The Infinite Library (15 page)
Read The Infinite Library Online
Authors: Kane X Faucher
Tags: #Mystery, #Retail, #Fiction, #21st Century, #Amazon.com
It was clear to me that the narrator would allow himself the luxury to maunder and munch away in speculation, regarding well the pleasure of his writing and paying no care to the pleasure of the reader. The picture painted of me kept returning to portraying me as some decrepit, grotesque, nearly pederastic old scholar. In this world and life, I was merely dull, not wizened and cryptic. The multiple worlds theory now seemed ever to be afflicted with lapses in judgement over its central casting division. I was a shambling
young
fart, and hadn't the social skills to beard young people and pose questions impregnable to sense. Well, I had very little redeeming social skills at all, but I made the occasional effort.
8
Scarabesques
O
f the many literary texts that I have encountered, none have been more satisfying to my tastes as those that concern texts themselves – libraries and books more particularly,” said Leopold, a neighbouring tenant in my apartment bloc. “I can rattle them off easy: Perez-Reverte's
The Dumas Club
springs readily to mind... A lot of stuff by Jorge Luis Borges, too – you've
got
to read his 'The Library of Babel'... wild, uncanny shit! But not only book-mysteries, but book-related mysteries... or bookish mysteries like Czuchlewski's
The Muse Asylum
, the only damn good thing to come out of Penguin in years, if you ask me.”
“I've read Borges and some of the others you mention, not all.”
Leopold made puckering faces as he talked; he was hard to look at. I continued: “It can be a dangerous thing to become entranced by the mysteries of books,” I said, holding the door to my apartment open and letting the warm light of my lamps soften the harsh edges of the poorly chosen hallway carpet as it frayed pointlessly over the unvarnished truth of the hardwood flooring's neglect.
“Like being lost in the tracing of an arabesque. Libraries themselves are deserts. Have you ever been lost in the desert and then find yourself dancing in it, going nomad?”
“I don't suppose many have, and, no, I can't say that I can count myself among such people. Sounds a little like going mad, never mind nomad,” I returned at some dismal attempt to make humour with my mouth, but the tortured pun was dismissed.
“There are only two types of people that prosper in the desert,” he went on to tell me. “Warriors and scholars. The desert is the scene of the highest courage and wisdom, cruelty and outward reflection. Real math comes from the desert. Real ideas and the heritage of knowledge come from the desert.”
“As do the big three world religions.”
“Yes... see? The desert
promotes
big thinking!”
“And oppression, at times. And a lot of dry, airy speculation. And venomous creatures. And stubborn sand in all your belongings.”
“An error in translation, I assure you. Listen, when they say 'what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,' it is the same with desert knowledge. The concept zero, the monotheistic god, all of that got corrupted when it went from the arid expanse of the infinite desert and took root in rich soil. Had it stayed in the desert, it would have remained pure and meaningful.”
I doubted my neighbour's loose roundup and said so, diplomatically by way of a question: “What use is a knowledge that can't stand up to being shipped elsewhere? Bad currency exchange. It sounds a lot like madness. It is only when madness can cross that barrier back into Reason that we can call and evaluate it as genius.”
Leopold was not willing to give an inch: “Whether there be trees and flowers, the desert is all around us, beneath us, lacing itself across the world. In the beginning when there was land, all was desert, and to the desert all will return. I am not distracted by trees and flowers.”
“You are a devout nomad,” I said smilingly. Granted, I was smiling because the situation demanded it: how many could honestly report that they were capable of having some kind of interesting conversation in their own apartment complex with a neighbour? It was interesting, but also absurd; Leopold cleaved to some mystical idea about deserts and their profound effects, and I didn't doubt his journeys into surreal realms was not above using the occasional substance to assist his passage.
“I travel the desert in every conceivable way,” he declared with a slightly unnerving glazed look in his eye. For a moment, I thought he was going to have some sort of transcendence episode, leaving me to explain to the police why there was a man yodeling on top of our apartment bloc with no shoes.
But Leopold, apart from his eccentricities, was not a problematic neighbour. He was one among the many self-proclaimed starving artists, comfortably shrouded in the cliché, and had a genuinely enthusiastic attitude toward many things that populated the diffracted canon of what he deemed of worthy attention. It was better a neighbour like him who was more prone to waking me up in the middle of the night while charging and shrieking with creative fervour at a canvas than jacking my television to supply a meth addiction. In the inner city, all was possible, and most of those possibilities very much
sucked
. I could, of course, do even better if he wouldn't choose the wee hours to get creative and enjoin his vocal apparatus in the process.
I was not as yet rattled by my inaccurate mention in the books I had secretly plucked from the infinite library. Although I was technically an academic of sorts, I was not the type who had to contend with dead grandmother excuses from students or the usual administrative nothingness of bureaucracy... And I was hardly the scholastic type professing grand theories and other metanarratives. I did, however, shudder at the brief mention of the central and unnamed narrator stealing books. He or she, along with this ridiculously named Sigurd, were most likely grad students overheated by their lexicons that took precedence over depth in scholarship – an all too common scenario. The reportage itself was amateurish and narcissistic, which made for a dull read. The narrator feigned at profundity in his or her conceptual topics, but seemed more intent on delighting in the sound of his or her own voice: another grad student giveaway. Editorializing the literary quality or the characters of the narrative was not something I should have concerned myself with. I needed to dig deeper into this report to find those cues and clues about myself. And, inasmuch as I could accuse the narrator for narcissism, was I not engaging in a reading practice that suffered the same accusation?
Leopold and I detached from our esoteric conversation, and I returned inside to pore over this text once more in search of some clue:
Backstory
Excerpt 2
Books should not have happy or unhappy endings; they should just end, free of any purposes and hopes we insist upon. You know: a bit of word play, some clever quips by the characters, the big tying together of a few loose ends in the plot, and time to shut the story down with tidy and total resolution of the old story arc. Nothing new - the world was always going back to the mirror and touching up what it has touched up before.
There I was, traveling past the outdoor patios with the smell of lilacs and lattes and peppermint wafting in the air, this one obscure snapshot moment of my life. I could see the sun setting, its orange fury casting a mellow patina upon the short and cozy buildings. I could see the sun between the trees by an intersection, and with lively steps, I walked across the royal carpet of its light. During any sunset, when one is walking down where the buildings couch the street, there are two types of light I admire: the fiery glint of flickering sunshine insinuating itself between a jumble of leaves, and the surreal, yet warm blue of solid shadow in the quiet damp of evening. Between the buildings, it was all blue shadow, and I felt as if the entire world was only two blocks long and everyone was my friend. What harm was there in finding somewhere to nest, to have a chat with strangers, to have a beer while I waited for the azure sky to change by gradations to ultramarine blue, to violet, to black? Spring was the time to build nostalgia. I tucked myself into the very shadows from which other things tend to emerge, or perhaps they bleed this kind of hazy purple-blue.
A woman with slender wrists caught my eye, and I just started ruminating out loud about things that idly passed my consciousness: “spring is the canvas, my mind is the brush, and my comportment towards the world at any given moment is testimony to the broad strokes I effect in erecting nostalgia.” The woman arched an eyebrow, regarding me queerly. I was talking aloud again. But no matter how hard I tried to revel in the glorious majesty of the season, my thoughts still circulated round the need for exile, the desire to extricate myself from all worldly affairs. I just couldn't wait any longer for a plot to start brewing. But, Lo! Sigurd and his pomp train of loud drunkards had plans for me. I swear, he was insanity with the face of a choirboy.
“
You've got to meet this girl,” he said, the sky now black and my thoughts cascading into nocturnal smoke. “She's sublime and deadly; just the type for you.”
“
Where?”
“
At the pub down the way. Come along and I'll buy us a round.”
So off we went to the pub. We would situate ourselves under the skylight with its wood trim and greasy panes of streaked glass. We sat at an oak table, the varnish worn off by three decades of elbows. As luck would have it, the girl was waiting for us, with a whiskey held in her hand, a hat sitting reluctantly on her head. She held the amber concoction by the bowl instead of the stem, and she appeared to us like some bizarre potted plant that grew from the seat. She tapped out the song that was playing on the speakers with her long fingers, keeping time both mechanically and correctively. By most people's standards, she was a catch. But to me, she wasn't all that spectacular. Her words were saccharin, and though she tried in earnest to get my attention, I just couldn't be bothered. At least she had the presence of mind to stop when I didn't take the bait with all her overarching and obvious in-crowd cues of naming names or waxing provocatively on auteurs of cinema. She may have been a professional hypnotist, a florist, an eternal grad student. I never did get her name (Alexa Richter). She saw some of her friends at another table, and fearing the rabid genius of Sigurd who was speaking in overanimated tones about hermeneutics in film, she took the opportunity to bow out.
“
I've got a great idea,” Sigurd slavered.
“
Yeah?”
“
But we might have to live the part for awhile to gain a discursive understanding. It's going to be about two guys who masquerade as geneticists in the American Bible Belt. In actuality, one guy is a poet, and the other guy works in an abattoir.”
“
Blood and poetry. I like it already.”
“
Here's the rub: they team up and bottle pig's blood, and sell it to Christian fundamentalists as the genetically reproduced blood of Christ. That way, the churches could go beyond the metaphor during Communion, and the two guys make a fortune. It would be the feel-good entrepreneur film of the decade - and a vicious polemic against religion and science, a reprise of the old role of the relic trade.”
“
So you're suggesting that we live the roles, perhaps to furnish the film with some aspect of realism?”
“
Fuck realism! We turn the scheme into a film and make a mint both ways.”
And so another distraction from the terrible malaise of our lives. But owing to Sigurd's nature, this would be one of the many ideas that would fail to materialize, his life an infinite collection of unfinished projects and stillborn ideas. And, to be honest, his idea was rather dumb, stale even before it finished developing in his head.
I had just finished this terribly written and meandering excerpt when the telephone rang. It was Angelo.
“Ciao, mate!” he said over a commotion behind him. His voice leered and slushed drunk, and the sounds emanating behind him were most likely pub-related. The connection was poor, which may have suggested that he was calling from very far away.
“Hello?”
“Gimaldi, Gimaldi, it's me, Angelo. How're tricks? Not disturbing you, am I?” - Again, Angelo in the linguistic ethnic confusion of smuggling bad turns of phrase from England.
