Q: …
A: Sure, miss. I’d be happy to describe it. The fourth floor of the library was where we had sex. The first floor didn’t have any books anymore, just monitors and VR goggles and titanium whatever the XXXX. The second floor might have been a theater except for one crucial difference I forget. The third floor was the food court/map room. That’s basically it.
Q: …
A: Because before the shooting, EAU’s library hadn’t had a non-librarian visitor for like a million months, so the librarians kept getting rid of books in this last-ditch effort to attract actual students. Ultimately it wasn’t the 3D plasma projectors but the moat and drawbridge and bulletproof glass that did the trick once twelve active shooters started stalking the campus with belt-fed XXXXXXX assault rifles.
Q: …
A: I’m not sure honestly. I think the deal was there was like this really zealous dean a few years back who sought to remake the library in the image of one of those HomeDomes they were putting all over Mars, so you had these ultra-sustainable features. You had little gauges on every faucet and outlet, you had a gray water system that could render XXXX and XXXX drinkable again, you had meteorite-proof greenhouses, solar panels wherever there wasn’t a window, a kitchen, a laundry room, a sauna, etc. The library really walked the talk as far as sustainability goes. Potatoes grew out of the couches in the coffee lounge even.
Q: …
A: No, not really.
Q: …
A: It worked out swimmingly in fact, because all of a sudden 609 students had to cohabitate there full-time.
Q: …
A: We did, yeah. Or the librarians did. That’s what librarians do. Count things. As long as twelve gunmen remained active outside, 609 undergrads stayed locked down inside. Which was more or less the scenario they’d been preparing for all along. I mean, librarians always need a project, right? Librarians don’t have to do anything except be smart and weird and prepare for things by being organized, so they completely nailed the active-shooter-lockdown-thing. They had systems in place. They had storehouses and inclusive governance and superfluous toilet paper.
Q: …
A: I totally agree. Before long, our former lives were completely forgotten. Amazing how quick that happens. Nine months inside might as well have been nine years.
Q: …
A: Of course, because obviously the library remained a fully functioning library, even after the campus’ power was cut. Plenty of kids kept up with the status of the standoff, monitoring every move on those monitors that weren’t books anymore. We knew how ridiculously well-equipped the shooters were. How well regulated, air quotes, as the XXXXXX amendment puts it. We knew they had the gear to stave off countermeasures for a protracted, you know, duration. I didn’t follow it as closely as some. Some kids gave interviews down there on the first floor with the two atrium rivers for a backdrop. That was mostly during the first few weeks. After that, we became old news. Evidently nine months feels like nine years to cable news networks too.
Q: …
A: No, never.
Q: …
A: I guess because I found it … incorrect … for reasons that escape me now. Answering square-XXX questions via Zoom while a fake indoor waterfall babbles over your shoulder seemed to, like, invite in some weird disconnect between what was actually happening and what was being discussed. Which, I get it, was probably the whole point, but it seemed off to me. It seemed to throw away this gift we got, which was this cool new … reboot … a really weird and scary reboot, mind you, but a new beginning nonetheless.
Q: …
A: Yeah, you can probably tell, huh? No, I didn’t mind the lockdown very much at all. In fact, I kinda loved it. Which feels XXXXXX up to say, but there it is. The reason is I think I already felt like I never really ever left the library anyway, even if I was visiting there less and less because there weren’t as many books anymore. The literal library, I mean. I mean, I still read all the time, just not in the library. Then there was the lockdown, at which point I read a lot in the literal library, because my life literally depended on it.
Q: …
A: Ha. Katrina was always saying XXXX like that. I’m not sure about your usage, she’d say, and then we’d duke it out etymologically.
Q: …
A: No, I’m fine. It’s fine. Totally. Yeah. I can talk about her. Thank you. For asking. Katrina. A librarian’s assistant, she was. Before the shooting. During, she got promoted. Full librarian. The cataclysm was good for her CV. Which in turn made her happier and easier to talk to. And yes, she was probably the main reason I was okay with the whole arrangement. I mean, she definitely was. We both were. For each other, I mean. Or, I mean, as okay as we could be. Because even though we were locked down amid this protracted armed occupation, we still had somebody nice to have sex with. And we had lots. I mean, there wasn’t exactly a ton else to do. Most mornings we spent either reading aloud to each other or XXXXXX acrobatically between the shelves. This was typical behavior for the fourth floor, the only floor with books by then. Sometimes you’d pull a volume off the shelf and catch a glimpse of a XXX or a XXXX through the gap. Pretty regularly we would hear another couple going at it in an adjacent aisle and get into a sort of volume duel. One of us would bawl out XXXXXXXXXXX and then one of them would go XXXXXXXXXXXXX voluminous XXXXXXXXXXXX and so on and so forth. That’s how it went down up there. The fourth floor was languid and saucy as XXXX. We’re talking Garden of Eden caliber XXXX. Except of course the quote-unquote angel with the flaming sword was keeping us locked inside this paradise instead of flushing us eastward out it. Plus there was the whole library-equals-tree-of-knowledge angle which we never quite got parsed out symbolically. I guess you could argue it was like after Eve and Adam ate each other’s apple but before Yahweh showed us pissed. Point is, I’d never had sex in the library before and always admired Katrina from afar and now we were doing it regularly in there because, you know, we couldn’t leave. So I felt good. At the time, I mean.
Q: …
A: I was right outside in quad the day it began. I heard the automatic rifle fire and fled back over the drawbridge. Luckily, I knew the library to be the fortified eco-bunker it was. Not everyone did. It was finals week too, because these XXXXX always pick finals week to flip out because that’s when everyone’s flipping out, so campus was completely flooded with kids who hadn’t shown up to class in weeks. This time was different though from all the others, because this was the first time gunmen had flipped out in a team, the first time since Columbine, if I’m not mistaken, when they were just two. Every time since then, they’ve been solos. But these XXXXXXXXXXXXXX who besieged EAU numbered twelve, a downright militia, and they’d been planning, they’d been practicing and stockpiling and authoring their XXXXXXXX manifesto. They didn’t just want to play a XXXXXX video game anymore, they wanted the world to become a video game and stay that way.
Q: …
A: Sure, I know several. Everybody did.
Q: …
A: That’s a good question. Honestly, I can’t recall. Like I said, I avoided the first floor, the news and stuff. I didn’t read the full list of casualties until the lockdown was over. I mean, I knew Stan Etling was among the dead, which was terrible and probably shut me down emotionally, made me think no, this isn’t really happening, I don’t want to hear the full extent of it, la la la.
Q: …
A: Yeah. Stan was Katrina’s ex. We were friends too.
Q: …
A: No, it’s fine. I agree. Totally. It looks weird. Especially in retrospect. But at the time, less so. I mean, Katrina and I definitely never had a conversation in which we consciously decided to help each other, you know, get over Stan’s death by XXXXXXX daily, but that’s obviously what we were up to. Coping. Sure, it was weird when she called out his name mid, you know, but not any weirder than, say, living in a college library mid-militant-occupation.
Q: …
A: At the time we had zero idea what they wanted, the gunmen. Even the kids who stared at news 24/7 didn’t. All we knew was they swept though campus in teams of two and secured certain buildings and started posting XXXXXX XXXX to social media. I was curious when I heard they had a manifesto, but it wasn’t available online until it leaked later and by then it didn’t matter. Basically, what we did get at the time was that these twelve XXXXXXX wanted to make a literal and symbolic assault on what they called the laundromat—no, no wait—the brainwashing machine of US society, the higher education system, which they saw as some vile scheme to confiscate their guns and saddle them with student loans and liberal sensibilities. They also denied the authority of the federal government, which was confusing, since they played the national anthem every day at dawn and had bald eagle tramp stamps.
Q: …
A: Mostly the latter. I didn’t tune in until late month eight when negotiations were underway. Actually, I didn’t even tune in then, but everyone inside was talking about it and I stopped making a concerted effort to ignore them. What alerted me was when networks stopped calling them terrorists. Then they became radicals. Then they became protestors. Then they became XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Then, as you know, they became free men.
Q: …
A: Absolutely. I remember it exactly. Katrina and I had just finished XXXXXXX in literature, the PR – PU aisle, perhaps, because we were just lying there naked with a stack of Proust for pillows when cheering rang up downstairs. News that a deal had been reached was just breaking online. Those XXXXX twelve frothy XXXXX were going to walk away free and clear. We didn’t know that yet, though, Katrina and I. We were talking about something irrelevant, which was the great gift of the fourth floor. Something like cell phones, how we didn’t miss them and didn’t want them back when we got out but would probably get them back anyway because that’s just how it goes. I told her the word selfie, like the actual word itself, had a laxative effect on me. She said she was incapable of even taking one—a selfie, not a laxative—and that anytime she tried, some other person’s face would show up on the screen. She’d hold the phone perfectly still and line it all up and smile, but as soon as she thumbed the button, she’d disappear and someone else kind of like her but not exactly would show up instead. By then the cheering downstairs was sustained and getting louder and so we deduced the lockdown was done. We knew we were done too, that once we put our clothes back on, we’d never hang out again.
Q: …
A: I don’t know how. We just knew. Or I just knew. Like I said, we were coping. The whole lockdown was too I don’t know. We, or surely she, would be too eager to turn the page, to close the book, to leave that valley and not look back. Plus, Stan would always be there between us once we got out. By then the other librarians were calling Katrina’s name at the end of every aisle. Where are you? they kept saying. Where have you gone? By the time they reached as far as MN – MO she called back, Hold on a sec, let me get dressed. Then she said to me kind of sadly, I guess I gotta go. They needed her downstairs to open the gate. They needed all the keys of all nine librarians at the same time to unlock the lockdown. That’s how it worked. All the other librarians were already down there with half a thousand jubilant undergrads behind them ready to be liberated. Katrina got dressed and picked up the books she’d been lying on and wiped something off a cover and carefully reshelved them. Before she left the aisle I said, Stan was the most honest guy I ever met. She stopped when I said that, kind of half-turned. Then she waved by closing her hand real slowly and opening it again. Then she went away.
Q: …
A: I didn’t move for a long while, just lay there butt naked, lamenting my lost-XXX paradise. Proust spent like his whole life abed, didn’t he, just writing and reading and XXXXXXXXXX and remembering? Is that what awaits me, I wondered. Would this be the climax of my days, which I’d spend the rest of my time reliving and reflecting upon? I thought it was likely so. I thought this was as good as it could get, a life between the shelves. Every ideal is a lie, Stan had said in a philosophy class one time. Or was it every lie is an ideal? He was quoting someone, I don’t know who. Or maybe he was paraphrasing. Stan didn’t flee straight into the library when the shooting started. He ran around trying to corral as many kids as he could. I’m a liar, I realized. Suddenly I saw how all this knowledge I believed in so much is no more than one fiction predicated atop another, a long dumb-XXX decimal system made up of made-up realities. I wished I could have asked Katrina what she thought of all this. I didn’t even know if she knew I had sat behind Stan in ethics class. But of course it was too late by then. Katrina was the last librarian to head downstairs, the last to flatten her palm on the p-tab, which meant once the drawbridge was drawn and the outer gate opened, she was the first to die.
Q: …
A: Apocalyptic. The rocket blast pulverized every pane of greenhouse glass, knocked every volume from every shelf. I woke up on the second floor clothed in paper.
Q: …
A: I don’t know. I was clearly concussed and yet I got the gist enough, that those XXXXXXXXXXXXX had lied. Obviously. Only later did I learn that one of the twelve did not approve of the deal they’d reached with the feds. They were going to walk out of there free XXXXXX men. They were going to talk on AM talk shows and land mega XXXXXXX book deals. They were good to go. But not the twelfth one, whatever his name was. He had three names of course. These XXXXX always have three. He wasn’t down. He didn’t walk in there just to walk away again. He wanted the campus replaced with a crater. Especially the library. Most especially the library. For mister XXXXX three names, the library embodied everything he was not and hated and feared: somebody else’s thoughts, somebody else’s words.
Q: …
A: That’s pretty much it.
Q: …
A: Ha.
Q: …
A: No. I never officially testified.
Q: …
A: Because I didn’t see the point, to tell you the truth. Plus all that hand on the bible business. No thanks. I offered to swear on a dictionary, but they called that malapropos, whatever that XXXXXXX means.
Q: …
A: Well of course. Of course I’d say everything I just said under oath.
Q: …
A: And?
Q: …
A: …
Q: …
A: Because I fail to see the substance of your question, is XXXXXXX why.
Q: …
A: Wow. You actually went there. Wow. Well. Okay then. Fine. Here we go. To start, I have zero idea who this Phillip whoever-the-XXXXX you speak of is. So I can neither verify nor negate his version of the lockdown. All I can only say is that Katrina never, not once, mentioned any cousin of hers, not during the entire time I knew her. Yet this so-called cousin claims to have been by her side all nine months? I call XXXXXXXX.
Q: …
A: Her what now?
Q: …
A: Memoir?
Q: …
A: …
Q: …
A: Um. Well. Yes. I mean obviously. Obviously I knew she was working on one. I mean, how could I not? Katrina wrote all the time. We both did. In fact, now that I think of it, Katrina never called it her memoir, but her narrative. That’s why you caught me off guard there for a sec. It was her narrative, always her narrative, just like Hemingway used to call his in that posthumous novel.
Q: …
A: Oh. Um no. I was not aware that. That a publication date has been. Has been set. That will be. Great.
Q: …
A: I’m not?
Q: …
A: At all?
Q: …
A: …
Q: …
A: Of course I actually knew her.
Q: …
A: She wrote that?
Q: …
A: Oh.
Q: …
A: …
Q: …
A: Um.
Q: …
A: …
Q: …
A: Honestly, I don’t know what you want me to say here.
Q: …
A: Fine. You got me. Some parts may have been uhm. Slightly embellished. There.
Q: …
A: Well obviously you’re very XXXXXXX intelligent.
Q: …
A: OK. Fair question. Honestly, everybody was just dealing in there the best they could. Still are. I just started asking myself what-ifs. What if this whole situation is perfectly grand? What if I actually love it? What if this is best it will ever get? What if I’ve already got everything a person could possibly need?
Q: …
A: Exactly. Except for that.
Q: …
A: I know, I know. It’s messed up. But you asked why I didn’t testify. You asked why I didn’t do podcasts. Now you know.
Q: …
A: I guess that’s just what it means to make meaning when you’ve been kicked out of the garden for good. You’ve got to come up with a story that makes tomorrow necessary. Got to weave some threads together that you can wear on your feet. This documentary of yours is no different. Listen miss, I gotta go.
Q: …
A: …
Q: …
A: Seriously?
Q: …
A: Huh.Well. Yeah. Yeah I suppose I’d be very uh. Grateful.
Q: …
A: Sure. You too.
Q: …
A: Oh XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.
Dan Tremaglio is the author of Half an Arc & Artifacts & Then the Other Half (Mint Hill Books), a finalist for the 2022 Indie Book Award for the Novella, and of the novel The Only Wolf is Time, forthcoming from Sagging Meniscus in 2025. His stories have appeared in numerous publications, including F(r)iction, The Master’s Review, Pacifica Literary Review, and Flash Fiction Magazine, and twice been named a finalist for the Calvino Prize. He lives in Seattle where he teaches creative writing and literature at Bellevue College and is a senior editor for the journal Belletrist.
The Collidescope 