Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

I do not mean to be poetic. Poetry is the last thing I mean to give you. I do not want you to look for multiple levels of meaning.

I’m lying, Gilrein. Of course I want you to search between the lines. Of course I do. No act of transcription is innocent.

And neither is Alicia’s Testament. It is a necessary slap in the form of a story. I realize, as you must, that it is too late for me. And I have every reason to believe it is also too late for you. You are already a ghost. You seem one of those transient spirits that cannot exist in the material world, yet neither can he find a way into the other world.

The other world. As if such a thing could exist. As if all the Edens of all our dreams could be anything but a myth we create to numb the crushing banality of our own viciousness. As if there were an alternative to the truth that the whole teeming lot of us is just no damn good.

If you buck against my last statement, then perhaps there is a hope for you that I have been unable to see. If you think the existence of Alicia’s Testament matters in the end, then perhaps you are not the perfect mirror I have imagined you to be. Whatever the case, it is in your hands now. It feels like a corpse and it smells like vinegar.

At the end of the third day, Alicia collapsed into sleep. The pen was still clutched in her hand. The hand was stained a deep blue. The muscles beneath the skin of the writing hand were wrenched past cramp and into a kind of nerve-damaged twitch, jerking and lurching at the end of the girl’s arm, as if manipulated by strings from some unseen dimension. Even in this kind of comalike sleep, born of shock-trauma, while the rest of the body lay prone, the hand continued to move, locked in a loop of its own particular dream. It played and replayed a Sisyphean nightmare where it endlessly formed a bottomless well of blood into signs and symbols and ideograms comprised of lines and loops and crosses and curves, and though the hand knew instinctually how to construct these characters, it could never find illumination as to their meaning, what the ink lines on the page represented in the scheme of some other, hidden world.

This is how the Censor’s men found her. Teams had been moving from building to building, stripping anything of value for the State Treasury and dousing what remained with a generous bath of gasoline. Meyrink had set his most trusted stooges to secure the attic library of the Levi and word was given that nothing was to be touched until the Chief Expurgator himself arrived on the scene.

When he climbed the stairs and, near the top floor, came to smell that unmistakable redolence of old paper, worn and slightly musty pages, beaten leather, that unique variety of slightly acrid perfume that incenses a room long filled with used books, the Censor of Maisel stopped and let it wash over him and felt the excitement of the addicted in the abundant presence of their opiate. He stood outside the doorway, eyes closed, the sound of his nose in full exertion alerting the soldiers within of his approach. When he stepped through the library entrance and found his men circled like fascist dwarfs around Snow White, his anticipatory delight was transformed instantly from the anarchistic desire of the looter into the anal responsibility of the authoritarian.

“What in the world do we have here?” he asked the room in general.

And his youngest attendant, a boy we now believe was named Moltke, innocently replied, “A survivor, sir.”

He gave the boy a look more withering than satisfied and asked, “How did this happen? I was told every room was searched.”

This time Moltke stayed silent and kept his eyes on the sleeping body and it was up to another to volunteer, “She must have been hiding, sir.”

But Meyrink wasn’t listening. He had spotted the scraps of paper spread around Alicia and was stooping to pick up a random sheet. Now, Gilrein, I have gone back and forth as to whether I am thankful that I will never know what went through Meyrink’s mind in the seconds that he read some chance run of words from Alicia’s Testament or whether, in fact, I am hopelessly regretful that his thoughts will always be lost to me. I have felt both ways. There have been days when I remember the warning of greater minds than my own never to look too long nor too deeply into the face of a monster. Yet, of course, other giants of cogitation have insisted that only by inhabiting the mind of the beast can we demythologize him and deal with him on our own, earthly terms. It is a debate that you, too, will soon have to engage in, I would think. But, though you may or may not wish to follow my lead, I have finally decided that, in the absence of ever truly knowing what the Censor thought and felt upon discovering Alicia, and more important, discovering her gospel, I will imagine what seems most likely.

And I think that Meyrink loved what he found on the floor. I think he was thrilled with the manner in which his words and deeds had been elevated to STORY. I believe he was moved and honored and exhilarated by the idea that the banal reality of the Erasure had already, almost instantly, been mutated into a kind of legend, a myth that made use of all the essential elements — life and death and language and hatred and power. And within this new myth, he, Meyrink, the Censor of Maisel, was pulled along by the force of the story and carried, somehow, to its center, its igniting spark, the initial word that provoked all that came next. I think Meyrink held a piece of Alicia’s credo between his hands, fingers taut in the margins of the paper, and I think he was stunned by this new, epiphanizing fable of what had been a bloody detail handed to a faceless bureaucrat. A moment before his mission was set into motion, Meyrink had been just one more Vice Chancellor of Expurgation occupying a cubicle office in the basement of the Ministry of Propaganda, Division of Official Indexing, Bureau of Standards and Decorum. And by the end of his chore, once every voice in the Schiller had been silenced, every eye permanently closed, he had been made into a monster of historic proportions, the kind of icon that is needed, every so often, to give the masses a ready, easily accessible definition of undiluted evil.

I think he could have bent down and kissed Alicia. I think he wanted, more than anything else that he’d discovered this far into his small life, to become the prince of eternal darkness in the dreams of the unconscious beauty at his feet.

He got on his knees and began to gather all the disparate papers together, attempting to shuffle them into some kind of order. At one point one of his men tried to bend down and help and the Censor screamed for the soldier to come to attention. He wanted no hands but his own to come in contact with the manuscript. Every few pages that he collected, he would stop for just a second and read a line or two from the topmost sheet, then, flushed and making a slight grunting noise, he would go back to his hunt. When he had found all the pages and double-checked under books and produce crates that there were no stray leaves, he sat on the floor and lay the stack of writing in his lap. There was suddenly a very antsy and nervous air about him, something that combined with his fatigue and exhaustion from working without sleep for too long. He put one hand flat on the manuscript, reached his other into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a set of keys, which he tossed through the air to Moltke. Then he quietly addressed his men, in a tone that was more request than order, instructing them to wrap the girl in a blanket and take her to his home.

Moltke began to protest with a reminder of the final paragraph in the Orders of Erasure, but the Censor silenced his underling with a hand on the shoulder.

A deputy named Varnbuler quietly, perhaps even challengingly, asked, “Don’tyou mean that we should take the prisoner to your office?”