The Body Library

by Jeff Noon

  “Miss Courtland? Of course, yes, that all makes sense.”

  “You know where she is?”

  Lewis hobbled up close. He studied Nyquist’s face in great detail, taking in every line and crinkle, every pockmark. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Are you afraid? Or confused?”

  Nyquist wouldn’t let him have the satisfaction. “I’m looking for Zelda. I’m looking for answers. That’s all.”

  “Oh, but I think you are afraid, John. I think you’re wondering who you are, really. Isn’t that true?”

  Nyquist tried to shrug off the accusation. But Lewis wouldn’t let it go. He said, “How’s your backstory? Well, let’s see. John Henry Nyquist. Late of Dayzone. Your mother dead at an early age, father missing, lost in the mists that plague that city. You were left to drag yourself up alone in a harsh, overbearing world. No wonder you find it so easy to get lost.” He didn’t give Nyquist any time to respond, adding, “But let me admit, I am at least partially to blame for your current circumstances.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I wrote a book called The Body Library.”

  With this statement, Theodore Lewis seemed to lose even more of his strength. He fell back against the wall and leaned there, one hand pressed to his chest as he tried to control his breathing. With an effort he made his way over to the stool in the corner of the room where he sat down. Nyquist stood near the window and waited for Mr Lewis to speak. He knew it would happen, he knew the story would emerge. The author’s lips moved and his tongue clicked at his teeth and he sighed. And then he spoke.

  “So you’ve heard of The Body Library, yes? You know of it?”

  “I’ve heard the title mentioned.”

  “But you’re not a literary man, I take it?”

  “Words escape me. They keep running away.”

  Lewis shrugged and settled back on his seat, his back against the wall. For the first time his face took on an air of calm. “That’s fine. That’s perfectly fine.”

  “Tell me about the book. Everything you know.”

  Theodore Lewis’s voice took on the soft, awed tone of an arch fetishist describing an object of desire: “The Body Library exists as a typewritten manuscript of three hundred and fifty-seven pages, plus numerous offcuts and early drafts. Because of the unique nature of the book, there can only ever be one edition. There were no carbon copies made. Such a thing would be impossible. And this fact alone makes it very precious.”

  “And you did all this by yourself?”

  “Myself and one other, a woman. Ava Beaumont.” He paused momentarily at the name, and his voice, when he continued, was heavy with loss. “Ava and I were married. Actually, we still are, but our union is no more, not in any emotional or physical sense. For this reason, she has reverted to the name she was born with.”

  “How are the book and the tower related?”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Try the beginning.”

  “Such thinking hardly applies to a book of this kind.”

  “Do what you can.”

  The writer nodded. He explained, “I was born to be a writer, telling stories from the earliest age possible. Because of this, most people naturally assume that I was born in Defoe.”

  “The exact center of Storyville?”

  “Yes. It’s thought that the very best writers come from that place. And that might well be true, but I fell into the world in a very different precinct: Graves. A sorry place, all told. A town where stories end, not begin. No writer would choose to be born there, yet such was my fate. I fell onto a grimy floor, with no known father and only a penniless drudge for a mother.”

  Nyquist noted how Lewis’s style of speech had changed now that he was in storytelling mode. He spoke like an old-fashioned author might.

  “From the dregs of existence I have crafted myself. So my stories were never concerned with the well-to-do, or the handsome or the joyful of heart; rather I wrote of and celebrated the destitute, the ugly, the downtrodden and the broken-hearted. These were my chosen subject matters. Now this approach afforded me some remuneration, but not much, for who would choose to read of such things? No, not many.” He paused as he remembered a more painful time. “And my life would have continued on such a path were it not for my meeting with Ava Beaumont.”

  Nyquist waited for him to carry on. But the other man’s gaze had drifted elsewhere, far away from this bare, dingy room in a dilapidated high-rise tower.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sometimes it is painful to think of such matters.”

  “Was Ava Beaumont a writer as well, like yourself?”

  “Not quite.” He pursed his lips. “Perhaps you’ve heard of the Dadaists?”

  “Weren’t they a music hall act?”

  Theodore Lewis smiled, the first such genuine expression he had shown. “No, no. The Dadaists were a group of artists prominent in the first decades of the century. They believed that art had become too academic, too bourgeois, and far too safe and comfortable. In opposition they worshipped chaos, and madness. For instance, they would cut up newspaper articles, photographs, romance novels and the like, and use the fragments to create a new painting or poem. They wanted to shock. They wanted to sever all links to the rational mind, to uncover the reality behind the mask, no matter how dark or hideous it might be.”

  Theodore Lewis’s eyes were lit from within, glowing fiercely as he spoke.

  “Ava Beaumont took great influence from them. And although the original Dadaists have long given up on their quest, Ava carried on through the years. Primarily, she’s a visual artist, a true creator.” His eyes blinked a few times. “She taught me one very important lesson. The truth of a story can only be revealed through violence, by cutting into the text, by wounding or even killing the narrative itself.” He smiled again. “Of course, with such words being spoken, how could I not fall in love with her?”

  “You said you were married?”

  “We were, and we lived in a shared heaven for a time. She already had a child, a young boy, Calvin. I treated him as my own son, I really did. Strange and awkward though he was.”

  “So you and Ava worked on The Body Library together?”

  “Yes. My career was going nowhere, my novels failing to sell. Subsequently, I was getting fewer and fewer readers. I was poor and desperate and open to any suggestions, any possibility. And Ava helped me, she taught me the way of the blade. Here. Let me show you.”

  He stood up and walked the short distance to his bed. He reached under a grubby pillow and pulled out a pair of scissors. He held these out in front of him, the blades reversed, pointing at his own stomach. “These are the scissors she used, her favored instrument. We had a pair each, matching pairs. We started our experiment using my own novels as the raw material, the seventeen books that I’ve published over the years. We cut into them. We attacked them, we sliced them open!” Lewis’s face expressed the violence at work in the act. “We operated on them like highly skilled doctors, or like crazed murderers at their play.” His whole body was taken over by a passionate fever. “Soon we’d exhausted the possibility of my books, so we started on other texts, on many others, stealing from here and there, building The Body Library word by word, phrase by phrase, page by page. We gouged at the books and slit them open and let the entrails spill out. Ava would do most of the cutting and slicing, while I worked on the fragments, teasing a kind of surreal narrative out of chaos. We made a fine team. Oh, it was exhilarating! It really was, after all the years of following the rules of literature, of being bound and gagged by grammar and syntax.”

  Nyquist was confused. “What did you hope to accomplish by this?”

  “Why, to reinvent the novel, of course.” It was a simple statement of fact. “To create a new type of novel more in keeping with the manic, disordered times in which we live.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone reading such a thing.”

  Lewis explained in a firm voice, “Ava had a saying: a novel is a
labyrinth; a labyrinth is a novel. That’s a truth well hidden behind conventional narrative. But a certain kind of reader, we believed, would relish the challenge of this new book.”

  Nyquist leaned back against the wall. Theodore Lewis’s growing intensity worried him; there was a kind of madness to it.

  “So you finished the book. What then?”

  “My wife left me, taking Calvin with her.”

  “And why are you here, in Melville?”

  “I have no choice, I’m afraid. I am drawn here. But God knows, her child Calvin avoids me. He lives like a wild animal, darting from one apartment to another. And Ava…”

  “What of her?”

  “She has been banned from ever stepping foot in this place, until the ritual is complete, and the words are brought fully to life.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ritual.”

  Lewis didn’t provide an explanation. Instead he said, “Ava sits alone in her little room far across the city, and do you know what she does, night after night?”

  Nyquist already knew the answer: “She reads from the book.”

  “That’s right. She reads The Body Library over and over, keeping the spell alive.” He frowned. “You see, we all have our tasks, as given to us by Oberon.”

  “You make it sound like a grand plan.”

  “It’s a spell. And believe me, Ava will do anything to make that spell complete. Legal or otherwise.”

  Nyquist lit a cigarette. He watched as Lewis brought his memories to the surface, an action both painful and joyous.

  “Ah, that woman. She has such power. She sits like a spider at the center of her web, knowing every strand, every weave, every weft. And with a single twitch she brings one story into contact with another, or else she snips a thread here and there, making stories disappear entirely.”

  Nyquist pulled the piece of manuscript paper from his pocket. “Your wife gave this to me. It led me to this apartment.”

  Lewis stared at the page as though it might be a living treasure, a creature of beauty. “Let me see that.” He took it from Nyquist’s hands. “Ah yes, page nine. Oh, I love this page! It’s one of my favorites.” The brightened mood soon left him, and his face took on a bitter expression. “The Body Library was my life’s work. Now it controls me. And it punishes me. And the cruelest of all punishments is that I’m still real, still of the world of everyday things. The book hasn’t taken me, it hasn’t made me one of its own, despite all the work I put in, and the sacrifices I have made in order for it to live and breathe, and for its pages to flutter gently as they prepare for flight. I am bereft!”

  He was holding the page in one hand, and the pair of scissors in the other.

  Nyquist asked, “Is that blood on the blades?”

  “It is.”

  “Yours?”

  “No.”

  “Ava’s?”

  “No. You really wouldn’t understand, even if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  “Ava has powers beyond any example of normal art. She’s either a witch, or a great visionary. I truly believe she added some kind of magical effect to the manuscript, even as I struggled to write the words down.”

  “What do you mean by magical?”

  In response the author opened the twin blades of the scissors and slid page number nine into the angle they made. The blades moved together, slicing cleanly through the sheet of paper.

  Blood flowed from both edges of the cut.

  As Lewis did this, Nyquist felt a searing pain in his hand. He looked at his palm and saw a straight cut from the base of the thumb to the edge of the third finger. He looked at the diagonal line in shock for one second until the blood came. He looked up at Lewis, seeking explanation, seeing only a cruel delight in the author’s eyes.

  “I will not write another word,” he cried. “Not one!”

  Nyquist stepped forward just as the scissors once more flashed and cut at the paper. This time he felt the pain in his midriff and he saw his shirt blossoming stark red on white, and he stopped where he was, in shock.

  The scissors were poised along another diagonal.

  Nyquist called out: “Wait!”

  The blades met a third time. It took Nyquist a moment to find the pain on his body and he brought a hand up to the side of his neck and held it against the cut, hoping to stem the flow. He fell to his knees. The three wounds marked him, the three pains held him like a triangle of points on a graph of skin.

  Theodore Lewis came close, brandishing scissors and paper as a threat, a weapon.

  “I think one more cut will do it, what do you think? Perhaps the eye? Or the heart?”

  Nyquist could hardly speak.

  Lewis watched him, his face entirely without passion now. “I really am sorry to do this to you, but you have to understand… I will not write another word for that man, that creature! Do you hear me?”

  “I don’t…” Nyquist forced the words out. “I don’t know what you mean!”

  “I will not go back there, into that room. I will not write another word! I have done enough. Tell Mr Oberon that. Tell him!”

  “I don’t know Oberon. I’ve never met him. I’m working alone.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Nyquist screamed at him. “I’m looking for Zelda. That’s all.”

  Lewis’s face was inches from Nyquist’s. “Zelda is elsewhere employed and mustn’t be disturbed. No, no at all.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She has taken my job. For this I am grateful.” Now the madness truly took him over. The author danced a few steps back and forth and then around in a circle. “I shall never return to such folly. No, never.” And he danced some more, singing gleefully to himself the whole time, the scissors raised in one hand, the paper in the other. “Never, never, never!”

  Nyquist took his hand off his neck. He tried to get to his feet, but Lewis hovered near. The scissors gleamed in the moonlight – the blood was fresh on them, the blood of the story itself. He stopped his whirling and he faced Nyquist and he licked his lips and said, “One more cut, one more cut.” He was mocking his victim, dancing near and then away, near and away. On the next close swipe, Nyquist reached out suddenly and grabbed the hand that held the cutting instrument.

  The two men struggled. They fought over the scissors.

  Nyquist should’ve won this fight easily, but the cuts and the blood loss slowed him down. And Theodore William Argyll Lewis fought like a tiger for his treasured possession. He yapped at Nyquist. He snarled and snapped and the twin blades opened and closed, cutting at air, at clothing, at flesh. In wild defense, Nyquist dragged the other man down to the floor and held on. The author was by now speaking nonstop, spewing forth words and grunts, splutters of spit and broken phrases, whistles and clicks of his tongue, words, words, words tumbling from his red maw of a mouth. Nyquist was fighting with a holy man, a speaker of snake tongues, of ancient languages, a wild witch doctor chanting rhymes and hexes. And word by word the spell had its effect; Nyquist was weakening further, the blood quickening at his trinity of wounds. His grip weakened on the other man.

  Lewis took his opportunity. He slipped away, breathing heavily, resting on his hands and knees like a beast of the field, his lips still delivering the Babel of sounds. Drool splattered on the floor beneath him. His neck suddenly stretched tight and his head arched backwards as he sent a whole stream of invectives towards the ceiling. Then his head lowered once more, the horrible voice stilled at last, and his eyes drilled forward at Nyquist. Pure hatred rested within them, and fear, and desperation and insanity, the feelings merging and mingling like the book of death and life along whose course these two men now battled.

  They faced each other, both on their hands and knees.

  Between them lay the scissors, perfectly aligned with the floorboards, within the pool of light from the window. The gleaming blades were spattered with fresh blood: Nyquist’s blood and the blood of words, mingling on the steel. One ma
n moved towards the makeshift weapon, the other also, both at speed. Their hands knocked together, and the scissors spun away a few inches across the floor. But Lewis’s hand darted out again and grabbed the scissors and brought them up, not towards Nyquist but to his own flesh, and he jabbed them inwards, the twin blades drawing blood from a wound in his neck, and he drove the scissors on again and again until the central vein was severed, and he drove the blades on further, as far as the handles would allow.

  Lewis’s strength faltered, his breath also, and the light dimmed in his eyes. The last of the words escaped his mouth as he both cursed and praised Ava and the child and the book and the tower and the person who lay behind it all, the one who controlled and took life as he pleased for his plaything. He cursed and praised Oberon, the king of spells.

  Nyquist watched from a few feet away, as Theodore Lewis kept the scissors pressed deep in his own flesh and he waited, waited until the final pump of his heart had drained the life force clean away. At the end a kind of peace came over the man’s face. He had freed himself at last from whatever curse had been placed upon him. And then his eyes blackened completely as though filled with ink. His body collapsed and he lay motionless on the floor.

  The author was dead.

  Keep Writing

  NYQUIST WAS lying on the floor, exhausted, freezing cold, his hands pressing down firmly on the floor as though by that means he might keep from sliding away. For a moment he had passed out. Now his eyes immediately fixed on one spot – the thick stain of blood on Theodore Lewis’s neck, life’s brief aftermath. He shifted his attention, following the blood trail from the neck to the floorboards, to join with the pool that had already formed there. The blood had flowed in a straight line out from the pool, and then turned a perfect ninety-degree angle. He couldn’t understand how a liquid could do such a thing. He sat up and moved a little closer.

  The blood had flowed into one corner of a pattern of recessed grooves cut in the wood, four grooves altogether, marking out the edges of a square shape set in the boards.

  It was a trapdoor. A small recessed handle gave access. Nyquist got to his knees and pulled at the handle and the door opened and swung back onto the floor with a bang. He was now looking down into a shaft. There was no light, but he could see the top tier of a set of iron steps. He stood up, breathed easily, and took stock. The blood was drying on his left hand, his midriff and the side of his neck. The wounds were not too deep, and the pain was distant enough for him to ignore it.