16

Excerpt 13-17 of the Backstory

 

“You've been listening to his corrupt teachings, haven't you?” accused Gimaldi with an unbecoming soreness.

“He had taught me things, yes, I guess, but I wouldn't say that he is 'teaching' me as you say.”

“I have no trustworthy friends in this world,” he moaned. “They have all left me for circus performers and illusionists. Alas, the liars have won.”

“I have not left you.”

“So you will write my book?” he asked me with a sudden surge of insistence and hope.

“No.”

“Then you have left me... far behind, to wither into dust, to be upstaged by heretics, liars, cheats, and robbers. If this is what you want, so be it. I feel a great loss in my heart, for I had such high hopes of you.”

“You don't understand,” I protested, ignoring the clumsy melodrama of his words. “I don't want to write the book because it isn't my place to do so.”

“Your place? Then, whose place is it? That alcoholic, Sigurd? His work is reminiscent of awful wailings in the night! Bedlam! With each sentence he writes, he destroys, confounds, distorts, fabricates, and befouls! That boy has erected a solid and impregnable fortress of imbecility, so my request could never be granted by a man whose mind is a workshop in Hell. He is a walking tomb of useless information. I chose you because you are clear, and because my work touched you.”

“It touched Sigurd, too.”

“But it touched you with sincerity. Sigurd can only be touched by his own fictions, and the pride that results from them.”

The tragedy of Gimaldi was beginning to disclose itself to me in his desperation, the way he pleaded with me, yet resignedly knew that all was lost.

He had asked me to his office at the university. His office was unusually scant of books for someone with such an impressive collection at his home. The office was almost a closet, furnished with a cheap plywood desk, a dying fern in a garish pot sporting some naïve faux-indigenous frieze, a squeaky chair, a badly painted bookshelf with Shakespeare titles and a set of “Proceedings of the Modern Language Society” dated 1972-1979. Why such a dynamic and mysterious man hid in such understated conditions could only be answered by the fact that he was a man who did not want to be found.

“The fact remains that I cannot write the book,” I said.

“Then let despair rule this day. This denial is little more than a repetition. I cannot teach today,” he said as he gathered a few items and began to depart in haste.

I tried to detain him, to explain why I felt unequal to the task. Besides, I didn't see the matter as one that was so urgent or significant. Why couldn't he have written his own book, and if modesty or mystery demanded, write it under a pseudonym?

“Why is it that you want me to write it? Touched or not, it's far too much pressure. I am just not capable of doing it. However, you know your own work best and what would be required to write a suitable prequel... So why not you?”

“Because I never wrote it,” Gimaldi confessed.

I was astonished.

“Who did?”

“Another Gimaldi. I only have this book because I took it from the Library. It is written by a Gimaldi far more superior than this shallow pitiable excuse of a scholar. I have claimed to have written it, but the truth is that it far exceeds anything I could compose by refined thought or eloquent prose.”

“This is quite the disclosure... I don't fully understand, but why is it so vital for me to write its prequel?”

“Because the book is an allegory. It is an allegory of what will come to pass. If you read carefully and apply some of its lessons to current events circulating around us, you will come to realize that you must stop Sigurd, and you must certainly stop Castellemare. You must write it so that the other Gimaldi is not forcibly attributed as the author of that atrocity.”

“I'm confused more now. What does Sigurd have to do with this? He's harmless, and he's my friend. And what is so dangerous about Castellemare? He just seems to be eccentric, a bit touched in the head. He also seems to be pretty well-off... Have you seen his house?”

“It is not that Sigurd is bad, don't get me wrong. It is what he will be compelled to do that should concern us. We must keep Sigurd away from Castellemare. And, for that matter, you should stay away from Castellemare as well. He is the facilitator of what will happen.”

“What's going to happen?”

“The horror of history.”

 

14

I didn’t get it. At all. Gimaldi claimed to have written a book that he actually didn’t, and he was asking me to write its prequel to prevent an alternate Gimaldi from being forced to be named the author of the very book I was being asked to author. There was something about a synthesis that was to take place as the setting for the prequel I was to write. I had to write something safe, Gimaldi said, that would function as a block to the real destiny of the synthesis taking place since it depended on the writing - and thus materialization - of the plot to occur. I still didn’t understand; I tried again. A book was going to be written and attributed to someone else, and in this book would be the fruit of a nefarious synthesis. I was being asked by this Gimaldi to write it before anyone else could, and thus prevent the outcome of the synthesis.

 

[An attempt at a synopsis of key facts. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I could have been directed to this one paragraph. But, owing to the absurd nature of this book, I am sure it could only have appeared at the appointed time.]

 

Gimaldi was unhappy with the state of Reason and Order in the universe and wanted to revise it, correct it, make it better. According to his book, it was not procedurally rigourous enough – it lacked precision and operational definitions. His book detailed the errors of Reason through a post-apocalyptic parable, referencing a new scholasticism or feudalism (the details are, indeed, fuzzy). Conversely, Castellemare was urging us to abandon the tenets of traditional Reason and embrace his vertiginous paradox philosophy of unreason. I could remember what Gimaldi said of doubting men, that they contained doubts in a clockwork universe that they hoped would preserve them if all mechanical Reason turned out to be wrong – a way of hedging one's bets if the gears chewed themselves to bit.

Castellemare stood as an angry smear on the face of an unavoidable future. Castellemare's views were too chaotic, and asked of any who subscribed to them to dissolve in that preternatural chaos. No, I would endorse Gimaldi on the grounds that his theories were life-affirming and hopeful of human achievement - not because these theories might loosely be based on truth, which they probably were not. Gimaldi's humanism was all-pervading in his character, and it was hard not to feel a touch sentimental about an enterprise that was most likely failed and idealistic. I tended to root for the underdog and cleave to lost causes.

I had a hunch that Castellemare was trying to hatch a chaotic plan to sabotage the linearity of existence. I know that sounds absolutely absurd and even melodramatic and stupid. But whatever this synthesis was that Gimaldi wanted to prevent, it was something perhaps worth stopping. Castellemare was just too much the villain in this case. I had to side with Gimaldi: he was the only one honestly pathetic enough to be the hero. Only heroes are pathetic until they win, whereas the villains are only pathetic in defeat.

Perhaps I had plunged myself into this with little regard to outside concerns. Sigurd's drinking habits were getting worse as he drifted from self-control entirely, and I had been too preoccupied to notice his rapid decline into dissipation. A bottle of bourbon a day became two, then three, and before long there was never a sober moment, no pause between his life floundering in cups. He had an instance of terrible violence, and the police, an event too sad for me to dramatize. I had been present when it all happened, and had I not been there to direct the arm of the law with some shred of sane context, things may have turned out much differently for my helpless friend. The event landed him in the confines of a hospital psych ward for observation.

Now it would be his emaciated body ambling down those sterile hallways, the meal time routines as the semblance of clockwork order, freely mixing with horrible hallucinations and violent bouts of withdrawal. But that place, oddly enough, was home for him. Among the other patients, he could thrive in an institutional version of Castellemare's Tain. I visited him. He complained about the nicotine patch they gave him in lieu of cigarettes, he plotted to steal some syringes and turn the medicinal tables on the orderlies, mumbled incoherent elegies to phantom people wandering in his hallucinatory fog, and was quick to accuse everyone of everything. The threats he issued had no singular target as he aired his vitriolic grievances at the blank, null-stub generality of the world. He insisted that the ward was an impediment to what he, with no mean sense of ego, dubbed his “research.” What this research was about was as focused and real as the intended target of his complaints. Despite the fact that I visited him regularly while he was undergoing observation and treatment, he took the opportunity to make me the target of his berating – but I had to keep in mind that his attacks were for everyone and no one, an attack for the sake of attack.

“You know, with one call, I could make sure we trade places... You think it's fun here? Can't even get a damn cigarette. And no books, either. Only bad condensed volumes of Reader's Digest bullshit. How am I going to do my vital research in this wretched place, this misbegotten son of a whore?... Yeah, they gave me a nice patch, those fucking draconian overlords of my sanity, ragabash poltroons... Slow down, you're getting loopy... Take the other half... Yeah, the blue one... Take the fucking valium! Christ, calm down.” He was performing both sides of the conversation while all I could do was watch and wait awkardly to take my leave.

He harangued the orderlies who were inured enough in this environment to take little notice or not take what patients said as personal. They didn't cajole him, but stayed the course of routine. That was their perfect defense: the passive resistance of maintaining order until the patient yielded to the regime of precision routine in the dull grey matte of the everyday. Sigurd's petulant attacks were patently ignored, and his angry questions and complaints were met by their dispassionate rote replies from hospital procedural rules. Every time I visited him, he conspiratorially confided in me that the hospital was in the pay of some nefarious figures who had every reason to see Sigurd stowed away. He claimed that the ward's single intent was to chemically lobotomize him. The charge nurse had informed me not to agitate him, and that he was on suicide watch. The nurse also alluded to some of his more violent antics against the orderlies and other patients. Fortunately for the staff, Sigurd was far too frail to pose much of a challenge.

This turn of events could not be appropriately be called saddening. No, it was an unnameable feeling. I sought the company and counsel of wiser heads.

 

Gimaldi sat with searching eyes, imploring me to forget the current plight of Sigurd as if matters of broader consequence should have been at the forefront of my attention. The snowfall was heavy and unrelenting, and he didn't want to go home. The bar was mostly silent and smoky, three elderly patrons drinking while huddled in packed silence at the bar, and us, at a badly scratched table with rickety chairs.

“No doubt you are taken with Castellemare's Tain. I, on the other hand, have no great spectacles to offer. And I will not debase myself in doing so, for a great thinker always regards fantastic and sensationalist things with suspicion, always wondering what the splendour is hiding,” Gimaldi lectured like a kind of drunk Socrates. “Your friend Sigurd's state of mind is a symbol of the result of Castellemare's flawed reasoning. His real reasons I can only offer a slight gesture, but let me tell[... “]

 

[One leaf apparently torn out as the numbering of the pages indicates that two pages are missing. Text resumes on following recto page.]

 

“I hope you will adopt the title I have chosen for it,” he said. “I am quite fond of Finis Logos as an appropriate title for the book you will hopefully write.”

“The End of the Word?”

“Precisely. Not world but word. And my counter-book will be the scene of a glorious rebirth. Yours will be closure, finality, what your generation so pines after, the apocalyptic; and mine will be the new beginning, the regenerative history, what someone of my historical proclivities desires most. And how could I begin something when the preceding has yet to end?”

 

[Another obvious removal from the text that would perhaps give all the information on the contents of the Finis Logos as tantalizingly referenced. The shift here from naming it De Imitatio Calembouri to this also follows a shift to the book being about a rebirth rather than a post-apocalyptic closure. It is probably another red herring. The remainder of this page is blacked out with permanent marker, and the last leaf to end the chapter has been torn out as evidenced by both the gap in page numbering and a scrap of the original page clinging to the binding. I had my doubts that the contents of this book had any relevance to me. It sounded as though this version of me was eager for someone to call the hand of language so that this Gimaldi could be known for its renaissance. It was a trite piece of theatre. At best, the configuration of this Gimaldi and Castellemare was cribbed from G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, in the polarity of that champion of order (Detective Symes) and the champion of disorder (the anarchist Gregory, aka “Thursday”)].

 

[Addendum note: Chapter 15 is also missing. I am beginning to realize that either a) Castellemare had planned for me to steal this book but wanted to remove most of the key passages that would allow me progress, or b) The pages were intact when I first took possession of the book and some unknown person has since removed them. According to where the pagination resumes, 16pp are missing. Text resumes at opening of 16^th chapter.]

 

16

I had learned later that Sigurd and Castellemare had been in frequent contact with one another. This served to unsettle me slightly, if not because it was done so discreetly, but it was the way men like Castellemare could attract the incoherent and misunderstood with the seductive philosophy of abandoning Reason for the bacchant revel of chaos. This was evidence of some level of collusion between the two. I felt it the sign of a terrible predator for someone to lure others in a state of weakness. Sigurd had recently been released from care and was now said to be visiting that posh home of Castellemare without inviting me.

Here is where events travelled into a strange province of circularity, of [Text missing. The text was missing here as well, blacked out to the end of the printed page with the remainder physically torn out. None of these removals look like an accident born of neglectful handling, but a deliberate action. I resolve not to take the bait of yet another bobbing mystery and read on. The book is coming to its natural, if not awkwardly set up, conclusion, but I am now missing a vital piece of the narrative if only because there would be no explanation as to why Gimaldi and the narrator decided to go see Castellemare, and their willingness to enter into some variety of labyrinth. There is no bridging material to explain these loose ends. It may not be important. The arc of the story had very little lift to begin with, and the clues of importance to me were sparse and scattered. At this point of the story, I gathered that they were going to be trapped in Castellemare's labyrinth, and the narrator would relent to write the book after all].

 

 

17

Even Gimaldi couldn't see any other option but to take up on Castellemare's challenge.

“We may never get out,” Gimaldi said. “That is always the risk, but hopefully our convictions are in league with the truth.”

“If we get out, then I will finally understand,” I said. “Then I can write the Finis Logos.”

We went to Castellemare's villa, and he greeted us with an excessive cordiality that merely masked his smugness. He led us to an unmarked door and said, “I guarantee that there is an exit, but you must first weave your way through the labyrinth. The entrance will be barred, so don't think of backtracking.”

A guarantee of an exit. If only the mystery would also have one, or perhaps the exit of the labyrinth and the resolution of the mystery would be one and the same. It seemed suspiciously orderly for someone like Castellemare – self-professed anarchic figure – to have a labyrinth as well as an exit. His may not have been chaos after all, but that troubling thought that gets us to question the guarantee of a clockwork universe: who fabricates and winds it?

And so we entered, and felt terribly anxious. It would probably be Castellemare's plan to let us die there if an exit was not found. Perhaps he was counting on us becoming desperate, making hasty decisions and causing us to further lose ourselves in this maze. This would vindicate his philosophy of chaos and non-resolvability, of paradox and defeat.

Gimaldi and I travelled down a corridor that led to a triangular room with two doors. The carpet patterns remained the same: red with gold trim, tracing that same interlocking pattern of red lions. One door was inscribed with the word love and the other with hate. We went through the south door (”love”) and came across another corridor leading to a quadrangular room and another triangular room, each with a variety of doors.

“We must mark our trail so that we don't repeat the same path,” Gimaldi said. “But I have no such marker.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Each room has the same items: a four by four plexiglass cube encasing some rare tome. Perhaps we could turn off the lights when exiting a room.”

“I do not see any light switches.”

Which was true. Pot lights kept the rooms illuminated.

“Then perhaps we should record the names of the books we come across. But I have no writing instrument, so we'll have to rely on our memories.”

The quadrangular room's book was the Liber Artemidorus, and the triangular room's book was the De Specificae Animaculum. We went through the right door of the quadrangular room and proceeded down the corridor before it turned sharply to the left and into a wall.

“Dead end,” I said. “Let's go back.”

One corridor led to a room and nothing more. To complicate matters, we encountered staircases, ladders leading both up and down, and the floor was sometimes recessed gradually - all this would cause us never to know with certainty what floor we were on. Some doors were locked on one side, and so we could only go through them by taking a roundabout route, only to return to rooms we had already traveled through.

Some doors only led to empty closets, yet all the doors looked the same. After two hours of trial and error, and encountering room after room (perhaps some we had already been to, but we couldn't know for sure), we came across a circular room with doors that branched from it - some on one side, and some on the other.

“Let this be our point of return,” Gimaldi said. “An anchor in this space to orient ourselves by. As long as there is no other circular room in this labyrinth.”

We entered another triangular room where there was another book, the Summa Necroticatis, and ended up in another corridor, but this one slightly different. It had a suspended corridor and three staircases above. We could not get to the corridor from there. So we returned to the circular room.

One of the doors from there led to a smaller circular room, with more doors. Once again, Castellemare's villa's architectural cunning exposed itself. While proceeding down one corridor, it appeared to fork, and at the fork, proceeding beyond the dimensions of the smaller circular corridor we had entered from. Upon closer inspection, we discovered a mirror.

“An illusion of space,” Gimaldi muttered, now becoming quite irritated.

When we returned to the larger circular room after another hour of searching, something peculiar had happened: the doors were in a different alignment since we had last been there. I heard a faint humming, and so my frightening hypothesis was confirmed: the room was revolving very slowly on an axis, like we were on the face of a large clock. Now it stood that nothing was stable. I reasoned that if this was the case, then we should proceed downwards to the source of the revolutions, to locate the pivot itself. After winding our way through rooms and taking any available ladder or staircase down, we finally located the bottom. Regrettably, it was a small circular room with only one door. When I opened it, there was a staircase that brought us up a few flights and into another room.

“Let us take stock of our progress so far,” Gimaldi said. “Where did the left door of the Liber Glamis lead us?”

“Back to the Summa Necroticatis room.”

“I see. And the right?”

“Mirrored corridor - dead end.”

“Then the path is clear. We head left to the Aegyptiae Anotatio room, up the ladder, go right through the Sed Contra Areopagitica room, down the left corridor, and out the Renuncio quo est room.”

But though we did this, we only encountered more of the same. I was feeling hungry and tired, but we could not risk sleep for fear that we would not recall the names of the rooms we had passed through.

Castellemare was more devilish than I had thought. The plexiglass cubes were bolted to the floor, the carpet was too tough to rip out, and so we had no way of marking our progress.

“Can we kick any walls in?” Gimaldi asked in exasperation, his reason petering out as tiredness came on. I tried to kick the walls, but to no avail. “How about the doors?” Solid oak, invincible hinges.

We thought of every possible solution. There were no debris, either, for the labyrinth was immaculately clean. There were more rooms than the ripping of our clothing into strips would make useful.

 

We spent two whole days there, now parched and weary. The hallucinations brought on by sleeplessness were also troublesome. But it was in this surreal state that I came up with the solution: to use Castellemare's philosophical object against him.

“I can't believe we missed it all this time,” I said with wild disbelief, half reproaching myself for not thinking of it earlier. “Come with me.”

And so we found one of the many corridors with a mirror. With two kicks, the mirror shattered. I gave a shard to Gimaldi and kept one for myself.

“What are we to do with these?” Gimaldi asked. “Slit our wrists?”

“No, we will mark our trail,” I said. That was when I placed the shard firmly against the wall and began walking, making a long scratch on the wall. When we got to the circular corridor, I explained the plan: “we mark all the doors, on both sides, with a large circle. Doors that we have tried that lead nowhere, we will scratch with an 'X' in the circle. Easy enough?

This had brought us to greater and greater degrees of success, but the most perilous was yet to come - especially owing to our tired state of mind and the effects of being so confined in a repetition of confusion. We finally came across the door that led us out of the labyrinth... into the Tain. To spend so long in a place where the walls were the same, defining the borders of one's visual perception, could have a serious effect - especially when one leaves such a place into its contradiction: infinite space without walls. When we entered, we both let out unearthly wails, and almost retreated back into the labyrinth. The sight of infinite space, though an illusion, was enough to destabilize even the most secured mind after any length of time in such maddening confinement. Gimaldi had evidently never been inside the Tain before, only heard of it.

Though Castellemare would not admit it, his labyrinth had been constructed from Reason, albeit a very complicated form of Reason. And Reason had led us out. Just as we made our way through the Tain, cries of joy and terror leaping from us, like the utterances of wild animals, our reflection was... replaced... with that of Castellemare's. He had entered the room to greet us.

“There can be a place for Reason,” I gasped in triumph.

“And another age ends, my little avatars,” Castellemare said. I did not understand what he meant until we left the villa...