The Bookkeepers

Lying down lazily on her green velvet sofa, Jane placed her tepid coffee on the enormous rug beside her and returned to her ebook. Wind chimes tinkled in her blissfully overgrown garden outside, the lightest misting of rain tickled the windows. For the last 20 years, Jane had planned her retirement to a tee. Some of her friends had planned round the world e-tours, others were e-touring planets Jane had never even heard of. Her plans were simpler. Late nights, late mornings, and books. The rest of her days would be the same, save some obligatory human interactions. Sleep, read, sleep, read. Heaven.

She hadn’t read Of Mice and Men since she was a young teenager and had amazed herself that she remembered so many of the passages, the words, and the feelings. Not just of the book but of the person she was back when she had first read it. 

Like music, books could make her a time traveller. Returning her, for a split second, to the feeling of being that young lady. The smell of overly sweet body spray, the scratchiness of school tights, the inner tumult of hormonal upheaval, the bone-deep serenity of still having parents. As she remembered the words she read, she spent a millisecond back in her family home. When she tried to capture the moment, elongate it, prolong the beautiful, painful nostalgia of being who she was then, it would simply evaporate. But when she allowed herself to just read, just keep going, the flightiest of memories would embrace her entire body and ooze through her soul. 

However, towards the end of the book, the time-travelling stopped. The passages became not quite unfamiliar, but more distant. As she rounded the ending, when George and Lennie laid the first stone for their new home on the land they had bought together, she remembered something more recent. 

The week before, upon completing 1984, she couldn’t figure out what was out of place about Winston and Julia escaping the Big Brother society together and ending up rearing sheep on an Irish Island. The week before that, Romeo and Juliet uniting their families with news of their new baby. And the week before that, when Daisy Buchanan falls deeply in love with Jay Gatsby. She had read all these stories in her youth. Some more than once. But their endings somehow felt at odds with her memories of them. Their endings seemed to have been born anew. They were satisfying, for sure, and truly hopeful. But they were somehow empty, not just of her recollections, but of depth: of feeling. 

She knew why, of course. The Bookkeepers. Decades ago, there was a threat of war, or at least very real terrorism, when the book burnings began. The emotion that was incited on both sides was incendiary and people got caught up in a moral and philosophical warfare. 

For some, literature was what it was and there was undeniable value in its unedited storytelling: a time capsule of sorts, capturing not just the events of the days they explored, but the attitudes of society and indeed the writers. For others, the content and views were deeply troubling, offensive and unsettling: there was no place in our society for saddening and unenlightened opinions that could cause upset. 

Jane had taken neither side all those decades ago, too busy with work to really engage, and quietly confident that the right decisions would be made on her behalf. The Bookkeepers, ultimately, made the decisions. But should she have paid more notice? By allowing the books of her youth to be remastered, had she lost not just the books themselves, but the entryway to the person she was when she first read them. And, more worryingly, was this whole retirement really just a plan to relive her life through the books she had once read? Because considering it had been years, decades even, since her life had allowed her to pick up a book, there possibly wasn’t much to relive. 

Just as she started to piece these disconcerting thoughts together, her watch gently buzzed and spoke. 

“You seem to be suffering with a little emotional turbulence,” the phantom therapist stated. “Would you like to talk about it?”

“No. Not right now.”

“Sure. I’m here if you need me. Perhaps we could take a walk?”

“Actually, a walk would be good,” Jane replied with an idea fizzing in her brain. “Where’s the nearest library?”

“The nearest library is 3,757 miles away. The New York City Library,” the voice droned. 

“Right. Well, where’s the nearest place to view real books?”

“The Literature Museum of Irving has a number of interesting displays that allow visitors to learn more about printed books. It is 4.27 miles away.”

“Perfect, set a course.”

It took Jane three and half hours to make the short journey. Her ageing body had no speed left in it, though her stamina remained unfailing. When she got to the small museum, located in a building that seemed to have been squeezed between two gyms, she was met by two armed guards. 

“Just visiting,” Jane said giddily, her fear of authority sneaking up on her like a child. 

They did not respond, noting her as unlikely to be a troublemaker. The interior of the building felt larger than it looked from the outside and the vast majority of it was dedicated to various revolutionaries who had fought, sometimes even literally, to have the classics preserved. She strolled past the memorials of these forward thinking people who had made it their life’s work to insure that politics didn’t destroy great works of literature that, though often deeply problematic, were hugely influential on the books and more importantly games, movies and e-experiences that people spend so much of their time enjoying these days. 

A stern man with an eye patch stood behind a counter towards the end of the cavernous room, swiping his e-book disdainfully. 

“Hi. Em, do you have any printed books?” Jane asked nervously. 

“What are you looking for?” he grumbled, barely breaking his gaze from the screen. 

“Of Mice and Men.”

The man pointed his dagger eye at her and raised an eyebrow.

“We have the ebook. Scan here. You don’t need to come in here for this, you know?”

“No, the actual book. I want to hold it.”

“No, there’s none left.”

“None? What do you mean?”

“There’s none left. A few in New York maybe. Or some collectors might have managed to hang on to them. But we don’t have any. Why do you want it anyway?” There was not an ounce of kindness at the beginning of his speech, and by the end he seemed to be seething for Jane's very existence. 

“Do you have a version of the original?”

“No.” The man started to peer nervously at the doorway.

“Where can I get a copy?” Jane asked, completely unaware of the inappropriateness of such a question.

“Are you here to cause trouble, is that it?”, the man said, his voice lowered to a growl. “Are you one of those protesters? Huh? Well even if we did have a file of the original, you can’t burn files, can you? And anyway, we don’t”.

“Protester? Burn? Oh god, no. Not at all. I didn’t get involved in any of that stuff. I didn’t even take sides. I thought each side had a reasonable enough point to be honest,” Jane blustered, her face flushing with shame. Her watch started to vibrate but she discreetly pushed it to shush.

“This is just a museum, okay? Whether you like it or not, those books existed and they don’t anymore. They were part of the world. An important part once. And you people got your way anyway, didn’t you? You’ve got your sanitised versions with no violence and la-di-da happy endings all round. You got your bloody AI generated revisions and ruined it for the rest of us,” he stammered, tears beading in his eye. Jane wondered if his watch was buzzing too.

“I’m so sorry. I think you misunderstood me. I’m sorry. I’ll just. I’ll go.”

And she left, fled even if her sluggish pace could be described as a flee. She hailed a carriage and was home in minutes, sweating and mortified. She held her hands to her mouth. Her watch was quaking on her behalf and she unmuted it to allow it to spill out its concern.

“Jane, you seem to be experiencing intense emotional disturbance. Perhaps a nap could help things,” it pleaded gently. 

“No. I want another book. Wuthering Heights, I want to read Wuthering Heights.”

“Wonderful choice. Wuthering Heights is awaiting you on your ebook.”

“Tell me the plot.”

“Wuthering Heights is an evocative love story set on the Yorkshire Moors. It tells the story of Heathcliff and Catherine, who fall in love despite their social divides.”

“What happens in the end?”

“Heathcliff and Catherine shun societal norms and marry. Heathcliffe earns his fortune through clever investments and they grow old together in Wuthering Heights.”

“What’s the ending of the original?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“The original book. They don’t end up together in the original, do they?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.”

Jane couldn’t understand why her heart was racing, her palms clenched, a sort of sorrowful rage was overtaking her.

“Was Wuthering Heights edited?”

“In 2078, a number of revolutionaries fought to end the widespread book-burnings and hackings that had persisted for some years. These revolutionaries, known as The Bookkeepers, worked tirelessly to find a solution to the problems these books in their original forms created. Their solution, an artful remastering of many of the classics, allowed these books to be preserved for generations to come.”

“What were the problems they caused?”

“Many of these books caused emotional turbulence that can be detrimental to the human mind.”

Jane knew all this. She was a teenager in 2078, more than 60 years ago now, and remembered the celebrations. At first there were celebrations anyway. A compromise had been reached, literature had been saved. But as time went on, the books weren’t just edited to remove offensive passages, the became edited to include happier endings, to improve the messages, to soften the emotional turmoil they could inflict. These days most of the classics were totally remastered by AI; the promise was that with new technology, old writing could be improved. Wha happened was they were edited into bland, heartless mush. The masters were remastered. Programs had mined the original authors’ works and completely rewritten the books. The same voice, it was claimed, the same writing style, prose, rhetoric, but improved.

And there was another memory she was unlocking. A somewhat shameful one. Her mother belittling The Bookkeepers over the kitchen table. Her mother and father bickering with each other. Words her father had said. Something like, leave the girl out of it for God’s sake. She’s a child. It’s her future whether you like it or not and you can’t change it. 

And then, something else. Something gentle and tender. Lying under a fort made from a sheet between her and her older sister’s bed. Holding books. Real books. Reading them furtively, reading them in her hands, the pages soft and padded. Her mother, smiling, shushing. Their little secret. Reading the book; printed books. Reading the temporary words printed in ink that would some day fade. Or burn. 

Tears ran down Jane’s face. Not shameful, rageful tears. Big fat memory tears, the ones that cleanse, the ones that dislodge feelings and allow them to be held. She removed her watch and walked to a dresser in her kitchen and emptied it of its contents. Then the chest of drawers in the living room. Under the stairs she riffled through boxes and undershoes. Up the stairs, she searched her bedroom, her studio, even the bathroom. Finally, standing on a suitcase for height, she reached up to the attic door and yanked down the opening, a tinny staircase unfurling as she did so. She scaled the stairs unsteadily and rummaged rampagingly through the boxes of memories put on hold. Finally, she found one. A book. A real book. She sniffed the cover, the pages that had been pawed by so many people, and fanned them through her fingers. She didn’t know how much she missed holding a real book until she no longer could.

Black Beauty. Her childhood favourite. The one her mother allowed her to keep like a secret. Buried in clothes she’ll never fit into again and dolls she’ll never play with. Black Beauty. The heartbreaking story of a horse. The book that, although she may not know it fully, taught a young Jane empathy, compassion, and hope. She returned to her green sofa with some effort and lay back. And she read. And as she did so, memories were dislodged.

Memories like butterflies. There, but gone. Real, but intangible. Feelings. Memories of feelings. Her mother’s stoic tenderness and ridged fingernails. Her sister’s contemptuous companionship and the smell of her morning breath. Her best friend’s loyalty and hair bows. The dreadful feeling of Monday mornings and the smell of her pencil case. She was transported, not just into Victorian England, but to her own childhood. Her own mind as a child galloped through her aged brain. 

She finished the book at 4am and slept through the following day. When she rebuckled her watch on Friday morning, it buzzed with algorithmic worries for her wellbeing. She ignored them, had a coffee, put on her comfy shoes, and walked the 4.37 miles. 

Upon entering the museum, she was satisfied to see the one-eyed mad behind his desk. Not glancing up, he asked her what she needed without recognising this was the trouble maker from a few days before.

“I have something I think you might like to see,” Jane muttered, opening her satchel to reveal the spine of the book. 

The man brought his pale hand to his mouth and then attempted to undo this betraying move. 

“Is that real?” he said firmly yet quietly. 

“Yes,” Jane said stoically. “It’s real.”

“Don’t take it out. Not here. Leave it in the bathroom. Collect it next week,” he said under his voice, returning his gaze to his screen after a quick glance at the doorway. 

Jane did as she was told, thrilled by the secretiveness. She walked home the long way, unsure pf what was to become of the book, of it’s recipient, or of her. 

When she arrived home, she returned to the attic and searched for more, but there were none. She lay on the sofa and wondered what she was so busy doing in her working life to have barely noticed the end of literature, never mind to have borne witness to its demise. So busy. She was always so busy. Finally, at the age of 85, she was of retirement age and had little left for her to enjoy. She had missed an entire revolution with her eyes wide shut, yet had banked her entire life on enjoying what that revolution had been destroying. She had assumed that what was decided was for the best, yet allowed her existence to be rinsed of emotion, of depth. She had offered an outstretched wrist when the watches were updated to monitor emotions and thoughts. Yet, now that she had time for emotions and thoughts, there was nothing left to inspire them.

She cried for six days. On the seventh she returned to the museum, hoping against hope that her book would be waiting for her. It was not. 

Instead, there was a different book, on top of which lay a note. “I can give you back Black Beauty whenever you want it. But for now, borrow this and return it for a new one when you’re done. We don’t have many, but we have some. And that’s a lot.”

Under the note was a copy of Of Mice and Men. Stained, dog-eared, Sellotaped. And with an ending that reminded her of her mother’s perfume, and made her weep.