The Infinite Library (61 page)

“What's the point, Castellemare? I'm getting tired of going around and around.”

“The point is that the outcome of the synthesis involves a woman, the very keystone of that arching epic of atrocity. Jakob here plays his part, and Albrecht's more cruelly refined misogyny places the feminine in its purely ineffaceable grandeur, but without being silly in the romanticist fashion. Of course, I don't want to give the whole thing away right here, now, do I?”

“Jakob, do you recall when I met you in the labyrinth?”

He merely looked at me, baffled.

“The labyrinth, Jakob,” I repeated. “You were with a rather tall and Germanic looking woman, very strong and lean. Short blonde hair, tattoo on her breast. You were lighting her cigarettes.”

Again, no flicker of recognition.

“Gimaldi, don't press the boy. What you saw were phantom images, symbols in flesh. Nothing in Setzer's labyrinth except for me could be considered anything more than illusions and artifice. You saw a cinematic taster of what is to come, and Jakob here was featured.”

“Now that you mention it,” Jakob was struggling to piece something together. “I did have this dream -”

“Bah!” Castellemare cut him off. “Dreams are all Freudian fluff pish-tosh! Spare us the recounting of your banal dreamscapes where you ride warring unicorns to bed the buxom princess tart!”

“No, let him continue. Jakob, what was your dream?” I asked in earnest.

“I... I remember something, but it must have been a week ago, and the memory is faded. But when you mentioned some woman with a tattoo, it started coming back to me a little. There was a fountain... “

“Yes,” I exclaimed. “There was a fountain! Go on.”

“Oh, really, Gimaldi... A fountain? Mere coincidence. I half expect that you two will agree upon having seen leaping satyrs as well. And then come to an agreement that he has maternal issues as a direct result of his being tapped on the head with a wooden spoon. Let's abandon this dead end chain of reasoning. Let's get back to why I am here.”

“Castellemare, the only reason you pop into my life is to drop another load of mysteries and riddles on my lap. You wish to torment me – that much I know.”

“You flatter yourself greatly,” he replied. “I come here presenting you with another little tidbit on the synthesis, and now you want to talk to the imbecile about his dreams. You'd make the world's worst detective. Moriarty would have given up on the likes of you. The time to come is a serious matter, Gimaldi, so don't waste your efforts on trifles. I have another reason for being here – it has come to my attention that I must vanish.”

“Vanish?”

“Yes, Gimaldi, our time is truly up. I wanted to take this opportunity to wish you well, say my goodbyes, pay my respects, and acknowledge you as a good foil. I am retreating into the Library for a long time and will not be making any further public appearances. My duties bid me there, and I cannot disobey the will of the Library. The boy here will also be making his way. It is for the best that he doesn't understand what will transpire so that the narrative will be pure and authentic. I can give you this information by way of parting that your neighbour, Leo, will at some point in the future commit suicide. Of course, it is all written, and you still have that book in your possession. Keep that, too, as a symbol of our friendship. May I offer you a shred of advice?”

I nodded, letting the 'friendship' reference go.

“Gimaldi, get a girlfriend. Really. You're strung so tautly, chasing after things you can barely understand... and if you're going to do that, you may as well chase the skirts since the mystery and anxiety that comes with the pursuit of women is far nobler, deeper, and rewarding.”

“Are you seriously leaving?”

“In a sense, yes. I am taking on one of my other monikers for a while to aid in the synthesis. That much I can tell you. You were a good employee, despite the theft business, especially in apprising me of the ulterior motives of my now deceased employee. For my part in being reticent and mysterious, I am sorry, but that is my nature. So long, Gimaldi... A long and prosperous trek through the narrative landscape. Come, Jakob, there are a few things you must know before I take my leave.”

Within minutes, Castellemare and Jakob were gone, leaving me in an empty apartment. All my leads were dried up save for that one book.

28

Excerpts from
7
^th
Meditation

7

The First Synthesis: The Sabbatical Artist Breaks the Equatorial Line

T
he sky seemed to let go, disgorging itself of its heavy burden. All the shades of blue, all the tones of grey, every burr and edge, every billow and streak came slashing down as though from an overturned paint can. The wind had brought the snow, and with it the white pall of colourlessness. The snow fell rapidly upon leaves shredded into paste by rain and shoes.

Leopold felt like a stranger today, a kind of lurching hostility pirouetting in his brain that made his eyes appear hard and hateful to those who passed him. Even the music in his earphones went its own course, alienating him, despite his occasional attempts to arrest it with his careful attention. As vain as he could be, he would mentally place himself in a scenario where he was the one singing, the one who belted out the lyrics or the guitarist whose fingers glided like the sound of rain on a shingled roof or in the seat of the pianist whose skills did not surpass the occasional trill. He had felt this way as the incipient self always in a deferral, always waylaying the onset of a truly cohesive and unified self. The cruelty of the more robust boys and the pride that was hung between their legs like the butcher's best cut of meat in the window... It was they who caused Leopold to recede and shrink into his shell like a scared tortoise. It was they who had had a hand in making him a stranger - even to himself. On days like this, he spoke so little that he could hardly summon his voice to request a pack of cigarettes from the shopkeeper without it coming out in a strained squeak or rattle.

Other memories assaulted him, for today was a day marked with reminiscence. He thought of his older sister and the peeler girl who looked like her, the fatal Alexa Richter.

[First encountered textual reference in this book to Alexa Richter, the daunting woman Jakob was devoted to in Setzer's labyrinth. A possible lead? Perhaps I should query my neighbour about this woman, what her connection really is to all this – if any at all].

He didn't know which of the two, as memories, caused more pain, a kind of dual source pain that collided into one bruise on the memory.

On this day, when his voice failed from lack of use, it seemed like every object in his field of vision would trigger a small emotional episode. He began to analogize his emotions, transient though they were, in this way. He asked himself what colour he would paint today, what the essential character of his emotions were as if to derive a bottom line statement, some normative claim. On this day, he felt them all, and the combination of all the colours was in itself not a colour at all; the blank white of the canvas. All his thoughts had pushed to the fore, but none would come out... a kind of constipated crowd of thoughts stillborn in the threshold. And though the canvas mocked and dared him to express even one thought, he could not: he was not a colour, yet every thought individually inside him shone with a threatening vibrancy, an untouchable sense of the sublime. This thought mutated into something related, to a similar memory from childhood. In primary school, he had experienced a moment of innovative bravado. What would happen if I were to take every colour in the crayon box and mix them up? he asked himself. Would I discover a new colour? And he had set to work on it like a scientist while the teacher merely glanced over at his project with an uncaring, glazed, disinterested smile. Leopold had set out all the colours. First came the green, thatched in blocky wax across the page, and then the red overlaying it. The young Leopold was so excited about the prospect of discovering something new and receiving the praise of an intimidating adult world that impatience set in. He could not colour fast enough, though he had to be precise lest the adults not take his results seriously. But the idea was faster than his ability to execute it. Then came canary yellow, then deep blue, purple, sarasota orange, and then every minor and arbitrary shade in between. Once he had spent the last possibility, the disappointment set in: the product was a chaotic mess that appeared to have no colour at all, but rather this same crayon vomit colour of brownish-purple green all child predecessors had attempted before.
He had inherited much of the same failures Jakob Sigurdsson would also inherit.

This was about the time that he had first been plunged into a classic paradox, the constant attempt to become who he was but always lagging at some distance. Tried as he did to traverse this distance, he was eternally halfway there... and another half, another half, always splitting the distance but never making contact. But Leopold knew that he would most likely die instead of ever eliminating that distance before what he was and what he could become. Applying this paradox to painting, he could not envisage how his paintbrush could ever touch the canvas in any meaningful way as that canvas blinked hard at him like an unsatisfied lover whose patience has run out. Would all this change with the possession of that inspired sketchbook?

Every painter learns that colours betray, and Leopold was quickly learning that the lulling charms of inspiration by way of theft was the scene of his betrayal of a now dead artist. Leopold rationalized to himself that this was no plagiarism, and that plagiarism itself was impossible when everything already existed and only needed to be mixed and mashed up into a new arrangement. Leopold leafed through the sketchbook once more before discharging the last vestiges of his underdeveloped moral decency. He had overtaken the identity of the former artist who had owned the book, somehow stepped into this artist's life as the perfect double rather than a rank emulator. Leopold would, upon the urging of Ensopht, write his own name over the former artist's, making the sketchbook his own creation. In doing so, he had doubled his life, incorporating the entire essence and artistic corpus of another into his own. In a particular section - “The Gallery of Femmes” - he came across a quote by the photographer, Peter Basch: “the bosom should be round, high, and firm, requiring no special posing to achieve this appearance.” This was how the section began, immediately preceding the table of contents and methodological statement. Leopold would read more about this new methodology as applied to the aesthetic. He would learn the fascination of art and its place as a form of orgiastic catastrophe. He would peruse the typology of women as set down in the book, and train his eyes to see the world on these terms.

The first sketch was of a woman with mechanical arms in a short party dress. Her head was tossed to one side, interpolated by a leopard-print shadow from multiple light sources. It was entitled “Femme Machina”. Running down the side of the page was some explanatory text, a kind of recurring legend for his types:
Machine girl: I love you. There is an age for togetherness, for the pure connection technology has failed to provide in its calculated platform of promises. You are the pinnacle of fashion. Do you fuck with the lights off or do you rush for the strobe to render your contrived moments of hedonistic delight a stuttering of still images? The needle holes last forever: craters of pseudo-sex ecstasy meteors pockmarking fine flesh. O this lusty elegance, this torturous enmity ephemera of the fast-fuck-bang. O that you live in that kingdom of the moment, and are but a bond slave in only being able to retreat to those moments after the fact. I saw you kissing the magazine cover, your face, regarding every twist, whorl and fibre of that digitized flesh in print, those patterns on the night phallus. Cast another shadow of sexy blue-grey smoke love. Count those cigarettes like you count stimuli buttons pressed desperately in an effort to efface the inevitable tomorrow. How many adornments, pieces of designer wireless ware upon your person connecting your vacuum to all other vacuums?

Another image, this time a woman with short feathered hair in a vainglorious pose in a rainbow cotton tube top. The shadows obscured her eye in profile, a shadow in the roughly hewn shape of a bird's wing. This was the story of “Femme Narco”:
Immortal you: glory, glory self-bomb destruction, that darkened spiral twist corkscrewing to the loud end. Every moment, another representation so plastic and non-biodegradable. A divine majesty that takes hold as hard, fast, and short as cocaine. Worry not about ephemera's touch, for I promise you a dynasty of a thousand years - a plastic castle.

“Femme Electronika” was drawn in a bas-relief style with a featureless, blank face with an enormous ringed piercing protruding from the middle where the nose would have been:
She pierced her energy siphuncle and claimed divine pleasure from the transience of a phantom kingdom. Though she could transform into various avatars and fuse her body with the astral surfaces of sound, she couldn't break from the omnipresent kick-drum beat that kept her gyrating, rhythmically immobile. All out of flesh estate, every inch of skin surface conquered by tattoos and steel rings, she had to open up space on the inside. An alien on fire, a blue polyurethane pill-popping fanatic making the planet ill with her constant bristling.