Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

For every day that ended in disappointment — a trade agreement that fell through, a borrower who confessed to the loss of a long-overdue item — there were just as many delightful surprises. There was Mr. Hulbert of Haus Ephraim who labored nights at the rubberworks and once brought her a genuine, rotating date stamp and a felt ink pad. Old Man Klopstock, who still manned a shovel detail at the city dumping ground, dropped off, one dawn, a cardboard box filled with a Bible, a dictionary, a huge geographical atlas, and an assortment of children’s comic books. And the widow Tschamrda, who washed windows at Busson, Mirski & Moult, salvaged the treasure of a multivolume set of legal statutes— The Revised Criminal Code of Old Bohemia —when the firm demanded a fresh edition with bindings that matched the new office decor. The widow rescued the books from the back of a trash hauler and secreted them away in a supply closet, then carried one volume home each night, tucked under the rags in a mopping pail, until she’d reunited the entire set. For her bravery and efforts, Alicia labeled the shelf that housed the statutes the Tschamrda Memorial Law Library.

People started visiting the attic with increasing regularity. And if father groused about the lack of privacy, he was quietly impressed with his offspring’s ability to turn a lunatic daydream into a thriving reality. He adjusted to the change in his routine, was able to sit at the dinner table in his undershirt, suspenders hanging to the floor, savoring a pan-fried kidney while to his left a duo of smoke-engulfed old men prowled for a rumored American “cowboy” book and to his right a circle of, to his mind, overly serious young women filled their arms with out-of-date German economics texts. And in time he thought nothing of sitting in the bathtub, soaking behind the thin muslin curtain as the young bachelor Karp, from Haus Manasseh, continued to nervously interrupt a reading and sewing Alicia with made-up questions and inconsequential comments. The young man clearly had a smoldering and ill-disguised passion for the girl. But, as Alicia herself would put it when questioned by her father about settling down and starting a family, “I’m not interested in such things, Papa. I have a higher calling.”

“Don’t end up alone, like me,” the father warned, but he knew, in this area at least, his words held no sway over his daughter.

The library was closed on the night that Censor Meyrink came to visit. Because of the heat, the attic was close to unbearable and many people were doing their reading outside on their stoops. Alicia, however, ignored the airless oppression of the book room and went to work sorting out the latest acquisitions in the new-books bin. From her vantage point before the front window of the loft, she had a sky-view of the whole of the block, could see the convoy of trucks and scooters, could see the shredding machine as it formed a barricade between the Schiller and the outside world. It is not so much that she froze when she realized what was about to happen. It is more that it all happened faster than her ability to analyze and solve the problem. Or, rather, faster than her understanding, in the moments that Meyrink began to read from the Orders of Erasure and the Reapers began to kick open all the doors and haul her neighbors outside, that there was no solution to be found. She spotted three soldiers running toward Haus Levi and, rather than making a conscious choice, gave in to the instinct, born of terror and confusion, that was flooding through her body for the first time.

And she dove into the book-filled laundry bin, squirmed and flailed her way to the bottom, covered herself with books, curled up into the smallest fetal ringlet her body would allow and blanketed herself with a shroud of paper and ink.

Moments later the door to the loft room exploded off its hinges with the kick of a steel-toed boot. This, even though the door had been unlocked. Three barking soldiers, not long past puberty, stormed inside. They spread out like rabid and clumsy street dogs, shoving over shelf after shelf, throwing anything they passed to the floor.

Then one of them yelled, “Tell the Censor we found it,” and the three exited the library as quickly as they’d entered.

Alicia waited, unable to move, so far beyond anything she would have previously labeled horror, floating in a jellylike void of paralysis, already on the verge of thinking I should have let them find me.

The screaming from the street below came into the attic loft through its only window. And as the screaming grew, Alicia lifted herself, pushed up with her palms, books sliding away like heavy water. She brought her head just above the lip of the bin, looked out the window to see all of Schiller Avenue packed to bursting with its inhabitants. She had the finest view of anyone present that night. A vantage so clear and unobstructed that it combined with the nature of the event itself to create the sense that she was watching a movie. This was how it appeared to transpire — a staged performance crafted by the best in a profession dedicated to agonizingly brutal illusion.

She made herself watch. She forced the eyes to stay open through it all, willed the ears to record every scream. She would not look away. She listened to the man read the Orders of Erasure. She saw the impact of his words on the faces of her neighbors. She watched the cyclone fencing being pulled from the flatbed and unspooled up and down the street. Saw the fencing being connected to the winches of the obliterator and watched the machine roar into life. She watched the penned-in crowd instantly turn into an enormous, flailing beast, crazed with the latest and highest fear, turning against itself, rearing up and striking out and, finding nowhere to run, lashing back in at its own body. She saw the trampling begin. Saw the soldiers climbing up on top of their trucks to get a better position for picking off targets futilely trying to scramble up the metal netting. Watched the teeth and hooks and razors spin into a blur, salivating grease as the monster prepared for its banquet. And she saw the first bodies hauled inside the Pulpmeister.

She was a witness, ladies and gentlemen. She was an attestor. She stayed hidden, but she kept watch, her eyes always just above the rim of the book bin. Never sinking below. She did not allow herself. Would not give herself even this small reprieve as her whole world — the only world she had ever known since birth, the only people she had ever lived with — was summarily destroyed and, literally, shredded into pulp. She was just seventeen years old, ladies and gentlemen. Can you imagine this kind of will at this tender age? This kind of control? Making your eyes and ears bear witness to the slaughter of everything you hold dear? Knowing, instinctually, that this was all you could do and still doing it?

Zwack stares out at the crowd, head pivoting slowly on the neck as she squints through the spotlight trying to see faces. Her wooden lids are unblinking. Finally she asks, “Could any of you ever agree to submit yourself to this kind of test?”

But after a long silence, the only answer comes from Otto Langer. Blinking his eyes as if he’s just woken up, his voice now restored to its familiar timber, Otto pulls in a deep and trembling breath and replies, “I could not.”

Wylie Brown walks deeper into the orchards thinking about the cost of useless knowledge, about the fact that she’s one of maybe ten people in the country who understand that the dead apple trees around her are a unique breed, a variety peculiar to this farm, a hybrid created by E. C. Brockden himself, not because he had any particular interest in the husbandry of fruit, but because he was told in a dream that “new apples will be needed to feed the new worms.”