“No.” She gathered her things. “The oversight committee will be in touch.” She gave no indication if they would be giving him good news or bad.
“Of course,” he managed to say. “Would you like me to walk you to the—”
“I’ve just spent how long studying your building’s blueprints? I think I can find my way to the front door on my own.”
“Certainly. Of course.”
She gave him a clipped goodbye and headed for the door.
When it’d closed behind her, Akio finally let out that sigh and slumped into his chair.
It looked like he’d dodged a bullet. He decided to wait until she was past security, just to be sure, before placing a call to Colonel Byrne to update him.
And to let him know that someone had been in touch with the undersecretary, sharing details that should have — without a doubt — remained under wraps.
Curiosity gets the best of me.
“Hey, Xav, can I ask you what you’re reading? What Fionna gave you back at the house?”
“Her answer to my question yesterday.”
“And that was?”
“Why she doesn’t want her kids reading the classics.”
Ah.
Yes, that’s right.
I almost forgot about that.
“What does she say?”
“Let’s see…” He shows me that there are three pages of meticulously written notes. “Read it or summarize it for you?”
“A summary is good.”
“Give me a sec.”
As Undersecretary Williamson drove away from the Plyotech Cybernetics R&D facility, she put a call through.
A voice answered. “Yes?”
“Reschedule my flight. I’m going to be staying the night in Vegas.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s here. They’re hiding it. I’m not sure where, maybe another level that doesn’t appear on the schematics.”
“What do you propose we do?”
“I’ll call you later. In the meantime, I’m going to pay a visit to a friend of mine to find out what’s really going on here.”
“Well, she actually makes some good points,” Xavier tells me.
“I’m all ears.”
“For starters, does anyone cry today when they read — or watch—Hamlet?”
“I’d have to say probably not too many, no.”
“That’s what she says too. But people will cry watching a Hallmark commercial. Why?”
“Hmm. I guess because we have to mentally translate Shakespeare, and the story becomes an intellectual exercise rather than an emotionally engaging experience.”
“Exactly. And, as Fionna says, ‘By forcing students to read stories that don’t emotionally resonate with them, we systematically teach them to hate reading. It’s happened to a lot of kids.’”
I can’t argue with that. I hated some of the “classics” I had to read in high school and college.
“And,” he continues, “she believes that the classics weren’t as well written as stories are today. The authors simply didn’t have the ability to edit and word process like we do today, so they were forced to settle for manuscripts that were good enough rather than the best possible. A good author today might edit a scene twenty or thirty times. Can you imagine retyping War and Peace or Moby-Dick thirty times?”
“That’s not really how I’d like to spend an afternoon. Or every afternoon. For a year.”
“Me neither. She points out that writers a couple hundred years ago didn’t have as much competition as writers do today, so they didn’t need to be as good to get an audience. They could… let’s see…”
He flips to the next page. “I’ll just read this part. ‘Writers in the past relied on gimmicks that are too puerile for today’s narratively astute and discerning readers. For example, Charles Dickens often used coincidence to solve his plot problems. It’s lazy writing, and contemporary readers know that and expect better stories. You just can’t make that fly today. You can’t introduce characters, develop them, and then just discard them (i.e., Les Misérables). Or be heavy-handed and didactic (Pilgrim’s Progress) or all but incomprehensible (Ulysses). Marketable stories today (that is, stories people read because they want to, not because they were told they’re supposed to) have to be, and are, better crafted.’”
“Wow. And this from a homeschooling mom.”
He considers that. “Maybe homeschooling isn’t a lost cause after all.” He peruses the sheets. “There’s one last section here. The competition part. ‘Today hundreds of thousands of titles are published every year. Obviously that wasn’t the case a couple hundred years ago. Today’s writers are competing for people’s attention against millions of other writers, billions of websites and blogs, not to mention video games, television, Facebook updates, tweets, movies, and so on. They have to be better just to survive.’”
“What about the test of time? Remember how she told us that The Catcher in the Rye and Silas Marner hadn’t stood the test of time?”
“Well, she says that the test of time is if people in the future still want to read a book and don’t just do so under threat of punishment.”
“A bad grade.”
“Exactly. A book you’re forced to read but would never read if you had the choice hasn’t stood the test. So, Poe’s stories have stood the test of time, The Lord of the Rings has stood the test of time; Silas Marner has not.”
“Fionna sure thinks outside the box.”
“Yes.” Xavier seems deep in thought. “She does.”
Undersecretary Williamson found out that her friend wouldn’t be able to meet until seven.
It wasn’t what she’d been hoping to hear, but she went ahead and set up the meeting at the Arête.
Which was, as it turned out, the most natural place for the two of them to have their chat.
Charlene helped Fionna look through Emilio’s files, following up on any references to Dr. Schatzing, RixoTray’s progeria researcher.
As she did, she told herself not to worry about Jevin and Xavier. They were big boys. They could take care of themselves.
No, she didn’t want to be clingy or overprotective. No, no, of course not. She didn’t want Jevin to change for her. The very fact that he was a bold, adventurous adrenaline junkie was one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place.
And, yet, in a way she did want him to change.
It was all very confusing, as if something was getting lost between her head and her heart.
She didn’t think it was fair of her to ask him to give up something essential about who he was just to be with her, but if he didn’t, she was afraid she might lose him for good.
You have to let go of someone to let him fly free, but if you don’t hold on to him you might lose what you care about the most.
The house phone rang, and Fionna looked at her strangely. “I didn’t even know that was connected. The whole time we were house-sitting here it hasn’t rung.”
Charlene eyed it.
“So you’ll text, no problem,” Fionna said, “but you really don’t like talking on the phone.”
“No I do not.”
“Why is that?”
“Call it a quirk.”
The phone continued to ring.
“Should I answer it?” Fionna asked.
“Not too many people have this number,” Charlene muttered.
Another ring.
Maddie’s voice floated down from upstairs. “Should I get that, Mom?”