This is what I whisper to you now, so that you will carry the story of the library, so that you will know how we made magic and how we made books out of burdens. This is to teach you how to transform loss into literature, and love into a future. It is to teach you how to make a book that will endure burning.
* * *
—
Hours after my father’s body went cold, the Needle found me huddled beside him.
“Will we get revenge?” I asked her. The hole in my daddy’s heart hid half a sentence, and I wanted to cut it from the skin of the person who’d killed him.
“It’s a long revenge,” she said, with some regret, and I was unsatisfied. I wanted urgency, murder, fury.
The Needle had white hair to her knees, and the ends were stone black. She carried an ax and kept it sharp, but that wasn’t what she gave me. The Needle gave me a bath and made me a sandwich, went back out in her night camouflage and hauled my daddy in.
“Before revenge,” she said, “is ceremony.”
“Do we have to go through the alphabet?” I asked, but the Needle had nothing to say to me about the letters between C and R.
The Needle kept the contents of all of her books in her head, though most of them had been burned ten months into the end. On her desk there was a heavy gold medallion she called the Old Boy, because on the back of it there were three men holding hands and declaring themselves brothers. In the winter she warmed it beside the fire, wrapped it in a towel, and used it to heat her feet. When she needed to send a signal, she used it to catch the light.
She called to all the Librarians in the area, and we went down six flights to her brain bunker. The stainless cubbies down there dated to years before the mess seized power, when somebody’d had an idea about keeping rare books safe in case of disaster.
Soon we were standing in the Needle’s knowledge shelter, around the table that held my daddy’s body. There he was, stripped naked and covered in tattoos, all of him made of words except the hole in his heart. I’d never seen him undressed before. In our house, he’d worn a darned suit, buttoned to the neck, none of his ink visible.
“Man needs a hat and tie at all times,” he’d say to me. The rest of him was startling to me. My daddy specialized in invisible ink, and the tattoos between the lines, he’d told me when I was little, would only show up if you shone a candle through his skin. I’d never seen them; there was no way to see them on someone who was alive.
Read after burning, I thought, and couldn’t think it anymore. I stood beside the table, at the level of my daddy’s head, put my hand on his cheek, and felt the stubble of his beard poking through his story.
“Sharp, Volume One,” barked the Needle, and we brought out our knives.
* * *
—
I was the one who was meant to cut the first page of the book of Silas Sharp. That’s what you did if the book was your parent.
The Librarians rolled up their sleeves. Arms tattooed in a hundred colors and designs, the secret history of the former world. They had shaven skulls beneath their hats, and their heads were wrapped with Ada Lovelace and Hypatia and Malcolm X, with the speeches of Shirley Chisholm, with Chelsea Manning, with the decoded diagrams of the Voynich Manuscript. Their arms were annotated with Etty Hillesum’s diary of life before Auschwitz, with Sappho’s fragments, with Angela Davis, with Giordano Bruno, with Julian of Norwich, with bell hooks, with the story of the Union soldier who began as Jennie Hodgers and volunteered herself to fight as Albert Cashier, with Bruno Schulz, with Scheherazade, with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with Danez Smith, with Roxane Gay, with Kuzhali Manickavel, with the motions of the planets, with the regrets of those who’d dropped bombs, with the sequencing of DNA, with the names of the dead, with almanacs and maps, with methods for purifying water, with primers for teaching letters, with names of criminals, stories of pain, dreams of better things.
None of this was categorized as magic, but it was magic nonetheless. All of this was the daily light, the brightness, the resistance, and refusal of intellect to endure extinction.
“What’s that?” I asked one old man, dark skin and a silver beard, his text luminous in the shadows of the bunker.
“Dictionaries, Enry,” he said. They were tattooed in pale ink. “Glow-in-the-dark microscript,” he said, and smiled at me. “I made it out of worms. This arm is Oxford English, but English isn’t all there is. There are words here that’ve never been defined.”
“Which should be the first page of my daddy?” I asked him.
“I’d say you should start there, with Silas’s heart.”
“But there’s something missing,” I said.
“There’s always something missing,” said the Dictionarian. “Usually the missing sections aren’t marked as simply as they are on Silas.”
“I can’t decide,” I said.
“We’ve never been a simple people, Enry,” said the Needle. “Nowhere, nohow, nobody. This decision isn’t simple, but you have it in you to make it.”
I lifted my scalpel and started to cut. He’d still be warm on the inside. He’d only been dead two hours. But skin degraded quickly. You had to cut fast.
I touched my daddy’s heart. I looked for the words that were missing, that had been driven down into him. I’d seen my daddy dress for the bindings of other Librarians and come back into the house salt-scrubbed and drunk on moonshine. In those early mornings, my daddy would tell me about the books.
“There’ve been many books made this way,” he’d say. “Long ago, books were made of animals. There were pocket bibles made of vermin—mice and rats—and fables made of rabbits. There were histories written on the skin of foxes, and there is at least one book in the world—or was—that was said to be bound in unicorn. There’s a sea volume, a tremendous novel calligraphed on vellum made of the skin of a blue whale.”
“A whale?” I asked.
“No one has seen a whale for a long time,” my father said, “but when I was a boy, I went on a ship and saw a whale blow, and then its tail as it dove, and that was story enough for me. This very library, the University’s, had a serpent’s story, inked into a seventeen-foot snakeskin, accordion-folded. The history of written words is, at least in part, once, and now again, a history of skin.”
“What about the skin of people?” I asked.
“There’ve been other versions of this kind of library,” he told me. “Lampshades and wallets. There’ve been bodies stolen throughout the history of humans, but the books bound into the Library of the Low are made not of stolen bodies but given ones. There’s nothing unholy in turning your own body into a bible for the living.”
“How do you know?” I asked him.
“I don’t,” he said. “But I studied under the Needle, and what I know about the world’s words, I know from her. We make our bodies into things that can last. We are not destined for coffins, nor for crypts. Our bodies will live on in the library, and one day, maybe, the world will change because of us.”
“But they’re only books,” I said.
“There’s magic written into them. The Needle taught me some old things.”
He pointed at his chest, at a line of text, and around the line, for a moment, there was something else, a brightness—calligraphy made of fire. Then it was gone.
Now my blade went in there, beside the word beginning. This was my job too, to read out the first page of Sharp, Volume I. I would, one day, be Sharp, Volume II.
“In the beginning,” I whispered, “time started in secret.”
“Long before the stories said it started, and long after,” said the Needle.
“This is how we bury our dead,” I said. That was the line assigned to me. “This is how we find a path to heaven.”
I sliced down the page, a rectangle. The room exhaled Silas Sharp’s name, and I was done with the part I had to do, the
start of the book.
The Librarians would scrape and stretch gently, to keep the pages from tearing. They’d be the ones who’d tattoo and inscribe the rest of my daddy, his bones and his fingernails, all night and into the next day, turning flesh into future. They could make pages that were thin enough to see sentences through, and the book of Silas Sharp, in the end, would contain at least a million words, written on every part of his body. His skull would be sliced into transparent coins, and his hair would be woven into the threads that would hold the binding. The muscles of his heart would be the toughest pages, inscribed with words my daddy had given to the Needle long ago. All Librarians gave their dedication to her.
I went back to the Needle’s house to cry. Even if this was how the world was, I would have traded all the knowledge in the universe for my daddy telling me a bedtime story, for him sitting in our kitchen in his hat, humming to himself as he tattooed an animal in iambic pentameter.
We’d had plenty of words in the history of humans, but still, it was easy to take them away. Thousands of years of progress had been obliterated by the time I was born. Knowledge couldn’t keep everything bad from happening; that was my first story, and it was a true one.
Knowledge wasn’t enough.
I had never known my mother, but her book—unfinished—was about how to build bombs out of normal household ingredients. Her back was tattooed in formulas for Greek fire, and her cheekbones with love songs. They were part of the book too.
She had all this knowledge written on her skin, but still she died.
On the day my father was killed, I thought that knowledge was no use to me, that we would have been better off warring, running outside and fighting the soldiers. They were murderers, and I wanted revenge. Instead, I had a story I couldn’t understand, the invisible ink of my father’s tattoos, unreadable, useless. I raged in the basement, my own skin free of words, my heart free of forgiveness. Love was not enough, and neither were words. Nothing was enough to replace him.
I imagined myself to sleep: the men in charge, and the way I’d slay them, paring their skin from their bones, twisting their hair into ropes. I’d use their skeletons for my bed frame, and their hearts, I’d throw on the fire. They wouldn’t be dedicated. They’d only be dead.
* * *
—
Yes: This is how we did it in those days. This is what we’d, from some angles, been reduced to, and from others, evolved toward. Books were written to be read, and we were writing them, making them, creating them, in a treeless place.
When the Needle got the idea to make the Skincyclopedia, it was because paper had gotten banned to everybody but the bodies willing to swear they’d never ever write anything wrong as long as they lived. Then paper got rendered illegal in favor of just a few things you could yell, four or five words at a time. There was a decree saying you weren’t allowed to teach your babies to speak anymore, or to teach them to read. You were allowed the slogans, and beyond that, they’d show you pictures and films of how they wanted you to be.
The Needle remembered a time before all the books were banned, a time when even the crumbling scrolls were digitized and available for viewing.
“I can’t hear a word you say,” the Needle’d said, legendarily, when one of the men in charge came to her door, asking her to be their translator.
The men in charge were afraid of encrypted communication among the rebels and wanted someone who knew things about codes and cabals. Knowledge had become frightening to the powers that were, and they’d decided to make it invisible. The Needle didn’t understand their logic.
Written history was filled with men like them, calling themselves heroes as they destroyed everyone else. The Needle told them she was fixing to die out like a dodo anyway and that she’d gone and forgotten everything but a recipe for piecrust. She went back into her house and closed the door in their faces.
“Are you writing down all the books you know?” my daddy asked the Needle when he first began to do the library with her.
“No,” the Needle said. “I’m making a new story out of the old stories. This story”—she called out the name, something about mice, something about men—“this one has a wife, killed for no reason. This one too. And this one. This one has a boy hung up in a lynching tree. This one has an eleven-year-old girl narrated into existence by the man who rapes her. This one has a scientist dying of cancer, her husband getting credit for her discoveries. This one has dozens of people trying to swim across a river and shot from the banks. This one has a child dying because his family can’t afford medicine. This one has a boy murdered because he loves boys.”
“You’re writing down the American collection again?” my daddy asked the Needle. Those stories sounded like the way the world was.
“No,” said the Needle. “There are some stories here that are holy. Others, I think, may benefit from being remembered differently.”
That was how this started.
By the time my daddy was murdered, the Needle and her Librarians were fourteen years into the Library of the Low. There were no margins, not on most of the first generation of Librarians, and not on any of the animals either. One of our goats was tattooed with a version of The Odyssey in which Penelope and the witches were the heroes, and another wore the secrets of manned flight, starring Amelia Earhart, Carlotta the Lady Aeronaut, Sally Ride, and Miss Baker—the first American monkey to survive weightlessness. There were shelves and shelves of stories.
“Knowledge,” said the Needle every Sunday, when we met to pray over poems, “is the only immortal. We leave our words behind us. It is our task to pass them properly.
“Holy!” she said, reading from one of her own arms, quoting one of the poets. “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
“Holy the eyeball,” the children echoed.
“Holy the abyss,” she replied. This was not the only poem the Needle quoted. She had a hymnal of her chosen poets, but this one was a simple one, an annotation of things the world was trying to render obsolete.
“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist / bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries,” she said next, quoting another poet, Inger Christensen. There was an alphabet of lines tattooed on her other arm. “fig trees and the products of fission exist; /errors exist, instrumental, systemic, / random; remote control exists, and birds; / and fruit trees exist.”
“Amen,” we said. “Amen.”
* * *
—
It is crucial to remember, and it is the history of stories, that even the righteous resort to wrongs. That even the magical can be frightened, and that even the revolutionary can fail when they curl into comfort. There are many nights in a lifetime, if it is long, and some of them must be spent sleeping. It is crucial to remember that even in groups of the good, humans are still humans, and bodies are still fragile, that uncertainty can take over and that when it does, there is no option but shouting strength back into the crowd. There are stories about perfection, but those stories are lies. No one ever made the world better by being perfect. There is only mess in humans, and sometimes that mess turns to magic, and sometimes that magic turns to kindness, to salvation, to survival.
* * *
—
Every Sunday, when the Librarians met at the Needle’s bunker, there was a vote taken on what to do, but the vote always came down on the side of staying secret.
“There is a long history,” said the Needle. “Of monks and nuns guarding the books instead of joining the war. And yet, the time may come. Is it today? Have we done enough to preserve? Is it time to rise?”
The hands went up. It was not.
I visited my parents in the library and put them on the table in front of me, memorizing their contents, filling in their gaps. I read the rest of us, the dead I’d never met and the dead I knew. I read stories about love and about murder, stories about farming and about revolution. I
read the library end to end, books from the immigrants who’d come from the south and the ones who’d come across the oceans, books from the people who’d been born here on this ground and died here too.
I pressed my hands to my parents’ pages and turned them. There was a full-page illustration of a woman warrior with a sword, and I looked at that most often. My mother’s book. My father’s book had a full page of my mother herself, wearing her glasses, working on the bibliography of rage and weaponry for the gone, for the America I’d never encountered, one full of dirt roads and donut shops, unplundered graveyards and grocery stores, skyscrapers and sugarcane. Police cars, pummeling. Immigrants, ICE agents. Hunger and hunger and hunger. Hurt.
“Holy,” I whispered. “Unholy.”
In the early mornings, the world was lost in translation, a language the soldiers and the men in power didn’t speak. There was fog, and in the night there was a warming river, and we brought people over it. There were babies born and new stories written, but we stayed the same, hidden in the Library of the Low, keeping knowledge from being burned, while the rest of the world caught fire.
I got my first tattoo as a copy of something from my mother’s book, a katana down my spine, and my second tattoo from my father’s book, a pen down the center of my chest, the same size as the sword. This was my family tree, quill and blade, ink and metal, the same importance, the same time. The back cover and the front. Who knew what my pages would contain? Who knew which of these things was mightier?
I didn’t remember the past, and I couldn’t imagine the future. I held off on more tattoos, and though everyone wondered, they didn’t force me. There was no forcing a generation without memory of libraries. We had not memorized paper books. We had not touched trees.
Read after burning, I thought, and went to my father’s book, and looked at it in the dark, but I couldn’t burn it. It was all I had of him, his book and his bones, the words he’d chosen.
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