The Infinite Library (21 page)
Read The Infinite Library Online
Authors: Kane X Faucher
Tags: #Mystery, #Retail, #Fiction, #21st Century, #Amazon.com
“Perhaps you should go,” Gimaldi said to me abruptly.
“No, he can stay,” the man said. “What do you have left to hide - especially since you have revealed all in that little metaphysical joke book of yours.”
“This is Castellemare,” Gimaldi introduced. “He isn’t what you would call tactful.”
For some reason, I liked him immediately.
“Pish-tosh, old boy!” Castellemare affected. “Keep up your end of the scathing attacks we are so renowned for, Gimaldi! Let’s put on a little show for the boy.”
Castellemare... The name was strikingly familiar, as if I had read it somewhere recently. Access to my memory on the matter was blocked by fog.
“What is it this time?” Gimaldi asked curtly.
“No need to be so standoffish, old friend. I just came to delight in your erudite presence,” he said. Then to me: “Is he this suspicious and unaccommodating with you as well?”
“He has his moments,” was my good-natured reply, as if I had somehow located an ally in this stranger.
“He’s such a card, isn’t he?” Castellemare said under Gimaldi’s burning glare. “People like him thrive on crisis and, worse, writing about it! Such habits are ridiculous since they always try to create a histrionics of the present by a silly historiography of the past and future. You’re not another crisis-writer, are you?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, good,” he said relieved. “Last thing we need is another little Gimaldi running around trying to put his little clues together to prevent a synthesis that is not as bad as he thinks it is.”
“Enough,” Gimaldi said with a moue.
It was a night of surprise visits, for who would come slinking around the corner, but Sigurd. He sat with us and conversed with the fluidity of a dilettante theorist. What Sigurd didn't count on was that Castellemare could see through his discursive deceptions, the way Sigurd relied on his scattered genius to confound others into believing that he was wise. The subject was, disagreeably, Montaigne... and this drifted into rhetoric, then Rabelais, switching back to Erasmus, Holbein, yadda and yadda.
This conversation had gone on for some time, and Sigurd's insecurity with his own knowledge began to show, compelling him to confuse his opponent: “but the entire substratum of Being is entirely expressed in the Cartesian Meditations where Spinozistic maxims cannot contain the very discursive modality of the predominant episteme!”
Whenever Sigurd's reason was exposed for the falsehood it was, he resorted to the piecemeal phrases he encountered in the haphazard reading of books, and took to the task of connecting them in a wild fashion with no regard to true meaning. I had come to tolerate this - even enjoy it - but in the company of others more schooled, he was an aberration against knowledge and clarity.
“
You are making no sense,” Castellemare said, annoyed.
“
I am making perfect sense,” Sigurd protested. “It's just that you don't have the necessary understanding of the finer acoustics in my discursive manner because you are locked in a Cartesian bubble of entrenched indifference! You lack the textual understanding of the very substrate of my anarcho-dialectical Being, and so you criticize me from the privileged perspective of an intellectual microcosm which cannot tolerate opening itself up to a larger, hermeneutical understanding.”
“
The longer the words you speak, the less you say,” Castellemare pointed out harshly, now ready to dismiss the entire contents of the argument.
“
Perhaps you just fear the true meaning in my discourse,” Sigurd countered.
“
You are a clever boy,” said Castellemare with sarcasm. “You should write books – like Gimaldi here. Big, fat, dreadfully unreadable books stuffed with ego.”
Gimaldi and I had quickly become spectators. Gimaldi appeared amused with the spectacle, for humility was the most appealing element of tragedy. It also meant that he was temporarily not the target of Castellemare’s barbs. Sigurd, now defeated, took on the appearance of having been pistol whipped.
“
How do you know Gimaldi?” I asked Castellemare, attempting to rescue my friend from reproach.
“
We are old enemies, he and I. Different Orders. Nothing to concern yourself with.”
“You’ve already given most of the game away as it is,” chided Gimaldi. “Why not finish up and reveal all!”
“And why would I do something so pointless as that?” Castellemare asked. “I’ve spared all the real horrors for the end. Besides, Gimaldi, I hardly think these two young chaps are keen on hearing the dreadfully dull story about your life, how you like codes and ciphers, your cutesy little trips to the Vatican Library, how you ... FUCKING STEAL BOOKS FROM THE LIBRARY AND BETRAY YOUR EMPLOYER YOU STUPID GIT AND YET YOU CONTINUE READING YOU NARCISSISTIC SHITHEEL STOP READING STOP READING STOP READING STOP STOP STOP STOP STO-
With the shock of a gun’s report right by my ear, I immediately slapped the book shut, dropped it and recoiled. I had had enough for a while.
10
Typesetter
I
was able to spend an entire month unmolested by shadowy librarians and their retinue of goons. I populated most of my days searching out of the way antiquarian book dealers and trying to pluck a few deals to sell on line for a premium. I had become comfortable in my rented flat, enjoying the warmth and the fare on offer. My vacation was only interrupted by contact from Setzer:
Mr. Gimaldi,
Please pardon this message out of the blue. Word has traveled that you gloriously betrayed your employer and have in your possession some volumes of particular importance. You seemed so mild-mannered, but I suppose that was an effective operative front. However, I ought to warn you that Castellemare is hardly one to be trifled with, and I'd suggest that you be on your guard. Word (which travels so fast and far these days) has it that he is absolutely livid and worried. He is a resourceful creature, and I don't doubt that he can charm some lower-echelon type to bring you to nocturnal justice. I am not so interested in this book called the Backstory of something-or-other, but I am vividly intrigued by the now missing 7
th
Meditation... I believe in it is Castellemare's plan, a plan he recently recovered and that you took from him. You see, Castellemare is no innocent librarian – he uses the library for his own gain, and if there is in this library something possible for him to enact that would bring him this gain, well...
I make a clean breast of things, Mr. Gimaldi. I'm not the type of person to string you along some interminable mystery like your former employer. I have access to the catalogue of the Library, but not the contents themselves. When these text went missing, I consulted the catalogue abstract and found your name prominently in both these texts. When word came to me that you had went rogue, so to speak, I made the assumptive connection. Hence, my contacting you now.
From my understanding, it will be necessary that ALL that occurs in the 7
th
Meditation come to pass. I have this on faith from a few more elder and reliable sources. I beg your pardon not to reveal their identities, however, since it serves none to reveal such information. In fact, your possession of this text will come to pass regardless, I consider it a kind of manual for precognition. The Backstory text will give you some insights into what the meditation will bring to the fore.
My role
in all this? The perpetual Sha
kespearean jester. I continue to occupy the position of Castellemare's blind spots. I would not, of course, advise you to come and seek me out since I am sure our “dear friend” would find you that way. However, if you so please, I would like out of curiousity to receive a scanned version of the meditation text. I leave it to you to decide, but I am always willing to trade in kind... And, I know you will be very famished for some information very soon.
All the best,
Anton Setzer.
Despite the open-handed gesture, I felt as though it were pulling me back into the labyrinth once again. I had finally discovered reference to Castellemare in the last chapter I had read, but I had put both books away for perhaps sanity's sake. I needed to pull away from the dangerous mystique. Sinking myself into “booking” it up for a while was at least stable, predictable, and ordered. I did not deal well with loose ends and perpetual enigmas. Setzer's email disturbed the brief yet welcome peace I had acquired.
As if to forcibly return to a state of the secure and safe, I ignored Setzer's request and went about my own business. The shadows were lessening in their effect to frighten me, and the world seemed to have lightened a bit. I had become comfortable enough to justify letting my guard down. I walked cobbled streets with impunity and delighted in my dealings with generous and knowledgeable booksellers. I was making just enough to eke by, but I also had my savings to draw from. But it was at this point that my story weaved with that of the backstory,
Best Before 2099
.
“We are old enemies,” Castellemare had said, or at least his character in the book. Referring here, of course, to himself and me. Was it so? Was the fiction a fair representation of fact? Certainly, I never had the sense that he was much of a friend, but I could not countenance the severity of enemy. Was I secretly beginning to hate Castellemare as much as he perhaps already hated me? I had already begun hating some time ago all his reticence and attempts to be thrust me into a series of insoluble mysteries, his cryptic words, his rhetorically timed silences, his very manner which was irritating in knowing so much and sharing nothing. And, perhaps, he hated me for not playing his game the way he wanted me to, in a fashion that would have amused him much more.
Setzer set upon me once more, this time with another email that simply had a document attached meant for me to read, perhaps even to vindicate his efforts in creating text:
Attachment: The_Orthographers.rtf
The story I must relate is an unbelievable one, and despite our age's wearying of fabulists and weavers of impossible fictions, I can assure my hearers that I share their exasperation. To that end, I beg pardon and patience for the unlikely and vertiginous events that befell me but are as true as my memory, and the setting of my now evacuated youth, will allow.
My story begins at age 26, a significant age for its numerical value, but yet still an age where men are hardly fully formed. Now that I'm 52, an equally numerically significant age, I can say that I'm formed, but not well, like a negligent and hastily produced attempt at pottery.
How I came to discover the “orthographers” is something that, with the unhurried pace that comes with age, I will reveal gradually. It is not that I fancy myself in any way or manner a prose artist, or wish to multiply the consternation of my hearers with overwrought descriptions suffused with pretty language, but that I am subject to the demands of factual and sequential narrative telling.
My name was then Jason Johns, as it still is today, although names remain inalterable even in the face of the greatest changes, calamities and triumphs. My name then and my name now only appear identical when, in fact, events change its character. What I do know now, and what I did not know then, is the significance and weight of every letter in my name – bland as it appears – as well as the equal importance of every name. Not, of course, like some crude Cabalist confusing deduction with convenient numerical imposition, for such inane mystic balderdash chooses to see a self-generated pattern as the divine Order of all existence.
At the age of 26, where my tale begins, like most men in my time, I was a listless and nomadic youth, spirited away easily by unfocused eagerness and the secret cloying need for some definitive purpose – any purpose – to better manifest what youth feels is their lot in glorious destiny. I was a good traveller by nature, taking whatever opportunity a small finance would provide to brown my flesh on exotic shores rimed with proud palms or feel the exhilarating chill of hiking through dense and dark northern boreal forests. There was no area so forbidden I would not take to explore, no matter how distant or unseemly. Guided by whim and lack of purpose, I pressed a pioneering foot on many a soil. There were no anchors to my spirit, so I went where I wished, the more remote the better.
