The Infinite Library (74 page)

I agreed to act as a consultant for this one potential sale and to cease pestering him. Of course, I was now left with another irritant: a psychoanalyst? Was I supposed to believe the most evil human being to make his presence felt in this world was someone who read Freud and told people at a hundred dollars an hour that they wanted to sleep with their parents?

Anton Setzer never made good to tap me for my services, perhaps finding that he did not require them or that my obsession was too burdensome for a man undergoing difficult medical treatments. The sad end would come about a year later. When all of this had long come to an end, I had learned that Setzer had died. The bookstore still kept his name, but was now under the ownership of his employee, Peter Ibsen. There was a tasteful memorial in the shop window – a black and white photograph of a pensive Setzer, beneath which were a few of his most favourite and recommended titles. If the news were not sad, perhaps there would have been some comedic value in the fact that Setzer was a fond and closet admirer of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The one text he did bequeath to me was posted shortly before his death: another short fiction which was as much a warning lesson as it was an explanation. He sent it in an envelope with a brief note:

Gimaldi: Some while back, I dropped your name to Heinrich Hermann, and old friend, which then resulted in Greg Pickman contacting you about library phenomenon. Hermann passed away last year, but I think you might find this tale as touching as I did. Be well. -AS

Sanscript

The terrible elegance of the guttering fire has now captured my attention since I had attempted to sample my bed for but a fleeting hour or two. It was that fire, riveting orange spumes curling into themselves, that kept me rapt – perhaps my only anchor to that ramshackle port of sanity.

It is an undeniable truism that any number divided against itself will always result in that single digit unity, just as any number subtracted from itself will result in the authority of null. It is into this binary silence I have read, and have since regretted it; and to this style of seeing and reading I have had to forcibly turn from. A one and a zero, a white space and a black one: this is the Manicheanism of reading, but of a hidden variety that was revealed to me at too unripe an age, in Lisbon.

To say that shadows are a thing of fright for me now is to only journey halfway toward the full truth which is equally shadowy. That I have by dint of chance performed some prodigy is something I would have gladly done better without. For now it is only the flame, my fixed and unbroken gaze with it, that spares me from seeing everything in its motley of shadows.

I can safely say that there exists in all texts a tenebrous and invisible world most of us are thankfully spared from ever glimpsing, a terribly secret realm that is entirely visible, but only for the eyes trained to see it.

I feign at being a man of letters with the convenient and implacable mask of scholarship. This, of course, means my work is overburdened with a cleverness it does not attempt to tastefully conceal. It could be worse, and it has been in previous bouts of my pen: I could perform my own exegesis, lauding my work with long-winded explanations on the stylistics and mechanics, the forcibly imported metaphors, the elitist pomp of making classical allusions...But that is the way some people tend to tell jokes, committing the faux pas of laughing at their own wit before it is judged by the laughter of others, and then trying to relive the punchline with boorish explanation and reiteration. But this is not a story about my errors as a failed writer, nor about the allegiances I maintained so that I could gladhand my way toward receiving literary prizes I certainly did not deserve.

At the time, I had been living in Lisbon. I was born into both a German family and that heavy burden known as the German language, and my family decided to relocate to Portugal for rather uninteresting reasons. I had distant relatives in my family tree who had some equally distant connections to Germany's historical shame, but not significant enough to leave any lasting stain on an otherwise mundane family name.

Having left my literary peer group in Munich, I was to be adopted by another in Lisbon, which was quite vibrant at the time. Fortunately, on the strength of an introductory letter written by a man of international well-renown (I will not bring him any shame or embarrassment by revealing his identity here), my passage into the upper echelons of Lisbon's literary elite was secured. It did not matter if what I wrote possessed any merit, but that sort of thing doesn't all that much matter in such circles - just so long as one gains admittance and has some relative degree of shared literary history. We had our meetings in a place called the Chamber.

The Chamber was slightly Bauhausian, the ruthlessly elegant and modernist minimalism that conceals behind its cold facade the fact it had been produced by complicated machinery. Clear glass alternated with frosted glass, silver and black stood at alienated distances. Our salon's decor was proof of what happens when the triumph of aesthetic austerity is mistaken for tastefulness, where opulence is condemned to mere tackiness. This was in contradistinction with the rest of Lisbon's proud architectural pomp - anachronistic holdovers to a bygone Baroque era.

The Lisbon society of letters was very much like societies of their stripe anywhere, filled with amplified and inconsequential intrigues, given over to passionate prejudices of the moment, and concerning itself with myopic discussions on contemporary poetics. The unwritten rules were generally similar as well: new members targeted their flatteries judiciously without seeming like obsequious dandies. Some would undertake to write high-born prose in reviewing the established members that, objectively, would be regarded by history as fatuous puff pieces engineered to curry favour and gain advantage. But there was another new member in the Lisbon clique besides myself, and not once did I ever see him ingratiate himself in any way. Perhaps his aloof comportment, finely threaded by an innate mysteriousness, frozen upon that half smirk permanently etched upon his Mediterranean face was enough to carry him beyond the necessity for baser methods for forging alliances. He was certainly charismatic, affable, and eloquent enough to be quickly held in some measure of esteem. His oratory was tinged with that smooth touch of the exotic, an accent that put me in mind of some Comte de Monte Cristo descending upon us. And, he was certainly a well-bred thinker with a quick-witted creativity. His name was Tariq, and this Lisbon group to which we both belonged was, I would later learn, of middling importance to him compared to the fraternity he pledged most of his loyalty to.

Tariq was a handsome man, with a dark complexion and an ageless face that one felt one could trust - although it was what it visibly seemed to conceal that conveyed he knew much more than he would tell. He participated meaningfully and respectfully to our discussions, in a way that was never too much or too little, contributing just enough to have presence but never fully committing himself to any side in a dispute. He had an objective, clarifying effect when our disputes raged, adding a cool and fresh breeze to any argument. However, to me, it always seemed as though he was just playing, a bit distant and unserious.

It must have been a few months before Tariq took me into his confidence. He was wearing a handsome cut of suit and gingerly sipping a cafe au lait on balmy evening. When I buttonholed him, out of my own curiousity to dispel mystery, he yielded jovially.

“I have tried thousands of times to unwrite my own life,” he began without losing that perma-smirk. “Usually by writing over it, rewriting the past as if the act of writing could abolish the truth of what was, but that is only to multiply and embellish, compounding a lie with an actual event. When this proved to be an artificial act, I sought ways where writing could efface my past without creating a new one in its place. It is a difficult thing to write with the singularly focused aim of removing all traces of oneself. At bottom, it is paradoxical...an enterprise fraught with failure. I could complicate my history, but every word served only to reaffirm its existence. It had to be an act more lasting than a series of scratching strikethroughs...or the denouncement of public record. I began with my family and tried to unwrite them. This proved somewhat easiest, for I could write that I had no relatives - a sure way to remove my lineage, but any persistent researcher could sniff out my lie.”

“This seems counterintuitive to the act of writing,” I said. “Do we not write, in part, for recognition, to leave our fingerprints upon history?”

“I have my reasons, and they are not what you would expect. I do desire recognition, but my effacement will actually achieve this. There was once a story I wrote - one that I have attempted in vain to unwrite - that received praise for the one fantastic element I reported as having occurred at such-and-such street. The street and house I described do exist, but I was asked if that I introduced was also true. I drew from life the house and street, but added that small touch of fabulist fancy that makes for a good tale, to blur that boundary between life and fiction. It concerned a medieval android, a tale peeled from the rumoured accounts of Albertus Magnus. I said it was not true, the android portion, although I had written it so convincingly that it seemed to suggest that it was. My questioner said with a disappointed and derogatory tone, 'Ah, so it's just an invention.' Inventions, it is assumed, have less value than natural and real things. But I would argue that inventions of the mind are as real as the blossoms on the trees of this boulevard. Do not inventions change our way of engaging reality, if not the entirety of reality itself? Not all inventions must be readily and universally useful either; I accord as much value to the inventions of Shelley and H.G. Wells as I do those of Edison or Marconi. But it is this stubborn belief that inventions - especially literary ones - are poor, deficient, and useless that has urged my sad resolve to unwrite myself, as if in protest. I, too, am merely an invention.”

“Or a fantasist. I do not mean this in a pejorative way. There can be much beauty and erudition found in such a genre.”

“I do not take it as pejorative, but I am no longer even this. To unwrite the whole world would be violently arrogant, and I am no Platonist who spurns the terrestrial realm and awaits reunion with the celestial sphere of the Forms. I take responsibility only for myself, and it is myself that I must unwrite, to efface this fiction, this invention. All my memories are merely the ones I choose to keep, or have no choice but to keep. I do not remember every breakfast I've eaten since childhood, every caress every lover has ever given me, or every object I have seen on every street I have traveled. Yes, to remember everything would be madness, and so we abstract from the world and keep the kernel of meaning. Is this not also a form of invention, of fictionalizing? Selection and omission. All my perceptions are merely forged by larger cultural and historical prejudices and my own experience (which is flawed). I inherit a world that is already a historical fiction, and I continue along to make ever more fictions that future generations will also inherit. Nothing I think, remember, or see is entirely real or free from my tainting them with that natural function common to all people - to fictionalize. Even this language we speak, this linguistic inheritance, is an arbitrary way of designating the world and communicating with one another.”

“Would not those who devalue invention also suffer using inventions themselves?”

“Yes. They invent their own system of values that devalues inventions. But so do those who highly value inventions hold an invented opinion.”

“Then there is no right or wrong. All is illusion,” I attempted to clarify.

“To say ' all is invention' is itself an invention. To say that inventions are good or bad, useful or useless, is again just an invention. But I wish to push toward the conclusion of my efforts, how my own invention was embroidered by a special knowledge that perhaps, if you are willing, I can share with you. Because it pleases me, and because you are not so rigid in your way of thinking yet since you are still young and malleable of mind, perhaps this would benefit you - or it may be the source of much hardship.”

I listened intently, not breaking the spell with any premature utterance.

“There is more than one way of reading, yes?”

“This I freely grant,” I said. “Interpretation is variable. There are many levels of reading.”

“But all of them play on one side of the black and white.”

“I do not understand.”

“Do you believe in unconscious writing? I do not mean this so heavily on the side of psychoanalysis.”

“Stream of consciousness writing, you mean?”

“No, a truly unconscious style of writing, the kind that unwrites all that we write by adding a layer that we are not aware of. All who write, write double. We inscribe a different writing in the white shadow.”

“White shadow?”

“Look at any text. Black on white. We form each letter, but at the same time, we are carving out the negative space of an entirely other alphabet. I have learned how to read the spaces between letters as being an alphabet of its own, rendering what we actually write the space between the letters that are actually printed, albeit in negative.”