The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  He had long been settled in apartment 33J. Long enough to have begun to feel as though he owned the place. He was well thought of in the neighborhood of the other apartments. Having lived there for so long, he possessed a remarkable amount of information about his neighbors: their ages and ailments, the progressive ages of their children, their various and varied occupations and so on. Most of all, he was quite good at remembering names. And so, when in conversation with his neighbors they always felt, given Dr Apelles’ polite and thoroughly informed interest, that his portraits of them, of their public and semi-public virtues, were such accurate and pleasing likenesses that he was, as far as they were concerned, the perfect neighbor. In short, he flattered them, but not intentionally.

  Not forgetting for a moment that it is Dr Apelles’ working life we are here interested in exploring, we will, in any event, step into his apartment. First, because his domestic life is the anchor point for his working life and informs his work in ways that, since he is almost a third of the way done with the translation, will become important soon, and, second, as he thinks, his thoughts turn to the very shape of his own life, his own self-portrait as it were, and that portrait, while primarily colored from the palette of his working time, is also shaded and filled in by the tints of his time at home. So the picture of his life could be seen as part craft and part found art—the kind of art that includes cups, teaspoons, cedar hangers, and most of all, his bed—which cannot go unmentioned in relation to a man who has so recently discovered that he has never been in love. For instance, just as Dr Apelles’ job at RECAP requires an artistically exact bureaucratic technique, and also, since his translations of Native American texts require him to be more faithful to the language he is translating than to the moment of its expression (and this is the principal difference between translating Native American languages and translating all others; more care is usually given to the fragile vessel than to its contents), structure more important than style, form more precious than content, rules more actual than the behaviors either allowed or prohibited, we should therefore not be surprised that the organization and sensibilities that govern Dr Apelles’ domestic life are quite well thought out. What is surprising, but shouldn’t be, is that for a single man to have one queen-sized bed, two cups and saucers, two mugs, two plates, two knives and forks and spoons, two towels, two washcloths, and so on begs the question of who the user of each of the doubles will be. The surprise should be that it took a translation to make Dr Apelles realize he had never been in love when his domestic prerogatives suggest a man who desperately wants to be in love; a man, in fact, who is ready for it.

  Ready or not, aware of his own habits or not, Dr Apelles had, as usual, woken up at six-thirty in his queen-sized bed and sighed. He sighed and straightened his legs and slid his hands under his head, but did not leave his bed quite yet. This was his usual ceremony. He sighed for two reasons—because it felt good to wake up and to gaze at the approaching day from atop such a comfortable mattress and because he always sighed upon waking—and since he was the kind of man who appreciated the ceremony of his own habits it would have been odd not to sigh. As usual, he kicked off the blankets and looked down at his toes and noticed that his brown skin was its usual smooth, hairless self, and that it was getting harder to see over his stomach. Not that Dr Apelles was fat or would ever be fat. His stomach was not round or rounded. Rather, as valleys are, over the years, filled in with dead organic matter and so lose their depth, so too did his torso; his ribs were less pronounced, his hip bones were barely noticeable, his stomach as soft-looking as a baby’s. “and so time does pass after all,” he said to himself. After which he got up, put on the coffee, filled a mug halfway with milk, and abandoned the kitchen for the bathroom where he showered (hair body face) and put his robe on and strode back out into the kitchen to catch the coffee gurgling its way to completion. He filled his mug the rest of the way up with coffee, added one level teaspoon of sugar, and stood by the window and drank it down. When he finished he went back to the bedroom and opened the wardrobe in which hung eight shirts, four pairs of slacks, four pairs of chinos, four sweaters, and four vests. Folded in a drawer below were eight pairs of socks, eight pairs of underwear, and eight handkerchiefs. On the shoe rack below this were four pairs of shoes—two black and one brown and one pair of once-white sneakers. This inventory should not lead us to believe that Dr Apelles is either quaint or neurotic. He simply made sure he always had what he would need for one week plus one day extra. That way, if there was some interruption in his schedule—a doctor’s appointment, a holiday—he would not be caught short, and this proves he was not neurotic after all since what it shows is good sense, not sense gone bad. After he dressed he went back to the kitchen and made toast and packed his briefcase while the bread was browning. It popped up. He buttered it and chose a spread from an assortment of different jams and jellies, applied that, ate the toast, wiped his mouth, swept the crumbs off the table into his cupped hand, carried them to the trash can, put the plate in the sink, and left his apartment.

  It is important to know all of this. It truly is, for reasons that are not at all obvious yet. It is important to know this because it demonstrates the qualities of Dr Apelles’ mind—it is a “speech moment” in which the structure of thought is revealed. Dr Apelles has created a very well-regulated order to his life because, by doing so, the inevitable and pleasurable deviations from that order are thereby revealed and can be seen more clearly and enjoyed more thoroughly. This way, a surprise stain on his shirt or toast that is a little too thick and must be evacuated from the toaster with a butter knife become not exactly exciting moments but unique expressions of life—not at all unlike the surprises that language holds hidden in the palms of its rules. So, it matters little that on this day, a Friday and an archive day, he wears a white shirt with brown and yellow pinstripes or that his coffee mug is green or that he likes seven-grain bread. Also, the importance of the order of Dr Apelles’ day will become clear when certain things happen to him later on.

  To jump back in time a little, when he opened the manuscript so important to this story and realized that he had found a truly unique document and that he had never been in love, the second realization was not as transparent as the first. “ah love! That’s what’s been missing from my life!” was not what Dr Apelles thought or said. He was not capable of saying such a thing, much less thinking it, any more than after spending a week in Paris a traveler can read Proust in the original. Rather, he realized that if he were to die that instant, if a great piece of plaster fell from the painted ceiling of the archive, he would die without being known at all, even by those with whom he was acquainted. If he died then and there (by the release of poison gas in the archive’s ventilation system), no one would understand his shirts and his four slacks, the importance of his toaster or the wonderful comfort of his bed; no one would hear or understand, much less cherish, his singular and heretofore solitary morning sigh. If he were to die (a heart attack was not out of the question), he would die as languages do: with no one left in this world to speak him. These were the thoughts that occupied him when he found the document and caused him to labor so much over the translation and why he was still tentative about the ending.

  The bell sounded.

  He packed away his things, put the manuscript back in its file, and handed it to Ms Fabian, the reading-room librarian.

  “Did you find everything you needed? I trust the translations are going smoothly,” she asked, sweetly. These people seem to have so much trust, but in what, even they could not possibly say.

  “Yes, Ms Fabian. Yes, I think I found everything I could possibly have hoped for,” responded Dr Apelles.

  “So I assume, since you seem so pleased, that everything was to your satisfaction?” Ms Fabian removed her glasses as she said this.

  “Satisfaction. Yes, well, I suppose I was satisfied, though I think I am well beyond ’satisfaction’ as you call it. I am
somewhat afraid I have made a discovery,” confessed Dr Apelles.

  “But,” protested Ms Fabian, “discovery is, as you must surely agree, what brings scholars such as yourself here, within the walls of the archive.”

  “Of course, of course,”—exclaimed he hastily—“that is one reason to come here, but it is a false reason, or, to put it another way, it only seems as though we come here to make discoveries when we don’t come here for that purpose at all.”

  “Now really, Dr Apelles,” interjected she, “knowledge, you must admit, is the reason these archives exist. You simply must come here for knowledge, my poor Doctor, it’s certainly not for the air, which is bad. It’s not healthy, it can’t be!”

  “No, no, no,” said Dr Apelles, rocking back on his heels and heaving his shoulders with mirth, “I do not come here for the air. But, my dear Ms Fabian, knowledge is not to be found here. It can’t be. Knowledge is never found, of course, it is created.”

  “I submit,” said she, “it is created, of course, how could it be otherwise? But, dear sir, out of what is it created?”

  “That is what I do not know. That is the problem after all. But, in the end, it is my problem, so I bid you good night.”

  “And to you as well,” she returned cheerfully, “and I look forward to seeing you in two weeks’ time.”

  He, bowing slightly, turned and made his way, to his locker where he recovered his coat, scarf, and briefcase, and, after passing through the security gate, made a half turn through the revolving door and stood for a moment on the granite steps of the archive, and, to his surprise, he sighed as he usually did in the morning when he woke up in his very comfortable bed. It wasn’t a sad sigh or one filled with resignation. It would be, if we were pressed to do it, hard to classify—but if we were to hazard a guess or a simile, we could say that the sigh was like a full stop in the run-on sentence of his life or like a page break inserted before a new

  page

  Eventually, after a short conversation with Mr Blackwood, one of the security guards at the door, he moved on down the steps and onto the sidewalk, leaving the neoclassical facade of the archives behind him. The sidewalks and avenues were, as usual at the hour, crowded with foot traffic and motor traffic respectively. It was winter, though temperate for the depth of the season, with enough of a chill to hasten the city’s workers homeward, but with, nonetheless, a crisp bite too that made many, Dr Apelles among them, think of autumn apples, the frost of windowpanes, and a matter of leaves on a forest trail. It was his habit to walk the ten blocks from the archive to his apartment—a constitutional from institution to institution—and as he strolled, more slowly than the other people around him, he once again began mulling over the translation.

  This was, as we have mentioned, a Friday at the archives, and as such, it was a twice-monthly exception to his usual routine, though it was, by its sanctified regularity, both routine and regular. Dr Apelles, lost in thought, quickly reached the restaurant where he usually took his evening meal, and after a cursory glance inside, he decided, once again, not to eat there. He continued on to the end of the block where he crossed the avenue and walked toward his own domicile on the smaller side street. It is here, at the intersection of the avenue and the side street that the two programs, the two very different schedules—research at the archives and work at RECAP—are reconciled. Let us examine. If, instead of going to the archive, if instead of it being the third Friday of the third month of the year, it is a workday, say, a Tuesday, Dr Apelles would have arrived at this street corner down from the opposite direction; that is, he would have arrived at the same point, from the other way and at a slightly later time. A workday began and ended exactly the same way as an archive day. Dr Apelles woke, sighed, got up, made coffee, showered, toweled, drank his coffee by the window, ate his toast, got dressed, and packed his briefcase, and left—all of this comprised the gate through which he passed from the confines of his solitude into the activity of his day. On a work day he reached the corner and instead of turning left toward the archive he turned right. There was a slight rise—the remnants of a hill, a natural feature that the city had not been able to completely obliterate—that added some variety to his stroll and provided him with a little more exercise. And in addition to this geographical feature, barely perceptible, the origins of his neighborhood, the historical remnants of its birth as the mercantile district, were also present. As a port city all kinds of goods were unloaded there, from pigs to pig iron and Dr Apelles’ neighborhood had been the center of trade for manufactured goods for many a year. Barrels and window sashes and all kinds of other wood products had been sold there. Linen and broadcloth, rope and tack, and more exquisite material as well—liquor, tobacco, china, umbrellas, footstools, pens, paper, and books. These things no longer arrived by ship, of course, and their consumption and sale was spread out through the city entire. Nonetheless, some shops remained from this era—a cigar store, a shop that specialized in fountain pens, three small hardware stores, numerous small groceries, boutiques, really, in which one could find Greek, French, and English specialties. From the corner at which Dr Apelles turned it was ten blocks to the train station, the same distance, more or less, as it was to the archives, and it was, all told, a pleasant walk. Though in the eleven years Dr Apelles had been walking it, the amount of traffic had increased so much that exhaust and noise would have been, for a man less skilled at staying in his own mind, distracting. Once at the train station it was only a matter of flashing his very modern commuter pass in front of the sensor that activated the turnstile, and he was granted access to the platform, and then, with an efficient amount of screeching and wheezing, the train arrived, Dr Apelles boarded, and he was quickly whisked out of the city and into the country. The tag-lined tunnel soon gave way to the backsides of soot-stained buildings, the tracks rose and the train crossed the river, and the gray gave way to tan, and then to green—the fields crowded the highways, trees crowding the lanes, and sub-divisions crowding the hills like Norman towns—and the city was far far behind. Dr Apelles was now in the country. A fine country it was—though like many American landscapes it was good for walking no longer, cut and transected by rail lines, roads, fenced car parks, freeways, and the like. All said, it did not excite Dr Apelles’ curiosity in the least and morewith—RECAP itself, a short walk from the train station, did not encourage, and in fact, demanded the suppression of curiosity. RECAP was situated, to fine advantage, in an old compound originally given to nuclear research during the 1950s and ’60s and comprised a sprawling collection of small brick cottages connected by gravel paths all fronted by quiet plantings of boxwood and shaded by sycamores and beech, all leading or existing in relation to the central research and storage laboratory that had been torn down and replaced with the RECAP building—a fortress of a place.

  In many ways the library resembled a prison, and in many ways, it was. RECAP stood for Research Collections and Preservation (Consortium) and it was a prison for books. Like a prison, RECAP was the response to many a social predicament. The most basic and disgusting fact that gave rise to RECAP was that there was a surplus of books in the world—more than the people needed and certainly more than they read. Thousands and thousands of books were written every year and added to those written the years before, and these books must be multiplied by all the different languages in the world. The result? The number of books, prints, maps, catalogs, pamphlets, indexes, compendiums, leaflets, fliers, and so on is difficult to imagine and even more difficult to contain. Six of the usual kind of library—the kind created to facilitate the meeting between books and people—could no longer hold all the texts in their collections. And the terrible question became this: what to do with the books one likes or that one recognizes as important or as potentially important but for which one has no use or that has not been read and never will be read? They can’t be destroyed because the nagging question is this: what if this or that text will be important, indeed,
invaluable, someday? So, wrestling with these questions, the six greatest university and public libraries in the world convened and, together, cabalistically one might be tempted to say, they dreamt up RECAP. It would hold the books until some future researcher needed them, until time itself swung around and made the books relevant again, or for the first time. RECAP was, therefore, like a prison for memories that a person had not yet had, or, if already experienced, weren’t sure they’d ever need again—however, unlike human memories, the ones contained in RECAP were organized by a system of perfect recall. In theory, any text could be found and recalled at a moment’s notice. The location of everything was known, but recall was only a theory because of the millions of texts already stored in RECAP, of the hundreds of millions of sentences, of the billions of words, not one had ever been read since they passed through the gates, and so far—in the fifteen years since RECAP’s inception—not one had been released back out into the world. It was a heavy sentence. Only an artist, a madman, or a scientist could have imagined and created such a perfect system for organizing and storing the unknown and unbeloved so lovingly. Obsolescence had never before been given so much care and attention.

  Having disembarked from the train and wound his way past the cottages and the sycamores and the beech and boxwood, Dr Apelles approached the fortress. The whole structure was, interestingly, designed to look like a giant, rectangular cardboard box, a banker’s file box. The building was three hundred meters wide and six hundred meters long, and though one could not tell from the outside, it was divided into three discrete sections—the Operations Center, the Sorting Area, and the Stacks. There were only two entrances, one on the end of the long side of the box designed for people, and another halfway down the middle of the opposite side—a bay large enough for three semi-trailer trucks to idle side by side. This entrance was for books. There were no exits as such, although, again, theoretically, both books and people were allowed to leave. Dr Apelles waved his pass in front of the sensor mounted to the right of the human door. He heard the lock click, and he swung the door open and stepped into the entryway. Once inside he nodded to the two guards, a Mr Florsheim and a Mr Bass, and took off his jacket and placed it, along with his briefcase, on the X-ray machine where they were scanned to make sure they did not contain—in addition to the usual contraband such as box cutters, scissors, explosives, or acid—any printed material such as books, magazines, or newspapers. The Designer had realized that workers shouldn’t be allowed to introduce any of their own reading materials into RECAP through the human entrance. It wouldn’t exactly hurt to lose a book into RECAP, to have a surplus book or two mixed in—the only one who could possibly object would be the owner of the lost item—but to do so would violate the principle of RECAP as a sacred location where every book had its place.