The first things to go were the libraries. Doors were kicked down and the librarians were hanged. I was responsible for tying the noose around their throats. One librarian pleaded with me. I said it was inevitable and that I was sorry.

And then the books themselves were burnt. We burnt all history from existence. The books were burnt in large piles in the streets. After the books had burnt for several hours, what was left was liquorish-black heaps. The embers pulsed and died repeatedly. Like eyes opening and closing, opening and closing. The children watched the fire. I told them to return home and not watch the fire.

But soon, the homes were gone too. Bulldozers were used, initially. Those who were a part of this regime did not have the required patience to ask families to leave their homes. So, the houses were demolished with families still inside them. My favourite demolition was the old-people’s bungalow home. My colleagues always commended me for my ice-cool demeanor and passion for death.

But I don’t know where I got this from.

Sometimes we used bombs to destroy the houses. Although my main role was executioner I still found enjoyment in flushing out rats. I threw a bomb into a club for homosexuals. Out they came. One man was completely skinned. He was walking like a toddler. He kind of zig-zagged as he walked and then just dropped to his knees. We all laughed at him.

And the leader of this regime told us that writers were required to have a face transplant or die. Our leader was fat. He was the fattest man I had ever seen. He was surrounded by killers all day so he could sleep outside in trollies and in rubble piles. So we rounded up the writers. I found one writer. His name was Hector and my team rounded on him and kicked him in various places on his pasty vessel.

We tied Hector to a chair and asked him what kind of work he wrote. He said he wrote about himself. He said he also championed young writers who used unconventional methods to get their point across. He said he was not interested in fame but he was an active social media user.

We did not like Hector. He was on our leader’s list of people who were dangerous to our new way of life. We offered Hector a cornflake cluster to calm him down. He chewed on it but did not swallow.

Hector had a moustache that was curled at the edges. He had the hair of a fawn. I patted him on his head and his sweat wet my palm. I said I could pat this head all day. Whoever says that you cannot hate somebody for the way they look is wrong, said our leader. It is as good a reason as any. So we decided to change Hector’s face. We performed surgery on him. We used scalpels and tape and tin cans filled with alien mixtures. We turned him into Ted Bundy.

Our leader said the statues had to go next. I remember when I was a younger man, I used to enjoy touring the city and joining City Guides. This one time, our guide took us all down a small alleyway and to the famous statue. We walked past ventilation shafts and, when I looked down, there were chefs at work in the kitchens and it looked hot down there. The guide turned to us and pointed at the statue.

It was a statue of XXXXXXXXX. We all knew the statue, of course. Just on the corner of the statue, some graffiti. The graffiti said that somebody loved somebody sometimes.

We all knew the statue well, yes. It was a statue of great religious significance.

One of the tourists touched the statue and gasped. They turned around and spoke to each other in Chinese I think. Then they repeated the action of touching the statue again and again and again, all the while taking photographs to remember the moment they touched the statue of religious significance.

But I just stared into the statue’s eyes. The face had eroded and the eyes and nose and mouth were blunted. So the face looked like a ball, pretty much. A ball with a thorn crown. And the arms, too, lacked sinew and definition. And the feet — probably the most important feature of the statue — they were basically just two hams now.

The guide said something about why the statue was important. One of the tourists was standing on the statue, his camera turned inwards to take a photograph of himself. He was alone.

But now, the statues must go. I pleaded with the leader. I said perhaps we could spare this statue. He said I was a fat fanny.

The statue of XXXXXXXXX crumbled under the weight of sledgehammers. A grown man was holding the head of the statue and started kissing it. This was very funny. Somebody else tried to emulate the laughs derived from the head-kissing, so up stepped a small man whose name was, and never will be, important. He took the crotch area of the statue and started to ride it. He rode it and rode it.

He tried to get in. Again, this was very funny. In those days, amidst the destruction of everything our ancestors had built and fought for, laughter was our antidote, our validation of our acts. What was wrong, we thought, with a man rutting a statue of great religious significance?

There just was not any meaning anymore, which did not matter too much. I wanted to share this with somebody. These thoughts. I thought of my family. Where were they now?

A memory. There we were, my family. We were in a car. In the front, my wife. In the back, my son and daughter. I do not remember their names. But I was driving. Driving forwards. We seemed to just go on and on. And outside it was dark and it wasn’t the city. It was somewhere in the country. The wide-open spaces made my eyeballs want to vomit out of my head. The open spaces remind me of my other fear — the fear of toilets filling up with brown liquids as my eyes become lost in the inarticulate void of sewage.

My son woke from a nightmare and screamed. I asked him what was wrong and he said he saw grandma again. I said what happened this time. He said, she wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t alive. She sat at the dinner table and he got under there and started playing with her legs. He started pinching at her skin. And then my son said he started to unravel her skin like they were beige tights. He said: I took all the skin off grandma. He described the skin all rolled up and useless at her ankles like a snakeskin.

He started to cry. Of course he did. He was crying because it’s a horrible image. He was crying because she would never come back. But I was crying too. I was crying because I don’t understand how a four-year-old boy could envision the slow skinning of his own grandma. I wondered then, as the car drove forward, about my son’s future.

I wondered too, about the education I had received in life from my father, as I stared at my wife’s tits.

And although I was beset by these memories, I still found time to discuss presidential assassinations. We all sat on the plain, staring down at the city below. The city was on fire. We thought of our favourite assassinations. It was decided that Kennedy’s assassination was particularly interesting, culturally. And the flapping scalp was a bonus, too.

We tried racking our brains for other political killings. Gadaffi’s was good, said my colleagues. Gadaffi looked like a lion, my colleague said. Somebody else suggested that Gadaffi would have looked good surrounded by lettuce.

The city was now not really a city. It was a wasteland. It was timeless. Although many believed the year to be 2014, it could have easily been 1814. Whatever year it was, it mattered not. It was and always has been a time of violence.

Some of us thought that time had stopped. Others thought time had accelerated and the world was delirious. But others knew time existed as it always had.

The last thing to go was laughter. Laughter was banned. So there we were, a pitiless band of killers who were once men and women. It was the end of days. I thought some more about my family, out there, wherever they were, and wondered if they were dead or not. Yes. They were. Inevitable. Of course they were. I see my son and daughter on a pyre in my mind. I see my wife violated repeatedly for the sake of my mind’s indulgence.

She is bent over and raped repeatedly and my children are burnt again and again and again. And there is the city below us, on fire. Time moves on, as it always has. And I try to remember who I was and what once was, but I give up and regard the ruins below me with a complete lack of irony. There it is, the city, in silence.