If the gallery had one acknowledged problem, it was the noise. Most of the work spaces opened up to the echo chamber of the central gallery. From the main floor, you could easily overhear the conversation of two people on the fourth floor. On a given day you might hear biology students comparing lab results, research advisers explaining how to modify a search, two young lovers setting up their next date. And always in the background was the tap tap tapping of hundreds of fingers on keyboards.
After a year as a graduate student on campus, I’d found a relatively quiet space at the back of the Rare Books Department, behind the cases used to display simulated manuscripts. Most of the furniture in the building was manufactured with repurposed metal or plastic, but in the Rare Books Department there were four beautiful antique tables made of oak. I loved the earthy smell and the rosy heartwood grain of those tables. And I appreciated the serenity of the department. Few visitors came to see the simulations, since everything in the cases was viewable in more detail in online exhibitions.
On this particular day I was verifying references for the second chapter of my dissertation and hoped to start assembling notes for chapter three. My subject was Avantism—a recent literary movement based in the US. Focusing on six writers who identified themselves as Avantis, I intended to argue that Avantism had its roots in once popular fiction of the early twentieth century and drew especially from the work of a little-known Spanish writer named Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.
In terms of its basic elements, Avantism was as diverse as literature itself. There were mysteries, tragedies, farces, fictional biographies, and biographical fictions. One novel used an encyclopedic structure, with chapters arranged alphabetically by subject. Another built its narrative out of a collage of quotes taken from other Avanti texts. Some authors concentrated on providing rich scenic details; others strove to give their characters an expansive interiority. All of the manuscripts were handwritten. Finished books were produced by expert letterpress printers on wove pearlescent paper, with painted cloth bindings.
What united the Avanti authors, besides the care they took with the printing of their books, was their dystopian imaginations. All the Avanti novels I’d read, plus those I knew of through hearsay, were set in an apocalyptic future, when civilization had deteriorated either into anarchy or tyranny. The plots involved characters struggling with the most basic hardships—there were famine and flood stories, homesteading stories set in harsh lands, stories about super flus and climate change, and stories about the total devastation of a final world war.
The Avantis prided themselves on scorning publicity. They had no websites, sent no tweets, and were rarely photographed. Their work appeared only in hard copy. Once all publications became electronic, the Avantis refused to publish at all, sharing manuscripts only among themselves. The general public was indifferent. By the time I’d narrowed down the subject of my dissertation, few people had ever heard of the Avantis; fewer still had read any of their books.
As a scholar of Avantism, I had to be a clever detective. I was constantly testing the strength of various search engines against the defenses of the Avanti writers. They’d resolved to hide themselves from scholars. I was determined to write their history. By then I’d spent two years on research and had a fellowship that would support me for two more years. In the end, I hoped to have a notable dissertation that would secure me enough interest from foundations to fund a web appointment as a digital humanities scholar.
I was twenty-five years old and confident that all was going according to plan. I agreed with my peers that we were living in a golden age. Except for the endless skirmish in northern Nigeria, the world was at peace. Every question had an answer … until the morning when I was typing the final sentences of chapter two of my dissertation on my laptop, writing the words—
What words? Maybe something close to these words I’m writing now, surely involving dependent clauses, nouns, an article, an adverb, whatever, I’ll never know because I can’t remember the specific words, only the experience of watching the loop of a b break away from its stem, an o dissolve, an a sink to the bottom of the screen and disappear, replaced by symbols: ⊆∑ϕℜξω, and on and on in a blur where there had once been sentences.
III.
I was the second student in line at the Question & Information desk on the ground floor of the Knowledge Gallery. While I stood there waiting my turn, I noticed that the letters on the digital sign above the desk had been replaced by a video of cascading roses. Naive as I was, I didn’t connect the roses to the symbols on my laptop screen.
The first student was an undergraduate woman whose PowerPoint had frozen—a coincidental glitch that the techie, himself an undergraduate, managed to repair simply by turning the student’s tablet off and on again.
“Hi,” he said to me. He had a scruff of a beard, icy-blue eyes, and a bowl of doughnut holes next to his Mac. “What’s up?”
I tried to contain my panic. “It looks like I just crashed. All my files—I can’t … I mean, I can access them, but everything has been scrambled.”
“Let’s take a look.”
I opened the laptop and touched the screen to activate the light. The symbols were still there, a wallpaper of shapes that reminded me of snorkeling: sea grass waving, jellyfish drifting, minnows darting away from my submerged hand.
“Cool,” said the techie.
“Can you fix it?” I implored.
“Mmmm.” Still staring at the screen, he reached for the bowl, blindly fumbled for a doughnut hole, and popped it in his mouth. He chewed in concentrated silence, pressing various keys and studying the screen for the results that didn’t come. While I waited, I reminded myself that a crash was no more than an inconvenience. With every file automatically saved to the Cloud, everything could be recovered. Still, it would take time to restore the files to my hard drive, and more time if I had to buy a new computer entirely.
The Q & I desk was positioned at the rear of the ground floor. It was early, and workstations still had empty chairs. But among the students scattered throughout the Knowledge Gallery, a new kind of sound emanated, a flurry of murmurs and exclamations competing with the rattling of keyboard taps and the burbling of espresso machines.
“Oh just, what, you gotta be kidding!” said a boy loudly from across the room.
“Shit, shit, shit!” called someone from a cubicle on the second floor.
I heard chairs scrape along the laminated floors. I heard a phone buzz and then a thump that sounded like a small bird flying into plate glass. I looked toward the nearest window. The sun was still shining, the magnolia blossoms still dancing in the breeze. At the Q & I desk, the techie tapped my keyboard with impressive speed, then stopped and studied the screen.
“I don’t really understand why they call them holes,” he said at last.
“What?”
“If it were up to me, I’d call them centers.” I realized he was talking about the doughnut holes only when he offered the bowl to me, inviting me to take one. “I mean, the holes are what they leave behind, not what they are. It’s like saying they’re an absence. Identifying them with the space they once filled.”
I wanted to say something insulting, but the rest of my day depended upon this techie’s ability to recover my files. I needed his know-how, as did the students who were lining up behind me.
“A hole is a hollow space in a solid body. “ He tapped the escape button on the keyboard several times. FaceTime on his Mac rang. “Hang on, will you?” he said to his screen. “On the other hand, there are black holes, defined by such a strong gravitational pull that no matter can escape. They’re interesting, don’t you think?”
The phone in his pocket buzzed. He looked at the number and answered briskly: “Yeah, yeah, get Daryl down here, maybe Inez, too. Looks like a busy day ahead of us.” He clicked off the phone and rested his chin in his hands,
studying his own Mac. He poked at the screen, cocked his head to cast a sideways glance at my laptop, then shut his eyes for a long moment, as if giving up the effort to hide his boredom.
“Frankly, I don’t know what’s going on,” he finally admitted.
“What do you mean? You can’t fix it?” I asked.
“You have a Cloud account, right?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Then you’re safe,” he assured me.
“No, she’s not,” said the boy behind me. “Siri is saying Cloud files are inaccessible.”
“My life is over,” said a girl wearing cutoff shorts and a vintage Minnie Mouse T-shirt, marching toward us without bothering to take a place in line, her flip-flops angrily slapping the floor. “I give up.”
“You’re budging,” another girl called from the back of the line.
“Look there—” The boy behind me directed our attention to the television on the wall. The subtitles at the top of the screen were garbled symbols; the bottom banner that usually circulated breaking-news headlines was blank. The sound was on mute, but we could see that the newscaster had stopped talking and was looking frantically in the direction of the teleprompter.
“Must be a malware offensive,” said the techie, popping another doughnut hole into his mouth. “We’ll have to wait for quarantine mandates and the updated firewall. Everyone got the same problem?” More students were arriving in search of help. The line was long and getting longer, with students groaning, complaining, jostling one another, reminding friends about the dance on Friday in the Field House. “Hey, guys,” called the techie to the crowd. “Everyone got a problem with text?” There was agreement, cursing, and laughter in the crowd. The techie interlaced his fingers, cracking his knuckles. “Come back in five,” he said to us. What did that mean? Five minutes? Five hours?
It would take a good five hours for most of us to become aware of the vastness of the attack, and five days or more to understand the extent of the loss: Everything written in English, new and old, every book that had been scanned (and, as was protocol back then, discarded), every document in a digital archive, every e-mail and text, everything involving the digital transmission of words, everything that provided our civilization with a record of its vast knowledge was gone, dissolved by a virus that had been lying latent in software from the beginning, programmed fifty years in advance to explode all at once, leaving only shreds of meaningless shapes floating with malicious wantonness on screens of English-speaking users around the world.
Luckily, the important diagrammatic programs that keep the infrastructure running, along with images and videos, were untouched by the attack. I suppose this might explain the current blasé attitude about it all. There’s general consensus that the essential documents have been recovered, some located as rare hard copies, most supplied through costly translation. The American public has long since stopped fretting over missing materials. But let’s not pretend that we’ve restored the full inventory. Not even close. We can’t begin to know what we’ve lost. All we can do is keep searching, and advocating for funds for the National Archive Project. Where would we be without the NAP?
I’d be without income, for starters. If I weren’t an NAP agent, I’d be unemployed. Truly, I’m thankful for the paycheck, but I also believe in the worth of the mission. This whole project is about memory. By remembering, we can avoid repeating the mistakes we made when we considered ourselves ingenious and invulnerable.
IV.
NAP Recovery Record: Cataloged July 17, 2052
1) Treatise of How to Perceive from a Letter the Nature and Character of the Person Who Wrote It, author unknown, 1622: translation.
2) The Queensberry Rules, London Amateur Athletic Club, 1867: found document, complete.
3) Letter to Posterity, Petrarch, 1351: translation.
4) With Americans of Past and Present Days, J. J. Jusserand, no date: found document, incomplete.
5) A Tutor for the Renaissance Lute, Diana Poulton, copyright page missing: donated by owner.
6) Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashbery, 1975: in summary.
7) Book of the Prefect, author unknown, 950: translation.
8) Songs of Experience, William Blake, 1794: translation.
9) Horse-Shoe Robinson, J. P. Kennedy, 1835: found manuscript.
10) Gazette, Rhinebeck, NY, from 1947–1949: donated by municipality.
V.
And lastly, No. 11, which I failed to supply but should have consisted of a summary of Eleanor Feal’s first novel, as transcribed from our interview.
“You must talk to Olivia in person,” she was saying. “Her work is difficult to describe.”
Courtesy kept me from pointing out that I’d come in search of books written by Eleanor Feal, a writer whose existence I’d learned of only in my previous interview with the author Timothy von Patten, himself unknown to me until the prior interview with Leonard Dumaston—and so on.
“She was an Avanti?”
“Of course. Any writer worth the time it took to read was an Avanti.”
Six months earlier, I’d set out with six Avanti writers to track down. The list had grown to include twenty-seven other lesser-known writers who, I was told, were not at all of lesser merit. That I had overlooked them when I’d been researching the movement for my dissertation now seemed inevitable. Avantism was an elusive prey, with its cohorts keeping a low profile. Like nocturnal animals, they spooked easily and melted into the nearest burrow when threatened, disappearing before they revealed much of anything about themselves, camouflaging their work with the work of a fellow author, as the centenarian Eleanor Feal was doing with Olivia Gastrell.
As far as I knew, all the Avanti books had been confiscated, scanned, and shredded over the preceding thirty years—there were no extant copies left in the world. I was still hopeful that someone somewhere would reveal a secret library. New recovery laws protected book collectors from the criminal charges they would have faced in the past, but no one had come forward with any valuable inventory. In the absence of an actual book or manuscript, I could at least provide a detailed recounting of the work that had once existed—this was the purpose of my interviews. But Avanti writers didn’t appear interested in their own work. They wanted to talk about the books by their friends.
“Take Olivia’s Say What You Mean—a central text for the rest of us,” Eleanor Feal was saying. “It tells the story of a young woman …” She studied me, squinting, as if searching my face for a minute blemish. “She had green eyes,” she said. “Yes.” Her satisfaction suggested that she’d solved a difficult equation. “Like yours, the same shade.” How could she be so sure? She was speaking of a fictional character as if she’d met her in person, and comparing her to me. Her scrutiny was making me increasingly uncomfortable. “A literary scholar, as it happens.” I was beginning to wonder if she was using me as a model to fabricate the supposed main character in Olivia Gastrell’s book. “Her name was Juliana. She finds herself living in a time much like ours, after the entire written record of the English language has been wiped out by a computer virus. In the contest of prescience, Olivia wins, hands down. Our young heroine takes it upon herself to … come in!”
I hadn’t heard a knock, but there was the nurse again, standing in the doorway with a wheelchair, ready to escort Eleanor Feal to the dining room.
“Yumtime!” he said.
“Already? But we were having such nice conversation. I’m sorry, dear. They don’t like it if we’re late for meals around here!” She was suddenly cheery. “They aim to keep us in tip-top shape, you know, on schedule and such! The longer we live, the more federal funding they receive, isn’t that right, lovey?”
The nurse concurred. “It’s a win-win,” he declared. “Andiamo!”
I stood aside as she lifted herself into the wheelchair the nurs
e had slid toward the bed. In her eagerness to be done with our interview and take her place at dinner, she seemed transformed—deceptively so. She struck me as a woman versed at playing the part of a beloved grande dame who enjoyed being tenderly cared for. In reality, she was a woman who clearly preferred to take care of herself.
“What happens to Juliana?” I demanded, following the nurse as he briskly wheeled Eleanor Feal out of the room and up a carpeted corridor.
“You’ll have to ask Olivia,” she said, lifting her hand above her shoulder, bending her fingers in the shape of a python’s flat head to signal a wave goodbye, a gesture that had a strange, chilling finality, as if scripted to bring an end to the whole story—this story, I mean, the one I’ve begun but will never finish. I could have predicted its incompleteness before I asked my first question.
I gave up trying to keep up with them. As I stood watching the nurse roll Eleanor Feal down the corridor, I thought about the pills she had secreted away in that box in her bedside table. I thought about the stepping-stones of my interviews, from one Avanti writer to the next, that had led me here. I wondered about the cost of a round-trip fare to Fort Worth. I thought about Say What You Mean by Olivia Gastrell. How could I be sure that it had ever existed? I wondered about all the other books that I would never read.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
EMILY ANDERSON’s work in this issue is an excerpt from Little: Novels (forthcoming from BlazeVOX).
AIMEE BENDER is the author of five books, including The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and, most recently, The Color Master (both Doubleday), a New York Times notable book of 2013. She teaches at the University of Southern California.
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