The Sound of the Sun

With sincerity and sorrow, I mourn the passing of Our Great Leader, but I must admit that the prospective return of my colleagues delights me. Though, I suppose their disappearances may necessitate a restoration of colleagues rather than a return. Of the fifteen archivists, four historians, two scribes, and one custodian named Dale that were once employed alongside me, none remain. Officially, of course, they were reassigned. Temporarily, or indefinitely, and often overnight or mid-sentence. The transfer paperwork would always cite “special and confidential archival duties,” with relocation to the "Eastern Department.” I did notice, however, there was no address.

Within a week, the reassignments had been completed, leaving me alone in the library. I would remain alone for the next seven years, but luckily, I did not have to ponder for eternity why I was not given the same opportunity as my workmates. The officer who escorted out Dale–-the very last of my colleagues to depart—would provide me with a brief, but sensible explanation. He would grunt, “minimal communication risk,” in my direction as he dragged Dale out by the hair. Yes, I was born without the capacity for speech. Rarely has it interfered with my duties in the library, especially after Our Great Leader obscured such institutions from the public, but I do understand that the Eastern Department may have different demands. This does not upset me. I do not know whether Our Great Leader ever personally reviewed my case. I imagine not. But somewhere, someone of status approved my continued service, and that was enough. My articulate, opinionated colleagues were, each in turn, recognized for their potential. I, perhaps, was recognized for my lack of it.

Our Great Leader never walked the floors of the library himself, but his presence dwelled in every corner. The building, once named the People’s Historical Reference Library, was deemed ideologically ambiguous in the second year of the Rectification Campaign, just a few months before my colleagues left. A memorandum, unsigned, but exhibiting five distinct seals, arrived in the mail. It informed us that “libraries, as vessels of collective memory, must not appear neutral.” It was strongly recommended that the building be renamed to better reflect the Party’s commitment to intellectual precision.

We were given two approved options for a new name: “The Unified Archive of Correct Thought,” or “The Harmonized Repository of Supreme Truth.” Unfortunately, none of us realized that Our Great Leader maintained a limit of forty-eight hours for affairs regarding ideological alignment. In the forty-ninth hour, we received a second memorandum, this one sporting only a single seal, burnt slightly at the edges. It stated that our indecision signaled wavering loyalty, and as such, the matter had been resolved on our behalf: the library would be named “The Archival Cabinet of Acceptable Curiosities.”

It was, in truth, an unusual title, not exactly due to its wording, but because we had not yet begun to classify curiosities, acceptable or otherwise, and the notion of a “cabinet” suggested a containment far smaller than our six floors of shelving. Regardless, the new silver plaque arrived pre-polished, a gift so generous that I had to dismiss my doubts.

Soon after the renaming, a list of items newly classified as “incongruent with national clarity” arrived. It was thirty-seven pages long. To ease the transition, a glossary of three organizational terms was also included: “acceptable,” “questionable,” and “erased.” We were instructed to use the final term liberally.

The recataloguing process itself was dignified, systemic, and largely silent—well suited to my talents. I quickly grasped the difference between a book needing redaction and one needing disappearance. Redaction typically involved the removal of some adjectives, reordering pages, and the occasional retitling of historical events. Famines, for example, would be referred to as “distribution challenges." Disappearance, on the other hand, was a much quieter matter, but caused some trouble nonetheless. Books marked erased were supposed to be delivered to the Disintegration Bureau, but mail was shipped out only twice a week, providing ample time for the hard covers to bypass the postal weight limit. As a result, our third-floor staff restroom was transformed into the Chamber of Deferred Materials

Expectedly, recataloguing is a much slower ordeal without my colleagues. Even when there were twenty-three of us, we received multiple letters ordering us to keep up with the seemingly exponential pace of correction. To this day, the letters continue to arrive, though I suspect their authors have long since disappeared. The most recent one read only: “to be ideologically current is to remain in motion." A single, oily fingerprint was in place of a seal. I eventually had to redact this message—“motion” could imply change rather than consistency, and Our Great Leader would never approve of that equivocation.

My commitment to the mechanical, soundless tasks of the library was always strong. My sense of Our Great Leader’s standards grew keen quite early on. Therefore, I recall an incident of personal misconduct with shame and confusion.

It was during my third isolated year in the library. I was obedient, experienced, and nearly content. Even so, it was during this time that I would betray not just Our Great Leader, but also the homogeneity of my lifestyle, which I never should have taken for granted.

The act itself was minor. It involved a single book—thin and softbound with yellowing, worn pages. It laid on the Pending Material shelf for a few days, simply due to preoccupation with other materials. I had no preconceived ill-intentions when I retrieved it for review. I was prepared for a prompt inspection and a probable erasure, and gave the cover a glance as I picked it up. Its absence of illustrations, odd weightlessness, and the thick layer of dust on its surface were all unremarkable. But the title was not.

“The Sound of the Sun.”

That was all. No subtitle, no author listed, only those five words printed in an unauthorized font. There was no table of contents, no index, just 63 pages of tightly spaced text and numerous diagrams rendered in smudged ink. I inspected the spine. It was missing a stamp, meaning it had entered the library outside official circulation. This alone warranted immediate erasure. And yet, I did not move it to the proper chamber. I never even marked it. Propelled by some sort of instinct or impulse, I would return to my desk, where I placed the book beside the day’s batch of redactions.

I did not touch it until the evening of the following day. The title was intriguing, but irritating me with its inconceivability. Sound does not travel in space. That is an established truth. It is taught in our physics lessons and reinforced by textbooks and national reference glossaries. The sun is a flame without a voice. A bright, warm, body of sustenance that is, officially and resolutely, mute. But I had found something that suggested otherwise.

When I did touch the book again, it was to tuck it beneath the folds of my jacket and bring it back to my quarters. I opened it after lights-out. The first paragraph was clinical in tone. Direct and observational. The unidentified author claimed to have recorded a frequency anomaly during a solar transit scan. The tone of the report was gentle. The writing was precise and methodical, but possessed a disobedient undertone of curiosity. The word “wonder” appeared on page five. I had not seen that word in print since the last Language Clarification Decree.

The diagrams were even stranger: undulations plotted on unfamiliar axes, mystical sketches of concentric spirals. One caption read, “The sun does not speak, but something speaks for it.”

I read until the margin notes became illegible. Near the end, the writing changed. It grew disorganized and erratic. Entire pages were crossed out. One displayed the same phrase, repeated seven times: “Silence is restraint. Restraint is survival.”

I returned the book to the shelf the next morning. I completed the proper form, marking it erased with clear, definitive strokes. I placed it in the outgoing crate for Wednesday’s mail to the Disintegration Bureau. As much as I wanted to believe I had restored balance, I knew, perhaps intuitively, that I could not escape consequence.

Our Great Leader was celebrated for his expeditiousness. I was not surprised when a letter arrived only two days later. Instead of a standard delivery through the postal service, this one was slid under the library’s back door during my shelving rotation. Its paper was heavier than standard stock. No greetings or formalities were included. It contained only two lines:

"A discrepancy has been found in recent classification.”

“Stand by for visitation."

There was no seal or signature. I did as instructed. I stood by.

The next afternoon, the elevator—an installment that had been inoperative since the leave of my colleagues–-would ding. An officer emerged. I was greeted not with words, but with an outstretched hand. As mandatory training had taught me, I handed over my identification documents with my head bowed. For a few moments, the officer would carelessly flip through my documents. He eventually nodded, then walked past me and vanished into the stacks.

I stood still, but when the rummaging from behind me turned into thuds and tearing noises, I so desperately wanted to run after the officer and stop him. I knew I could not move. Any intrusion with a government-ordered search would result in my imprisonment. So instead, I imagined Our Great Leader. I thought of a phrase from one of his early addresses, back when he still delivered them in person. “Obedience is the highest form of thought.” For the hour and a half that the officer spent conducting his search, my mind would replay his words, eventually blocking out the sounds of precisionless hands and bringing me, not peace or solace, but an uncomfortable sense of clarity.

When the officer returned, he carried only a small beige folder that I knew had not been in my possession. This was good—no confiscations meant reduced trouble. He wordlessly handed it to me, and then just as he had come, he briskly departed through the elevator. I held the folder for several minutes before opening it. The first page inside was a printed notice, stamped in the corner with a seal I did not recognize—a key inside a circle, but noticeably lopsided, as if it had been hastily applied. I gazed at this seal until I had the courage to shift my eyes to the notice.

Clearance granted.

Discrepancy resolved.

Resume duties under updated guidance.

Beneath this was a single-page insert, formatted in the familiar style of my cataloguing directive. However, it did not include the thirty-seven page list of “incongruent items” or the redaction checklist like the first directive. All it contained was the glossary of organizational terms, but this one only had two classifications.

– Acceptable

– Erased

“Questionable” had been eliminated. There was no longer room for doubt. At first, I felt relieved. The paper made it official that I was not to be removed. I had been investigated, processed, and cleared. Whatever trace the book had left on the records, it had been forgiven, or buried, or ignored. Maybe I had never been in danger at all. In fact, I was so relieved that when I entered the stacks, planning to resume my shift, the sounds from earlier had slipped my mind. As soon as I stepped through the door, I noticed multiple major errors.

Volumes had been rearranged, poorly. I spotted a poetry collection classified under Political Geography. A memoir of Our Great Leader’s military youth had been placed in Mythology. Several limited first editions had been shelved with their spines inward. Torn out pages were scattered across the floor. And the most puzzling part: some titles were gone. Gaps in the shelves and an unsettling sense of emptiness told me that the library was missing books. I frantically searched the disastrous room, attempting to identify which ones were taken while simultaneously fixing the mess.

After about ten minutes of panic, I reached the “Parenting” section of the stacks. Instead of being alphabetized, or ordered by publication date, this shelf was organized by family members. Simply, I placed all the “father and daughter” titles together and “mother and daughter” together and so on. It did not seem that the officer had changed the arrangement of this section, but the shelf now had a large empty space, and I quickly detected a pattern. Every “mother and son,” “father and son,” or any book with “son” in the title had been removed. I stood there for a moment, puzzled, until it hit me. The officer was an idiot. The Sound of the Sun had led him to “son.” As much as I admired Our Great Leader, I did wish he would push the recruitment period for officer training a little later than the second-grade.

I basked in the absurdity of it for a moment, and then went to check the astronomy section, just in case. Sure enough, the titles that actually included the correct spelling of “sun” remained. My rage dissipated significantly. The library’s condition was fixable. And I still had books that I wanted. So, I resumed my shift, beginning with a trip to the third floor to empty out the “Room of Questionables.” I planned to move them to the neighboring Chamber of Deferred Materials, as instructed by the new directive. I opted to take the elevator since it was now somehow functional, and stepped out onto the third floor. I was met with a flickering warm light across the hallway tiles and curls of smoke along the ceiling. I followed the scent.

The Chamber of Deferred Materials was burning.

The door had been propped open with a charred piece of wood. The flame inside was dancing in spiraling patterns. The piles and crates of banned books were already consumed. I watched as floating pages disintegrated midair. The labels on the walls had turned black.

Standing in the doorway, helplessly, I thought of the sun. Of its silence. Of the diagrams I had seen. Of the book I had erased. The word wonder. And a passage, one that came right before the author seemingly lost his mind.

“The sun is a voice without words. It speaks in a tone too vast for us to hear. You may be unable to hear it, but its sound is not silence.”

It repeated in my head as the flames continued to consume the chamber. The heat was unbearable and my eyes watered in the smoke, but then, in the crackling sound of the fire, I thought I heard a whisper. I took a step closer. Close enough that the flames latched onto my sleeve and began to consume me.

The hospital would ask me what happened, and of course I could not tell them. I suppose that was beneficial, though. Who would want to explain that they were attempting to hear the voice of the sun? I was discharged after a few days. As soon as I reentered the library, I would gather all the titles containing the word “sun” and ship them out for disintegration. Marking materials as “acceptable” and administering circulation no longer excited me. What did the approval of a book matter if I was blatantly, in some measure, ideologically misaligned.

My next four years were incident-free and blurred together. Besides the occasional visit from an officer for inspection, the library maintained its old, silent rhythm. I never received another edition of the cataloguing directive, but the shipments of books became identical. Titles seemed to repeat. There was never any new content, just slight variations in phrasing. Marking and erasure no longer involved deliberation or care. There was no more haste, no more suspense in every catalogued page. The words and pages faded into background noise.

My thoughts, too, grew repetitive, dull, and unremarkable, though I did experience intermittent moments of reminiscing. I would think of Dale when the silence felt too domineering. I would recall his auditory presence—the squeaks from his cleaning cart, the sweeping of his broom, and his humming as he worked. I missed him and all my colleagues. I missed their sounds. Sometimes, The Sound of the Sun would occupy my mind as well. I would repeat lines, picture the graphs, and wonder what had happened to the author to make them abandon all sense of clarity.

So, as I mourn the passing of Our Great Leader and write my unspoken words, there is something else I must admit. It is unlikely that even if my colleagues were to return, I would see them again. I will no longer be here. And neither will the library.

I have made my decision. The books are stacked in tall piles and the shelves are doused in gasoline. When I drop the match tonight, the flames will not spare the shelves or the papers. Not the volumes of history or science, not the forbidden knowledge or the empty records. I will be the last one standing in this hollow place, and I too will die in the flames. There will be no trace of the library, of the erasures, or of my presence. And perhaps, once engulfed, I will hear something. Before I am entirely consumed, before I am no more, the sun, so distant, so elusive, will finally have its voice in the crackle of the fire. I will hear it. I know I will.