The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  Once Dr Apelles was cleared into the building he stowed his jacket and briefcase in his locker outside the break room, or Reading Room, as it was officially known. The Reading Room, like every other space in RECAP, had an overseer, a person whose job it was to make sure that no books were unofficially introduced into the building or illegally removed from it. The Reading Room was governed by Mrs Millefeuille. She sat at a desk, open at the bottom and sides so that nothing could be hidden inside or underneath it, and monitored the workers who came to the Reading Room to eat and relax during their two fifteen-minute breaks and their half-hour lunch break. The Designer recognized that it would be cruel to simultaneously surround the workers with books and not allow them to read. So, in addition to monitoring the workers, Mrs Millefeuille was responsible for stocking the Reading Room with newspapers. Every morning, before the rest of the workers arrived, she secured the newspapers on wooden dowels and removed the advertising inserts and coupons, she then counted all the pages in all the newspapers and wrote the number on a ledger open on her desk. During the day, when the workers came in to eat and to read the papers she wrote down who read which paper, and at the end of each break—at 10:45, after the lunch break at 1:00, and again at 3:30—she recounted all the papers and submitted them to the used-paper department situated in the rearmost office that vetted every sheet of paper used in the offices during the day to make sure they were indeed useless scraps and not pages or fragments of books, and these were recycled. Who can say if they ended up being paper on which was printed a book that ended up back in RECAP? It was rumored that Mrs Millefeuille had developed very specialized hearing—akin to the truffle-smelling ability of specially trained pigs—that could detect the faintest sound of ripping paper.

  There were three sets of offices past Mrs Millefeuille’s Reading Room, and the activities that took place in each were not terribly interesting, but suffice it to say that they were organized along hierarchical principles. First was the Operations Center where the computers were kept that tracked the books that came into RECAP—how many arrived each day, where they were from, and for whom they would be stored. The O.C. also, with the aid of powerful computers, monitored the movements of the workers, created the proper balance of heat and humidity—the place must always remain at 64 degrees Fahrenheit with 54 percent humidity in order to ensure the books would never decay—and ran the security system comprised of motion detectors, video monitors, X-ray machines, and such. The next office was, again, a mixture of man and machine—and here the staff dealt with the six libraries that belonged to the consortium and coordinated with them so that the flow of books into RECAP was steady and regular. If twenty shipments of books arrived on one day and one shipment the next, mayhem would undoubtedly ensue. Also, and of equal importance, this office coordinated the schedules, sick leave, payroll, retirement programs, hiring and firing of the personnel. So, in short and in brief, this office dealt with both human and paper traffic. The last office, and the only one with a view (a terrible view of a green lawn, a short hedge of burning bush, and beyond that the backside of a shopping mall), housed the director of RECAP, one Ms Manger. She had an important role, of course. She was in charge. It was inspiring for her to see the trucks sidle past her window on their way to the bays loaded with books ready to be eaten by RECAP. She was a delightful woman, really. Since Ms Manger was in charge she had access to all the data in the O.C. and could view all the cameras located in the S.A. and monitor the atmosphere and activity in the Stacks.

  Dr Apelles did not enter any of these offices. Though he did muse, as he closed his locker and strode down the hall toward the entrance to the Sorting Area, that Ms Manger was, if not fond of him, then at least unusually aware of his presence, if only because, as a trained bibliographer and a librarian, she had seen and snacked on two of his translations that had appeared in small journals. One was a translation of a Mesquakie “Thunderbeing” story, the other a treatise on the relation between song and vocables in Ojibway as evidenced in Schoolcraft’s transcription of “Chant to the Fire-fly.” Ms Manger was a translator, too (of sixteenth-century French chansons), and since she was terribly uncomfortable around most people most of the time, any possible connection with any of her workers was seized the way a hungry stranger at a stuffy reception grabs for a table cracker before dinner is announced. Another reason for her vicious timidity was that she suspected that the workers thought she only brought up things like translations or recipes submitted to local cooking contests because she was suspicious about print. Books were seductive, and if one of her workers was a writer, he or she could very possibly get into serious trouble being surrounded by all the books in RECAP. This was partly true insofar as she kept track of both print and her workers’ relationship with printed material, but she was also genuinely interested in her workers and really did like translations and cooking contests.

  She was aware, therefore, that Dr Apelles had his PhD in linguistics and philology—and this made her interested in him since he was only a floor worker, a cataloger of books along with the others, none of whom held advanced degrees. Ms Manger was the first person he met at RECAP when he arrived for his interview. She had met him in the Reading Room. He was nervous. He had held various teaching positions and research posts as a graduate student and as a post-doc, but he had never liked the work. People made him feel jittery and insecure. RECAP looked like a perfect place—a place of books but with very few people to go with them.

  He had stood nervously, eyeing the newspapers while Mrs Millefeuille eyed him. After a few minutes Ms Manger had breezed in and shook his hand.

  “Dr Apelles?” She seemed nervous, too.

  “Yes.”

  “It would be a great asset for us if you were to work here. It would lend a certain prestige to RECAP to have a PhD on the floor.” She was all business, but she had a thin, sunny air about her.

  He was hired after his tour of the facility and another short meeting in her office. But how quickly our first impressions give way to new impressions! After he signed his contract, then and there, something changed. There was a deeper glint in Ms Manger’s eye.

  “I hope you stay with us for a long time,” she said, a little breathlessly.

  “I hope so, too.”

  “I must say, I looked at your curriculum vitae and have acquired some of your translations for RECAP. They are most impressive.”

  “Modest, Ms Manger. Modest. They are really nothing.”

  This gave her the opening she needed.

  “More than that! And you are more than that, too, I suspect.” And the way she said it made him feel as though she had been, in some way, if only by reading his work, stalking him.

  That was eight years ago and still she seemed to have some secret agenda, some secret surplus of feeling that did not set Dr Apelles at ease.

  A final word about Ms Manger: in order to imagine her completely and without a excess of thought or description; imagine a teenage girl in 1952 in thick cat’s-eye glasses, a yellow pleated pinafore, and a pink blouse waving excitedly from shore at a tanned white-toothed college boy piloting his sailboat out of the resort harbor in the company of a much prettier blond girl, completely oblivious to Ms Manger’s adieu and even of her entire existence—and you will have a portrait of Ms Manger’s personality and position even though she was raised in Lawrence, Kansas, and had never been on a boat and we are in the year 2002.

  Anyway, as we said, Dr Apelles did not see her this day. He turned left and flashed his pass again, this time to enter the Sorting Area where he did his actual work. The Sorting Area (S.A.) was vast, three hundred meters squared, and was divided into three sections. The books arrived in the semi-trailer trucks and were unloaded in the Receiving Area (R.A.). RECAP usually received 6 truckloads a day, and the total number of volumes ranged from between 300,000 and 750,000, depending on the size of the books. These books were unloaded by the modern equivalent of longshoremen onto
metal carts. Once a load, or a fraction of a load, of books was moved onto a cart, the workers scanned the cart with hand-held scanners that transmitted information simultaneously to the O.C. and to the S.A. Once scanned, the carts were physically moved into a long queue that officially separated the R.A. from the S.A. The S.A. consisted of eleven stations, each station manned by one sorter, who took the books from the cart in front of their station, one by one. By now Dr Apelles had donned an apron (blue) and latex gloves (cream-colored—just like the ones he wore at the archive), scanned his pass into the computer at his workstation and was ready to begin his actual work. He removed all the books from the top rack of the cart and, one by one, he turned each book face-front, back-front, spine-side and page-side, top-edge, and bottom-edge and then held the volume by its cover and fanned it to make sure the book was fit to be stored in RECAP. Torn, mildewed, or otherwise damaged books were not allowed. If such books were discovered by the sorters, they, along with the entire lot, were sent back to their home library to be rebound or disinfected. He then took each book and laid it on the corner of his workstation countertop where an x/y axis ruler was inlaid on the surface. Once the book was sized he affixed a barcode sticker inside the cover and put another one on the spine, and then placed the book into the appropriately sized black, acid-free, pasteboard box. Once the box was full, he stuck the master label that designated the lot, the collection, and the home library from which the books had come on the upper left-hand corner of the box. The whole box was then loaded on an empty cart on the other side of his station. Each of these carts was filled only with boxes headed to the same area of the Stacks, otherwise it would mean a lot of trouble for the shelvers and could result in confusion or misplacement. Dr Apelles usually did this all day long. He did not take fifteen-minute breaks or break for lunch because he saved up his break time, so after nine days of work he had earned the nine hours he used to take off every other Friday to work on translations in the archives.

  The workers on either side of his station, at stations number six and eight, were, like the others, more “typical” workers. That is, they enjoyed their breaks and lived them till the last possible moment. These two, Jesus Knoepfler—a big, jolly Puerto Rican fellow—and Campaspe Bello, either Greek or Italian or both, judging from her name, were very typical workers indeed, which is not to say that they weren’t intelligent or interesting or unique. Rather, they watched the clock and talked to each other over and past Dr Apelles’ station and mimed fatigue and annoyance and indulged in silent laughter with their heads thrown back, which then sunk back down toward their workstations as their shoulders lifted and jerked, carrying the weight—not of the world because that is Atlas’ job after all—of their mock mirth, which can be a heavy weight because as workers in that kind of repetitive and relatively unrewarding mode of employ, life can feel quite heavy. They were friends and they were friendly. And to the casual observer it might even seem as though they flirted and were perhaps involved with each other, if not for a certain sensitivity on Campaspe’s part to Dr Apelles’ presence.

  This sensitivity had been present since she was first hired five years after Apelles began working at RECAP. Apelles had been working at his station, dutifully doing his work. And though he knew that there would soon be a new worker at the station to his right, he hadn’t paid much attention to when that might occur. Suddenly, he heard Ms Manger’s voice. Since she always made him a little nervous, put him a little on edge, he had looked up, only to better gauge whether or not she would be interacting with him, and saw Campaspe.

  She was very beautiful, rosy and golden. And very young, at least half his age. As Ms Manger went over her duties, Campaspe nodded eagerly and smiled at the conclusion of each instruction, which made her seem all the younger. And then Ms Manger introduced Apelles.

  “Everything you need to know you can learn from him,” she had said cheerfully.

  “I doubt that,” he said wryly. He couldn’t think of anything he knew that would be of any use to anyone else.

  “Oh no! It’s true! He is amazingly good at his job.” As always, there was something hungry and brittle behind her praise.

  “Then I am in the perfect spot. I like to learn,” said Campaspe. And there was something sexual behind what she said. Or so it seemed to Apelles.

  They each strode around their respective stations and shook hands, and that was the only time they had touched.

  And Apelles stopped, at that moment, thinking about her. Not because she wasn’t attractive—she was beautiful. And not because she wasn’t nice—she absolutely was. Rather, he stopped thinking about her because she was beautiful and nice and in being so, not worth thinking about because she would never, ever, want anything from him except work advice and dull daily conversation. Or so he thought. He didn’t even allow himself to think about her while he masturbated even though his mind’s eye usually wandered far and wide during those moments. Because in order to fantasize about her he needed to feel, even just a little bit, that she was attainable. And he couldn’t imagine that she would ever be. All in all, their first meeting didn’t leave much of an impression at all.

  As for Campaspe, she didn’t talk to him beyond saying “Hello” in the morning and “Good-bye” in the afternoon and not, we can be certain, because she wasn’t talkative; rather, she took her clues from Dr Apelles, who did not say much to anyone and who, it must be said, seemed, to his coworkers at least, the kind of quiet, hardworking fellow who was sustained in private, always in private, by some obsessive and unique mania for model trains, or stamps, or the history of arctic exploration, or medieval fortress towns of the Loire—none of which, in fact, he was interested in. Dr Apelles’ life had grown so quiet and his translations had grown so loud as to effectively drown out any human noise around him. And yet in the silence that followed the thunder peal of this last translation, he began to hear those around him again.

  But his coworkers did not know this nor did they yet notice the change. And so, no one, including the pretty Campaspe Bello, talked to Dr Apelles this morning. But she was, now, tuned to him. Today, for example, when he dropped a book and bent down to retrieve it, she had looked in his direction, that is, to her left, until he reappeared, at which time she looked instantly away. Later, when he passed her to check on or double-check on a cart and its number, her eyes followed him. Without really looking at him or engaging him, she kept track of where he was and what he was doing, and, in general, as much as she joked with Jesus, her thoughts were directed at the nearer target of Dr Apelles. She often wondered what lay inside, what his life was like, and, if truth be told, she had, recently, even gone so far as to Google him, but the results had been either in a foreign language or in reference to an obscure journal, dedicated to mosaics and military campaigns that seemed too improbably distant from the Dr Apelles she knew to be worth a second click. But her searches, and there had been three searches, confirmed for her the fact that he had an existence outside of RECAP, a fact which had served to sharpen her curiosity that had never traveled much farther than her own workstation. It is not strange to wonder about the habits and feelings of solitary and silent men. What is strange is that, for his part, Dr Apelles had never noticed that she noticed him, that she watched him, because almost all men, no matter their age, are usually keen to be noticed, especially by women as fine as Campaspe. She was a short girl, a few inches over five feet tall, and perhaps twenty-four years old. She had curly hair, beautiful, rich, chestnut and bronze curls, a deep olive complexion that in the summer months turned a fine rosy brown color. She had plump wrists and soft arms and very thick, full lips. And it was not hard to imagine her on a pebbly beach somewhere in the Mediterranean, bringing her father (who was a fisherman) his lunch as he smoked his short pipe and mended his nets under the bright sun. She looked very innocent, but also capable of a great deal of passion. And that was, as can be expected, exactly how Jesus imagined her when alone with his thoughts. If Campaspe
had looked his way with the same meaning with which she loaded her glances at Dr Apelles, Jesus would have been a happy man. The farthest he had gotten with her was a Mexican restaurant near the train station for after-work margaritas, with paper umbrellas standing in the drinks and four other coworkers standing in the way of his asking her out on a date. But then, well, enough . . .

  Dr Apelles finished loading a box and he double-checked the bar code on the books with the master code on the outside of the box. When he looked up and reached for another batch of books, he saw that Campaspe was looking at him. And something stirred inside him. Something, almost imperceptibly, shifted. He was surprised to note or remember, for the very first time in the three years that she had worked next to him, that she was very attractive.