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That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

Page 5

by K. J. Bishop

How could that be answered, when I could only see from one point of view at any one moment?

  Then it struck me that I had perhaps been mistaken in thinking that the Ape and I cancelled each other out in the matter of the door on the right. There was no good reason to favour myself when I was so dissatisfied with my own state. As the door not indicated by either of us, the left door now seemed to have the advantage. I waited for a thought to challenge this, but no such thought arose. And in fact, a certain instinct in me favoured the left. It seemed not implausible that the instinct might be the subconscious echo of lost information. So left I went, and to make myself feel bolder I stuck my middle finger up at the Ape behind me.

  You were not in your cell. You had not bribed someone to let you out, nor had you filed through the bars on the tiny window and climbed down the vertical acres of brick wall below. You had – to use the only apt word – withdrawn.

  I was glad that you had gone; I did not like to think of you imprisoned. Even though, in being gone, you caused me pain and made my life difficult, I was excited to learn something about you: you were an artist.

  The walls, floor and ceiling of your cell were covered with trompe l’oeil drawings in charcoal, loosely executed but nonetheless convincing, of a vast and terrifically complex interior space. Beginning with four large arches that you had drawn on your walls – so that the cell ceased to be an inverse cube within solid brick and became a cube of air in air, defined only by four slender pillars in the corners – you had created a realm of masonry: walls, flagstone floors, vaulted ceilings, archways, columns and windows, arranged to create structures and spaces that interfed, nested within each other, and contested for control of the perspective, corners pushing out or folding in under the influence of other corners you had drawn in paradoxical relation to them. Upon, within and between these flexing planes you had fitted catwalks, ladders, machine housings, chimneys with plumes of smoke – and now the eye found staircases, balconies, terraces, and now galleries, arcades, courts and colonnades – and now it was pushed into back rooms, unlit narrows, sewers, crypts, and, yes, cells and dungeons.

  As for the vertical axis, you had placed the site that had been your cell within a shaft, created by one quadratura drawn on the ceiling and another on the floor, into which you had sketched huge lanterns slung on chains, by which were illumined the balconied walls of the shaft soaring up and up to a distant ceiling and plunging down and down to a faraway floor. On the actual floor of the cell you had drawn a narrow ledge for standing on, and I was careful to use it, since I felt a faint draught coming up from below.

  In this warren of your invention all of the windows, doorways and arches gave onto more stone and brickwork, more interiors; some of the spaces thus exposed were plausible, while some were impossible, corridors running for hundreds of feet within the thickness of single walls, trompes within the trompe.

  Nowhere in any of this was a door closed or a passage blocked; not one single opening was prohibited, and therefore no hiding place was suggested.

  If it was a building, it was a trap; if a trap, a factory; if a factory, the castle of a lunatic with too much disposable income. And if it was a castle, it was a prison of wondrous form and perhaps infinite capacity. There was no ‘outside’. That was clever of you. They can find you if you go outside, but what system of retrieval exists to extract a person who has slipped an unprecedented degree further inside? And if you had escaped into a prison, who was this prison’s authority but you? Anyone who followed you in would become your prisoner.

  ‘A bit gone to town, isn’t it? Not to mention self-involved,’ commented the warden who had brought me to your cell and who now stood at the door, holding a real lantern to improve upon the light supplied by the barred window (around which you had drawn scaffolding, suggesting a construction site). I didn’t reply. The warden went on, ‘The occupant was done for breaking and entering. Going to be locked up forever. Framed like a picture, in my opinion.’

  I had no faith in anything I was told by the authorities here. For all their bureaucryptic filing silos, for all their eyes, they didn’t know who you were. There had been speculation that you were either a Dangerous Beast, a Beautiful Captive, or an Idiot Savant. The truth was never discovered, because you only faced people when they were facing away from you.

  Nor did they know who I was, any better than I knew myself. They thought I was from the Department. I had shown them my false ID, which they accepted without question. I couldn’t even be sure that I wasn’t from the Department, or that my false ID was really false.

  But leaving all else aside, the warden had unwittingly made one meritorious point. Your contrivance was very much like a town, or rather a city. A city without exterior spaces, without sky or landscape or any suggestion of routes in and out. A city that was nothing but city, a positive without (as opposed to within) a negative.

  How could I find you in that accumulation of spaces? A maze with so much porosity, and no evident boundary, suggested an open secret – a site riddled with meaning. But perhaps you were trying to trick me into a useless search for something hiding in plain sight, or for the shape of a riddle to be answered, when in fact the only way to find you would be to make a methodical search, however difficult, in that maze which was more like a thousand mazes interpermeating and spawning permutations.

  As I pondered what might be the collective noun for mazes – an accretion? – the warden spoke up again. ‘What do you reckon? Bit of an escape artist, eh?’ The words echoed more than they should have.

  ‘An open case of paradox boxed.’ I was trying to impress not the warden, but you, with my cleverness.

  The warden remained silent while I contemplated your absence, closing my eyes. The draught immediately blew stronger, not only from the drop below but from all around. Winds and whispers. I heard water and feet running. Something hard hitting a metal pipe, reverberating. Mild grey light touched the lid of my mind’s eye. The air of your world carried smells of cabbage, chicken soup, bedclothes.

  They say smell, more than any other sense, has the power to evoke memories. These traces of odour from your world could not make me remember you; but they caused some kind of breakage. They affirmed that there was something to be remembered, something that had been, a past before this prison. I couldn’t say that I believed in this; I knew it. And with this absolutely certain knowledge there came not just relief but pain.

  I turned so the warden could not see me crying. I doubted that people from the Department were given to public outbursts of grief. I wiped my face and, to dry my hand, rubbed it on the wall without thinking. Your drawing smudged; my wet hand had erased a small arch.

  The accident gave me an idea. I ordered the warden to bring me a bucket of hot water and a mop.

  These were brought, and I washed your artwork away. I made the walls empty and clean. I made a desert, and the four walls were the four winds.

  I stepped into the wind that was the wall with the window. At that moment, as I passed into the hollow air, I tried to remember whether the warden and I had ever regarded each other face to face. But my memories were already passing away.

  To get anywhere in the desert city one had to go not only through streets and alleys but through houses and places of work. The common, nearly ubiquitous style of architecture was inward facing, the buildings encountering the streets with mud-brick walls that were all but blind, their only windows small and high ones for ventilation rather than views. But the doors at street level were for the most part open, and when one of the numerous dead ends blocked the way you only had to walk through a coppersmith’s workshop, or a family courtyard where children played around a fountain under the sleepy eyes of a grandfather, or an office full of women typing under fluorescent lights, then take another door out to another street. In you went and out, trying to be unobtrusive.

  Two things were nearly everywhere: sand and sales. None of the streets were paved, and every route was ankle-deep in fine, very old, oxidised o
range sand. It lay indoors too; one only got away from it by going upstairs. But even up on the flat roofs there were stalls and markets. A bazaar was all through the city like vines in a jungle. Vendors lined the streets and squatted on staircase landings and in the corners of rooms. The roofs were crowded with specialists selling caged birds, cassette tapes and car-seat covers, while to buy a potted cactus, a fly whisk or a baby stroller it was necessary to find the forecourt of a temple, where purveyors of these items would be doing business inside portable shops made of cyclone fencing; but finding a temple was not easy. Even the gods of the city lived in houses unembellished like the rest, as bland as the sand. Only those structures and precincts whose function made disguise impossible, such as the stadium, the cemetery and the great fort, were outwardly distinguishable. And these, too, had their marketplaces: in the aisles and under the seating at the stadium, around the sides of the parade ground in the fort, inside the shady kennels of the dead.

  I trailed through houses where the lamps burned pig fat, and houses where they burned naphtha, and august premises where they burned attar of roses. Once I found myself in a large, airy room with vaulted ceilings and gilded furniture, where no less a person than the Governor of the city was auctioning off a pile of carpets and curtains to passersby.

  I was trying to find the centre of the market.

  It was hard to imagine finding your tracks among the household goods, hardware and toys for sale in the long, hot street into which I emerged after making my way out of the Governor’s palace. This was not for a lack of likely clues but an oversupply of them. Any object I saw could have led me to you, if I found the right way to employ it. A set of snakes and ladders suggested Qabalistic adventures and the possibility of signs to your whereabouts lying in Hebrew gematria. A circuit board suggested a Ouija board and an answer from the other side of death, then alternatively it suggested a set of snakes and ladders… I felt dizzy considering the possibilities implied by a sieve, a sewing machine and a sink plunger. All the wares were wheres, and every where a potential here.

  I recalled my long journey across the desert. The desert had no apertures. Oases, once in a while; but an oasis is no more an opening in a desert than an island is an opening in the sea. In the desert there was desert; here there was everything else.

  I was always asking the way to the main bazaar, but kept diverging from the directions given me, in order to loiter further among aisles of alarm clocks, pantyhose, hairdryers, cigarettes, nail polish and plastic lunchboxes. After being nearly blinded by the repetition of the desert, I was overcome by these objects – overcome, that is, by desire for everything I was seeing. Every single bit of merchandise swayed me to want it, by some power, whether of a physical quality or a tempting association; every item struck me as an opening, the beginning of a story or a path – with you, somehow, at the end. It was only because they all promised you to me that I couldn’t believe any of them. Had I found one of these commodities, a bottle of silver nail polish for instance, by itself in the immensity of the desert, I would have accorded it far more importance. In it I would have seen quicksilver, satin sheets, a sword, and I would have used these images as tokens to guide me.

  I am a lover, I thought. That I love is perhaps the most essential condition of my existence. Yet this vital aspect of myself is very much like a charming but small object lying in a sand-drift: easily overlooked, and in danger of being lost, submerged under the piling details of the hunt.

  The city was as convoluted as an insurance contract drawn up by a drunken spider, but not so topographically heathen as to be without a centre. A cartographer could have mapped it on ordinary graph paper. Towards the middle of the afternoon I dragged my feet into an umbilicus – a big square with ornamental columns in the corners – and here I found the treasure trove: the best silk carpets, the fine fabrics, the saffron, indigo and salt, the pierced brass lamps that when lit would project stars or flowers or the names of God and angels in letters of light, the perfumes in gilded bottles. I expected all of these to exert a strong power of fascination over me, but surprisingly they did not. They had obvious charms for the imagination, and no doubt one was meant to see them as messengers of the yonder in purchasable form; but they weren’t at all honest, sitting there pretending to be magic carpets, magic lamps, flacons of the alchemists’ drinkable gold; they betrayed themselves by suggesting scenarios that no one in their right mind would believe. Once bought, they would only torment by not being able to deliver on their promises. Better to buy a nice lunchbox, whose translucent blue plastic will have a soothing effect on the soul, and which is cheap enough to be thrown away when the pleasure wanes.

  (There is a feeling of having been on a great quest, a journey of discovery and initiation, so what a let-down to learn that one only went shopping, and what’s worse forgot to buy tomatoes, and now the good tomatoes will be gone, and all the eye-candy in the world boils down to plain beans for dinner…)

  In support of my efforts to find you, I had acquired a good working knowledge of a number of divinatory methods. Amongst these, for its speed and simplicity, I especially favoured cledonomancy, the art of interpreting seemingly random events, such as overheard speech or an object encountered at a certain moment. The art presupposes a world full of meaning, and requires the practitioner to be alert for all sorts of signs, such as coincidences, metaphors and puns, with relevance to the matter under scrutiny. While its use demands discrimination in what one attributes significance to, it also demands faith that the senses will perceive what they are meant to perceive, which amounts to faith that the secret itself desires to be found out. I therefore had to believe that you were not passive.

  The square with its columns suggested an overturned table. Had you turned the tables on me? But one should be wary of seeing personal signs in large-scale phenomena – and, in any case, if the square was a sign, there was no action I could think of taking based upon it.

  I got out of the bazaar in a hurry, pushing my way through the crowd of shoppers, not caring that I was jostling people and stepping on feet.

  Next I found myself in the book bazaar. So far I had not seen a single book for sale; perhaps this was the only section of the city where books were sold. The book stalls filled eight or nine ostentatiously drab alleys. Discreet graffiti on the walls in the vicinity proclaimed many of the buildings to be schools and academies. Their doors were closed, presumably in deference to the distractibility of students.

  It wasn’t long before I noticed how many of the books addressed the subject of a search or quest. The romances, detective novels and tales of treasure hunters and explorers must have filled hundreds of boxes. Then the thought struck me that all the non-fiction was concerned with the quest for knowledge; and all the fiction was looking for an appropriate ending – or not even an ending, perhaps, but an overall completeness, a functioning gestalt.

  I had another episode of dizziness, this time so severe that I had to lean against a wall and breathe deeply. I had thought the desert city was enough of a labyrinth, but here, in this small area, was a trick: a muster of thousands more labyrinths, each slipped within the cover of a book that I could carry in one hand.

  Any one of those mazes might lead me to you, or might contain a phrase or word that would lead to another text that would lead…

  Moreover, some of the books were in languages I didn’t know at all. It had always been an article of faith with me that wherever you were, you were not inaccessible – but what if I were wrong in that assumption?

  I felt ill, and my breath threatened to turn into a whimper, until a simple thought came along to save me: every one of the books was useless. Supposing that I bought one of the novels, I would share the characters’ quests and journeys, and experience their triumphs, reconciliations, deaths; or if I bought a work of non-fiction I might study the exposition of the subject matter until I had completely drained the book and understood everything in it; if I bought a book of poems I would give the poet my hand
and be led into the gardens of the soul. But other people’s thoughts and dreams, wherever they led, couldn’t possibly lead me to you. I would close the book, and you would still be a hollow in front of me. So, instead of crying, I laughed, and walked through the rest of the book bazaar without feeling any further temptation or anxiety.

  All the same, I had no idea what I would do now. But, fortunately, inspiration arrived from another quarter.

  The travel brochure was buried in the sand on the street; my shuffling foot uncovered it. It was just a flyer, printed on one sheet of paper, folded in thirds. On the front was a photo of a good-looking couple posing on a terrace outside a fancy hotel, with the hood of a limousine jutting into the base of the picture like Atlas holding up the world. The copy, printed in copperplate type, read:

  ~You Could Be Here~

  Could you? I wondered. You could be here. Was here the place where you were able to exist?

  By the personal manner in which it had come to me, the flyer had better credentials as an oracular sign than the column-cornered square. Both my intellect and my instincts told me to accept its message, even before I noticed that the agency’s name was Delphi Travel. An address was printed across the bottom, over the limousine. I asked directions, and shuffled around for another two hours trying to get there, eventually finding the agency down a hall off someone’s living room where some kids were watching cartoons.

  ‘I knew I shoulda taken dat left toin at Albuquoique,’ Bugs Bunny was saying. Whether it was a good omen or a bad, I had to turn left into the hall, which smelled of fly spray and ended at a door. I went through into a tiled bathroom. Next to the shower was a glass door on which stick-on plastic letters spelled out DELPHI RAVEL, with the ghost of a peeled-off T.

  The only person in the office through the door was a fat woman wearing a swimsuit and a black silk sleeping mask. Lying back in her chair behind the desk, she appeared to be dozing, but when I came in she said:

 

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