The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  [I was disturbed by a loud crash outside. Finding it to be just another minor collision near the intersection followed by some angry voices, I returned to my reading, but it seemed that I could not find my place. My recent experience with seafood made the mention of creatures in a tidal pool unsettle my stomach with reminiscence]

  Gimaldi's intention was to prove that the emanation of the One Library occurred through a process of transmission, stitching his view to a poor plagiarism of Alfred N. Whitehead. I felt this to be in bad taste, but his talk of murder, although spoken in abstract terms, seemed to take ever more precedence than his compelling me to write the initial text to be countered.

  [I sought for the previous mention of the undisturbed tidal pools, yet found none; instead, emantionism took its place. The text is revising itself every time I close it or return to it.]

  I wanted to go beyond the values of good and evil, to declare that the mixture would only cause change. For some ill-fated reason, I decided to write on his work, but it couldn't decide whether to be a book review, an exegesis, or a critique. But why “Best Before 2099”? Knowing Gimaldi, this represented more than a clever gimmick on his part. It didn't help that Gimaldi remained tight-lipped when asked about the counter-book, and this was what prompted me to write. I had to know, and I needed to understand. First of all, I had yet to glean any idea as to what book his counter-book was countering. And then I had to make every effort to destroy it.

  [This passage was heavily underlined twice: as a single, bold stroke, and a second wavy line. It had been done with a pen, but not by me. This had appeared on the same page I was reading before I was distracted, and I knew this would have drawn my attention earlier had it been there. I placed my bookmark on the page, closed it, and opened it again. The underlining was gone. So, too, was what I had just read. Something else was in its place. On the bottom edge: “shockwave and steel, melancholy and the burning of all the books.”]

  To continue my conjectural fancies, I tried to connect Gimaldi's life with his work, for is not one a manifestation or reflection of the other, work and life but mirrors? (mirrors. mirrors. mirrors)

  I had reconciled myself to deliver my awkward critique. Gimaldi's house was espaliered with ivy, the stonework lugubriously set as if to rival the greyness of days like these. The garden was a scrabble patch, neither Gimaldi nor his wife having any care to maintain it. A weathered sign was taped to the leaded glass above the mailbox, in drab white letters that read: NO SOLICITORS. In fact, there was nothing remarkable about this house save for its antiquity. (Gimaldi’s wife’s maiden name was Work).

  I knocked on the door and waited. When no one answered, I slipped my critique in the mailbox. As I was walking away, and as if they had been waiting for me to leave, I heard the door open. But when I turned around, all I saw was the retreating hand of Gimaldi's wife as she quickly grabbed the contents of the mailbox and let the lid fall down with a dull clang.

  I stopped into a coffee shop on the way to nowhere, sat at a table near the window, and then decided to sift through the thoughts I had accumulated since meeting Gimaldi, and how this coincided with my social withdrawal. Instead, my thoughts ran up to the point of departure and fell away. With no purpose and no more money, I went home, clouded by my go-nowhere thoughts.

  The voice of war interrupted my thoughts, and in marched Sigurd.

  “Man, you have to see the film I made,” he said, barging into my home and forgetting to close the door behind him.

  “Yeah?” I replied, lacking in energy to endure his hyperactive presence at that moment.

  “It's brilliant!”

  Everything he made was brilliant, according to him. And for the most part, it was, but there was something about his self-congratulatory manner that violated the claim. (It’s a film, Gimaldi, made by Leo and the Red Lion, the clay red lion red clay, lion clay red redddd). CLAY CLAY CLAY

  “I took your ideas on the pop culture idol and mixed them with Heideggerian poetics and Godardian cinematics,” he continued as if genius was in the mixing, a pretentious theory cocktail.

  It wasn't like I cared if he borrowed or stole my ideas, for ideas were cheap things anyway, originating from an infinite source. What bothered me was that he acted as an energy leech, stealing all my attention, focus, resolve, and would top it all off by sucking all the ideas from my head before they were fully formed. (EMET/MET: GOLEM EMET GOLEM GOLEMBI GIMOLEM GIMALEM GIMALDOM GIMALD - clayclayclayclayclayclay...)

  I put up my hands and said, “Stop it. Just stop it. I don't have the energy today.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked with simian puzzlement.

  Finally, I yelled. I don't recall what it was that I said, but I was sure it was devastating, cathartic – more so for such a childlike and fragile ego such as his. (I could yell that way at any Angelo I want).

  And just like that, the world went still. Sigurd stared at me with a mixture of perplexity and anger until he rose and said, “Fine.” That was when he left.

  Everyone had a personal library in the mind where knowledge was kept with great care and pride. For Sigurd, he was not familiar with his own. His mind was a hostile and forbidden territory of minefields and chasms. He proved more a devotee of Castellemare's than he realized, at least in practice.

  8

  Gimaldi had mailed me a reply to my critique, which went on for over a thirty pages. But a few passages really reached me, but which I cannot in good faith reproduce here. It was a heartfelt, and occasionally angry retort. Not a word on my reflections on the title. He insisted on this word “interpolation” at least as many times as there were pages in his response. But there were more curious passages where he let loose, lost in some kind of fog where he was flailing at phantom enemies. Were these passages that did not make it into his counter-book? It was almost as though he had written all this before since it barely touched any of the points I had made in my critique. The tone of the last few pages had succumbed to extreme agitation, a belligerent delivery to no one at all. Also a matter of curiousity was his occasional and, I believe, accidental mentions of the Order, “Les Devorants”, and “The Grand Artificer.” He had written his response in incredibly feverish haste, and perhaps he did not realize that he had used the blank side of a page that held something he had written on the other side, presumably not for my eyes, but which I must relate:

  It behooves us to take immediate action to prevent this synthesis from occurring. I have contacted the Master of the Document, but he says there is much discord over the induction of L. I still say that he is better contained within our Order than to be put into play by Tho. v. C. in producing that unholiest of unholiness. But how do we prevent a rival Order that has all our possible strategies already for its perusal? Without L. contained, should we broker a peace with the Ludic Order? Setzer is not a hard man to find these days, but I shudder to think what would come of such a tricky alliance. Not to mention that -

  The rest was unintelligible before running off the page to its continuation upon a page I did not have in my possession. I jotted down the mysterious references as a list of clues: Master of the Document, L., Order, Tho.V.C., Ludic Order, Setzer. This letter draft contained some very obscure references, and although it might not have had any bearing on the current mystery I was following, it may have served to colour in some of the gaps in my understanding of Gimaldi.

  [For fuck’s sakes. It’s a grocery list of clues. Someone is mocking me].

  I returned to reading the remainder of his meandering rebuttal and then decided to reread the small passage detailing something about a synthesis, but it was gone. No, not gone, but changed: it was not what I just read:

  I can only hope that if there is another Gimaldi, he may be better disposed than I am to the prevention of what is to come. He should take L. in hand and sabotage the plan. He must come to understand that he can never take his eyes of The Book, for it never remains as it was; every return presents something different. The infinitely
malleable, changeable thing. “For fucks’s sakes... Someone is mocking me.” - this is what he would like to think, if it gives him comfort to be at the centre and not just on the periphery looking in. Passive, so passive.

  9

  I had been incommunicado in the following months, gypsying about and doing odd jobs related to books. A friend of mine had me work with him in a rare bookstore, organizing antiquarian texts and minding the menial task of cataloguing. But it was a good, laid back kind of job, and there were many slow and languid days when I could sit down and read whatever peculiar text caught my eye. Also, being a bit weary from the strange and severe company I kept with the likes of Gimaldi, I spent my weekends with children in a literacy workshop at the public library, reading them stories. There was a secret joy in being around children, for I could feel the warm exuberance they had as they explored a world as yet unknown to them. How I pined to be like the child, to encounter the wonder of the world anew without the concerns of adulthood and all the complications that it came with. It was on a Sunday at the library that Gimaldi made a surprise visit, shattering the contrived normalcy I had erected around my life.

  Horribly out of place among the children and the stomach-high shelves, he crept towards me like a spider, dressed in a black casual suit, followed by the wary glances of the children. I would like to talk about his suit - Gimaldi’s suit - in detail, down to the weave, the pockets, what was in those pockets, the hem, the wrinkle, the taut line puffed with fat, the jagged and sloppy machine-made seam, and more about that suit, that suit... that funereal suit. Gimaldi’s suit, Gimaldi’s suit - not the book, the suit, the suit, the card without pips, that Gimaldi that -

  [The above paragraph was not there when I last looked. I had just put the book down to pour myself some coffee and returned to this. Someone is trying to force a clue on me. How is it that a book can transform every time I come back to it?]

  “First exile, now this. Aren't you taking this too far?” he said with his usual flippant disregard.

  “What is it, Gimaldi?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just came to see what the fuss was about, what with you taking refuge in the company of children.”

  “I need this sort of thing right now. I'm not like the rest of you: I get tired.”

  “Sure you do. I treasure illusion as much as truth. Enjoy the illusion of these children's innocence for awhile, and then you'll bore of it. Can we go outside? To me, libraries are not to be so colourful and pristine, filled with stuffed toys and cutesy inducements to read. One should feel dwarfed and intimidated by the books, not the other way around. A library is a place where you should feel like you're imposing, that the Library itself is unapproachable, and thusly shall ye be best humbled.” - the way he said “library” felt as though it were capitalized. “This Lego Land version of a library with its plastic rainbow colours is making me ill.”

  And so we went outside. He lit up a smoke and cast his gaze on the slush tracks riving freshly fallen snow. For some reason the thought came to me, unsolicited, someone should send a floral arrangement to the home of the widow. Why this thought?

  “What is it this time?” I asked after one of those pregnant silences where gestation is a horizon.

  “Oh, right. Are things okay with you and Sigurd?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason other than I am always concerned about you two. Especially about Sigurd.”

  “We had a parting of ways.”

  “Heated words, hm? The difference between the both of you got too great, eh? Sometimes that is the case, and sometimes it happens because one or both friends outgrows the other. This is usually the case among those whose friendship is based solely on the intellect. I can probably fathom why the rupture occurred between you and Sigurd. I suspect, owing to your nature, you are the one who walked away. In fact, isn't walking away your life motif? I know more than I tell. A failed fight leads to resignation. I know that you were once a hot-tempered young man with his angry idealism threatening to cut down the enemy - most likely, as is wont for the young these days, the enemy was something large, bloated, and abstract. But now, like so many revolutionaries, you've ended up growing older and silent in the city you tried to rally and change.”

  He kicked at the snow gently with the toe of his shoe.

  “Is this going somewhere?” I asked impatiently.

  “Yes. Where was I? Oh, yes... Sigurd. You're more... grounded, we'll say, than him. You could no longer endure his relentless barking and arm-waving, so you extricated yourself... You walked away. I know the feeling well, for I've seen so many barkers come and go, all suffering the same indignant fate. However, men like him always seem to inspire such glorifying epitaphs - why is that? Men like us slip back into the shadows, abandoning the woes of the world, the empty conquests, and the like.”

  He never made eye contact with me, but with a loaded phrase where he likened himself to me, I could see why. One does not like staring into the eyes of a mirror. But there was something else – his speech felt contrived for my benefit, a bit too rehearsed to elicit a certain effect. Was I Gimaldi? This was not the lightest of questions.

  He went on: “I would like to tell you about the past, but I'm afraid that my testimony contradicts what is written in history books. Books lie, my friend, but I rather enjoy the lies. They amuse me. I especially like the seductive lies that drag me into their fabric, forcing me to believe despite everything. Perhaps this is why the notion of miracle has not left us yet: science has worked so diligently to rid us of any trace of miracles, yet we still secretly hold the hope of them in our hearts.

  “I could tell you true stories about the Histriones, of Croce, about the Templars, but it would only serve to confuse you. No, you have been brought up with the lies that books have told you, and granted they are far more comforting and aesthetically pleasing than the truth. I will not rip the illusion from you. Keep it, hold it, love it, let it give you solace on dark days. Let the truth die a noble death, with no marker, no troubadours singing its songs, no glorious parades or the trotting out of its many lustrous icons on saint days. Let the truth die with the man who holds it. If there was anything I learned while teaching, it is that truth is overrated. The lies are just as, if not more, beautiful and poetic. And after centuries, if the lies have survived, they become the truth, as such.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Your critique... It reached me,” he said, and it sounded as if he were trying to stifle sarcasm.

  He began humming as the sun peeked out from behind a clogged canvas of clouds, and those clouds were heavy with impending snowfall, and the wind would be a cold, cruel whip where each lash was another of the unanswerable questions.

  “Why do you not go by Ammonius anymore?” I asked, more of a mocking taunt. His eyes finally met mine, with bafflement.

  “You assume too much from what you read. You make faulty connections, throwing bridges hastily over rough and complicated waters. My name is Gimaldi, not Ammonius.

  But why did he so fervently insist that I research Obsalte? Was there a link to Ammonius? If so, was it his intent to have someone expose him, know him? But, in the end, he was probably right: he was simply Gimaldi and little more, having written a fiction I took to be true. Did I assume it to be a pen name of his, one that he ought to have assumed?

  After a time, he began again: “Everyone has their story. This is a story I once heard or read about a monk: 'The year was 1410, and I could hear the murmur of a stream near the vineyard. Little did those theologians know, those beaked men who had taken me on to translate a translation, an exegetical work... I was not who I claimed to be. In fact, I was called upon to translate the works of a man who had translated me, but no one knew--or would believe--the original text was my own. It had felt like centuries since I had last seen these youthful words of mine, and here I was in full anonymity about to be commissioned to eat my own words at the foot of a very large, wobbly, ridiculous circle. Had I actu
ally thought these things? For sure, the translations had been barbaric, importing the simple dialect, compromising the style and meaning I had so artfully put in them, but now its beauty and truth shredded by rough and frequent translation. And what a slow, exegetical process it must have been: from Greek to Arabic, to Latin. What was lost in this translation? 1,410 pages...”

  He brought his recital to a close, looking expectantly at me as though I were to connect the elements of his fumbling allegory to derive the proper conclusion. The man was an index of coded language, ready for that one moment where he could pull the veil from history and say “voila!” Or, perhaps, like the nefariously secretive creature he could be at times, he was planning to pull the carpet out from under history's feet. Either way, the man was a master illusionist. And why not accept the lie? A magician's life is a constant lie, a continual presentation of illusions, each one more clever and astounding than the last.

  “My life,” he continued, “Is an open work, meaning that it only engages those particular people willing to receive very specific information. In choosing my friends, I am very careful; this act is synonymous with choosing an audience. In choosing books, or rather that books choose me, the act of discrimination is much sterner a matter.”

  I did not know how flattered a friend would be to be likened to an audience member, but this was Gimaldi's way. His talk became more elliptical and scant in detail. It was like he was trying to drive home a point he had misplaced along the way, and so I had to bear with him as he searched aloud in his mind for what precious, emphatic idea he was seeking to posit.