The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  These downward spiraling reflections had exposed to me that my life was not even the simplest of ciphers. Without a mystery, without some code or puzzle to occupy my time, I had nothing much else to live for. The solution to this mystery was upon a horizon I was rapidly approaching, and I was admittedly frightened of its resolution if only because it meant that I would sink back into a lack of purpose. And so, I thought, perhaps I had subconsciously erected my own blind spots to delay my progress; perhaps I could have come to solution much earlier in spite of myself. I could blame those like Setzer and Castellemare for playing keep-away, but I played a part as well in keeping the solution at bay for fear that my life would return to its default emptiness.

  Why did I not cultivate real friendships or even follow the conventional romantic line? I certainly had appetites like most people, and although I could never have declared myself a highly social being, even those who live monkish lives obsessed with books attended the occasional gathering, got married, and lived relatively normal lives. To satisfy the social need, academics had conferences, but even those did not interest me. It was not that I sought out of some insecurity to be bold by publishing the occasional article that I did not physically have to deliver, but that I felt no desire to socially participate with others without textual mediation. However, it was not as though I was socially inept and awkward, but rather conspicuously disinterested. In my personal hierarchy of values, books were primary and people were a distant second. Neither was I hiding from anything in particular; rather, I could speculate that an age that fostered disconnection and contented alienation had forged my behavioural tendencies.

  After two hours of deciphering work, I had decided to sample the social realm out of curiousity and experiment rather than any longing or desperation. I had dimly thought of calling on Leo, but my relationship with him was the sort that would never develop into anything meaningful, and that to push beyond some intellectual common interest would result in awkward silences. It was bordering on 9 PM on an inconsequential Wednesday night in Toronto. I did not want clamour, but I didn't want tomblike silence either. All that stood between myself and making a selection as to what I would do this night would be my eternal ambivalence. I would convince myself that, despite the bottleneck of counter-arguments and a well-ingrained detest for what passed for common sense, doing something social would present a healthy benefit, a diversion, something to restore sanity in the face of my current preoccupations. These flimsy and thin arguments could hardly function as resolved justification, for I did not feel in any fundamental sense “insane” or “unhealthy” - labels so hastily affixed, but that merely float above one's head like a ring of vacuous signifiers stitched to make an aureole of condensed identity. Not that, of course, the insane or unhealthy always recognize they are insane or unhealthy. I did find it odd and slightly perturbing that my own emotional range tended toward a flat line, never spiking to those grand extremes of euphoria or melancholy. I was in a state of being that those afflicted by conditions of emotional volatility needed prescriptions to achieve.

  The tendency of a sedentary lifestyle is to remain sedentary, and so I weakly and unconvincingly resolved to take a walk for the benefit of my health, and if I so happened to chance upon a place of interest, would linger there. I floated like a ghost on Bloor Street West, beside the off-kilter postmodern facade of the Royal Ontario Museum, the motley coloured blur of corner stores, print shops, commercial sweet-nothings, churches, and then headed south toward the beacon of boredom, the tower. Down along Spadina Avenue, a few used bookstores I glanced at but never patronized, around the circle, and into Chinatown with its ideographic signage blending one into another as people still mobbed the outdoor produce stands. I drifted beside furrier shops, the endless profusion of fast food eateries, all the way to Queen Street West with its glass and steel goliaths, precisely hewn icebergs of corporate splendour. Anchoring myself at the intersection, my ambulation swung me toward the east, eventually reaching Yonge Street like a sudden surge of unwelcome light and noise. As if in retreat, I headed back up north until I hit upon College Street, and then, as if trying to delay my surrender, traveled west until I came across one of the many faux-Irish pubs that shamelessly decorate themselves with iconic posters of Guinness. Whether it was due to boredom, irony, or an unnamed fleeting sensation, I decided upon this location as my point of interest. It would be as good place as any to reconcile myself with why it was that I rarely wandered through the streets of Toronto, and why whenever I did it was a signal disappointment.

  The self-styled Irish pub was already in what could be called full swing for a weekday night. Knowing that I would be otherwise bored or annoyed, I took along my notebook and ordered a pint from a server showing too much cleavage. Despite how listless I could be without a directed task, my life was not for want of obligations. I still needed to honour a rather neglected request from a distant colleague to whom I had promised that I would check his modernized font reproduction of Aegidius Romanus' Quaestiones Metaphysicales (Venedig, 1501) against the facsimile of the original. It was, in a pinch, painstaking yet monotonous work not involving much brain power as much as a keen eye for mistakes. The text was spattered in abbreviations I had long since memorized from my school days. However, the facsimile copy, as good as one could produce from an original, still had some smudginess that made some words with their suffix abbreviations difficult to understand. I had made note of those in my notebook and was looking them over. Meanwhile, another colleague had pressed me to give a look at some ciphered text that reminded him of Tyronian marks, and was filled with letter-nulles or “dummies” to make deciphering a more aggravating affair. However, no matter how hard I tried to rally my attention to these real-world affairs, I would eventually succumb to revolving around that pivot of a mystery concerning the Ars atrocitatis which was, to my understanding, the kind of narrative that extended the human catalogue of cruelties.

  I was not at home with my small collection of assumptions, and perhaps Setzer was right that at times I made a craft of my own carelessness. I could not seem to pull my focus in tight enough, or marshal my more keen thoughts to figure the whole mess out – and it surely was a disastrous mess. Not only did I have to contend with the mystery of the synthesis, Castellemare, and the whole nut, but the Ars text was the sort of book that, over time and over many glosses and revisions, was itself succumbing to a continuous and gradual contamination. There was no source text, thereby completing my confusion. And, perhaps, this is what Castellemare wanted, a maddening text so agreeable to his ghoulish and manipulative nature.

  Only after ten or so minutes did I realize that I had been scanning a page in my notebook without reading it, wholly consumed by my thoughts slipping off elsewhere. I half expected to see Leopold as he was given over to enjoying the night life, and perhaps I wished he would have come and distracted me and that we would be able to set aside the unpleasantness of our last conversation. The flash of Leo in my mind perhaps signified some variety of tinkering in my hind brain, a nascent echo of a connection with the Ars atrocitatis in some way. What was his role? From what I had read so far from the 7th Meditation, he was instrumental to the synthesis, but how far could I trust this book, especially since it had been effectively placed in my hands by Castellemare himself who had every reason to see the fulfillment of the synthesis and not have me running around mucking it up? In fact, what books could I trust? I could not place my trust in books anymore than I could in those who made their business of them, including Setzer.

  34

  Excerpts from 7th Meditation

  Intersections Vivified

  All that is to be written comes fully dressed.

  “What, pray tell, is your agenda?” asked the voice with curious insistence, just over the sound and force of drums.

  The Librarian neatly folded the script and placed it in his petticoat pocket. He knew that history would be written by the felon. “Why, the blooming of the narrative, nothing more.”
>
  “I could have fabricated it instead of you going to all this trouble.”

  “No, no,” the Librarian downplayed. “All of it has already been plotted and my duty is rather clear.”

  “Will the writer comply?”

  “He doesn't know yet. Let him fumble along a bit longer. That, too, has been plotted in advance.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “Stand down. Everything is proceeding according to the Library's plans.”

  14

  Leopold Chronicles the Last Movement

  “Notes from my travels, a chatterbox litany. The city streets were captured in the heart of a raga moving from aarohan to avarohan. An old woman with palsy held a steel bed frame with one steady hand while the other rattles in the diatonic of movement and rest as buildings are making their slow cascade to the kidney-shaped bowl of a valley of downtown, all at the speed of continental drift; monsters without names leap from behind the curtain of ubiquitous advertising; the city continues its chromatic madhya drut. I can feel the finale sluicing in my bones.

  “Men in stetsons and blazers carpet the streets with their strange apocalyptic eyes – I see them and so take no rest. One liquid chrome moment drips into the next, a saline bag, a needle, another filthy rain or snowfall on the heads of those who surrendered their umbrellas to despots – this I know because it was read to me by the sky itself. The face of the city has lost its elasticity, it now begins to tighten, recede into itself, features ossifying in a kind of ice-flow toward an increasingly dense center. And in the center I can see it. See it with me: a vortex buttressed by our six hymns. It is glorious what will push out from within it, how we will dissolve and be remade. I hear far-off drumming. It adheres to me.

  “My memory of the others barely anything more now than a few looping topics, hanging questions, misplaced quotation marks, shifty copulas, blended all together into a kind of sound collage where I cannot discern which of us is saying what. Slogans of the evening become cryptic trapdoors in our six-way talks, and the suspense of what will come electrifies me, coming up behind me on its quiet, split-toed feet. Everything about me feels slashed, and I am blissfully confused. There is no canvas upon which I can suitably express what is rending me to bits.

  “This prosody, this hexameter coming to its conclusion. I hope very soon. We are all so collapsible, I never realized. I never knew how tenuous I had always been, just how weak my venom against the normal world was when it was uncoupled with the others. Together we are stronger. I can feel myself being cannibalized, slowly at first, and being drawn away from the viscera around me, puffing up and out in belches of smoke.

  “Why have I treated myself so dearly, preciously, taken on prim airs all this time when what I tirelessly defended – this corrupt and incomplete me – was not worth the effort? My ego announced itself in piccolo tones, but it was little more than a pointless carnival game, no? As a self-professed master over myself, I reigned over such small and paltry things that I am grateful to be taken up in the storm of something so much bigger than this ink blot I safeguarded all these wasted years. I do not require the kind of distinction only my little name can earn me. It is not enough – the prophet was right.

  I know I am mad because I have voluntarily abandoned who or what I was, diving into this assimilation with not even a single shred of regret. What was I before all of this? A piss-pot. A fraudulent emulator. A stalled engine. A transient blur. A staining discharge upon a sheet. Deliver me now.”

  The actual synthesis took but mere moments. Each of them dissipated and became whole. A single man strode confidently from the spent husks of six fractured identities. The synthesized man did not look back at his ripped caul: it was done.

  35

  Hiatus

  The digital alarm clock beside my bed was reminding me in its red-on-black monotony that my time had run out – it was done. There was no doubt that I had played my part in all of this magnificently, even if I never had any intention to be their scripted actor. All whom I had met were doubtless pleased the way I followed every one of their clues. The compound and derivative man that was to emerge from this sinister synthesis would be realized, and all my bungling toward knowledge was instrumental in bringing this to fruition.

  Today was my birthday, and so I was able to quietly tick off the 46th swing around the sun. I had ceased believing in birthdays in both theory and practice when I had no one meaningful left in my life to observe them with, which was at the age of 34. I was far too cynical to become dogged by the usual psychological clutter of panic associated with the natural course of aging, the things the bravado of youth had planned yet circumstantial reality had revised downward, or the fact that I was such-and-such an age and unmarried, sans children, or even in the plateau of some gainful career. No, these things were little more to me than externally imposed anxieties that never truly rang sense with me. The arbitrariness of numbers, the faded grey of once-urgent reasons to reach certain unqualified benchmarks, all of it more mud than life policy.

  Little attention is paid to the history of how books and coins circulate. Coins are minted, go from hands rich and poor, are used for countless purposes, and one day they return only to be melted down and perhaps struck once more as a new coin. Books, as well, since they change owners who may or may not read them, may have differing interpretations of them, and may in the end return to be pulped and become a new book. The cycle of books comes with an unwritten history except for those books fortunate enough to be of some value where one can trace their travels from one catalogue to another. The history of the owners cannot compare, for the owner's connection to a book is mostly singular whereas the book may have connected to so many owners. The owners' lives are so fleeting compared to the lives of books, a life that can endure for centuries and remain silently on a shelf as empires rise and fall, wars rattle the world or peace subdues it, new discoveries are made and tragic epidemics wipe out populations. I suppose the life of books rather than their owners was more of interest to me especially given this uneventful event of my birthday.

  I was due to pick up Dr Warburg's study of the Ars atrocitatis, but I would discover too late that I had mistook his office hours and had come too late. The events of the 7th Meditation were beginning to heat up and moved diligently forward to the imminent synthesis. The events were, admittedly, too fantastical in parts to be wholly believed, and so I decided to draw the conclusion that the author was writing in allegory with various literal episodes to confuse those who were not meant to read it. On the whole it was less a sumptuous narrative cycle and more a farrago of obvious portents and esoteric flourishes set in a series of mediocre stylistic curlicues, stilted and unconvincing dialogue, and deliberate attempts at deus ex machina. Perhaps, but I was a poor judge of all things prose, more keen on the technical apparatus in which prose was held: the book-objects themselves.

  If what I was reading had either occurred earlier, or was contemporary to what was happening, then I was already too late. I reasoned, not without some folly, that perhaps my reading of the text was what propelled it into reality. Or, perhaps this was all just a jape perpetrated by Castellemare or someone with his warped sense of humour. Be the text a joke or reality, it did little to ameliorate my sense of being dicked around. I desperately needed a break, a crucial repose from these intercalating texts and their motley coincidences. Besides, I thought to myself, I ought to at least go through the motions of pretending to reward myself for making another trip around the sun, as if it were something I earned rather than have foisted upon me by the lurching forward of time.

  I resignedly cast a disappointed gaze at the end of my cigarette, shifting the blame to the object rather than to myself. For no real reason, the world felt somewhat changed. There was nothing tangible I could identify that could rationally prove my feeling, and I speculated that it was merely the echoing effects of the synthesis having occurred in the book. And as much as I wanted to discard the book, I could not help myself from returning
to it in an effort to learn more that would be of some use to me. Since it was my birthday, I could not resist the inveterate temptation to reflect on the past, much of it orbiting all that had been caustic, embarrassing, disappointing, or even traumatic. If this were a novel, and me the protagonist, it would be far too late to establish the precedent of my character through an appeal to anecdotes in the past that would somehow give my bony person more flesh, and even less convincing cause for redemption or to win a reader's sympathy.

  On this day I decided to avoid all bookstores, which was harder than one could imagine given the narrowness of how I perceived my surroundings: seeing a city only in terms of an internal map of bookstores, libraries, and the like. I had to shake the effects of what I had read which was disturbing in its own way. I found myself at the liquor store and thought to replenish my scotch supply – if anything, I could signal my anniversary by drinking enough so as not to feel or remember it. However, I knew what would actually happen: I would return home and sink into drunkenness only to launch back into my sleuthing with more determined zeal. I was hardly the type who, as they drank, fell into that idle and lazy state of repose, but rather was a “working drunk.” Perhaps it was only work that made me happy, and the bite of the scotch would not be deep enough to persuade me otherwise.