Monsters

The Station Chief, a benign man by the name of Brookes, sent out the memo on Monday morning. We all knew what we had to do...we’d been through all the training modules countless times by then. We needed to destroy everything in the building, basically all the books in the library. It was very disheartening. I don't like destroying books.

Starting at 7 am, we began removing books from the shelves and dumping them in large piles near the shredder which had been set up in the main foyer. Then someone had to feed the books into the spinning jaws of this machine at which point the books were chewed up before being spat out the other end in piles of clotted ribbons.

Mrs Karloff decided the best thing was to work through the entire library in alphabetically and in a rare moment of spontaneous personal revelation, she also told me that she had once had an affair with Hemingway. No shit? I said. That’s right, she replied. He was quite a man but he had lots of problems.

The sheer quantity of shredded material produced by the shredded books kept piling up. It began to fill the ground floor rooms, climbed the staircase, rising up to the second floor, pushing against the windows. It was as if we were filling the entire building with a giant birds nest. Impeding our progress, the damn Station Chief kept demanding that we attend meetings in the main hall. In these meetings, updates were provided concerning the volatile political situation beyond the walls. Ms Karloff, Mrs Chaney, Mrs Lee, Mrs Lugosi….they were all in attendance. And they all had some long-winded piece of intel they wanted to share. By that point, we were all stripped down to our underwear because it was so damn hot inside the building what with all the extra insulation provided by the growing piles of shredded paper. It’s a real shame, announced Mrs Karloff. What? I said. She showed me a letter written by Pappa. A love letter written in his clipped, staccato style. We have been ordered to shred every scrap of paper in this building, said Mrs Karloff. Personal correspondences as well? I asked. Yep, she said. When I read this letter aloud, she continued, I can hear his voice coming back to me from all those years ago. Did you know I was the girl in the ‘Hills like White Elephants’? She said. Shut the front door, I said, truly amazed. I had always liked Mrs Karloff.

As the days proceeded, you could smell burning jet fuel in the air and see columns of black smoke twisting up into the sky. You could also hear angry crowds gathering beyond the embassy walls. We were completely cut off. The airport was only five km away but it might as well have been the moon for all the good it did us. Strangely, the gardens just beyond the embassy windows remained pristine and peaceful. Over the wall, looking to the east, I could see the snow-capped mountains.

After four days, the entire building, or near enough, was full of shredded paper. You could barely move. It was at this point that Mrs Karloff and Mrs Cushin were getting ready to evacuate. Their evacuation plan had been finalised by Brookes. Sometime later, I received my instructions, neatly typed on a piece of paper. That was how I found myself dressed in a blue stripped jellibra while moving through the crowded marketplace. I kept my head down, avoiding eye contact with the military personnel, all of whom were relaxed yet still alert for insurgent activities. Down at the harbour, people were gathered at the barricade, their possessions in hand as they fought to secure passage out of the country on the rusted ocean liner that was moored to the dock. I reached into the pocket of my jellibra for my passport inadvertently removing a handful of shredded paper. And this was how I was caught. A child spotted me and began screaming.

They marched me back to the embassy. They told me I would oversee a team of women who would reassemble the entire library, piece by piece, page by page. I knew it would take years. It took me five years to reconstruct a single page of Ulysses. Eventually, I found fragments of Mrs Karloff's love letter. It began My dearest girl.....and it continued in this way, the words stamped onto the delicate sheets of paper like continual gunshots.