That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (8 page)

Two things were nearly everywhere: sand and sales. None of the streets were paved, and every route was ankle
-deep in fine, very old, oxidised orange sand. It lay indoors too; one only got away from it by going upstairs. But even up on the flat roofs there were stalls and markets. A bazaar was all through the city like vines in a jungle. Vendors lined the streets and squatted on staircase landings and in the corners of rooms. The roofs were crowded with specialists selling caged birds, cassette tapes and car-seat covers, while to buy a potted cactus, a fly whisk or a baby stroller it was necessary to find the forecourt of a temple, where purveyors of these items would be doing business inside portable shops made of cyclone fencing; but finding a temple was not easy. Even the gods of the city lived in houses unembellished like the rest, as bland as the sand. Only those structures and precincts whose function made disguise impossible, such as the stadium, the cemetery and the great fort, were outwardly distinguishable. And these, too, had their marketplaces: in the aisles and under the seating at the stadium, around the sides of the parade ground in the fort, inside the shady kennels of the dead.

I trailed through houses where the lamps burned pig fat, and houses where they burned
naphtha, and august premises where they burned attar of roses. Once I found myself in a large, airy room with vaulted ceilings and gilded furniture, where no less a person than the Governor of the city was auctioning off a pile of carpets and curtains to passersby.

I was trying to find the centre of the market.

It was hard to imagine finding your tracks among the household goods, hardware and toys for sale in the long, hot street into which I emerged after making my way out of the Governor’s palace. This was not for a lack of likely clues but an oversupply of them. Any object I saw could have led me to you, if I found the right way to employ it. A set of snakes and ladders suggested Qabalistic adventures and the possibility of signs to your whereabouts lying in Hebrew gematria. A circuit board suggested a Ouija board and an answer from the other side of death, then alternatively it suggested a set of snakes and ladders… I felt dizzy considering the possibilities implied by a sieve, a sewing machine and a sink plunger. All the wares were
wheres
, and every
where
a potential
here
.

I recalled my long journey across the desert. The desert had no apertures. Oases, once in a while; but an oasis is no more an opening in a desert than an island is an opening in the sea. In the desert there was desert; here there was everything else.

I was always asking the way to the main bazaar, but kept diverging from the directions given me, in order to loiter further among aisles of alarm clocks, pantyhose, hairdryers, cigarettes, nail polish and plastic lunchboxes. After being nearly blinded by the repetition of the desert, I was overcome by these objects – overcome, that is, by desire for everything I was seeing. Every single bit of merchandise swayed me to want it, by some power, whether of a physical quality or a tempting association; every item struck me as an opening, the beginning of a story or a path – with you, somehow, at the end. It was only because they all promised you to me that I couldn’t believe any of them. Had I found one of these commodities, a bottle of silver nail polish for instance, by itself in the immensity of the desert, I would have accorded it far more importance. In it I would have seen quicksilver, satin sheets, a sword, and I would have used these images as tokens to guide me.

I am a lover, I thought. That I love is perhaps the most essential condition of my existence. Yet this vital aspect of myself is very much like a charming but small object lying in a sand
-drift: easily overlooked, and in danger of being lost, submerged under the piling details of the hunt.

The city was as convoluted as an insurance contract drawn up by a drunken spider, but not so topographically heathen as to be without a centre. A cartographer could have mapped it on ordinary graph paper. Towards the middle of the afternoon I dragged my feet into an umbilicus
– a big square with ornamental columns in the corners – and here I found the treasure trove: the best silk carpets, the fine fabrics, the saffron, indigo and salt, the pierced brass lamps that when lit would project stars or flowers or the names of God and angels in letters of light, the perfumes in gilded bottles. I expected all of these to exert a strong power of fascination over me, but surprisingly they did not. They had obvious charms for the imagination, and no doubt one was meant to see them as messengers of the yonder in purchasable form; but they weren’t at all honest, sitting there pretending to be magic carpets, magic lamps, flacons of the alchemists’ drinkable gold; they betrayed themselves by suggesting scenarios that no one in their right mind would believe. Once bought, they would only torment by not being able to deliver on their promises. Better to buy a nice lunchbox, whose translucent blue plastic will have a soothing effect on the soul, and which is cheap enough to be thrown away when the pleasure wanes.

(There is a feeling of having been on a great quest, a journey of discovery and initiation, so what a let
-down to learn that one only went shopping, and what’s worse forgot to buy tomatoes, and now the good tomatoes will be gone, and all the eye-candy in the world boils down to plain beans for dinner…)

In support of my efforts to find you, I had acquired a good working knowledge of a number of divinatory methods. Amongst these, for its speed and simplicity, I especially favoured cledonomancy, the art of interpreting
seemingly random events, such as overheard speech or an object encountered at a certain moment. The art presupposes a world full of meaning, and requires the practitioner to be alert for all sorts of signs, such as coincidences, metaphors and puns, with relevance to the matter under scrutiny. While its use demands discrimination in what one attributes significance to, it also demands faith that the senses will perceive what they are meant to perceive, which amounts to faith that the secret itself desires to be found out. I therefore had to believe that you were not passive.

The square with its columns suggested an overturned table. Had you turned the tables on me? But
one should be wary of seeing personal signs in large-scale phenomena – and, in any case, if the square was a sign, there was no action I could think of taking based upon it.

I got out of the bazaar in a hurry, pushing my way through the crowd of shoppers, not caring that I was jostling people and stepping on feet.

Next I found myself in the book bazaar. So far I had not seen a single book for sale; perhaps this was the only section of the city where books were sold. The book stalls filled eight or nine ostentatiously drab alleys. Discreet graffiti on the walls in the vicinity proclaimed many of the buildings to be schools and academies. Their doors were closed, presumably in deference to the distractibility of students.

It wasn
’t long before I noticed how many of the books addressed the subject of a search or quest. The romances, detective novels and tales of treasure hunters and explorers must have filled hundreds of boxes. Then the thought struck me that all the non-fiction was concerned with the quest for knowledge; and all the fiction was looking for an appropriate ending – or not even an ending, perhaps, but an overall completeness, a functioning gestalt.

I had another episode of dizziness, this time so severe that I had to lean against a wall and breathe deeply. I had thought the desert city was enough of a labyrinth, but here, in this small area, was a trick: a muster of thousands more labyrinths, each slipped within the cover of a book that I could carry in one hand
.

Any one of those mazes might lead me to you, or might contain a phrase or word that would lead to another text that would lead…

Moreover, some of the books were in languages I didn’t know at all. It had always been an article of faith with me that wherever you were, you were not inaccessible – but what if I were wrong in that assumption?

I felt ill, and my breath threatened to turn into a whimper, until a simple thought came along to save me: every one of the books was useless. Supposing that I bought one of the novels, I would share the characters
’ quests and journeys, and experience their triumphs, reconciliations, deaths; or if I bought a work of non-fiction I might study the exposition of the subject matter until I had completely drained the book and understood everything in it; if I bought a book of poems I would give the poet my hand and be led into the gardens of the soul. But other people’s thoughts and dreams, wherever they led, couldn’t possibly lead me to you. I would close the book, and you would still be a hollow in front of me. So, instead of crying, I laughed, and walked through the rest of the book bazaar without feeling any further temptation or anxiety.

All the same, I had no idea what I would do now. But, fortunately, inspiration arrived from another quarter
.

The travel brochure was buried in the sand on the street; my shuffling foot uncovered it. It was just a flyer, printed on one sheet of paper, folded in thirds. On the front was a photo of a good
-looking couple posing on a terrace outside a fancy hotel, with the hood of a limousine jutting into the base of the picture like Atlas holding up the world. The copy, printed in copperplate type, read:

~
You Could Be Here
~

Could you? I
wondered. You could
be
here. Was here the place where you were able to exist?

By the personal manner in which it had come to me, the flyer had better credentials as an oracular sign than the column
-cornered square. Both my intellect and my instincts told me to accept its message, even before I noticed that the agency’s name was Delphi Travel. An address was printed across the bottom, over the limousine. I asked directions, and shuffled around for another two hours trying to get there, eventually finding the agency down a hall off someone’s living room where some kids were watching cartoons.

‘
I knew I shoulda taken dat left toin at Albuquoique,’ Bugs Bunny was saying. Whether it was a good omen or a bad, I had to turn left into the hall, which smelled of fly spray and ended at a door. I went through into a tiled bathroom. Next to the shower was a glass door on which stick-on plastic letters spelled out DELPHI RAVEL, with the ghost of a peeled-off T.

The only person in the office through the door was a fat woman wearing a swimsuit and a black silk sleeping mask. Lying back in her chair behind the desk, she appeared to be dozing, but when I came in she said:

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘
This place.’ I reached across the desk and put the flyer in her hands. She took it without fumbling, though she hadn’t taken the mask off.

‘
Can’t help you,’ she said. ‘We don’t do trips there.’

‘
But it’s your advertisement.’

‘
Since when do you believe advertising?’

‘
I was led here by portents. I was meant to come here.’

‘
By
four tents
?’

‘
Portents,’ I said loudly.

‘
No need to shout,’ she huffed. ‘I may be blind, and even a little eccentric, but I’m not deaf. Now you listen. I don’t know about your four tents or horse sense, but we only do trips to one place. You want to go there? You got money?’

‘
Which place?’

‘
What do you think I am, the great Know-All? I just sell tickets. You got papers?’

‘
I have a forged identity,’ I said.

‘
A four-eyed entity?’

‘
I have papers.’

‘
Well, say what you mean! Do you want a ticket or are you just going to stand there saying stupid things?’

‘
Yes.’ I quickly clarified: ‘I want a ticket.’

I paid her, and she gave me change in the coins of that country, which were small round mirrors
.

The plane flew over a land daunting in size and antiquity – another desert, so old that its mountains were worn down to low hills; its rivers were dry, empty watercourses carrying nothing but shadows across the brown plains. I had learned something of this country’s history from the in-flight magazine, discovering that it was known to have been inhabited for a length of time roughly equal to that in which light travels the radius of the galaxy, before becoming the object of a search by foreign nations. I had received the impression that in the eyes of its conquerors, the Great Grazier Horde, most of whom had settled in a few cities scattered around the coast, it had not yet lost the twinkling allure of a rich prize. I hoped that this background augured well for my own quest.