Fault Lines of Memory

By the time the violent tremor from the neighboring country reached our small border town, its force was already spent. The initial swaying was like a weary sigh. Chandeliers swung gently, dust drifting down from the bookshelves like the low murmurs of ancient times disturbed from their slumber. I, Chen, the town library's administrator, was engrossed in a fragmented scroll on ancient geomancy—said to foretell the mysterious connection between shifts in the earth's veins and the ebb and flow of human hearts. Outside the window, the sky was a strange, overly calm grey-blue, as if drained of all emotion before a storm.

No one died in the fleeting tremor, at least according to official reports. In the first few days, people talked about the disaster in Myanmar, the numbers cold and distant, like the untouched statistical yearbooks on our shelves. Life seemed to quickly return to normal, except for the large globe in the library. Its axis had tilted slightly during the tremor, leaving the continents at an unsettling, precarious angle. I tried to fix it, but to no avail, as if some deeper misalignment had occurred, uncorrectable by simple physical means.

The anomalies began to seep in through the details. At first, it was names on library cards not matching the borrowers. An elderly professor, a regular visitor, insisted his surname was Li, while our records showed Wang. His hands trembled as he searched his pockets, finally producing an ID card. It did indeed say "Wang". He stared blankly at the card, then at me, his eyes like those of a child lost in a hall of mirrors. I reassured him it might be a system error, but a chill ran down my spine.

Then came the misplaced books. I clearly remembered placing 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' in the South American literature section, yet I found it tucked away in a corner of the Eastern philosophy shelf, sandwiched between 'The Analects' and a yellowed copy of the 'Upanishads'. Initially, I thought readers had misplaced them, but the situation worsened. History books began to confuse eras, formulas in scientific texts seemed arbitrarily altered, and novel endings subtly changed between different editions. The library, this sanctuary built on order and permanence, was slowly, silently crumbling into a Tower of Babel.

More unsettling were people's conversations. In the streets and alleyways, conversations often broke off mid-sentence, words losing their shared meaning. Someone mentioned "alkali," their tone urgent, filled with inexplicable panic, as if it were a life-or-death code, but no one, including the speaker, could decipher its meaning. Others began forgetting important things: the way home, family members' names, even their own identities. They weren't suffering from ordinary amnesia—it was more like a drift in memory, as if their pasts were being replaced by another, vaguer script. I saw a mother calling a neighbor's child by her own son's name, her gaze gentle yet firm, while the called child looked utterly bewildered. This scene terrified me more than any physical damage.

I tried to find a pattern, documenting these anomalies like charting an ever-changing star map. I consulted the fragmented geomancy scroll again, searching for answers. Its pages were filled with obscure diagrams and prophecies, mentioning "When the earth dragon turns, it not only cracks the land but also stirs souls and dreams, swapping recognition and memory." Could it be that the earthquake's energy didn't just act on the physical world, but traveled along some invisible 'earth vein,' infiltrating the deep structures of human consciousness, shaking the very foundations of memory?

I thought of the celebrity's mother in that distant country, said to have Alzheimer's disease, her memories slipping away like sandcastles. But what was happening here seemed different. It wasn't simple forgetting, but misplacement, overwriting, a forced splicing of different reality fragments. As if a higher-dimensional librarian, after the earthquake, had randomly, perhaps even maliciously, rearranged the index cards of our world.

I began to doubt myself. Were my own memories still reliable? Were my cherished memories of my late wife—those warm afternoons and gentle words—merely implanted phantoms? I looked in the mirror, seeing the same familiar, increasingly haggard face, but the eyes staring back seemed to hold a trace of strangeness, of hesitation. This city, this library, myself—we had all become like Kafka's castle, unreachable, outwardly unchanged but labyrinthine within, full of false paths and misleading signs.

Late at night, I sat alone beneath the library's vast dome. On the distant horizon, the artificial sun project was said to have made new breakthroughs, promising eternal daylight. Yet, in this reality twisted by tremors, what could artificial light truly illuminate? Could it penetrate the fault lines of memory, repair the cracks in our inner worlds? Or was it just another grand illusion, meant to conceal the unknowable abyss beneath our feet?

I closed the geomancy scroll; the last few pages were blurred and illegible. Perhaps the answer was inherently unknowable. We are like characters in a text constantly being edited, rewritten. The earthquake was merely a crude deletion mark, erasing some passages while copying and pasting unrelated sentences from elsewhere. I stood up and walked towards the tilted globe. I reached out and gently spun it. Continents and oceans flowed under the light, carrying a sense of fated dizziness. Perhaps accepting this misalignment itself is the only form of clarity. In this trembling library, we are all amnesiac readers, holding a book we can never comprehend, searching for a long-gone exit in labyrinthine aisles. And the next tremor, from afar, may already be gathering.