The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  Leopold Castor was busy tracing wobbly circles in the air with a numb finger. In his current state he found it hard to trace even such a simple shape. Yet he tried again and again until the fatigue of failure set in as it always did, incapable of overcoming the erratic trembling of his hands. A light piano could be heard emanating from the CD player's speakers, encrusted though they were with stickers from old and now defunct flash-in-the-pan bands that once captured Leopold's interest but fell into the rubbish bin where the odds and ends of disconnected memories go. He was unable to marshal his suffering and narcissistic self-destruction into motion, to convert the general character of his common malaise into work. There would be no further development, but rather a deeper entrenchment of his mood, sublimating his frame of mind to anything but an artistic work. The blank canvas was testament to his impotence and neglect. It stared menacingly at him, imploring and goading him to do his worst; for it was only the worst that he could possibly achieve. He was one man and that was one canvas, and though reciprocity demanded his active relationship with it he could not afford to purchase another. “If I had an infinite supply of canvas,” he said hoarsely, “I could summon the courage to experiment freely. A man and his canvas necessitates that there be more of the latter than the former. But financially confined. Infinite canvas: if I fuck up, take it down and replace with a fresh one, forever if necessary... or at least the masterpiece is created and then I can die.”

  Of course, he could have painted over all his errata, but there was something in the purity of the untouched canvas that he sacralized, something that – when once effaced – could never be reproduced. The novelty of the virgin face, once touched, banished for all time. And as much as he fantasized that death would take him at the pinnacle of his finest and most triumphant achievement, both ego and curiousity would doubtless bade him to hang on, to see how the next chapter of the tale will unfold. But, since he had not achieved anything remotely masterful in quite some time, and not to his impossible and idealized vision of what that would be, the fantasy's fulfillment or dismissal was rather moot. His was the perpetual argument ad pabulum.

  His over-anxious desire to found and ground a new “ism” in art, to become emblematic of a new era, to be its representative icon - all of this was not only presumptuous and egotistical, but a rank impossibility in an age that tired of the hasty series of people declaring “new” anything, the chasing after phantoms, the making of supply with no corresponding demand. Much that was mere cultural and historical recycling bore these bloated titles of largesse, of being new and novel, but hardly deserving of it. Would it be any doubt that even if Leopold had succeeded in making something truly new that it would be held under suspicion or dismissed by disinterested silence? Stagnation supreme, and he was as victim to it as anyone else. The more he thought of art's purpose, art as a whole, art's future, the further he distanced himself from creating – a self-fulfilling emasculation. The market had peaked without warning, and all that seemed left were old fragments that would be stitched together in different ways. He had no artistic prowess for repetition. The call had gone out: art is dead, so long live art. But even this was the repetition of resurrection, and what art needed was a touchstone with the real, and the real was a vicious place. What art needed was a a salient her to rally around, or maybe a charismatic villain.

  Stumbling to his feet on unsteady legs, he resolved to make another attempt at something potentially meaningful. Squeezing the tube of chrome blue on his chipped and crusted palette, he bolstered himself before the canvas with the false sense of courage that he could overcome its mocking blankness and not merely slink away. As soon as he brought that tired and frayed brush to the canvas' face, he would soon regret it.

  After this regret, what was left to him but that nocturnal bosom that freely accepts all failures without prejudice? Leopold made his way, as usual, to the pub.

  Ensopht penetrated the inner city and its coagulated antisocial bubbles, pedestrian traffic whorls and hubs of panicked commerce... A dazzling array of dizzy scenesters and endless chatterers dotting the grey. Sitting quietly in a pub booth near a table surrounded by young men who fancied themselves rebellious, he cocked his ear to hear how people spoke these days, their lilting gerunds and burred muzzle-dialects that would froth and boil to no avail before submerging into the flatulent murmur of phonetic depths in the vernacular asshole. So many layers of sound: a slight wheezing strung along with a booming voice from a noble carriage, a shallow mumble here, a piercing inflection there, all voices in different tempos, in a predictable staccato stumbling toward the ideal legato of the fully-fleshed style of oratory.

  Some posters of events on the walls. A gaming convention poster sported a virtual woman with enormous digitized breasts. This was not a minimalist era; more meant more. The scramble for some special and sacred identity in a hyperbolic yet homogeneous culture conveyed a different species of alienation – an alienation which had its yet to be developed yearning for some kind of extreme solution. To stab and thrust desperately beyond the thick and sturdy plastic of it all... Ensopht knew what desire lurked in every heart of hearts, what it secretly pined for even if it lacked a name. The people, as a whole, wanted the return of the hero, the tyrant, the cruel, the arcane, the treacherous, the brave. The people, at bottom, craved blood. They craved it to be shed, they craved it to be in an agitated pulsation to reanimate their lives, lives surrendered to a kind of paradoxical mobile inertia. And no non-stop war footage or slasher films were satisfying this need, a desire that demanded the visceral, not more screens.

  Ensopht cast his curious peephole gaze at the full environment, this diorama of the failed repeated in so many places. A conspicuously overdressed man wandered drunkenly from table to table, telling any with ears that he was the man who lived with the ghosts of poets. An artist at a far table, agitated with manic activity, was frantically scrawling page upon page of human mutilation in his sketchbook - a sketchbook born from fever. People collected here, collected there, a fractured hall of mirrors where each participant may disperse infinitely in distorted self-reflection.

  And then there was silence; all eyes turned to the artist at the far table, his eyes wide with the rising arc of frenzy brought upon by whatever delusions beguiled him, the substances he no doubt took to bolster his sudden stuttering resolve. His sweaty finger was on the trigger, the gun's nozzle was pressed against his head. The circuit of will, weapon, and execution of act were being brought into their balanced alignment. Suddenly, that alignment was punctuated by a shot and the arrangement fell apart as quickly as it come together. Everyone except Ensopht was caught in the freeze frame of horror, paralyzed. In their minds was the same looping image of those few instants before the silence had broken. Calmly, Ensopht was the first to move, walking purposefully to the table where the artist's body was slumped to one side, exposing the gruesome gaping poppy he now had in place of his head. Ensopht primly removed the lifeless hands from the vacated sketchbook and, with an approving grin, placed it under his arm, making a quiet and uneventful exit.

  Once he had made a fair enough distance from the scene, he perched himself upon a park bench and straightened himself before the sketchbook as if about to delve into a rare and sacred text. The sketchbook issued a creaking, leather complaint when it was opened, and it was full save for three blank pages at the end. The header page read, in bold, red italicized letters more hacked by a thick-felt tip than written: “THERE IS NOTHING WORSE THAN BEING!” These six words, in their peculiar conjunction, teased a hint of reminiscence upon Ensopht's face. The drawings were all done in shades of red, purple, gashes of blue and black, deeply set and smudged with mad thumbs. These were juxtaposed by the sharp and thin lines of a man who was quite evidently, as modern clinical parlance would have it, “troubled.” The drawings centered on the rather distasteful subject of genital mutilation, mixed with various scrawled portraits of subjects with no trace of emotion or expression upon their faces. At the bottom of each
page there was a running footnote. Upon reading through it, two texts were alluded to: Ars atrocitatis, and Ex jure solaris. Ensopht was compelled unto curiousity to explore the reference with more scrutiny, for he found it odd that the first book would be so carelessly mentioned. The second book was of illicit significance, a hopeless mystical hash contrived by a writer beyond any healthy measure of obsession with Cranach, Durer, and Dante. The Ex jure solaris was also extensively quoted in the sketchbook, this particular example of note:

  When we die, it seems to be universally assented to by theologians that we either go to Heaven or Hell, pending our obedience to the Lord. The location of Hell is usually depicted as being situated below the earth's crust, underground in some demonic workshop of fire, the satanic “fornax.” It is said that sinners are lumped together and licked by flames that give off no light. I, on the other hand, disagree with this narrow representation. Hell's domain is situated on the surface of the sun. Owing to its massive size, it can more than accommodate the entire population of the earth if they so warrant such a sentence. And if by some abnormally large influx of sinners the sun becomes overcrowded (an unlikely situation), there are other stars in the universe, some much larger than our own. We blessed should take a healthy delight that we may bathe in the warming rays of the sun which is entirely comprised of the bright torment of those whom have denied our Lord.

  As for the erroneous claim that the flames must be dark, I can only partially assent. In essence, they are very bright, and we must shield our eyes from the luminous body of the sun. But to the interred, the flames are so blinding and do singe the eyes so, that the sufferers can see nothing. And this is the true and retributive horror of the sinner: to not see what tortures him.

  The reason why this passage seemed to have been of interest to the artist was unclear to Ensopht, although it perhaps fit in quite nicely with the overall theme of the sketchbook itself – it being a kind of catalogue of tormenting items. Ensopht had the acute premonition that one of his players would be making his way into the night, and Ensopht was determined to coincide with him.

  Leopold cast his tired yet lascivious eyes at two young girls dressed in tight pink and blue shirts and flared pants before they were abducted by some flashy distraction inside a college bar. Nothing but their most cursory glance washed over his unkempt and paint-spattered person. He had not shaved in days, and his fingers were covered in specks of paint. He had, without being given notice, surpassed youth and the attentions thereof, an unemployed 33 year old artist in age limbo.

  He ducked into a known and well-worn alley and went into a building through an unmarked door. The filth did not end in the alley, but had been tracked into the building, a place that was lazily outside the radar of public attention, a drinking refuge without a liquor license, frequented by those who had been willfully forgotten. The regulars were mostly lonely old men who had already been kicked out of every other legitimate bar in town, but still in need of somewhere out of doors to nurse themselves. These were the unlovable, those that sank from circumstance or their own doing to wallow in the shadows of their own memories. Leopold knew a handful of them, but only because they had all been thrust together by the accident of drinking together. The one they called Wally for lack of anything else to call him was among the downtrodden, and he was allegedly a professor at the university. Patrons here had called Wally a “Juice-Junky” due to his claim of attaining quasi-religious euphoria by draining conventional dry cell batteries with his tongue. He was positively ecstatic when rechargeable batteries were commercialized. Wally had engaged this habit for twenty years, the results of long-term use showing in the twitch of his nerves. Of course, for Wally, his habit did not stop at batteries, and it was said that he could endure inhuman voltages, with claims of his tolerance for electric fences and the like. His threshold for electricity, a tolerance built up by experience, was nothing short of phenomenal. In his view, Heaven was an enormous electronic dynamo. He was convinced that the people all around the world were increasing what he called “the global voltage”, teasing out maximum yields of electricity, to delight in the electric wonderland. “Electricity is the drug of tomorrow!” he said. “As we speak, corporate men in big towers are juicing themselves to states of ecstasy. If electricity had been used by the Greeks, I am sure that Aristotle would have taught about that instead.” Leopold didn't mind Wally, just another surreal character in the otherwise empty landscape of his social engagements.

  Leopold took his place at the bar and ordered a drink. The owner usually found it difficult to keep a well stocked bar which meant that selection was limited. Usually, all there was available was the owner's home-brewed beer. It was a tepid, flat, and somewhat gritty brew with an aftertaste reminiscent of cheap men's cologne. No one questioned the owner's brewing techniques, and no one complained, for they all knew it was “drink what I got or go chug mouthwash at the metro.” And it was half the price of an actual beer.

  Ensopht had, by the strangeness of his character and by a general feeling, found this place. When he entered, the patrons immediately fell silent, regarding the stranger with extreme suspicion, or what would look like suspicion struggling to unscrew itself out of drunk, wavering gazes. Noticing the silence, Leopold turned around on his tattered stool to see what was the cause for what could stay those opining tongues. And there was the cause, standing tall in sartorial splendour, with the look of noble expectation cursively written across his face. Having found who he was looking for, Ensopht took a seat beside Leopold.

  “A besotted environment, so rife with despair,” Ensopht said, “where a man's idleness collaborates with his misery.”

  “Pardon?” Leopold turned.

  “I was remarking casually on misery. Surely, this mustn't be alien to any who would come here for a few refreshments?”

  The owner, who shared the other patrons' suspicion, frowned and abruptly asked Ensopht what he wanted to drink.

  “Only your finest,” Ensopht replied cordially, perhaps not knowing that today's finest also happened to be the worst, and what everyone else was drinking: the home brew.

  “This isn't a swanky joint, fella. Ya might wanna try up th'rood,” the owner said, jutting a thick and ugly hairy thumb in the vague direction of downtown's more legal establishments.

  “This will do fine,” Ensopht said, regarding the drink in its filthy glass with a sense of amusement. “So,” he began again, “we were talking about misery.”

  “No, you were talking about misery,” murmured Leopold who was in no mood to talk to a weird looking man that others might associate with him. If anything, he enjoyed this place for its brute honesty, but mostly for his ability to remain completely anonymous. It gave him comfort to witness that others around him were hopeless and far more worse off than he was. Who but a freak, a serial killer, or a desperate scam-salesman would have the audacity to dress in expensive clothes and strike up a so-called meaningful conversation with a stranger? Leopold half expected the man to continue, and he would have to sit through it until the freak exhausted himself and moved on. The trick was not to argue, not to ask for clarification points, and the freak would eventually go away.

  “So what is it that makes you so miserable?”

  “Taxes, the crown, drowning puppies, the hard to reach places in the peanut butter jar,” he answered glibly.

  “Quite an anthology of lament. Please do not be flip with me; I'm only asking a simple question.”

  “I don't like simple questions.”

  “Some questions hide their depth and complexity when they go robed in simple attire,” Ensopht said, looking right at Leopold and catching his eyes.

  “Ok, then. Sit tight, brace yourself, 'cos I have a whole epic of misery I can dish up right here. I am miserable because I am a failure as an innovator, a joke of an artist, I indulge in a few too many recreational drugs, I never finish what I start, I have terrible nightmares, I hate my mother and father, I don't have a good enough job to support myself, I f
eel like I'm twisting about in a straitjacket, I have no one who loves me, my ideas are stupid and facile, everyone I went to school with now has six-figure salaries and nice houses, I dropped out of college, I can't seem to shake this fog and lack of inspiration, I regret having been born, and my only pleasure in life these days is booze and masturbation. Fucking satisfied?”

  “Now that was a beautiful reply, sculpted from the very depths of a very human condition!” Ensopht applauded. “You, I presume, live in isolation, a very grey kind of isolation... You are sick and without purpose, listless, wholly dissatisfied yet desire to have the means to change your situation. You are alone, but do not want company, catching you in this kind of ambivalence. You wish you could strike out, but are frightened by consequences. You reject the silly responsibility a world has foisted upon you. What do you suppose is the root of this error?”

  “I dunno... the mind, the world?”

  “It usually is, but that is such a vague and dissatisfying answer. Surely, there must be some more specific cause of misery.”

  “Didn't I just catalogue a bunch of examples?” Leopold stated.

  “You gave me a list of anecdotal items. You fail to ask the question in its more abstract sense. How easily the things we attribute as causes for our misery only veil a deeper source.”

  “Shit, dude, you ought to get a job writing fortune cookies. Everything you say sounds like a fucking proverb. Don't waste your precious talents on me, ok?”