The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  Dr Apelles, though alone for quite some time, had only recently begun to feel lonely, and he had nurtured certain expedients of a carnal nature that he, also on a regular schedule, availed himself of. We shouldn’t judge him, of course—at least he wasn’t out breaking hearts. On the every other Friday that he did not go to the archives, as he walked homeward from the train station he stopped at a little storefront above which a blinking, more like winking, neon sign advertised “Mai’s Massage.” After stopping, and without any kind of guilty look around whatsoever, he entered through the green door, and coursed quietly past the silver cloud of the jangling bell. So regular a fellow was he—he always arrived at the same time, and always on the same day—that he was considered, by those who worked there, a regular. He always saw the same girl. Or, it should be noted that he always saw the same girl for a while, since the masseuses couldn’t be expected to work in such a place for as long as Dr Apelles had been going there. He passed the front desk and spoke quickly, politely, and pleasantly with the woman at the counter and proceeded to the back, where gratification in the form of a faux massage, coupled with faux pleasure on the part of the masseuse, amid plastic potted palms, would take place. Everyone likes happy endings in both stories and life, and Dr Apelles achieved his every two weeks with girls who were usually Thai and whose name was always “Mai”—and it should not be supposed that Dr Apelles had a fetish of any sort, rather, he had studied the Thai language and it felt more respectful to address his right-hand girl in her own language. And, by being able to communicate more fully, though in such transactions language is blessedly unnecessary, Dr Apelles was able to satisfy both his desire and his conscience because he could learn the girl’s circumstances. It was important for him to know that while the work might be less than agreeable to the masseuse, at least his pleasure would not occur at her expense. Apelles was a good customer and was good at being a customer, but that hadn’t always been the case.

  When he first decided to go into Mai’s Massage after walking past the place day after day after day—he had paced back and forth in front of the door, and from one end of the block to the other for the better part of an hour—he opened the door, and with a deep breath, stepped inside to the jingling of the bell that seemed sinister and telling (as though its purpose was to notify the angels in heaven that he was about to sin), and then he had no idea what to say or what to do. He was in a place governed by rules and bound by traditions that he did not know. It was only after a few weeks of practice that he became fluent in this kind of pleasure. We mention this aspect of Dr Apelles’ life not to titillate or tease the reader, and we mention it with no small amount of apprehension given the typically high moral standards of the reading public. But suffice it to say that the novel of Dr Apelles’ life is half English with its parsonages and demesnes and afternoon teas and abstention and self-abnegation, and half French, containing brothels and betrayals and the seductive scent of cattleyas.

  Moving on from Campaspe and the sorting stations, the coded and tagged and boxed books on their new carts were lined up behind the sorting stations and taken on forklifts into the Stacks. First, they passed through a pair of large doors into a kind of pressure chamber that separated the S.A. from the Stacks. This chamber prevented excess moisture, heat, or cold from entering into or escaping from the Stacks themselves, which were truly a marvel of engineering and preservation. The Stacks occupied twice the space taken up by the O.C. and the S.A. combined, and to put it in imaginable terms, the Stacks were twice the size of a football field. If the O.C. represented the manor house and the S.A. the immediate gardens, then the Stacks were the rest of a vast preserve. There were two hundred rows of shelves, each fifty meters long and twenty meters high and, all told, the shelves were the final resting place for all the books that entered RECAP. Each cart that entered the Stacks was lined up at the end of the appropriate row and queued there, ready to be assimilated. Men would then push the carts onto the waiting tines of another, very specialized fork-lift, and they would be lifted up up up into the ethosphere and the boxes unloaded onto the appropriate shelf, the bar codes on the boxes referenced against a bar code affixed to the shelf, and then after all these steps were taken and checked and rechecked the books were finally at peace, given rest, and would, most likely, never move or see human eyes again. The truly ironic aspect of all this was that it was vitally important that the location of each and every box was known, and that with the stroke of a computer key it could be found, but the boxes would never be found, in the sense that no one wanted to discover them, which is why they were in RECAP in the first place. So, in brief, the books—like all the people who wrote them and all the people who read them and all the people who translated them or even all the people who bought them—were known and yet unknown. It is so easy to get lost. And, to the librarians, and for Ms Manger in particular since she is in charge, the nagging, terrifying thought is that if a box of books were moved over one meter on its shelf or moved one shelf down, it could very possibly be lost forever.

  Dr Apelles and the other sorters had their own specialized fear very different than that of the administration for whom the shelves and the books—all the words—were an abstraction; for the administrators the books were a jumble of texts whose subject was unknown but for which they had to find a logical place. They would never see the books themselves and, on the other end of the process, the shelvers didn’t deal with books, they dealt with boxes, and all they had to do was guide the boxes to their final resting place and that’s all. The sorters, on the other hand, had a very different relationship with the books and so they had a different kind of fear. They actually touched with their hands each and every text and looked at each and every text and by doing so they became, if only in a limited way and for a limited time, acquainted with the books, acquainted with the texts’ personalities or potential personalities. They saw and felt the covers, the spines, and the edges (deckled or plain, machine or hand-cut). They smelled like the books. They were covered with the dust of the books, their stations were littered with paper fragments that were shaken loose during their work, and by the end of the day their stations looked more like an empty, confetti-strewn parade ground than a librarian’s table. And the sorters’ fear was this: each book was unique, and they would only see each book once, and they would never know what was inside. Each glance was passing, past, and the contents would remain forever unknown. Book after book passed by them, text after text, all day long. And each time what if? What if they opened just one, what if they read, just a little? But they couldn’t, but they didn’t.

  At the end of the day Dr Apelles repeated his morning movements in reverse. He walked away from his station after logging out, waved his pass at the sensor and entered the O.C., collected his jacket and briefcase, walked past the Reading Room, waved his pass at the sensor by the front door, walked to the station, boarded the train, and was whisked back into the city—now dark—where he walked toward the intersection of the avenue and smaller side street. And, as always, the storefronts were the same as before, all the signs, and the buildings, and the sidewalk—all the great city in which he lived. One day older but eternal, passing before him, to the side, and behind—unrealized and unread.

  However, since it was a Friday and not a massage Friday, he, as we have mentioned previously, turned right off the main avenue and, shortly, arrived at his apartment building. He entered. The doorman greeted him and Dr Apelles greeted him back. He walked up the three stairs to his mailbox and switched his briefcase to his left hand and withdrew the key to his mailbox from his pocket with his right hand, and though he was unable to quell the desire for a letter, all he saw, and in truth all that he could expect to see was a medium-sized envelope containing an obscure academic journal dedicated to Algonquian linguistics. This he tucked under his arm and in a few more minutes, after his elevator ride, he was in his apartment. Since he did not eat in the restaurant as was his habit, he made himself a grilled
cheese sandwich for dinner. He drank a beer with his meal. These are solitary and frightening hours.

  Later that night, with the city below him, pressed between the pages of his evening and his morning, Dr Apelles had a dream. He was in the library. And he was alone. And, as is common enough to be universal, our dreams of dissatisfaction and distress need the visual prompts—dripping faucets and endless corridors and the faces of people we know only casually attached to personalities of great importance—common to such dreams in order for us to acknowledge the uniqueness of our conscious predicament. Dr Apelles, then, had turned the covers down and crawled under them only to wake, in the same bed, under the same covers. He woke to find his bed in RECAP, at the exact spot usually occupied by his workstation. His coworkers, all of them, had crowded around the headboard, and they were urging him to wake up. He was befuddled, and not a little confused, to see Mr Florsheim and Mr Bass, Mrs Millefeuille, Ms Manger, Jesus, Campaspe, and all the others away from their usual stations, and to see himself surrounded by the carts and boxes of his daily work when he thought he was sleeping, and, moreover, confused and surprised to see, as he could in his dream, that it was undoubtedly nighttime because no light came in the clerestory windows and the loading bays were shut and locked. They shook him and called his name, and it seemed to him that Campaspe’s hand lingered longer on him than the others, and she called his name a little more loudly and a little more longingly. Her hand felt cool on his chest, and it rose to rest on his cheek—her fingers silky soft and cool.

  He stood and slipped on his slippers and proceeded through the S.A. alone, heading toward the atmosphere chamber and the Stacks. All was quiet. The faces and voices of his coworkers faded behind him. He heard nothing except the scuff of his leather-soled slippers on the cement floor. He pressed the red button that opened the first door. The door opened. He stepped into the atmosphere chamber and the door closed behind him. And as soon as the door rumbled shut the chamber stretched and stretched until it disappeared at the vanishing point, and, with the process of elongation, the usual sounds of the vaporizer and the cooling/ heating system were heard no longer. The corridor was silent except for the sound—sometimes far, sometimes near—of a dripping faucet. Dr Apelles began to walk.

  The dream summarized itself. He was conscious of walking for hours accompanied by the sad sound of the dripping faucet though he did not walk for hours and the corridor was not endless. He arrived at the far door of the atmosphere chamber, pressed the button, it opened, he stepped forward, the door closed. He was in the Stacks that, because this is a dream and because the Stacks actually seem this way in real life, appeared to stretch on forever. And since they were limitless but filled, completely filled, they held (and this was certain) every book that had ever been written. All books in all languages from all times—there was no end to them.

  Dr Apelles stood in front of the Stacks—still in his pajamas and slippers—and realized with great horror that none of the books were boxed. Some were loose and leaned along the shelves, others were piled on top of one another, others still were stacked sideways and laid flat, and towers of them loitered on the floor between the shelves. There was no order to any of it, no way to know what book belonged where. Dr Apelles turned around, he was desperate to escape the Stacks, frantic to find his way out, but the door to the atmosphere chamber had disappeared—shelves and aisles stretched on forever behind him, too—the way he had come had disappeared, there was no trail. He turned back around but it was the same in all directions—there was no way out. At first Dr Apelles felt confused and hopeless. He knew that he had to do something, that there was some procedure that would free him from the Stacks—a place that had structure but no order, potentiality but no actuality. He had the sensation that time passed quickly, an eternity was unfolding, and he knew that it was up to him to organize the maze of books, to find their relationship, to put the books, in short, to put the languages, in relation to one another. And there was only one way in which he could to this. He must read them all in order to know where they belonged and find his way out.

  He stepped forward into the Stacks. They towered over him on either side and by craning his neck he could make out the top shelves, half lost in the gloom of the upper atmosphere. The lower shelves were, as we have mentioned, piled with books—they leaned and stood and squatted and lay flat with no logic to their place or position. Dr Apelles looked closely as he passed and saw some books that were quite old, with tooled leather covers, and it was easy to imagine that, inside, the covers were secured with string and marbled paper and had tissue paper covering the frontispieces. Other books were quite new—bright-eyed covers made of card stock slicked with plastic film. There were books of all sizes—from miniature to folio, pamphlet to compendium. This truly was a librarian’s nightmare.

  Dr Apelles kept walking—something led him on. Or, rather, something kept him from stopping at any one place. He needed to find the right book—the one with which he could start the work. It was important to pick the right one. But there were so many from which to choose! He hesitated. His steps faltered. He stopped. He reached out and then his hand retreated, recoiled. He wasn’t sure. Then he was sure and he reached out once more, but only to blend the edges of the spines, equaling them on the shelf. What a maddening dilemma! He must choose the right book, but he could not know if it was the right book without opening it, and by opening it he would make his choice! A more experienced man would know that this is not unlike choosing a lover.

  On that particular shelf, the one at chest level, there were thirty or so books standing upright and a few laid flat on either end to hold up their brothers in the middle. Dr Apelles could see, past the top edge of the soldiered books, that there were more piled behind the front rank. These books, all of them, were a mix of old and new—some were ancient—they had been reproduced by hand in obsolete scripts, at least, judging by the cover, that is how they looked; others were old but not ancient, leather-bound but printed and put together by machine; others were new, pulp novels and comic books. And there was no clear choice, no book that, owing to age or condition or method of production, looked the most likely, the most crucial. Dr Apelles felt an overwhelming sense of urgency—he knew he must begin his work.

  Suddenly, like a devil on his shoulder or (better) an angel at his elbow, Campaspe was in his dream.

  “Open it,” she said breathlessly. “Just open it.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know which one.”

  “Just begin. You must begin,” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you do. You do know. You have to chose.”

  His fingers played the spines, tapping and sounding, until he found an innocent-looking leather-bound volume from what looked to be the early nineteenth century though he couldn’t be sure unless he opened it. For better or worse it seemed like a good place to start—he could always move in either direction in time. He took it in his hands, blew the dust off the top edge, and smoothed his hand across the cover. He held the edge upward and, sure enough, the pages had been cut open and he was pleased to be reminded that there was once a time you had to read with a knife. Time was passing quickly, the sound of dripping water was much more insistent. Dr Apelles took a deep breath, bit off thirty or forty pages of the story with his thumb, and opened the book in the middle of a scene.

  Two women were running down a regally wooded hill, holding up their dress hems. It was raining, and the girls laughed as they gathered speed. Suddenly the action jumped off the page, sprang fully formed from it, and leaked out into the archive. To emphasize this abnormality, a peal of thunder rattled the bookshelves, and it began to rain all around Dr Apelles. Another clap of thunder sounded, and a gust of wind raced down the corridor. The rest of the books stirred. The pages in Dr Apelles’ hands shuddered and slid past his fingers and he beheld, in front of him, a young man with longish hair, sideburns, a waistcoat, and a white-ruffled shirt lea
ning on a mantelpiece as he spoke and blushed. Then he was gone and Dr Apelles saw green hills and broad-crowned oaks, and then a manor house, a girl in bed with a terrible sickness.

  A storm lashed the windowpanes. It continued to rain around him and the wind howled through the Stacks as a coach and four strived through the storm. Dr Apelles thought that it might be wise to turn the book to a calmer section, but before he could, the wind struck again, the books stirred, jittered, and began to flip open. They tumbled from the shelves, and when each book was opened a new scene sprang to life. A boy visited his great-aunt, where she lay in a large bed next to a yellow dresser on which stood her medicines, and the boy bent down to kiss her cheek. Then Dr Apelles saw a family, and they looked remarkably like his own—men, women, and two children gathered around an empty grave into which they threw bits of cloth. Then, to his horror, he saw an Indian toppling from a granite cliff, and mixed in with that scene, a man and a boy lying flat on top of a large boulder surrounded by red-coated soldiers. All the stories contained there, once opened by that first gust, began pouring out their contents into the Stacks, and each released its own action and place and weather. He saw a baby being eaten by witches and a man innocently buying a bar of lemon soap and another man straightening a beautiful woman’s corsage while the carriage they were in humped along the cobblestones. To his left was a man throwing cabbages over a stone wall and to his right a bearded professor played table tennis in his basement with a pair of twins. Above Dr Apelles reared mountain ranges in the process of being lifted into the sky like a theatre backdrop, and below him he could see a submarine nosing its way through the depths. He saw a young couple in tunics tending their flocks that quickly disappeared and was replaced with a terrible battle in a large swamp where the thatched dwellings of the inhabitants were burning. As each book opened, its action came to life and the chaos surrounding Dr Apelles increased. There was terrible wind, and snow, and rain; the ground was rocky one instant and oceanic the next and then smooth turfed—more and more images crowded the space and it became dizzying. And most terrifying was that each scene, while independent and discrete from the ones occurring around it, looked to be conscious of its neighbors, as though dancing a kind of gavotte; each scene waltzed through the archives complete unto itself yet somehow, by some hidden logic that Dr Apelles did not grasp, moving in concert with every other scene. The characters and images roared and rumbled and swirled around. Dr Apelles was frightened and he cowered in the delicious din that surrounded him. He thought, through his terror, that he had chosen incorrectly. But perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps the results would have been the same no matter which book he had opened first. It was all the same. And what was important was that he had opened a book at all—each and every one singular, unique, and special. In any event, the tempest shook the Stacks, image crowded image and threatened to overwhelm Dr Apelles.