The first and last time I fell in love was an accident, and illegal for a few reasons. She was thirteen years older than me. I was seventeen. At the time, I didn’t see any issue with it. She was also a criminal. I saw nothing wrong with that, either.
The Regime’s Department of Public Interest began demolishing libraries before I had the chance to be interested in reading, so it was a disturbing thing to see a single, dim, flickering light on in the former high school library. At first, I was confused that there was a librarian, a word seldom said, usually with great caution.
I knocked, curious and frightened. Who I would learn to be Miss Campos reciprocated such a demeanor, opening the door ever so slightly. A green eye stared at me, a blinding brightness in contrast to her brown hair and skin. Panic radiated off of her, and I imagined this is what people meant when they said that dogs could sense someone’s fear.
Making no sudden movements, I gently waved. “I’m just a student.”
The room was mostly dark, with rusted shelves and a carpet covered in dirt and soot. Books scattered the place, charred. Water dripped from a few places in the ceiling, and the fault of a broken window had caused wind to scatter ashes around. It smelled of my grandfather’s basement. Dilapidated was a compliment.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen a book before that moment, but more so I had never seen a secular work of literature. I had heard from my parents about a time where textbooks in school were full of “information instead of indoctrination.” They would say that a lot, hushed but harsh tones, fists clenched, confused about the democratic decisions of a people that could lead to such a situation.
“We voted for this,” my father said, “even if we individually did not. We the majority allowed this.”
As I walked slowly through the literary wasteland, Miss Campos kept a sharp eye on me. I became awfully self conscious when she looked me up and down, suddenly too aware of my body and the clothes on it. Granted I was in a uniform and all of my peers looked like this, but it was ill fitting due to my body build versus the societal expectation. The uniform was only available in certain measurements. I awkwardly straightened my tie and spotted under ash, a coherent book. The title jarred me, but I couldn’t put it down.
“Slaughterhouse-Five,” her smooth and soft voice said, “that book has been through too much.”
She said nothing after that, but her distrust in me seemed to slightly dissipate as she went on to silently and swiftly clean the shelves, organizing books that were in good condition into stacks off of the nauseating floor.
After long, tense silence and a handful of suspicious glances, I spoke. “Look, I know you think I’m some sort of undercover guy,” I gestured to myself, “because of the uniform being, like, two sizes too small,” and I put on my best smile, which my dental hygienist had complimented during every dentist visit, “but I’m just a regular guy who’s curious.”
“You know what curiosity does to people?” she asked.
Without any confidence, I answered, “Kills them?” I felt like I was answering a riddle to cross a bridge.
“It makes them wish they never were curious in the first place.”
“I’m okay with that.”
Her face softened, and her shoulders dropped. It turned out she believed that I was just some kid. She went on to tell me how copies of Slaughterhouse-Five had been burned in a North Dakota school’s furnace in pre-Regime days. Other schools had successfully removed it too, “along with countless other titles,” she said. “Books have always been so taboo. Why? Even when people said that nobody reads anymore, they still were up in arms about libraries. Explain that to me.”
Her passion for the trials and tribulations of libraries and secular literature ignited excitement in me, something I had never heard before. When I asked if I could borrow Slaughterhouse-Five, the color drained from her face.
“You’d better only read it in here,” she answered.
Every day, I would visit Miss Campos, and every day, she would speak a few more words than the time before. Eventually, she was speaking so much that Slaughterhouse-Five remained unopened on the rickety, rotting desk where a librarian once sat.
Miss Campos was once an actual librarian, too. When the Regime was instated when she was twenty years old, libraries were relatively safe. With the frequent and familiar challenge or vandalism towards libraries by third parties—which had been happening long before the final election—the priorities of the Regime were elsewhere. Like deciding that federally protected land was no longer federally protected.
She worked everywhere, in every type of library imaginable: public, specialized, academic, even worked in a billionaire’s personal library on his estate.
“I hate billionaires, I really do,” she said, “but the man had a fabulous library.”
She had even worked for the final president as the sole institutional librarian at the Capitol. Despite never having the proper degree, her pure charisma and merit earned her those roles.
“Charisma is a tricky and dangerous trait to have,” she said. “Look what happens.”
She was hired by the school in secret, to rebuild the library. It was destroyed and burned to the ground years prior, during a Department of Public Interest raid. Under an executive order, they went into every classroom and stole textbooks, went through everyone’s personal belongings and confiscated any literature that wasn’t aligned with the government-recognized religion. Then they had a field day with the library, finally arresting the librarian. I heard she was very kind.
My parents told me of a time where education was not government-approved, but left to the decisions of the individual states. I wondered if that would have been better or worse.
Miss Campos and I ate lunch together, which was more so me watching her with uninterrupted fascination as she deseeded a pomegranate. She was like a vulture tearing apart a carcass.
She would tell me about her times in these libraries, the people she used to interact with, the people she used to be deeply connected to. Most of the librarians she knew were arrested or exiled, or both. She didn’t have a way of contacting any of them.
“And for all they know, I’m dead,” she said with a shrug. “They’re probably re-educated now. You know, we allowed this. Nobody stood up to speak against it, myself included. We are all at fault. What else is there to say?”
I thought of my parents. “Some people speak against it.”
“In the privacy of their own homes,” she quickly responded. “At what point do we want to actually enact real change? Everything is too familiar, too easy. We made it into jokes online. The most serious of conversations were behind closed doors. We shrugged in public to avoid conflicts. Those who were really serious about it were ignored or mocked. Now it’s too late.”
“There are still people going out and resisting.”
“And are arrested and exiled, or re-educated.” She sounded annoyed, and I felt like an idiot.
I shouldn’t have spoken at all. My face became hot. How could I have said something so plainly stupid? Here was this amazing woman, and I was nowhere near wooing her. I was just causing an argument.
The more I spoke with Miss Campos, the more I realized I had never actually cared about girls. I carelessly argued in class and found it entertaining when the girls would get annoyed. I was this goofy boy with the ill fitting uniform, too focused on baseball, the guys on my team, and government-approved academics. And out of nowhere I cared about what I looked like, the things I said, what she would think of me.
I had fallen in love with Miss Campos, unapologetically.
Trying to be as subtle as possible, I asked her if she had ever been in love. I was alphabetizing fiction by the first three letters of the authors’ last names while she shelved.
The fact that she had been made my face hot and my stomach turn. To have been jealous of a fully adult woman being in love once years before we met is absurd when I think of it now. But if I was told back then that I was being ridiculous, I probably would have thrown a tantrum, unintentionally proving that point.
She was actually almost married, to my dismay. She was a librarian in Chicago, the Harold Washington Library. He was a horticulturalist. They met because she was picking flowers in the Chicago Botanic Garden, which was simply not allowed. To his surprise, she had picked the begonia, his favorite flower. While it was a complete coincidence, he believed otherwise.
Once a week, they would wander the Chicago Botanic Garden, and soon the relationship progressed. She told him how she loved to pick flowers and hang them to dry.
“Why do you like to watch something slowly die?” he asked.
Everything was fine at the beginning, even more than fine. They became engaged, but he went into a serious depression, not sudden but in fact gradual. Miss Campos convinced herself she was the cause.
“The one different thing in your life is me,” she told him. “I can’t watch you slowly die.”
“Many things are different. My age, my parents divorcing, this fucking government…”
She gathered the small amount of things she had in his apartment and headed for the door.
Then he followed, realizing something. “Is this because of what I said so long ago?”
Yes. “No,” she answered. Without another word, they never saw each other again. She abandoned Chicago and the Harold Washington Library one day before the Department of Public Interest descended upon the city, escaping exile, imprisonment, or re-education by a hair.
“And to confirm it all, he was happier without me,” she told me. “I saw him on social media. It was so obvious. He met somebody new shortly after. In spite of the world burning.” She looked into the distance past the broken window. “The world is dying, but we still love.”
Was I so selfish to have been glad that she’d left him? Did I really believe I had a chance with her?
I placed my elbows on a short shelf, head resting on my hands. “How did you end up here? I mean, who wants to end up in Rhode Island?”
She shook her head, lost for words. “I discovered I couldn’t stick to a single place or person. But I can do this,” she gestured at the library, now almost showing no sign of damage or destruction, “I can take books from ruins and make them stand again. Even if they’re knocked down shortly after.” Ignoring the broken window, the ashes were gone, the books were shelved, and the water from the ceiling was being caught by a large bucket. Even the light ceased its incessant flickering. “So I’m a traveling… library maker, I guess. What else would you call it? I’m the only person in the profession.”
Miss Campos would be contacted in secret by schools mostly, urgently requesting her help. She would stay for a few weeks or months until the library was functioning. Then she would hit the road, always miraculously, right before the Regime’s inspections. She knew that her hard work was being destroyed, but she was gratified by the fact that nobody would ever find out it was her.
“It’s the only thing I’m good at,” she added, a wave of sadness washing over her. “Khalid,” she said, “I don’t… like me. I ruin everything I touch.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“It is. Is this an eternal curse? I pick flowers to watch them die. I make men rot from the inside. I leave everyone and everything I come to know without saying goodbye. Is this what I’ll always be? Is this the consequence of Eve eating the apple?”
“Well, she probably didn’t eat an apple. It was most likely a pomegranate. So it is speculated.”
Slowly, she turned to see her massacred pomegranate from lunch beside us. When she looked back at me, I prayed to be struck down.
I was so humiliated that I wished I had never been curious in the first place. Not only was she a criminal, but a prophet; this was also illegal.
I thought about the things she said to me, how we lacked enough courage to really go out and do something. The way everyone would make the most serious of things into jokes, forgetting the true weight of such situations. One day, I went into the library when I knew she wouldn’t be there. Trembling, I took Slaughterhouse-Five from the desk and slipped it into the waistband of my heinous trousers, making me look more ridiculous than I already was. I held the door to ensure it closed silently as I exited. A few seconds later, I heard the shattering of glass from within the library. When I turned to see what happened, flames erupted from the floor, caressing the books.
I never saw her again.
That afternoon, I sat outside of the Statehouse and opened Slaughterhouse-Five. With remarkable timing, I was tackled to the ground and arrested. I should have set a stopwatch.
One thing that happened during arrests was public humiliation. Luckily for me, I had been humiliated at full capacity days before, which made the parade from my house to the prison that much easier.
“Do you know why your son was arrested?” an officer asked my none-the-wiser parents. They shook their heads. “He was reading unapproved literature!”
My mother and father looked at me sharply. “Well? Do you have something to say for yourself?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t get to finish it.”
My mother slapped me across the face, yet showed no sign of anger. Even my father smiled. They apologized to the officer in disingenuous tones.
Lines of people watched me in horror as the police made a zoo exhibit out of me. Even the guys on my baseball team stood on the sidelines, mouths agape. What started as a smirk turned into a giggle, which turned into me uncontrollably laughing. The more horrified the people seemed, the more I laughed.
I thought about how stupid it all was. Only a short amount of time before that, we were relatively normal. Sure, there were outbursts and the familiar polarizing topics. But could the charisma of a single leader cause such accelerated, rampant deterioration of a sane nation?
Yes.
They stripped me, searched me (as if I could fit any literature inside of myself), and walked me to my indefinite shelter. Men stared at me behind their bars, miserable faces. We all wore this drab, gray-blue coverall.
“Come on, boys,” I jeered, “smile!”
I attempted to joke about how it could be worse. “We could be in a nation that looks for any reason to imprison people they don’t like that much!” But nobody laughed. Maybe because it was true, or because it was too wordy.
Nobody ever smiled or laughed while in prison. Eventually, I stopped, too.
I recount this now as I sit in my prison cell. Maximum security, mind you. I’m a real threat to the nation. I was even put on the terrorist list!
I love to think about it: me, a government-approved boy turned terrorist because of one person. How we humans are capable of so much!
I don’t bother counting the days I’ve spent in here like they do in the movies, tallying on the wall with chalk. I don’t know when I’ll get out, if I’ll get out. The way the outside looks in my mind cannot be reality. I left the real world ten years ago in disarray, logged trees all about, burned down buildings, gray skies. New England in January.
Come to think of it, maybe it would be the same.
Just yesterday my parents visited me and brought with them a gift: government-approved literature. A representative ordered them to give it to me to “hopefully begin the re-education process.” What a treat.
“We strongly advise you to definitely read it,” my mother said, glancing between the book and I with each word, “from beginning to end.” They both looked at me anxiously, as though silently pleading. My father pushed the book towards me with meaning.
I sat in my lonesome cell and skimmed through its contents that I once revered. In the middle of the book hidden by pages was a section cut out in the shape of a rectangle.
Within it lay Slaughterhouse-Five.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
About the Author
Raisa Norberg is a writer and librarian. Her work has been published in JAKE, Johnny America, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. She currently lives in Northern California.
