Now and Forever, Page 5

  McCoy was there, not dead but sleeping, having given up, and was now taking a snooze.

  Exhaling, Cardiff spoke down at his terrible enemy, glad that he was alive.

  “Stay there,” he said. “You don’t know it, but you’re going home.” He dropped the lid gently, taking care to insert a twig in the gap between top and bottom to allow for air.

  He ran back to Claude, who, sensing the visit was over, started off again at a good clop.

  All around them the yards and porches were empty.

  Where, Cardiff wondered, has everyone gone?

  He had his answer when Claude stopped.

  They stood before a large, rather handsome brick building, its entrance flanked by two Egyptian sphinxes lying supine, half-lioness and half-god, with faces he could almost name.

  Cardiff read these words: HOPE MEMORIAL LIBRARY.

  And in small letters beneath that: KNOW HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  He climbed the library steps to find Elias Culpepper standing before the great double front doors. Culpepper behaved as if he’d been expecting the younger man, and motioned at him to sit down on the library steps.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  “We?” said Cardiff.

  “The whole town, or most of it,” said Culpepper. “Where have you been?”

  “The graveyard,” said Cardiff.

  “You spend too much time there. Is there a problem?”

  “Not anymore, if you can help me mail something home. Is there a train expected anytime soon?”

  “Should be one passing through sometime today,” said Elias Culpepper. “Doubt it’ll stop. That hasn’t happened in…”

  “Can it be stopped?”

  “Could try flares.”

  “I’ve got a package I want sent, if you can stop it.”

  “I’ll light the flares,” said Culpepper. “Where’s this package going?”

  “Home,” Cardiff said again. “Chicago.”

  He wrote a name and address on a page ripped from his notepad, and handed the piece of paper to Culpepper.

  “Consider it done,” said Culpepper. He rose and said, “Now I think you ought to go inside.”

  Cardiff turned and pushed the great library doors and stepped in.

  He read a sign above the front counter: CARPE DIEM. SEIZE THE DAY. It could have also read: SEIZE A BOOK. FIND A LIFE. BIRTH A METAPHOR.

  His gaze drifted to find a large part of the town’s population seated at two dozen tables, books open, reading, and keeping the SILENCE that other signs suggested.

  As if pulled by a single string, they turned, nodded at Cardiff, and turned back to their books.

  The young woman behind the library front desk was an incredible beauty.

  “My God,” he whispered. “Nef!”

  She raised her hand and pointed, then beckoned for him to follow.

  She walked ahead of him and she might well have had a lantern in her hand to light the dim stacks, for her face was illumination. Wherever she glanced, the darkness failed and a faint light touched the gold lettering along the shelves.

  The first stack was labeled: ALEXANDRIA ONE.

  And the second: ALEXANDRIA TWO.

  And the last: ALEXANDRIA THREE.

  “Don’t say it,” he said, quietly. “Let me. The libraries at Alexandria, five hundred or a thousand years before Christ, had three fires, maybe more, and everything burned.”

  “Yes,” Nef said. “This first stack contains all or most of the books burned in the first fire, an accident.

  “This second stack from the second burning, also an accident, has all the lost books and destroyed texts of that terrible year.

  “And the last, the third, contains all the books from the third conflagration—a burning by mobs, the purposeful destruction of history, art, poetry, and plays in 455 B.C.

  “In 455 B.C.,” she repeated quietly.

  “My God,” he said, “how were they all saved, how did they get here?”

  “We brought them.”

  “How?!”

  “We are tomb robbers.” Nef ran her finger along the stacks. “For the profit of the mind, the extension of the soul, whatever the soul is. We can only try to describe the mystery. Long before Schliemann, who found not one but twenty Troys, our ancestors played finders-keepers with the grandest library in time, one that would never burn, would live forever and allow those who entered to touch and scan, a chance to run after an extra piece of existence. This building is absolute proof against fire. In one form or another, it has traveled from Moses, Caesar, Christ, and will continue on toward the new Apollo and the Moon that the rocket chariot will reach.”

  “But still,” he said. “Those libraries were ruined. Are these duplicates of duplicates? The lost are found, but how?”

  Nef laughed quietly. “It was a hard task. Down through the centuries, a book here or there, a play one place, a poem another. A huge jigsaw, fitted in pieces.”

  She moved on in the comfortable twilight spilling through the library’s tall windows, brushing her fingers over the names and titles.

  “Remember when Hemingway’s wife left his novel manuscript on a train, lost forever?”

  “Did he divorce or kill her?”

  “The marriage survived for a while. But that manuscript is here.”

  He looked at the worn typewriter box labeled: FOOTHILLS; KILIMANJARO.

  “Have you read it?”

  “We’re afraid to. If it is as fine as some of his work, it would break our hearts because it must remain lost. If it’s bad, we might feel worse. Perhaps Papa knew it was best for it to remain lost. He wrote another Kilimanjaro, with Snows instead.”

  “How in hell did you find it?”

  “The week it was lost we advertised. Which is more than Papa did. We sent him a copy. He never replied, and the Snows was published a year later.”

  Again she moved to touch more volumes.

  “Edgar Allan Poe’s final poem, rejected. Herman Melville’s last tale, unseen.”

  “How?”

  “We visited their deathbeds in their last hours. The dying sometimes speak in tongues. If you know the language of deliriums you can transcribe their strange sad truths. We tend them like special guardians late at night, and summon a last vital spark and listen closely and keep their words. Why? Since we are the passengers of time, we thought it only proper to save what might be saved on our passage to eternity, to preserve what might be lost if neglected, and add some small bit of our far-traveling and long life. We have guarded not only Troy and its ruins and sifted the Egyptian sands for wise stones to put beneath our tongues to clear our speech, but we have, like cats, inhaled the breaths of mortals, siphoned and published their whispers. Since we have been gifted with long lives, the least we can do is pass that gift on in inanimate objects—novels, poems, plays—books that rouse to life when scanned by a living eye. You must never receive a gift, ever, without returning the gift twice over. From Jesus of Nazareth to noon tomorrow, our baggage is the library and its silent speech. Each book is Lazarus, yes? And you the reader, by opening the covers, bid Lazarus to come forth. And he lives again, it lives again, the dead words warmed by your glance.”

  “I never thought…,” Cardiff said.

  “Think.” She smiled. “Now,” she said, “I believe it’s time for a picnic, to celebrate we don’t know what. But celebrate we must.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The picnic was spread waiting on the back lawn of the EGYPTIAN VIEW ARMS.

  “Speech!” someone called.

  “I don’t know how to begin,” Cardiff said.

  “At the beginning!” There was a gentle laughter.

  Cardiff took a deep breath and plunged in.

  “As you may know, the State Department of Highways has been measuring string from Phoenix east and north and from Gallup north and west. The exact measurements of a new freeway will touch latitude 89 eighty miles west of longitude 40.”

&
nbsp; Someone on the far side of the picnic let his sandwich fall and cried, “My God, that’s us!”

  “No!” someone else cried, and a dozen others whispered, “No!”

  “That’s not possible,” someone said.

  “Anything,” said Cardiff, quietly, “in government, is possible.”

  “They can’t do that,” one of the ladies cried.

  “But they can. No freeway in any part of your state has ever been put on the ballot. The highway men, God listen to that, highway men, are their own conscience.”

  “And you traveled here to warn us?” said Elias Culpepper.

  Cardiff blushed. “No.”

  “You were going to keep it secret!?”

  “I wanted to see your town. I planned nothing. I assumed you all knew.”

  “We know nothing,” said Elias Culpepper. “God almighty. You might as well say Vesuvius is threatening to erupt at our city limits!”

  “I must admit,” said Cardiff, “that when I saw your faces, had breakfast, lunch, and dinner with you, I knew I couldn’t leave and not tell you.”

  “Tell us again,” said Elias Culpepper.

  Cardiff looked at Nef, who gave him the merest nod.

  “The State Highway Commission…”

  Lightning struck. Earthquakes shook. A comet hit the Earth. Cats leaped off roofs. Dogs bit their tails and died.

  And the picnic ground, the sweet grass, was empty.

  Sweet Jesus, thought Cardiff, have I done this?

  “Fool, idiot, stupid dumb idiot fool,” he muttered.

  He opened his eyes and saw Nef standing on a rise of green lawn calling over to him. “Come into the shade. You’ll die of sunstroke.”

  And he went over into the shade.

  CHAPTER 26

  My God, Cardiff thought, even the sunflowers have turned away. He could not see their faces, but he was certain they fixed him with a fiery stare.

  “I’m empty,” he said at last. “I’ve told all my secrets. Now, Nef, you must give me yours.”

  “Well,” she said, and began to take sandwiches out of a hamper, to cut bread and butter it and offer it to him as she spoke.

  “Everyone in this town was once somewhere else,” she said. “We came together one by one. Long, long ago, we knocked elbows in Rome or Paris or Athens or Dallas or Portland until, very late in time, we found out that there was a place where we might collect. Sanctuary, Arizona, was one of the names, but that was foolish. I imagine Summerton’s just as foolish, but it fits. It has to do with flowers and survival. We all grew up in Madrid or Dublin or Milwaukee, some in France or Italy. In the very beginning, a long time ago, there were some children, but as time passed the children got fewer. It had nothing to do with wine or flowers, nothing to do with the environment or the families, even though it seems to have been genetic. I guess you’d call us ‘sports.’ That’s a scientific term for something that can’t be explained. The Darwinians said the process was all jumps, hops, genetic leaps, with no links between. Suddenly, members of a family whose ancestors had lived to seventy years were living to ninety, a hundred. Others, even longer. But the peculiar thing, of course, was that there were those of us—young men and women—who did not much change at all, and then simply did not change. While all our friends moved on to sickness and old age, we strange ones stayed behind. It was one long picnic spread over the entire North American continent and Europe. And we, the lonely ones, were the exceptions to the rule of ‘Grow up, grow old, and certainly die.’ For a while, we hardly noticed this peculiar longevity ourselves, except to note that we felt fine and looked good while our friends jumped headlong into the grave. We peculiars lingered in mid-spring with summer always just around the corner, and autumn somewhere far down the road, not even a rumor. Does any of this make sense?”

  Cardiff nodded, fascinated with what she was saying, the flow and beauty of her telling making it, somehow, believable.

  “Most of our meetings were by chance,” she went on. “A trip on a ferry boat, a voyage on a ship, a descent in an elevator, a collision going through doors, a place at a table, a passing glance on a seventeenth-century street, but somewhere in time we gave pause and asked where we came from, what we were doing, and how old were we, and saw the lie in each other’s faces.

  “‘I am twenty, I am twenty-two, I am thirty,’ we said, at tea, or drinking in a bar, but the truth was not there. We had been born during Victoria’s reign, or when Lincoln was shot, or as Henry VIII laid his queen’s head on the chopping block. It took many years for the truth to rise, one here, two there, until our real births were revealed. ‘Good Lord,’ we cried. ‘We are Time’s twins. You ninety-five, yes, and I one hundred and ten.’ And we searched each other’s face, as in mirrors, and saw soft-showered April and sun-filled May instead of raining October, dark November, and Christmas with no lights. We wept. And when the weeping stopped we compared long-lost childhoods and the bullies who had tormented us for being different, and not knowing why. Friends abandoned us when suddenly the friends were fifty and sixty and we still looked fresh out of high school. Marriages failed and the grave shut out all the rest. And we were left stranded in a great mausoleum that echoed with the laughter of school chums now incinerated or, if still alive, wielding crutches and piloting wheelchairs. Soon we found, by instinct, that it was best to keep moving, on to new towns to take up new lives, old souls in new bodies, lying about our past. We were not happy, then. We became happy. How? The rumor, after centuries, of a new town reached us. The myth held that a man on horseback crossing a great desert got off in emptiness, built a hut, and waited for others to arrive. He placed an ad in a magazine that extolled the young weather, fresh times, new circumstances. It contained multitudinous hints that might be unraveled by similar freaks in Oswego and Peoria, fellow lonely ones who watched the fall of friends all around and heard the earth thunder on too many coffin lids. They felt their limbs, still as limber as on graduation day, and wondered about their desolation. They read and reread the strange travel ad that promised a haven, a new place, as yet unnamed. A town that was small, but growing. Only twenty-one-year-olds need apply. Well, there, you see? Hints! No direct pronouncements. But lonelies everywhere, from Deadfall, Dakota, and Wintershade, England, felt the hair rise on their necks and packed their bags. Maybe, they thought, it would be worth the time and travel. And what was once a roadside bypass became a post office, a Pony Express standby, and then a jerkwater train stop, where strangers scanned each other’s faces and found yesterday’s sunrise instead of tomorrow’s midnight. They were driven by more than birthright. They were driven by one final terrible fact: at last, none could give or produce children.”

  “It came to that?” whispered Cardiff.

  “Yes, it finally happened. We lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none. So, year by year, strangers got off the train, one way, or rode up on horseback or walked the long walk and never looked back. By 1900 Summerton had its crops planted, its gardens full, its gazebos built, its social life established, and world communications running out but not in. No radios, no TVs, no newspapers, well, almost none. There was and is the Culpepper Summerton News, with not much news, for no one was born and almost no one died. Occasionally someone fell down a flight of stairs, or off a ladder, but we tend to mend fast. No cars, so no fatalities. But we were all busy, busy raising food, socializing, writing, dreaming. And then, of course, there were romances. For while we could not propagate, we could still enact passion. A perfect population, assembled from the four corners of creation, a jigsaw beautifully fitted with no rough edges. Everyone had a job, some wrote poems, others novels, all got published in far places, fantasies mainly of cities beyond belief, whose readers thought the tales mere figments of wild imagination, but we were living it. So there it is. Here it is. Perfect weather, perfect town, perfect lives. Long lives. Most of us shook hands with Lincoln, attended the obsequies at Grant’s tomb, and now…”

  “Now?” said C
ardiff.

  “You are a messenger of doom, come to destroy it all.”

  “I am not the message, Nef. I do deliver it, yes.”

  “I know,” said Nef, quietly. “But how I wish you could go off and come back with some better truth.”

  “If I could, so help me God, Nef, I’d gladly bring it to you.”

  “Go,” she said. “Please. Find it and bring it here.”

  But he could only sit on the evergreen grass of eternal summer and let the tears run down his cheeks.

  CHAPTER 27

  “And now,” said Nef.

  “Now?” said Cardiff.

  “I must prove that I do not wish to kill the bearer of bad news. Come.”

  And she led him across the lawn where the picnic blankets still lay as after a storm, tossed and half-furled, and some few dogs had arrived with the army ants while several cats waited for the beasts to leave, and Nef walked among them and opened the front door of the Egyptian View Arms and, ducking his head, blushing, Cardiff stepped in swiftly, but she was already at the stairs and halfway up before he touched the first riser, and then they were in her tower room and he looked and saw that her vast bed had been stripped and the windows thrown open wide with their wind-tossed curtains and the town clock was striking four in the afternoon as Nef lifted her arms and a great soft bloom of sheet rose in a summer cloud over the bed and he seized his half and with her gentled it down in a field of white over the bed to cover its face. And they stood back and watched the late afternoon exhale and fill the lace and blow the curtains inward toward the bed, like a fall of never-arriving snow, and there was a glass of lemonade on either bedside table, and his questioning look caused her to laugh and shake her head. Only lemonade, nothing more.

  “Because,” she said, “I will inebriate you.”

  It was a long fall to the bed. She arrived an eternity later. He sank under white sheets of snow and recalled his whole life, in a whiplash of memory.

  “Say it,” he heard her cry, a long way off.