The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  “Don't mind,” she said, issuing a dragon's breath of billowing shisha smoke from her thin lips. “He gets over-emotional about Castellemare. He is upset with having this reminder of the man who defied him, who keeps turning up at the most inopportune times. It is like a teacher who carries an eternal fault for not having corrected an unruly student who keeps haunting him. That's what Castellemare does.”

  “Castellemare haunts him?” I asked, absorbed by a stark, high-contrast charcoal drawing of a tall, nude woman with what seemed to be a swastika tattooed on her breast.

  “Oh, incessantly. It's all part of their meta-fiction, and a fabulation at that. Gimaldi is happiest when surrounded by the past. You know the elation one feels when rediscovering a childhood teddy-bear? Multiply that tenfold when my husband encounters books and prints from times gone past. Now reverse this elation, and then you'll understand how he feels about Castellemare. Castellemare is the one that kills any hope for history.”

  The east wall was made up of one enormous shelf of books. I pointed to it and asked, “May I?” She nodded.

  I will not list the texts Gimaldi had in his possession. I had been delving into my borrowed copy of Codex Infinitum, and the other Gimaldi (in that other world) only kept as many volumes as would not sell. By contrast, this Gimaldi that I knew hoarded his books, and perhaps the very thought of selling even one of them would have been agony. The Gimaldi of the book I was reading seemed younger in many ways, but with some of the same closeted habits. I began to wonder what the other Gimaldi would have thought of this one, or me for that matter... But the answer that would dispel my wonder was tucked somewhere within the book I had in my possession. Were we doing the same thing, I wonder? Was that other Gimaldi reading my story just as much as I was reading him in order to discover the answer? In my reading, I had just finished the chapter where Gimaldi met Setzer and was introduced to Setzer's own version of the Library.

  [If this was my invitation to editorialize what I thought of the narrator or this depiction of myself, it would not be kind.]

  Gimaldi returned, and I spared no time in haranguing him with questions.

  “Castellemare gave me a book to read and -”

  “I don't want to hear it,” Gimaldi said, waving his hands as if frantically trying to erase my utterance from the air. “Next thing you'll say is that it is about me. His entire collection of books is filled with maddening lies, fabrications, things that should and cannot possibly exist. He makes a mockery of Reason, and you would do well to refuse his so-called gifts. You will only end up like many of the others he has enticed into his labyrinth of error. He is trying to turn you against me. He is trying to win you over as his disciple, but do not be fooled: he is not doing this because he desires disciples or thinks you of any merit; he is doing this only to ensure that I have no one on my side. That I remain alone!”

  It was a pathetic outburst despite the dramatic intention.

  “Did you write the Codex Infinitum?” I asked.

  “Did I... did I – what, now?”

  “As a means of libeling Castellemare. Or did he write it. The edition I bought gives a publication date of 1977, but there are some pretty sure signs that it was a self-published job, maybe a few years ago.”

  “I have no idea what you are blithering about. You see?! This is the sort of mad nonsense Castellemare puts in your head. I told you to avoid him. And now he has your head twisted!”

  Gimaldi feigned exhaustion in order to cut my visit short. I took the cue to leave, feeling that I had somehow hurt the man. If I were Gimaldi, I would have felt that there was no way to compete against a Sphinx full of fascinating new surprises.

  I phoned Sigurd and we made our apologies. We agreed to meet, and I desperately wanted a reprieve from this braided mystery of two enigmatic men who spoke only in tormenting riddles. Gimaldi wanted my trust, my belief, my efforts to write him into the world with one hand, and to erase him with the other; I was scared. For all I knew, Castellemare wanted my bones. This was why I called Sigurd. I needed a break from being batted around between two old lunatics. It was never clear to me what my motive ought to have been in continuing associating with them at all. Is it clear to you? Who am I anyway?

  It was a time to be firm, for I did not want Gimaldi's wheedling me to write that book. No, I would refuse to write the book. There was nothing special about me. I was not the ideal candidate to do as Gimaldi required unless, in his view, the only criteria was that someone was indulgent enough to listen. Selected by someone else's desperation.

  I spilled into the day, darkness tumbling awkwardly out of a tomb. My knees ached with each hurried step I took, but my purpose was clear. By a tree overladen with icicles, a tree seemingly driven as an afterthought in the middle of the public park, I waited. Sigurd's goofily gaunt form came shambling down the path, his shadows a vacillating braid across the blue-tinted snow. I had the Codex Infinitum in my hand, the pages held under such pressure that I thought they would stick together. I had brought it as both a prop to tell a story of what had been happening lately as well as a peace offering. It would make Sigurd feel special, which was his only need in friendship, the appeasement of his narcissistic pathology.

  Truth was, he was perhaps the only one I could trust. I would launch immediately into the problem – or the host of problems that whirled madly about in a halo of biting flies. The colophon to the Codex Infinitum sported some unusual phrases to end a rather long-winded and sentimentalist few pages on the wonder and mystery of libraries. These phrases I showed to Sigurd, and they worried him as much as me.

  The colophon spoke of the book having two printers working collaboratively: a German and a Venetian. I thought it a bit antiquated to have a last page colophon, and perhaps just a bit too pretentious. The rhyming colophon read as follows:

  By the fruits of the invention does A. Setzer punch the words of the author

  and under his charge, his talented protege, C. Anderson.

  In copies numbering hundreds two, first edition's bother,

  and in copies numbering hundreds three, by that famed printer's son

  Runneth to a second edition courtesy of Jakob Sigurdsson.

  What comes first, the doctor or his education?

  A synthesis imminent, but causing much consternation!

  The colophon's ending verse was rather bad and jingling, but the curious resemblance of the second printer's name to Sigurd's was far too glaring to ignore.

  “What do you think it means?” he asked me.

  “It could just be a coincidence, really, but this book has quickly become a bit troubling.”

  “What's it about?”

  At this bald question I could only fall mute. That this was the completed work published well before the incomplete one was difficult enough to understand, but its contents concerning Gimaldi and Castellemare was too hard for me to explain by way of summary. I had not heeded Castellemare's advice to underline important dates, names, places, and so I was lost. As well, the name of A. Setzer was repeated; in the story, Gimaldi visits the mad artificer for answers, and yet here is this same Setzer attributed with having printed the first edition of the book. Was this some elaborate fictional hoax perpetrated by Castellemare, or – and I had not ruled it out yet – Gimaldi? I had to know. Sigurd could tell that I was at a loss to explain what the book was 'about.'

  “Where did you get this book?” he asked.

  “Guess.”

  “Castellemare?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let's find Castellemare,” he said plainly. “Maybe if we both press, he'll give us some answers.”

  He wouldn't prove that difficult to find; in fact, he found us. We went to the nearby cafe to figure out how to find him, and there he was, decorated in his usual smirking fashion, a sartorial court jester.

  “Gentlemen! What a surprise,” he said, his affectation slightly foppish.

  “We were just about to launch an expedition to find you,” I said.
/>   “Well, you can call it off; here I am. What can I do for you?”

  “We want you to pony up some answers on this book you lent,” Sigurd said.

  “You again? Get back into your cups and stay there until your own confounded thoughts untwine you.”

  “Leave him be,” I warned.

  “I see you have come together in force. Hoping that a little intimidation, some tag-team coercion might loosen my tongue? You have the book – why not try reading it before you start pestering me with the ultimate meaning of its plot? And don't tell me you have read it, for I know you haven't, and what you read was not all that careful now, was it?”

  “There's something spooky in this book, frequently mentioned,” I began.

  “And you hate suspense? Are you coming to me to lodge a complaint? Did I choose unsuitable reading material for your delicate sensibilities?”

  “Why don't you just tell us what the real deal is about this damn book?” Sigurd charged.

  “Why don't you ponder the relevance of your appearance in this scene. You haven't even read the book, so why are you making belligerent demands at all?”

  I knew Sigurd; being outed for not reading something soiled his desired image that he be perceived that he had read everything.

  “Let's not get testy, boys. Come back to my house for a light chat,” Castellemare offered to me alone.

  “Only if Sigurd can come along.”

  “For comedic relief? For insurance? Do you think you'll come to harm on account of these bird-like bones of mine? Fine. If you insist, you can bring your buffoon along. My friend, you read bad books and keep bad company, and that is just an observation – take it or leave it. I still can't believe you read Gimaldi's awful little opus.”

  “Hey, lay off Gimaldi's book,” Sigurd said.

  “That self-indulgent, overwrought, frivolous bilge? It is nothing but his attempt to cash in on the meteoric rise of marginalia that is so in vogue these days, a little haughty and high-handed mystic slush,” Castellemare readily dismissed. “I fail to understand your loyalty to the man, but I suppose it takes all kinds. Gimaldi cannot even emulate the trashiest and pulpiest of what is written these days.”

  And so we were led back to Castellemare's home, that palatial villa that had awed me before, this time with someone whom could act as second witness to the strange wonder that was Castellemare's mysterious abode. I could tell that the magnificence of the home was not lost on Sigurd. The entrance was like a small cathedral, with stone banisters topped with immaculate spheres, opening outward to the walkway like a goliath's inviting hand. The doorway was both broad and tall. The doors were of thick and solid oak, rounded at the top to conform to the archway, and sporting a pair of unpolished brass rings as thick as a man's wrist. We could have spent an inconceivable amount of time wandering the immense edifice, losing ourselves in obscure paintings and seemingly unending adjacent rooms - always a room adjacent to another, each with a specific purpose, a nuance of utility just slightly different from the last. But it was not here that we'd marvel, but in the room I had visited before. I found it odd that I did not register all of this when I had been invited before.

  A running carpet of red plush and gold trim tracing an interlocking fretwork of red lions weaved its way up a flight of stairs, centered perfectly down the middle of the hallways, all the way to the room in question. Once again I was staring at that oak door, still in the initial wonder of what was beyond it. And then the door was opened, and the eery magnificence of this mirrored room had remained as captivating as it had been before. It looked as though the room had no bottom or top, or any limit to its dimension. And when the three of us stood inside, our reflections went off in all directions at once, down to an infinite abyss and up to an infinite summit. Each reflection became smaller, and one could not help but to perceive a great distance that was only an illusion. But it was the same for Castellemare and Gimaldi: two men whose perilous learning, profound mystery, and alleged mutual antipathy was much like this room: an illusion of depths and distances, a mere compounding of reflections ad infinitum.

  Castellemare was the first to speak: “a room like this is perceived differently by many people. For some, it is the joy of humility that comes through the immensity of reflections that reduce the voyeur to the infinitesimal. For others, this same perception brings fright to the insecure. And still, for others, there is a childish simplicity to the great wonder of possibilities stretching out into eternity for them. If you want the representative metaphor of history, it is here. If I needed a crude analogy for the Library, this would be it, along with winding stairwells.”

  Castellemare didn't need to explain, for I understood, albeit in a differently way than he intended. I looked up and saw infinite causes. Looking down, I could see infinite effects. I was just an intermediate and accidental link in the causal chain, a static point in history. And no matter where one was in the chain, the view would remain the same because the causal chain extended into past and future endlessly. On the horizontal axis of reflections was the many variables, possibilities each affected by another series of causal events.

  Castellemare requested that we sit in one of his many parlours.

  “Let us sit in the Champagne Room and talk,” he said.

  “Where's that?” Sigurd asked, still dumbfounded by the effect of the Tain.

  “Adjacent to the Bourbon Room, of course. Everybody knows that.”

  We followed him and his laughter.

  “Do you have a room in this place for every type of drink? Bring on the Tequila Room!” Sigurd said with inappropriate cheer.

  “We needn't be silly,” Castellemare slightly admonished. “They are simply theme rooms containing the artifacts of certain geographic areas I had frequented, or representative of the flavour of a particular historical epoch.”

  And so we sat, in plush chairs, around that enigma of a man, but the awe, immensity, and eerie quality of our surroundings seemed to compel us to keep quiet.

  “Gimaldi's counter-book is... a naive epistle written in the spirit of one enfeebled by dogmatic mysticism,” Castellemare began with no preamble. “He comes from an ever-weakening tradition that believes that metaphysics is possible. Gimaldi will give up the ghost before any rise in the general sentiment could give way to the acceptance of his clumsy philosophic views. Recurrence entails time - time for the unfolding of transitions,” Castellemare said.

  “You seem pretty sure that Gimaldi will give up,” I remarked.

  “Yes, I do. I draw this conclusion from experience with people, and with the likes of Gimaldi. I have also read it somewhere.”

  “This may seem silly, but I get the distinct impression that you and Gimaldi are struggling to see which one of you will win me,” I said.

  “You make it sound like a courtship. I do not want your allegiance. I have no real need of such a thing. “ Castellemare was quick to dismiss, “just your patience.”

  “Patience for what?” Sigurd asked.

  “Patience to let the plot develop and maybe even enjoy it,” Castellemare replied with a smile.

  [The remainder of this dialogue was missing. In its place, as if stitched there as an afterthought or a moral lesson was a brief and puzzling excursus that seemed to be a partial digression].

  ---

  In this Order, our sacred symbols: the book, the mirror, the deciphering wheel...

  The book.

  The mirror [John Lerida]

  Phantom relation:

  a) Elemental conjuration (the sacred orthographers)

  b) Destruction as preservation (the sacred biblioclasts)

  One single columnar spine that keeps these two covers together, but itself hollow – a winding staircase. In one version, it is literal: a traveler's descent. In another, an opposition: the “sanscript” of reading what cannot be seen, what is between what is written.

  The book as mirror, a phantom relation between two “things” not here now, but deferred, sliding off the
infinitesimal moment of the now, of the present—yet ever-present even if it is just connected by phantom cables. I hold a crayon in my hand and transcribe myself—a virtual compendium—across the surface of the mirror, a mirror that I will fold up into a book once it has come to pass and I no longer create the reflection. I let the reflection cast itself, like a net, over me. And others come to this mirror-book, too, and see for themselves different things, varying reflections that I have no access to.

  The others come to this book and remark it, bring their own transcription implements to its surface. Their faces are chalk white, like mine, but the reflections indicate different gods than what I am. They are other. But I am also other—to myself, fully and refreshingly self-alienated…and yet self-revealed in that moment of the mirror where I speak words to it and all it can do is mime the movement of my mouth.

  I am a compendium, a bestiary, an encyclopedia, and it matters not if all the bundled data is correct, True, Good, Pure, even indigent of another time… it does not matter if the compilation of entries do not follow some recognizable alphabetical order, or a numerical order; I know the logic of my own book intimately, even if it is reams of iniquity, of self-deceit, playful illusion, a ghastly mirage, a complete laceration of self into splinters. All of this will be reflected in my mirror book, as I am sure it will yours. You will always find yourself - not anyone else - in the book. You are alone and the book only reflects your own image back at you. Never think you sought anything in a book other than yourself; that would be folly, delusion.

  And the mirror book will be a surface of reflections, and these reflections will have no material volume—which is to say that they will have the absolute volume across an infinite(simal) space. These reflections will bring the gift of my compendium back to me in a split moment, conveyed in its own furrowed brow, its own haggard eyes, its own strained lines of a weary face, its own minuscule text from left to right. And I cannot close this book, even though I suspect it has covers and a spine. I would like to address all these anatomical features, to trace their contours and know them in a tactile sense as I close my eyes. Yet I do not wish to eroticize these features, as if learning her body in the night under the consistent laying on of hands. You may come to this book and a passage I find innocuous, superfluous, of mere verbiage and filler, might arrest you, seize upon you like a marauder…or captivate your eye with a secret desire to break the serpent gaze, to look away. The book not only receives, but freely gives, but it is itself a translation into another language, a kind of transcendental image, a carnival of minds.