The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  The freezing rain was still coming down. A few cars felt their way in either direction, the lenses of their headlights crusted with slush like eyes filled with sleep. Dr Apelles and Campaspe saw, occasionally, individuals out on the sidewalk sliding their feet along the pavement.

  Neither Dr Apelles nor Campaspe had ever seen a city, especially this one, so empty, so stripped of humans.

  All the cars usually parked on either side of the four-lane avenue had by now been towed away. None of the storefronts were open. Above and behind them warehouses reared up into the sky.

  And though the ice storm had denuded the city, had stripped away the humans and their human activity as a great wind will pick leaves off a tree, what remained was amazing to behold. With parallel but unspoken awe Dr Apelles and Campaspe registered the amount and variety of life that had produced this place.

  A pizza joint passed by the cab, flanked by a check-cashing and money-order business on one side and a pawnshop on the other. And it was, now that there was no one there to obstruct the view, easy to imagine someone going from one to the other, and it was even easier to imagine the circumstances (a divorce, the expensive sickness of a parent) that necessitated the visit and then the relief brought by a cheap meal. Above these modest stores and others like them Dr Apelles and Campaspe could make out older signs made out of wood and bolted to the brick or painted on the brick itself that advertised services no longer offered in this world. They could see back into the past.

  Higher up, on the sides of the larger warehouses they could see, peeking out from behind new billboards, chipped murals—blasted by the weather—barely legible, advertising products of a bygone age.

  The city rolled past.

  Each building was now exposed for what it was and for what it had been. Both Campaspe and Dr Apelles would have liked to go inside these places. As though in a dream they imagined the buildings to be unlocked and vacant, prepared for their curiosity.

  The side streets opened up to reveal, for an instant, row houses and dilapidated Queen Annes, and then closed. Page after page was presented to them—the city passed them as quickly as the wind can fan the pages of a book left outside on a table.

  Dr Apelles and Campaspe read them as best they could and then, just when this street or that was almost gone from sight, he and Campaspe inserted themselves into the story presented to them there. The city lay open to them—in the late hour and with the treacherous weather—and they felt they could be anything, that nothing was impossible.

  The road rose, and the buildings dropped away. They were on the approach to the bridge. Then they were on it. They could see nothing but blackness below. When they reached the apex of the bridge they saw ahead into their own city—so boisterous—and no matter the weather it was tinkled with lights, and surely there were people down there, many of them going about their lives no matter what. The ice storm was talked about for many years.

  6

  The bell had already sounded and everyone was moving. It was time for them to return their materials. As a rule they were as methodical in that process as they were in their work. Without speaking to one another or communicating in any way they formed an order. Box after box, folder after folder, were returned. Dr Apelles responded slowly. After the silver cring of the bell died out, followed by the golden silence of the end of a day’s work he had continued to gaze at the ceiling while he remembered the ice storm before bringing his box and things to the cart next to the reading-room librarian’s raised desk. He exchanged a few words with the reading-room librarian. He was in a daze.

  Once outside he stood on the front steps. Night had fallen. He looked into the sky, which was clear, but in which nothing could be seen.

  It was hard to believe that his researches were almost over. Everything was clearer now.

  For a while things had not been clear. Before the ice storm the translation—it could be nothing else—had caused a jumble of thoughts. What else could explain his memories of Victor and his own early life intruding so imperiously? He had been so lost. If Dr Apelles was completely honest with himself he had to admit that he had never been found.

  At first, his confusion had only deepened after the night of the storm. The ice storm was talked about still and would be for many years. And for Dr Apelles it was a night he would never forget, and was, as he stood on the steps of the archive and looked out on the people hurrying home on the sidewalk below, still, in many ways, continuing to have an effect on his life.

  That confusion, which reached a pitch on the day of the storm, had continued to grow thereafter, beginning the day after the storm when he slipped and slid his way over to the archive. He had begun his work again, but the tense fluttered from his grasp and then he lost it altogether. He could no longer remember where the stresses were supposed to be placed, could no longer remember which vowels were long and which were short. He had lost his style.

  But then, a tint had crept into the palette of his translation. And the whole of it emerged differently than he had expected. Before that time his work had been interrupted by other thoughts. Now they were colored by them. Colored, especially, by Campaspe. As the structure of his life melted under the heat of new emotions so did the sense of the translation.

  The guard came out.

  “You can’t stand here. You’re blocking the door,” he said, not unkindly.

  “Yes. Of course.” They exchanged some more words, about the homeless and the city, and then Dr Apelles moved down the steps and into the throng of people.

  Whereas before Dr Apelles might have pondered the inscrutable lives of those on the street, since the ice storm he had given this up. He no longer sent his mind out to wander among the unknown and unknowable forest of people around him. He would take his usual path home, which was straight except for the one turn off the main avenue. But his thoughts moved in larger circles between the translation and Campaspe. He would see someone with a simple handbag or wearing red tennis shoes and he would imagine Campaspe carrying just such a bag or wearing the same shoes. And this type of exercise made him wonder what her life was like: what had her life been like before he knew her and what it was like now when she wasn’t at work.

  If Dr Apelles had been able, in his mind’s eye, to follow Campaspe through her day, he would have been surprised by what he saw.

  He would have been surprised, first of all, by her behavior after the ice storm. When she finally made it home she took the day off (more out of necessity than anything else since the city was shut down) and did nothing much at all. She was tired and pleased and kept smiling to herself as she straightened her already tidy apartment. And her smile—as she folded laundry and dusted on top of the fridge—can only be described as tinged with madness, if by madness we mean joy.

  Campaspe’s apartment was small, a studio, and even though it could be considered cramped, it was very homey. The whole of it—the single room containing the kitchen, the living space, and her bed, which was set under the window—was painted a warm, rusty red. Neat shelves of books grew as quickly and healthily as the few potted plants set around the place. The shelves began at the door, walked along the long wall, skipped over the doorway to the bathroom, made a turn at the corner, kept running their hands along the wall facing the street, skipped over the window, paused around the bed, skipped the other half of the large window, reached the other corner, turned right and ran, unbroken, to the edge of the kitchen area, took a deep breath and dove under the opening to the kitchen, and reemerged to make the last few steps back to the front door. A coat rack stood to the right of the door. A small dresser guarded the foot of the bed. And that was all the furniture she had, except for the small table and two chairs tucked under the window in the kitchen.

  That Campaspe had so many books and that she had read them all was surprising in someone so young. That she had stolen most of them from bookstores and public libraries (but not from RECAP) should
n’t be surprising considering she had two incompatible handicaps: she was both poor and curious. When a book grabbed her attention she was compelled to read it then and there. And since books were expensive, and since she could not wait, she took them from the shelf, put them under her coat, and brought them home where she could read in peace. And there they stayed, there they were, lining her little place. She always meant to go back and pay for them, but was too embarrassed and so they remained as symbols of her poverty and her curiosity.

  Dr Apelles would have been surprised by her little place and by her thievery (he had never stolen anything in his life), and most of all, on the day after the ice storm, he would have been surprised by her smile, which had not yet subsided. And it did not subside even when she was done with her cleaning and dozed on her sun-kissed bed and ran her ringlets around her index finger the way some women do when recollecting their pleasure. Apelles would have been surprised if he had been able to see all of this: surprised by the quietude of her life, by her refusal or inability to live hers like most other girls her age lived theirs.

  Campaspe did not “party.” She did not go out at night in a group of likewise beautiful girls and drink Red Bulls and vodka and sweet shots or slammers served out of paper cups by waitresses with a belly ring in the front and a tattoo in the back (as though their sexual identity was branded on their ass and threaded through their body and anchored on their navel), both revealed by a cropped shirt that showed a flat belly under engineered breasts. She did not get drunk with groups of girls like this and grind and drink and flirt with the boys or make out (just for fun, it doesn’t mean anything) with her girlfriends on the dance floor only to end the night too drunk to actually fuck anyone and smelling and looking like a rotten flower—sweet and wilted and smeared—spilling the syrup that was once in her stomach all over the bathroom floor. Nor did she “hook up” with boys and had no patience for the promise of premature ejaculation written out in the braille of facial acne. Nor did she decoy herself in coffee shops, sitting in the sun waiting for some emo boy to approach her. No . . . she was not interested in any of this. She was only interested in her work and in Apelles.

  True, Campaspe was better read and more intelligent than her modesty suggested. True, as a sorter at RECAP, she worked well below her “level.” But the strictures of RECAP were a solace for her. They provided order and there was a kind of beauty in that order. But more than that, RECAP was a pleasant torture because she could not satisfy her curiosity about stories and books there. She had never stolen a book from RECAP, had never so much as cracked a spine to peek inside. So—her days were spent in penance for her nights. Every day at RECAP she assuaged her guilt over her bookstore thefts. And so every day began for her as a balanced scale and allowed her to be the happy person she was. As for her feelings for Apelles, those ran deep and had been evolving, in silence and at a distance, since she had first started at RECAP.

  Campaspe had been interviewed and screened by Ms Manger and had secured a job as a sorter. It was also Ms Manger, who, on her Campaspe’s first day, had shown her all of RECAP. They began flying through the place in a wide orbit, beginning in the Reading Room, coasting by the O.C., then they whisked by Ms Manger’s own nest, and circled the S.A. They passed by the R.A., the edge of the sorting stations, hurried along the back wall and into the Stacks, back out, through the area where the carts were lined up, ready for the shelvers, and back to the center of the floor amongst the sorting stations, where they finally, with wings set, set down at Campaspe’s sorting station.

  “And so here we are. This is your station.”

  Campaspe nodded and surveyed the station, the empty cart, the empty shelves, the row of sorter’s manuals, the clean, uncluttered work surface,. She was thinking all the while that Ms Manger resembled not so much a visionary manager of a state-of-the-art library as the head housekeeper in a Victorian mansion; that Ms Manger did not own any of the demesne somehow heightened her need for control.

  “Once you get started and Jesus, no—” as Campaspe set eyes on Apelles for the first time”—over there.”

  Apelles had looked up at that moment and said, “Good day,” with a slight nod.

  “Hello. Hi.”

  “Over there,” said Ms Manger a little more shrilly—“that’s Jesus. This—” her arm swept open to showcase Dr Apelles as though he were a prize—“is Dr Apelles.”

  And Campaspe thought Ms Manger had blushed.

  “Hello,” said Campaspe again.

  “Good day,” said Apelles again.

  “This,” Ms Manger’s other arm opened, not as wide, not as readily, to include Campaspe, “is Campaspe. Now. Jesus, would you . . .”

  And he did. He showed her how to measure and tag and sort, how to use the manuals, and how to mark and reserve damaged books.

  Jesus was smitten and so he did what men do when they desire a woman—he tried to be more of a man but ended up acting like a boy, which is how Campaspe will think of Jesus no matter what he does later.

  Ms Manger stayed only so long as to make sure that Campaspe was catching on, and then she went back to her office.

  Jesus tried to draw Campaspe out. He asked her all sorts of questions, which she answered loudly at first. She had hoped that Apelles would overhear, but when he did not or chose not to, she stopped answering and responded to questions about her life with questions of her own about the job.

  Her first day was much like the day after and the day after that and all the rest that followed. She watched Apelles. She did her work. She parried Jesus’ attempts at seduction. She watched Apelles—his physical attitude, the way he held the books, the way he dressed—the same way we watch birds: with passion and interest and respect but as a species apart, moving on higher and more distant ether than we do, but curious and comforting to consider and a pleasure to have nearby.

  She had been attracted to him from the start. His silence was beautiful to her because, although he said little, it was clear that he was not capable of dissimulation—he could not appear as anything other than what he was. He could not be, or seem to be, anything other than Apelles.

  All the same, during that first day and thereafter, she couldn’t help wondering where he was because his mind, clearly, was on, but not in, his work. What worlds must he contain? What was he thinking? Like the work itself, Apelles was a pleasant torture because she longed to lift his cover and read him, to bring him home and read him immediately and completely, and, ultimately, to shelve him in her most private and intimate stacks in her warm, cozy, red-hued apartment.

  If Dr Apelles had been able, only for a day, to see himself through the camera of her eyes, he would have been shocked by the intimate angle of her vision. Every part of him would have appeared in close-up: the humble strength of his almost pudgy fingers were revealed in detail; the portrait of his neck (and he had never, ever thought of his own neck) framed by his collar, ear, and hair was lovingly drawn down to the small dark mole below his jaw that he sometimes nicked while shaving; she cut to the plump strength of his hips and ass under his chinos when he bent down, in profile, to retrieve something from under his station; and the furrows of his almost perpetually furrowed brow were very endearing when seen close and reminded Campaspe of the way her father had frowned and pursed his lips when cutting his fingernails. When Apelles walked from the R.A. to his sorting station her eyes stayed close to him in a long trolley shot; Apelles’ face and torso close up as the background moved steadily past.

  Apelles was not buff or lanky, or even average. He had no physical analog in the types that always seemed to recreate themselves in men: the barrelly men who could have been power lifters and who tuck their DKNY T-shirts into their jeans, the emo boys in bowling shirts, the college kids who dress like gay dockboys in Abercrombie &Fitch, or the rockers who all try to resemble Iggy Pop. No. Apelles was rounded and smooth and solid, complete unto himself, and Campaspe couldn’t help t
hinking that he was like some kind of animal—a badger or a woodchuck or a beaver—who needs nothing else, who need not do anything in particular at all for us to recognize him, instantly, for what he is. This is how she saw him all that time before the ice storm. And after, as she lay in her bed and corkscrewed her hair around her finger and smiled and sighed and marveled that the muscles of her inner thighs, the ones that clench, were sore, she murmured, “Of course, of course, of course.” She had fallen for him.

  He had no way of knowing that she thought of him in those many delicious ways, not then. For his part, he would concentrate on her, the one cheek she offered him in profile day after agonizing day, the exuberance of her curly hair and then, when he reached for more, there it would be, the translation. And he would look up, and he would be back in the archive, the translation in front of him, the reading light glancing over his pencils and his portion of the oak table. He saw the vaulted ceiling and the upper windows through which he registered the dimming of the day. It was as though he had just discovered the thing and was filled with equal amounts of wonder, loneliness, and frustration. He would get back to work. It felt as though he had been dreaming. He would look back down at his workstation and instead of the books in RECAP he saw the translation.

  Likewise, if he was at the archive, and the papers were actually before him, he saw not the words or their meaning but gestures of Campaspe’s that he had seen and collected at work. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear, or the habit she had of biting her lips when trying to put the books she had sized into their box. And as he looked, day after day, at the same gestures, the same profile, at times he thought if he stared hard enough he could penetrate the surface of these gestures and get to some other place. Just when he thought he would break through, there he was, studying the grain of the table or counting his pencils, or thumbing the plastic cover of a page. It was maddening. Everything was unsettled.