Read The Keepers of the Library Online
Authors: Glenn Cooper
She inched closer and kissed him on the lips.
After half a minute he pulled back, and said, “You know, I think I’m going to have to decline your awfully kind invitation.”
“Your wife?”
He nodded. “I’ve made promises. To her. To myself.”
“Yeah, but don’t you find me attractive?” She slid a hand over his crotch.
His head was swimming. “I certainly do.”
“The world’s going to end. Shouldn’t we just enjoy ourselves?”
He admired her legs. “That’s a commonly held point of view. But …” He took a deep breath and when he exhaled, something happened.
He felt like the air wasn’t expelling, like it was building up, pressurizing his chest. He tried to stand up, but he couldn’t.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I …”
The pressure overwhelmed him, and he struggled for air. There was a sound in his ears like a train passing very close. He’d been in some tight jams in his life, he’d been in firefights with men intent on killing him, but he’d never felt the kind of panic washing over him now.
He was dimly aware of Meagan’s fingers on his carotid, and a faraway voice saying, “My God, I think you’re having a heart attack.”
Through the salon window the sky was still blue but darkening. He didn’t want to stop looking at it but he lost sight when he slumped onto the carpet.
I’m BTH, he thought. I’m not supposed to die today.
An Essay by Phillip Piper
As of today there are 394 days left until the “Big Day,” the “Horizon,” the “Last Day of School” as a lot of kids are calling it. Everyone is wondering what will happen, and people are going different shades of mental. Are we going to be blasted out of existence by an asteroid the size of Rhode Island? Swallowed up by a black hole? Fried by gamma rays from the sun? Or is February 10 going to be just another day?
I’m no different from everyone else who’s been thinking about mankind’s fate except for one thing. My father is Will Piper, the man who told the world about February 9, 2027
.
This essay is a little hard for me to finish because my dad is really sick. He had a heart attack, and he’s in the hospital. I know he’s BTH, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be all right. No one knows if he’s going to
walk or talk again or be able to respond to us. He’s on a breathing machine in intensive care. They’re giving him a new medicine, and we’ll see if it helps. But I know if he was conscious, he’d be all over me to turn this essay in by the deadline, so that is what I’m going to do
.
I wasn’t even born when all this went down in 2009 and 2010. I found out about it and the part my dad played when I was twelve, I think. He wrote a book which I admit I never read. I saw the movie
, Library of the Dead,
instead. It was a pretty cool movie, but it was weird watching actors play your father and your mother. My mother always said she wished she was as pretty as the actress who played her, but my father was never interested in speaking about it. He said the movie was silly and filled with inaccuracies and that he wished he’d never let it be made. The truth is, he’s never been someone who wanted to be in the public eye
.
In 2009, my dad was an FBI agent in New York. He got involved in a case involving someone called the Doomsday Killer. A man in Nevada was sending postcards to people in New York City announcing the date they were going to die, and all nine of them wound up dying on the exact date. No one could figure out what was happening since there was nothing to link the victims, and all of the “murders” were completely different. My dad was the lead agent on the case and my mother—she wasn’t my mother at that point—was a junior agent. They were a team, and I guess you could say they still are
.
Nothing was making any sense and they kept hitting dead ends. But my mom and dad were really smart and figured out that the postcards were coming from a computer geek named Mark Shackleton who worked at a top secret government lab at Area 51 in Nevada. Not only that but my dad actually knew the guy from when they were freshmen roommates in college. Back in 2009, everyone thought that Area 51 was some kind of secret weapons facility or maybe a place where UFOs were studied. It turns out the real truth was even more amazing
.
Area 51, as everyone knows now, is the storage vault for the famous Library of Vectis. In the year 777, on the seventh day of the seventh month a baby who was the seventh son of a seventh son was born in England in a place called Vectis (it’s now called the Isle of Wight). The boy grew up to be some kind of a savant who had a preoccupation of writing down lists of birth dates and death dates for people from all over the world, people he never met. Some monks in an abbey took him in and realized that what he was able to do was miraculous. They created a secret order to take care of him and recruited women to give birth to his children and his children’s children. Over the centuries, thousands of these savants produced a giant underground library of books, over seven hundred thousand of them, with the birth and death dates of everyone who was going to live through February 9, 2027
.
No one knows how they did it. Some people say they must have had some kind
of psychic connection to the universe or to God. I guess we’ll never know. But in the thirteenth century, something happened. All of a sudden, when they were working on their parchment pages for February 9, 2027, they stopped writing names. Instead, they wrote
Finis Dierum
which is Latin for End of Days. Then all of them killed themselves
.
After that, the Library was sealed up by the monks, and no one knew it existed until British archaeologists found it 1947. Winston Churchill gave the Library to the Americans who realized it could be very valuable. The US government set up Area 51 to hold the Library and spent a lot of time and money figuring out how to mine the data for political and military purposes. For example, if you knew that fifty thousand people with Pakistani names were going to die on one particular day you could do some serious planning on an American response to the crisis. For fifty years, no one outside the government knew about the Library until my dad found out
.
Mark Shackleton had his own ideas what to do with the data. He wanted to make money off it and invented the Doomsday Killer as part of his scheme. My dad discovered the truth about the existence of the Library and shut Shackleton down. He got a hold of a copy of the database for all the births and deaths of everyone in the United States through 2027. If your death wasn’t recorded in the database, you were considered BTH, Beyond the Horizon. He checked out himself, my mom and me, and some of our
relatives. We were all BTH. He hid the database in Los Angeles as an insurance policy
.
For a while, my dad kept the secret of Area 51 because of an agreement he made with the government. I don’t think he was too happy about that, but he wanted to protect me and the rest of the family—I was born in 2010—and besides, he always believed that if people knew the dates of their deaths, that could seriously mess with their minds and create a bad situation. He and I never talked about it, but in the movie his character really agonizes over the decision to keep quiet. I think that part was accurate. But when I was only an infant, he was contacted by some men who had retired from Area 51. They were part of a group called the 2027 Club, who were trying to figure out what was going to happen in 2027
.
One of the books from the Library of Vectis dated 1527 wound up at an auction house in London. They wanted my dad to help them get ahold of the book. It was the only book missing from the Area 51 Library, and they thought it might hold some answers about 2027. They were right. There was a sonnet hidden inside written by a very young William Shakespeare. My dad went to England, and in an old house called Cantwell Hall, he followed clues in the sonnet and found out about the End of Days stuff and the savants committing suicide. He also found out that knowledge of the Library of Vectis had an influence on some famous historical figures like John Calvin and Nostradamus, not to mention William Shakespeare
.
There were security people at Area 51, government agents who were called the watchers, who were sent to stop my dad, and they got close. They tried to poison our whole family with carbon monoxide. I almost died, but they killed both my grandparents, whom I never got to know. My mom and I went into hiding, and my dad went to Los Angeles to recover the hidden database. He got shot by the watchers and escaped to the home of the head of the 2027 Club in Las Vegas. He was captured there, but my mom saved him, which was pretty cool
.
My dad gave the database to my half sister’s husband, Greg, who was a journalist with
The Washington Post
because after thinking about it for a long time, he decided that people had a right to know what the government knew. Greg published a sensational story about the existence of the Library, and my dad became a reluctant celebrity. My mom kept working at the FBI. She’s still there
.
The database never got published. The government sued the newspaper and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. So people never got to know about their personal dates but everyone knows about February 9, 2027
.
It’s funny, but I never spent much time thinking about February 9, I mean really thinking about it, until my dad got sick. No one close to me since I’ve been old enough to understand has ever died or even gotten seriously sick. It took my dad’s heart attack to change that. Now I realize how fragile life is
and how, just like that, it can be taken away. Now I’m scared about what will happen to him, and I’ll admit it, I’m scared about what will happen to me, my mom, my friends, and everyone on the planet
.
I don’t have any answers. I may be Will Piper’s son but I’m as clueless as the next guy on what’s going to happen to us. But here’s what I think. I think that we should try to make each of these 394 days count. We should try to be extra nice to each another, try not to be jerks, try to smile a lot, and try not to complain and moan about everything or be superdepressed. We ought to live each day to its fullest and enjoy ourselves
.
The way I figure it, we can either have 394 awful days ahead or 394 terrific ones. I’m going to go for terrific ones
.
I think that’s what Will Piper would choose too
.
T
hrough the impenetrable fog of illness he’d
heard voices, some comforting and recognizable, others not. The foreign voices spoke hard, strange words: troponin, CK, left anterior descending, MCEs, cine MRIs, wedge pressures, dopamine, O
2
sats, vent settings, cardiomyoplasty.
Time was unfathomable. Later, he would liken his perceptions to Dali’s melting clocks. A second. A day. A month—they were all the same. He was mostly aware of the discomfort of a breathing tube in his nose, and it became his nemesis.
When he was a young FBI agent, a star player in the twisted world of serial killers, he would pursue his target with an all-consuming passion and aggression, invariably to the detriment of whoever shared his bed and his life at the time. Now the tube was his enemy. He wasn’t sure why it was crammed down his throat. Rational thoughts about it drifted away because of the sedatives given to prevent him from yanking it out. And just in case he lightened up between doses, his wrists were nightmarishly bound to the railings of his bed.
One day the fog lifted and he became gradually
aware of his surroundings. He was propped in a half-sitting position. His throat burned but he could no longer feel the stiff plastic in his nostril. He reached up, expecting the tug of restraints, but his hand moved unrestricted to his face, where he felt for the absent tube.
He looked to one side then the other. He was in a glass-walled room with muted lights. There were softly beeping machines. There was an intravenous line in his hand. He reached down to address an irritation in his crotch. There was a catheter. He gave it a tug and wished he hadn’t. When he yelped, his body snapped forward, and his pillow slipped away.
A pretty nurse came in. “Hi, Mr. Piper. I’m Jean. Welcome to the land of the living.”
She leaned over and repositioned his pillow. Her breasts came close to his face. The land of the living is good, he thought. But he demanded a little more specificity. “Where am I?”
“Miami. This is the Miami Heart Institute.”
“I hate Miami.”
She laughed.
“My throat’s killing me,” he croaked.
“I’ll get you some lozenges. We only pulled the breathing tube at 2
A.M.
It’s 6
A.M.
now.”
He pointed down. “Can you pull this thing out?”
“It’s coming out real soon.”
A larger question came to his mind. “What happened to me?”
“You had a heart attack. A big one.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Five weeks. You were a week in Panama City before they transferred you here.”
“Jesus.”
A phlebotomist came in to draw blood. She smiled at him then poked his sore, black-and-blue arm.
The nurse hung a bag of medicine, then said, “Your wife’s been notified you’re off the ventilator. She should be here soon. Dr. Rosenberg will be here for rounds in an hour. She’ll fill you in on everything that’s happened.”
“She?”
“Yes, she.”
“I’m surrounded by women.” It didn’t come out as a complaint.
Dr. Rosenberg had fiercely pulled-back hair. She was all business, not the kind of woman Will instinctively took to, but in this case he had a lot of time for her.
He’d had a whopper, she explained. A ruptured plaque high up in his left anterior descending artery which, because of poor collateral flow in other vessels had left a fair bit of his left ventricle, the main pump muscle, weak and useless. His heart failure was severe.
In the old days his options would have been limited to a mechanical pump, a piece of machinery that would have made him ambulatory though permanently tethered to a battery pack, or a heart transplant, with all the attendant risks.
“Screw the old days,” Will rasped, painfully sucking apple juice through a straw. “What did I get?”
“Fortunately, there’s been a revolution in the therapy of post MI pump failure,” the doctor said. “We gave you MyoStem, a new FDA-approved preparation of cardiac-muscle stem cells. I injected them directly into the damaged areas through a catheter. They’ve taken beautifully. I liken it to reseeding a barren lawn. You still have a few bare patches, but it should fill in completely.”
“Will I get back to normal?”
“Are you a marathon runner?”
“Not in this life.”
“Then you should get back to normal.”
“Sex?”
“Patients usually ask,” she said amused, “but not in the first minute. Sexual activity shouldn’t be a problem.”
If I can fish, and I can screw, then I’ll be okay, he thought.
At least until February 9.
W
hen Nancy arrived he was sitting upright with his hair combed and teeth brushed. He instinctively grinned with the same sheepish smile he always sported every time he’d messed up with her.
She just stood there at the foot of his bed, crying.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said.
She looked so small and thin. She’s lost weight, he thought. Poor kid. The things I put her through.
When she was younger, stress had made her put on weight. The opposite was true now. In the early years of their marriage, he’d dropped little remarks which had sent her into mental tailspins, then a diet. But when she reached her midthirties and seriously started climbing the FBI org chart something shifted. Maybe it was the pressure of management jobs or the burden of being married to the likes of him or her excessive early-morning gym routines, but her body had turned lean and firm. He wasn’t complaining.
Almost two decades separated them. She was still a fairly young woman; he was entering his self-admitted crotchety years. He considered himself all too predictable, but to his mind, she was as changeable as the prevailing winds. Some days she came off as tougher than nails, demanding, and hugely self-assured; other days she seemed diminutive, needy,
and doubt-ridden. Some days, she complained to him bitterly about being up in Washington essentially leading the life of a single parent and making him feel like a selfish rat for not joining her. Other days, she said she’d had it with the bureaucracy in DC and just wanted to pack it in and move to Florida.
Now this.
“I didn’t …” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Come here,” he said.
The bed rail was down. She leaned over and kissed him, wetting his cheek with her tears. He took his free arm, the one that didn’t have an IV stuck in it, and enveloped her. He tried to squeeze but he was as weak as a kitten.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She straightened herself. “Sorry for what?”
“For being a pain in the ass.”
“Since when did you start apologizing for that?”
“I guess it’s a new thing.”
“It won’t last. Jesus, Will, we thought we were losing you.”
“I’m BTH, remember?”
“You know what I mean. Like Mark Shackleton.”
Mark Shackleton, he of postcard fame, who’d operated with a sense of impunity because he’d known he was BTH. Shot in the head by Area 51 agents fifteen years ago, he was still alive, a vegetable in a coma.
“I put you through a lot. I’m glad I didn’t pull a Shackleton. I saw Doctor Stick-up-her-ass this morning. She said I got some new treatment.”
“Dr. Rosenberg. Unless a woman’s a bimbo, you think she’s officious.”
He smiled. “See, we’re arguing again. Just like old times.”
“I missed you.”
He nodded and asked in rapid fire, “How’ve
you been holding up? Where’ve you been staying? Where’s Phillip?”
“I’ve been trying to hold things together as best I could, especially for Phillip. He’s back at school, staying at Andy’s house. Andy’s parents have been great. I’ve been in a hotel near the hospital.”
“On leave.”
“That was the plan, but it got derailed. We got busy. I’ve been coordinating things from down here, using the Miami office. I called Phillip this morning to tell him the news. He’s arriving this afternoon, with Laura and Greg.”
“Is Laura okay?”
“She’s been down here a couple of times. She’s been worried sick.”
“And Nick?”
“He’s fine too. He’s away at school.” Nancy set her jaw, a look he knew all too well.
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t want to bring up any unpleasantness at a time like this, but before Phillip arrives I wanted you to know he’s had a confusing time of it.”
Will waited for more.
“It’s the circumstances of your heart attack. The paramedics found you with a couple of young women inside Ben Patterson’s boat.”
He frantically searched his memory, came up blank and assumed the worst. “Christ. I’m …”
“Please don’t apologize to me, Will. I’m not looking for that. I just want you to be sensitive to Phillip’s feelings. He’s been struggling with a lot of emotions.”
Will teared up and summoned her for another hug. “I swear to you, Nancy, for as long as we have on this earth, I’m going to be a better man.”
T
hey bought him a small cake with a single battery-operated candle—real ones were verboten in the oxygen-rich intensive care unit.
The nurses dolled Will up in his own, now loosely fitting clothes, and wheeled him in a lounge chair so he could receive visitors more comfortably. He remained attached to intravenous lines and monitors and required oxygen prongs in his nostrils but to the surprise of everyone who had borne witness to his coma, he looked very much himself.
Though his voice was hoarse, his lips were cracked and coated in Vaseline and his complexion was sallow, his eyes retained their old sparkle, and the corners of his mouth sported his trademark self-deprecatory crinkle.
The powers that be limited the visit to twenty minutes. Nancy, Greg, and Laura hovered over him in an awkward homecoming while Phillip lurked at the doorway.
Laura had never outgrown her free-spirited youth. She was still a postmillennial flower child who dressed in long cotton frocks, her flowing hair streaked with gray. She was a novelist with a steady following of like-minded women who took to her stories of quirky love, abandonment, and randomness. It hadn’t hurt her career that she was Will Piper’s daughter; some of her fans combed through her books as if they were sacred texts looking for hidden truths about 2027, a subject she had long embraced.
Her son Nick was an only child, a few months older than Phillip. It had always been a source of family tension that Will’s son and grandson were the same age. Laura had made no secret of her opinion that Nick had drawn the short straw and had been deprived of the unfettered attention of his grandfather. Nevertheless,
Will genuinely liked the kid, always had, and on Nick’s infrequent visits to Florida, found him a better fishing buddy than his son. But ever since he went off to boarding school in New Hampshire, they rarely saw each other.
His son-in-law, Greg Davis, was his usual saturnine self and during the visit, the two men exchanged a single obligatory bear hug and few words. The animus was largely one-sided—Will didn’t particularly love the guy but he certainly never disliked him. If Greg was good enough for his daughter, he was good enough for him.
The difficulties lay with Greg’s chronic disappointment and his belief that his career might have blossomed if Will had only been more helpful.
Will had always rejected the notion out of hand. When Greg was a junior staff reporter at
The Washington Post
back in 2011, hadn’t he handed the kid the scoop of the century? Hadn’t Greg become instantly famous as the journalist who first reported the existence of the Library of Vectis and Area 51? Hadn’t he landed a Pulitzer Prize? Was it Will’s fault that Greg’s plans to write the book of books about the Library got shot down by a Supreme Court ruling that compelled the
Post
to cease and desist and return Will’s pirated copy of the US database to the government? Was it his fault that Greg was forced to adhere to the government’s nondisclosure agreement? Was it Will’s fault that publishers fell all over themselves to get their mitts on
his
book about the Doomsday case?
Greg had left the
Post
after the Supreme Court verdict and ridden his journalistic notoriety for a while with jobs at the
New York Times
, then a succession of magazines and entrepreneurial publishing ventures, none of which had amounted to much. His
latest project was a portfolio of NetZines aimed at immigrant communities living in America, and he and Laura lived in Brooklyn now, supported disproportionally by her novels.
Will found the cake too challenging to swallow and just ate the icing. “Best thing I ever tasted,” he said.
“When you get home, I’ll give you cake every day,” Nancy said.
“Did they tell you how long they were keeping you in, Dad?” Laura asked.
“No, but the doctor said that when the MyoStem takes as well as it has for me, the recovery is fast. I’d leave today if it were up to me.”
“It’s not up to you,” Nancy said sternly.
He changed the subject. “Been able to write?” he asked his daughter.
“I’ve been a little distracted.”
“How about you, Greg. How’s your business getting on?”
Greg had carried his angular body and sharp-featured face into middle age, but his curly mass of hair had wilted away. The dome of his head was now bony and geographic. The question seemed to animate him. “We’ve been busy, crazy busy, because of Nancy’s thing. Extra editions, you name it.”
Nancy looked at Greg sharply.
“What thing?” Will asked.
“Nothing,” she said, shooting Greg a dirty look. “I’ll tell you later. It’s nothing we need to talk about right now.”
Ordinarily, Will wouldn’t let a comment like that go—he’d dog it until he had an answer, but he was too weak and foggy to pursue it. He let the bone drop from his teeth.
He called his son over. The boy took a few paces into the room. “I hear you’re staying with Andy.”
Phillip nodded.
“How’s that working out? Getting any work done, or are the two of you just farting around?”
“It’s okay,” the boy answered sullenly.
Will sniffed back some tears. “I’m sorry I put you through all of this.”
“It’s okay. Can I go downstairs so I can use my NetPen?”
“Don’t you want to tell your father about your award?” Nancy asked.