The Infinite Library (33 page)

“I have no idea what you are blithering about. You see?! This is the sort of mad nonsense Castellemare puts in your head. I
told
you to avoid him. And now he has your head twisted!”

Gimaldi feigned exhaustion in order to cut my visit short. I took the cue to leave, feeling that I had somehow hurt the man. If I were Gimaldi, I would have felt that there was no way to compete against a Sphinx full of fascinating new surprises.

I phoned Sigurd and we made our apologies. We agreed to meet, and I desperately wanted a reprieve from this braided mystery of t
wo enigmatic men who spoke only in tormenting riddles. Gimaldi wanted my trust, my belief, my efforts to write him into the world with one hand, and to erase him with the other; I was scared. For all I knew, Castellemare wanted my bones. This was why I called Sigurd. I needed a break from being batted around between two old lunatics.
It was never clear to me what my motive ought to have been in continuing associating with them at all. Is it clear to you? Who am I anyway?

It was a time to be firm, for I did not want Gimaldi's wheedling me to write that book. No, I would refuse to write the book. There was nothing special about me. I was not the ideal candidate to do as Gimaldi required unless, in his view, the only criteria was that someone was indulgent enough to listen. Selected by someone else's desperation.

I spilled into the day, darkness tumbling awkwardly out of a tomb. My knees ached with each hurried step I took, but my purpose was clear.
By a tree overladen with icicles, a tree seemingly driven as an
afterthought in the middle of the public park, I waited. Sigurd's goofily gaunt form came shambling down the path, his shadows a vacillating braid across the blue-tinted snow. I had the
Codex Infinitum
in my hand, the pages held under such pressure that I thought they would stick together. I had brought it as both a prop to tell a story of what had been happening lately as well as a peace offering. It would make Sigurd feel special, which was his only need in friendship, the appeasement of his narcissistic pathology.

Truth was, he was perhaps the only one I could trust. I would launch immediately into the problem – or the host of problems that whirled madly about in a halo of biting flies. The colophon to the
Codex Infinitum
sported some unusual phrases to end a rather long-winded and sentimentalist few pages on the wonder and mystery of libraries. These phrases I showed to Sigurd, and they worried him as much as me.

The colophon spoke of the book having two printers working collaboratively: a German and a Venetian. I thought it a bit antiquated to have a last page colophon, and perhaps just a bit too pretentious. The rhyming colophon read as follows:

By the fruits of the invention does A. Setzer punch the words of the author

and under his charge, his talented protege, C. Anderson.

In copies numbering hundreds two, first edition's bother,

and in copies numbering hundreds three, by that famed printer's son

Runneth to a second edition courtesy of Jakob Sigurdsson.

What comes first, the doctor or his education?

A synthesis imminent, but causing much consternation!

The colophon's ending verse was rather bad and jingling, but the curious resemblance of the second printer's name to Sigurd's was far too glaring to ignore.

“What do you think it means?” he asked me.

“It could just be a coincidence, really, but this book has quickly become a bit troubling.”

“What's it about?”

At this bald question I could only fall mute. That this was the completed work published well before the incomplete one was difficult enough to understand, but its contents concerning Gimaldi and Castellemare was too hard for me to explain by way of summary. I had not heeded Castellemare's advice to underline important dates, names,
places, and so I was lost. As well, the name of A. Setzer was repeated; in the story, Gimaldi visits the mad artificer for answers, and yet here is this same Setzer attributed with having printed the first edition of the book. Was this some elaborate fictional hoax perpetrated by Castellemare, or – and I had not ruled it out yet – Gimaldi? I had to know. Sigurd could tell that I was at a loss to explain what the book was 'about.'

“Where did you get this book?” he asked.

“Guess.”

“Castellemare?”

“Yes.”

“Let's find Castellemare,” he said plainly. “Maybe if we both press, he'll give us some answers.”

He wouldn't prove that difficult to find; in fact, he found us. We went to the nearby cafe to figure out how to find him, and there he was, decorated in his usual smirking fashion, a sartorial court jester.

“Gentlemen! What a surprise,” he said, his affectation slightly foppish.

“We were just about to launch an expedition to find you,” I said.

“Well, you can call it off; here I am. What can I do for you?”

“We want you to pony up some answers on this book you lent,” Sigurd said.

“You again? Get back into your cups and stay there until your own confounded thoughts untwine you.”

“Leave him be,” I warned.

“I see you have come together in force. Hoping that a little intimidation, some tag-team coercion might loosen my tongue? You have the book – why not try reading it before you start pestering me with the ultimate meaning of its plot? And don't tell me you have read it, for I know you haven't, and what you read was not all that careful now, was it?”

“There's something spooky in this book, frequently mentioned,” I began.

“And you hate suspense? Are you coming to me to lodge a complaint? Did I choose unsuitable reading material for your delicate sensibilities?”

“Why don't you just tell us what the real deal is about this damn book?” Sigurd charged.

“Why don't you ponder the relevance of your appearance in this scene. You haven't even read the book, so why are you making belligerent demands at all?”

I knew Sigurd; being outed for not reading something soiled his desired image that he be perceived that he had read everything.

“Let's not get testy, boys. Come back to my house for a light chat,” Castellemare offered to me alone.

“Only if Sigurd can come along.”

“For comedic relief? For insurance? Do you think you'll come to harm on account of these bird-like bones of mine? Fine. If you insist, you can bring your buffoon along. My friend, you read bad books and keep bad company, and that is just an observation – take it or leave it. I still can't believe you read Gimaldi's awful little opus.”

“Hey, lay off Gimaldi's book,” Sigurd said.

“That self-indulgent, overwrought, frivolous bilge? It is nothing but his attempt to cash in on the meteoric rise of marginalia that is so in vogue these days, a little haughty and high-handed mystic slush,” Castellemare readily dismissed. “I fail to understand your loyalty to the man, but I suppose it takes all kinds. Gimaldi cannot even emulate the trashiest and pulpiest of what is written these days.”

And so we were led back to Castellemare's home, that palatial villa that had awed me before, this time with someone whom could act as second witness to the strange wonder that was Castellemare's mysterious abode. I could tell that the magnificence of the home was not lost on Sigurd. The entrance was like a small cathedral, with stone banisters topped with immaculate spheres, opening outward to the walkway like a goliath's inviting hand. The doorway was both broad and tall. The doors were of thick and solid oak, rounded at the top to conform to the archway, and sporting a pair of unpolished brass rings as thick as a man's wrist. We could have spent an inconceivable amount of time wandering the immense edifice, losing ourselves in obscure paintings and seemingly unending adjacent rooms - always a room adjacent to another, each with a specific purpose, a nuance of utility just slightly different from the last. But it was not here that we'd marvel, but in the room I had visited before. I found it odd that I did not register all of this when I had been invited before.

A running carpet of red plush and gold trim tracing an interlocking fretwork of red lions weaved its way up a flight of stairs, centered perfectly down the middle of the hallways, all the way to the room in question. Once again I was staring at that oak door, still in the initial wonder of what was beyond it. And then the door was opened, and the eery magnificence of this mirrored room had remained as captivating as it had been before. It looked as though the room had no bottom or top, or any limit to its dimension. And when the three of us stood inside, our reflections went off in all directions at once, down to an infinite abyss and up to an infinite summit. Each reflection became smaller, and one could not help but to perceive a great distance that was only an illusion. But it was the same for Castellemare and Gimaldi: two men whose perilous learning, profound mystery, and alleged mutual antipathy was much like this room: an illusion of depths and distances, a mere compounding of reflections ad infinitum.

Castellemare was the first to speak: “a room like this is perceived differently by many people. For some, it is the joy of humility that comes through the immensity of reflections that reduce the voyeur to the infinitesimal. For others, this same perception brings fright to the insecure. And still, for others, there is a childish simplicity to the great wonder of possibilities stretching out into eternity for them. If you want the representative metaphor of history, it is here. If I needed a crude analogy for the Library, this would be it, along with winding stairwells.”

Castellemare didn't need to explain, for I understood, albeit in a differently way than he intended. I looked up and saw infinite causes. Looking down, I could see infinite effects. I was just an intermediate and accidental link in the causal chain, a static point in history. And no matter where one was in the chain, the view would remain the same because the causal chain extended into past and future endlessly. On the horizontal axis of reflections was the many variables, possibilities each affected by another series of causal events.

Castellemare requested that we sit in one of his many parlours.

“Let us sit in the Champagne Room and talk,” he said.

“Where's that?” Sigurd asked, still dumbfounded by the effect of the Tain.

“Adjacent to the Bourbon Room, of course. Everybody knows that.”

We followed him and his laughter.

“Do you have a room in this place for every type of drink? Bring on the Tequila Room!” Sigurd said with inappropriate cheer.

“We needn't be silly,” Castellemare slightly admonished. “They are simply theme rooms containing the artifacts of certain geographic areas I had frequented, or representative of the flavour of a particular historical epoch.”

And so we sat, in plush chairs, around that enigma of a man, but the awe, immensity, and eerie quality of our surroundings seemed to compel us to keep quiet.

“Gimaldi's counter-book is... a naive epistle written in the spirit of one enfeebled by dogmatic mysticism,” Castellemare began with no preamble. “He comes from an ever-weakening tradition that believes that metaphysics is possible. Gimaldi will give up the ghost before any rise in the general sentiment could give way to the acceptance of his clumsy philosophic views. Recurrence entails time - time for the unfolding of transitions,” Castellemare said.

“You seem pretty sure that Gimaldi will give up,” I remarked.

“Yes, I do. I draw this conclusion from experience with people, and with the likes of Gimaldi. I have also read it somewhere.”

“This may seem silly, but I get the distinct impression that you and Gimaldi are struggling to see which one of you will win me,” I said.

“You make it sound like a courtship. I do not want your allegiance. I have no real need of such a thing. “ Castellemare was quick to dismiss, “just your patience.”

“Patience for what?” Sigurd asked.

“Patience to let the plot develop and maybe even enjoy it,” Castellemare replied with a smile.

[The remainder of this dialogue was missing. In its place, as if stitched there as an afterthought or a moral lesson was a brief and puzzling excursus that seemed to be a partial digression].

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In this Order, our sacred symbols: the book, the mirror, the deciphering wheel...