The Reader

General Robert E. Lee closed the book, set it aside. Three weeks and three books. Granted, stories, yet they felt so real. At the end of the second, Wilkes Booth shoots the president, Abe Lincoln, in the shoulder, but you can tell, it wasn’t like that to begin with, that Booth must’ve killed him. Shot and killed him.
Lee scratched his right eyebrow. He’d met Abe Lincoln just once, at the White House, letting him know face-to-face that he was resigning his commission in the United States Army, that he would not take command of the U.S. forces. He hadn’t said, I am more Virginian than American.
The president was not his enemy. It had not been a war between enemies, awful as it was. War is forever like to like, mortal to mortal. Lincoln had not asked him to reconsider. I expected this, he had said. A tall man, gray-eyed and serious. No buffoon, no ignorant westerner; nothing of what they said about him in the South was true.
He knew now, and hadn’t known it at the time, but it was Abe Lincoln who was the other general. Not even Grant. That it was Abraham Lincoln’s hand that had guided the armies of the North. And, oh, how Abraham Lincoln had bemoaned that General Meade allowed him to slide across the Potomac unscathed and the war to continue. That would have been the end.
Hindsight told him everything, and nothing.
The books had appeared on his doorstep wrapped in paper and tied with string. He knew right off, knew it again from the first page of the first book, with the picture of the penny on the cover, that the times were inside out. But that was already an old story—even before they fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. Or not inside out—more like the strip named for the astronomer from Leipzig, twisted back on itself, always coming back to the beginning. August Ferdinand Mˆbius.
And now with the third and last book read, and the child Sarah saying, Be careful what you say about what’s still to happen, what should he do? Burn these books? Is he to keep them on a shelf, in sight, out of sight? Books no one has ever written, not as yet. Books that would write themselves, print themselves, wrap themselves up and deliver themselves just like an ordinary parcel. And that the last word of the last book should be [the name of his faithful horse,] Traveller.