The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  “I apologize. It was not my intention to detain your attention against your will. It is just, well, you seem to bear the mark of someone struggling to understand.”

  “Listen, joker, I make it my job to understand. That's why I'm an artist. I try to understand shit: my own, everybody else's. I really don't need some dressed up fop coming in here and telling me that I am struggling to understand, got it? With that, I think we ought to part ways,” Leopold ended with a mock proper English accent.

  “An artist?” Ensopht perked up. “Well then, you do know of what you speak... my reverence for the artist is unparalleled. Draw me something.”

  “Just like that? I find it hard to draw on command, and without my materials... Fuck, man, I'm not yours or anybody's goddamn monkey. I don't 'do' art to be some amusing, late-night, sideshow spectacle.”

  “Bah! Your excuses are pale. An artist is always in a habit of obeying: his impulses, the strange inspirations that take him aloft without his prior consent, the overwhelming surge of his kaleidoscopic emotions - and especially the orders of his patrons. As for materials, only a poor artist cannot create with but the sparsest materials available. To you I say, 'here is a napkin and a pen: now draw!'”

  Leopold felt both flush and strangely invigorated. Who was this strange fellow who goaded him on? He was resolved not to take the bait, however. The situation felt too improbable.

  “Listen, man, I don't need to justify anything to you. If you walk away thinking to yourself that I'm no artist, that I'm just pulling your leg, I could care less.”

  “I am asking you in deference and respect towards your station. You would be hard pressed to encounter any others who would actually be interested in you as an artist.”

  Leopold drew a quick sketch and pushed it forward for Ensopht's appraisal.

  “Hm. Good understanding of the human form. I find the mouth in the place of the genitalia quite peculiar yet potentially provocative. However, it is still quite jejune. As an artist, you're not very good.”

  Leopold was shocked. Of all the likely responses, this uncompromising rejection was not one of them. He more expected, at the very least, some polite acknowledgement of his sketch, or some false praise. Ensopht got out of his seat and left. Leopold went after him.

  “What do you mean I'm not good?” Leopold called after him, demanding an explanation for such an abrupt rejection.

  “You are simply not that good. That is my opinion.”

  “And who makes you qualified to judge art, huh?”

  “It is just an opinion. I could explain my opinion in more detail, tell you what formed it, but I hardly think that will be of much help to you. Consider my appraisal just a matter of taste, nothing more.”

  “Well, you're judging me on one fucking two minute sketch in a dive. How is that hardly fair? You haven't seen my real work.”

  “Real work? Oh? I guess I haven't, and I suppose you can be satisfied in the knowledge that my opinion only concerns that which you produced for my observation, leaving your 'real work' immune from my judgement. My opinion should mean even less given that your 'real work' remains intactly unseen. I suppose you are in the habit, when others request to see an example of your work, to falsely represent yourself with work that is not your real work. You have nothing to gain by proving your artistry to me. I believe you are an artist; I just don't think – given what you showed me – a good one. I can tell that we both abhor the conventional, and what you showed me was not too conventional. But there is something missing... I think it is... courage and a clear idea. Goodbye. Perhaps I will encounter your 'real work' in the future, nestled within some chic gallery where visitors may fawn over it with endless comparisons to other artists in place of genuine flattery.”

  With that, Ensopht left Leopold who was smarting and seething. Ensopht knew exactly what Leopold lacked, what he needed... and what he needed had just recently come into Ensopht's possession. Leopold was a keystone in what would need to transpire, but there was no need for him to know this just as yet. This had been a simple reconnaissance mission.

  Speaking only in short of breath decrees, Leopold was attempting to sample that other life, the detached life behind the veil of abandon, the immanent life as revealed by machines stacked on top of machines at the throbbing dance club. This was the land of the jubilant sadist and the subversive satyr, the fertile ground of corruption... of joyous surrender... all earmarked and decked out in the shifty and unreliable colours of false promises and the glitter of fairy money. A place of youthful exuberance without substance, while Leopold was now too short on youth, and so his lack of substance would be evident if others could peer over themselves. This environment was an affirmation of quiet vengeance, of angry dancers with Bacchanalian smiles on their faces and bodies aloft that always collapsed into silly imitation despair, into shattered narcotic fits and starts and sputtering as if to produce an abomination of meaning while they cleaved desperately to all the old meanings (the youth: simply Aristotelians with a less developed vocabulary). This was yet just another place of the deferred orgasm, of fashion bigotry, and the desperate illusion that loneliness and unhappiness had been vanquished by modern medicine and aggressive retail therapies. Leopold knew this to be yet another vortex of the inane, of plastic repetition, of hapless tarts on display. Why was he here? To test himself? To place his own disgust with such commercial disasters in higher relief, as if he were somehow too clever to be drawn in by its silly blandishments? To be here was already to signal that one had surrendered, despite one's seemingly noble intentions. It would have been disingenuous to describe his distaste for what this club represented, for he was, by his very presence, complicit with it. He was here to draw inspiration from a social tub of lukewarm shit.

  It wasn't that Leopold felt alive at the club, for that wasn't the club's deeper purpose in its inveigling nightmare. The club acted as the buffer between long bouts of waiting, a reprieve from responsibility. And this reprieve was granted by the condensation of fast-paced events into one packaged and unbreakable succession of highs, a chain of quasi-orgasmic moments of excitements that grew like bubbles and quickly aborted themselves. The bodies, the music, the fluidity of movement and sound - these were the unparalleled successes of a commercial milieu that never ceased screaming its ecstasy as if in defiance against respectability. If this place could speak of any metaphysical truth, it could only speak it in the present tense, a kind of cosmically ordained episode of vomiting, taking place in a postcard art-deco Hades.

  Leopold bent his elbow against the stranger's nagging words that seemed to grow with an amplified echo, battering against the bruised vessel of his fragile ego. Deluged by the manifold sensation of his selected environment. He attempted to cloak himself with the concerns of this place, but found it ill-fitting.

  A woman with a closely shaved head and pierced lip seemingly burst out in animal tracks Leopold was determined to follow, to follow despite his lack of nerve. The circus in which he had chosen to make his temporary home had made its demands of him. In a moment of great intoxication he had to seek out the flesh to enact some sort of space age romance that would burn bright and fleetingly like a coil of lit magnesium. His vision broke her down into her component parts: the tapered face, the tense artery in her elongated neck, the indented temples, her crescent moon breasts suspended in a two sizes too small t-shirt, her platform boots, her spiraling motions as she swung herself in rhythmic servitude to the machinic beat, the dagger eyebrows. In that moment, he could have fetishized these components in a way that he wished he could with but a brushstroke caress, in purest admiration for form in conjunction with a devastating lust. The way the light played on her body, wild and opalescent patches of varying hues, it seemed as though her very pulse mimicked the lightening and darkening of the light, the bellows of colour and the lungs of tint.

  The tight cosm Leopold find himself in was still busying itself hooting and tugging at itself as if in the throes of an incoherent nightmare. To sc
ream was to dramatize, and the debit cards of the patrons performed endless coitus with the club to produce intoxicants by the glass, the pitcher, the shot glass. The effects of their indulgence completed their perforation from their diurnal selves which now seemed so far away, a phantasm of morning. Equilibrium in pandemonium, lights blurred and softened before arching up and casting sharp and crisp signatures upon this cavalcade of flesh. Flesh, thought Leopold, everywhere flesh. Just flesh. Flesh in clothing, flesh drooping over the bar, flesh on sale, flesh on parade but spoken for, flesh paying its dues to this clubhouse in any way that it could. Still, just flesh... flesh suffocated by the vapid chants crackling over the speakers, mashed together by effusive flashes of magenta and black and sodium light, rising up in a swelling tide as if this would provide the salvaging lift for those gathered in their vacant community. At this point, Leopold would have envisioned the perfect end to this cataclysmic scene where all would fade to white. But, no, the club was a hostage machine. Soon enough, beyond last call, the club would release the hostages, excrete and eject them into a waiting series of taxis, or else unleash them to scarf down fat at chip wagons waiting for their drunken prey. This, thought Leopold, was joie de vivre, shrink-wrapped, available from any machine that would dispense it, like an automat.

  Leopold would attempt to dissolve himself within the sartorial matrix, but would find himself unceremoniously and silently ejected once the lights came back on, and the patrons divided themselves equally among the many streets radiating outward into the night. Nothing further for Leopold to do but to return home, home to sleep, perchance to dream.

  And so it was that Leopold, shortly after nudging the front door of his third-floor apartment, casting his keys and wallet beside his futon, would become cloaked by slumber, perchance indeed to dream – a dream that was not his own, but shared...

  [If this Leopold was meant to be identical to my neighbour, this text was telling me what he did with his time, and why he came back so late and made such a racket.There is a reference to a sketchbook once again. I will make a note of it].

  ... A white room with white tables and blue chairs. Six men were seated, three per side, facing one another. Three on one side, engaging in a rambling discourse; three on the other side in a passive and awkwardly expectant silence. The fluorescent lights made their skin seem sallow, sickly. Ensopht, a man in a lab coat, and a rather forgettable man, were on one side. Wally, a man who looked like a university professor, and Leopold, were on the other. Wally quietly ran the positive end of a dry cell battery across his scaly tongue. Ensopht leaned back in his chair with hands folded in front of him, at times leaning forward as if to shade himself from the awful exposure of the overhead lighting. But the lights were inescapable, pan-luminous, oppressive... a room without even one small streak of shadow.

  “So, Ex Jure Solaris,” Ensopht said. “Welcome to one shining face of Hell.”

  Before Ensopht, the blackest object in the room, was the deceased artist's sketchbook, gingerly divided with small neon tabs.

  “Let us talk now of what will come to pass,” Ensopht continued, leaning over his folded hands. “This is very important, and so I would please ask you to pay especial attention while I apprise you of the proper sequence of events, including your part in this whole drama.”

  The first man fidgeted in his seat. He was dressed according to professorial type with well-groomed beard and a slash of white hair interspersed with dull brown. He would be the first to reply.

  “What will come to pass? Drama? I'm already disappointed with this dream,” he said.

  “And who are you?” Ensopht asked.

  “I am the philosopher.”

  “I am the scientist,” the second man broke in.

  “And what are you?” Ensopht asked the quiet third man who was smiling wryly to himself.

  “Me? Oh, I'm merely the Third Man. I'm kind of like that guy you don't know where to put, where to seat, that sort of thing.”

  “And I'm Wally!” announced a scruffy figure with childlike exuberance.

  “Splendid,” said Ensopht. “And so our cohort is complete. We have the philosopher, the scientist, the artist, the Third Man, the madman, and the prophet.”

  “And you, I suppose, fancy yourself a prophet rather than a madman?” Leopold interrupted. He was still quite bitter about Ensopht's negative appraisal of his work.

  “Why of course, just as you fancy yourself an artist. I will suspend my disbelief is you suspend yours.” After a time: “Each of us has his counterpart, each acting as the shadow of the other. The philosopher and the scientist, the prophet and the madman, the artist and the Third Man. Before I conduct what the prophecy has foretold, it would do us well to discuss the shape and design of what will follow from it.”

  “Prophecy? I have serious reservations about this... It sounds hokey,” said the philosopher. “Besides, prophecy assumes determinism, predestination, and the logical problems that follow from that position are legion. I mean, even allowing for but a small shred of it is to deny free will.”

  “I prefer to sidestep the determinism and free will argument entirely,” said the scientist. “Events occur according to laws and probabilities, and these can be empirically verified. All else is mysticism. There are predicative events, and these only happen within local contexts according to scientific rules.”

  “This dream bites,” said Leopold. “Why couldn't I be dreaming about sex rather than being stuck around a table with a bunch of old farts who want to talk philosophy?”

  “I am not a philosopher,” corrected the scientist.

  “I take umbrage at your statement,” said the philosopher, puffing himself up. “Did it happen to occur to you that I am the one dreaming you? What am I doing? Why am I bothering to argue with fictions of my own dream imagination? It is so utterly pointless. I am going to try to redirect as best I can this dream.”

  “Please, do stay with us,” cajoled Ensopht. “I assure you that our little roundtable chat will prove very interesting. Let us commence with introductions. Leopold, would you start us off?”

  “Uh, ok, I guess,” he said doubtfully and feeling very bored. “Name's Leopold. I make art. My dreams are generally a bit more interesting and less like an AA meeting.”

  “My name is Russell, and I have dedicated my life to the noble pursuit of truth. I am, by trade, a philosopher. My research interests mostly concern a delving into Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology and how they may practically apply to the better direction of the mind.”

  Leopold feigned a yawn.

  “Hello!” said Wally. “Truth is so vital, I can't agree more. The truth is the juice, that Holy Electric panacea, Pangaea of current upon current that flows like satin ribbon into our souls! A dark world without the buzzing of hydroelectric God is a dead world! But, I guess, and I suppose, this isn't a discussion about truth. Or Aristotle. Or AA meetings. Let's keep this electric current flowing. Zap!”

  “I will introduce myself last,” said Ensopht. “Why don't you go ahead?”

  “Hello, my name is Dr Aymer. I'm a genetic researcher. I supervise a laboratory with ten graduate students as my research assistants. My ongoing research has been published in Cell and other such periodicals. As opposed to our philosopher, I believe matters of truth depend on being proven by means of experimentation and evidence.”

  “Can we relax making indirect attacks on professions?” cautioned Ensopht. “Let us continue with the next in our dramatis personae.”

  “My turn? Nothing much to say... I'm just some guy, that guy you might meet at a party and forget who it was the next morning. I'm that anonymous guy in the group photograph, the blank and numberless face in the crowd, really. Not much to me, I'm afraid. I'm just an average fellow.”

  “Surely you must have some sort of profession or interest, or... “ protested the philosopher.

  “Don't press him,” Ensopht politely warned. “Our nameless friend here has every reason to remain sparing and vague abo
ut his details. Let his mediocrity stand and press no further. In any event, my name is Ensopht and I am the facilitator of the prophecy. You've each been carefully selected to participate in its fulfillment as was preordained. Each of you have a quality that is requisite for the completion of a very vital task. We will have plenty of opportunity to get more intimately acquainted, but for now it is crucial that we discuss what the prophecy entails. Some very odd and disturbing events will be visited upon your waking lives -”

  “Are you saying that we six here are all real, and are dreaming this in unison?” asked the philosopher.

  “Yes, indeed,” Ensopht said with a smile. “Please, do not expect me to go into some long and complicated explanation on how this is even possible, for it is a trivial matter compared to the real reason why you have all been gathered here. The prophecy concerns the synthesizing of each one of us here – or at least our core fundamental attributes – into one person, a kind of avatar, if you will. Each of you has been paired up with an opposite, sitting directly ahead of you. This dualism is very important so that the synthesis may occur, making these attributes enter into relation and salvaging the most essential ones into the synthesized product. Do not worry: this will not be in any way painful, nor will it spell the end of your lives. Once these features are synthesized, you will go about your normal lives. This is more of a metaphorical synthesis, and each of you will have your say on what elements we should keep, and what we should discard. In this way, our cohort here is more of an advisory committee to ensure quality in the final product.”

  “I have a question,” interrupted the scientist. “Under what authority is this being conducted? And, of course, despite your claim that we were preordained, may we opt out?”

  “I act under the authority of the prophecy. The name of the one who holds the script is unimportant, but he is among the chief architects of the prophecy and a great Librarian. As for an opt-out clause, I'm afraid I'm to compel you to remain with us.”