by Richard Farr
The one positive thing those first weeks was that you’d begun to draw. It wasn’t a skill you’d ever had, but you were visibly trying to teach yourself, on every scrap of paper you could find, like a frustrated mute seeking another line of communication. Old envelopes. The back of a foot-long Costco receipt. A yellow pad. Unintelligible squiggles at first, they morphed into thumbnail-sized kindergarten images: chairs that looked like a pile of sticks and faces that looked like potatoes. Then plausible houses emerged, and groups of stick figures. There was something that looked vaguely like a cave, with more figures, and you did that one many times, and though the features were hazy, the bodies gradually became more detailed, more accurate. Next you produced a larger, full-page outline of a woman’s head; it was much more sophisticated, and though you left the face blank, I knew immediately that it was Iona.
“That’s your mother, Daniel. Iona. She was trying to find out about the Mysteries when she—when she died. And you wanted to carry on that work.”
“Yes,” you said, but when I asked you about drawing the face, you looked away.
Then the drawing of Kit. It was on a totally different level again, like something a beginning art student had taken a week to complete. Head and shoulders, it was, with the head turned slightly. And the striking thing wasn’t just that you’d drawn her face, but that you’d made it so real. With full eye contact.
I could easily have believed, and part of me wanted to believe, that in some sense this was a memory. Were you really dredging up the fact that once you’d had a thing for the green-eyed Russian girl, who you’d found so friendly and yet so oddly resistant to the Calder charm? But you didn’t keep the drawing to yourself, and you didn’t show it to her either. Instead, in private, you handed it to me. Presented it to me. Made a gift of it, with a formal gesture and a look that was hard for me not to read as amusement.
“For me, Daniel? Thank you. But why?”
“It’s Kit.”
“Yes, I can see that. You’ve done it so well, especially her eyes. She looks—she’s so—it’s a really good drawing. But why are you giving it to me?”
As if I didn’t know! As if I didn’t know that somehow you knew. By then, I’d already begun to see that your silences and absences hid a strangely sharpened intuition. You knew things it was surprising you knew. You knew things you couldn’t possibly know.
I put the drawing away on the slatted IKEA utility shelf in the basement, under my collection of five identical black T-shirts. It would be safe there and not in anyone’s way. I was grateful for it, and I made a genuine effort not to slip it out and stare at it more than four or five times an hour.
You know how Kit never seems to think about her appearance? Old jeans, no cosmetics, ponytail held in place with the blue rubber band from her mother’s unread newspaper. So it was a mild surprise, a couple of mornings after you’d given me the sketch, when she reached into her day pack, pulled out a small hairbrush, and asked if I’d fix her hair.
I probably spent about half an hour just staring at the brush with my mouth open. It was an ordinary black plastic thing, five bucks at the drugstore, but it sort of amazed me, like I’d been offered the first-ever glimpse of a scientific instrument from another planet. Whoa! In the depths of that secondhand Lands’ End day pack, Kit carries around a hairbrush! Fascinating! My whole concept of who she was shifted subtly at that moment. I don’t mean it made her better or worse. It just made her someone who sometimes carried a hairbrush around, and I’d never thought of her like that before. It opened up a whole world of other possibilities. Delicious trivial secrets about her that were still out there by the dozen, waiting to be known. Maybe she loved Indian food? Or was allergic to cats? Or quite liked early Taylor Swift, but had never admitted it to anyone because it would fry her credibility as a fan of Russian punk? I had no idea! Whole continents to explore—
“Morag? Can you?”
“Sorry. What?”
“Brush my hair out. That’s all. Do you mind?”
Mind? Was she kidding? I couldn’t hold my hands steady. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think, or string a sentence together. I was so afraid of my own feelings that I blurted something idiotic like Your hair looks fine. After which, naturally, I wanted to stab myself and crawl away to die, because now she would shrug, as if nothing in the world mattered much, and put the brush back in the bag, or worse, ignore me and turn to Rosko, and tell him a joke and ask him to do it instead, in which case I’d have to stand there and watch him do it, and feel horribly excluded, and on top of that feel ashamed of having such ridiculous feelings.
She didn’t ask Rosko. Instead she took my hand, placed the brush in it, and gave me a look that made me feel like I was trapped in front of a heat lamp and might get blisters on my eyelids. So I brushed her hair. And it was a strange experience, because while I was doing it, the rest of the universe, including not just you and Rosko and the kitchen table, but all hundred billion galaxies, simply vanished, ceased to exist—evaporated and gone like a snowflake. Later, when she left, the universe showed up again, or enough of it did for me to watch from the kitchen window as she walked away up the street, trailing her fingers against the side of a yellow car. I felt violently, insanely, murderously jealous of the car. To get over the feeling—and maybe hide myself from the sheer embarrassment of having had it—I put my face in my hands and closed my eyes and took deep breaths, only to discover that I’d just perfumed my entire consciousness, every nook and corner of my mind, with the scent of her.
That’s when I gave in. That’s when I admitted to myself that for the first time in my life my emotions were not mine to control—had been, in fact, hijacked. It was thrilling. It was frightening too. And (how’s this for irrational?) it managed to make me pissed off even at Kit. I didn’t have the time for this. I was too preoccupied with Really Important Stuff, like saving you from a condition I didn’t understand and saving the world from a threat I didn’t understand or even believe in, but had to believe in because I’d seen it with my own eyes. Now, of all times, when I was trying to play the part of Morag Chen, Metaphysical Detective (Private Eye: Clients Include Daniel Calder and the Rest of the Human Race), how dare this tall, calm, kind, sane, funny, sensible, sarcastic goddess wander into my life and pick me up and pull me down without permission into this whirlpool of sentimental, self-indulgent longing? I had romance novels for this. Captured by Love. Hunter’s Heart. Tonight and Forever. I can read one in an hour. I can scratch that obscure emotional itch without examining it too closely. I don’t even mind that the narrator’s always a thinking girl’s nightmare, or that her dreamy stud-muffin of a savior is a spray-tanned chunk of lunk with a chiseled jaw, a Rolex collection, and the conversational skills of Washoe the chimp. Consume, toss aside, get on with other things. For years, that’s been my technique for not admitting to myself that I’m a wee bit confused about certain feelings. My technique for coping with Lorna when she tells me one more time that it’s a lonely life in an archaeological camp, but I’ll meet a nice boy eventually.
Yekaterina Pavelevna Cerenkov. She was never meant for you, and it wasn’t my fault that being pickled in testosterone prevented you from seeing it. So I want you to know this, D: as soon as I admitted to myself how I felt—and still without even the slightest shadow of a reason to think she was interested—I made a decision to expend zero emotional energy on feeling guilty about it.
OK?
Got all that, Daniel Calder? Not going to hate your “twin sister” for not being who you thought she was?
Good.
Now we have that sorted out, you can stop biting your nails and listen. Because, kiddo, it’s story time. By the fireside. At whatever’s left of your local library.
CHAPTER 2
THE FLAME OF KNOWLEDGE
After Ararat, after Quinn’s death, you might have expected the Seraphim to deflate—a balloon without the helium. You might have thought that thousands of believers being fried where they stood wo
uld put off potential converts, or at least make them think twice. But it was just the opposite. The message of Julius Quinn had been confirmed, it seemed, and the new system of belief became an irresistible flood, carrying away Christians, Muslims, Hindus, don’t-knows, and atheists without distinction. Millions of people who had been merely curious about the Seraphim—and who had also, perhaps, sorta-kinda believed in an afterlife (which is to say: they’d been told to believe it when they were children and had never given it a minute’s further thought)—were finding to their own surprise that this time they really truly did believe it. The stairway to eternity! Complete with friendly Architects, like event volunteers in blaze-orange safety vests, waiting to give a hand up onto the first step! Amazing how many people wanted to give away everything they owned, and leave their families if necessary, and get in line.
The Seraphim were quiet, nonviolent revolutionaries: nice, ordinary people carrying their smiles door to door, where they fingered their narrow white scarves and spoke with calm confidence, like people who’d already seen the future and wanted only to share. They were polite about their infinitely large promises, not trying too hard to persuade but giving away copies of Anabasis (“complete with the new introduction”) while proclaiming with great satisfaction the Coming of the End, the Beginning of Infinity, the Immanence of the Post-Human Eternity. Students with half-baked beards. Middle-aged ex–soccer dads in khakis. Retired people with walking sticks and neon-white dental implants, neither of which they’d need much longer because apparently the “unembodied” neither walk nor chew. Theirs was not a religion, they always reminded people: not a “mere faith.” What Quinn had revealed, thanks to the Architects, they spoke of as if it was a brilliantly original but well-confirmed scientific theory. The deep truth at last about humanity’s nature and destiny.
We hadn’t been back in Seattle more than a week when I had my own doorstep encounter. A well-scrubbed, perky couple in their twenties, clipboard and all: they might have been going door to door for a local election. “Ascend!” they said. “Come with us, and we will ascend to the realm of the infinite!” It made me think of those freshly dead saints you get in baroque paintings—surrounded by a winged rugby scrum of angels, eyes rolled back as if Tasered by the Lord, being borne up into a cumulonimbus heaven. No thanks. I cut the conversation as short as I could, because I didn’t want anyone putting two and two together. There were rumors, you see: rumors about a helicopter, which a survivor had seen escaping from the summit just before the eruption. Those people would have been oh, just fascinated to discover that Bill Calder’s son, plus that Asian girl who helped with the Akkadian translations, had been aboard.
“Very interesting,” I said, taking yet another copy of the familiar red book. “I’ll be sure to read it.”
“Please do. It will persuade you.”
They seemed so horribly, horribly nice. Moony, earnest, harmless. I was careful to keep us both out of sight after that, and it was only partly because I didn’t want us to draw attention from the Seraphim. On the streets of Seattle, like everywhere else, there were meetings, demonstrations, counterdemonstrations, demands for information, kicking and screaming. Ordinary life, like a layer of old paint, was beginning to blister and peel.
And then the burnings began in earnest.
When we’d left for Crete in search of your dad, a whole month or lifetime earlier, there had been, what, a couple of dozen cases of unsolved library fires around the world? It got some airtime, sure—a shockingly novel form of cultural terrorism, like the sledgehammering of antiquities in Iraq. (People said the same things about one as they had about the other. Being ignorant of their own history, they were filled with self-righteous amazement that a culture could believe it was a good thing to destroy knowledge and obliterate the past.) But the targeted institutions were small and scattered, and I remember feeling oddly comforted, as if the world had dodged a bullet, when the number of incidents didn’t snowball.
This time, the number snowballed.
The first big story was a blaze at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin—a modern building full of very old stuff. They lost “several dozen of the world’s oldest surviving biblical and Islamic manuscripts, among other treasures.” Two days later, it was the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge: plenty of historic carved bookcases destroyed, but their first edition of Newton’s Principia miraculously saved. The day after that, the Theological Hall at Strahov Monastery in Prague, another famous seventeenth-century library and described by one devastated bookworm as “the most physically beautiful library in the world,” was totally gutted in the middle of the night. At which point some blogger did the digging and discovered many more recent fires (or attempted fires) around the world at other less-picturesque venues.
The timing was quite something: I’d been reading to you, and our latest bedtime story was Partridge’s unpublished manuscript. Burning the Books: What Really Happened at Alexandria. I’d picked it up because I thought maybe, just maybe, talking to you about him and our misadventures in Rome might knock something loose inside you. No luck so far, but the book was a page-turner.
It starts with the headline stuff, the famous names, the human-interest clickbait. It’s 48 BCE, and handsome Roman badass Gaius Julius Caesar is down in Egypt visiting beautiful Mesopotamian badass Cleopatra. The city she rules makes Glorious Rome look like Inverness on a wet Sunday in winter: it has the greatest roads, the greatest temples, the greatest festivals, the greatest public art of any city in the world. And the cultural crown jewel is the library, by far the most impressive ever. Gaius Julius’s ships have rock-star parking in the harbor, right next to it. For the glam couple, it’s a multipurpose trip: trade, diplomacy, cultural exchange, feasts and celebrations put on at great expense to impress the unwashed masses, and time left over to make the beast with two backs on a solid-gold bed in the palace.
While Jules and Cleo are lying there amid the damp silk sheets with silly grins on their faces, one of the Roman ships catches fire. Nearly burns the library down.
Oops. An embarrassing accident!
Or that’s the official story. Partridge leaves you hanging at the end of the chapter, but you already know he doesn’t believe it.
He jumps narratives at that point, gives you the history of the saráf, the shadowy organization with—like Seraphim—a name from the Hebrew for “burn.” According to Derek P, the saráf were the ultimate fundamentalists: their mission was getting us back to the language of the gods by burning away all the corrupt, merely human knowledge. Simplify simplify simplify, that was their mantra, like all the other fundamentalists since. Save humanity from itself by cleansing the mind of impurities! Wipe away the fog of civilization! No need for any of it: we have the Answer Book right here!
He told us the saráf had a nickname; do you remember that? The Fire Seekers. Because of their taste for arson, but also because they were obsessed with the idea that the gods had first visited humanity at a volcano. And would return to us at a volcano.
But back to the smoke-choked harbor in Alexandria. Partridge says that Caesar’s “accident” is, like the biblical version of Babel, another cover story. The flames didn’t spread from the ship to the library. They spread from the library to the ship—a deliberately set fire that went out of control. Caesar (and Cleopatra, and the head librarian too) were saráf. Alexandria was their big project: the world’s greatest-ever pile of manuscripts, preferably unique ones. Put in one place not to preserve them but to more efficiently destroy them.
The rest of his book piles up evidence that Alexandria was only the tip of the iceberg. Or should I say the tip of the volcano? There were big, important libraries at Nineveh and Pergamon. Ugarit and Knossos. Babylon and Nippur. Ebla. Constantinople. Ephesus. Stone buildings housing clay tablets. Or, in the later ones, papyrus scrolls. Not much combustible material, and their only sources of heat or light would have been half a dozen clay lamps running on animal fat. But when you look at the ruins? Infe
rno, every time. Listen to this, D. I’m quoting him from memory, but that’s OK, because my memory’s a photocopier:
Imagine yourself arriving in a foreign country. You come to a broad valley, where felled trees, all that remains of a great forest, lie scattered across the land. As you watch, teams of people are busy collecting them, working together, stacking them carefully in the middle of the valley. A neat, symmetrical tower is forming. What is your theory? What are these people doing? One theory is that the stack of timbers is the beginning of a great building. A permanent structure, certainly; perhaps a monument to one of their gods.
But there is another use for tall piles of timber.
The evidence I have found is that the major libraries of the ancient world were created deliberately and lovingly indeed. One document boasts that at Ephesus they managed to accumulate unique copies of works in Phoenician, Coptic, Aramaic, and even whole languages for the existence of which no other evidence now survives, from as far away as India, Morocco, and the Ethiopian Highlands.
These institutions were created by the saráf as sacrifices to the flame of purity. They were designed for the efficient destruction of knowledge, not its preservation.
They were anti-libraries.
Partridge was fond of irony: he called that chapter “The Flame of Knowledge.”
“Seraphim,” you said without hesitation, when we looked at the pictures from Strahov together. “Purification. Preparation.”
You seemed a little obsessed: you even found an old atlas in the Eislers’ shelves, a huge blue hardback with WELTATLAS in gold caps on the spine, and hunted for the sites, pointing them out to me and marking the pages. It was a surprise; it showed a level of understanding I hadn’t thought you capable of and made me just a little more confident that you—all your normal mental abilities, along with your memories too, and that most obvious missing thing of all, your sense of self—had been obscured, not erased.
