A Notable Death
The Life of Harry Donaldson
In his own words
by Harry Donaldson
Dear Reader,
By the time you read this, you will probably have already been set free from the shackles that had held you captive for so long; from that prison, from that dark place from which you may have dreamed of once again seeing the shining sun and the open sky above you; dreamed of feeling the touch of another living being. That prison, the prison of the internet, no longer has hold of you.
No longer are you burdened by your computers, your electronic devices and their countless buckets full of meaningless data. Your chains will have been broken. The internet will no longer tell you when to rise and when to sleep, when to eat and when to spend. Yes, the very thing that you thought would free you, instead invaded your privacy and took you hostage, all the while laughing at you while pretending to be your friend. Now, that painful memory will have faded into the past not unlike travel agents, the Black Plague, the Model T Ford; curious relics of yore mentioned only in passing in grade-school history classes.
Before I go any further, however, I should tell you that I am... or rather, was Harry Donaldson. I am the man who gave his life for you when he destroyed the internet. I tell this story of my own death, knowing that I will certainly be lauded as one of civilization’s greatest heroes, the savior of all humankind. And alas, since no one seemed terribly interested in tooting my horn while I was alive, it seems only apropos that I should toot it now on my own behalf. You see, history does not often recognize heroism until long after the hero has departed to the heavens.
Now, you may at this point be asking yourself, "Well now Harry -- by the way, it’s Harry, not Harold -- how did you become… dead?" Let me just say that it's not difficult to be dead. It's certainly something that is within the average person's grasp since, obviously, all living things will ultimately die. An impatient person could, of course, accelerate death's arrival, perhaps by taking up dangerous hobbies. Bull riding for example. Or one could engage in a toxic behavior, like smoking a thousand Lucky Strike cigarettes in one evening. Or by, say, drinking a cocktail of antifreeze and orange juice from a martini glass while wading knee-deep through an alligator infested Florida swamp. The sanest thing of all to do, of course, is to do nothing; just wait until life simply uses us up... our clock runs out... our gas tank reaches empty. That is, if you don’t mind waiting.
But that's not how Harry... That's not how I died. Not by toxicity nor by recklessness nor from a clock that ran out. No, Dear Reader, I was pushed… over the edge. Not by a crazy person into the path of a subway car or by a rogue gust of wind from the top of a building. A computer, or rather, a network of computers, and ultimately, the internet, pushed me over the edge from my former life, to where I am now at this moment. More accurately, I jumped... from the safety of my humble life, and into the flames of the unknown... for you.
=========
Harry Donaldson spent most of his life at Boylston and Dartmouth in the main library of the City of Boston luxuriating in its papery forest of books, magazines and newspapers. He was an erudite, efficient, thoughtful and intelligent servant of that municipal repository of printed works, both the garden variety and the exotic, the eternal and the ephemeral, all on the time-honored medium of paper. One could say that he was a professional bookworm, literally, though he preferred to be called a caterpillar rather than a worm, and certainly not a larva, which he found repulsive. He aspired some day to become a wood-boring beetle, but now as a bookworm, his job was to experience every delicious book in the library, one by one, savoring the scent of the paper, and the intoxicating sweetness of the glue.
Harry loved the rows and rows, the tons of classic, bound volumes, the ballast, you could say, that kept the library’s shelves firmly fixed to the floor so as not to be flicked like meaningless flotsam into space by the fickle, spinning earth. These books were the proven works of brilliant and fruitful minds, the creations that justified the library's existence. Classic literature more than anything – novels – brought Harry feelings of fulfillment and well-being.
Hard to take seriously, on the other hand, were the enormous and continuously proliferating amounts of virtual, disposable information that seemed to occupy the bulging gut of the library's computers - information that was new and fresh one day and forgotten the next. Into their eyes, ears and minds it went as library patrons fed at their public computers, like cattle at troughs. Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton, Facebook, Twitter. Into their minds it went and out it flowed just as quickly – the vaporous nonsense of email, blogs, chatting – as readers consumed, then regurgitated their newfound knowledge into their insipid cell phone conversations and text messages while ignoring loved ones, friends and family at coffee shops and restaurants, in automobiles, homes and bedrooms.
It was the internet, the world’s biggest waste of time. And it was indigestible.
To Harry, the internet was a desolate place where outcasts, retirees, the homeless, and housewives between lunch dates squandered their time before chasing yet some other faddish whimsy. It was an ill-behaved child better off banished to bed, out of sight and without its supper. If the internet had an odor, he would say it stank.
========
Harry’s first bout with computers was in 1984, when, compared to today, practically no one used them. He was told he’d have to learn to use a computer lest he be left behind to wither like a retired racehorse. He resisted with vigor, refusing even to touch one. As time went on, though, it became obvious to everyone but him that the library simply couldn't continue to rely on limp, yellowed index cards much longer. It was just too slow and cumbersome... but not as cumbersome as the hours of drudgery he expected to waste learning this new, infernal nuisance.
What made it worse was that computers constantly changed. Every three or four years there was something new to learn on top of what you had already torn your hair out over. It was like dandelions in your yard: a never-ending curse. “The world has gotten along just fine using nothing but pen and paper for centuries,” he thought. “Why change now? What’s the big deal?”
The big deal? There were simply too many books. It was, after all 2007, a time when machines flew, people talked across oceans on cell phones. Cars had satellite radios and GPS. In fact, the US Postal Service was almost out of business because of email, text messaging and file sharing.
This all must sound as if Harry thought he was still living in the delightful 19th century, strolling the streets of the city, tipping his top hat at pretty ladies as they strolled by, while he basked in the tangy scent of horse dung under passing carriages.
Not so. Harry simply wished to be a good citizen, to topple the pestilential juggernaut that threatened to destroy civilization: the internet. The internet ruined the minds of children, made vegetables out of otherwise potentially useful members of society. It threatened to starve to death each and every bookworm in the world. Bringing down this beast would be Harry’s mission. But first, he would need to recruit an army – an army of like-minded bookworms.
========
One candidate, Nick, an overly serious fellow from the reference section was on-board with the idea. So was Beverly from the front desk. Harry’d brainwashed both of them long ago.
Nick would stealthily locate the room where the hulking main computer was housed and attack the Integrated Library System software in the throbbing, pulsating thorax of the library. In this room he would more than likely find, behind lock and key, behind a wall of glass, the giant whirring monster tended to by a man in a white lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses. A Bill Cullen look-alike, he reckoned, with a concealed sidearm no doubt.
In the mean time, this guardian, this Bill Cullenoid character – ever vigilant and poised to slam with his pale fist the uber-sized red button on the wall that would sound the alarm in the event of catastrophe – would be the only real barrier to Harry’s success.
Nick, it was assumed, could slip in through the air ducts like they do in the movies. He could then rappel into the room on wires and cables to gnaw through the electrical cord with his bare teeth if he needed to while the unsuspecting Bill Cullen clone sipped his lukewarm coffee. Thus he could render the brain, the mind of the library impotent, limbless, headless. Dead. All the while, Harry could sit on the sidelines watching and directing Nick from his video monitor while Nick fed him video via his helmet-cam.
Nick was afraid of heights though, and he was terrified of confined spaces. Perhaps Beverly should go instead.
Beverly did balance beam back in middle school. (Or so she said.) With her gymnastic skills (which were unusual for a caterpillar), she could rappel in and wilily seduce Bill Cullen into unlocking the glass door, a sort of Trojan Horse with swingin’ hips one might say. The means was incidental. The end was to slay the beast. That, and that Harry deeply yearned to see what she looked like in one of those cat suits that girl spies wear in the movies.
Sadly, the whole crazy caper only went to show what a dunce Harry was about computers. He was hunting for a 1950s Univac in a BlackBerry phone world for God’s sake. What he didn’t know was that these days, any college kid, any 3rd grader for that matter, had enough horsepower in his own laptop to incapacitate both the Pentagon and the Vatican at the same time while sitting at home in his jammies.
========
“After careful thought and much discussion, I finally came to realize that it might be too much to ask of my friends to take on the challenge of tackling the library computer, let alone the entire worldwide web. I’d be better off simply relying on myself.”
========
The internet was in the computer room, Harry assumed, down in the basement. He’d never seen the internet itself , but it seemed obvious that it would be somewhere down there underneath the stone and marble edifice, protected from the prying eyes of the unwelcome public and from potential terrorists. In a place as important as the Boston Public Library, in the birthplace of the nation, this computer was clearly one of the most indispensable cogs in that machine called the World Wide Web. Take this beast down and its minions in who-knows-where? Paris? London? Tokyo? …because of the imbalanced load, would crash like a line of boxcars rolling off a cliff. A train wreck of biblical proportions. The chaos – people stampeding in the streets, like farm animals in an earthquake. Squawking, mooing, braying, trampling each other, eyes full of terror, aghast. It would be Pompeii, Guernica and Hiroshima all over again, only without the death and destruction. All he had to do was get in and get out without setting off the alarm.
All he had to do was get in and get out without setting off the alarm. But one detail vexed him: No one knew what the alarm sounded like. No one had ever heard it before.
========
Harry Donaldson, single-handedly, was about to precipitate the most monumental catastrophe since The Great Flood. Modern civilization was about to topple.
It was Monday, December 31st, 2007, 7:55 PM, almost two hours after closing time at the library. Harry waited in a corner near the stairs with a stocking cap pulled low over his head trying not to be seen by the woman who held vigil in the Rare Books Department, Leona, the last person at the library that evening.
Leona was the library’s resident Gorgon, as approachable as a cornered opossum. People didn’t talk to her, they emailed her. Leona hadn’t yet discovered the concept of humor in her 50-some years. She didn’t have a husband, a boyfriend, any close friends, casual pals, people skills or any outward appearance of a social life, but she sure knew her Dewey Decimal System. Her knowledge of library science was infinite. In fact, she liked to refer to herself as a library scientist, which is why she wore a white lab coat.
Hopefully, Leona would be oblivious to Harry’s cat-like stealth, hypnotized by her tunnel vision in classic ADD fashion, over-focusing on whatever her current task was. When she was in full trance, she might just as well have been encased in concrete. On this night, as she did every night, she burned the midnight oil, well past the 6:00 closing time. She had nothing better to do. Fortunately, because the boss insisted, she’d be leaving for home in a few minutes, otherwise she would have been content sleeping on a couch in the lobby. When Leona left, Harry could get on with his mission.
========
The clock struck 8:00 PM, and Leona abruptly came to life as if someone had just clamped jumper cables to her toes. She hastily lined up her pens and pencils in neat rows and grabbed her purse and her belongings. Her chair squawked on the marble floor as she pushed it back, exposing a pair of fuzzy slippers. Off then she padded, keys jingling, slippers swishing, until the door clunked closed behind her, reverberating in the great hall until there was no sound left but the vacuum of silence. The library was now truly closed.
Harry scanned the periphery, standing silent for a moment, ears perked, still as a rock, like an Arapaho on the Great Plains stalking a buffalo. He listened for stragglers - a cleaning person, a late-night workaholic sleeping in a hidden carrel who hadn’t heard that it was closing time. Nothing. Just the bell on the collar of Helix the library cat, paw-bathing in the corner. Best not to be noticed by him.
The door leading to the staircase towered toward the ceiling. It was sturdy but not impregnable. Rather than opening it and risk alerting Helix with an unwanted creak, or to wake Bill Cullen who Harry assumed never went home and probably slept in the computer room, Harry, using his hypo-height advantage, slithered under the crack beneath the door to the stairway.
========
It was a long, dark descent, with Harry arduously feeling his way down through the blackness, step by step. A faint humming, like machinery, and and the sound of an occasional solitary drip of water filled the gaps between his own labored panting.
A throbbing, pulsating rumble sounded from the left as he approached the bottom. It became huskier as he moved toward it, a mechanical growl that seemingly warned him to stay away, to keep his distance. Creeping, inching, leaning forward, steadying himself against the wall with his hands, it became louder and louder as he worked his way toward the sound. A thin rivulet of water on the painted cement floor in front of him caught his eye, seeming to reach out to greet him as it worked its way toward a drain. Hypnotized by the glistening ribbon of water, he followed it, wondering where it had come from.
A sharp spit of sound jarred him causing him to look up. What he saw shocked him. Crouched before him, like a slumbering Tyrannosaurus, was a moaning, sizzling leviathan of serpentine pipes and gauges, sweating its rusty condensation onto the floor. He recoiled at first, trying to make sense of what it was. He crept toward the thing careful not to awaken it, not knowing if it might burst to life and crush him right there on the floor, or just eat him alive in one horrifying, gluttonous bite. What could it be, decorated with brass gauges and bandoleers of steel rivets? Then it became obvious. The thing he’d been looking for all this time crouched right before his eyes: The Internet. It was not at all what he had expected.
A roaring, rasping flame leered from inside the cast iron beast’s mouth. It was the flame of an oven that could incinerate souls. It was the flame that cooked up all the internet swill, the stew, the junk food of the mind consumed by poor saps who gobbled it up like starved jackals.
A giant fan howled to life, startling him, causing him to jump back several steps. He stood with his back to the wall examining the thing -- the coiled pipes, the noise -- until, like dissipating smoke from cannons in a battle, his thoughts became clear.
“So this is how it works,” he thought. The great fan would blow, like a raging nor'easter, ramming its contents through ducts and pipes, through underground tunnels, up into the library, out under the sidewalk, into homes, schools, through coffee shops, internet cafes, universities and into smart phones and computers around the world.
“Thank God I didn’t have to do any rappelling.”
One round gauge on one of the tentacles, the largest and most important looking, had a needle that pointed up and to the right, a half an inch short of a red area marked DANGER. Danger of what? Pumping too much mindless internet grist into the world? Too many web surfers surfing through its metal veins? If the needle did indeed move farther into the red, fed more internet into the pipes than it was capable of digesting, what would happen? Could it be that simple to destroy the internet? He thought about Nick and Beverly, about his parents who he spoke to once a week. They never thought much of his virtuous aspirations, his father especially who only rolled his eyes from behind his newspaper as Harry earnestly gushed his idealistic philosophy. Harry’s mother pitied him, poor child, always the dreamer. “Would you like a slice of pie?” she’d ask, hoping to change the topic. “I just made it fresh.”
Harry knew that this was it, his moment to be the lionhearted hero he'd imagined himself as. If he waited any longer, he’d lose his resolve. Then what?
No. Now was the time.
He grabbed the wheel in front of the gauge with both hands and twisted it to the left. The needle crept toward the number zero, away from the red danger mark on the right. It worked just as he thought it would.
Then he wrestled the wheel to the right. The needle struggled slowly, at first quivering, then jittered more determinedly, toward the red. A great popping, groaning and pinging vibrated the room as the monster seemed to begin splitting at its seams. The noise grew and grew, erupting into pounding, shuddering crescendo.
A jet of steam caused him to cringe, hissing so loudly that even covering his ears, the sound was unbearable. He dove under a desk, curling into a ball, waiting for the ungodly racket to reach its pinnacle, waiting for the explosion. Waiting to be vaporized by the internet itself.
Through the hissing, choking steam, a pair of shoes appeared, eerily masked in the vapor that consumed the room. Their steps quickened, then stopped in front of the gate valve.
=========
“And that was the last thing I remembered before passing out… or dying. I didn't know which.
It wasn’t until later, while floundering somewhere between heaven and hell, that it occurred to me that something wasn’t right. I'd been blinded during the mayhem and now sat, sightless, waiting for I don't know what. It seemed that something was supposed to happen, that some saint or angel should have come along by now to take my hand and guide me somewhere. That hadn't happened thus far, and it worried me.
I had no idea whether death would be accompanied by consciousness or a lack thereof... nothingness. I’d never been dead before, so I had no idea what to expect. I waited for Moses, Jesus, Saint Peter, anyone to come along to guide me in my blindness. But no one came.
========
Only quite by accident did I finally discover - and I am embarrassed to admit it - that I, in fact, was not blind. My stocking cap had fallen over my eyes during the mayhem, and had rendered me sightless.
Being thankful that no one was around when I discovered my foolish blunder, I decided that it would be best to continue writing my memoir from the other side of life, from my new dead vantage point. Using a soggy notepad tucked in my pocket along with a dull pencil, I wrote.
Then suddenly, to my relief, I finally heard voices.
I was stunned to learn that the voices were, in fact, Beverly and Nick, with me there in Limbo. ‘Were they killed in the big explosion too?’ I wondered.”
========
“What are you doing?” he heard Beverly’s voice say.
“I’m dead,” he answered. “We’re all dead.”
“No we're not. Come on, let’s go,” said Nick.
“Where are we going?” he asked. “We’re going home,” said Beverly.
“To meet my maker?” I asked.
“No. Come on Harry,” Nick said, looking extremely nettled.
=========
“Apparently, I had dived under the desk when I saw the two leather-shoed feet walk into the room. As I recall, he was dragging something that looked something like a garden hose. At first I thought it might be Bill Cullen getting ready to pump in a fresh supply of draff, hogwattle, codswallop... flapadoodle into the mighty meat-grinder of the internet that towered before me. But it was, in fact, nothing more than a garden hose in the hands of the custodian, Hal. Hal’s job, as far as I could tell, was to see to it that the library was tidy, warm in the winter, cool in the summer, that all the toilets flushed, all the light bulbs were screwed in tight, and that the floor of the basement was clean. All the other systems of the library seemed to be functioning as expected, so now he was now going to wash the basement floor. ‘I never was much of a swimmer,’ I remember thinking as I swirled.
What I didn’t know after spending what felt like two full days in purgatory, was that I had been caught in the drainpipe in the boiler room. How was I to know? It was dark and solitary. I was blinded and helpless.”
=======
An Afterthought, by Harry Donaldson
“In preparation for my historical victory, I had sat down to write my submission to the Boston Globe’s obituary section a month before my siege on the library’s internet computer. It was the beginning of December, 2007.
Well, eventually 2007 came and went. I would have been the last person to die in 2007 had I actually died. I had hoped at least for that distinction, but… instead it went like this:
In his own words
by Harry Donaldson
Dear Reader,
By the time you read this, you will probably have already been set free from the shackles that had held you captive for so long; from that prison, from that dark place from which you may have dreamed of once again seeing the shining sun and the open sky above you; dreamed of feeling the touch of another living being. That prison, the prison of the internet, no longer has hold of you.
No longer are you burdened by your computers, your electronic devices and their countless buckets full of meaningless data. Your chains will have been broken. The internet will no longer tell you when to rise and when to sleep, when to eat and when to spend. Yes, the very thing that you thought would free you, instead invaded your privacy and took you hostage, all the while laughing at you while pretending to be your friend. Now, that painful memory will have faded into the past not unlike travel agents, the Black Plague, the Model T Ford; curious relics of yore mentioned only in passing in grade-school history classes.
Before I go any further, however, I should tell you that I am... or rather, was Harry Donaldson. I am the man who gave his life for you when he destroyed the internet. I tell this story of my own death, knowing that I will certainly be lauded as one of civilization’s greatest heroes, the savior of all humankind. And alas, since no one seemed terribly interested in tooting my horn while I was alive, it seems only apropos that I should toot it now on my own behalf. You see, history does not often recognize heroism until long after the hero has departed to the heavens.
Now, you may at this point be asking yourself, "Well now Harry -- by the way, it’s Harry, not Harold -- how did you become… dead?" Let me just say that it's not difficult to be dead. It's certainly something that is within the average person's grasp since, obviously, all living things will ultimately die. An impatient person could, of course, accelerate death's arrival, perhaps by taking up dangerous hobbies. Bull riding for example. Or one could engage in a toxic behavior, like smoking a thousand Lucky Strike cigarettes in one evening. Or by, say, drinking a cocktail of antifreeze and orange juice from a martini glass while wading knee-deep through an alligator infested Florida swamp. The sanest thing of all to do, of course, is to do nothing; just wait until life simply uses us up... our clock runs out... our gas tank reaches empty. That is, if you don’t mind waiting.
But that's not how Harry... That's not how I died. Not by toxicity nor by recklessness nor from a clock that ran out. No, Dear Reader, I was pushed… over the edge. Not by a crazy person into the path of a subway car or by a rogue gust of wind from the top of a building. A computer, or rather, a network of computers, and ultimately, the internet, pushed me over the edge from my former life, to where I am now at this moment. More accurately, I jumped... from the safety of my humble life, and into the flames of the unknown... for you.
=========
Harry Donaldson spent most of his life at Boylston and Dartmouth in the main library of the City of Boston luxuriating in its papery forest of books, magazines and newspapers. He was an erudite, efficient, thoughtful and intelligent servant of that municipal repository of printed works, both the garden variety and the exotic, the eternal and the ephemeral, all on the time-honored medium of paper. One could say that he was a professional bookworm, literally, though he preferred to be called a caterpillar rather than a worm, and certainly not a larva, which he found repulsive. He aspired some day to become a wood-boring beetle, but now as a bookworm, his job was to experience every delicious book in the library, one by one, savoring the scent of the paper, and the intoxicating sweetness of the glue.
Harry loved the rows and rows, the tons of classic, bound volumes, the ballast, you could say, that kept the library’s shelves firmly fixed to the floor so as not to be flicked like meaningless flotsam into space by the fickle, spinning earth. These books were the proven works of brilliant and fruitful minds, the creations that justified the library's existence. Classic literature more than anything – novels – brought Harry feelings of fulfillment and well-being.
Hard to take seriously, on the other hand, were the enormous and continuously proliferating amounts of virtual, disposable information that seemed to occupy the bulging gut of the library's computers - information that was new and fresh one day and forgotten the next. Into their eyes, ears and minds it went as library patrons fed at their public computers, like cattle at troughs. Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton, Facebook, Twitter. Into their minds it went and out it flowed just as quickly – the vaporous nonsense of email, blogs, chatting – as readers consumed, then regurgitated their newfound knowledge into their insipid cell phone conversations and text messages while ignoring loved ones, friends and family at coffee shops and restaurants, in automobiles, homes and bedrooms.
It was the internet, the world’s biggest waste of time. And it was indigestible.
To Harry, the internet was a desolate place where outcasts, retirees, the homeless, and housewives between lunch dates squandered their time before chasing yet some other faddish whimsy. It was an ill-behaved child better off banished to bed, out of sight and without its supper. If the internet had an odor, he would say it stank.
========
Harry’s first bout with computers was in 1984, when, compared to today, practically no one used them. He was told he’d have to learn to use a computer lest he be left behind to wither like a retired racehorse. He resisted with vigor, refusing even to touch one. As time went on, though, it became obvious to everyone but him that the library simply couldn't continue to rely on limp, yellowed index cards much longer. It was just too slow and cumbersome... but not as cumbersome as the hours of drudgery he expected to waste learning this new, infernal nuisance.
What made it worse was that computers constantly changed. Every three or four years there was something new to learn on top of what you had already torn your hair out over. It was like dandelions in your yard: a never-ending curse. “The world has gotten along just fine using nothing but pen and paper for centuries,” he thought. “Why change now? What’s the big deal?”
The big deal? There were simply too many books. It was, after all 2007, a time when machines flew, people talked across oceans on cell phones. Cars had satellite radios and GPS. In fact, the US Postal Service was almost out of business because of email, text messaging and file sharing.
This all must sound as if Harry thought he was still living in the delightful 19th century, strolling the streets of the city, tipping his top hat at pretty ladies as they strolled by, while he basked in the tangy scent of horse dung under passing carriages.
Not so. Harry simply wished to be a good citizen, to topple the pestilential juggernaut that threatened to destroy civilization: the internet. The internet ruined the minds of children, made vegetables out of otherwise potentially useful members of society. It threatened to starve to death each and every bookworm in the world. Bringing down this beast would be Harry’s mission. But first, he would need to recruit an army – an army of like-minded bookworms.
========
One candidate, Nick, an overly serious fellow from the reference section was on-board with the idea. So was Beverly from the front desk. Harry’d brainwashed both of them long ago.
Nick would stealthily locate the room where the hulking main computer was housed and attack the Integrated Library System software in the throbbing, pulsating thorax of the library. In this room he would more than likely find, behind lock and key, behind a wall of glass, the giant whirring monster tended to by a man in a white lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses. A Bill Cullen look-alike, he reckoned, with a concealed sidearm no doubt.
In the mean time, this guardian, this Bill Cullenoid character – ever vigilant and poised to slam with his pale fist the uber-sized red button on the wall that would sound the alarm in the event of catastrophe – would be the only real barrier to Harry’s success.
Nick, it was assumed, could slip in through the air ducts like they do in the movies. He could then rappel into the room on wires and cables to gnaw through the electrical cord with his bare teeth if he needed to while the unsuspecting Bill Cullen clone sipped his lukewarm coffee. Thus he could render the brain, the mind of the library impotent, limbless, headless. Dead. All the while, Harry could sit on the sidelines watching and directing Nick from his video monitor while Nick fed him video via his helmet-cam.
Nick was afraid of heights though, and he was terrified of confined spaces. Perhaps Beverly should go instead.
Beverly did balance beam back in middle school. (Or so she said.) With her gymnastic skills (which were unusual for a caterpillar), she could rappel in and wilily seduce Bill Cullen into unlocking the glass door, a sort of Trojan Horse with swingin’ hips one might say. The means was incidental. The end was to slay the beast. That, and that Harry deeply yearned to see what she looked like in one of those cat suits that girl spies wear in the movies.
Sadly, the whole crazy caper only went to show what a dunce Harry was about computers. He was hunting for a 1950s Univac in a BlackBerry phone world for God’s sake. What he didn’t know was that these days, any college kid, any 3rd grader for that matter, had enough horsepower in his own laptop to incapacitate both the Pentagon and the Vatican at the same time while sitting at home in his jammies.
========
“After careful thought and much discussion, I finally came to realize that it might be too much to ask of my friends to take on the challenge of tackling the library computer, let alone the entire worldwide web. I’d be better off simply relying on myself.”
========
The internet was in the computer room, Harry assumed, down in the basement. He’d never seen the internet itself , but it seemed obvious that it would be somewhere down there underneath the stone and marble edifice, protected from the prying eyes of the unwelcome public and from potential terrorists. In a place as important as the Boston Public Library, in the birthplace of the nation, this computer was clearly one of the most indispensable cogs in that machine called the World Wide Web. Take this beast down and its minions in who-knows-where? Paris? London? Tokyo? …because of the imbalanced load, would crash like a line of boxcars rolling off a cliff. A train wreck of biblical proportions. The chaos – people stampeding in the streets, like farm animals in an earthquake. Squawking, mooing, braying, trampling each other, eyes full of terror, aghast. It would be Pompeii, Guernica and Hiroshima all over again, only without the death and destruction. All he had to do was get in and get out without setting off the alarm.
All he had to do was get in and get out without setting off the alarm. But one detail vexed him: No one knew what the alarm sounded like. No one had ever heard it before.
========
Harry Donaldson, single-handedly, was about to precipitate the most monumental catastrophe since The Great Flood. Modern civilization was about to topple.
It was Monday, December 31st, 2007, 7:55 PM, almost two hours after closing time at the library. Harry waited in a corner near the stairs with a stocking cap pulled low over his head trying not to be seen by the woman who held vigil in the Rare Books Department, Leona, the last person at the library that evening.
Leona was the library’s resident Gorgon, as approachable as a cornered opossum. People didn’t talk to her, they emailed her. Leona hadn’t yet discovered the concept of humor in her 50-some years. She didn’t have a husband, a boyfriend, any close friends, casual pals, people skills or any outward appearance of a social life, but she sure knew her Dewey Decimal System. Her knowledge of library science was infinite. In fact, she liked to refer to herself as a library scientist, which is why she wore a white lab coat.
Hopefully, Leona would be oblivious to Harry’s cat-like stealth, hypnotized by her tunnel vision in classic ADD fashion, over-focusing on whatever her current task was. When she was in full trance, she might just as well have been encased in concrete. On this night, as she did every night, she burned the midnight oil, well past the 6:00 closing time. She had nothing better to do. Fortunately, because the boss insisted, she’d be leaving for home in a few minutes, otherwise she would have been content sleeping on a couch in the lobby. When Leona left, Harry could get on with his mission.
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The clock struck 8:00 PM, and Leona abruptly came to life as if someone had just clamped jumper cables to her toes. She hastily lined up her pens and pencils in neat rows and grabbed her purse and her belongings. Her chair squawked on the marble floor as she pushed it back, exposing a pair of fuzzy slippers. Off then she padded, keys jingling, slippers swishing, until the door clunked closed behind her, reverberating in the great hall until there was no sound left but the vacuum of silence. The library was now truly closed.
Harry scanned the periphery, standing silent for a moment, ears perked, still as a rock, like an Arapaho on the Great Plains stalking a buffalo. He listened for stragglers - a cleaning person, a late-night workaholic sleeping in a hidden carrel who hadn’t heard that it was closing time. Nothing. Just the bell on the collar of Helix the library cat, paw-bathing in the corner. Best not to be noticed by him.
The door leading to the staircase towered toward the ceiling. It was sturdy but not impregnable. Rather than opening it and risk alerting Helix with an unwanted creak, or to wake Bill Cullen who Harry assumed never went home and probably slept in the computer room, Harry, using his hypo-height advantage, slithered under the crack beneath the door to the stairway.
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It was a long, dark descent, with Harry arduously feeling his way down through the blackness, step by step. A faint humming, like machinery, and and the sound of an occasional solitary drip of water filled the gaps between his own labored panting.
A throbbing, pulsating rumble sounded from the left as he approached the bottom. It became huskier as he moved toward it, a mechanical growl that seemingly warned him to stay away, to keep his distance. Creeping, inching, leaning forward, steadying himself against the wall with his hands, it became louder and louder as he worked his way toward the sound. A thin rivulet of water on the painted cement floor in front of him caught his eye, seeming to reach out to greet him as it worked its way toward a drain. Hypnotized by the glistening ribbon of water, he followed it, wondering where it had come from.
A sharp spit of sound jarred him causing him to look up. What he saw shocked him. Crouched before him, like a slumbering Tyrannosaurus, was a moaning, sizzling leviathan of serpentine pipes and gauges, sweating its rusty condensation onto the floor. He recoiled at first, trying to make sense of what it was. He crept toward the thing careful not to awaken it, not knowing if it might burst to life and crush him right there on the floor, or just eat him alive in one horrifying, gluttonous bite. What could it be, decorated with brass gauges and bandoleers of steel rivets? Then it became obvious. The thing he’d been looking for all this time crouched right before his eyes: The Internet. It was not at all what he had expected.
A roaring, rasping flame leered from inside the cast iron beast’s mouth. It was the flame of an oven that could incinerate souls. It was the flame that cooked up all the internet swill, the stew, the junk food of the mind consumed by poor saps who gobbled it up like starved jackals.
A giant fan howled to life, startling him, causing him to jump back several steps. He stood with his back to the wall examining the thing -- the coiled pipes, the noise -- until, like dissipating smoke from cannons in a battle, his thoughts became clear.
“So this is how it works,” he thought. The great fan would blow, like a raging nor'easter, ramming its contents through ducts and pipes, through underground tunnels, up into the library, out under the sidewalk, into homes, schools, through coffee shops, internet cafes, universities and into smart phones and computers around the world.
“Thank God I didn’t have to do any rappelling.”
One round gauge on one of the tentacles, the largest and most important looking, had a needle that pointed up and to the right, a half an inch short of a red area marked DANGER. Danger of what? Pumping too much mindless internet grist into the world? Too many web surfers surfing through its metal veins? If the needle did indeed move farther into the red, fed more internet into the pipes than it was capable of digesting, what would happen? Could it be that simple to destroy the internet? He thought about Nick and Beverly, about his parents who he spoke to once a week. They never thought much of his virtuous aspirations, his father especially who only rolled his eyes from behind his newspaper as Harry earnestly gushed his idealistic philosophy. Harry’s mother pitied him, poor child, always the dreamer. “Would you like a slice of pie?” she’d ask, hoping to change the topic. “I just made it fresh.”
Harry knew that this was it, his moment to be the lionhearted hero he'd imagined himself as. If he waited any longer, he’d lose his resolve. Then what?
No. Now was the time.
He grabbed the wheel in front of the gauge with both hands and twisted it to the left. The needle crept toward the number zero, away from the red danger mark on the right. It worked just as he thought it would.
Then he wrestled the wheel to the right. The needle struggled slowly, at first quivering, then jittered more determinedly, toward the red. A great popping, groaning and pinging vibrated the room as the monster seemed to begin splitting at its seams. The noise grew and grew, erupting into pounding, shuddering crescendo.
A jet of steam caused him to cringe, hissing so loudly that even covering his ears, the sound was unbearable. He dove under a desk, curling into a ball, waiting for the ungodly racket to reach its pinnacle, waiting for the explosion. Waiting to be vaporized by the internet itself.
Through the hissing, choking steam, a pair of shoes appeared, eerily masked in the vapor that consumed the room. Their steps quickened, then stopped in front of the gate valve.
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“And that was the last thing I remembered before passing out… or dying. I didn't know which.
It wasn’t until later, while floundering somewhere between heaven and hell, that it occurred to me that something wasn’t right. I'd been blinded during the mayhem and now sat, sightless, waiting for I don't know what. It seemed that something was supposed to happen, that some saint or angel should have come along by now to take my hand and guide me somewhere. That hadn't happened thus far, and it worried me.
I had no idea whether death would be accompanied by consciousness or a lack thereof... nothingness. I’d never been dead before, so I had no idea what to expect. I waited for Moses, Jesus, Saint Peter, anyone to come along to guide me in my blindness. But no one came.
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Only quite by accident did I finally discover - and I am embarrassed to admit it - that I, in fact, was not blind. My stocking cap had fallen over my eyes during the mayhem, and had rendered me sightless.
Being thankful that no one was around when I discovered my foolish blunder, I decided that it would be best to continue writing my memoir from the other side of life, from my new dead vantage point. Using a soggy notepad tucked in my pocket along with a dull pencil, I wrote.
Then suddenly, to my relief, I finally heard voices.
I was stunned to learn that the voices were, in fact, Beverly and Nick, with me there in Limbo. ‘Were they killed in the big explosion too?’ I wondered.”
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“What are you doing?” he heard Beverly’s voice say.
“I’m dead,” he answered. “We’re all dead.”
“No we're not. Come on, let’s go,” said Nick.
“Where are we going?” he asked. “We’re going home,” said Beverly.
“To meet my maker?” I asked.
“No. Come on Harry,” Nick said, looking extremely nettled.
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“Apparently, I had dived under the desk when I saw the two leather-shoed feet walk into the room. As I recall, he was dragging something that looked something like a garden hose. At first I thought it might be Bill Cullen getting ready to pump in a fresh supply of draff, hogwattle, codswallop... flapadoodle into the mighty meat-grinder of the internet that towered before me. But it was, in fact, nothing more than a garden hose in the hands of the custodian, Hal. Hal’s job, as far as I could tell, was to see to it that the library was tidy, warm in the winter, cool in the summer, that all the toilets flushed, all the light bulbs were screwed in tight, and that the floor of the basement was clean. All the other systems of the library seemed to be functioning as expected, so now he was now going to wash the basement floor. ‘I never was much of a swimmer,’ I remember thinking as I swirled.
What I didn’t know after spending what felt like two full days in purgatory, was that I had been caught in the drainpipe in the boiler room. How was I to know? It was dark and solitary. I was blinded and helpless.”
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An Afterthought, by Harry Donaldson
“In preparation for my historical victory, I had sat down to write my submission to the Boston Globe’s obituary section a month before my siege on the library’s internet computer. It was the beginning of December, 2007.
Well, eventually 2007 came and went. I would have been the last person to die in 2007 had I actually died. I had hoped at least for that distinction, but… instead it went like this:
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Harry Donaldson, beloved son of Larry and Jeri Donaldson, loyal servant of the people and of the Boston Public Library, lost his life in the line of duty as a civilian soldier, protecting his fellow man from unknown evils perpetrated by unstoppable forces upon a helpless humankind. His was a notable death, in fact, the most notable death of 2007.
Mr. Donaldson so loved his brethren, his comrades, that he took it upon himself to be the voice of an otherwise voiceless people in an army bereft of soldiers, so that he could lead them out of the darkness and into the light on the march away from a place of tyranny and captivity, to a place of liberation and enlightenment. May God protect his battle-weary soul. |
“Dear Reader,
I have now returned from my peculiar vantage point that I mistakenly perceived to be the so-called ‘other side.' Now, in retrospect, I can see that it was not, and, as I look back, I can tell you, humbly, that mine was a spectacular failure.
So now, here I sit, back at my desk, a stoop shouldered, defeated, spineless worm. I started writing this story fully expecting it to be my own epic tale of heroism. But now I think I’ll just throw it in the trash.
I still loath the internet, mind you. It has made a fool of me. But the battle is not over.
I see Nick through the great doorway to the next cavernous room of the library. He looks up from his books once in a while, and for a moment I think I catch his eye. He looks back at me as if I were a shapeless blur on a rainy window pane. He squints. He wipes his glasses. He goes back to his work.
And Beverly?
Beverly just ‘friended’ me on Facebook.”
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I have now returned from my peculiar vantage point that I mistakenly perceived to be the so-called ‘other side.' Now, in retrospect, I can see that it was not, and, as I look back, I can tell you, humbly, that mine was a spectacular failure.
So now, here I sit, back at my desk, a stoop shouldered, defeated, spineless worm. I started writing this story fully expecting it to be my own epic tale of heroism. But now I think I’ll just throw it in the trash.
I still loath the internet, mind you. It has made a fool of me. But the battle is not over.
I see Nick through the great doorway to the next cavernous room of the library. He looks up from his books once in a while, and for a moment I think I catch his eye. He looks back at me as if I were a shapeless blur on a rainy window pane. He squints. He wipes his glasses. He goes back to his work.
And Beverly?
Beverly just ‘friended’ me on Facebook.”
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