by Paula Guran
You can call me Enry. That’s what my daddy named me. He said there was no H to be had in a world where hell had spit up this many fools and holy was this much in question.
I was not an unhappy child. The world withering above me was the only world I’d ever known, and to me it was a beautiful one.
Every few days a murmuration of soldiers came through town and said no one had any right to rights. Whenever they came, I hid myself in a knowledge shelter with the rest of the children born since the end of the world, and we waited for the soldiers to pass.
The rest of the time, we learned languages and studied history, farmed with sunlamps, and guarded the books. We were taught to read on medieval fairy tales about weather and Victorian poems about ghosts, on books of code in thirty-four languages, and magic books dating to long before Christianity. We were taught myths from Libya and poems from Andalusia and Syria, spells from Greece and gods from the land we hid beneath. We were taught about genocide but also about making the land bear fruit. We only came aboveground at night. We were not supposed to exist.
The adults, though, had to show their faces on the surface to get water rations and to be censused.
When I was ten years old, my daddy went aboveground one morning and didn’t come back by nightfall.
I found him on his back in the center of the old marble floor in the University library. Someone had decided he was smart enough to kill, or maybe he’d just walked in the path of a bullet. These were bullet years, and they flew from end to end of cities like hummingbirds had, before the hummingbirds had fled. Bullets wanted to feed. We all knew it. We’d been warned.
My daddy pointed at his chest and fumbled at his collar. I loosened his tie. I unbuttoned his buttons. I opened his shirt.
“You have to burn this,” he said. “Some books, you can only read after burning. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”
Blood was making a lake around us, and my knees were wet with it. My daddy’s breathing slowed, and his hands froze like winter had nested inside him. He was the only parent I had.
I had no spell to keep him from dying, though there should have been spells. Everyone talked about magic, but no one had all the magic they needed. That was another thing you knew if you were ten years old and living beneath a library, if the world had started ending long before you were born and now you found yourself alone in it.
There was never enough magic to save everyone. Sometimes you only had enough for yourself, or you had the wrong kind entirely. I had almost nothing in the way of spells back then. I knew how to make a dragonfly out of sonnets and a bird out of ballads. I could bring a little beam of light to life in my hand and watch it glow, but it wasn’t hot and it wasn’t a heart. I had nothing for my daddy and no way to refill him from my own soul, no way to split it, no way to share.
It is crucial to remember that life, when it is long, is full of goodbyes. I had a husband once. You are the child of one of the children of my children’s children. My husband was a man who could walk on water and whose veins ran with poems written six centuries before anyone insisted on religion. By the time I met him, I had enough magic to fill anyone with light. I could read in the dark, and the books of my family were written all over the world.
You are the amen of my family, and I am the in the beginning of yours. This story is the prayer, or one of them. This story says you can live through anything and that when it is time to go, when the entire world goes dark, then you go together, holding on to one another’s hands, and you whisper the memory of birds and bees and the names of those you loved.
When it is not time to go, though, this story says you rise.
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 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.
