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.
“May I conduct a small search now?”
“Oh, my, I must be quite a disappointment for you today. The Library is closing for a small while. We are catching up on inventory of our holdings. Many books have transferred in and out of the Library this past while, and we have a great deal of work to do. So, no, I'm afraid we are closing fairly soon.”
“When will you be open again?”
“That I cannot say for certain. This work will take some time, but do check back with us at your leisure.”
“When is this book due back?” I asked, indicating the Ars.
“Given your patronage, you are free to keep it for as long as you like on what we call a perpetual renewal basis. The Library has given me the instructions to allow you to take your time with it. Do keep it safe.”
“So, I can keep this book forever?”
“No, that is impossible. We only rent and borrow our books. We never own them. The Library owns them all. But we, we die, and the books change hands, and when there are no more hands, they return here. But I must regretfully ask you to leave as we are now officially closed.”
And so out I went, back through the tunnel and mysteriously re-emerging in my apartment, Ars in hand. There was a handwritten note placed conspicuously on my bathroom mirror:
Betrayed twice by the same coin. May you suffer my eternal returns.
I reasoned that the author of the note was none other than Castellemare. I also came to the conclusion – albeit without solid evidence – that if all events were predetermined, that there were two scripts. The script Castellemare had me follow, and a higher one that he did not have access to: the meta-script of the Library. My obtaining of the Ars may have not been in Castellemare's script. The cryptic threat at the end of the note gave me worrisome pause. Did Castellemare mean to do me harm, or was this merely a petulant swipe, an empty threat designed to induce anxiety? Or, was this just another twist in the plot and him playing a role that would lead me where the narrative was to lead me? Given that Castellemare was out of my communicative reach, there was no hope of me rubbing it in to satisfy my need for revenge in having been strung along. I could take some solace in the fact that my goings-on were somehow communicated to him. However, the need to get some measure of revenge was still burning within me. There was no need to involve any of these enigmatic persons any further, for it would serve no real purpose. In fact, I would have most likely given them the reason and means to sabotage me.
There would probably be no real harm in me possessing the Ars atrocitatis given that the events written therein were a foregone conclusion. As the Library has shown me, there is really no such thing as plagiarism, for every work written has been written by every possible hand. In the last two years, I have witnessed – or at least read, amounting to very much the same in the Library's view – books changing authors, so that something like the Red Lion had a roving authorship. What harm in me making claim that this book was mine, that I authored it? That I was the author of this book was an odd touch, perhaps suggesting that the Library had an ironic sense of humour. But, in the end, and given my involvement, I felt entitled to being the author, for had I not authored these events in my own way, bringing about the synthesis? I could have spent the last two years living or writing this mystery, and I found that there really was no difference. How very much the recycling of modernist aesthetics. I end with one more story, the continuation and conclusion of a dream of a stairwell many of us descend:
The Stairwell of Mequitzli II
The severity and frequency of the dreams have since subsided. In their place are hallucinations of mirrored prisons, the travels of a coin, the paradoxes of grammar, and all manner of things that seem arcane, unsolicited by even my own imagination.
I am still upon this endless downward descent, but its purpose - nested in its very nebulous purposelessness - gives me strange comfort. I hear murmurs emanating from these stone walls with their crude bas reliefs, a singing report of what happens outside in a place I have long ago since been barred rejoining. To believe these melodies, I am told that the outside has less and less need of books. I am told that the people participate in a kind of illusory cloud, connected to everyone and to no one. I can feel a waft of lonely cold whenever I touch the wall, and I now know that it is this enclosure, this infinite stairwell, which protects me.
This is not a prison after all. The walls that encircle me actually should be understood in their inversion; the walls encircle the world, and I am walking in the only free space left.
The walls continue to morph and tell me stories of the outside, filtered and translated into a lasting mythology. True, the symbols and icons have become cruder, but they are a direct reflection of what occurs in the prisonhouse of the world outside, which is actually an inside, a tragic shell. These symbols, roughly hewn, their sneers twisting, the agony and lament of a world that can no longer express its feelings because it has lost all intimate contact with a language it once knew. And me? I am disconnected from this lost tribe as well, and can hardly remember a time when I participated falsely among them. Since I started this descent, it did not take me long to realize that I'd wind on down further - forever, perhaps. Another tribe will rise from that world with its principles fresh, its language an exploratory limb curiously encountering what is around it. New words and symbols will form. The same problems that have afflicted the tribes of before will come to afflict them, too, in time...And, in time, they will realize the boundaries of their space and not be able to escape them. By then, the symbols will become cruder once more, the opulence and daring innovation of their myth-making will atrophy until their entire history becomes a flattened mush of uncertainty and despair. They will have created new gods that will eventually leave them, or will become ghostly and mute. Wars will mark one part of their decline; hostility toward creation and difference will finalize their denouement. I will be a witness from outside, this outside that appears like an inside, a winding core that has no other name but time itself.
There is a solemn kind of joy that marks a journey of this kind. I am consigned to this state of reading the history and myths of a people through the impressions upon the walls that emerge and stretch their shapes. It is the impression of their phenomena that I scan in this perpetual twilight descent. Will the imprisoned tribe ever learn something? I cannot say. Their cruelties will continue to amass, and eventually go unrecorded. I cannot bear the responsibility of being the universal memory of so many tribes coming and going, of times, of grand epochs and declining eras of madness and violence. So, I refuse to remember beyond what I choose to. I continue to scan these walls as if they, and not me, were moving before my eyes.
I gaze deep into that pit, that chasm, and yet feel no fear. It is all that is unknown and free. Yet I do not elect to toss myself into it. There is something holding me to my slow descent upon these stone stairs. I cannot let go of the desire to know and to see and to understand whatever will come next, even if what comes next is just a variation of what happened long before. Perhaps this is my hope - that something new, truly new, will come to pass. I may be disappointed, but both hope and future are inexhaustible.
If the architecture of this mysterious place is an indication, then the future may not be as inexhaustible as I had imagined. I do not know if it is my imagination from far too long traveling in this place, but it seems that the stairs are narrowing. This is the only pattern I know, so I cannot say with certainty if it will continue. But perhaps one day the stairs will be so narrow, the walls so close, that I will have no choice but to make that misstep that sends me hurtling down into that abyss. Perhaps, again, the pattern will change and the steps will widen once more. Peering over the edge does not furnish me with an answer since the steps may have been narrowing gradually for so long and far, and one can only see so far in this place.
Time here seems to be measured by space. Distance is what records time, but not indelibly. I begin to wonder if when I pause to rest, or in those long stretches of dreamless sleep, if time stops. If this were the case, I also wonder if time is contingent upon my progressive descent, and what would happen if I chose to turn around and ascend - would time inside that vast prison go in reverse? Although I toy with these thoughts, I will not put them into action since I understand so little that I would not impose my arrogant experiment upon something that is perhaps its own perfect design. I must view the steps I have passed to be no longer existent.
I have yet to encounter any other travelers upon these stairs. Either they are immortal - as I may be - and so would not expire for me to find their bodies, or I am alone. Or, perhaps, I have yet to cross the distance required to encounter their corpses. If someone has passed before me, was that person the author of these carvings that have become cruder with each passing step, or am I right in my speculation that these carvings are the symbolic impression of the immense prison on the other side? I have become weary of my own company, the torment of circuitous thinking that companions my endless descent. However, I have become accustomed and resigned to my own company for so long that I cannot imagine what horror another being would be.
I have come to the following conclusions:
If there is a meaning to the carvings upon the wall, they cannot be known simply by examining them
The context of these carvings is forever denied me.
The meaning of the wall carvings is precisely its own.
The carvings are endless, even if their variations are finite.
The author of these carvings must either be plural, generational, or otherwise by an immortal hand.
None of these conclusions satisfies the philosophical mind, but these are the only conclusions I can conjure. An endless narrative with no meaning or purpose any can divine, rumbling downwards for an inestimable distance, expressions that are both alien and familiar simultaneously or otherwise gain in meaning only by the imposition of the viewer. To contemplate something infinite, with its finite variations, usually results in the weak habit of assuming some kind of order to make sense of utter meaninglessness (beyond it being simply an expression). Every carving contributes to the endless whole, but no individual artisan has any knowledge of this. It is a synergy of an infinite metanarrative, and all play their parts in it unwittingly.
Is it god? I think not. I now dismiss the very idea that this is perfection, perfection being an attribute assigned by the limited minds of humans. This simply is, free of any discernible purpose or right and wrong. The stairwell, the chasm, the carvings upon the walls - all of it merely”substances” itself. Without will or agency, it merely functions, a Spinozistic kind of deity that is in and of everything. I have attempted every form of analysis gifted unto me by human knowledge, and yet I have not come up with anything more definitive by way of adequate explanation. I have sampled the mystic state, trying to comprehend this temporal non-space, throwing myself into hallucinatory trances that only seem to reflect back to me the variegations of myself. The carvings haunt my dreams, and I have attempted to perform an analysis on them, partitioning what I think to be dominant themes and motifs that may yield some sort of clue - all for naught.
My memories continue to flee from me, being replaced only with my time here. I can dimly remember what it was like before I embarked on this descent, a place that I now know with more visible assurance was in actuality a prison. I can faintly recall the long hours spent in argument and dialogue with contemporaries on abstract matters of the universe we had no hope of solving, and my conclusions to them would inspire them to declare me a nihilist. But it is not that I do not believe that there is no meaning, but that it is unknowable, and no method will decipher the metanarrative be it through logic, historical documentation, art, or mysticism. Something unknowable does not mean that it does not exist, but that our capacities are limited.
I am beginning to lose my language. It becomes harder to think in words. The new language that has rooted itself in my thought, supplanting the very human tongue I once knew intimately, is made up almost entirely of images - the carvings on the wall that are so many voices of a kind, their petroglyphs occupying a roughly similar orbit in my mind as it does the winding descent of this eternal shaft. I am occasionally paralyzed by a sudden internal luminary flash, a grand cataract of white light that hobbles me and threatens to send me over into the chasm if I am not quick and careful enough to plant myself upon the steps. Also, there are moments of quite uncomfortable chill, a draft issuing from the wall that numbs me.
Postface:
With one last gesture before abandoning all the rudiments of spoken or written language, before a complete consummation by thinking in pure symbols, it should be said that the petroglyphs' meaning has finally disclosed itself fully. Whether my sanity has been confiscated in my immeasurable duration here, I cannot say and leave it to those inside the walls to discern. I see in cycles three, a “memnoir” of sorts. I see an infinite library from which is plucked a singular narrative bolt that cuts across the day leading into the crepuscular end. I see what is born of paper and ink, the black and white genesis of a world that disperses its contents freely and vastly without bounds into the vacuum. From this unthinkable library comes unnatural books, books that only the Library destines to be in the hands of some at particular times, despite the caretaker librarian's efforts to suppress the will of the Library itself. From paper and ink comes the synthesis of a man who will stand as the full incarnation of atrocity, horror, and liberation.
The second act is composed of fire and voice, painted in red and gold. The foretold man, the product of a very meticulous synthesis of an artist, a scientist, a madman, a prophet, a figure of pure anonymity, and a philosopher comes to ruthlessly dominate desire by its unfettered emancipation.
The last act, where the knife of history herself glints with its one steel finger, is smoke and ash. The grey and silver of this act brings the narrative to its circular closure, and I see the reprise of a new feudalism take root after a cataclysm not easy to put into description. A new series of gods supplant the old in that cyclical fashion where things always repeat, but repeat differently. I grant as many clues as what will come to pass, as it must and so will it be, as a language of symbols permits. Gimaldi and Castellemare, Albrecht and Sigurdsson, Calembour and Schulmann. These names do not register any alarm for those who come across them as of yet, and perhaps never. But those who encounter these names in whispers without mouths ought to take note of them.
To say that any of this has come to a conclusive end is folly. The acts I have spoken of signal the beginning, and even if this appears at the end of some tome, it is but the first signatory of a dramatic pact between fiction and its opposite where their differences are harmonized to the point of abolishing their distinction.
And so ends the report of my quest, but the beginning of an impossible thought, a seventh meditation. I tarry no further but to delve into that impossible thought as the stairwell narrows to such a point that it becomes infinitesimal in ratio to the wall, and all becomes an absorbent chasm where not even light escapes its totality and inconceivable mass. I trouble myself with a meditation that will chart different course for you and me. It is a meditation bequeathed to both of us, on a stairwell or in an illusory prison. Ponder still this one thought, this one maddening meditation that will incite such a chorus of perplexity and perhaps extreme vexation: libraries infinite, stairwells without end, and mountains without their valleys.
How can we even think of Gimaldi without his Castellemare? I cannot read the signs well, but maybe you can.