The Infinite Library (31 page)

“To what end? Why the ruse, if what you say is true?”

“Perhaps,” and Setzer paused for dramatic effect as he leaned in closer, “He wants to torment you. He wants you to think there is a big mystery afoot, and that you are the victim of it. Perhaps this is the way he gets his kicks.”

I was beginning to tire of his several 'perhaps'es.

“Anton, you asked for a scanned copy of the
7
^th
Meditation
. May I ask why?”

“Have you done so?”

“Not yet. I wanted to speak with you first.”

“Curiousity, really. I know I allude to Castellemare's plans, but I do not know what it is precisely yet... if the plan is nefarious is uncertain as the shadow has not lifted from it. There is much that Castellemare does not know about my operations, and vice versa. And, besides, it is more for reasons of professional rivalry that I would love to have a copy of the text. It is an idle curiousity, really.”

“Just to get under his skin?”

He smiled with mischievous assent before continuing: “Gimaldi, I don't expect you to understand the games played between two old adversaries.”

“Am I in any danger? I must know.”

“Danger? I don't know. Maybe not. Although I would wager that Castellemare does not want those books falling into the wrong hands. If you are or aren't in danger, the best thing for you is to remain on guard.”

“I still need more information.”

Setzer regarded me with a sudden flash of annoyance. “What do you think this is? I have been giving you information hand over fist! You're being awfully greedy, Gimaldi. I'm not a book you can plunder and leave on your bedside table when you have acquired all you needed from it. I'm not some kind of knowledge dispenser for your benefit. I am beginning to take ill of you.”

“I apologize. I do realize that you have furnished me with a great deal of information this evening, and that my persistence is based on fear, given my current predicament.”

“Then let me give you this last bit of advice,” he said, his tone conveying that he had not recovered from his annoyance. “Seek ye the man named Leo, your neighbour. If you hunger this much, then you best make your inquiries there. I have given you all that I can without compromising myself. Just beware of Castellemare.”

And with that we called it a night. I took the bus back to Toronto, a five-hour haul that ended in the wee hours. What else could I do but delve back into the
Backstory?
... and to continue being wary about the figure named Castellemare, his shadow looming over this entire mystery? I could have thought of several other books I would have rather read, but I simply had to know.

14

Excerpts 10-12 of the
Backstory

G
imaldi had given me vague warnings about going to Castellemare, telling me that there were dark truths no man should have to endure. He asked me again to write the book, and again I denied him... and again. “Go to him, and be prepared to stare into the heart of where the occult meets history,” Gimaldi said, daring me, playing the self-pitying martyr, the petulant. He also said that curiosity was another element of tragic undoing. And he knew that I was curious. But the more warnings I received about Castellemare, the more I was drawn to him. The warnings seemed designed to drive me to the one I was being warned against.

Where would I find him? When I asked Gimaldi where Castellemare lived, he flashed a defeated grin and said, “Nowhere, but... in time itself.” So no help there – only nonsense. What I didn't count on was for Castellemare to find me, as if I had conjured him.

I was at a pub, watching the inside of my own gaze. My mind lost in a fog. Blankness. That was when Castellemare, dressed in black came by, sweeping that blackness over blankness.

Castellemare sat across from me with hands folded in front of him. He was wearing a smirk that suggested there was something enormously funny at the end of his gaze, perhaps me. After a few minutes of his smirking and staring, he began wiggling his thin eyebrows repeatedly.

“Why are you staring at me?” I asked.

He widened his eyes and exaggerated his impish smirk.

“What's going on?” I insisted, but he only continued his mime antics.

I turned away to escape his disquieting stare. He got up and sat at a table in my field of vision. He then slowly turned his head toward me and continued his strange smirking. What he did next was even more curious. He lit a cigarette and let it burn away in the ashtray, not smoking it. I watched as the cigarette burned to the filter, discharged itself from the ashtray, and rolled to the ground. He then scouted the passing people, waved his hand twice, and a stranger walked towards me with a glazed look in his eyes. The man opened his mouth to speak: “Ammonius Saccas was a porter in Alexandria. He and Plotinus first met in a mirror. All of Greece, Rome, and Egypt had begun to worship the god, Serapis, drawn from the insistence and influence of Apuleius, Plutarch, and Lucian. Ammonius said that skepticism was death.”

The man snapped out of whatever trance he was in and resumed walking.

An eerie hum followed. Castellemare produced another cigarette. No one seemed to notice that smoking was banned from indoor spaces years ago. No one seemed to notice the incongruous placement of an ashtray.

“What do you know about Obsalte?” Castellemare finally spoke.

“Little to nothing.”

“Good. Keep it that way. It has been my experience not to be tempted by Gimaldi's busywork. What you just heard about Ammonius is all you really need to know.”

“I want to know more,” I said, almost in defiance. “What I just heard was a bunch of mystic gibberish. I could ask any old Sigurd to go out and find me that bullshit conspiratorial mumbo jumbo.”

“If you insist. Barbaric warriors, if allowed to live long enough, usually turn to religion. Did you know that? It's a kind of sickness when the glory of combat is over, and the desire for deification or piety takes over. But it takes a catastrophe, a great crisis, for them to make this leap from the sword to the cross.”

“I don't follow.”

“I didn't suppose you did. You seem to be a dim boy.”

“Gimaldi warned me off of you.”

“I trust that you've read his counter-book?” he asked probingly.

“I did,” I replied. “A bit sketchy in places, though.”

“Ha! Gimaldi as
a man
is sketchy in places! Take it from someone who has read him before: he likes the textual leaps. It's his way, a throwback to his origins. He's afraid to produce worthy works. A textual leap is his way of veiling an omission. Him, a researcher? Pfah! A detective? Oh, laughs! I told you last time we all met: it is just a metaphysical joke book, nothing more. Come with me: I have some things to show you.”

I followed him out of the pub and into a taxi. What had I to lose? I was being pulled in the direction of yet another mystery, and my ability to resist was absent. When we arrived, we were in one of those quietly set upscale parts of town where old houses crumble behind large trees. Castellemare's house was an enormous and old testament of what wonders could be produced with stone. We entered, went up a winding flight of stairs and reached an oak paneled door. As he opened it, I could see a marvelous yet disturbing thing. The room was all mirrors, stacked reflections emanating from the walls, ceiling, and floor.

“This is what I believe to be called a Tain, a large array of scrying glass, or what have you,” he explained. “Want to know more about yourself?”

“Myself?”

“Certainly. Most people do. Some people will go as far as to STEAL BOOKS AND LOOK FOR ANY TRACES OF THEIR OWN NAME. SUCH PEOPLE ARE INCURABLE NARCISSISTS WITH AN EXAGGERATED SENSE OF PERSONAL ENTITLEMENT. Anyway, just gaze into one of these looking glasses and let the mind go its own way.”

[
The obvious insertion and capitalization of the phrasing was making it seem rather clear to me that this book was meant to be read by me. Why would someone go to the trouble of upbraiding me in print?
]

Hesitatingly, I positioned myself in front of a mirror, my reflection cast in all directions at once, stretching outward on all sides towards infinity. I began to muse over the form I saw so ubiquitously present: myself - and this was not a pleasant image or feeling. But this vain introspection soon gave way to a kind of aleph-effect... I was able to stretch my thought to the outside, bring all those seemingly disparate and brief experiences into view. I could not only see Gimaldi's house in my mind, but I could sense it, and the road construction nearby... a cement pipe... stenciled letters... An inspiration enough to title a book... Stenciled letters not intended for that inspiration, an expiry date, a cement pipe consciously or unconsciously engaging an old man's attempt to write a book... Finally, the sense impressions must have overwhelmed him... This world, so intriguing, yet so false... The man named his book after the most absurd presence: a cement pipe's stenciled letters that read “Best Before 2099”. It announced a subtitle:
De Imitatio Calembouri
. The book said it was volume three. The book was about what happened after the synthesis, the atrocity, and the cataclysm. Did I know what any of these things meant? I saw an inscription within the infinitely mirrored space that may have been the full inversion of mind:
as fish grow in proportion to the size of their container, knowledge too grows in a like fashion. What of knowledge in an infinite space, in an infinite library?

A hand touched my shoulder, coaxing me away from the reflections; it was Castellemare sporting another smirk. He led me down to his den. His decor was partially Baroque, but mostly eclectic, the ooze and overflow of an antique dealer's warehouse. A painting hung on the wall that bore his likeness. I asked about it. It read,
Aetatis Suae 33.

“Oh, that? A portrait and nothing more. You wouldn't know the painter. He never came to be recognized - just faded away, died. Artists are rarely important until the second act. Say, that Tain was a hoot, wasn't it? There was a fine story about such a room, one that inspired me to install it in the first place. It was about a prisoner who wakes up in a room very much like that one, but the space of his confinement keeps expanding every day although the appearance is exactly the same. I believe that story can be found and read in a very particular labyrinth. It is of no matter – just one of my little interests. That, and the Library, of course.”

“Library?”

“A very special one, young man. Gimaldi did not tell you of this? Tsk-tsk. I thought he would have had the decency to give you a reason to avoid the likes of me.”

“Where is this library?”

“Anywhere. To speak of space is so dull. Remember that short story I was telling you about, the one with the mirrored room? Well, in my Library, I have plenty of copies of it.”

“You're quite the collector,” I said, veering on sarcasm but stopping short since I was in a home I could easily be ejected from.

“No, I never collect things. I despise the fetishism of sets. I prefer organizing what is collected. I am the Librarian, and the copies of this story I have possess different authors, different endings, written in different styles. I am sure there is one in there written by you, one by Gimaldi, and one by me. But that is not why you are here. You are here because you are on a quest for knowledge, knowledge on Obsalte.”

Without giving more than a cursory glance at one of his shelves, he pulled out a leather-bound text with ribbing on the spine. I was actually not looking for information on Obsalte; I had forgotten that quest and was now more consumed with finding more about Gimaldi and Castellemare.

“This is what you may need. In there,” he said, “You will not find answers, but more questions. It isn't about Obsalte directly, but more about us – Castellemare and Gimaldi. Consider this a temporary loan; I will require this book soon, perhaps on short notice. You may wish to start reading it tonight.”

The book was entitled
Codex Infinitum.
I had read a few chapters from it before, a book I had chanced upon at a used bookstore that had attracted me with its heavy Latinate title, the gravity of some secret trusted only to me. The book itself was a desperate disappointment, and I had cast it aside despite mention of Gimaldi and Castellemare. Why did I toss it away so quickly?