The Book on Fire (6 page)

The finest books are at once completely ordinary and completely
strange. You feel you’ve read them before, or something like them, but the more
you struggle to pinpoint the references, the more you realize that the books
create their own references: they are their own histories. The first book I
read in the Library of Alexandria was such a book. It had, I felt, been formed
in my shape, and was waiting for my arrival. Completing it, I blew out my
candle, curled on the sofa, and slept like a newborn.

****

My
thief’s sense woke me. Opening my eyes, I saw a grain of light, heard a
footfall. I gathered my satchel and candle and retreated behind the door
through which I had entered, closed it softly, then peered through the keyhole.
My initial reckless euphoria had been replaced by the need to explore further
and I did not wish to be apprehended. A woman in gray, bearing a candle in one
hand and an ostrich-plume duster in the other, emerged through one of the
apertures. She sniffed the air a moment, then spotted the spread-eagled book
and dirty mug and apricot pits beside the sofa and pursed her lips. She
replaced the book on the shelf, picked up the mug and pits, tidied the books a
little and swatted them with her duster, then passed out of the room.

I stayed motionless for a time before venturing out once more.
Replenishing my stock of candles from a stash on an upper shelf, I started
through the library, going in the direction from which the librarian had come.
For hours I wandered, from node to node of that vast net, utterly lost, as I
had been in the catacombs, but lost in paradise.

In tremendous caverns, bookshelves lifted tier upon tier into the
gloom; long ladders were affixed to the shelves, which I climbed, up to the
ceiling. I perched there at the edge of a cliff of books, and looked across the
canyon; it was as if a river, in carving its valley, had exposed strata of
titles. Other rooms were mere nooks, no bigger than a cupboard, with space
enough for a single bookcase.

I read impossibly gorgeous scripts. Scripts in which each hieroglyph
filled a page and took a day to write, but could express an entire philosophy.
Scripts in which each letter stood for a notion, so the writing dictated
thought patterns rather than words. Scripts that had no meaning at all, or that
started out meaningfully but then, as the author was caught up in the physical
act of writing, became relationships of lines and shapes on paper, beautiful
and abstract. Private scripts, the authors long dead, so the script stood
isolated, unreadable, precious nonetheless. Rainforest scripts of samara and
turaco crest. Marine scripts of shark tooth and sand dollar. I passed through
rooms of books the size of doors, each cover the death of an eland, and rooms
of books dainty as ladybirds. Books written on communion wafers, grains of
rice, sheets of ice.

Books are hiding places. I found books grangerized to twice their
normal thickness by pressed flowers, letters, panties, snapshots. And of course
books are palimpsests. Some books had been read by so many scholars they were
entirely underlined, in blue pencil, ballpoint, fountain pen. Some ancient
pages were black with notes scribbled in a hundred hands around the margins,
between the lines, across the print itself, the text subsumed beneath a lichen
of commentary.

I passed through caverns of drifting paper that fell like
rectangular snowflakes. Caverns of dark pools, where books swam like fish, all
gills and fins. Empty caverns of dream books, the beautiful books imagined by
authors who died too young to write them. Many rooms had sofas or plump chairs or
cushions piled on carpets, many were provided with thermoses of coffee and
cocoa, bottles of wine, bowls of fruit and nuts and baked goods. It was the
most wonderful place in the world.

In the Library of Alexandria, time lay between leather bindings. Drinking
cocoa, eating fruit and cookies, I wandered through the fabulous chambers.
Several times, I saw a librarian’s candle and swiftly snuffed my own and moved
farther in. Though occasionally I was forced to plunge into a book, I struggled
to remain on the surface, skimming titles, trying to gather the layout of the
place. When I first entered it, saw the books scattered around the room and
read the titles ranged in no alphabetical order, I thought there was no
pattern, that the library was just a big dustbin for books, and this both
pleased and alarmed me, but as I moved deeper, I began to sense a different
paradigm at work. The library was vast, and in those initial days I entered
only a smattering of the rooms, but even so I began to feel my way into its order.

When you are unable to remember a name, some character in a book,
say, you can nevertheless smell it, taste it, as if words have auras. So you
know it begins with an S or a Z, is scented like cinnamon, colored like lapis
lazuli, chimes with sheen or serene. You know how long the word is, its curly
shape, whether it was recto or verso, and its placement on the page, but the
sound will not trip off the tongue. Just so, slipping through those rooms, I
began to sense the books I might discover next, as if the halos about them were
other books. I could not have stated precisely my reasons, but holding a volume
in a chamber I could have said that the surrounding books had to do with dreams
of flying, and that if I entered the chamber ahead of me I might find books on
angels, and the chamber to my right might contain books on the phoenix and
quetzalcoatl.

Thus, as I moved through the library, I had the sensation that I was
encountering the books of my childhood, books forgotten for decades, titles on
the tip of my tongue. And indeed I did encounter, from time to time, books I’d
read so long ago they seemed myths, and books I’d been searching for my whole
life, upon which I pounced like an urchin upon coconut candy, and books that
had been rumors in other books, their very existence putative, like sightings
of basilisks or unicorns. But most of the books were strange and new. When I
moved through the libraries and collections and bookstores of the world above,
I seldom encountered books unfamiliar to me, and most I had seen dozens or
hundreds of times, but here were rooms filled with volumes that might have been
written on another planet, so odd were they.

And slowly I arrived at a realization so startling I was almost
afraid to believe it. I found, as I moved through this subterranean forest,
that I could imagine a book, known or unknown, read or unread, and be certain
of the path I would have to take to find it. I tested it, over and over, and
could not fail, as if my mind had been somehow prepared for this library, or as
if the library had been modeled on the patterns of my mind. And when I realized
this, I knew I could follow the patterns back through the caverns to the room
where I had entered the library, to the book I’d read when I’d first arrived. I
could not be lost, and this seemed right. Was Adam lost in Eden? Only cast into
the eastern thorns did he lose himself, but in the garden of the tree of life
and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where God strolled in the
afternoon, he could name every flower, every bird and beast. There was
something so heady about this, I felt I was under the influence of a drug. We
all have titles, questions swept like sodden leaves into the corners of our
minds, that we have little hope will ever be answered or solved, but that we
cannot get rid of. Suddenly, I found myself in the orchard of answers. Any
title, any question I could think of, was waiting to be plucked. Greedily, I
dashed through the library, finding this volume and that, seizing on ideas, and
what I encountered of course engendered new branches.

But with this realization came the knowledge of the precarious
nature of the library. In the aboveground collections, a book here or there
might never be missed, but this library, so carefully tended, was in a delicate
balance. A theft, I thought, might create havoc.

For a time, I wondered if I would simply stay here forever, reading,
sampling the delicacies, hiding from the librarians—the ghost of the Library of
Alexandria, a reformed thief in paradise. And I wondered what would become of
my soul if I chose that path. Even in the world above I was reclusive and
solitary, often sunk in a book or in my thoughts. But if I eschewed human
contact altogether, my only companions fictional characters, my only landscapes
those manufactured of ink and imagination, what would I become? Would I start
to resemble a book myself? I imagined the process: a male Daphne, spine curing
to leather, ribs ironed to leaves, fingers and toes and tongue flattening,
elongating, blood darkened to ink, veins strung like boustrophedon across the
pages. My pressed heart would beat out iambic pentameter, hendecasyllabics, and
some day I’d simply lean in a corner with my companions, waiting for a female
hand to pick me up, lift my cover. And what book would she read then? Ah, that
is the book we step toward, you and I. Can you see it? Can you feel the texture
of those pages?

****

Before
I entered the Library of Alexandria, my dreams had been of the books I would
discover there, but I found, once I had penetrated the labyrinth, that I had to
know who the caretakers of these volumes were, who had ordered the pretty
cabinets and who had chosen the framed engravings and who had baked the cookies
and plumped the cushions on the comfy sofas.

So, rather than fleeing the librarians, I began to stalk them. The
rooms of the library were so cluttered it was not difficult for one accustomed
to stealth to find places of secret vantage from which to spy on the
librarians. Like a child in a vast game of hide and seek, I edged closer to the
gray-garbed women; a dark asteroid passing through their system, intent on
piecing together a little of their lives and days.

At the heart of the library was the great reading room. Here, as
dawn poked rosy fingers through the skylights, I peered through a keyhole at
the librarians ranked beside the benches. In the swelling light, they
performed, with taut grace, a curious dance, in unison, paperknives slicing
slowly through the dusk, ankles arcing in legato arabesques. At the conclusion
of each sequence of movements, as their hands reached the end of a swing or
their feet the apex of a kick, they snapped them into a pose with sudden power,
and a choral yell that startled me even when I was prepared for it, and I
realized I was watching the rehearsal of a martial art, though one so finely
choreographed it seemed more than half ballet. Birds, of the silent,
long-tailed species unique to the library grounds, dropped through the
apertures and looped about the room before flicking back into the day. The
movements of the librarians in the lessening twilight, the birds pulsing
silently over them, were chilling and beautiful. I imagined receiving a blow
from a librarian’s hand, and desired and feared that touch.

When they dispersed, I followed some as they moved through the
caverns of books. They dusted and straightened the volumes and swept and mopped
the floors. They filled jars of cookies and fruit and replaced thermoses of
coffee and cocoa. But they were continually distracted by the books. I saw the
guilty expressions on their faces as they pulled down volumes and leafed
greedily through them, the look of a dieter succumbing to apple pie, and I
realized that even the denizens of paradise were not entirely at liberty to
enjoy the fruits therein. Though there were hundreds of librarians, the library
was enormous, and the tasks of dusting, tidying, cataloging, and binding were
such that they could not read to their hearts’ content.

****

What
turns you on? Ligotage, rectal mucus, watersports, fisting? Chains, children,
sheep? The sexiest sight in the world is a woman reading. A stroll along the
strand at Biarritz, past oiled breasts and roasting loins, can leave me cold.
Page through those clandestine glossies, every orifice filled, no permutation
unexplored, and watch me yawn. But it’s night, a tram passes, and I glimpse, in
a pocket of light, a woman in a blue dress, auburn hair tousled, lost in a
book, and that image can sustain weeks of wanking. I’ve long imagined an
illicit literature tailored to my perversion, reader’s porn, with paintings in
the style of Sargent or Lord Leighton: Marilyn Monroe nude on a divan, reading
Ariel
.
Audrey Hepburn in a Spanish café, miniskirted thighs converging on darkness,
immersed in
Fiesta
. Josephine Baker in her dressing room, fondling a
gilded nipple, sunk in
Les Illuminations
. Madhubala reading the
Thousand
Nights and a Night
. These are the images that would turn me on. Let me
paint you the most erotic picture in my gallery, spied upon while crouching
behind a bookcase, peering through a gap between two leaning volumes.

The youngest librarian sat cocooned in candlelight, on an
owl-colored armchair, legs drawn up beneath her so just her toes peeked from
beneath her gown. A book lay open on her lap. One hand rested along the top
right corner of the pages, caressing them as if she cuddled a cat, a finger
moving down along the pages, brushing slowly back up the edges. When her eyes
reached the end of a spread she flipped the page greedily, then continued her
fondling of the book. The rest of her body was still, the other hand supporting
her cheekbone, her head angled down and to the left. Her robe was too big for
her and tumbled in thick folds, concealing the shapes of her breasts and
thighs. She had not shaved her head for a few days, so it was shrouded by a
downy aura that glittered slightly if she stirred. She wore round wire-rimmed
glasses. I obsessed over the shape of her ears, delicate as halved nautili, the
crescents of her nostrils, her slightly parted lips. Once a strand of spittle
shone between them before she turned a page and her tongue severed it. Her
eyelashes beat like slow moths. She had a tiny mole on her neck, like a clove
embedded in her flesh.