Ink

by Hal Duncan

He hopes that he's planted the seed of something in Pickering's head, in the shifts, the misdirections and redirections, hopes that he's formed some new connections, like stitches drawing ragged skin together over the empty wound inside him. But he's better at graving the Cant than speaking it, and Joey, well, Joey is a tough subject, trusting nothing, hunting truth and hating all illusions. But they need him. For all of Jack's fire, even with Puck's love and Guy's savvy to temper it, the three of them need Joey's cold, dark will. Pickering, Pechorin or Narcosis, Joey will never be entirely onside, but they need him, his sharp tongue a surgeon's scalpel to cut through the lies they tell themselves. A painter's palette knife scraping back the layers.

  A Grand Disunification Theory

  The old idea that Paracletus's work derives mainly from the Book is, however, challenged by many scholars who have pointed to the later pages of Paracletus's Principaea as evidence of his derangement; as the book progresses, the reader cannot help but note, these parallel threads of rigorous logic, the invention and application of the “suppositional calculus,” the derived topological models reminiscent of the work of Poincare, the predictions and hypotheses, all become alarmingly muddled by the tables and graphs of empirical observation he begins to add, at first in the margins and then gradually throughout the text, in any available area of white space.

  By the thirty-sixth volume, as Schaller points out, the exegesis of the models actually takes up more space on the page than the models themselves, with these annotations of verification indiscriminately placed on odd or even pages, and quite often related to equations on both pages by circles, arrows and other such shorthand symbols of connectivity. This is not, says Schaller, the work of a mere copyist, but the dynamic—even fevered—map of a mind leaping furiously this way and that, trying desperately to make sense of increasingly contradictory theories and data.

  On the opening pages of Volume 38 the division between Macroscopica and Mi-croscopica completely breaks down, with equations, formulae and observations distributed all but randomly between and often across both odd and even pages. From here on in it descends, as Schaller puts it, into a “Grand Disunification Theory.” The previous scalar distinction now utterly abandoned, it is tempting to suggest that Paracletus is dealing with what we might label Mesoscopica—and a generation of epidemiologists and economists are indeed now trying to apply his theories with this in mind.

  However, if he is doing so, it is unlikely that he is drawing on the Book. The evidence is, Schaller maintains with quite credible reference to the few remaining biographical sources on Paracletus's life, that after a brief study of the Book which provided his initial inspiration, Paracletus subsequently lost his access to the work and spent his remaining years trying to reconstruct its voluminous insights, dooming himself to madness and failure by the very nature of this goliath task. It is this, he says, which lies at the heart of Paracletus's descent into chaos, his attempt to map a labyrinth that he has only glimpsed.

  Winding Ways, Enchanting Ways

  Fox stops at the corner of Charing Cross and Woodlands Road to light a cigarette, looking back up toward Park Circus, up and back and slightly to the side in time, at the white church tower. Then he turns to face the—

  —lights of hanging lanterns and neon signs of Chinatown, all dragons and Chinese pictograms. He's never actually been quite sure where this street is— maybe San Francisco—but it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Chinatown is Chinatown, whichever city it's in.

  It's the same time on his watch, but it's lighter here, the thin slice of sky that's visible above paling light blue where, ahead, it angles sharp down from the roofs and into the cram of supermarkets selling monosodium glutamate and trinket Buddhas, landscapes carved out of bamboo and framed between two panes of glass and with black lacquered wood surrounds. He steps out onto the cobbled street to avoid a deliveryman, a box hoisted on his shoulder as he lugs it in the doors of restaurants up the stairs to the upper floors. There are signs everywhere with words like Peking, Dragon, Jade and Canton. Inns and Emporiums and Gardens. Every city should have inns and emporiums and gardens, he thinks.

  “Mr. Fox! You are up early.”

  “I am up late,” he says.

  He steps back up onto the sidewalk to slap a handshake with Mr. Chung and ask him how the Shanghai Empress is doing for business these days … well, he hopes. And, yes, it is, and why has he not been around in weeks to drink green tea and play Go. Ah, but he's a busy man these days is Mr. Fox.

  “Nonsense,” says Mr. Chung.”/ am a busy man. You are a writer. It is your job to sit and drink green tea with an old man and play Go. Where else will you learn our ancient Chinese wisdom?”

  Guy laughs. The old man's favorite saying is Confucius never had to run a restaurant. What did Confucius know? Next week, promises Guy, next week.

  He drops his cigarette butt in a puddle at the corner, and heads down an alleyway into a narrow maze of brick, follows steps that wind up under an arch into winding ways, enchanting ways, weaving between Istanbul and London's East End, streets of crumbling saunas and polluted air. Red lights in the windows. Girls with perfumed hair.

  He wonders if there are any fallen angels in those brothels right now, pulling their clothes on, shirts and ties, peeling notes out of their wallets to pay the daughters of men. So many of them have gone native now, it seems, drawn to the joys and sorrows of the flesh now that their Covenant has fallen. It gives him hope, in some ways, scares him in others. The sort of chaos they're immersed in now has a tendency to collapse into new dualities.

  Two Rival Schools of Thought

  In the 1800s two rival schools of thought began a bitter argument over the origins of the Book, and by extension the origins of the Cosmos. Developing from the religious tradition whereby the Book was held to have been written down by God, using his own blood for ink, the Manualists formalized their doctrine around the belief that the ink was the primary substance of reality.

  In essence they held that the ink was God and God was the ink, the substrate on which the Cosmos is based, both prior and exterior to reality. That is to say, beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the mundane world, they believed, the “infinite intellect of a divine power, dark and liquid, is the very medium of activity from which the finite is defined.” This was, indeed, the dominant idea for centuries, in line as it was with the theological climate of Christianity and Creationism. We are all God's handiwork, said the Manualists, and most of the world agreed.

  With the Enlightenment, however, this idea found a challenger in the shape of the Neo-Iconoclasts, who pointed to the absurdity of characterizing the infinite (i.e., nonexistential) in finite (i.e., existential) terms. Fiercely opposing the anthropomorphism of a Creator deity, they scoffed at the “primitive and superstitious tomfoolery of imagining the world to be black spittle wiped from the beard of God, and daubed in pretty patterns on the page.”

  If all actions are written in the Book, the Neo-Iconoclasts insisted, then surely the action of a Manualist “Hand of God” must also be prescribed within the text. Hence while some were willing to admit the possibility of a demiurgic scribe, one as bound by the Book as any other creature named in it, they denied the prior existence of a transcendent Creator, believing in nothing beyond the Book, nothing before, after or outside it. The primary substance of reality, the substrate on which the Cosmos is written, they held to be the vellum, hailing this as the true fundament of reality.

  That Distant clarion Voice

  The steps under his feet are white now, pinkish limestone, Jerusalem stone. It's Arab East Jerusalem, still a midwinter morning, predawn, still in 1999, but shifted over sideways a little. Kentigern is called Glasgow in this fold. Even less of the sky is visible in these streets which narrow the farther on he goes; but what sky there is is a rich cerulean, at once more heavenly and airily real.

  He checks his watch—bang on time—and lifts the cigarette up to his lips to take a draw, closes his eyes as, somewhere
in the distance, a muezzin in his minaret begins the call to morning prayers.

  Fallen angels, he thinks, and books of souls. That's one of the legends of the Book of All Hours, that it was brought to earth by the angels who fought neither for Heaven nor for Hell. While the War in Heaven raged, they thought only to keep it safe. But it was lost.

  He opens his eyes.

  Bursa. Just outside the Dilmun Otel, cafes and restaurants around him, and Mount Uludag sloping above and down into the city. Somewhere below, a muezzin sings, and Guy stands at a fence, cigarette in hand, looking down over the slope of roofs and gardens, listening to the waver of that distant clarion voice.

  The Book isn't the only thing that's lost, he thinks. They all are, in one way or another, all humanity cut loose from their native realities by the Evenfall, even their individual identities torn up and scattered. Now the Evenfall has died away and they clamber from this broken world to that, searching the Hinter mist for family and friends, forging new kinships in this cold haze, latching on to shapes and shades that might be their lost brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers. That might be their lost others.

  He's come to understand now that there's a deeper connection between them—Jack, Puck, Anna, Joey, Don and himself… Finnan too, wherever he is. The seven of them, seven souls, but maybe really only one… identity.

  He walks up past the little wooden booth with the Heykel taksi parked outside, into the driveway, into the foyer of the hotel. He likes the old world, hard-times grandeur of the Dilmun. It's not on a par with the Celik Palas just up the road— with its vast domed Turkish bath, black-and-white photos on the wall of how it was in old colonial days, with formal gardens stretching down through where a road now runs, busy with cars spewing black fumes out of juddering exhausts. There was a time when the Qelik Palas would have been much more up his street—but now the Dilmun feels more of a home.

  ‘Geniden,’ he says.

  Good morning.

  ‘Geniden,’ the receptionist says. ‘Room 611?’

  ‘Evet. Te§ekkur.’

  The Unwritten Book

  It is easy to see that these two philosophies—Manualist and Neo-Iconoclast— are essentially arguing for the primacy of, on the one hand, infinity and, on the other hand, zero. Both attempt to ground the existential enigma of the Book in an essentialist absolute, captivated by the perfection of these abstract ideas—the theistic notion of the ink as a divine spirit, the atheistic notion of the vellum as a tabula rasa. Both, however, are ultimately magicking reality from their preferred abstractions, seeking to get the determinate out of the indeterminate, something out of everything or something out of nothing.

  Both are therefore equally flawed, offering no real agency for the collapse from the infinite potentiality of a metaphysical state—divine spirit or tabula rasa—to the finite actualities of existential reality. We cannot get from either a full vial or a blank page to the Book of All Hours by the mere wave of a word. The unwritten book, as Hobbsbaum said, is neither in the ink nor on the page.

  It is only in recent years that philosophers have returned to a more archaic theory of the cosmogonic nature of the Book, one which proceeds not from the infinite to the finite, but from the indefinite to the definite—the Orphean Cosmogony, as it is known. By this theory, neither ink nor vellum has primacy, both being only more recent surrogates for the pigments and hides in which the Book developed over time, emerging throughout human history in the merging of its scattered sources, its independent inventions—a cuneiform mark on clay, a tribal tattoo on skin, a notch made on an ivory spearthrower.

  Taking chaos as its starting point, the Orphean Cosmogony sees the generation(s) of the Book not as a singular event, a scribing by an individual author, but as a process of conjunction and differentiation, of evolution. There is no unwritten book in the Orphean Cosmogony, no prior and perfect metaphysical state of absolute certainty. Instead the Orphean Cosmogony looks for the origins of the determinate in the indeterminate—something out of anything rather than everything or nothing. Before the Book, it tells us, there were a myriad of books, countless artifices of vellum and ink, and clay and reed, of wood and ocher, stone and blood.

  Spring in Bursa

  The elevator tings as it reaches his floor, and the doors slide open for him to step out into a corridor of artificial light and warmth. There's something both secure and smothering about these sorts of hotels, he thinks, with their decor unchanged for decades, lighting always ambient and temperature constantly just comfortable. You can't tell what season it is outside.

  He knows it's spring in Bursa though, even before he slides his keycard into the magnetic lock and steps into the room with its curtains open wide; on the sixth floor it's always spring in Bursa.

  ——

  He slides the window open for that feel of air still fresh with the night but warming with the rising sun. The noise of traffic which comes with the open window doesn't irk him; frankly, it's a comfort after all the pseudo-medieval nonsenses of Havens out in the wilds of the Hinter and the sex-steam excesses of Kentigern. He's rather fond of his Modernity, for all its faults.

  The others—Jack and Puck, Joey, Anaesthesia, even Don—somehow seem to belong in those less mundane folds; they're creatures of the vellum and the ink, of the Vellum and the bitmites. But Fox… he may well have been traveling in it, immersed in it, for longer than any of them, but he's never been dissolved in it the way they have, never lost himself the way they have… not for more than a short eternity at least.

  Sometimes he rather wishes he could just surrender, let the bitmites drown him in whatever dream they think he wants.

  But what he wants is to wake up, for all of them to wake up, for Jack and Joey to stop playing you-kill-me-then-I'll-kill-you, for Puck and Anaesthesia to stop playing victim and avenger. Ah, well. There's Don, at least… Don just does whatever needs doing, ever the stoic and sober old soldier. They've sat together, late into the night, looking out over some apocalypse from a rooftop garden, watching fires lit by Jack and listening to the screams of angels torn apart by Anaesthesia's rupter. Watching skyscrapers fall in plumes of gray smoke.

  “We've got to find some way to finish this,” he'd said to Don once.

  It was Kentigern, just after they'd liberated Joey, and the bitmites had turned the city into a temporary autonomous hell. The Empire had ended. The fascists had fallen as the bitmites tore out of their stinking sewers, ripped across the city, rippled across the city, a plague of rats ridden by fleas. They'd won, but all they got in exchange was sectarian civil war, Greens and Blues, gangs loyal to nothing but a color, stepping in to impose a new order on the chaos with cutthroat razors, half bricks and sawn-off shotguns. Christ.

  Don had just smiled wryly.

  In another fold, Don had said to him, in another Kentigern, they would have called themselves Catholic and Protestant, followed rival football teams, sung songs of hate across the terraces; there'd be the odd stabbing, the odd pitched battle in the City Centre after a nil-nil draw. This was just the same picture drawn in bolder brushstrokes; it was a part of the city's nature, part of its character, a heritage of pointless animosities. The way it would always be.

  Fox had looked out toward the sun rising in the east—forever, it seemed, rising in the east. Was it just a little higher today?

  “Nothing lasts forever,” he'd said.

  Now he looks out of the window at spring in Bursa, and he's sure of it. Just as the Evenfall swept across the Vellum and changed everything, just as the long night of Hinter followed in its wake, things are changing again.

  That's the thing about chaos.

  Of Acrobats and Artists

  The concept of chaos as it applies to the Book of All Hours is a particularly emotive issue. While the resurgence of interest in the Orphean Cosmogony has focused attention on this area, the legacy of Manualist and Neo-Iconoclast thought in religious and scientific circles means there is still much resistance to the idea that the Book may be
an intrinsically chaotic entity, with order merely an emergent behavior, an epiphenomenon.

  When, in 1939, Professor Samuel Hobbsbaum advanced the theory that, contrary to Schaller's assertion, Paracletus had in fact remained in contact with the Book throughout the later years of his work on the Principaea Cosmogonka, and that the progressive derangement of his work was actually a reflection of the content of the Book, the whole of Academia erupted into uproar.

  “The Book does not play James Joyce with the Cosmos,” said Schaller.

  In approaching the Book of All Hours and the Cosmos it describes, however, we are faced with an existential construct composed of myriad somethings, of stars and planets, of particles and waves, of matter and energy, of trees and thunderstorms, of acrobats and artists. The tendency to see the Book as a singular and grand, consistent and complete thing is, Hobbsbaum argued in his 1939 address to the Royal Institute of Metaphysics, to all intents and purposes, an act of faith predicated on our desire for certainty.

  The Book, Hobbsbaum argued, might just as easily be inherently contradictory, open only to multiple inconsistent, incomplete descriptions. Our most accurate descriptions of the Cosmos, as Paracletus was attempting to explicate in his Principaea, may be at best only coherent and comprehensive … and utterly incompatible with each other.