The Archive of All Things

I imagine the place on the day of your arrival. At first, it adheres to some impossible geometry: Walls that meet in far-off dimensions, records that open into the bellies of other records. There’s a comforting recursion, like a photograph sandwiched between mirrors, time pulled apart. 

And then it begins to form in my mind another way, as a massive sibling of the archives you would have seen in your own life’s journeys: A sprawl of badly levelled shelving, the mothball scent of neglect, the squeal of rusty filing cabinets struggling against the indecency of opening. It sits in all its plain, ugly humanness, spread out over millions of miles in all directions. And inside, accessible to you now on the other side of your searching, every record of every event. Every history, every moment, every detail thought lost, thought buried. 

You, who so delicately autopsied the body, who cradled the organs, named the disease. You, who could have looked away, could have joined the chorus of forgetting. You, who didn’t. 

I remember the day your book arrived at my house. This small rupture in time—your past and your future at once bare on the page and shrouded in half-knowing. I followed you across oceans. In the new world, with its endless appetite for offerings of gratitude, I read your loneliness and remembered my own. I thought of this work we do, I thought of what Baldwin said: And then you read. 

Writers are like this—not so easily awestruck, until we are. I still don’t know how you did it, how you walked at once in all four cardinal directions—certainty and doubt, the future and the past. How does one travel preemptively through the coming chapters of their child’s life, knowing the finality of the thing pre-empted? And from so intimate, so singular a journey, to move backward, into the maw of a genocide, of entire bloodlines ended. And through all this, to anchor the suffering, the unimaginable loss, not to a bedrock of rage but to a bedrock of joy. A bedrock of love. How, how? 

The other day I saw a picture of a man burying the foot of his child. It was the only body part left, the only thing he could find in the rubble. I thought about the memorial that will one day be built to acknowledge what happened here. I imagined it in the shape of the rest of the body, an outline in steel, miles wide, digging into the sides of the skyscrapers and the museums and opera houses, taking whole chunks out of them so as to let the phantom limbs pass. And then I thought of you as you were, engaged in your life’s work, piecing through the records. Made to face evil, the world gorges instead on silence. I watched that man bury what was left of his child and I thought about the grace, the hard grace of all you tried to unsilence. 

In the Archive of All Things, there’s a small, hunchbacked attendant at the desk. Wire-rimmed glasses, tweed suit, a curmudgeonly air. There is no map or directory or guidance here, but for you the attendant makes an exception. He points you in the direction of the distant shelves where you will find every missing account, every relative, every kin, every single soul who passed through the killing fields. Every history, and every future too. 

I imagine you, finally, sat leaning against the shelves, a large, gold-leafed book open on your lap, watching the ink appear word by word, moment by moment, in the story of your own child’s life. 

I imagine a bridge. 

Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. He has published two novels, American War and What Strange Paradise. His first non-fiction book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, was published in February, 2025. He lives near Portland, Oregon.