And then, for three days she managed to stay hidden and awake. She gathered together every loose scrap of paper she could find in the attic. She took the pens and pencils from the soup can on her checkout desk and she began to write. She wrote as quickly as her hand could form the symbols on the page. She ignored the muscle cramp that, toward the end, would cause permanent damage to certain nerves near the base of the wrist and bring her final pages to the brink of illegibility. But she never crossed the line into illegibility. Every word, no matter how smeared and sloppy, proved legible. Completely readable. You must believe me on this point. Or, depending on the stage of our transaction at this time, you may be able to look for yourself. But I do not advise this. Remember that you have been warned. Like Lot’s wife.
Alicia found words to tell the story of the Erasure.
Now understand, and this may be the most important thing I have to tell you, Gilrein, she did not write down the facts. She did not transcribe what she saw through the window of the library. She did not relate, in words, the events that took place in Schiller Avenue on that humid night in July. She did not make a diary nor a journal. She did not engage in reportage. She wrote, instead, what we might agree to call a fiction. She told a story. Created a myth. She transformed what she had seen in the same way that she had been transformed by what she had seen. If I had anyone else to rely on, I would. But I have only you — this New World/New Testament reflection of my own self-loathing. You MUST understand this, Gilrein.What the girl wrote was something so far beyond accounting. Beyond simple journalism. She made her witnessing into a horrible art. She made a weapon of her epiphany and her transmutation. She created an evolutionary virus out of ink and paper. She put air into a trumpet that could shatter each frozen soul to hear its agonizing music.
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.