Name: Archive 2843730126, Cultural Affairs and Factual Revisionism

Location: Undisclosed

Date: N/A

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Research, I tell the two guards, for a book. They smirk and jiggle their automatic weapons against body armour, suppressing laughter. Not very professional. But they have been given a job that could be done by anyone. They have trained for nothing and they resent it. I know the feeling.

Eventually, they step aside and I’m confronted with an old man of indeterminate origin. He shakes my hand and tells me a simple name I forget immediately. His eyes are misty and unfocused and I wonder if he’s holding anything.

We take the elevator. “Bunkers are a little passé,” he says, eyes black and bored, watching the glowing floor numbers as they go higher and higher. “Everyone knows you have something if you keep it in a bunker.”

We get to the Penthouse suite and there’s a ping as the elevator doors open.

The pages are spread out around the circular room in individually-sealed glass compartments. The glass is bullet-proof. Each page is framed by a gold border.

“They are in chronological order,” my guide assures me, though this is impossible to confirm given they are all blank.

We walk over to the first compartment.

“Twenty-seven litres, it took. Over a two year period.”

I look at the pages and in the glass the reflection of my guide, hands in pockets, stares around the room vacantly. He must be on something. I would like to ask if he has any spare.

“We assume the nurse and the calligrapher were forced into the act,” he continues. “A holy book. They would have been against it.” His voice carries nothing. “Haraam. A sinful act. But then forbidden to destroy it once complete.”

I stand closer to the glass and squint. Nothing.

“How do you know?”

“Sorry?” The guide looks confused and moves closer to where I’m squinting.

“How do you know it’s…” I gesture towards the pages. All of them perfectly white.

“There used to be marks.” He looks unsure, tired. This is the question he has been put here to answer. This is his job. “Ink, preservation chemicals… the obvious. It has been… told.” He shrugs and his voice becomes the same dull monotone as before. “They are all dead now.”

I turn to him. He doesn’t look that far off death himself. “And… anyone alive?” I ask.

“A cleaner came into the room and saw the pages filled one morning. Beautifully written, exquisite. It was a work of art, he said. He sounded the alarm and the guards and the professionals,” he lists them off one by one on his fingers slowly, “the linguists, the translators, the semanticists, the sociologists… they all came running.” He moves his arm slowly around the walls. “They were blank. The cleaner was fired,” he says quietly. “Put under psychiatric care.”

“And you? Have you seen blood?”

Instead of answering, he looks back at the pages.

The silence is a part of it. It’s not flat or linear, but circular: feeding upon itself. I do not want that silence. It screams of something that should be there.

“Is this what you’ve always done?” I ask my guide.

A smile creeps delicately over the boredom, the lethargy. A light somewhere in those dimming pupils. “I used to be a teacher.” A pause. The punchline: “History.”

The silence is an hourglass pushed onto its side, without thought of consequence. The silence is consequence drifting serenely out of the Penthouse window like forgotten sand.

We smile together, the guide and I, surrounded by the glass-enclosed circle of an invisible holy book. Our work is meaningless and I still want to ask if my guide is holding, if he has anything that will make me feel as calm and indifferent as he looks. But I won’t ask him. It wouldn’t be the proper thing to do in such a situation. In a space so quiet and so empty. And a man so tired and so old.

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