The Fire

I live in a big city. The city has no name, but there is talk that long ago it was named New York City. The year is 2069 and it is winter. In the city, it is cold and white and the snow piles itself around the nearby capsule apartments like pale corpses around the crematorium. For the last twenty years our land, known only as our land, has been united and watched over by our father and mother, the great leaders of the land. Although I have lived only a paltry 17 years, I have lived long enough to realize that what is happening across our land is not right, and so I write in this journal at risk of my life in the sore hope that others may realize the same.

It was only two years ago that the government began its campaign to burn all books. For longer than I or my parents can remember the government has had control over our education and kept a strict watch over literate individuals, but it was not until those two years ago that the outright fight against literacy began. The first phase was to separate all literate children from their parents. I was taken then from my warm home far to the south of our land to the harsh northern extreme in hopes of removing me from my parent’s influence as much as possible. The city of New York, as I call it, is a bitter place. The buildings are harsh and cold and block out the brightness of the sky completely. Everything is cement and stone and ice. The white fingers that are capsule apartments reach upwards toward the sky, blocking out the life and light from our world as they do so. Thousands of people can live in those tall, scrunched white buildings. The apartments are little more than bedrooms, with hardly space to sit up, and the bathrooms and mess hall are communal. I am lucky. When I was moved here, a cruel government official moved me into the city’s last wooden living quarter in an act of apparent punishment. True, the building was drafty and cold in the winter and stuffy in the summer, but it was close to the ground and, by association, life. Besides, it offered a perfect place to hide my books.

When I moved from my southern homeland, I was lucky enough to have been able to bring some books with me. It was still a month from the outright banning of books, and I no one bothered to check if I had smuggled some illegal ones with me. Since then, a few officers had come by my apartment to see if I had any books hidden, but they never once thought to look underneath the moldy carpet and squeaky wooden floorboards. We were all raised in a world of concrete and asphalt; it never occurred to anyone that you could hide something within a wall or floor. Among my collection were four books: Battle Royale by Koshun Takami, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, 1984 by George Orwell and a blank journal which I write in now. One time after the banning, I thought someone spied me reading the Bradbury book but as weeks passed and still nothing happened, I forgot about the incident completely. I only thought of the event some two full months later, when my home was burned to the ground.

It was the dead of the night and I was asleep. All lights in the city were turned out at 11pm and the city was so dark that when you opened your eyes, it was like being in some deep subterranean tunnel. Even the streets outside were pitch black; the capsule apartments blocked out the moon and stars and sun so completely that even during the daytime, streetlamps were used to light the city. It must’ve been 2am by the time I awoke. I was hot. I threw off my blankets and tossed in bed. Why was it so hot? It was December at the time and should’ve been freezing. I opened my eyes and glanced around. Ordinarily I shouldn’t have been able to even see the opposite wall of my room, but now a light was coming in through the window and bathing the entire apartment in a golden glow. I jumped out of bed and rushed to the window. There were people scattered all around the building, jeering and yelling as a great red-hot flame ate its way up the last wooden building in New York City. As I looked, I noticed that some of the men were firemen, but were doing nothing to stop the fire. I felt as though I had fallen into one of my books. I cursed under my breath then, something that would’ve earned me a caning and a short stint in prison if heard, then ran to the spot where I had hidden my books. Frantic, I pulled up the carpet and began to loosen the floorboards beneath. A drop of sweat rolled down my forehead. I gathered all of the books to my chest and ran to the door. I burned my hand on the doorknob, but even the painful smarting in my palm could not deter me from my course. I fled down four stories of stairs and came into the heart of the conflagration on the first floor. I looked out of a nearby window and saw the firemen watching me. I could not possibly escape with all of these books. My heart wrenching, I threw Orwell and Bradbury and Takami into the fire. The journal, however, I tucked into my waistband. There was nothing written in the book yet. It was not illegal, only suspicious. Then, my heart still breaking with my loss, I fled from the burning building into the cold desolation of the city.