by P. J. Lyon
Her Whispers in Alexandria
P.J. Lyon
Published: 2010
Tag(s): "short story"
Dedication
For Patricia
Thank you for the whispers.
Her Whispers in Alexandria
Her Whispers in Alexandria
by P.J. Lyon
It was not a block, but a wall, and he with no Jericho horn to loose the bricks.
Travis could find no words.
Not a single vowel let alone a sentence or a paragraph.
Rolled into the typewriter was a yellow page that had once been white, and in both states had never felt the touch of ink.
He stared at the yellow page for hours most days and the yellow page stared back, accusing, deriding him.
Forget it. You’re no good. This is no good. Words are forgotten, useless, dust.
Exercise, some wise sage had told him, would break the wall quicker than any Jericho horn.
So he had walked, jogged and run, but the wall remained and his feet were sore, his breath lost, and his side stitched with new pains.
None like the pain of the empty page though.
That was a pain that lasted through the days and nights and into the following days and nights, which were all one blank, yellow-paged mess now. A pain that filled a part of him that no doctor might ever cure, or even locate. There was no surgery for what ailed him.
He consulted Shamans and Charlatans alike. He drank foul potions, chanted arcane words in rhythmic patterns in rooms filled with sweet smoke. He sweated inside a lodge and was dropped into the frozen waters of a murky lake.
The page remained blank, started to age brown.
Other pages had filled with the ease of water being poured out from a jug. In other times in other years, he’d no sooner rested his fingers upon the keys than the flood began, the insect chatter of keys would fill the air and…
Between then and now there had to be something, some reason why or how, or even…when?
Travis made a calendar from his memories. He marked days of loves started and loves lost, of money gained and money given away, he drew red crosses over bad days and grinning smiles over the days he now remembered as worthwhile. There were skeleton bones and skulls, and flags that flew at half-mast and sometimes did not fly at all. Finally his wall was filled dates and hearts, crosses and grinning faces, bones and flags and all of it a mess with no pattern. A dyslexic map of his days.
Some days he forgot the blank page altogether and instead turned to the map upon his wall, but he was no cartographer, and this problem needed another discipline altogether.
Soon he became an archaeologist, digging through the mess to find the fossilised remains of the day when the wall was first built. In the dust of those remembered days he came upon a significant find.
A receipt.
A single, turned yellow with age, receipt for typewriter paper.
Was it this day? Was it this moment when the first bricks were put into place?
He sat with the receipt in hand, hoping to divine knowledge as an old man with twigs in his hand might try to divine water.
What happened on this day? Where was I going, what did I hope to find, what was lost, what was found?
Ten fitful nights of ten separate and fitful dreams later, he woke sweating, terrified and with the smudged receipt in his hand.
Once the terror had subsided, once the dream was over and he had towelled away the heat and cold in equal measure, Travis knew where the first brick had been laid, where it all began.
***
The Library.
That refuge of all hopeful and hopeless romantics.
He found himself there before it opened, and just after, he was a man waiting outside a delivery room or a haunted house, all paces and what-ifs.
This was where the truth, his truth rested. He was sure this is where it began. But now he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the why of his endless, blank-sheeted days.
Would knowing change a thing?
Would the truth bring back the words, stain the unstained paper?
And what if it didn’t?
The rain came before he could make up his mind and made up his mind for him.
He ran inside.
She was all librarian, how he imagined librarians to be. Books open before her in various states of reading, glasses that slid down her nose and were forgotten until the end of a chapter, and then, remembered, slid back up toward the bridge, only to be forgotten again as a new chapter began.
It took a long time for her to surface from the words before her and notice him.
“Ahh, you’re the writer, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, the words as cold as any lie he’d ever told before.
“It’s been a long time. Have you been ill?”
“Kind of. I was wondering, do you remember the last time I was here? Do you remember what I was doing?”
“Reading, I hope.”
“I mean…was I acting….strangely?”
She smiled the smile of a mother who fully understood the fears and hopes of a child.
“All writers act strangely. They’re like excited children left alone in sweet shops when it comes to a library.”
“No…I mean….” And he realised he didn’t know what he meant, but he did know it was here and on the day when he’d bought new paper when the wall was first begun.
“You mean beyond excitement? Beyond the usual spoiled for choice, don’t know which way to turn or which book to choose behaviour?”
He nodded.
She nodded back.
Then she pointed.
“You were reading yourself,” she said.
“Pardon?”
She pointed again to the shelves.
“Reading your own published works. Travis Daniels, that is your name?”
He nodded.
“Short stories?”
“Yes.”
“’In a Season of Burning’? ‘Sparrow Fall’?”
He nodded again.
“And I was reading those, was I?”
“You were.”
“I wonder…”
Travis let his wonder carry him to the shelves and his own works there.
He stood before them, his vision narrowed to trap their spines and ignore the rest. And there he found his name in glorious letters tattooed along the spine. And still further, the titles of his books.
All this was once in my mind, he thought. These are my dreams made real. My hopes are caught between the pages.
That same tingle of excitement he’d felt on first seeing himself upon the shelf was repeated now.
But that tingle cut itself short.
Why then was I here? What happened that my brain will not allow me to remember? What could be so bad about being here and reading my own works?
Apart from the embarrassment at knowing the librarian was watching him, there was nothing Travis could imagine as a reason for the empty page days that followed.
He reached for ‘Sparrow Fall’ and turned it in his hands.
And remembered the first time he’d touched a book that bore his name. The first time he’d broken the wrapping and turned the page, his page. A virgin writer then, on the edge of experience that he could not have known but spent all his time imagining.
He turned the page now.
And the past returned.
The first brick.
***
He stared as though in staring he might make the reality shift and the blank page be filled, but there was no denying what he saw and what he had witnessed that day so long ago when he’d come here to see himself on the shelves.
The empty page.
The first
brick in the wall, the lead domino that had started the chain.
A lending page as yellowed and empty as the page that rested in Travis’ typewriter.
No stamps, no dates of return, no marks that anyone but Travis had taken the book from the shelf. He flipped the pages, mirroring the past. They were razors at the edge, without creases, without smudges and stains and signs of… reading?
Yes.
It was the same thought repeated across time. The same brick that built the wall, now rested heavy upon Travis’ shoulders, brought him down far enough to reach out for another book upon a lower shelf and a million miles away from his own.
He held the new book beside his own.
A violent and bloodstain-covered story of simple revenge and dubious honour it was. He opened the page beyond the blood and saw a different spatter looking back at him from the lending page.
Side by side.
A drift of snow next to a dark rain.
The other book had been stamped so many times that all dates ran into one another. So popular was the blood and heroics that a second, third and fourth lending page nestled beneath the first. It was majestic confusion of ink next to the empty white of his own book.
This was it then.
I saw this, and more besides.
Yes.
The memories of that day returned. The randomly opened pages, each marked by the dates of return. The dog-eared, tea-stained, broken-spined reminders of that which had been read were all around him. It seemed that all had been read apart from his own work, and then he had fled.
Broken-hearted he had returned home to feed the machine its last meal and forget.
And he had forgotten, his mind as blank as the empty page until…
“You there, you returned,” the voice was a whisper from the classics section.
Travis turned to see the smokey hem of a long black dress drifting away around the edge of a bookcase.
“Hello? Excuse me?” he said, following the smoke trail.
She was framed by books on either side. She touched them as she passed, gentle fingers running the spines as if she were blind and could read by her caress.
“The writer returns. I wondered if you would, although I hoped you would.”
He followed.
With a question.
“Who are you?”
“A whisper,” she said, “that which needs to be said and should be said to all writers who come here with in light and leave carrying darkness.”
She turned a corner.
And so did he.
“What do you mean?”
“I am the whisper that remained after Alexandria burned.”
I’m crazy, Travis thought. Too much time staring into the yellow paper has brought me and the voices here to where it began and now where it must continue.
“I’m sorry,” Travis said. “I don’t understand—“
“You do,” she said. “You would have understood a lot sooner if you’d listened, if you’d stayed here after your heart was broken and you decided to find darkness instead of light. That day, Travis, if you’d only remained for a few more fretful beatings of your heart then it would have been okay.”
She turned another corner.
And Travis stayed.
He couldn’t follow figments of his broken imagination, no matter his desire to hear what she had to say. This was crazy. It was time he faced the blank white page of truth. Nobody wanted what he was offering. Nobody needed his words. They wanted other words, brutal words and violent words. There was no room for his sentiment on the shelves and no person willing to take those words to heart.
“You are wrong.”
She whispered into his ear.
Travis jumped.
And she was no longer at his ear, but a shadow seen drifting on the opposite side of a book-case.
“How did you do—“
“Her voice came from everywhere at once.”
“I am the whisper after the fire, Travis, were you not listening?”
If he hadn’t been before, he was now.
“A ghost?” he said.
“A spirit, the spirit more like,” she said.
Travis ran to catch her, but upon reaching the opposite side, she was gone. A shadow running ahead of the sun.
“Wait,” Travis said, “what do you mean… when you say the spirit?”
Her back was still to him, her long black smoke-drift of a dress billowing around her as she stood, mid-aisle, and spoke.
“Every writer reaches their particular midnight. They find it in a library where their loves are ignored or discounted at the bottom of a pile of paperbacks. I am the whisper that every writer hears at that moment. The curator of hope.”
“The muse?” Travis asked, his voice as hopeful as any child on a birthday morning.
She laughed.
“No, the muse comes in light not darkness. I’m what the muse can never be. I am the whisper in your ear that tells you not to give in, despite the broken heart, despite the lengthening of the shadows towards midnight. I am the curator of hopes and the keeper of the one and only truth that is worth knowing.”
“What truth?” And now Travis felt as though he were a child who was waiting for Christmas the day after his birthday.
She laughed again.
“You would like it if the truth were simple, would you not, even though you know that the truth, whenever we see the truth, is always complicated?”
He stepped toward her, hand stretched out to touch and turn and finally see her face.
“What truth?” he said.
His hand found her shoulder, turned her, but she was not turned. He stood again at her back, his hand limp at his side, his mouth open and empty of questions.
“The truth, Travis, is that we all play at resurrection games. Writer and reader alike.”
He managed nothing but a grunt in her direction, not a question, nothing that could be understood. But she did understand.
“The writer puts words down to be known beyond this life. The writer lives in hope that what touches him will touch others and in so doing grant him a life beyond his own. And the reader… the reader hopes to stop time by the turning of the page. Each book the refilling of sand in the hourglass. Each book, then, if only for a short time, becomes timeless.”
He found his voice, and it wasn’t much like the one he’d used for so many years. It was a croak on the edge of breaking.
“And you?”
“I am the whisper after the fire. I am the curator. I am that which comes just after midnight to lean into ears and tell softly the truth. I am the light after the dark.”
Her form shifted and shook as though she were a dark snow falling inside a toy globe. She was dark, then light, then dark and finally…
Travis shielded his eyes from the glare.
He reached for her.
He called to her.
“What if it happens again? Will you return? Will you—“
The light was gone.
A whisper remained.
He chased that whisper home.
***
He sat before the yellowed paper, his mind filled with recent whispers and new doubts.
So then, this is how I break down a wall, not with a Jericho horn but with… ?
Travis threaded a new blank page into the roller.
His fingers watched the keys as a hawk watched a mile away mouse.
He swallowed hard.
Then he swooped.
The wall fell.
Brick after brick.
Word after word.
Until there was nothing left but the whisper of paper as it settled fresh from the roller and heavy with ink, on the table below
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