The Infinite Library (71 page)

35

Hiatus

T
he digital alarm clock beside my bed was reminding me in its red-on-black monotony that my time had run out – it was done. There was no doubt that I had played my part in all of this magnificently, even if I never had any intention to be their scripted actor. All whom I had met were doubtless pleased the way I followed every one of their clues. The compound and derivative man that was to emerge from this sinister synthesis would be realized, and all my bungling toward knowledge was instrumental in bringing this to fruition.

Today was my birthday, and so I was able to quietly tick off the 46
^th
swing around the sun. I had ceased believing in birthdays in both theory and practice when I had no one meaningful left in my life to observe them with, which was at the age of 34. I was far too cynical to become dogged by the usual psychological clutter of panic associated with the natural course of aging, the things the bravado of youth had planned yet circumstantial reality had revised downward, or the fact that I was such-and-such an age and unmarried, sans children, or even in the plateau of some gainful career. No, these things were little more to me than externally imposed anxieties that never truly rang sense with me. The arbitrariness of numbers, the faded grey of once-urgent reasons to reach certain unqualified benchmarks, all of it more mud than life policy.

Little attention is paid to the history of how books and coins circulate. Coins are minted, go from hands rich and poor, are used for countless purposes, and one day they return only to be melted down and perhaps struck once more as a new coin. Books, as well, since they change owners who may or may not read them, may have differing interpretations of them, and may in the end return to be pulped and become a new book. The cycle of books comes with an unwritten history except for those books fortunate enough to be of some value where one can trace their travels from one catalogue to another. The history of the owners cannot compare, for the owner's connection to a book is mostly singular whereas the book may have connected to so many owners. The owners' lives are so fleeting compared to the lives of books, a life that can endure for centuries and remain silently on a shelf as empires rise and fall, wars rattle the world or peace subdues it, new discoveries are made and tragic epidemics wipe out populations. I suppose the life of books rather than their owners was more of interest to me especially given this uneventful event of my birthday.

I was due to pick up Dr Warburg's study of the
Ars atrocitatis
, but I would discover too late that I had mistook his office hours and had come too late. The events of the
7
^th
Meditation
were beginning to heat up and moved diligently forward to the imminent synthesis. The events were, admittedly, too fantastical in parts to be wholly believed, and so I decided to draw the conclusion that the author was writing in allegory with various literal episodes to confuse those who were not meant to read it. On the whole it was less a sumptuous narrative cycle and more a farrago of obvious portents and esoteric flourishes set in a series of mediocre stylistic curlicues, stilted and unconvincing dialogue, and deliberate attempts at deus ex machina. Perhaps, but I was a poor judge of all things prose, more keen on the technical apparatus in which prose was held: the book-objects themselves.

If what I was reading had either occurred earlier, or was contemporary to what was happening, then I was already too late. I reasoned, not without some folly, that perhaps my reading of the text was what propelled it into reality. Or, perhaps this was all just a jape perpetrated by Castellemare or someone with his warped sense of humour. Be the text a joke or reality, it did little to ameliorate my sense of being dicked around. I desperately needed a break, a crucial repose from these intercalating texts and their motley coincidences. Besides, I thought to myself, I ought to at least go through the motions of pretending to reward myself for making another trip around the sun, as if it were something I earned rather than have foisted upon me by the lurching forward of time.

I resignedly cast a disappointed gaze at the end of my cigarette, shifting the blame to the object rather than to myself. For no real reason, the world felt somewhat changed. There was nothing tangible I could identify that could rationally prove my feeling, and I speculated that it was merely the echoing effects of the synthesis having occurred in the book. And as much as I wanted to discard the book, I could not help myself from returning to it in an effort to learn more that would be of some use to me. Since it was my birthday, I could not resist the inveterate temptation to reflect on the past, much of it orbiting all that had been caustic, embarrassing, disappointing, or even traumatic. If this were a novel, and me the protagonist, it would be far too late to establish the precedent of my character through an appeal to anecdotes in the past that would somehow give my bony person more flesh, and even less convincing cause for redemption or to win a reader's sympathy.

On this day I decided to avoid all bookstores, which was harder than one could imagine given the narrowness of how I perceived my surroundings: seeing a city only in terms of an internal map of bookstores, libraries, and the like. I had to shake the effects of what I had read which was disturbing in its own way. I found myself at the liquor store and thought to replenish my scotch supply – if anything, I could signal my anniversary by drinking enough so as not to feel or remember it. However, I knew what would actually happen: I would return home and sink into drunkenness only to launch back into my sleuthing with more determined zeal. I was hardly the type who, as they drank, fell into that idle and lazy state of repose, but rather was a “working drunk.” Perhaps it was only work that made me happy, and the bite of the scotch would not be deep enough to persuade me otherwise.

And so that was what I did, bundle of thrilling excitement that I am. Although as much as I urged my own personal library to open up as it had in the past to allow me entry to that vast and infinite space, it remained mute and closed off to me. On occasion I would pull a few books from the shelf to see if more would emerge in their place, but to no avail. The scotch was keeping me alert, and I drained more than half the bottle and an entire pack of cigarettes as I vainly oscillated between my books and the internet for any clues I could possibly salvage. There were no mysterious emails or eerie phone calls as the sun nested itself behind the skyline and eventually made way for a curtain of mauve-black. The last rays of day had struck impotently through the only crack I could allow of sunlight to enter my apartment, fearful as I was of my books becoming bleached by light and affecting their resale value. Feeling restless and unsatisfied by my failed research outing, I redid my inventory sheets and reviewed for the seventh time the descriptions of the books I had for sale to ensure that I was not missing any pertinent details. Despite the tedium of the task, I could not allow myself to return to that book. I had to steel myself from going back and reading further, if for but one day of sanity. This I achieved and eventually fell asleep shortly after midnight, partially relieved that nothing mysterious and off-putting had occurred, but also disappointed.

This disappointment would not endure, and the toccata performed by mad figures unseen would exhaust my patience and whatever shadow limit I could draw from. The torment was setting a steady pace, counting down the hours and days to what I did not know. It all began with a very bad morning complemented by a severe and sudden pain in my head.

Something, I was sure, had happened in the night... something that had rent the fabric of the world with a cruel violence. A sudden throbbing in my head upon waking became a full-blown stabbing force, causing me to see double. At that moment, something was scratching at the door. Stumbling about in pain and confused sight, I hastened to pull on pants and make my way toward the door. When I yanked it open, there was nobody there, another attempt to drive me mad. By this time the pain in my head was causing me to buckle. I could vaguely make out a figure now appearing at the doorway wearing a mask, a mask that looked like Castellemare. The figure stooped low since I had now fallen on my knees in agony. He pressed a pen on me, one of those thick and expensive fountain pens. I was powerless due to pain to resist whatever the figure was doing, and he thrust beneath my hand a small sheaf of papers, thumbing their onion skins to the final page and guiding my hand to sign it.

A whisper followed: “You've been served and delivered.”

“Wh-what... is this?” I asked in a weak strain.

“Contract,” the whisper responded, now pulling the pages away without any hope of me having read what I just signed.

I grasped at the pant leg of the unsolicited visitor, but I was too weak to keep hold. He kicked free and followed this up with a sharp cuff of my head, causing me to yowl. I groped around for some kind of object. Finding a phone book, I hurled it in the general direction of the figure. I heard it slap impotently against the wall, but then forced myself into a lurch, tackling the figure on his way out. I could hear the click of the mask on the hallway floor. The person's hands were rough and cold as he clawed himself free.

“Get back here! Who are you!?” I hollered. My hope was that one of my neighbours would be alerted and would intervene – to no avail.

Another strike to the head. I had had enough and redoubled my efforts to collar the figure before he fled, leaving me in that terrible uncertainty of what it was that I signed. I was able to get hold of more clothing and dragged him down on top of me. I furiously scrambled out from beneath and was able to pin him down. My head, although still clouding my vision with pain, was able to fix on the face of my visitor whose mask was now half off, exposing a horrific twisting mouth that was snarling. I managed to snatch the papers from his claw-like hands, tearing them in the process of prying them loose. I steadied my foot on his neck as I attempted to stand, piecing the ripped pages together. What I read was equally bizarre: it was a publishing contract. For what, I had no idea, but from what I could glean from the minute and 18
^th
century script was that I agreed to my authorship of a text. The title was not given.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Contract,” he croaked, attempting to remove my foot from his neck.

Applying more pressure with my weight, I asked, “A contract for what book?”

“Contract,” he repeated.

Scanning the pages again, there was no hope. It merely lumbered from one incomprehensible clause to another, indemnifying the publisher from this and that, assigning authorial rights for “the book”, granting reproduction rights unto perpetuity.

“You are mistaken. This is invalid,” I said. “I haven't written any book. What publishing house do you work for?”

But I would not get my answer, for there was a sudden peel of madcap laughter issuing from inside my apartment, startling me just enough so that my visitor could take advantage of my distraction to scramble free. He fled down the stairs quicker than I could nab him. The laughter was continuing. I reentered my apartment and called out for the laugher to reveal himself, but I located the source of it behind my shelf. As I frantically pulled books out, the laughter got louder, but there was nothing there but the backing of the shelf. I heaved the whole shelf down amidst another crescendo of pain in my head, and the laughter just increased in volume – but with no one there.

The laughter suddenly ceased, but picked up again – this time issuing from near my computer. The mix of pain and mounting madness was causing me to lash out blindly, throwing my books around my apartment in a fit. I threw my bed over, hurled a bottle at the wall, wrecked my kitchen, and kicked over anything that was within my reach. I clutched at my head and the laughter only swelled.

A voice without a body, perhaps in my overheated head, said, “No sense turning back around. You'll write it.”

The laughter died and I was left with my entire apartment in shambles.

36

A Circulating Cosmology

The Infinite Library - Annals (2)

By Jorge Luis Borges (?)

J
ohn Milton's cosmology hitches the small bauble of earth by a golden chain attached to the immensity of heaven, and heaven's shadow – equally immense – is the domain of hell. Between hell and earth is a place called chaos through which Satan must pass to reach the earth. But in our cosmology, the earth dangles as a bauble as well, and is surrounded by the expanse known as the Library, which assumes a variety of forms. They are infinite spaces that gird the terrestrial world, but they are not composed of matter or antimatter, but an in-between substance unknown to science and crudely called the spiritual or divine by the religious. But there is no god in these infinite spaces even though there are residents in the domains.