The Infinite Library (80 page)

“Yes, you are partially correct,” he said haughtily. “I have exhausted your knowledge very quickly given how little of it you possess. So, I am revising my initial assumption that you are simply deceiving me for that would take a level of intellect you lack.”

Tariq’s pointed jibe did not find a target in me, for I have not the ego required for such negative appraisals to take root and have value. He was, after all, just a minor irritant, an interruption in the slush.

“But,” he continued, “I will evaluate for myself if I should linger in this place or continue pressing deeper into a beyond I am certain exists, leaving your sorry kind behind me to wallow in this meaningless slush.”

Tariq stood in the slush for quite some time, his face hard with concentration. I went about my usual affairs: either stirring the slush or leaning upon the wand and looking up at the projections.

“You know,” he began abruptly from his pensive reverie, “I was taught a very special way of reading.”

“You may have mentioned that to me,” I said, really not wishing to spark further conversation.

“Yes, it is a form of sanscript reading, or what can be known as reading between the letters, reading what isn’t there.”

I smiled despite myself. How could I help it when he was taking pride in a skill that was the source of his obstinacy? Perhaps next he would try to read patterns in the slush, claim to see the face of god, a delicate and eternal order to the universe, anything that he could read that simply was not there except in the eye of the mystic reader.

“Do you know how to return from this realm?” I asked him.

“Of course I do!” he responded testily as though the question was beneath him, and yet I saw a flash of worry upon his face.

Tariq would eventually find his way back out, no doubt frustrated by his encounter here and willing to discount it as a true or meaningful experience. I could see that he was let out in one of the analogues of this place: a desert. I do not know what else came of him.

Others of my kind have told me (and none of us say more than a few words to one another per human year, and most likely over a lifetime not more than a few paragraphs total) that they have had the occasion of these encounters every once in a while. Or else it is recorded by inherited oral lore, such as the Englishman who was writing a poem and found his way here, and called it chaos, that maddening expanse between earth and hell. I have heard he had gone blind. Another who went blind later in life had based his short story on a small speck of infinite possibility, an aleph, after his visit here and being amazed by the multi-faceted granular crystals of the slush (this particular visitor was not overbearing in some pointless search; he was said to be a very endearing, kindly curious, accommodating sort of man). I do not know what link there may be to the visiting of this rainbow-making realm of slush and light and the occasion of blindness. Someone like Tariq, in a way, had come and gone in the same blindness.

As I stir the slush, interminably, causing a new constellation to appear in someone’s sky, and then perhaps something else. A trick of the light, yes, and a glorious web of unique rainbows.

43

Overdue Fines

I
had enough of it all. I had enough of reading impossible books with their impossible scenarios. I had more than enough of reading my impossible adventures within them. The Library and all its contents were a menace if only because it was a beguiling paradox and because minds with fiendish designs exploited it. What I knew would not help or hinder me, nor would it function to save others. I could watch numbly while the same featureless people piled in and filed out of the library, each untouchably ignorant to the spectral mysteries that lay behind each shelf, or tucked in code within every book. It was doubtful that any patrons of any library on earth, save for but the select few, had any knowledge of a vast and potentially infinite library that replicated itself behind every stack, or from which would accidentally emerge a book so toxically dangerous that it would upset only those who chanced upon it or had the specialized knowledge to know that the book was not of this known world.

Placed in its proper context, given the reality of diminishing returns that was the general public's literacy and historical intelligence in an age of apathy and vigorously promoted ignorance, those like Castellemare operated under the fundamental illusory assumption that the slippage of books from the Library posed serious and irreparable harm. This, of course, was not the case. There was no real and present danger, and as much as those like Castellemare and his archaic way of thinking believed the populace would take note of an odd book, the situation was largely harmless. The urgency to retrieve these slipped books, and the penalties exacted for failing to do so, was disproportionate to the actual conditions. Much ado about nothing, storm in a tea cup, and so forth: the exaggerated sense of importance assigned a task that was consequently quite meaningless. Since books were slipping from the Library, this could have meant two things: one, the Library in its structure or organization was flawed; or, two, the
Library intended
for these texts to be released into this known world at particular times for particular people. If the second premise was true, then what Castellemare and other self-important guardians of the Library's contents were doing was actually working to the disservice of the Library itself.

The synthesis meant this one thing: the rifts that occurred between the Library and this world was successfully utilized to bring about a man instead of a book. An impossible man, and a man I know myself powerless to stop. The synthesis was not just the merger and summation of the six “types” as I had read, but was the distillation of all the most exemplary persons of cruelty and atrocity contained within one man and his despicably potent will. The fool named Jakob Sigurdsson would be malleable to this man's will, and would seek in the synthesized man a new father. The infernal might and crooked ideas would supersede that of his historical forebears - murderers, sadists, torturers, genocidists all.

I found it odd, and perhaps disappointing, that this was where my story ended. I no longer served any purpose, that purpose already having been served. And what of the many remaining loose ends, the false clues, the cul-de-sacs that caused me to digress from my determined role? Mere details and padding. The forbidden books I read, the ciphers deciphered, the convergence of various terrifying events, the feast or famine of leads... All of it merely those like Castellemare blowing proverbial smoke up my ass. Busywork. A twisted man's idea of something funny. And now what? The synthesized man walks the real world, and I am here left unenlightened, unfulfilled, as if I had been dragged along for so long just to waste my time and enhance my worries. The events from my first meeting of Castellemare near Vatican City up to the fulfillment of the synthesis had succeeded in doing perhaps just a few things: further developing my sense of insularity, distrust, and desire for solitude. I did not
prosper
from my learning of the Library; quite the opposite. I was handed a knot the size of the world.

Leopold had left. The apartment beside mine was rented to someone who worked in an insurance broker's office. I kept walking leerily around my copy of the
7
^th
Meditation
, not sure what I should do with it. It was a pointless book now, a mere record of what happened. The book only had value when there was hope to prevent it from coming true. Now, it was little more than a moot historical document. It would have been too dramatic for me to burn it, but too sentimental of me to keep it. I was the one left holding the book while the characters were free to live their lives. As usual, I was the passive reader.

For the longest time I felt that the backstory which alluded to
Best Before 2099
was mostly a red herring. It gave scant references to Castellemare, prompted me to seek out this “Sigurd”, and gave me the cheap narcissistic thrill of reading about an alternate me. All this time I had completely neglected the lesson it was trying to teach me; namely, that my protest was against things and people that did not really exist. The Gimaldi in the backstory begged his protege to write the book his own was countering, to give his protest a relevant point of origin. In like fashion, my own attempt to protest against the synthesis would only hold if the synthesis itself was publicly accepted as having happened. Instead, my grievance would be considered the hallucinogenic thoughts of a madman.

Names. A list of names now blank leads that never led to a solution since the mystery was more simply solved – or, rather, the plot was furthered by my unwitting and ridiculous need to solve the mystery. I never learned the identity of the unnamed narrator of the
Backstory
. I did not seek out the one named Alexa, thinking it pointless now. References to mirrors, libraries, stairwells, and the burning of books just sat in a useless clump – me sifting through the red lion's kill. I felt defeated.

A possible act of revenge, or perhaps what was planned for me all along: I have toyed with the idea of declaring myself the author of a particular book that has gone for some time without one.
Ars atrocitatis
cannot be found anywhere, and no one could truly prevent me from writing it, in producing the modernized chronicle of what happened after the synthesis. I could couch it in fiction, I thought, although I had no skill in prose. Somehow I felt it was my responsibility, although it was far too late to warn anyone, at least the future could have access to the rise and terror of a one Dr Edward Albrecht. And so, perhaps, if this incarnation of atrocity turned out to be another misstep in history, another error, someone in the future could be warned when the narrative of the Library was pregnant with another such figure. An act of benevolence from the defeated. Or, perhaps, it would be a book given to torment another person just like me, strung along a similar mystery to become an essential catalyst to the launching of the next atrocity.

A strange vacillating hum was emanating from my bookshelf. I approached it cautiously to investigate, and suddenly my eyes started to blur. The sensation was akin to being in a long, narrow tunnel. The spines of two contiguous books parted and warped to my peripheral vision, and just as suddenly I was standing in this tunnel bordered on either side by books – a faint glimmering light in the distance. I began to walk toward this light. Fluttering in the tunnel were orphaned leaves, unstitched from their binding. They were moving about too quickly for me to catch and read them. I finally reached the end of the tunnel where the light was emanating from and found myself in a familiar place accompanied by a familiar voice.

“
Welcome back,” said the voice. It was the Librarian. “Please shut the door behind you; there is an awful draft. Must be something quite horrible out there.”

I complied with the request, pushing the heavy oak door closed.

“
I have the book you requested,” the blind Librarian said with a serene smile.

“
Which book is that?”

He continued as if not registering my confusion. “It took me some time to find it. Someone had carelessly shelved it in the wrong place. The Library is generally very good when we are looking for something, but sometimes it cannot contend with the errors of others.”

“
Castellemare,” I said.

“
Oh, do you think it was him? I would not like to think so. He is usually so very careful in putting the books back in their proper places. The Library is one immense order, and it would be unfortunate if some custodian tried to hide books from the Library itself.”

“
Which book did I request? I don't recall making a request.”

“
Oh, no? I don't wish to dispute you, but I'm rather sure that you did make this request... Unless someone else made it on your behalf, but I would know if that were the case. I had a hold put on it. So, here is the book you requested.”

And so there it was, the
Ars atrocitatis
, author: Gimaldi.

“
I will take this one from you and replace it on the shelf,” he said, pointing to my copy of the
7
^th
Meditation
which I did not recall having with me when I entered the tunnel. Numbly, I placed it on the desk. He felt for it with his hands and paused a moment.

“
Oh, I'm sorry, but this book is late.”

“
Pardon?”

“
Overdue. You will have to pay a small fine. I'm very sorry. It was due some time ago, I'm afraid.”

Given the incredible immensity of the Library, the many mysteries it contained, its very existence as being of the highest and most inconceivable paradox, I could not believe that it would present me with something so common and mundane as an overdue library fine.