The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  When she arrived at work she had left the translation in her locker, obeying the cardinal rule of RECAP: she was not to bring any outside reading material onto the floor.

  But that had felt wrong somehow—to have the translation in her locker. Since she had decided, once and for all, to give it back, the single-copy handwritten document had acquired the most precious value. It, and it alone, and its safe return, could preserve his good feelings for her. She smiled to herself all morning. Her feelings for him and his for her felt as precious, as special, as unique and singular as his translation. She felt like the worst was over. And so on her first fifteen-minute break she went to her locker and took her bag out and made her way to the bathroom in the O.C.

  She was almost at the bathroom door when she passed Ms Manger in the hall.

  “Leaving?” asked Ms Manger.

  Campaspe blushed.

  “Oh! No. No. Not leaving. You know,—” she rolled her eyes in gyno-conspiratorial complicity, “—that time of the month.”

  “Of course. Of course,” said Ms Manger.

  Campaspe turned as she shouldered open the bathroom door and took note that Ms Manger had stopped in the hallway and had followed Campaspe with her eyes.

  Once inside Campaspe closed her eyes for one second, two—did Ms Manger doubt her? Was her lie that apparent? Evidently so.

  She took the handicapped stall and set her bag on the floor and took out the translation. She counted the pages to make sure she had them all, folded them once, and tried to suspend them in the elastic of her underwear, but she was wearing a thong and the pages would not stay put, so she pulled up her jeans and tucked them in the back and then buttoned up and pulled her white sweater down over the top. The pages seemed to be well-enough hidden.

  She put her bag in her locker and went back to her station.

  She began working again, smiling to herself, feeling better.

  And as Dr Apelles stands in the elevator it seems that not only is his mind much faster than his body, it is more spacious as well. He cannot settle on any one thing. There is the translation. And there is Campaspe. There are all the thoughts and flashes, just flashes really, of his childhood. And the women he has been with—Annette and Frances and the many many Mais. And there is his work—all the translations in all those languages, an exquisite knowledge very few can appreciate.

  All morning Campaspe glanced over at Apelles’ empty station. Jesus noticed her looking and thought that she was looking at him.

  “Hey, C.”

  “Jesus. How’s it going?”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Yeah. Life, you know.”

  Jesus looked at her steadily.

  “You guys got something going on, huh?”

  “What?”

  “I said, ’you got something going on.’ You’re hooked up. You’re together.”

  It was a statement.

  “Yeah. I guess. Yeah,” stronger, more sure, “yeah we do.”

  Jesus grunted.

  “For a while. We’ve been seeing each other for a while.”

  Jesus grunted again.

  “You could say it’s serious.”

  She thought immediately of the translation resting against the small of her back. And the warm pages bent along her spine and felt, truly, like Apelles’ hand resting there. It was very exciting.

  “It’s real,” she said dreamily as she bent down to get a box from underneath her station.

  “You got something sticking out of your pants.”

  Campaspe did not rise.

  “Hey, C. Something’s wrong with your sweater.”

  “Oh! Oh, it’s raggedy, that’s all.”

  She was partially blocked by Apelles’ station and the cart drawn up to hers, so she took the pages out as surreptitiously as she could and put them on her work surface next to her manuals. But she knew Jesus had seen the translation, and, as the saying goes, Campaspe’s heart went cold.

  Apelles muses that Campaspe and her desires had sent her hurdling past him toward his translation. It must have begun that night when, after having gone to bed in his queen-sized bed, he thought he heard paper rustling in the next room. He had gone to sleep, into that twilight where anything can happen but very little ever does, and what does happen there is the most usual humdrum kind of stuff. When he woke he had the nagging feeling that he should check his briefcase and he did. It was where he had left it—on one of the kitchen chairs, the handles slanted against one another, blown there to the same angle by his hand. He opened it. All his papers were there, all the handwritten notes. Everything in the physical universe at least, was in place. His notes and his briefcase, but also the cups and saucers, his beloved toaster, his queen-sized bed—all of them were where they should be. But a new consciousness different than his own hovered over, entered, and inhabited his things now. They were possessed. At first this made him feel exiled from his own life, but the feeling is beginning to change. There might just be room aplenty in these things for him and for Campaspe and these simple objects can be entered and shared. The chipped and mismatched and time-stained and typical had become hiding places for the two of them the way children hide under the stairs and share secrets with one another.

  Campaspe felt queasy. She attracted too much notice. Jesus had always desired her. That was obvious. He was jealous of Apelles and had been for some time. That was obvious, too. And to have his jealousy bubble up to the level of consciousness at just the same moment he noticed something amiss with her sweater, and to then see her blush and remove whatever it was she had tucked into her pants created a bridge between his jealousy and that thing, the translation, though he could not know what it was. This is what made Campaspe feel queasy.

  “Hey, C.”

  Campaspe looked up and tried not to think about the manuscript that lay in open sight on her workstation.

  “Hey, C. So what does he do when he’s not here on Fridays?”

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “Come on. You gotta know. What does he do?”

  “He translates. He works as a translator.”

  “He’s a translator? What does he translate?”

  Campaspe closed her eyes. She definitely did not feel well.

  “He’s working on a story. A special story.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in all honesty. “I think it’s about him. It’s about him.”

  Just then the lunch hour began, and Campaspe hurried off to the bathroom, the only place she could imagine being alone. She sat in a stall and tried to wonder her way out of the predicament in which she found herself, but could not. Everything she did made everything else worse, or so it felt.

  When she returned to her station the manuscript was gone.

  Dr Apelles stamped his foot and cast his eyes upward. The elevator had not even traveled halfway to his floor. He hated the afternoons. Especially the afternoons he spent at work. It was the day’s end, that terrible time between working and living; there was nothing to look forward to—his work was done. All the books at RECAP had been logged, checked, and rechecked, and all the boxes were stacked and ready for the next day. There was some slight satisfaction in a good day’s work, but there was also the sense, and it was overwhelming, that all that had happened or would happen had already occurred and opportunity had passed. So the evening time, when one was supposed to be free, felt like a prison to him. It seemed to Dr Apelles that all the other workers felt as though they had been released, and all their longings during the workday were cured in the evening. For these happy people, smiling to themselves or cheerfully bantering their way homeward, the evening waited for them like a tuxedoed beau just inside the doors of an elegant restaurant that was cozy and dimly lit with plenty of places to hide and scheme. For Dr Apelles, on the other hand, the evening pro
spect was one of crushing tedium and downright terror because, if truth be told, the evenings had until recently held few surprises, and were not, usually, something to look forward to. Without the veneer of activity that he has been in the habit of applying over the emptiness of his days, his time showed itself for what it really was: empty. But now, with his translation out and adrift in the world, his life had become larger. He had Campaspe to thank for that.

  Oh, why won’t the elevator hurry? It has barely gone up at all, and time is dragging. The afternoons, between work and evening, are a burden: by anticipating those later hours, they are thus consecrated and intensified, much like thinking ahead to a dentist’s appointment or a scheduled medical procedure; the anticipation of pain is usually worse than the actual experience of it. Every jab of the needle confirms for us what we thought all along—and we long to shout if we could, see! I knew it would be bad!—and negates all the benign moments we spend making sure our bodies do not fall apart prematurely. So, too, those truly bad nights—when the walls close in, and our work seems either of great importance but impossible to achieve or of no importance whatsoever, when from afar we hear the laughter of people having fun and enjoying themselves without us, and when there is absolutely nothing the mind wants except relief, and when sleep doesn’t come or when it does it is not enough or what there is of it is filled with dreams that make our hearts ache—give us the small satisfaction of having been right all along in that now distant, dim, and far-away afternoon. Those nights effectively wipe away those other evenings of peace when the universe is in hushed accord with our every quiet, modest, wish. Dr Apelles’ sole consolation in the afternoons at RECAP had been that he got to watch Campaspe put away her things. But that is different now. Oh, the battle inside him is raging. His old pessimism. His old desire to remain hidden.

  All the same, there is something blessed about the way she moves: how she orders the manuals lined up on the right side of her workstation by pressing her uplifted forefinger against each spine one by one; how she sweeps the shreds of paper to the floor with her palms flat against the table as though smoothing the sheets of their marital bed; how, when she squats down to search for boxes or other supplies stored under her workstation, Dr Apelles can see, from the side, how her strong thighs meet and transform her calves, changing their usual compact shape, spreading them into a seam of muscle so strong and smooth it is no wonder poets of old felt compelled to use phrases like marble and rose when describing the flesh of women they desired—and Dr Apelles is further able (it is amazing where the mind can go) to imagine how a long spell of squatting will raise a red mark in the hollow of her knee that he could run his finger over and be able to tell, even with his eyes closed, just by the heat and texture, where that hot zone began and ended.

  Campaspe was hot. Flushed. Confused. And terrified. She scanned the top of her workstation. The translation was gone. She looked on the floor, on the off chance it had fallen there. It had not. She tried not to look at Jesus as she fanned the manuals on her station to see if, for some reason, she had slipped it in there. But everything was in order even though nothing, speaking of emotion, was in order.

  She did not want to ask Jesus straight out if he had taken it. Would he answer honestly? That was doubtful. And besides, she did not want to attract much attention, any attention—because she was guilty twice over: once for taking something that wasn’t hers, and once again because she had broken the rules of RECAP and introduced “foreign material” to the floor.

  She could hear Jesus humming along to his iPod.

  She could hear her own heart beating. And she could hear, faintly at first, and then with growing insistency, not so much what Apelles would say, because she couldn’t imagine him actually saying anything, but what Apelles would feel. And the future of his feelings for her were not certain anymore.

  Dr Apelles, through long habit, has been reading Campaspe whether she wants him to or not. He thinks, as the elevator passes another floor, how, when she is done rummaging below her workstation she will grasp the edge and lift herself up and say, lightly, to no one but herself, barely audible over the noise of RECAP, “ooof” in the same voice children use when lifting something they expect to be heavy even when it is not. Her little exclamation gives her the extra boost necessary to accomplish the action, though surely she would have been able to lift herself back to standing without saying anything at all. But by saying it, and this is what he liked so much about it, she shows, on the far horizon of her consciousness, that she is thinking about what she is doing. Now I am standing up. This is my body and I am making it move . . . And in the silence of RECAP, or rather, in the absence of speech, her little “ooof” functioned as a step forward into her mind, just as landings on well-designed stairs give you a glimpse of the upper floors and tell you that, even though it might seem like a long way off and the feet are weary with travel, you are almost there. These were the things that Dr Apelles usually waited all the blessed day to see, and if he was not at RECAP, was compelled to imagine, to read, as it were. It is a gift that Apelles only now recognizes—to create for himself Campaspe, to imagine her fully.

  He thought of her now. Did she have the translation with her? She did not.

  All the early afternoon, between lunch and the second break, Campaspe was in agony. She did not look at Jesus and went through the motions of work all the while thinking about how she could get the manuscript back.

  She could not think of how to do it.

  And so, recognizing that there was only one option, and that the most important thing was to get it back to Apelles, no matter the price she would have to pay, she did something drastic.

  The clock struck. It was time for the second fifteen-minute break. As casually as she could, she made her way to her locker and got a snack and took it to the Reading Room. She checked out a newspaper (she couldn’t remember, later, which one) and seated herself at one of the tables.

  There were a few workers at the other tables, seated singly and in groups of two and three. Jesus came in, and though he usually sat with her during her breaks, he took a table in the far corner and watched Campaspe over his sandwich.

  And, as quietly as she could, without anyone noticing, she proceeded to rip a piece off the corner of the page. And then another. Bit by bit she began to eat the newsprint.

  It tasted terrible, chalky, but the bitter taste of the page had the exact same flavor as her betrayal of Apelles, and she swallowed it dutifully.

  At first Campaspe didn’t think she would be able to get the whole page down in the fifteen minutes but she wetted her finger and tore silent piece after silent piece and chewed and drank her soda, and, after fifteen minutes the page was gone. The break was over. Campaspe returned to her station.

  Dr Apelles looked at his watch and at the numbered floors dinging by above the elevator door. RECAP would be closing now. When he was there Dr Apelles would wait for those last minutes, when without looking at the clock, he could tell, by an increase in the pitch of activity—a louder and more persistent rustling of paper and slide of book cover over wood and pasteboard—that it was closing time. And it was only under that cover of noise that he could, by wearing it as camouflage, look at Campaspe with impunity—armored, concealed in, hidden by all the activity around him he could look at her as much as he liked. He took in as much of her as he could and stored it up the way squirrels store a winter’s worth of nuts, and like those squirrels, he forgot where he hid most of those nuggets—and there he would be, scurrying around in his mind trying to find every last shred of every memory of every part of her that he knew, and since he knew he was bound to lose these treasures, the pleasure of collecting, of standing and taking in her movements, was washed away by the anxiety that he had not collected enough to last. Usually, though, it was enough, and he kept his stores intact, and later, while seated at the table of memory, he snacked on them through the evening and this made the nighttime toler
able.

  On this day closing time was marked with a different kind of activity. RECAP buzzed like a hive. Just before the sorters began closing down their stations, as the shelvers and loaders were returning their carts to their proper waiting places, the alarm sounded. Very few had ever heard the alarm go off for any reason other than a drill. But they had all been trained to recognize the sound. It meant that either the atmosphere of the Stacks had been compromised or a book or text had gone missing.

  In this case, Mrs Millefeuille had, after the last break, tabulated the pages of newsprint as usual and found one missing. She had rechecked her count. There was a page missing. Mrs Millefeuille had then notified Ms Manger as per regulations and Ms Manger had sounded the alarm.

  All the workers stopped what they were doing. The O.C. staff stood in a row in the hallway leading past the Reading Room. Those who worked on the loading dock stood in a long line next to the queue of waiting carts. The sorters, Campaspe among them, stood to the side of their stations like soldiers in a barracks. And the shelvers waited in a line by their carts along the far wall on the way to the Stacks.

  RECAP was officially locked down for the first time since it had opened.

  Dr Apelles, on the elevator, imagines the end of the day at RECAP. Closing time. The sound of shuffling paper rises in the afternoon air like the wingbeats of a flock of birds—restless, unsettled—as they prepare to fly off to some more distant place. There is a sense of urgency to it, though they repair every evening. And as they lift and wheel as on a city square, they turn first this way and then that, for no obvious reason, just to collect themselves, to perfect their unison. One wonders where they go, or if they go anywhere at all. And it seems possible that the only reason for this movement is that they have the most exquisite wings, and since they have them they must use them. And so the sound rises, Dr Apelles can hear it around him better with his eyes closed—and he has the sense that, just as the birds have taken wing, the sound of the shuffling paper signifies a general movement that is impossible to anticipate. When will they, as one, wheel to the left and brag their bellies at the pavement? It is impossible to detect a leader, an individual in advance. And what makes them move, singly but all together, is different than what enables them to choose their direction. A mystery to be sure—they must be tuned to something that Dr Apelles cannot begin to understand.