The Librarian or Pulp Miles

Dust crawls up nostrils and falls back down as many globs of mucus. Cow skin and flat dry pulp are catalogued and inventoried for miles around. Worlds history comes down to this building. Some parts were removed and some parts lost. Work refined over millennia. Stories and documents of older times than this. Garments of wool and cotton from his homeland, knees and elbows are worn through and patched. The librarian walks along eyes down blackened feet quiet while the sounds of people and trams and cars outside leak in through the window cast high above the wooden entrance. The librarian stops and unclasps his hands from behind his back reaching high up above for a leather bound book. He stands tall as the book gasps for air.

‘Reports and Writings on The Helecanthian Age.’
‘…subsisting off fruit and grain they had encountered among the dry grass and sands of the island they grew rather tall and their skin toughened. This was a time in which their toolmaking improved and many of their customs had been set in stone. The death ceremony still observed to this day was refined at this time: consisting of covering the deceased in a white blanket shawl after tattooing in dark red ink the deceased’s name, profession and how many summers they had survived. (See article B.7)…’

The librarian closed the large book, ran a dry hand over the front cover it’s engravings of symbols and words still depressed into the toughened leather. The book went back to it’s designated space and the librarian walked along the shelf coughing into the crook of his arm.

An excerpt of a book would renew the brain and it would sprout up back into life. The library was old and filled with the knowledge of the known world. The lives of so many were recorded here, some were true and some made up. The librarian remembered them all the same. At certain intervals the fiction and the not fiction taught the same things and recorded the same feelings. The librarian saw writing and type, he remembered it all the same.

He scratched his forearm that was nothing but a memory in it’s self. The men shot dead, the cold watered eye making mark before the bolt pulled and set and the trigger pulled. He thought often of those days wrapped up in jute, huddled in mud and subsisting off government cigarettes. Black soft spots would grow on the feet of the soldiers like the souls rising up out of the ground and resting forever in the bottoms of the feet. Company bullets made of fine steel and a rifle made of wood and iron. He came home and they commended him with more metal and gave him more wood to shelter in. Then they forgot.

Everyone forgot and no one wanted to remember. It was evident in the times, in peoples faces. All the bloodlines so soaked in just that. Even the fathers who did not come back still managed to smear their infants in the fetid mudded blood of the enemy and ally. The librarian did not experience shellshock as he did not attempt to suppress his psyche.

A 12 volume 23,000 page collage: a memoir of letters and journals and documents of the war was his true work. The medals he got for rifle fire were boiled down into their worth and sold back to him in paper and glue and ink. The library could burn and this would survive among it. He could burn alive and suffocate on the air stole from him and it would all be remembered.

Widows spat and cursed and children threw stones, chides of, dog, murderer, ghost, were thrown at him. Words in languages he was employed to eradicate. A sympathetic man in wool and cotton. Long grey hair and beard the costume of sorrow of old men who time prefer to forget and who they have forgotten themselves. He’d say,
please this will hold the memory in time forever,
they would weep into hands into sleeves and rags and they would believe him. He learned the language of those he trained to hate, he grew to love their language, the terseness of the words the encompassing of feeling and spirit and love within them. He would nomad from town to town. He would cry with them he would apologise. Some were grateful, others were not. Those who survived his hail of youth and come home with stomachs the pit of fire would beat him and stab him, a stray animal with no meat worthy enough to kill and eat. He would endure and learn from them. He wagoned to the largest city he could with the words of history dragged behind by horse. He became the Librarian after the death of his mentor, who was the real Librarian, he assumed the role through means of survival. He grew to be the building and he used it well.

‘A Living Document of the Merroneni War’
by
All Who Were Involved

The people hated it. The book brought shame on everyone. It’s reflection too close. The Librarian hated it also. No work encompassed everything even if it physically did. It held too much feeling for anyone to draw a conclusion. To write anything down made it a fiction. Truth couldn’t be found in the eyes that witnessed nor the soil that held the blood.

We thank you we do. This is our people our life, nothing could come close.
Thank you, he’d say with sorry. He made a smock of the many atonements.
A simulation of an omniscient who could watch it all, provoke actions and see reactions.

Eventually they tried to burn it as a sin, as a crime. The humiliations of all and none justified in them. The librarian grew older and he understood it less. He burned it all for them and made charcoal from the ashes. He painted the walls of his building white and watched it dry for weeks. People came and watched as he worked, sandwiches and coffees drank at the enquiry desk watching the bearded man up high with a broom for a brush. Then he started to draw and pattern with large hands of charcoal.

His body grew black and sore and he never tired.

He finished and the world forgot. They came and asked for books of glory or of tragedy. They told the librarian their stories and he would forget them for he was old.

At night the librarian would spit phlegm of black into buckets, his lungs painted black with the history of it all.