The Infinite Library (38 page)

“You know, with one call, I could make sure we trade places... You think it's fun here? Can't even get a damn cigarette. And no books, either. Only bad condensed volumes of Reader's Digest bullshit. How am I going to do my vital research in this wretched place, this misbegotten son of a whore?... Yeah, they gave me a nice patch, those fucking draconian overlords of my sanity, ragabash poltroons... Slow down, you're getting loopy... Take the other half... Yeah, the blue one... Take the fucking valium! Christ, calm down.” He was performing both sides of the conversation while all I could do was watch and wait awkardly to take my leave.

He harangued the orderlies who were inured enough in this environment to take little notice or not take what patients said as personal. They didn't cajole him, but stayed the course of routine. That was their perfect defense: the passive resistance of maintaining order until the patient yielded to the regime of precision routine in the dull grey matte of the everyday. Sigurd's petulant attacks were patently ignored, and his angry questions and complaints were met by their dispassionate rote replies from hospital procedural rules. Every time I visited him, he conspiratorially confided in me that the hospital was in the pay of some nefarious figures who had every reason to see Sigurd stowed away. He claimed that the ward's single intent was to chemically lobotomize him. The charge nurse had informed me not to agitate him, and that he was on suicide watch. The nurse also alluded to some of his more violent antics against the orderlies and other patients. Fortunately for the staff, Sigurd was far too frail to pose much of a challenge.

This turn of events could not be appropriately be called saddening. No, it was an unnameable feeling. I sought the company and counsel of wiser heads.

Gimaldi sat with searching eyes, imploring me to forget the current plight of Sigurd as if matters of broader consequence should have been at the forefront of my attention. The snowfall was heavy and unrelenting, and he didn't want to go home. The bar was mostly silent and smoky, three elderly patrons drinking while huddled in packed silence at the bar, and us, at a badly scratched table with rickety chairs.

“No doubt you are taken with Castellemare's Tain. I, on the other hand, have no great spectacles to offer. And I will not debase myself in doing so, for a great thinker always regards fantastic and sensationalist things with suspicion, always wondering what the splendour is hiding,” Gimaldi lectured like a kind of drunk Socrates. “Your friend Sigurd's state of mind is a symbol of the result of Castellemare's flawed reasoning. His real reasons I can only offer a slight gesture, but let me tell[... “]

[One leaf apparently torn out as the numbering of the pages indicates that two pages are missing. Text resumes on following recto page.]

“I hope you will adopt the title I have chosen for it,” he said. “I am quite fond of
Finis Logos
as an appropriate title for the book you will hopefully write.”

“The End of the Word?”

“Precisely. Not
world
but
word
. And my counter-book will be the scene of a glorious rebirth. Yours will be closure, finality, what your generation so pines after, the apocalyptic; and mine will be the new beginning, the regenerative history, what someone of my historical proclivities desires most. And how could I begin something when the preceding has yet to end?”

[Another obvious removal from the text that would perhaps give all the information on the contents of the
Finis Logos
as tantalizingly referenced. The shift here from naming it De Imitatio Calembouri to this also follows a shift to the book being about a rebirth rather than a post-apocalyptic closure. It is probably another red herring. The remainder of this page is blacked out with permanent marker, and the last leaf to end the chapter has been torn out as evidenced by both the gap in page numbering and a scrap of the original page clinging to the binding. I had my doubts that the contents of this book had any relevance to me. It sounded as though this version of me was eager for someone to call the hand of language so that this Gimaldi could be known for its renaissance. It was a trite piece of theatre. At best, the configuration of this Gimaldi and Castellemare was cribbed from G.K. Chesterton's
The Man Who Was Thursday
, in the polarity of that champion of order (Detective Symes) and the champion of disorder (the anarchist Gregory, aka “Thursday”)].

[Addendum note: Chapter 15 is also missing. I am beginning to realize that either a) Castellemare had planned for me to steal this book but wanted to remove most of the key passages that would allow me progress, or b) The pages were intact when I first took possession of the book and some unknown person has since removed them. According to where the pagination resumes, 16pp are missing. Text resumes at opening of 16
^th
chapter.]

16

I had learned later that
Sigurd and Castellemare had been in frequent contact with one another. This served to unsettle me slightly, if not because it was done so discreetly, but it was the way men like Castellemare could attract the incoherent and misunderstood with the seductive philosophy of abandoning Reason for the bacchant revel of chaos. This was evidence of some level of collusion between the two. I felt it the sign of a terrible predator for someone to lure others in a state of weakness. Sigurd had recently been released from care and was now said to be visiting that posh home of Castellemare without inviting me.

Here is where events travelled into a strange province of circularity, of
[Text missing. The text was missing here as well, blacked out to the end of the printed page with the remainder physically torn out. None of these removals look like an accident born of neglectful handling, but a deliberate action. I resolve not to take the bait of yet another bobbing mystery and read on. The book is coming to its natural, if not awkwardly set up, conclusion, but I am now missing a vital piece of the narrative if only because there would be no explanation as to why Gimaldi and the narrator decided to go see Castellemare, and their willingness to enter into some variety of labyrinth. There is no bridging material to explain these loose ends. It may not be important. The arc of the story had very little lift to begin with, and the clues of importance to me were sparse and scattered. At this point of the story, I gathered that they were going to be trapped in Castellemare's labyrinth, and the narrator would relent to write
the book after all
].

17

Even Gimaldi couldn't see any other option but to take up on Castellemare's challenge.

“We may never get out,” Gimaldi said. “That is always the risk, but hopefully our convictions are in league with the truth.”

“If we get out, then I will finally understand,” I said. “Then I can write the
Finis Logos
.”

We went to Castellemare's villa, and he greeted us with an excessive cordiality that merely masked his smugness. He led us to an unmarked door and said, “I guarantee that there is an exit, but you must first weave your way through the
labyrinth
. The entrance will be barred, so don't think of backtracking.”

A guarantee of an exit. If only the mystery would also have one, or perhaps the exit of the labyrinth and the resolution of the mystery would be one and the same. It seemed suspiciously orderly for someone like Castellemare – self-professed anarchic figure – to have a labyrinth as well as an exit. His may not have been chaos after all, but that troubling thought that gets us to question the guarantee of a clockwork universe:
who fabricates and winds it?

And so we entered, and felt terribly anxious. It would probably be Castellemare's plan to let us die there if an exit was not found. Perhaps he was counting on us becoming desperate, making hasty decisions and causing us to further lose ourselves in this maze. This would vindicate his philosophy of chaos and non-resolvability, of paradox and defeat.

Gimaldi and I travelled down a corridor that led to a triangular room with two doors. The carpet patterns remained the same: red with gold trim, tracing that same interlocking pattern of red lions. One door was inscribed with the word love and the other with hate. We went through the south door (”love”) and came across another corridor leading to a quadrangular room and another triangular room, each with a variety of doors.

“We must mark our trail so that we don't repeat the same path,” Gimaldi said. “But I have no such marker.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Each room has the same items: a four by four plexiglass cube encasing some rare tome. Perhaps we could turn off the lights when exiting a room.”

“I do not see any light switches.”

Which was true. Pot lights kept the rooms illuminated.

“Then perhaps we should record the names of the books we come across. But I have no writing instrument, so we'll have to rely on our memories.”

The quadrangular room's book was the
Liber Artemidorus
, and the triangular room's book was the
De Specificae Animaculum
. We went through the right door of the quadrangular room and proceeded down the corridor before it turned sharply to the left and into a wall.

“Dead end,” I said. “Let's go back.”

One corridor led to a room and nothing more. To complicate matters, we encountered staircases, ladders leading both up and down, and the floor was sometimes recessed gradually - all this would cause us never to know with certainty what floor we were on. Some doors were locked on one side, and so we could only go through them by taking a roundabout route, only to return to rooms we had already traveled through.

Some doors only led to empty closets, yet all the doors looked the same. After two hours of trial and error, and encountering room after room (perhaps some we had already been to, but we couldn't know for sure), we came across a circular room with doors that branched from it - some on one side, and some on the other.

“Let this be our point of return,” Gimaldi said. “An anchor in this space to orient ourselves by. As long as there is no other circular room in this labyrinth.”

We entered another triangular room where there was another book, the
Summa Necroticatis
, and ended up in another corridor, but this one slightly different. It had a suspended corridor and three staircases above. We could not get to the corridor from there. So we returned to the circular room.

One of the doors from there led to a smaller circular room, with more doors. Once again, Castellemare's villa's architectural cunning exposed itself. While proceeding down one corridor, it appeared to fork, and at the fork, proceeding beyond the dimensions of the smaller circular corridor we had entered from. Upon closer inspection, we discovered a mirror.

“An illusion of space,” Gimaldi muttered, now becoming quite irritated.

When we returned to the larger circular room after another hour of searching, something peculiar had happened: the doors were in a different alignment since we had last been there. I heard a faint humming, and so my frightening hypothesis was confirmed: the room was revolving very slowly on an axis, like we were on the face of a large clock. Now it stood that nothing was stable. I reasoned that if this was the case, then we should proceed downwards to the source of the revolutions, to locate the pivot itself. After winding our way through rooms and taking any available ladder or staircase down, we finally located the bottom. Regrettably, it was a small circular room with only one door. When I opened it, there was a staircase that brought us up a few flights and into another room.

“Let us take stock of our progress so far,” Gimaldi said. “Where did the left door of the
Liber Glamis
lead us?”

“Back to the
Summa Necroticatis
room.”

“I see. And the right?”

“Mirrored corridor - dead end.”

“Then the path is clear. We head left to the
Aegyptiae Anotatio
room, up the ladder, go right through the
Sed Contra Areopagitica
room, down the left corridor, and out the
Renuncio quo est
room.”

But though we did this, we only encountered more of the same. I was feeling hungry and tired, but we could not risk sleep for fear that we would not recall the names of the rooms we had passed through.

Castellemare was more devilish than I had thought. The plexiglass cubes were bolted to the floor, the carpet was too tough to rip out, and so we had no way of marking our progress.