Gregg Williard
One night my father told me this story:
In an ancient kingdom was the library with THE ONE BOOK. It sat alone in a room with a straight chair facing a roughhewn table as thick and scored as a butcher's block. On this table was the book. The book had no name and was thick too, cloudy and gray like wax poured and cooled in a square mold. Only the condemned sat at this table, because certain death awaited anyone who dared to open the book and read the story within. Those sent to the room were given one hour to read the book. Refusal meant torture and death, and the condemned were watched through hidden optics to assure their compliance within the appointed time. The prisoners were promised that if they survived the book, and could give a short book report to the king about what they read, then their sentence would be commuted and they would be rewarded with a great fortune. But when the time elapsed the guards entered and invariably found the open book clutched in dead hands, or dropped to the floor beside the agony-splayed corpse. Carefully averting their eyes from the text or the victim's death rictus, the guards closed THE ONE BOOK and returned it to the table. The bodies were removed for ritual dismemberment after display in the public square. After countless centuries of terror and death no one ever escaped the Library of THE ONE BOOK.
Night after night I asked to hear the story again. I would not relent. I listened for any inflection or detail revealing a flaw in the scenario, then proposed one escape plan after another to outwit the cruel king, and my father:
What if the prisoner opens the book and bends over it with an intent look, but with eyes closed?
No, my father said, the all-seeing panopticon spyglass sees from all angles and has a close-up lens so the observers would see that the prisoner's eyes were closed. And remember, the prisoner must give an accounting of what he has read.
But what if the prisoner is secretly blind, or maybe has blinded himself as the price of surviving the test, and opens the book and stares straight at the book, for the whole hour!
No, my father said, he would still be unable to give the book report to the king.
But what if, when they ask the blind man to give the book report, he says, he says, Ah! It would be fatal to you my king, and as a faithful subject I cannot allow such a horrible fate to befall my royal liege, so I must remain silent as a sign of my devotion!
No, my father answered, the book is not coherent, or fatal in the retelling, or in hearing again, but only in the act of reading for the first time. The blind knave would be tortured for his cunning with even more cruel enthusiasm.
What if the prisoner is a magician and has this sheet of paper up his sleeve, so he uses his sleight of hand to slip the paper over the pages of the book, but maybe he moves the paper a little bit, to get one word at a time, so after awhile he gets the story, but only in little bits, like taking a tiny tastes of poison over time, and it doesn't . . .
No, my father said, the all-seeing eye would detect any such ruse and would result in. . . .
OK, I said. So if the panopticon lens is all seeing and from every angle, then, at the last minute, just when the guards are coming in, the prisoner picks up the book and opens it so it faces out, covering his face with the back of the book like a mask, and he turns his head back and forth and up and down, so that the all-seeing panopticon lens SEES THE BOOK instead of the prisoner, so that all the observers watching the spyglass are killed by the book, and then, when the prisoner turns to the guards THEY HAVE THE BOOK RIGHT IN THEIR FACES AND THEY'RE ALL KILLED TOO AND HE CAN GET OUT!!!
No, my father answered, a mere glance at the book, while inducing bad headaches and perhaps facial skin irritation like a sunburn or low-level radiation exposure, would not be fatal. That could only occur with a slow, deep reading and comprehension of the words.
Then, what if the prisoner opens the book, and speed reads the book—so that, yeah, he really reads it, he really gets the story, but he's not doing it in a slow deep way, which you said was necessary—you said that!—that he had to really read it in a slow deep way for it to be fatal, but that this prisoner knows how to speed read, so he's really getting the story, he's not just glancing at it, but it's not that deep and slow kind of reading that you said would be fatal! OK?
No, my father answered, because a comprehension of the story could not be gleaned from speed reading the text. As I've told you, speed reading is not appropriate for works of literature. Only slow, deep consideration of the words could reveal the meaning of the book.
But Dad, you said slow and deep is what kills you! Understanding kills you, is what you're saying!
Yes, that is the prisoner's dilemma. And through the countless centuries. . . .
OK OK! What if the prisoner doesn't understand the language of the book, so he pretends to . . .
No, my father said. The book is written in the universal language, before Babel, known to all.
Wait! What if the prisoner opens the book but turns it UPSIDE-DOWN so he can't possibly read . . .
No, my father said, the universal language is legible upside-down, backwards and forwards, even reversed in a mirror . . .
All right! What if the prisoner is dyslexic, like me, but it's this big secret, maybe isn't even a diagnosis in the ancient kingdom, so nobody knows, and the prisoner opens the book, and acts like he's carefully reading every page, and nodding and looking really interested, but he's not actually reading or understanding anything, so the story can't kill him!
No, my father sighed, you've forgotten that the prisoner is required to give a book report about the . . .
Wait! Wait! The prisoner is dyslexic, and acts like he's deep reading the book but really isn't reading it at all, and then, when the guards come in, and they take him to the king, and the king says, "and what can you tell me of the plot, theme and moral of the ONE BOOK?" the prisoner tells him, tells him ANYTHING, like the plot of the last Avengers movie or Goldilocks and the Three Bears or . . .
No, my father said. The King is well-versed in the real story of the book, so such a deception . . .
Dad! The other night you said, YOU SAID, 'the book is not coherent, or fatal in the retelling, or in hearing again,' right?
My father hesitated, looking several steps ahead and seeing the trap. Still, he answered, That's right . . .
OK! So, if the king knows that Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or any other random thing is NOT the story in the one book, then it means he KNOWS what the one book is really about, right?
Riiiiight . . .
. . . and the only way he could know that is if HE READ IT HIMSELF, because you said, YOU SAID that the one book is not coherent when you hear it again, but only when read by yourself the first time, which means he can't tell if what he is hearing is the actual story or not unless HE READ IT HIMSELF, but if he READ IT HIMSELF then he'd have to be dead!
No, my father said, you forget . . .
But then he fell silent.
I went on.
AND, even IF he read it himself, and knows the actual story, and somehow did that and managed not to die, he STILL can't tell if the prisoner—the dyslexic prisoner who can stare at the book and look like he's reading it and can make it all the way to the meeting with the king—he can't tell if the prisoner read the book, because you said the retelling, and hearing again is not coherent . . .
For the first time, my father stumbled. He said, what I meant was that the 'death effect' was not coherent and did not carry through to the retelling. Of course, the story of the one book can be conveyed in a book report or a retelling, which is how the story of the book was received by the king, and how he can judge if the prisoner has read the book.
That's cheating, Dad.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.
OK, who told the king the story of the book?
What?
Who told the king what was in the book?
I don't know. A nameless commoner.
A nameless commoner with literacy skills.
My father made a face.
I said, never mind. A nameless commoner who read the book, and somehow managed to live through the experience long enough to tell the king about it.
That's right. There was one who found a way.
And he was a dyslexic kid, wasn't he? An autistic kid.
My father was very sick. I knew that, and didn't know that. Finally, he nodded and answered cautiously, I believe that is what the legend told.
I kept trying. Until the story stopped.
When I turned nine, my father vanished. It was days later we found out the police had locked him up in a hospital. When my mother took me to see him, he was mute. I knew it was my fault. For being too stupid to understand books. Or to read clocks or faces. Even after I managed to write him letters (with my mother's help), he didn't answer them. I wasn't surprised. What I had sent him were stupid, ugly letters of stupid, ugly letters. When my father came home, he couldn't remember the story of THE ONE BOOK. Then he left again and came back again but was never really back at all. He yelled at milk. Pulled knives on chairs. My mother divorced him. We didn't see him for years. I hid in computers, so far in that I took up residence there. My mother coaxed me back out and I consented to a kind of double identity, dual citizenship in countries of the digital and the analog; of silicone and carbon; of quantum and classical; of light and of meat. But I was really neither here nor there, living just inches away behind a monitor screen, waiting and treading water in a cathode hot tub. I wasn't the kid pressing my face against the window to gaze into the game store, but the kid living alone in the game store, pushing from the inside to see out. It was always clear that the fundamental mystery of that world was my father, why he had left. Gaining fluency with code was exactly no help in framing the question. His absence was not in 1's and 0's. I needed a reason why he hadn't come back, and the only one I had was me. My mother always said it wasn't me, and it was better he never came back. She wanted him gone. I gave up and said I believed her, but never really believed anything again. Except for code. Proving to myself and the world that I could do something real, and something right. I couldn't make my father come back. I couldn't protect my mother. I couldn't finish the story. So maybe I could make some other difference. I could make sense. My own. And could shape a world according to my rules. At least that is what I told myself by day. I cobbled together a living from start-ups and consultancies, never staying anywhere for long. There was sub-contracting for Google and then Amazon, where I worked with a research team on haptic interfaces, technology to make warehouse robots respond directly to the body and mind. At night, when sleep was again denied me, I chased a fantastic dream of talking to my father, with code, in code.
When we finally meet again at a coffee shop, I don't even say hello. I ask why he left us. He reaches in his bag and takes out a manila envelope. Inside are my letters to him. I flinch at the sight of them, their chiseled bleakness, like runes in old stone. I look at his face. I had always carried a memory of an implacable mask. Teller of tales with an oracle's drone. The mask has slipped. The voice halts. In the hospital he couldn't speak. In the coffee shop he can't lie. But that is the lie. He opens one of my letters and flattens it gently on the steel tabletop. A body laid out for autopsy. He says, these were so beautiful, I was too ashamed to go on with my life. I was unworthy. Of you. Your mother. Our life together.
I say, why are you lying to me?
He doesn't seem to hear. He turns my letter around with his fingertip until it faces me. He taps the faded page. His nails are as meticulously trimmed and clear as always. Mine are bitten, clouded and cracked with fungus. He says, I think you should read these. You've forgotten the boy who wrote them.
As always when anyone is near, I curl my hands into white balls to cover my nails. Using them clutched to sweep away the letters does a brisk, robot job. The people at the next table stare. I get up and say, do you know who I am now? Do you know what I do, what I've done?
The whole place goes silent, watching us. He stoops and picks up the letters, fitting them carefully back into the envelope. He says, Yes, I do. You have revolutionized inventory warehousing. You have fashioned new algorithms. Dynamic and self-evolving relationships of aggregate data. New generations of smart barcode scanners and picker routing.
Stop it.
I want to go there. I want to be buried in books.
I shout at him to stop lying. I storm past tables of frightened customers out the door. I never want to see him again. I wait behind a car in the parking lot. After a time he comes out the door, bent over with the weight of his bag.
The ceremony was closed casket, quick and dirty in a cut-rate funeral home with a dollar store car freshener hanging in the john.
In the dream I am a creator. In the day I am a nobody. When Amazon called me back to hire me as lead coder for an urgent debugging project, I said they had the wrong guy. But I went.
They were waiting for me at the Fulfillment Center. I was given a badge, security and data clearance, a work station all alone and a briefing in a gray room. There was no mistake, they said. They told me my father died of a heart attack while working as a Water Spider and a Picker at that Fulfillment Center. The bugs started with him. In the dream, he told me he wanted to be buried in books, but Amazon centers use Chaotic Storage. He was surrounded by everything. He knew that, and he knew that I knew that. In a small way I had helped design it, contributing to some of the coding on warehouse routing a few years before. But I still didn't believe them. My father may have been nuts, but he didn't need to work himself to death at a Fulfillment Center. Not for $11.50 an hour. He was rich. His whole family was rich. His brother, another schizophrenic, had made a fortune in the '60s with a secret recipe for Freedom Cookies, a granola-molasses-vanilla-peanut butter-secret ingredient creation that took the Bay Area by storm and became an official staple of the Black Panther Free Breakfast Program. The family story claimed that Uncle Tor wanted to donate the rights to the Panthers, but was tricked by the rest of the family, who sold the recipe (or what many said was a flat imitation) when Uncle Tor ended up dead in a suspicious explosion, allegedly making homemade bombs in his basement. With a family history like that, it was no surprise they were all estranged from each other, though the cookies, (or perhaps the brand alone), made them millions that continued to flow in for my father. Part of the brand's success was the legend of its not-quite authenticity; someday, someday, the real recipe would be found, and the true Freedom Cookie would return. Like the Revolution. Like the Second Coming. Apocalypse. They even stocked Freedom Cookies at my coffee shop, but I never ate them. I believe my Father had made certain promises not to discuss Tor's death with the authorities, and in exchange his share of the profits was safe. But that was only one version. My mother accepted it, the money and the story, more or less, and I went along.
No one at Amazon could explain the nature of the problem, or what a lowly worker like my father had to do with it. But I knew.
They gave me the assignment. Reconstruction of my father's final days in the warehouse. I settled into a dazed review of my father's employment. The records showed that his first job was Water Spider, but after three months he had been transferred to Picker. The corporate gospel, I knew, presents this as a promotion, but both jobs are grueling and relentless, more than enough to kill a man in his sixties. In some centers, supervisors can inflict more public humiliation and intimidation on Water Spiders, who maintain packing station supplies of boxes and envelopes, tape, internal packing, address labels and everything else needed to prepare product for delivery. But he was a Picker. Pickers follow programmed routes in small CAT utility trucks, some with cabs on hydraulic lifts and, in the newest test models, cybernetic arms controlled by stick-on interface patches or magnetic tattoos worn on the operators' arms or foreheads. Publicly hazing a Picker zipping by at high speeds is not only difficult to do, but also, they came to realize, very risky; while using the cybernetic arms in the initial testing phases, emotional distress in operators could be transmitted into lethally aggressive neural commands to the metal arms and hands, more than capable of tearing a harassing supervisor to pieces. Perhaps out of caution, my father received consistently satisfactory-to-superior ratings, but the exact routing data could not be retrieved. This kind of gap was not typical, yet it could and did occur when personnel files were under review by insurance adjustors, safety inspection or data stacking for systems review, the sort of thing that might happen when a worker had an accident, or died of a heart attack. I let it go for the time being. Despite myself I was feeling a little flush of pride in his superior reviews. He never received a formal write up for performance deficiencies, time infractions, or counter-productive, negative attitudes. His record was impeccable, and his future with the company secure.
From my previous contracting I knew his job and all the other jobs at the center inside and out. But this wasn't a performance evaluation. I was looking for other data about him. Something that was not consciously formulated, a search that required the usual attention to detail, pattern, conceptual form, and depth, but with a nagging other. On a gut level this kind of work lives in a special broth of enzymes and sugars, shot with an electrical charge that, this time, was held, and increased, with a concentrated stimulant patch that I doubled with another. I worked up a search construct of all retrievable data on him, with a collage of security videos wherever he might be captured. Without his routing record it took some time, but I settled into a work-meditation, which I had come to know as "spin." At first, my father was indistinguishable from the dozens of other black and yellow trucks, and hundreds of workers in identical florescent green vests and green helmets. Then I enlarged a blur and I had him. He wore a silver helmet. Silvers signified test drivers equipped with the haptic interface. He became the truck and its metal arms, and through their touch he knew the ten billion things. The quantum protocols that governed chaos order, the understanding that shelving a book by D.W. Winnicott beside a cast iron skillet beside a purple wig beside a bag of yellow BBs for an air gun beside a BluRay of Red River completes a more than perfect symmetry, is for a measured interval the one stocking configuration for maximally efficient retrieval, grounded in continuously updated twelve-tier deep algorithms of consumer demand frequency, order hierarchy, and S.K.U. (Stock Keeping Unit) chord progressions playing sub-audible Batch Retrieval (and Replacement) Harmonics through the aisles, setting storage cages to thrum steel-string licks too high for ears but pitched for silicon and blood.
It's the charge of the haptic. My father had found it. One of the rare few who had. I was another, though I had kept it a secret, knowing that it was a dangerous talent that Amazon had every reason to contain, or destroy. Now they wanted me to find my father. But he was dead, wasn't he? The security videos showed him collapsing, showed the EMT's hauling him away, where he died en route to the hospital. We had buried him, my mother and I. But he wanted to be buried in books. Now Amazon was looking again. Where was he? I had to find my father. I had to lose him. Our bodies were the music. I'd worn the patches too long. Into the red.
There he is.
In the security video he is steering his yellow utility CAT nimbly through the maze of shelves in concert with a swarm of others, bees of a digital hive. I bring the magnification up and freeze the image, silicon clear. He's got that beatific smile, radiant in his work. One of the select. On the seat is a thermos of coffee, a pee jar, and a collection by Borges, The Library of Babel. And on his lap, gray and fat, is THE ONE BOOK, open. To kill? To preach? I had assumed he was here for the haptic high. Most didn't feel it, but a few came away changed. It was my job to find them, take them out of the CATs, reconfigure the neural links. Stop it before it spreads. Of course, my father would be one of them. His heart did the job for me. Or was it the book?
I worked through the night. Many nights. It wasn't just my father's self-erasing tracks. There were blackouts throughout the warehouse. They weren't letting me in. The gaps were growing. I finally gleaned the truth. The haptic link was spreading, messing with Chaotic Storage throughout the center.
I gave them my report. They threw it aside.
Surely the system can be recalibrated, they said. Corrected. The system is continuously self-correcting. It's made of a continuing matrix of new data. It has to be reset. Or shut down.
This is different. This is a matter of something being inserted onto the shelves that shouldn't be there. Something that changes the system. I'm just figuring it out now. I've been tracing Picker routes.
Which ones?
It's difficult to say because they seem to be self-erasing. That is part of the problem. I can't explain it.
What is being inserted?
Books. Books are being inserted.
Amazon is books.
No. This changes all the other books and orders. They become data mines. When they're scanned by the Chaos Storage Reader they . . . explode.
I waited. They finally told me the truth.
Yes. We know. And they take over the haptic hands. Go wild. Tear apart anybody who gets close. We can't get into the center where your father worked. It's mined. And these data mines are spreading to other centers. Orders are being scrambled. There is no fulfillment. And the worst part. All the profits for the books are going directly to the writers.
And every other book order sent out is something called THE ONE BOOK, right?
How do you know that?
I can't explain.
We want you to go in. Stop this thing at the source. No one else we've sent into the warehouse has come back. You can stop him. He's your father.
Was.
It makes no difference.
I can't stop him. I can't find him. I could never find him. I can't do this. I won't go in there.
I went in.
It was dark and cold. My phone was swamped with deformed avatars and frothing trolls, then went dead. I moved on by head lamp. Aisles were tunnels—multiplied, peeled away, excavated, overlapped into unknown networks. I tripped over an arm in a blue sleeve, the hand clutching a barcode reader. Racing CATs sent whining echoes to doppler into the distance. I never saw any of them, or my father's truck, until it had me pinned against a dead-end storage cage of something that looked like Little Mermaid Halloween costume fins, and copies of THE ONE BOOK.
In the corner was a thick butcher block table and a Shaker wood chair. I sat down. The windshield had mutated into a smalted blister. Behind it an unknown face was dimly lit by dashboard dials. The truck's metal arms extended THE ONE BOOK. Many papers out. I gathered them up. My broken, illiterate letters. And a faded recipe in jagged ballpoint: Uncle Tor's original Freedom Cookie Recipe. The metal hands paused, then placed THE ONE BOOK on the table. One hand withdrew, and returned to gently place a fat, bumpy cookie beside the book. My father's voice said, The original recipe. No more fake freedom. I took a bite and closed my eyes. It was true.
My hands sought out the cover of THE ONE BOOK. My father said, Are you ready?
I opened my eyes and said, Ready. I opened the book.
I left coding to work in the coffee shop. We even sold Real Freedom Cookies, and had people waiting in line out the door. People from the Freedom Cookie company and from Amazon called for me all the time, but my manager played dumb. At the coffee shop I learned how to make runes and I-Ching pentagrams and spirit animals in steamed milk. I learned how to read people's faces, and find stories in them that kept me warm at night. Amazon kept after me as things broke down, more and more. I had to hide.
The place where I finally stopped running was black. Oil covered everything: sand, seashells, dead gulls, live gulls, plastic flotsam and jetsam of more prosaic disaster. One item stood out, a single black overboot, bearing in its new incarnation the brilliant gloss of old-world cobbled patent leather. I tossed my butt at the heel. It hissed out a goodbye puff, a little psst of secret sharing or dismissal, a wave to the geologic ironies at play in this spill: oil as spoils of ancient compressions, millennial wine decanted and tricked to fuel our march, sole our boots. Carbon based ephemera of which I was the most ephemeral of all, shivering in the icy glare of a moon that polished the glugging skin of the spill to high chill, warmed a little by the pink lanterns of a beach party nearby. I turned back, to home.