Instead, I waited nervously in the warm sun for his arrival. On the surface, it appeared to the Agents as an intimidation tactic of mine. There are people who had looked upon my willingness to take on this meeting with great adoration. I was commended by the heads of many task forces. They were all proud to have a director who wanted to be on the front lines. God Bless America. I wish I could say I was proud of that gesture, but I knew the truth. I was lying to my country to protect my best friend. I needed to know that he hadn’t become something else. Something, or someone, to be concerned about. In the dim valleys of my heart, I needed to know that Holden was still Holden.
* * * * *
RECYCLE 05 RECYCLE
Holden was not Holden. Let’s just toss that one out there.
Forget a frame on the wall that wasn’t quite level.
What I saw that day was angled so drastically to the left it looked straight again.
I was standing by the zebra habitat when I noticed Holden approach through the crowd. The sun was shining, but he seemed clouded; unconcerned with seeing Martin Trust at the finish line of his abduction (mixed metaphor – Editors please fix). When he came close, I sent the Agents to keep a perimeter. It read as a safety measure, but I sent them away so they wouldn’t hear or see anything that went on between myself and Holden. The moment I felt safe, I wrapped my arms around him in a long, sorrowful embrace. He didn’t return the hug. I remember that more than anything. There was an emptiness in him, a greasy blur upon his eyes that told me he had been missing his treatments. Forget the doggy bag, the cancer had eaten my friend and was asking for a second helping.
Holden was surprisingly indifferent for most of our discussion. I asked him about the money and the treatments and he swore on his life that he hadn’t missed a single one. Actually, there was a moment when I broke his hardened shell. I remember that now. He smiled. Before he realized why I had brought him to the park, he was flattered that I would go to such lengths to track him down for not returning my calls. Those emotions didn’t last long.
We walked deeper into the park and I explained that his name had come up with Homeland Security. Gingerly, I approached the subject of how he been involved in a terrorist act on a bar called The Library. Most of the time, he nodded with his mouth tight. There was no response, beyond that. Just nodding; as if he knew that what I was saying was right, but somehow believed it had all been in a dream. That didn’t last long either. When I brought up The Free Thinkers and Marion, Holden did the opposite of what I had expected. He didn’t deny a thing.
In my disbelief, I listened as he told me that what he had done ran much deeper than arson or book pages. I asked him to elaborate, but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t tell me what he had meant. Holden simply admitted that he convinced Marion Tabor to destroy the bar, but explained that there was a much different, more important, reason why those pages were burned. That was the moment I realized, in the flash of the insatiable fever that clouded his cloudy eyes, that my best friend for life, the Holden I knew and loved and stuck by through all the thick and all the thin, was gone. Truly gone. The once recognizable face of the man in front of me twisted to a gnarled expression. He began spitting angrily, saying that I knew exactly why he had burned down the bar. That I was pretending not to know.
Then the whispering began. I type it now because it pulsed shudders of panic into my heart and I think you should understand the degree to which his sickness had overtaken him. Feverishly, he muttered, “You brought the Agents. Agents from the Publishing House have picked me up. Of course, they have. Of course they have!” He grappled for my shirt and continued to repeat that phrase as I urged him to listen to what he was saying.
Holden was always stronger than I was. Our fights began with a playful shove. That shove turned to wrestling. The wrestling turned to fist flinging that turned to me laid out on the grass, gasping for breath while he stood triumphantly over me. I hadn’t felt such defeat in over a decade. Holden told me one final thing before he cracked me in the gut, stole the wind from my quickly-bruising lungs and lunged himself into the crowd. He told me that I couldn’t be trusted. That I knew precisely why Marion had done what she had done; why he had done what he had done. And, more frightening than anything else, he told me that I was part of the system now. A system that needed to be destroyed.
The chase that ensued would have cost me a suspension if I hadn’t been the director or the man leading the investigation. It would have looked suspicious that I lost him. I had dispersed the Agents, distanced them far enough from us that they hadn’t seen him race madly away and, by the time I contacted them on the radio, he was already gone. Long gone. It’s outta the park gone.
What did he mean? What did I know? He was paranoid. Why couldn’t he trust me anymore? What ‘system’ was I a part of? I loved Holden, but I realized that I’d made a mistake by not telling anyone that he was dangerous to society and if I didn’t do something quickly to stop him, this veteran-hero would soon declare war on his own country.
* * * * *
RECYCLE 05 RECYCLE
I find that there are a lot of lists in the world. Lists of names that all share something in common. Your government has its lists. The one that Holden was added to that day is a list that none of you want to find your name on. I told them, the authors of the list, that he was not the leader of The Free Thinkers. That anti-establishment group had been established for a while. I felt comfortable assuring them of this because Holden had sworn that he was going to his radiation treatments. I was lying to myself and I knew it. Martin Trust unable to trust the man in the mirror. But I rationalized my lies by assuming that his actions were due to post-traumatic-something-or-other from the war. I told myself that his cancer may not have gotten worse at all. How easily we deceive ourselves.
For the sake of my family, I chose not to divulge everything to my department. I told them that I had known Holden since childhood, that we were acquaintances, that I knew he had joined the Army (God Bless America), and that I wanted to give Holden the benefit of the doubt. Although we live in a paperless world, money leaves a paper trail that is easily swept up when the dirt collects. I knew that the funds I loaned to Holden would lead back to me and I had to confess to helping him pay for his treatments. Thankfully, the only person I had to answer to was the director of Homeland Security, who couldn’t care less – as long as we were ahead by runs during the seventh inning stretch.
So, the list.
The list is filled with the names of people we need to look out for. To ‘be concerned with’. It was right for Holden to be on that list. I knew in my heart that something was deeply wrong with him. Although I didn’t know if he was checking his Book, I began sending him letters every day. I was so convinced that he wasn’t too far gone and believed that opening up communication could help us bond. And I kept sending checks. Until the day I met Winston, I tried with much effort to reach out to him. Winston made me decide to stop sending everything all together.
Winston Pratt was a homeless, elderly man in his early eighties. I would describe him with more detail, but it doesn’t matter. He was a bed bug like the rest of them and that’s all you need know. Winston had been found placing a sticker onto the side of a building that said: Don’t read The Book. With all the hubbub at the Publishing House progressing because of people tossing a torch onto a bar of book pages, it didn’t take long for Agents to jump on a plane and bring him to me.
Defacing the building broke a few laws, but it was considered a very small and petty crime. Not enough to have you hauled in. The message, on the other hand, was more than enough. What surprised me about Winston was the conviction the man had in his voice when questioned. I’ll type out one of his more elegant retorts, so you can understand what we had to deal with. His squeaky words were surprisingly poetic and seemed to be coming from someone else; from the man behind the stage who was holding the strings to that frail, old puppet.
He said, “What’s a life sentence to a man with little life remaining?”
There had been a sharp, wooden sliver of distrust inside his heart, widdled by someone else. And this puppet master had an agenda. This fact became most obvious to me when I saw how worked up the man had gotten over The Book. When I pulled out my digital notepad, he pointed at it and started raving that The Book was wrong. The Book was a lie. The Book was evil. His response shocked me, and not because his eyes were locked on my digital notepad because he thought I was holding The Book. It shocked me because The Book is Good. You all know that. This man was insane, if he thought differently.
After calming him down (helped by dropping a plate of hot food into the mix), and questioning him further, he revealed some of my deepest fears. Plastering stickers to the sides of buildings was a lesser duty of the group that kept coming up in all my paperwork. The Free Thinkers. This man, this elderly fool, had been recruited. The members of the Publishing House that were involved in the questioning linked his insane ramblings about the digital reading device immediately to a man that they were certain had been holding the strings.
I couldn’t stop the curiosity that came. I wanted to. God (bless America) knows I wanted to. The Agents ushered me out of the room, closed the door behind them and grilled the man about Holden Clifford. He acted strong. Put up a fight. He tried to resist their demands, but frail, calcium-deficient bones break easily and so did he.
At the conclusion of the questioning of this homeless gentleman named Winston Pratt, the manhunt for Holden Clifford began. I had been right. Everyone had been right. Holden was the leader of a movement that was sweeping the digital desktops of Homeland Security. Holden was the mastermind behind The Free Thinkers. He had military training. He was a leader and a fighter. He had post-traumatic-something-or-other. And his mind was slipping into deep, cancer-drenched pools of insanity. Found in any one person, those traits made a strong cocktail of cuckoo. In Holden, they created a leader who would gather a group of easily manipulated minds to follow his paranoia and confusion without knowing where it would end. Under his deranged guidance, they were systematically destroying some of our world’s most precious artifacts. And it was my job to find Holden. It was my job as director to find and detain him before he could inflict any more damage.