The Infinite Library (63 page)

However, without any leads, I was forced to consider breaching that invisible social membrane in getting to know Leo a bit better. He kept strange hours, as did I, but he was rarely home which meant it would be a hit-or-miss scenario of building a deeper bond with the man. I did not want to get drawn into his artistic torments or play his ego masseuse when he felt like a failure, and so my probing into him had to be delicate and somewhat distant enough to avoid becoming too enmeshed. It was to be a mission of reconnoitering, to look and see what information I could plunder in regards the imminent synthesis. Our first conversation happened a few days after Castellemare bid his farewell to me. It was, like most of our conversations, accidental; I had just returned from doing a light grocery run.

“Hey, I didn't know if you were moving out,” he said as he came outside his door and I was struggling with both my parcels and the key. I put them down.

“No, some people were returning a few books of mine,” I said affably in the hopes that the conversation would not stop dead on facticity.

“Boxes of 'em! Didn't figure you for a lending library. If that be the case, maybe I should borrow a few off ya.”

“You are always welcome to do so. Once I read books, they mostly become dead weight on my shelves unless I have to return to some passage or another for an article or a lecture.”

“Oh, yeah, that's right... you teach at the uni, right?”

“Not this year. I was limited duties, part-time, but not here. Farmed off to Italy for a semester. Taught some manusciptology. I mostly make my coin buying and selling old books.”

“Heh. Maybe I'm sitting on a fortune and don't know it. I should let you look at what I have.”

“Maybe,” I laughed. “A lot of people don't know what they have. You have a sizable collection?”

“Naw, not much. Whatever I pick up on my travels or what ex-lovers may have left at my pad. I doubt I have anything valuable, but I do have some art books that cost me a pretty penny.”

“Yeah,” I said, struggling to find something to say to keep the conversation from drowning. My attention was distracted by the thought of the ice cream I had in one of the bags, and not wanting it to melt.

“You into art?”

“Well, I can't consider myself a specialist or a connoisseur, but I guess I like what I like.”

“Ugh, not a matter of taste guy, are you? Taste is so subjective... doesn't cultivate a critical appreciation for work.”

“I fully agree with you, but I acknowledge my limitations. I'm simply not qualified to judge art.”

“Y'see, that's one of those misconceptions about art: that we somehow feel entitled to act as its judge. Art is not like that.”

“I defer to your viewpoint. I just know that my knowledge on art is lacking. I wouldn't know a Matisse from a Renoir. But, ask me if a book is an authentic Elzevir printing, I'm your man.”

“To each their own, for sure.”

“Say, Leo, I was just going in to put away some groceries. I have some beer if you'd like to enlighten me on art,” I said. It was forced, and I feared that he would have seen this as contrived. However, the word 'beer' seemed to be the only thing that caught his attention.

“Sure! I don't know about enlightenment, but we can tie a few on. I haven't got anywhere to be today, so come on over and bring the brew; I'll put on some tunes and we'll chill.”

I took this cue to enter my apartment, place my groceries in their proper place, and take the 12 of beer I had recently purchased in hand and knock on Leo's door.

“A-ha! I see my favourite guest brought along my neighbour! C'mon in.”

To say that his apartment was sparsely furnished is to say that Bauhausian architecture is slightly averse to opulence. His walls were covered in what I could not decide were works in progress or completed, alternating with violent gauges in the wall, slashes of paint, thumb-tacked rave flyers and random sheets of gloss, and some mysterious stains I knew better than to inquire the history of. He took the beer from my hands to place in the fridge (which I could faithfully assume was empty save for some decaying condiments) and waved me over at a bean bag chair thrown in a corner. Despite the Spartan furnishings and the general feel of being in a decrepit flophouse, his stereo system was state of the art. It was busy gyrating to itself with some kind of electronica concoction. Leo reappeared with two beers in hand, one of which he offered to me. The place was unkempt and grimy, but it seemed to suit the occupant who was apparently besieged by creativity and couldn't bother with housekeeping. In a stack of milk crates was his “library”, which were mostly oversized art books. I spied a well-worn and presumably used copy of Dante's
Divine Comedy
in its common Penguin black spine edition. There were a few books by Sartre, one by Camus in French (
La Peste
), and some other title I would later be told was written by an ex-lover and published by a now defunct small press. Of course, as was my nature, my focus would be directed at the host's book collection, but I was far from being judgmental. In fact, that kind of elitism in judging someone by the books they owned belonged to a bygone era, and I was merely looking at the books in terms of their salability – which, in this case, was nil. These were the sorts of books sold by lot at an auction or estate sale to ersatz used bookstores just looking to fluff up the inventory. A tired sunset was blaring through the curtain-less double window, the ledge choked with fly carcasses and dust turning to mold and grime. It was a bachelor apartment, so his tattered futon (there was no frame) was on the floor with its twisted bundle of sheets, and that was where he comfortably sat himself. Beside the futon was an unvarnished night table that had seen better days, wearily upholding a notebook and a nicotine-blemished alarm clock that was once white but was now that cream colour most white appliances take on in the presence of a heavy smoker. Apart from the stereo and some art, I had walked into a Salvation Army thrift store. Given our seating arrangements, the general disarray of the apartment, and the fact that we were swigging from bottles instead of glasses, he surprised me with a request if I minded if he smoked. I pulled out a pack to indicate that I was a high ranking officer of the addiction, and he set a cracked dinner plate stuffed with jammed cigarette butts between us.

“So, you teach at the university, eh? Prestigious,” he began.

“Part-time,” I corrected. “The closer I got to the alleged top of the academic food chain, the less I took it seriously.”

“Oh, yeah, that's right: you're a hawker of books.”

“Yes, but not just any books. I scope for deals and make money off the difference.”

“Is there good money in that?”

“It's feast or famine. If I can't make at least a hundred dollar profit after shipping costs, I don't bother. The trick is to have a roster of salable books on the go. Some of them sit on my shelves for a long time, while others have a quick turnaround. Even the antique book market has its trends and fads. When my instincts fail, those failures sit on my shelves.”

“A lot of failures?”

“My book collection is modest and small,” I grinned. “Either I have shrewd instinct or have been lucky. It's pretty standard in my trade to advertise books not in my collection yet. A lot of my stock is online, belonging to someone else. Other times I act as the liaison between buyer and seller, taking my middleman’s skim. When business is slow, I charge a modest fee to appraise other people's books, assigning a value based on condition and determining if it is authentic. What about you, Leo? You're an artist. What's your medium?”

He took a long and seemingly dramatic swig of beer, perhaps readying himself to open up a long saga of his history as an artist. “Ah, I dabble. I've had a few shows, but nothing anyone's ever heard of. I'm in a creative period at the moment, not a marketing one, so when I come out of it, I'll start looking around for places. I am not constrained by any particular medium: I take on whatever I need to get the job done.”

As the course of the conversation continued, he gradually ventured into personal historical topics, including his mother – whom he hadn't spoken to for a few years on account of her failure to support his chosen lifestyle with reprimanding questions of when he was going to get a real job. I asked if he had forayed into the online market as a means of disseminating his work and name, but he held an indifferent and slightly wary view on online marketing for art.

What I was really on the lookout for was what had been mentioned in the
7
^th
Meditation
: the Red Lion sketchbook. I knew better than to pry him for any information on any of the characters I had encountered in the text for fear that he might become unduly alarmed. He did go on at length about a kind of “personal renaissance” he was currently experiencing, and how busy this was keeping him. I would have assigned to this the usual bravado of artists trying to prove their worth, but I knew this to be the truth given what I was reading. There was a black book tucked almost out of sight beneath his futon mattress, and I saw it when he moved his foot in and nudged the mattress itself.

“You have a book under there,” I said.

Leo was caught off guard.

“A book? Oh... yeah... the place is littered with them. I'm not much of a housekeeper. It's just some really bad sketches I did a long time ago, not worth seeing. Really juvenile stuff. A bit too sentimental to throw it away, though.”

I decided to leave it at that. His explanation seemed to have been given in a kind of grasping panic, and so I had a good suspicion that this was the famed Red Lion sketchbook.

“Have you any shows planned in the near future?” I asked.

“Oh, certainly! I got this really sweet gig at the Parson Gallery in six months, and word has it that some art critic heavy is going to write a catalogue essay on it.”

“The Parson Gallery, if I'm not mistaken, is rather upscale. Congratulations.”

“Yeah, it sure is. It all seems like a dream to me, like I cannot believe this is happening. I've arrived. I'm just embarking on something huge, the great creative turn of my life. It's hard to explain... but there's this one moment in every famous artist's life when they just
know
that what they are doing is instant classic.”

I let Leo boast freely, although I knew the real source of his inspiration had everything to do with a sketchbook once belonging to someone else. He was cashing in on that person's work, and I was sure that deep down he felt every bit the fraud.

I decided to test the waters a little, string him along with a fib to see if he would disclose more than he had: “I've had this recurring dream as of late, and if it would not be too boring or presumptuous, I'd like to get your opinion of it as an artist.”

“A dream? Sure, shoot.”

“Well, you see, the dream is set in this large, white room. I am like a fly on the wall, really, so I don't have any part to play in it. However, there are these six men sitting on blue chairs, and one of them has a black book with a red lion image on its cover. The one with the book is trying to convince the other five that they will merge somehow to form some kind of composite being.”

“Really?” Leo said suspiciously; I could tell that he was extremely unnerved. “Go on.”

“Well, I know this sounds silly, but I distinctly recall you being in this dream.”

“Izzat so? How odd. I find it more odd that someone who makes his living hawking old books would be fucking spying on his neighbours. Maybe he hasn't anything better to do than to follow people around and eavesdrop on their conversations.”

The conversation had turned hostile, and I could see that he was very paranoid. I had made a very bad move.

“Okay,” I said, trying to defuse matters. “All kidding aside -”

“Who is fucking kidding whom around here, eh?” Leo said, now standing with the beer bottle held like a weapon in his hand.

“Let me level with you, please. There are things you have to know -”

“Yeah, like how to keep creeps like you from following me around! I'm a fucking magnet for you people? You best get the fuck out, 'neighbour', before I call the cops.”

“Leo,” I said, surprised that I was raising my voice, mostly to compete with his mounting anger. “I'm not following you! If you would just -”

And that was when Leo winged the half-full bottle at my head. Fortunately, for me, he missed despite how close I was. I took that as my rather obvious clue to leave. I made for the door and quickly ducked inside my apartment before Leo could give chase. Things around here were going to be rather awkward from now on.