Russell the would-be philosopher sat in his overly white kitchen; its stainless steel appliances set in minimalist array, the flood of the grey light of morning tucking itself in the far too clean crevasses of the kitchen. The coffee had scalded his lips, and he was crying. He could not bear to witness the reflection in the steel, or in the spoon, or on the glass of the cupboards. Russell did not know to whom the reflection belonged anymore. All he knew was that whatever he fancied himself to be was merely the pilot of a vessel that desperately clambered for identity. Russell only wanted to be someone – anyone - while he could, before the chance would be snatched away by that which promised a premature end to his search for an identity he could live with.
Russell was losing his bearings. He felt himself split in two, the mitosis of a cell with no nucleus. No, not a cell... a kind of lateral evolution, a swapping of traits among the already born, a slime mold. The madness that had visited the others had now visited over him as well. His double – or what his mind perceived to be his double – was nothing more than a voice coming from another room.
“Will you go to war against me, little magus?” asked the voice of his double.
“I don't understand,” was Russell's reply.
“I wasn't talking to you. Keep quiet. Stay indiscernible.”
Russell wanted to amplify himself in protest, but his thoughts were being mulched, broken down into a pasty solution and becoming absorbed into the nullity of he knew not what. It was as though he were being hollowed out, violently forced to disgorge the paltriness of his contents to face what he really was: an impostor, a filmy residue and little more.
Something else imminent was brewing. Peels of mocking laughter erupted from the other room, his double obviously amused by Russell's free-falling dissolution. Russell tried to appeal to his hasty readings of the great philosophers as a guide to defending himself against the paradox of the synthesis, but only their faces stood in static silence, mutely dismissing his internal appeals. Their places in the arcanum of his mind was quickly being filled with monsters. He held his head and weakly cried for help against the menacing visions pushing up from the soil of his subconscious, a disarray of fragments.
This scherzo was claiming each and every one of them, a vicious maelstrom that caused them all to recoil in their respective places, the shuddering waves of synthesis rippling outward in a a rapidly expanding arabesque.
[If my proceeding through the text was matching the pace of actually occurring events, then it was too late for me to do anything. I wonder if I stopped reading, events would be frozen, halting the narrative in the book as well as its correspondence in this world. Wishful thinking, Gimaldi].
12
The Third Man Issues a Taste
See here. Touch but a shade of what roils within: rats, sodomites, underbelly people and overbelly people, winos, dispossessed pharaohs, painters of mechanical unicorns, trampled Magyars, Laertians, slovenly street children straight from Dickens, maniacs, schizos, map-worshipers, plotters, crowded piles of medieval sex manuals written by anonymous monks, furious Tatars, broken hookahs, pinned up centerfolds from the 1950s, empty liquor bottles, gas-sniffers, cardboard tents, tattered blankets, street pirates, pinchers, oenolots, oafs, beggars, mouldy bread, occasional gobs of blood, schizophrenic graffiti, tag-artists, runaways, coffee zealots, and urban washouts, there was one implacable and constant hum. It was a twitching drone coming from within the low hanging pipes, barging in on stupors and bringing some moments to a feverish pitch of epileptic delirium. Wires that cut into the skin, deranged gazes, the rarest types of people in eccentric orbits around their quarry, horror dressed in new flesh, a shower of glass shards, the recasting of dice against shadow... In sum: heralding glimpses into the new era, that of the dark side of collective desire, collective will. Breathe into our clay and grant us life, bookish one. We are your clay bird. Your golem. Your reddest lion. Beware those with only one book, but make that book live.
33
To the Reader (Ad Lectorem)
“Let me assume the burden of responsibility for what I choose to research. I have a personal investment in this project, and I am asking you for assistance,” said a familiar voice on the telephone.
I had just arrived home from Dr Warburg's office, fresh from reading a section of the 7th Meditation. The voice left me frozen.
The voice continued: “Gimaldi had just returned from Dr Warburg's office and was alarmed by the voice he was hearing on the telephone. The copy of the 7th Meditation dangled from Gimaldi's benumbed hand.”
And then we said simultaneously, “You were killed... Is this another trick?”
Anton Setzer.
“Hello, Gimaldi. The prodigal returns it seems, yes? I don't mean to slight you and your knack for fact-finding, but you made a crucially wrong assumption. No, I wasn't killed, nothing of the sort. No mystical order had settled my hash as Angelo had reported to you. But you never saw the corpse, and took Angelo's word on faith. I'm certain that your caution will not allow you to take me at my word, but for what it is worth, I can explain.”
“Were you tailing me? Is that how you knew I was with Dr Warburg?”
“What do you take me for, Gimaldi? A skip tracer? Before you get all knotted up, let me read you this passage from a book I am reading: 'Gimaldi, reeling in confusion elbowing for dominance with a rising anger, demanded to know from the presumably dead Anton Setzer if the latter was tailing him. Gimaldi had sat himself down on the edge of the bed, a cold sweat beading upon his flushed brow. Setzer's voice, irritatingly calm, interrupted Gimaldi's raft of questions by reading to him from an interesting book. What made the book interesting was not so much the writing or the plot, but that determinism was not such the vain and ridiculous idea Gimaldi had previously dismissed as bosh,' Anyhow, just thought you would be interested. How are you?”
Rage was swelling up within me, but I choked it back, stuttering into the receiver: “I was led to believe you were murdered, you read me a creepy passage from some book that most likely details my every past, present, and immediate future motions, and you ask me how I'm doing? You want to make small talk?”
“I'm terribly sorry, Gimaldi. I had thought by this time you were well inured against being confronted with these impossible moments.”
“At least I know Angelo is dead.”
“That he is, Gimaldi. You don't seem so broken up about it. He did well, actually, and every man has his price.”
“What did -”
“I pay him for? Sorry – I just had to turn the page. You discovered that Angelo was a double-agent. Well, in exchange for information about Castellemare, he was willing to concoct that fiction of my having been murdered which you believed much more readily than I could have hoped for. But, I guess it's all written.”
“You traded information about Castellemare so that Angelo would convince me that you were murdered? For what purpose?”
“Hold on, Gimaldi, let's not jump too far ahead of the plot. Certain necessary events had to take place, one of them being Angelo's death. Also, I wanted you to make your way through my labyrinth. I'm really only trying to help you.”
“Then why this fiction? Why didn't you just personally invite me to take a stroll through your fucking maze?”
“It would have compromised the outcome. You see, the lie Angelo told was not just delivered to you, but to Castellemare as well. I needed Castellemare to think I was dead. He directed Angelo to tag along with you knowing that you would most likely take refuge in my labyrinth, trying to dig deeper into the mystery for more clues. Angelo told me of Castellemare's orders and I told Angelo to follow them. Had you not offered to go to my labyrinth, Angelo would have suggested it. I needed Angelo dead because, in time, he was going to kill you. The plot could not stand for the protagonist to snuff it. Not that you're entirely up to the mark of protagonist, but that is another issue, and one that risks editorializing a plot I did not design. But, in one version of the story, Angelo did kill you. Y
ou really ought to read Borges' Garden of the Forking Paths. I digress. You see, when Castellemare thought I had been murdered, as reported to him by Angelo, he thought this would be the perfect opportunity to get three tasks completed. The first was to retrieve one of the books you stole. The second was to exploit your abilities to gain access to my labyrinth so that Castellemare could. The third was to have you killed.”
“But he was already working his way through,” I protested.
“Yes, but by a laborious back end. You recall that my doors lock from one side. He was trying to get at my machine, but not for the reasons he probably told you. Plus, he entered the door marked timor and we all know book production is one of love. Anyway, Castellemare's duties as a Librarian also include binding books. He knew you were getting a bit too close to understanding more about the synthesis and Ars atrocitatis. Now that you know about it, there is no reason for me to conceal the title from you. The plot now permits it. Anyhow, he wanted to gain access to my machine to produce multiple false copies of the book, to throw you into a hopeless conundrum. And, before you ask, he could not just produce copies without my machine. You might say my machine has certain intriguing qualities that can produce authentic books from any period. You might also say it is the machine that someone like Constantine Simonides would have killed to possess. You know all about him now, according to what I read here about your meeting with Dr Warburg. And, again, before you ask since I know it is on your mind, I am not Simonides.”
I was becoming frustrated with his way of talking about real world events like they were episodes in a novel.
“What do I do now?” I asked, hoping his reading could help. “Where is Castellemare? What happened to this idea of interpolating your respective collections?”
“Gimaldi, each of your questions truly deserve fleshed out responses. I, sadly, can only provide a few short answers at the moment. You can do whatever you wish. I do not know the whereabouts of our treacherous Librarian. And, finally, I suspected Castellemare's real motivations early on and played the fool. He is not to be trusted... But, then, I suppose I haven't given you much reason to trust me either. However, you have to admit that I've been far more accommodating and helpful than any of the others you have had to squeeze information from. Let me give you a piece of advice: You missed your calling as a detective; your shrewd instincts and persistence are highly admirable, but you have a tendency to be sloppy on those very rare occasions when those skills matter most. I know that you would not have any chance to prevent the synthesis since it has already happened – that is just a matter of irrefutable fact. However, you can come to understand what it means. That, you should know, is of vital importance.”
“May I see the book you are reading?”
“I'm sorry, Gimaldi. I am prohibited from doing so. Don't ask who is doing the prohibiting.”
“Tell me this, then: who is Clysm?”
“Oh, my, yes. Sorry about that. I was merely trying to conceal myself, and perhaps poorly at that.”
“I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that you were the one to send that text. Who else but you? Is this a genuine text, or one fabricated using your forgery machine?”
“A bit catty, Gimaldi. Yes, it is a genuine text, and had you done your research, you may have found it listed in some tucked away library's holdings. There is a facsimile of this text, although incomplete, near you at the Fisher Rare Book Library on the University of Toronto campus.”
“It was written in cipher, and one that I have since deciphered with relative ease.”
“I would stand up to cheer and clap, but you did forget a few crucial details. You assumed a double cipher – which is correct – but you didn't push it far enough. There was another cipher still. In fact, many traditional forms of ciphering were used, one of which harks back to Julius Caesar's rather simplistic transposition in his military dispatches... You know, writing D for A, E for B, that sort of thing, just moving up the letters by four spaces. Part of the text also makes use of a few of Aeneas Tacitus' secret kinds of writing as reported by Polybius, some other simple conventions employed by Charlemagne, Pharamond, Walchius, Bibliander, Cardanus, and of course Trithemius. Be happy I sent a manuscript instead of a waxed wooden tablet a la Demaratus, or a message shaved upon the scalp of a slave. For that I should be commended,” Setzer said with a laugh amused by his own obscure references.
“Why not tell me directly instead rather than wasting my time in me having to decipher?”
“Gimaldi, I respect your intellectual proclivities and the application of your talents. It would be as crude of me to tell you what the deciphered messages are as it would be to play the pedagogue by some long explanation of what symbolic importance a movie has. Yours is a noble and dying art, now dominated by those computer-using cryptanalysts working in top secret government organizations trying to decode the chatter of radical Islamic terrorists. Such application is not only a technological ugliness, but the knowledge to be obtained has no mysterious and scholarly gravity; these code-breakers can only yield up what will be bombed next. Codes and ciphers these days lack any real sport, and the knowledge is so drably practical. However, I was somewhat pleased that you kept in mind Trithemius' use of misdirected energy.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that you were not satisfied with ending your deciphering at just one level, being content with your findings no matter how banal. That was the Abbot of Spanheim's trick: to make the message so benign as to avoid detection.”
“What is left to decipher?”
“I would apply a few more famous keys. The text was not meant to be so impossible to crack that one gifted with the knowledge of the history and methods of cryptology and cryptanalysis couldn't engage it. This clue I will yield up: the name of the final outcome of the synthesis – and I do mean name, in the proper Christian sense.”
“I have stumbled across a few references.”
“I know you have, Gimaldi, but now is the time for you to confirm the scant evidence you have at hand. You may also be delighted or horrified to discover that the entire cast of characters in this bête noir drama can be distilled from this one text.”
“And what of the Ars atrocitatis?”
“Ah, I knew you would ask me about that, even without reading our dialogue right in front of me. Castellemare has been a very busy bee, I'm afraid, and I do believe he is concealing these people away from the rest of us. The book itself is of no real matter since the events are already unfolding, and will continue to do so with no hope of anyone being able to prevent the sequence of events.”
We parted on uncertain terms. Upon replacing the receiver upon its cradle, I went back to the manuscript, partially reinvigorated by Setzer's clues. I had already tried a range of common deciphering techniques, but avoided the too-obvious ones. That was one of the cardinal rules of cryptanalysis: try the easiest and obvious solutions first. However, this was the rule I decidedly flouted until now. As well, I did not consistently apply the wide range of deciphering methods at every deciphered level. The results were beginning to emerge.
I could have inputted the text, like some of my more tech savvy contemporaries, as values in a computer. There was something intransigently antique about the way I preferred to decode and decipher, as if I secretly believed that codes and ciphers written in hand ought to be solved in the same manner. I knew never to share my practices with those dwindling few in my field for fear that I would have been perceived as someone who was willingly wasting time doing by hand what a computer could perform – with perhaps less frequency of error – in a matter of instants. I did not dismiss the astonishing results the advent of computing has had on my profession, and results came pouring in at a more liquid pace as the devices improved. But I knew that in the crafting of codes and ciphers, the human mind was incapable of producing perpetual nonsense without it returning to some semblance of order, and that we abhorred incomprehensible redundancies such that we could not fashion a cipher that read �
��DDDDD” - computers, on the other hand, do not have this faculty of discrimination and will compute all variables and permutations regardless of how absurd it would be to us to consider them.
I had tossed aside Setzer's uncanny ability to know exactly what I was doing, saying, and what I would do or say. His reference to a book that seemed to confirm that life was a determined thing written down in advance was something for the philosopher or the theologian to consider. The staggering paradox of such a book would have disquieted me a great deal had I not already taken the Library – itself a paradox – as established fact. Having been immersed in this mystery for so long, I had finally come to the point where my belief in more generic forms of rationality and order had been suspended. Certainly, suspense of disbelief makes one accept that Superman can fly for the sake of the story line. I had done something similar with all that was transpiring for the sake of the mystery I was occupying a central role within. Perhaps, at some warped and submerged level, I was actually beginning to enjoy it.
Castellemare had been right in his implications that my life had no real direct purpose until the mystery presented me with one. Without a puzzle to concern myself, all seemed listless, and when that puzzle stood there daring me to solve it, it consumed my entire focus, succeeding to becoming my entire perception and worldview. Nothing existed outside whatever puzzle I gave myself or was thrown my way, my sense of the real a myopia. Castellemare probably sensed that aspect of me which made me the ideal candidate for his plans. He knew I would not become distracted with the banal real world things, but would commit myself wholly to the singular task of solving a mystery. Of course, if it was all written that I would participate... But, then again, there were books in that maddening Library that conveyed this mystery without my participation.
The Infinite Library Page 48
