by Ilan Stavans
His body shook with a shiver. He covered the whole room with his gaze. A doorman bid the clients farewell with a slight bowing of the head. Two sales clerks behind the counters stood erect as mannequins. A janitor cleaned with an enormous white feather duster the pier glasses on the walls and the large pendulum clocks attached to them. Full of resolve, he straightened his back. Taking his portfolio under his arm, he walked directly to the staircase, like a person with an inevitable appointment upstairs. Nobody stopped him or paid attention. “Trespassing Prohibited,” “Personnel Only” read the signs on door after door. Not a single sound outside. Perhaps only the slight shuffle of his shoes on the thick carpet and a creaking of the wood here and there, as if it were breathing behind the doorways. Some bell was ringing, muffled, solitary. Inside, on the contrary, everything was beating: a multiplicity of living organisms, coming apart and fertilizing each other, a multitude of time-giving terms, little seeds of endurance, which a giant gloved hand pretended to remove and return to the dust of the uncreated, to the chaos that came before temporality, to exile, to alienation. With extreme care, he turned the shiny knob on one of the doors. He was greeted by a thick darkness that began to dissipate as his eyes got accustomed to it. He could distinguish the streaks of neon light from the streetlights, filtering through the windows, due to the wrinkled curtains, without fully shining. An endless gallery opened up before him, with an incessant ticking, an interminable collection of bell jars casting their shadows on the mirrored tables where they rested; and inside these, the watches, mechanisms of uniform movement and completely regular cadence, wind-up barrel, main wheel, second wheel, instant wheel, flywheel, compensating balance, hand shaft, rhomboid wheel, hour wheel, crown wheel and rod-quartz crystals, chime clocks, cuckoo clocks, repeating watches, watch chains, stopwatches, water clocks, vibrations, oscillations, pulses, synchronizations; all subject to change, nonetheless having a before and an after, a beginning and an end, all subject to error, it being impossible to eliminate the imperfection between that beginning and that end, not the eternal returning but the cycle, what is advent because it is awaited, and it is awaited even if it is not announced, a wait that suddenly erupts even if expected, the succession of discernible units in a continuum prolonged toward infinity, an infinity that can be measured, however, regularly, rhythmically, one-two, one-two, the abolition of what is discontinuous no matter how much the sense of each day is dependent on the possibility of reducing that to its everyday context subject to office hours and a job that devalues it by turning it monotonous, ticktock. But sometimes he manages to capture some white butterflies and rescue them from the smoke in the garden where he plants roses and forget-me-nots. For he is a scrupulous gardener, and there is not a corner left without a lovingly watered and trimmed plant, supervised from its most tender sprouting, growing, thickening, blooming, feeding on the future, on successions of light and air, chlorophyll and oxygen; slow tropisms, those that search for the sun and those that withdraw from the sun, those that open up during the day and close up at night, the ever thirsty, the ones with adventitious roots, the creepers, the ones with straight stems, those that bloom and those that only have leaves, those with tendrils and those with verticillate leaves. He too, like other children, had arranged them, album plate after plate, to acquaint himself with their shape, knife-shaped, palmate, lanceolate, arrowhead, penninervate . . .
He closed the door cautiously behind him. A slight smell of alcohol and rusted metal tickled the inside of the nose. Where could he begin? And what if his wondrous crystal had not even arrived there yet? How could he make it out, so small among such gigantic secret keepers? He stepped on the fossilized roots of a carboniferous forest as he entered. Breath transpiring; was it his or that of those bodies and assembly joints? As he descended, he was immersed in a subtle gas vapor: a liquid could be felt circulating through his veins, something thinner and lighter than blood. His ears were buzzing. He perspired. An avalanche came down, and in the nursery, the hours began to burst out inside their vials: everything was transformed into an onslaught of thousands of seconds flying around the gallery, crazed fireflies. Everything: time and memory, memory and remembrance, remembrance and continuity, continuity and atemporality. Everything: what he had always postponed, the moments that had not been lived, the distracted hours, the grayish days, the truncated weeks, the severed months like dried-up branches, and some of the years, purulent years molding away in neglect. Neglect? Not entirely. There were also the gems, rubies, sapphires and spinels, garnets, beryl crystals, and of course quartz—that crystal of shiny crystals, margarites, citrines, amethyst, with its iridescent transparency and its contents of moss, speckled agates forming their arborization with the remembrance of their body, fingers of singular afternoons plucking their deepest strings, those whose sound escaped, precisely, the ticktock and the calendar, those that palpitated awake—a name, a face, its laughter—in the marl of his daily perambulations: the invisible hour. He descended. Minute fish scales, slight flakes of endurance would hit upon the membranes that stretched out in his mind like a wide spiderweb: strung in there, innumerable superimposed images would pivot, swirling and stumbling, a vertigo of cells filled up with a mellifluous vapor where the ticktock seemed to suckle, avid bumblebee, on his most distant memories, far away, very far away, spore, sperm, atom, nebula, light particle, energy flow, wave, 186,000 miles per second, ion. He ascended, blowing, helix, spiral, shedding its leaves backward, enveloping itself, forging itself, suturing itself, pod opened to the wind thus recovering its tightly circular coherence, tenderly follicled berry, still a promise, not yet fruit, present, only a present being created in a progressive manner, genesis, continuous elaboration of the totally new, growth of the unforeseen—“time is either an invention or nothing at all.” In his throat, then, the shout exploded like a beam, the frightful abyss. And the crystals began to shatter, but toward the inside, as if being soldered to their own interior revolving around that point, that voice that was his, not the everyday voice, however, but another one, a first one, pristine ticktock, dust storm of recovered instants in the clay of the original man, in the simultaneity of the grain and the flower, the sowing and the reaping: unequivocal signs of time, its language of signs, its language of doors opened toward infinity. He ascended in successive commotions, in successive vibrations, slashing the foliage at right and left, inventing his own path, liberating it from silence to turn it into word, articulation of names to give the objects and rescue them from their movable lime, white dew that burst out spraying a multitude of letters, intermittent points like lanterns banging the mouth in their fight to spring out vowels, consonants, syllables, onomatopoeias, rivers of voices in swelling elasticity, rapid and burning vibration that opens its way to his eyes and lips from a depth growing upward to the alike and contiguous in successive stages. Voices and visions of the instruments and artifacts accumulated there danced their shadows before him and inside him without his being able to distinguish, in that simultaneity, where the outer and the inner were. He felt the tired sickle of time reaping the center of the circles that coincided with the center of other circles, and something escaped the measurable and visible to get lost in the transfinite. A chamber clock gave the signal: the space turned over, coextensive and concomitant, the gears came off their flying axles and pivots. His human presence and curiosity had awakened them from their rhythmic and cadence-like sleep to the chaos of the unspoken, of the potentially lived; and, like in nightmares, they spun in place, full of rancor, and with the evident intention of taking on a body and transforming themselves from mere desires, from simple movement, into concrete facts and acts. The arms linked to the clock hands, the legs of the pendulums, the cavity of the faces, the tongues of the springs and flexors, the molars of the crowns and disks came apart in a merry and threatening clamor. Fire spurted from a solar quadrant that he carelessly approached, fascinated by that dance of stellar incandescences—something told him that, this mirage of proximity notwithstanding,
Alpha Centauri was over four light-years away—inside that circumference resembling an empty water clock, whose border formed a flaming fringe. He wanted to look inside. But time is also a reflection of shadows. Therefore, the daring man who attempts to decipher it, spell it out, look at it in the light, can be blinded by its brightness. For time is also blindness, a fragment of life wrapped inside a blind layer until occluded. His eardrums and pupils overwhelmed, he began to crash against the mirrors and crystals, attempting to defend himself with a metal rod from the phantasmagoric round assaulting him, cordless marionettes that pulled him by the hair and skin with parsimonious animosity, ticktock ticktock, fine-edged rubies stabbing his retina and shredding his ear, sectioning his vocal cords into the thinnest slices. Thirsting for sharp luminous corpuscles, ticktock ticktock, time turned out its irreversible drunkenness, like a ritual flaying, until touching, blood, and chlorophyll, the yod of all births . . .
Promptly, ten days later, at the invisible hour before the sunset, he picked up his quartz watch, returned in perfect condition. Months later, however, he lost it . . .
Xerox Man
ILAN STAVANS (b. 1961)
Based on a famous incident of the 1990s, this story deals with a Jewish book thief from Buenos Aires in New York whose mission is to steal rare books. It first aired on BBC Radio in England.
Not spoken in language, but in looks
More legible than printed books.
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, The Hanging of the Crane, 1874
MY SHARE IN the explosive case of the so-called Xerox Man, as the New York tabloids delighted in describing Reuben Staflovitch shortly after his well-publicized arrest and as the Harper’s profile reiterated, is too small: It amounts to only fifteen minutes of conversation, of which, unfortunately, I have an all-too-loose recollection.
I first heard of him at Foxy Copies, a small photocopy shop right next to the prewar apartment building where I spent some of my best Manhattan years. The shop’s owner was a generous man in his midfifties by the name of Morris. Morris attended his customers with a kind of courtesy and unpretentiousness out of fashion in the city at the time.
I used to visit Foxy Copies almost daily, as my duties required material to be xeroxed and faxed on a regular basis. I refused to have my home invaded by technological equipment, so Morris, for a nonastronomical fee, did the job for me.
He always received me with open arms. If time permitted, he would invite me to schmooze for a little while at his desk behind one of the big photocopy machines. We would discuss the latest Yankee game or that week’s Washington scandal. He would then process my documents as if they were his own. He had read one of my pieces once in a trade magazine and prided himself on having what he called “a distinguished list of clients,” among which he included me. “You will make me famous one day,” he often said.
In one of our conversations I asked Morris, just to be a nuisance, if he ever felt curiosity about his customers and the stuff they photocopied.
“Why should I?” he answered quickly, but then lowered his defenses. “You want me to really answer your question? Then come with me,” and we walked together toward a back room with a huge closet, which Morris opened right away. In front of me I saw a stack of disorganized paper.
“In Brooklyn,” he said, “an old teacher of mine used to like strange words. When I bought Foxy Copies, one of these words came back to me: paralipomena. It means remnants that still have some value. What you see here are piles of xeroxes clients leave behind or throw away.”
The sight reminded me of a genizah, the annex in every synagogue, usually behind the Ark, where old prayer books accumulate. Disposable Jewish books cannot be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, which can fall into the wrong hands and be desecrated. So these books are stored until the genizah gets too crowded, at which point someone, usually an elder, buries the books in the backyard.
“A genizah of sorts, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes,” Morris answered, “except that a special company comes once every three months or so to pick this stuff up. I hate not to see it properly recycled.”
I browsed through the xeroxes.
“Trash, really,” Morris said. “Most of it is in plain English. Except for the remains left behind by Mr. Staflovitch,” and as he uttered the name, he pointed to a lower pile. I looked at it closely, and its pages appeared to me to be in ancient Semitic languages.
Morris didn’t like to talk about his clients, but deep inside, all New Yorkers are indiscreet and he was too. So he told me that Reuben Staflovitch—yes, as I recall, he used the complete name for the first time at that point—was by far the most taciturn. He described him as well built, of average height, always dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and unpolished moccasins, with an unruly beard and his trademark sky blue Humphrey Bogart hat. “He comes in with a black doctor’s bag about once every two to three weeks,” Morris added, “usually at closing time, around 6:30 p.m. He asks to have a Xerox machine all for himself. With extreme meticulousness, he proceeds to take out from the doctor’s bag an antiquarian volume, which takes him between thirty and forty minutes to photocopy. Then he restores it to the doctor’s bag, wraps the xeroxed material in plastic, pays at the register, and leaves. Few words are uttered, no human contact is made. He leaves in the exact same way as he arrives: in absolute silence.”
I remember talking with Morris about other topics that day, but Staflovitch was the only one who truly captured my imagination. “You know,” Morris continued, “it is amazing to watch him do his job. His photocopying is flawless; not a single page is wasted. But just after he finishes, he puts his fingers into the pile and takes out a single copy—only one—and throws it away. Why he does this I have no idea. I never dared to ask. But I save the excluded page out of pity.”
I extracted the top page in Staflovitch’s pile from the closet. “Can I take it with me?”
“You bet,” Morris replied.
That night, in my solitude, I deciphered it: it came from a Latin translation of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed.
Not long afterward, while on Broadway, I saw Staflovitch himself. Morris’s description was impeccable. Except for the Humphrey Bogart hat, he looked as unemblematic as I had imagined him: a nondescript Orthodox Jew just like the ones on Delancey Street. He walked quickly and nervously, with his doctor’s bag on his right side. A hunch made me follow him. He headed uptown toward the 96th Street subway station but continued for many more blocks—almost thirty—until he reached the doorsteps of the Jewish Theological Seminary, where, crossing through the iron gate, he disappeared from sight. I waited for a few minutes and saw him reappear, walk uptown again, this time to Columbus Avenue, and disappear once and for all into an apartment building. “This must be his home,” I told myself. I felt anguished, though, wishing that I had come face to face with him. I was puzzled by his mysterious identity: Was he married? Did he live alone? How did he support himself? And why did he copy old books so religiously?
When I next saw Morris, I mentioned my pursuit. “I’m feeling guilty now,” he confessed. “You might be after a man with no soul.”
My fifteen-minute conversation with Staflovitch occurred about a month later, as I was leaving Columbia University after a day of heavy teaching. He was entering the subway station at 116th Street. By chance the two of us descended the staircase together. I turned around, pretending to be dumbstruck by the coincidence and said, “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? Aren’t you a Foxy Copies customer?”
His reply was evasive. “Well, not really. I don’t like the neighborhood . . . I mean, why? Have you seen me at the shop?”
I instantaneously noticed his heavy Hispanic accent, which the media, especially the TV, later picked on. “Are you from Argentina?”
“Why do you care?”
“Well, I am a Mexican Jew myself.”
“Really? I didn’t know there were any. Or else . . .”
Wanting
clearly to avoid me, Staflovitch took out a token and went through the turnstile. I didn’t have one myself, so I had to stand in line, which delayed me. But I caught up with him after I descended to the train tracks. He was as close to the end of the platform as possible. The train was slow in coming, and I wasn’t intimidated by his reluctance to speak, so I approached him again. “I see you’re in the business of xeroxing old documents . . .”
“How do you know?”
I don’t remember the exact exchange that followed, but in the next few minutes Staflovitch explained to me the sum total of his theological views, the same ones expounded to various reporters after he got caught. What I do remember is feeling a sudden, absolute torrent of ideas descending on me without mercy. Something along the lines that the world in which we live—or, better, in which we’ve been forced to live—is a xerox of a lost original. Nothing in it is authentic; everything is a copy of a copy. He also said that we’re governed by sheer randomness and that God is a madman with no interest in authenticity.
I think I asked him what had brought him to Manhattan, to which he replied: “This is the capital of the twentieth century. Jewish memory is stored in this city. But the way it has been stored is offensive and inhuman and needs to be corrected right away . . .” The word inhuman stuck in my mind. Staflovitch had clearly emphasized it, as if wanting me to savor its meaning for a long time.
“I have a mission,” he concluded. “To serve as a conduit in the production of a masterpiece that shall truly reflect the inextricable ways of God’s mind.”
“You’re an Upper West Sider, aren’t you?” I asked him.
“The other day I saw you on the premises of the Jewish Theological Seminary.”