The Librarian

by BRYAN C. FISHER

The 57 year old man with thick, graying hair, brandished the handgun as he was finishing his coffee.

"This little guy is my favorite. It's like a scalpel. The Taurus PT22 is the modern Dillinger."

Eric was tough, a former marine who had spent the last 23 years doing this job. He was almost blank as he was describing his current sidearm to Ezra, his young charge. Of course, I took issue with the reference to John Booth's choice of weapon.

"Eric, the Dillinger did nothing for Booth when he was up against people who knew he was armed."

He just rolled his eyes as he looked down the barrel of the gun towards the floor, before glancing up at me.

"Booth stepped out of the shadows and exposed himself. The Dillinger was perfect for him until he let his theatrical side take over. He got flashy... I don't get flashy."

I shook my head. He had a point. "But," I thought to myself, "what if we were discovered? Would that little gun protect you, then?" A whole lot of money and talent was devoted to finding the library that we protected. We were the Spear.

For two millenia, our secret society, the Spear of Ptolemy has preserved one of the real wonders of the ancient world - the knowledge once held in the halls of one of history's most prolific and well-known libraries: The Library at Alexandria. While humanity has recovered some of the information supposedly lost in the fires that demolished the building, so much of the knowledge - world changing knowledge - remains to be re-discovered.

Over the centuries between 48 BCE, when much of the library's collection was allegedly destroyed, and today, the Spear has carefully preserved and cataloged the books and scrolls they protected, while keeping the knowledge safely concealed until the civilized world was again united under a common flag, as it had been in the days of the Roman Empire.

Throughout the generations, the Spear dwindled, from the 72 members who heroically and stealthily secreted away the 227,000 - well, 227,417, to be exact - most important scrolls and books that had been housed in the great library, to just the two of us. It's been this way - librarian and apprentice - since 1778, when most of the remnants left to fight for the British against the colonists after the library had been relocated to the Colonies, in Richmond, Virginia.

The 17 men who left to fight against the colonists believed that the British would unite the civilized world. Indeed, they were on their way to amassing an empire that would span the globe, and they had all the resources they could possibly need to squash the colonist rebellion. What they lacked was spirit, which is, of course, why they would go on to lose. None of the 17 ever returned, or if they did, they never found the library. It was moved to Charleston, South Carolina before the war ended.

By the late 1800s, it was settled here, at the Grant Opera House, where it's been ever since. In all, 1,827 people in history knew, for sure, that the most valuable contents of the library were saved (Well, now that you know, it's 1,828).

Eric was still mumbling about his little .22, as I slipped my Smith & Wesson .357 into a concealed holster at my hip. I kicked my feet up on the table to enjoy my own coffee. Today was, like so many others in the 12 years that I'd been learning from the old man, going to be filled with nothing exciting - the life of a librarian and his student. I'd long since learned the routines of the librarian, and the keys to maintaining a life of secrecy and invisibility. I sipped my coffee and smiled as a sliver of sun peaked through the small window near the ceiling onto my arm.

Suddenly, there was a soft whistle from the door. Someone had breached the entrance. We both leapt into action, with Eric going for the handle, pistol in hand. Just as he reached it, two bullets punched through the door frame, right at the lock - I'll have to fix that - and the door flew open. Eric caught it with his shoulder and shuddered backwards as a woman with black-no, brown, very dark brown-hair and a black leather jacket raised a large gun-I'm guessing a .45 magnum-towards him, shooting just as he fell to dodge the bullets.

I had slipped around the corner out of her line of sight right before the door opened, and I now slipped a little further into the shadows.

Eric quickly rolled behind the chair, and got off two shots, hitting her in the leg. As she fell, he leapt up to finish her.

He pulled the trigger.

Click

She quickly recoiled, but he kicked her in the chest before she could get another shot off. He was on top of her, trying to wrestle the gun away from her for a minute before she managed to fire into his arm, knocking him back. He glanced over towards me and closed his left fist over his chest - It was time.

He ejected the bad round just before another shot, from her .45, hit his leg.

"You won't get the librarian alive!" He yelled, before firing three shots in my direction.

I stumbled out, grasping my shoulder as if I'd been hit.

"Help me, please!"

She looked at me with a baffled look, before she fired two more rounds into Eric's chest, killing him. I rushed to her side as he slumped back. She warily nodded towards my arm.

"I'm okay. He just grazed my arm, I think. But, your leg."

She knelt to put pressure on the bullet hole in her leg.

"Is there anything I can do?"

She glanced up at me and my 5' 7" frame - much more slight than Eric's imposing 6' 3" had been. I was nowhere near as threatening. She shook her head, pulling a folded piece of paper out of her pocket with her spare hand. I took a silent step behind her.

"Where's the librarian? I expected him to be older."

"He was."

She collapsed into a heap as the smoke wafted from the barrel of my Smith & Wesson - which had just put a bullet into her head.

I picked up the paper. The name on it was Alexander Wyatt Hamilton. The description was of a 72 year old man with a frail build, light blue eyes, and a Star of Bethlehem tattoo on his shoulder blade. I shivered. It was accurate. How, I don't know... I stepped back around the corner where I had been hiding when she came in and pressed a button hidden behind a tapestry, sealing off the basement of the opera house. I then turned to the corner.

"Well, Wyatt, I don't know how they did it, but they figured out who you were, and at least she figured out where we are. I'm so sorry that this is the protocol, but the Library - and the Spear - must live on. Thank you for your life's dedication. I won't disappoint you."

The old man didn't move. His eyes blankly stared up towards the ceiling. Two of Eric's bullets had struck his chest and the third landed in his temple. I wiped a tear from my cheek as I knelt and closed his blue eyes.

Reaching up to the desk, I pulled the dusty black ledger from the back corner and opened it up to the list of names on the 3rd page. I wrote today's date to the right of Wyatt's name and underlined my own name beneath his. I sighed as I closed the book, and wiped the dust from the cover, which was emblazoned with tarnished gold leaf, LIBRARIAN'S LEDGER. It held the names of all the librarians since the library was moved to the New World. We also used it to keep a record of all the encounters between ourselves and the outside. I'd have to enter today's encounter later. I stared at the book for several minutes.

My name - Ezra Michael Booth - is up. I am now the librarian. I need to find a new apprentice. And hire a new bodyguard.

I looked over at Eric's body.

Maybe I should hire two bodyguards this time.

"But first," I said aloud, as I stood and shook my head, "I have to fix the fucking door."

Recidivism: Just Another 'ism that is Still a Problem in America

67.5% - That's the 3 year re-arrest rate for prisoners in the United States. Of those, 40% find themselves back in prison within 36 months of release...

There are several metrics where the United States claims the top spot. Along with having the highest divorce rate and the highest obesity rate, we have the highest incarceration rate in the world. China, which has a population four times the size of the United States, has the second largest prison population, trailing the U.S. by 25%. Approximately 1 in 30 Americans is currently incarcerated, on probation, or on parole (ie. Actively in the penal system). On a side note, having the highest obesity rate means that we also have the"largest" prison population...

Of course, it's not really a surprise. So many laws carry prison time as a possible consequence that a reasonable guess is that more than 70% of the adult population in the U.S. has committed an offense that could land them in jail. Ever gone to the bathroom to get someone their prescriptive medicine? Your husband or wife, maybe? The way the law is written, you could be convicted of dispersing a controlled substance, which carries jail time... Nearly half of American adults will admit to driving while under the influence of drugs (legal or not) or alcohol in the last 3 years, also an imprisonable offense, and a third admit to having used illicit drugs in their lifetime (mostly marijuana or prescription drugs). This particular group includes more than one U.S. president in the last 20 years, though one of them "didn't inhale..."

But, getting thrown into prison is just one problem. The numbers introducing this post extrapolate out to mean that.once you've been there, you are more than 10 times as likely to go back if, and when, you are released. We have a system designed to keep you out of society once you're in the system. That's not the way a penal system in a free country should operate. It should be a system that only punishes those who really deserve to be punished, and once they serve their time, they ought to be transitioned back into normal society.

I understand that this is a hard position for politicians to take, because nobody wants to be labeled as soft on crime, but there's a difference between punishing a crime, and destroying a life, and in their zeal to criminalize anything they don't like, hire more police, and build more prisons, politicians have long since left punishment behind. We've long since passed the point where our elected leaders should be ashamed of all the lives that our penal system has destroyed.

Really, only those crimes that harm society, and which are not reasonably deterrable, should result in prison time. Crimes like DUI can be reasonably deterred by requiring a person convicted of a DUI to have an ignition interlock installed on their car. There's no reason to spend $25,000 to lock them up for a year, when a device that costs maybe 1/50th of that can prevent the crime from being repeated. Of course, DUI is just one example of wastefulness in our penal code.

We'd save billions of dollars each year just by keeping most traffic offenders out of prison. Then, there are all the drug possession offenses, property crimes, many white collar crimes, and so on... These are crimes that don't usually put the health, safety, and freedom of others at risk.

Some of those crimes should involve repayment, sure, but the current penal system doesn't even allow for that to happen. For those crimes, there should be a labor program that offenders are required to participate in, if they don't have a job. That way, they are repaying their victims, and not placing a $25,000 annual burden on the taxpayers. Plus, they learn to take responsibility for their actions, and when they finish the program, they don't have a difficult transition back into society, since they never left it...

We need to take a serious look at fixing our broken system. Set aside our fear of being called soft on crime, and consider the more dangerous problem of creating a society where almost all of us are criminals, just lucky that the government doesn't use our indiscretions too throw us all in prison...

Yet.