The Infinite Library (45 page)

The reason why this passage seemed to have been of interest to the artist was unclear to Ensopht, although it perhaps fit in quite nicely with the overall theme of the sketchbook itself – it being a kind of catalogue of tormenting items. Ensopht had the acute premonition that one of his players would be making his way into the night, and Ensopht was determined to coincide with him.

Leopold cast his tired yet lascivious eyes at two young girls dressed in tight pink and blue shirts and flared pants before they were abducted by some flashy distraction inside a college bar. Nothing but their most cursory glance washed over his unkempt and paint-spattered person. He had not shaved in days, and his fingers were covered in specks of paint. He had, without being given notice, surpassed youth and the attentions thereof, an unemployed 33 year old artist in age limbo.

He ducked into a known and well-worn alley and went into a building through an unmarked door. The filth did not end in the alley, but had been tracked into the building, a place that was lazily outside the radar of public attention, a drinking refuge without a liquor license, frequented by those who had been willfully forgotten. The regulars were mostly lonely old men who had already been kicked out of every other legitimate bar in town, but still in need of somewhere out of doors to nurse themselves. These were the unlovable, those that sank from circumstance or their own doing to wallow in the shadows of their own memories. Leopold knew a handful of them, but only because they had all been thrust together by the accident of drinking together. The one they called Wally for lack of anything else to call him was among the downtrodden, and he was allegedly a professor at the university. Patrons here had called Wally a “Juice-Junky” due to his claim of attaining quasi-religious euphoria by draining conventional dry cell batteries with his tongue. He was positively ecstatic when rechargeable batteries were commercialized. Wally had engaged this habit for twenty years, the results of long-term use showing in the twitch of his nerves. Of course, for Wally, his habit did not stop at batteries, and it was said that he could endure inhuman voltages, with claims of his tolerance for electric fences and the like. His threshold for electricity, a tolerance built up by experience, was nothing short of phenomenal. In his view, Heaven was an enormous electronic dynamo. He was convinced that the people all around the world were increasing what he called “the global voltage”, teasing out maximum yields of electricity, to delight in the electric wonderland. “Electricity is the drug of tomorrow!” he said. “As we speak, corporate men in big towers are juicing themselves to states of ecstasy. If electricity had been used by the Greeks, I am sure that Aristotle would have taught about that instead.” Leopold didn't mind Wally, just another surreal character in the otherwise empty landscape of his social engagements.

Leopold took his place at the bar and ordered a drink. The owner usually found it difficult to keep a well stocked bar which meant that selection was limited. Usually, all there was available was the owner's home-brewed beer. It was a tepid, flat, and somewhat gritty brew with an aftertaste reminiscent of cheap men's cologne. No one questioned the owner's brewing techniques, and no one complained, for they all knew it was “drink what I got or go chug mouthwash at the metro.” And it was half the price of an actual beer.

Ensopht had, by the strangeness of his character and by a general feeling, found this place. When he entered, the patrons immediately fell silent, regarding the stranger with extreme suspicion, or what would look like suspicion struggling to unscrew itself out of drunk, wavering gazes. Noticing the silence, Leopold turned around on his tattered stool to see what was the cause for what could stay those opining tongues. And there was the cause, standing tall in sartorial splendour, with the look of noble expectation cursively written across his face. Having found who he was looking for, Ensopht took a seat beside Leopold.

“A besotted environment, so rife with despair,” Ensopht said, “where a man's idleness collaborates with his misery.”

“Pardon?” Leopold turned.

“I was remarking casually on misery. Surely, this mustn't be alien to any who would come here for a few refreshments?”

The owner, who shared the other patrons' suspicion, frowned and abruptly asked Ensopht what he wanted to drink.

“Only your finest,” Ensopht replied cordially, perhaps not knowing that today's finest also happened to be the worst, and what everyone else was drinking: the home brew.

“This isn't a swanky joint, fella. Ya might wanna try up th'rood,” the owner said, jutting a thick and ugly hairy thumb in the vague direction of downtown's more legal establishments.

“This will do fine,” Ensopht said, regarding the drink in its filthy glass with a sense of amusement. “So,” he began again, “we were talking about misery.”

“No, you were talking about misery,” murmured Leopold who was in no mood to talk to a weird looking man that others might associate with him. If anything, he enjoyed this place for its brute honesty, but mostly for his ability to remain completely anonymous. It gave him comfort to witness that others around him were hopeless and far more worse off than he was. Who but a freak, a serial killer, or a desperate scam-salesman would have the audacity to dress in expensive clothes and strike up a so-called meaningful conversation with a stranger? Leopold half expected the man to continue, and he would have to sit through it until the freak exhausted himself and moved on. The trick was not to argue, not to ask for clarification points, and the freak would eventually go away.

“So what is it that makes you so miserable?”

“Taxes, the crown, drowning puppies, the hard to reach places in the peanut butter jar,” he answered glibly.

“Quite an anthology of lament. Please do not be flip with me; I'm only asking a simple question.”

“I don't like simple questions.”

“Some questions hide their depth and complexity when they go robed in simple attire,” Ensopht said, looking right at Leopold and catching his eyes.

“Ok, then. Sit tight, brace yourself, 'cos I have a whole epic of misery I can dish up right here. I am miserable because I am a failure as an innovator, a joke of an artist, I indulge in a few too many recreational drugs, I never finish what I start, I have terrible nightmares, I hate my mother and father, I don't have a good enough job to support myself, I feel like I'm twisting about in a straitjacket, I have no one who loves me, my ideas are stupid and facile, everyone I went to school with now has six-figure salaries and nice houses, I dropped out of college, I can't seem to shake this fog and lack of inspiration, I regret having been born, and my only pleasure in life these days is booze and masturbation. Fucking satisfied?”

“Now that was a beautiful reply, sculpted from the very depths of a very human condition!” Ensopht applauded. “You, I presume, live in isolation, a very grey kind of isolation... You are sick and without purpose, listless, wholly dissatisfied yet desire to have the means to change your situation. You are alone, but do not want company, catching you in this kind of ambivalence. You wish you could strike out, but are frightened by consequences. You reject the silly responsibility a world has foisted upon you. What do you suppose is the root of this error?”

“I dunno... the mind, the world?”

“It usually is, but that is such a vague and dissatisfying answer. Surely, there must be some more specific cause of misery.”

“Didn't I just catalogue a bunch of examples?” Leopold stated.

“You gave me a list of anecdotal items. You fail to ask the question in its more abstract sense. How easily the things we attribute as causes for our misery only veil a deeper source.”

“Shit, dude, you ought to get a job writing fortune cookies. Everything you say sounds like a fucking proverb. Don't waste your precious talents on me, ok?”

“I apologize. It was not my intention to detain your attention against your will. It is just, well, you seem to bear the mark of someone struggling to understand.”

“Listen, joker, I make it my job to understand. That's why I'm an artist. I try to understand shit: my own, everybody else's. I really don't need some dressed up fop coming in here and telling me that I am struggling to understand, got it? With that, I think we ought to part ways,” Leopold ended with a mock proper English accent.

“An artist?” Ensopht perked up. “Well then, you do know of what you speak... my reverence for the artist is unparalleled. Draw me something.”

“Just like that? I find it hard to draw on command, and without my materials... Fuck, man, I'm not yours or anybody's goddamn monkey. I don't 'do' art to be some amusing, late-night, sideshow spectacle.”

“Bah! Your excuses are pale. An artist is always in a habit of obeying: his impulses, the strange inspirations that take him aloft without his prior consent, the overwhelming surge of his kaleidoscopic emotions - and especially the orders of his patrons. As for materials, only a poor artist cannot create with but the sparsest materials available. To you I say, 'here is a napkin and a pen: now draw!'”

Leopold felt both flush and strangely invigorated. Who was this strange fellow who goaded him on? He was resolved not to take the bait, however. The situation felt too improbable.

“Listen, man, I don't need to justify anything to you. If you walk away thinking to yourself that I'm no artist, that I'm just pulling your leg, I could care less.”

“I am asking you in deference and respect towards your station. You would be hard pressed to encounter any others who would actually be interested in you as an artist.”

Leopold drew a quick sketch and pushed it forward for Ensopht's appraisal.

“Hm. Good understanding of the human form. I find the mouth in the place of the genitalia quite peculiar yet potentially provocative. However, it is still quite jejune. As an artist, you're not very good.”

Leopold was shocked. Of all the likely responses,
this uncompromising rejection was not one of them. He more expected, at the very least, some polite acknowledgement of his sketch, or some false praise. Ensopht got out of his seat and left. Leopold went after him.

“What do you mean I'm not good?” Leopold called after him, demanding an explanation for such an abrupt rejection.

“You are simply not that good. That is my opinion.”

“And who makes you qualified to judge art, huh?”

“It is just an opinion. I could explain my opinion in more detail, tell you what formed it, but I hardly think that will be of much help to you. Consider my appraisal just a matter of taste, nothing more.”

“Well, you're judging me on one fucking two minute sketch in a dive. How is that hardly fair? You haven't seen my real work.”

“Real work? Oh? I guess I haven't, and I suppose you can be satisfied in the knowledge that my opinion only concerns that which you produced for my observation, leaving your 'real work' immune from my judgement. My opinion should mean even less given that your 'real work' remains intactly unseen. I suppose you are in the habit, when others request to see an example of your work, to falsely represent yourself with work that is not your real work. You have nothing to gain by proving your artistry to me. I believe you are an artist; I just don't think – given what you showed me – a good one. I can tell that we both abhor the conventional, and what you showed me was not too conventional. But there is something missing... I think it is... courage and a clear idea. Goodbye. Perhaps I will encounter your 'real work' in the future, nestled within some chic gallery where visitors may fawn over it with endless comparisons to other artists in place of genuine flattery.”