The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  “If you say so, but you continue to hold to this idea that there is some entity or outside that is responsible for this place, completely disregarding the possibility that this is the very base of the universe itself, that there is no deeper floor or foundation, that beneath all of this slush is nothing more... than just slush.”

  “I know this not to be true because you have not considered the light. There is an origin to this light.”

  “Is there an origin to a circle? Is there a foot upon which we can say a circle begins? Perhaps all has emerged as is, and the light that concentrates into this slush originates from the place from which it has been variegated. It is possible for light to converge and diverge many times, to break into separate hues, or by the concentrated angles meeting at a point to reproduce a solid white beam.”

  “Then what you are saying is that there is no original source to this projection, that it is a cyclical motion of light to and from the projected zone. And so it might be just as true to say that this place is simply a projection of the projected universe.”

  “An interesting thought experiment, I suppose. Yes, it is possible that we are the projected and not the projectors. But, perhaps there is a third possibility. Perhaps both the projector and the projected are the same thing and that it is only a matter of taking turns so that we produce the light that makes the world, and the world produces the light that makes us.”

  “I find this paradox offensive,” Tariq argued. “Even in circular processes there must be, according to the rules of time, a beginning. That beginning can only occur in one place, thus meaning either my world or this realm is the zone of an originating projection.”

  “I am not one to dispute finer philosophical points, but you neglect the possibility that if time fixes an event in a particular place that this event is exclusive and not repeated elsewhere. It is possible that the original projection - if there is such a thing - could have simultaneously occurred in both your world and this realm. So, the same event beginning at two opposite points of a circle.”

  Tariq hesitated from discounting my conjecture as illogical. But I could tell by that dumb hunger in his eyes that he could not admit of that possibility without assuming that there was some original, singular event that caused two points in a cycle to begin. The authorship of one entity or event that bifurcated to create the possible cause I put forward. And so, I knew his type: perpetually condemned to assume that there must be another layer concealing the true, single cause of everything. I was tiring of Tariq’s presence and felt no obligation to pay him any further mind. Yet, he would continue to pose questions.

  “You have seen that there is nothing left to uncover. There are no doors or windows to other places. You know all that I know, which is very little or nothing. I think it best if you quit this place.”

  “Yes, you are partially correct,” he said haughtily. “I have exhausted your knowledge very quickly given how little of it you possess. So, I am revising my initial assumption that you are simply deceiving me for that would take a level of intellect you lack.”

  Tariq’s pointed jibe did not find a target in me, for I have not the ego required for such negative appraisals to take root and have value. He was, after all, just a minor irritant, an interruption in the slush.

  “But,” he continued, “I will evaluate for myself if I should linger in this place or continue pressing deeper into a beyond I am certain exists, leaving your sorry kind behind me to wallow in this meaningless slush.”

  Tariq stood in the slush for quite some time, his face hard with concentration. I went about my usual affairs: either stirring the slush or leaning upon the wand and looking up at the projections.

  “You know,” he began abruptly from his pensive reverie, “I was taught a very special way of reading.”

  “You may have mentioned that to me,” I said, really not wishing to spark further conversation.

  “Yes, it is a form of sanscript reading, or what can be known as reading between the letters, reading what isn’t there.”

  I smiled despite myself. How could I help it when he was taking pride in a skill that was the source of his obstinacy? Perhaps next he would try to read patterns in the slush, claim to see the face of god, a delicate and eternal order to the universe, anything that he could read that simply was not there except in the eye of the mystic reader.

  “Do you know how to return from this realm?” I asked him.

  “Of course I do!” he responded testily as though the question was beneath him, and yet I saw a flash of worry upon his face.

  Tariq would eventually find his way back out, no doubt frustrated by his encounter here and willing to discount it as a true or meaningful experience. I could see that he was let out in one of the analogues of this place: a desert. I do not know what else came of him.

  Others of my kind have told me (and none of us say more than a few words to one another per human year, and most likely over a lifetime not more than a few paragraphs total) that they have had the occasion of these encounters every once in a while. Or else it is recorded by inherited oral lore, such as the Englishman who was writing a poem and found his way here, and called it chaos, that maddening expanse between earth and hell. I have heard he had gone blind. Another who went blind later in life had based his short story on a small speck of infinite possibility, an aleph, after his visit here and being amazed by the multi-faceted granular crystals of the slush (this particular visitor was not overbearing in some pointless search; he was said to be a very endearing, kindly curious, accommodating sort of man). I do not know what link there may be to the visiting of this rainbow-making realm of slush and light and the occasion of blindness. Someone like Tariq, in a way, had come and gone in the same blindness.

  As I stir the slush, interminably, causing a new constellation to appear in someone’s sky, and then perhaps something else. A trick of the light, yes, and a glorious web of unique rainbows.

  43

  Overdue Fines

  I had enough of it all. I had enough of reading impossible books with their impossible scenarios. I had more than enough of reading my impossible adventures within them. The Library and all its contents were a menace if only because it was a beguiling paradox and because minds with fiendish designs exploited it. What I knew would not help or hinder me, nor would it function to save others. I could watch numbly while the same featureless people piled in and filed out of the library, each untouchably ignorant to the spectral mysteries that lay behind each shelf, or tucked in code within every book. It was doubtful that any patrons of any library on earth, save for but the select few, had any knowledge of a vast and potentially infinite library that replicated itself behind every stack, or from which would accidentally emerge a book so toxically dangerous that it would upset only those who chanced upon it or had the specialized knowledge to know that the book was not of this known world.

  Placed in its proper context, given the reality of diminishing returns that was the general public's literacy and historical intelligence in an age of apathy and vigorously promoted ignorance, those like Castellemare operated under the fundamental illusory assumption that the slippage of books from the Library posed serious and irreparable harm. This, of course, was not the case. There was no real and present danger, and as much as those like Castellemare and his archaic way of thinking believed the populace would take note of an odd book, the situation was largely harmless. The urgency to retrieve these slipped books, and the penalties exacted for failing to do so, was disproportionate to the actual conditions. Much ado about nothing, storm in a tea cup, and so forth: the exaggerated sense of importance assigned a task that was consequently quite meaningless. Since books were slipping from the Library, this could have meant two things: one, the Library in its structure or organization was flawed; or, two, the Library intended for these texts to be released into this known world at particular times for particular people. If the second premise was true, then what Castellemare and other self-important guardians of
the Library's contents were doing was actually working to the disservice of the Library itself.

  The synthesis meant this one thing: the rifts that occurred between the Library and this world was successfully utilized to bring about a man instead of a book. An impossible man, and a man I know myself powerless to stop. The synthesis was not just the merger and summation of the six “types” as I had read, but was the distillation of all the most exemplary persons of cruelty and atrocity contained within one man and his despicably potent will. The fool named Jakob Sigurdsson would be malleable to this man's will, and would seek in the synthesized man a new father. The infernal might and crooked ideas would supersede that of his historical forebears - murderers, sadists, torturers, genocidists all.

  I found it odd, and perhaps disappointing, that this was where my story ended. I no longer served any purpose, that purpose already having been served. And what of the many remaining loose ends, the false clues, the cul-de-sacs that caused me to digress from my determined role? Mere details and padding. The forbidden books I read, the ciphers deciphered, the convergence of various terrifying events, the feast or famine of leads... All of it merely those like Castellemare blowing proverbial smoke up my ass. Busywork. A twisted man's idea of something funny. And now what? The synthesized man walks the real world, and I am here left unenlightened, unfulfilled, as if I had been dragged along for so long just to waste my time and enhance my worries. The events from my first meeting of Castellemare near Vatican City up to the fulfillment of the synthesis had succeeded in doing perhaps just a few things: further developing my sense of insularity, distrust, and desire for solitude. I did not prosper from my learning of the Library; quite the opposite. I was handed a knot the size of the world.

  Leopold had left. The apartment beside mine was rented to someone who worked in an insurance broker's office. I kept walking leerily around my copy of the 7th Meditation, not sure what I should do with it. It was a pointless book now, a mere record of what happened. The book only had value when there was hope to prevent it from coming true. Now, it was little more than a moot historical document. It would have been too dramatic for me to burn it, but too sentimental of me to keep it. I was the one left holding the book while the characters were free to live their lives. As usual, I was the passive reader.

  For the longest time I felt that the backstory which alluded to Best Before 2099 was mostly a red herring. It gave scant references to Castellemare, prompted me to seek out this “Sigurd”, and gave me the cheap narcissistic thrill of reading about an alternate me. All this time I had completely neglected the lesson it was trying to teach me; namely, that my protest was against things and people that did not really exist. The Gimaldi in the backstory begged his protege to write the book his own was countering, to give his protest a relevant point of origin. In like fashion, my own attempt to protest against the synthesis would only hold if the synthesis itself was publicly accepted as having happened. Instead, my grievance would be considered the hallucinogenic thoughts of a madman.

  Names. A list of names now blank leads that never led to a solution since the mystery was more simply solved – or, rather, the plot was furthered by my unwitting and ridiculous need to solve the mystery. I never learned the identity of the unnamed narrator of the Backstory. I did not seek out the one named Alexa, thinking it pointless now. References to mirrors, libraries, stairwells, and the burning of books just sat in a useless clump – me sifting through the red lion's kill. I felt defeated.

  A possible act of revenge, or perhaps what was planned for me all along: I have toyed with the idea of declaring myself the author of a particular book that has gone for some time without one. Ars atrocitatis cannot be found anywhere, and no one could truly prevent me from writing it, in producing the modernized chronicle of what happened after the synthesis. I could couch it in fiction, I thought, although I had no skill in prose. Somehow I felt it was my responsibility, although it was far too late to warn anyone, at least the future could have access to the rise and terror of a one Dr Edward Albrecht. And so, perhaps, if this incarnation of atrocity turned out to be another misstep in history, another error, someone in the future could be warned when the narrative of the Library was pregnant with another such figure. An act of benevolence from the defeated. Or, perhaps, it would be a book given to torment another person just like me, strung along a similar mystery to become an essential catalyst to the launching of the next atrocity.

  A strange vacillating hum was emanating from my bookshelf. I approached it cautiously to investigate, and suddenly my eyes started to blur. The sensation was akin to being in a long, narrow tunnel. The spines of two contiguous books parted and warped to my peripheral vision, and just as suddenly I was standing in this tunnel bordered on either side by books – a faint glimmering light in the distance. I began to walk toward this light. Fluttering in the tunnel were orphaned leaves, unstitched from their binding. They were moving about too quickly for me to catch and read them. I finally reached the end of the tunnel where the light was emanating from and found myself in a familiar place accompanied by a familiar voice.

  “Welcome back,” said the voice. It was the Librarian. “Please shut the door behind you; there is an awful draft. Must be something quite horrible out there.”

  I complied with the request, pushing the heavy oak door closed.

  “I have the book you requested,” the blind Librarian said with a serene smile.

  “Which book is that?”

  He continued as if not registering my confusion. “It took me some time to find it. Someone had carelessly shelved it in the wrong place. The Library is generally very good when we are looking for something, but sometimes it cannot contend with the errors of others.”

  “Castellemare,” I said.

  “Oh, do you think it was him? I would not like to think so. He is usually so very careful in putting the books back in their proper places. The Library is one immense order, and it would be unfortunate if some custodian tried to hide books from the Library itself.”

  “Which book did I request? I don't recall making a request.”

  “Oh, no? I don't wish to dispute you, but I'm rather sure that you did make this request... Unless someone else made it on your behalf, but I would know if that were the case. I had a hold put on it. So, here is the book you requested.”

  And so there it was, the Ars atrocitatis, author: Gimaldi.

  “I will take this one from you and replace it on the shelf,” he said, pointing to my copy of the 7th Meditation which I did not recall having with me when I entered the tunnel. Numbly, I placed it on the desk. He felt for it with his hands and paused a moment.

  “Oh, I'm sorry, but this book is late.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Overdue. You will have to pay a small fine. I'm very sorry. It was due some time ago, I'm afraid.”

  Given the incredible immensity of the Library, the many mysteries it contained, its very existence as being of the highest and most inconceivable paradox, I could not believe that it would present me with something so common and mundane as an overdue library fine.

  “Um... Okay... How much do I owe?”

  “Let's see... forty-three cents.”

  I fished through my pockets and found no money. However, for some reason, the thirty facsimile shillings that I had taken from Angelo's body were there.

  “I'm sorry, but I don't have any money on me. I could go back and get my wallet if you like.”

  “Oh, please, don't bother,” he said kindly. “Whatever you have will be good enough, and we'll call it even.”

  I hesitatingly placed the thirty shillings in his patiently waiting hand. The Librarian smiled pleasantly.

  “Yes, this will do. I know that life can get very busy, and we forget what we have borrowed, but do try to return your books on time so as to be fair to others who may want to borrow them,” he politely reprimanded. After a time: “Will there be anything else I can help you with today?”

  “I have a
few questions.”

  The Librarian did his best to direct his lazy, blind eyes in my direction. “You have my attention and I am at your service.”

  “There was another book I... borrowed... some time ago, and it has gone missing.”

  “I am aware of the book of which you speak. A good samaritan found it and returned it on your behalf.”

  “Who was that?”

  “The good samaritan? I don't actually remember. An honest man, I would think, and good-natured to return a book rather than keep it at your expense.”

  “And where is Castellemare?”

  “That I do not know either. We custodians do not run into each other so often given the vastness of the Library. It can sometimes be years without seeing another living soul.”

  “But you are not technically alive... “

  “I am as alive as the Library. The definition of life need not be narrowed to those that have tissue. Anything else?”

  “Is there anything you could possibly tell me about Setzer, or maybe even the synthesis?”

  “Setzer... Setzer... I cannot say I recollect that name, but I could conduct a search in the Library.”

  “He was a living being, the kind out there,” I said, thumbing in the direction of the door before remembering that he was blind. “Out in the world.”

  “All that is out there is in here, and all that is in here may not be out there. You, of course, already know that.”

  “And the synthesis, my role in it, the -”

  The Librarian cut me off: “I am very sorry, but you are asking me questions better put to the books than to this forgetful old man. I do not know of this synthesis, and I certainly have no knowledge of any role you may have played in it. If anything knows the answer to your question, it is the Library.”

  Again, he smiled. Nothing could perturb him as if he were beyond any concern that did not deal specifically with the Library.