Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

When the community was assembled in the street, packed together like carp in the fishmonger’s barrel, everything suddenly grew quiet and Censor Meyrink stepped farther into the road, his boot heels ticking on the cobblestone. He positioned himself in front of the shredding machine and waited until convinced that all eyes were upon him. Then he took his silver clipboard from under his arm and read to us the Orders of Erasure.

The Bogomil rolls out of the cavern of the downtown financial strip, the small cluster of midget skyscrapers, a lane of flat-faced, reflecting cubes that will one day tell future architects and archaeologists that this was the valley where imagination came to die. Langer exits the shadow of the First Apostle Bank & Trust and the Inspector watches through the safety divider and the wind-shield to find the outline of Gompers Station.

During every drive, they end up, at some point, circling Gompers, and the Inspector wonders if a time will come when the cabdriver will confess the nature of his compulsive attraction to the decrepit train hall. Its hold on him is self-evident. The story slows and Langer’s voice drops toward a whisper. The speed of the taxi decreases to a crawl and the old man stares out at the building as they wind their way round a 36o-degree panorama of obsolescence and decay. Always the same route, a slow and rigid circle around Gompers and then back off into random parts of the city, the speed of both the cab and the story instantly restored to normal.

Technically, the charge leveled against us, the whole community, every baby in the Schiller, even those still asleep in the womb, was the study and dissemination of subversive texts. To the best of my reasoning, back when I used to dwell on minutiae of this sort, back when this kind of obsessive and futile detail would plague me for weeks on end, I would assume by subversive texts the Censor was referring to the nihilistic pamphlets distributed by a small clique of adolescents in the Schiller, among them Fritzi and Kolo who lived with their mother above Loisitschek’s butcher shop. But at times I have also wondered if they could have been referring to that circle of old men, amateur cabalists, hobbyists of the mystical, who spent the last of their days in the back of the Kokoschka bathhouse, exchanging angry commentary on The Fecundation of the Soul.

I ask you, does it really matter? What is the difference between foolish young boys overheated with the first bloom of the darker philosophies and foolish old men enjoying the mysterious algebras of other worlds beyond our own? Both are to be pitied and, to a point, indulged, for one group may learn from their excesses and the other is past the point of being a danger to anyone.

Up until this juncture, the subversive-text provision was an ancient and seldom-prosecuted statute of the old ecclesiastical courts of Maisel. But it had been subsumed into the secular charter under the definitions of treason. And as a treasonous offense, of course, it was punishable by death, to be administered in a manner acceptable to the Magistrates. If there had been some sort of court trial, no one from the Schiller had been invited to it. And the Capital Fires a year later destroyed whatever documentation might have been found.

Still, that night in July, there was no mention made of treason nor of a death sentence. The Orders of Erasure appeared to be a mundane warrant that authorized the search, seizure, and destruction of any and all radical materials circulating throughout the Ezzenes community of Schiller Avenue. But do you haul the largest eviscerator in Old Bohemia to a tiny ghetto in the middle of the night just for a common search and confiscation detail? Whose sense of the dramatic is so inflamed?

I ask you, Doctor, what should we make of the Ezzenes’ capacity for naïveté? We thought they were going to throw our books into the dragon’s mouth.

But at some point, as Meyrink read the Orders, perhaps at some preunderstood moment, some sentence or word sounding a silent alarm, the Reapers, as if animated by an electrical shock, ran for the flatbed truck and began to offload the rolled bundles of cyclone fencing. You know the type of fencing I am referring to? You must know. For another of the great ironies of the Sweep, this one unique to me, is that the fencing was manufactured here in Quin-sigamond. I am not joking. Produced right here in our city. Black Rose Wire and Gable Company. Down on Terezin. A family concern, I understand. Very much a quality product, the wire so fine and yet so unbreakable, so malleable and yet always razor sharp.

The community as a whole was attempting to listen to the legalese and babble being proclaimed much too fast by Meyrink and at the same time trying to watch as the unmarked soldiers wrapped us in the fencing. They ran down the length of the avenue, unspooling the taut rolls of chicken wire the way you would unfurl a flag, past Haus Reuben, Haus Simeon, and on, separating the people from their homes, making the corner at Haus Levi, and returning toward the front of the alley and the patiently waiting monster. We thought they were fencing us out of our homes. That they would search each apartment for the mythical subversive tracts and, in the bargain, help themselves to whatever humble trinkets they might find. At worst, some of the pessimists believed we were finally being relocated, that the city was taking our street by eminent domain and shipping us to a place even more removed and destitute.

And yet, if this was to be the case, why the need for the expurgating machine? Did none of us look beyond the Censor at the hardware flanking him and wonder why they had gone to the bother of hauling this demon through the sickeningly hot night in order to threaten a roadful of pacifist Jews?

It was only after Meyrink spit out his last words — something about “the security and sovereignty of Old Bohemia”—and clapped the clipboard under his arm and did an awkward goose step past the shredder, outside the net of fencing, that our panic began to simmer.

And when the Reapers hooked the free ends of the fence to the winches and turned them on and the fencing immediately began to retract, to condense, to roll itself up upon the drums, to pull inward and force the entire community in upon itself, this was when the panic exploded into full boil, into hysteria and the madness of primal, undiluted terror.

As the motors of the shredding machine were switched on and the grinding of the various movable parts began to mix with the screams of the crowd, the outer edge of my people began to feel the first sting of the wire, the thin steel strips cutting into their faces, their arms and legs and backs and bellies and genitals. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to go. We were trapped within the net of the fence. And the net was closing in on itself. We were mashed one against the other. And the horrific chaos within the web was growing more atrocious with each passing instant.

Can you imagine, Inspector, what the next three hours were like? That is how long we agree it took to complete the Erasure. Can you imagine what took place within the corral in that time? Within the minds of the trapped, clawing at sky and ground and lattice to get free? Clawing finally at one another out of desperation and even out of basic physics, out of the way the body was being manipulated by the force of the wire net pulling forward, pulling inevitably toward the mouth of the eviscerating beast.

Immediately, in the first seconds of constriction, some made the mistake of trying to climb up the fence. But they were betrayed by the flexibility of the construct. And even if the makeshift netting instantly began to bend back down on top of them, this did not stop the Reapers from firing a spray of artillery at the would-be escapees. It was like a fishbowl. There was literally no place to hide. Boys and girls climbed up their fathers’ backs and shoulders, trying to jump, to heave themselves over the barbed top of the fence, only to be shot by the State’s marksmen. One young mother simply gathered her infant into her chest and squatted down in the midst of the tumult until she disappeared under the cover of swarming bodies.