~2200 words, ~18 minutes reading time
This text should be read once on paper, then destroyed.
Non-librarians are forbidden from reading the red text. Cover it if you have to.
#
Father Gabriel taught me how to handle information leaks. The first step is prevention. The knowledge of the old world is a well-guarded secret, available only in Old Spanish to those who work in the library. Of course, knowledge may leak anyways. Anyone who hears the leak becomes a workhorse —sentenced to long days of labor, forbidden from speaking unless spoken to. They have food and water, but little rest. Father said that keeping the hearer busy helps them forget. Sentencing the one who caused the leak is left to the head librarian. Father Gabriel explained to me the difficulties of this: if one lets the speaker stay, they may cause more damage. If one punishes the speaker too severely, then no one admits that they caused a leak. Last time (when I was a small child), he locked the speaker in a cellar and made him say the leaked sentences a thousand times. He could not speak by the end —his tongue limp like a dead fish and the sentences reduced to a string of noises.
Before my time and Father’s time, speakers had their tongues cut. Or they were killed at the edge of town. Or they became workhorses for months, only to be exiled in the dead of winter. I am not supposed to know this.
Father Gabriel told me more than he told anyone so that I’d be prepared when I became head librarian. He would never tell me what he read, so he instead explained how he thought. How he ran the library, what he decided to read to the community, how everyone in the library did their jobs. It had been years since he made paper or bound books himself, but he still remembered.
He’d guided me through making my own books. Father let me pick the topic. Human anatomy. I found the old library books and copied everything we needed for medicine, translating it from Old to New Spanish. I omitted the giant illustrations of skin, hair enlarged to the size of fangs. I omitted the black and shriveled lungs. When I read about wisdom teeth surgery, I asked Father why anyone would want their teeth gone.
“Wisdom teeth caused people great pain in the old days. Living with so much information, they had no room for wisdom. Their jaws were too small. They did not know how to give up their knowledge, so they gave up their teeth instead.”
I did not write this down, although I may use it in a public reading someday. I did not write down anything about wisdom teeth surgery. I only labeled the wisdom teeth in my diagram.
There are rules on which books should be copied. The visual sciences are both safe and useful. Father once showed me how a loom works and guided me through a history book on making clothes. History is considerably less safe than visual science. He called it “a guidebook for evil”—lessons on all the ways humans have done each other harm, demonstrations of killing machines, temptations to betray each other.
Father Gabriel gave us history lessons during public readings. His voice carried over hundreds of ears. The old books are thick and plentiful, but he was often brief: “In the old days, we shared all our knowledge. We taught each other many things about medicine and agriculture, but we also taught each other how to exploit others and wage war. We could not trust each other when we’d taught them how to kill us and why they would want to do it. Communities built tools to destroy each other. Good people turned on each other out of fear. The violence grew and grew. It did not stop until almost everyone was dead. We are the survivors. We will survive only if we leave behind evil.” This is our job in the library: to plant seeds on scorched earth.
I had not delved into the truly dangerous books, philosophy and rhetoric rested in a dusty corner. Invisible sciences — the movement of tiny particles and the study of how living tissue dies — remained similarly untouched.
The technical manuals for great mechanized tools were burned long ago. Their ashes are still in our soil.
Father encouraged us to write our own fiction, but old fiction books were strictly forbidden. He said they’re insidious, poisoned by the ideas of the old world. The only person allowed to read old fiction was Father Gabriel. Occasionally I saw him leafing through a novel and scowling at the pages.
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Several months ago, I found an error in one of Father’s books on farming: “Crop rotations require a careful selection of plants and often last for two to years.” A word was obviously missing, and I figured this was my time to stretch my legs as a librarian and fix it myself. I read through the old books on crop rotations, which made me ask more questions about the seasons, which led me to read a couple books on the Earth’s rotation. I thought I’d understood why we didn’t copy everything in the old books, but every new fact perplexed me more than the last. Why didn’t anyone copy this? Why couldn’t I know about this?
I did not know how old the world was. I did not know you could put an age on the world. I did not know that humans used to be warm in the winter. That they could extract light and heat from dead things in the ground. How much labor could we have saved with this? How many lives could we have saved with this?
I knew that the knowledge must have been wrong, somehow. I couldn’t tell Father what I’d done, but I needed to know more. One day, I wouldn’t have him to guide me, and I would have to separate the safe from the dangerous myself.
Every week, I read something I hadn’t intended to copy. I learned that the woman who became too weak to continue farming likely had lyme disease. I learned that our land used to be full of people, the Nation of Spain. The communities that fought each other were not villages. They were immeasurably large, with millions killing and dying for strangers. The city that became our town, the old Oviedo, had reached beyond the horizon and was still dwarfed by other cities. The scale of the Earth is beyond me. The scale of humanity is beyond me. I hadn’t known that there was so much. I hadn’t known that so many may still be alive, waiting for us.
I was able to read so much because Father was very sick. I’m sorry for failing to mention this sooner — I’ve learned to hold my tongue like a fly clasped in a hand. Every day, in the morning and the evening, I walked the radius of the town. From the library at the center to the ward at the North edge, I walked to visit Father Gabriel. Between, I read dangerous words and failed to find why he was sick. The doctor suggested various teas because he did not know the word “antibiotic.” A library scribe wanted to ease the pain with wine because she did not know the word “immunosuppression.” They were more helpful than I, who only knew what would fail and would expose my own knowledge if I acted. I read more.
Whatever justification I had before, I learned that it was a “rationalization.” Now, I truly had to do it. Medicine led me towards tools I do not have. This led me to manuals which no longer existed.
In another world with another past, Father could have been saved. The technology that we’ve declared apocalyptic would have saved him. We had blinded ourselves and our children. I read more.
History of biology led me to war. The knowledge stuck like tar, but I chose to remember when I wanted to forget. Biochemistry told me I was puppeteered by microscopic forces. These forces had turned against Father for emotionless, mathematical reasons. Philosophy said I had a soul regardless. Psychology told me that the true answer was a question of ego. Fiction said that my soul was all I had. Poetry disagreed.
I visited Father again. He was more awake than usual. He told the doctor to leave.
“What have you been reading, child?” He dragged the words out his hoarse throat.
I told him about the books I’d been copying. Square Foot Gardening, The Secret to Healthy Goats, The Backpacker’s Guide to Meteorology.
Father’s eyes met my own. “The other books.”
My body tensed electric, then I told him that I knew what electricity is. I told him everything.
He smiled. “You’ve grown. You’re smart. You’ll make an excellent head librarian.”
I didn’t know if he could get me sick, but I hugged him anyways. He propped himself up with one arm and put the other around me. He clung to me as I tried to ignore the deep grooves between his ribs. He flinched, then coughed.
“I know how hard it is.” His whisper was like stones rubbing together, “I trust you.”
“I don’t know what to do.” I said into his shoulder, “What if we’ve been wrong?”
“We never truly know.” He whispered, “But we have to choose. So we read.”
“And that helps you know?”
He gave me a look I still don’t understand. Then he rang his bell and the doctor came back in with a wet rag. Father and I exchanged a teary smile. I left. The walk back smelled like rain and chickens.
#
The sick are supposed to be buried behind the ward by a workhorse. Gabriel was instead buried with the other head librarians, in the garden behind the library. We had no workhorses for Father Gabriel’s burial, so two brothers volunteered to make up for always quarreling with each other. A hundred people showed up to the funeral. Most of them I only recognized from the public readings. Some brought slips of paper with them, notes to Gabriel that they dropped onto his casket. One farmer brought his dog, which he couldn’t trust to be left alone. I could not stop wondering which patch of dirt would be my own, how many people would visit my own burial, what notes they would drop into my casket. It was not my place to think these thoughts, but I could not bear to think about the present.
All of the librarians spoke. I used many words to say less than I wanted to. I don’t think anyone found the words for it all.
When the brothers started covering the grave, I walked back to the library and etched Father Gabriel’s name into the standing wall of concrete at the entrance, just as he had done for Father Manuél and as Manuél had done for Mother Leya. I went back to what should have been Gabriel’s office but was now mine. I read an old field guide on foraging for wild berries. Someone had already copied it, but I wanted the original words.
Absentmindedly, I looked through the desk drawers. There was paper, writing utensils, a handful of tools. There was a book bound in newer leather than anything else in the library. History of The Librarians of New Oviedo. It was written in Old Spanish. I read more.
It was full of different people’s handwriting and different people’s inks. There were no dates, but each chapter listed its own timespan: 24 years, 40 years, 31 years. There were leaks and scientific advances, disasters and recoveries. It was here I learned that we destroyed the technical manuals. I learned that we used to kill whoever caused information leaks. I turned to Gabriel’s sections and there was a plan for a whole new bookshelf of copied books. A plan that we had completed.
I learned that our new town is so, so old. The books we copy were written centuries ago. We had grown and failed and fallen, again and again. I learned that Gabriel’s history was not a single story but a swinging pendulum. The knowledge spread, we turned against one another, we died, we forgot, we returned.
I kept returning to that book in the dim morning hours, understanding what we’d done. Gabriel was better than I could ever be. But he trusted me with this role. So that our world does not unfurl.
I cannot know the future. In this moment, I hardly know the past. I do not know who I write for. If Father and I walked the right path, then you should be another librarian. If not… I cannot speak towards your life. I pray that you are not an archeologist or some other carrion bird, picking at the scraps of our civilization. I write in New Spanish, separate from the History of The Librarians of New Oviedo, so that my words may reach you regardless of circumstance.
I am afraid. So deathly afraid of what may happen. But doubt will not destroy me. If the knowledge spreads, there will be no going back.
You, whoever you are, someone has trusted you with literacy. I have trusted you with my words. For this, I have one request: leave as you came. Lead with my knowledge, but do not let the knowledge leak. Destroy this, consign me only to your memory.
And one day,
silently and for the final time,
forget about me.
I hope you understand.
Nadav Schul-Kutas is an undergraduate student studying economics at Reed College. In addition to writing, he likes to design board games and complain about how he doesn’t have enough time to do either. He has forthcoming publications in Cast of Wonders and the Impressions Anthology Series. You can find him on Twitter @NadavSchulKutas retweeting drawings of animals.
Photo by Freddy Kearney on Unsplash
