But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
He read the last line and slammed the book shut. He hid it in the bottom drawer of his nightstand, beneath other books, scraps of paper, medicine boxes, anything he could find to bury it. Then he burrowed under the covers, trembling. There was no doubt about it; the book he had just read was evil, and nothing would ever be the same again.
The words were quivering inside him, like seedlings breaking through dry earth. A thought popped into his head: If he forgot to close the book, left it open on some page or other, Big Brother might slip out. The notion made his lips curve upwards. Something like that must have happened already, many years ago—how else could this city be explained? The Secretary had told him he couldn’t become a Guardian of the Library until he’d read that book. “It’s just one book,” he said, “but it’s like nothing you’ve read before. This is the mother of all banned books. Listen carefully. They might catch you reading a banned book and make you pledge never to do it again. But not this one. If you get caught with this book, you’ll disappear. You won’t exist anymore. It’ll be as if you were never there in the first place.”
At that point, he’d yet to read a single line. “But why?” he asked.
“Because it tells our story.”
Fingers shaking, the Secretary slowly reached for the book to give to him. He had replaced the cover with one from a book published by the Censorship Authority titled Latest Achievements in Genetic Evolution. The new censor noticed the old man’s fear. Taking the book, he stuffed it under his arm and turned to leave.
“Have you gone mad?” The Secretary’s words stopped him short. “Don’t walk around with it like that,” he whispered. “Put it in a bag.”
What was the point of having a fake cover if he had to hide the book?
The old man didn’t give him a chance to ask. “Read it first, and then come back so we can talk. Don’t come during the day. You need to be more careful now. Come at night. I’ll be here.”
Raising his eyebrows, the Censor asked, “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Do you sleep?”
He’d been under the impression that things had become so bizarre, nothing would surprise him anymore. After all, Wonderland had its own logic—or unlogic—but he hadn’t realized he was about to leave Alice behind to enter the Republic of Big Brother. Now, as he cowered in bed, he felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. The slogans of the New World came back to him with unprecedented clarity:
WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
When he reached that point in his thoughts—or rather, in Big Brother’s thoughts—he yearned for the days when Alice’s voice was the only one in his head. Not even she could survive in the Republic of Big Brother. She’d end up flooding the world with tears because a thing was neither itself nor its opposite—it was whatever the government wanted it to be, and two plus two could never make four.
The clocks were striking thirteen when he finished the book, but he decided to wait another twelve hours before meeting with the Secretary. When darkness was complete, he found himself facing the Censorship Authority. He knew that he was, in fact, standing in front of the Ministry of Truth. Before, an invisible line—something like the equator—had separated the real from the imaginary, but after that book, the line ceased to exist.
A swirl of gritty dust swept in through the glass doors as he entered the building, and the hallway reeked of cabbage. Was it a smell from his memory, or from the book in his head? Or had it come from the Secretary’s office, the hotbed of rabbits? It struck him then that he was a citizen of “that” Republic, an employee at the Ministry of Truth!
You’re a thought criminal!
It was a child’s voice, but it didn’t sound like Alice. That’s what became of children who didn’t die in rehabilitation centers, he thought. They ended up guarding the surfaces of their neighborhoods, each of them in their own small way.
Surprisingly, the Secretary wasn’t reading when the Censor arrived at his office. Instead, he was fiddling with a piece of bark. Where had it come from?
“What’s that?”
“I used to be a carpenter before I came here,” said the old man, gazing tenderly at the bark.
“You can’t make anything with that.”
“I know,” he said wistfully. “I miss the smell. It smells of childhood, don’t you think?”
The Book Censor thought the old man seemed deflated. Perhaps the System had finally wormed its way inside him. That’s how systems worked after all: once embedded, they would devour you until there was nothing left, no different than a bunch of tapeworms. He thought of his daughter and wondered whether he had tried to force-feed her the government’s larvae.
For a long while, the Secretary just stared at him, as if searching his face for traces of the book. Unmistakable bruising from the impact of learning the truth, contusions caused by words and sentences; the line separating fiction from reality had never really been there at all. He had begun to think like a Cancer!
“Are you having doubts?” the Secretary asked.
Then he rose to his feet and told the Book Censor to follow him.