Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  Perched on a bar stool atop a table, there was another boy, who looked older than me because of his long silvery hair. He played an elegant tune on the violin. “From the Library of Music across the Silent Canyon.” Gadzooks caught me looking, and perhaps mistook the expression on my face. “They sneak across when the Librarian isn’t looking. That tune he’s playing—Mozart and Salieri’s Per la Ricuperata Salute di Ophelia. One of their prize possessions.” But I wasn’t thinking of a boy from the halls of lost music; instead, I was remembering a boy from a place far more ordinary and humdrum, though his fingers were no less nimble on the strings.

  Still—he was a long way away, and I was here, in the Library, and that was the price I had paid.

  They refilled my glass a second, then a third time, and I gladly accepted.

  The door burst open and two Collectors entered, flanking a man covered entirely by a threadbare blanket. The door safely closed behind him, he threw off his covering, and spread his arms; he was greeted with a cheer. At first glance he appeared emaciated, almost consumptive, resembling a child’s pipe-cleaner puppet, but he had a flamboyant assertiveness that belied the wispiness of his physical presence. “Ladies and gentlethings, I am here! Quite enough of the sad songs, don’t you think?”

  The musician switched to a guitar and launched into a rendition of David Bowie’s “Jean Genie,” though this version of the lyrics weren’t those Tom remembered; a lost version, he supposed, like everything else here. The song seemed to prompt a sea-change in the party; a Collector with beautiful silver stitching climbed up beside him and swayed her hips, the bartender began acrobatically tossing bottles, the patrons starting to turn around the dancefloor with a newly giddy energy.

  “That’s more like it,” said the man, sauntering to the bar. “And, why hello to you! Gadzooks, who might this handsome fellow be?”

  “Tom—the new Indexer,” said Gadzooks.

  Although I had known the man was referring to me, I feigned surprised.

  “A shame—one must never fall for an Indexer; the lamps are lit, but there’s never anyone home.” The man seized a glass from the bar, and tapped me on the nose. “Lovely you might be…but I require a tryst to possess a modicum of intelligence. What comes out of a mouth is just as vital as what goes in.” He gave me a lingering look and then left for the swell of partiers.

  “Who’s he?”

  Gadzooks looked at me as if I’d spat on his paws. “Jean Genet. We recovered the original Notre Dame des Fleurs. The Librarian has no idea.”

  Genet perched himself atop a suitcase in the centre of the room, thumbing theatrically through a sheaf of papers in his hand. “Shall I read?” he called out to the crowd, who cheered and held their drinks aloft. “Very well, very well. ‘I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head…’ Oh, this is one of my favourite bits! I remembered it word for word—got this one just right!”

  Gadzooks handed me another glass. “That’s Hemingway’s suitcase that he’s standing on,” he said, with great import.

  When I did not react with awe, he sighed and abandoned me.

  I didn’t remain alone for long.

  Genet plucked at my shirt-sleeve. “Remarkably, I find it easier as the night wears on to ignore your lack of discursive faculties. Animals rut, and they cannot reason.”

  I sipped from my glass, holding it as a meagre barricade between myself and him. I had been with men. I preferred it. But never with a Genet.

  He summoned two tall conical glasses from the barman, and placed a slotted spoon across each one, on which he placed a sugar cube. His fingers—contrary to his otherwise louche presence—were long and nimble, executing his actions with quiet delicacy. I found the practised nature of his preparations reassuring.

  Absinthe trickled over the cube, dissolving the sugar, and pooling in the bottom of the glass. Genet interlinked his arm through mine, bending it back around to reach his mouth. “Thank goodness you’re not Rimbaud,” he said before taking a gulp. I sipped and coughed. He laughed. His warm breath traced across my cheek before he kissed me hard. He drank again, and determined, this time, I matched him sip for sip. It lit an emerald fire in my belly.

  There were boisterous shouts rippling around the Speakeasy—Genet wheeled around, discarding his empty glass. “What’s that? You want me to go on a night run?”

  I swayed on my stool. “What’s a night run?” Was it the longest sentence I had said all day? It felt marvellous.

  “Wait and see,” said Genet. I caught a glimpse of Gadzooks across the room. He shook his head, and I wondered if the gesture indicated disappointment or a warning. No matter—Genet took my hand and pulled me up. “I’m hearing…‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ by Walter Raleigh? Any other offers?”

  Calls sounded from around the room.

  “The Romance of the Devil’s Fart!” “Inventio Fortunata!” “A Time for George Stavros!” “The Poor Man and the Lady!”

  Genet gestured as if he had tasted a bad oyster. “Boring!”

  “Plath’s Double Exposure!”

  Genet grinned. “Excellent. Come along, my handsome witling!”

  And then:

  The overhead gas lamps were extinguished, but a kind of luminescence, much the same lustre as moonlight, emanated from the stitching of the oldest books on the shelves like silvery skeletons. I crouched low.

  Genet swaggered ahead of me. I half expected him to burst into song, or start skipping.

  At the Index firelight still burned in one door window, casting a lone spot of colour across the flagstones. Genet stood and looked through, waiting for me to catch up. “1943,” he said. “I escaped from one hell into another.”

  He spun on his heel. “Just through that door and a few streets away there is a room above a tavern. And in that room is a bed with springs that sing as you fuck. Would you like to discover conjugating?”

  A rat scurried. I jumped, startled, which he mistook for virginal anxieties.

  Genet laughed. “Relax. We must forge a path to Plath.” He led me away from the ring of doors. He seemed to have a knack for moving without eliciting noise; I did not share it. Each footfall of my own rang back at me from the shelves. I fell behind. Genet had vanished, leaving lazy spirals of disturbed dust in the air, and I was on my own.

  I anticipated he would be thumbing through the Suicide section, but I arrived and found it solemn. Rather than being alphabetised, here the shelves were organised by methods of dispatch. Most works were incomplete. I traced my finger along the shelves, moving from gas oven to hanging, then finally to razorblade. I squatted, tilted my head to read the spines.

  And there it was:

  The Sum of All Our Tales. Barnabus Hardy. A single slim volume, it seemed insignificant in the vastness of the Library. I pulled it carefully from the shelf, and ran my fingers over the plain cover. The type was raised; my skin prickled. To hold the book in my hands had been worth the exhausting pretences of the day.

  A tiny voice spoke in the dark, inches from my ear. “Swivet.”

  I nearly fainted.

  I envisioned the Librarian leaning down from the ceiling, his hands armed with a needle and cord with which to sew my eyes shut.

  The rat sat bolt upright on the fourth shelf, grooming its snout. “Zamzodden.”

  I looked around before uttering “Rumblegumption.” The sheer delight of multiple syllables, held dammed up inside me all day, burst onto my tongue. I added another for good measure. “Falstaffian.”

  It paused and cocked its head. Shiny black eyes stared at me. “Anopisthograph.”

  I thought for a second. “Sardoodledom.”

  The rat twitched its nose and long whiskers and dashed away, throwing back over its scaly fine tail a disgruntled, “Ninnyhammer.” It dislodged a book, which fell with a ponderous thud.

  “Well now, my handsome library boy. This is a surprise.” Genet was leaning casually against Shotgun/A-G, watching me. He stepped close to me. In
the moonlight, it was almost possible to describe his gaunt face as handsome. “I was injurious in my dismissal of your mind. Hiding such an”—he reached out and grabbed at the crotch of my trousers—”impressive vocabulary would be grounds for”—he squeezed and I gasped (truth be told, I was hard, rigid, tumescent then, both by the wickedness of the man and my discovery)—”termination.”

  I stepped back and he released me. His scuffed shoe nudged the fallen book. Double Exposure. “Of course,” I said. “We should go back.”

  He tsked. “Say it right.”

  I sighed. “It would be auspicious for us to return to the Speakeasy before our mischief is discovered by a certain overseer.” Somewhere within me a door opened.

  The Librarian found me on the morning of my second day’s employment hungover and only a few breaths short of whimpering at every book deposited by the Collectors for me to index.

  “How’s our young man doing?” he said, unfolding his papery frame from between the stacks.

  Behind him, Gadzooks mumbled something. He had barely glanced at me beyond the necessary since the night before, when Genet and I had burst into the Speakeasy out of breath and dishevelled and sweaty.

  “Fine,” I said, enunciating the single syllable with care.

  “Tremendous, tremendous,” he said, rubbing his endpapers together. “The Index is looking pleasingly sparse. Fine job, fine job.” He paused, mid-flow, and looked around, wrinkling his nose. “Hmmm.”

  And:

  “Hmmmmm.”

  I rubbed my bleary eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  Gadzooks looked away.

  The Librarian took a deep breath which expanded his torso like an accordion. “Something smells amiss,” he said. “No. Something smells…missing.”

  I risked a glance over his shoulder, to where the slim pink spine of Double Exposure sat on the shelf.

  The Librarian sniffed again. “Most incomprehensible.” He departed, dragging his long coat on the ground, which rather than wiping them bare instead lined the flagstones with dust in his wake.

  I fretted all the day. Shelving volume after volume of lost books, I slipped more than a few times on the cold brass ladders. Behind texts, the rats devoured the deracinated and the archaic. Gadzooks laboured next to me, but he still avoided conversation.

  That night he did not invite me back to the Speakeasy. I didn’t mind: I had other things to occupy my time. Before he had been smuggled back to 1943, Genet had pressed the worn copy of Our Lady of the Flowers into my arms, suggesting that it might make good bedtime reading, and departing with a lascivious wink. (Thinking on it later, his precise words had been, “Take this and think of me in bed,” which I supposed wasn’t quite the same thing.)

  And so it was for a week or so. The Librarian would appear unbidden and unnoticed, sniffing the air before vanishing, leaving me to dreary tasks—filing the assembled works of a seven-volume fantasy epic into Doubt, box after box stuffed into Teenage Diaries, navigating the complex organisation of Pantos/Variations/Peter Pan.

  Gadzooks had been correct about the rats’ fondness for me; they would appear amongst whatever shelf I was tending. “Anopisthograph!” said one in particular. I was convinced it was the very same rodent with which I had exchanged words on the night run. “You’ve already had that one,” I said, and shooed it away.

  The next day I saw the Librarian sniffing around the display that featured famous luggage—the Library must have had other workers, still unseen, who tended to the glass-enclosed exhibitions of the detritus of authors—and with that long finger tapped by Hemingway’s suitcase. I was thankful that—for tonight at least—Genet’s manuscript was not hidden within as it usually was, with such fragrant prose that the Librarian could not have failed to scent its presence.

  Yet, for all his strange behaviour, the Librarian didn’t seem to suspect I possessed an intellect or a libido.

  Eventually Gadzooks thawed, and reappeared at my bedroom door. “Would you like to—y’know…?”

  At the Speakeasy, Genet regaled the crowd from atop the suitcase. (I wondered what had Hemingway done to Genet to deserve such roughshod disregard for his possessions, and eventually asked him; he said only “The man is famous for writing about a fish. Not a whale but a fish.”) Genet greeted me loudly. “Witling! I don’t suppose you have my book on you? I’ve drunk enough to chase away the memory of what I wrote ages ago. That I can remember my own name is a wonder.”

  He pirouetted drunkenly, and toppled over. He chuckled. “Perhaps I shall just be Jean tonight and let Genet stay on the shelf.”

  I helped him to the bar. I arranged two glasses, placed spoons over them, and a sugar cube atop each. Genet watched my hands as I poured the absinthe over it.

  “Why do you leave it here?” I said.

  “It? Pronouns are the weakest of words. Even an adverb has more panache.”

  I leaned into him. He thought I meant to kiss him and I moved at the last moment so my lips touched his ear. “Your book,” I whispered into it, and felt Genet press vigorously against me; after all, what words could be more seductive to a writer? “They smuggle you in, they smuggle you out—couldn’t you take it with you?”

  Genet held my face in his hands and blinked a while. “A first draft—a mere masturbatory fantasy. It belongs right here, one more lost book. It’s a dirty rag for my spent fantasies, written in the throes. What was published is superior.” He frowned. “At least, that’s what the Collectors say. I’ve only sold…” He let go of me and began to count on his fingers but quickly lost his way. “Well, not many, but they tell me that one day—”

  I kissed him. Our teeth clicked and thankfully parted. We had yet to even drink the sugared absinthe but I found his mouth so pleasing that I did not notice someone tugging at the cuff of my trousers.

  No, not someone. A rising wave of noise broke the familiar chatter. The minstrel faltered in his song; the assembled revellers bloomed into panic. The single rat at my feet let go of the fabric and leapt for my knee, claws digging through my trousers into the skin. “Anopisthograph. Anopisthograph!” and then at the doors the noise crescendoed with a tumult of panicked rats spilling through and across the floor.

  Genet cursed. I shouted, “The Librarian!”

  And:

  “Run!”

  And:

  We dashed, and it was hard not to laugh with how Genet smiled as we escaped. I pulled him towards the Index; he pulled me towards the staircase; in the tension between the two we spun in each other’s arms as if we were dancing. In the end, I did not deny him another night spent in my bed. I shut the door fast, almost crushing the rat that scampered in and took refuge in my writing desk.

  “Ow,” Genet said as we collapsed onto the mattress. “How can you sleep? What is in this? Horsehair?” He wet my lips. “Have you ever eaten cheval?” He groped me. “It’s an acquired taste.”

  Authors were indeed.

  I nibbled on the sweet rolls they fed us. I had pocketed an extra one for Gadzooks.

  “The last Indexer would give me his meals,” Gadzooks said as he chewed. “He never came to the Speakeasy. He wasted away in his room.”

  “Lost in a book?” I said.

  “Oh, no. He didn’t dare read. I think that’s why he faded to nothing. Every time he spoke he lost the words in his head.” Gadzooks rapped on his misshapen skull. “If you don’t replace that with something…even feelings, then you stop.”

  I had so many words in my head but I wasn’t sure if there would be enough feelings if I lost my vocabulary.

  A rat scurried into the middle of the Index.

  “Anopisthograph.”

  And then:

  “Thomas Hardy,” said the Librarian. His fingers traced down my cheek and neck, and far from the brittle dryness I had imagined, they felt sharp, as if they might leave a trail of papercuts on my skin. “Quite fascinating. Such a faultless résumé should have been enough to make me doubt. Clever boy…I was lulled by the passive voi
ce. I should have checked your references.”

  The rat turned slowly, almost apologetically, and backed away beneath the stacks. I sighed.

  “Indeed,” I said. “That would have been prudent of you. Judicious. Shrewd. Discerning, even.”

  The Librarian winced.

  Gadzooks attempted to fade away into the shelves. “Ah-ah-ah,” said the Librarian. He beckoned Gadzooks closer with a crooked finger. “Surreptitious sneaking—I’m afraid I cannot allow that.”

  With one hand the Librarian covered my face. I feared he meant to smother me; his skin against my nose smelt of spilt ink, the emaciated palm against my mouth made me choke with its taste of glue.

  Then I heard Gadzooks scream.

  The Librarian released me. All that remained of my Collector friend was a large hessian sack and some old wooden toys. A yo-yo stopped spinning, its thread a last umbilical cord.

  “Don’t think of it as murder,” said the Librarian. “Think of it as a metaphor for murder.”

  I swallowed.

  “The old beak warned me. Something missing. Boys before you sneaked into Unwarranted Adventures or Illegal Pornography. But you went there.” He gestured at the door. Neither of us needed to say aloud the section.

  “What am I to do with you?” He plucked from his coat pocket a book that made my heart sink. “And more importantly, what am I to do with this, found in your mattress.” He inspected the spine. “The Sum of All Our Tales, by Barnabus Hardy. Father? Grandsire? Brother?” He leered. “Lover?”

  “Father.”

  “Pity,” the Librarian said. “You must have been so young. The age when you were warned about razorblades in Halloween candy—not the bathtub.”

  I stiffened.

  “No note. Just his final manuscript. Did the literary world mourn his loss?”

  “Stop.”

  The Librarian shut the book hard enough that his clothes rippled. “By all means. But tell me, young Hardy, have you ever heard the word ‘deaccession’? Not so common any more, which is a shame.” He opened the grate of the nearest gas lamp. I screamed at him to cease, to desist, but still he poked one corner of my father’s only book into the flame.