Refuse

5

The six criminals chewed in silence. They were co-conspirators in the grand drama of revolutionary enterprise, and the silence gave weight to the proceedings. Most of the time, the room was basked in the weird ambiance of breathing and chewing and not much else. Chewing. That’s the way that paper is pulped in the underground. It is chewed, like the cud of the ruminants on the agricultural floors. From the word “ruminant” we get our word “ruminate”:

Alexander taught them how to make paper this way. He said that prisoners throughout antiquity—in the other world, and in this one—had made black-market paper in this fashion. Once, he told them the story about prisoners during a great world war that chewed stolen bits of paper to make new paper for escape maps and notes that could be smuggled out to the underground resistance.

So the six guild friends chewed away like prisoner-revolutionaries manufacturing the means of their own escape. They each chewed and spit in indeterminate intervals. The skill was a learned one. It took time and experience to know just when the fibers were broken up enough and separated sufficiently so that they’d produce good paper. You had to learn not to think about where the paper had been, or how many thousands of times it had been recycled before.

In previous iterations perhaps dog hair or goat hair, or shreds of old garments and fragments of materials now unknown and lost in the mists of time might have been added to the eternal mix.

The source material could be derived from just about any old natural paper product: tissues, computer paper, cardboard boxes, wrapping paper, manila folders, notepaper, chit reports, or even envelopes. The source paper was always shredded first. Usually by hand. This is why pre-shredded paper stolen from the reclamation bags was such a great find. The bulk material, shredded into small bits, was then soaked overnight in buckets of water so that it could be chewed and pulped more easily.

Small metal frames had been fashioned laboriously from the heavy twists of wire used to seal the reclamation bags. The frames held fast the sections of tight wire mesh screening that had been purchased in the underground black-market, probably copped from the farming floors, or maybe from a willing black-market opportunist in Supply.

The pulp, when properly chewed to the right consistency, was then spit out onto the frames, spread to the appropriate thickness, and then dried for a day in the frames. When dried sufficiently, it would then be carefully (Oh, so carefully!) peeled from the frames and hung with clothespins to cure for another week. This process produced a very basic, coarse, and sometimes brittle paper. If the paper was intended for use for their own writing, they only cured the paper for five or six hours, then it would be pressed between two heavy objects, or, preferably in their makeshift paper press. The pressing would remove most of the ridges and valleys so that the charcoal could move more freely across the paper.

Alexander often talked of more advanced and involved papermaking processes. In the past, some of those processes were used by black-market paper guilds in the silo. But, the more intricate the process, the more things could go wrong, and the more likely it was that someone in authority would find out, and the guild would be busted.

Leah chewed in silence. Though there was occasionally some discussion, silence was really one of the hallmarks of papermaking meetings. This form of fellowship did not tax the emotions or put undue strain on friendships. In fact, Leah usually left the meetings with a sore jaw, but a cleansed soul. The friends spoke with their eyes and hearts more than they did with their mouths, and every so often, one of them would get that faraway look like they were writing, right there, right then, in their minds. Leah had written entire chapters, and had memorized them—word for word—while chewing and pulping the paper upon which she would eventually write those very chapters. There was a sublime beauty to the process that she could not convey but that she felt down to her very core.