The Infinite Library (5 page)

I could tell that Angelo was visibly impressed with the titles I selected - just obscure enough to challenge any specialist rare book collector. Castellemare turned his back, stuck in a hand to ruffle the volumes a bit, and then produced two books for my inspection. Alarmingly, they were exactly what I specified.

“I was going to ask if you wanted this edition of the
Aglaophamus
rather than the reprint with the missing inscribed flyleaf, but I suppose any copy will do,” Castellemare stated, not missing a beat with that permanent grin.

“This is incredible! Who would have known that you would have these exact texts here? I mean, coincidence alone -”

“Gimaldi, in the library there are no coincidences; there is only order, and one has only to learn how it works to find what one is looking for.”

“Well,” I reasoned aloud, hoping for confirmation. “If you have such a vast collection where editions seem to frequently 'slip' as you say, perhaps you need the services of an archivist to catalogue the entire collection.”

“There is a catalogue, of sorts, but it is only accessible in truncated versions, and only when the Library deems it fit to have it in my possession.”

“You are the librarian and you don't have unlimited access to the full catalogue?”

“That's right. The fact that I have any access at all does grant me considerable privilege.”

“Then how are you able to pluck books from that... portal... without having to search a catalogue?”

“So many questions in your quiver of curiousity... I have only to will which book I want, and the Library will provide. Of course, it may restrict borrowing privileges for some texts for reasons known only to it. As for returning the books to their right places, you will find the Library quite accommodating to the task... but we are moving far ahead of ourselves.”

“Do the trick,” Angelo prompted Castellemare like an eager child.

“Well, it might be a bit early, but so be it. Gimaldi, demand of me any book, but I urge you to be as ridiculous as possible. That is, I want you to make up fictional author names and their works. You will see that I have anything you could possible contrive, any book that could ever possibly exist.”

I replaced the two books on the desk and thought for a few moments before issuing a number of fictitious names: “Padre Pistolas’
Caligula’s Computers
, Esther Loyola’s
Why I hate Céline
, Emmanuel Goldstein’s
Orgasthmatics
and
Excommunicon
…”

“Excellent choices!” beamed Castellemare who quite adeptly pulled those exact volumes from the shelves for my inspection. It was unbelievable. Any lingering doubt I had about this fantastical library was only maintained by the thought that I may have been the victim of a hallucination.

“How about some books written by you?” he asked. “How does a four volume collected works sound? Or, let’s make it eight. With the letters in the title gold-stamped, with a dedication page to Genghis Khan and his writings on aeronautics and polite dinner discourse at 30, 000 feet as the chief source of your inspiration? Name it, and it shall be. How about books written about your conquest of the Andes? Or perhaps on your grandson who became the King of Botswana? How about your epistolary confessions on being a Saxon transsexual or a Renaissance communist? Or perhaps a treatise you wrote on the merits of being a nautiloid? Or perhaps your deep-sea adventures with Napoleonic online banking? Or maybe a copy of
Measure for Measure
written by you in the year 1291? Or your signing of the Magna Charta whilst riding an elephant to the castle of Hitler, emperor of Atlantis?”

Anything I could possibly conceive of, no matter how ridiculous, he was able to furnish. His small library was an aleph of pure possibility. This was but one small manifestation and modification of an infinite substance, a One-All library he had hired me to work in. Noting the infinite possibilities of this library, I would have worked for free.

If the metaphysics of this held, then the library was proof that we were living in a world of textual idealism governed by a transcendent order of a different kind. No doubt, the Library had a book precisely on this, and a million proofs alongside their refutations. I would also learn that the Library had several books on the theory of the Library itself, and books on those books, books on those books on those books, and so on. It was maddening, for if the truth that supported the existence of this Library were in the constituent books along with proof against it, how could it be proven either way? How could a truth of a unity be dependent upon its parts, those parts granted truth by its unity? It was paradoxical, an Uroburos.

I was going to ask if there were any books about him in the Library before realizing that this would have been a ridiculous question; of course there were… potentially an infinite number of them, just as there were an infinite number of books about, or written by, us all.

“So, you see, Gimaldi, it is of the utmost importance that the ingress and egress of pure possibility remain… controlled. One cannot shut the door to pure possibility without stopping the flow of time and becoming. Nothing would change if there were not small portholes into the sublime, you see. The delicate balance always entails controlling the access points, to only let a certain amount flow into the mundane to make it marginally more interesting. The rates and flow of this are in constant flux, depending on the needs of the world -
or the Library -
are at any given time - whatever time is,” he finished with an impish grin.

“There must be no time and all time in this library, distinctions of past and future being meaningless,” I said, musing aloud. “Does this make you… God?”

Castellemare almost fell over in laughter. Angelo followed suit by aping him.

“Oh, Gimaldi, you will make my ribs crack with the strain of your hilarious inquiries! I never suspected that you were a comedian! In answer to your question, supposing that you want a serious reply, I can always provide you with a book saying that I am God, and another saying that I am not! Ah, humanity... so quick to assign some mystical supremity to what it cannot explain or understand. Imagine me: some kind of manifestation of the divine!”

This was followed by another round of sharp laughter. The short of it was this: any possible truth could be maintained or contradicted, but only in reference to the Library whose truths were infinite, and could infinitely exhaust any potential subject infinitely. Making any inquiries into the Library would prove effectively useless, and render all questioning impossible. It would be enough to drive more sensitive philosophers to despair and suicide. I was beginning to understand why Castellemare always seemed to speak ambiguously about almost everything.

“Oh, you mandarin of joy!” Castellemare applauded. “I could keep you around for the mirth alone… But I suppose that wouldn’t make you necessary either, for I could just read all your jokes as they are written down in a book somewhere… haha! But then again, you could be a necessary being… If you would like to wait here, I can get you a book that proves just that, that Gimaldi is a necessary being in all possible worlds! And then you can read the subsequent and prior volumes that say you are not! O ho ho! This reminds me of a book I once read about the effect knowledge of the library has on those who hitherto had no knowledge of it! Ha! In fact, I think this exact scene is transcribed there, right down to the dialogue… But if you ask me, the Proust version is laborious, while the Bukowski edition is very pithy while also being fairly descriptive. The Proust version on cocaine is a gas to read, but the Proust version where he is doing heroin is a tedious bore! Chaucer’s recounting of our meeting is filled with amusing trilinguistic puns, and so I would highly recommend it, him being so much a writer of the European world as opposed to that myopic Shakespeare – save the Shakespeare that actually did the grand tour. Anyhow, you get the general gist.”

“Yes, that our lives are determined insofar as everything is in a book somewhere in this infinite Library.”

“Not determined, just that all possibility is contained therein, which is why the Library is potentially infinite.”

“Potentially? Don’t you know?”

“I have books that argue both sides, and others that offer alternate theories. The truth of the Library is in the books, and the truth of the books is in the Library. Hence, we cannot make any absolute declarations without making utter asses of ourselves.”

“But we know that the Library exists,” I protested.

“Do we?”

I felt a migraine clawing at me, creeping up my neck and lodging at the base of my skull, slowly wrapping its tendrils around my temples. I asked to be excused, that I had some affairs to attend to in the city, and that I would be in contact soon.

As a parting note, Castellemare said, “hopefully your Internet searches of me bore something fruitful… Oh, don’t be alarmed that I know. I assure you that I have no need to spy on anyone. It was just that this one book sort of popped into my hands, opening to a page where it was written that you were in your hotel room and curious about who I was, if I was some kind of charlatan or madman. What you will find on the web are my actions in this actual time, but nothing there will state what I do in my virtual time. In one version of time, I killed you, and in another, you killed me. In another version, we never met, and in another you were me and I was you. Farewell, and until next we chance upon each other. Oh, and before you leave, do you have those two texts I lent you?”

I nodded.

“Yes, regrettably, I need them back. You may have occasion to look at them again if you are not distracted by some other equally fascinating text in my Library... That is, if the Library will permit it.”

I replaced the books on his desk, bid polite adieu to Angelo, and took my leave. The sky was dead.

Yes, I did research Castellemare while I was in my hotel room. Perhaps I should have denied that I was snooping on him, but I was caught off guard and could only reply with the honest stutter of the guilty. But was it a bluff? Was it written down in that impressive Library, or was I being watched? I apologize: I am such a poor hand at describing events that my tale must seem like a shabby ventriloquism, a dry and ostentatious rendering of real events. However, I do hope to convey that my thoughts and impressions of Castellemare was that he was borderline insane. His manner of speech was all wrong, confused, lapsing into idioms from different ages. His laugh had that exaggerated animation and expressive trilling of someone in the midst of a very bad schizophrenic episode.

As well, I am not at all comfortable with speaking too much about myself – at least not in the novelist's way of creating a profound and emotionally turbulent character. You who read my tale will come away with a feeling of indifference to me, an ambivalence; neither loving nor hating me, you may not even be able to summon up a faint like or dislike. I am a rather plain man in his early forties with habits and interests that stop short of interesting, and merely appear ever so slightly odd or tedious. I imagine myself and all those I have amassed in my tale to be in a narrative world of treachery and heroism with no clearly defined villains or heroes. Would that life be so convenient that it could provide us with such clear distinctions.

The only other precedent I could find for this infinite library was indeed Jorge Luis Borges’ story, “The Library of Babel.” But that Library was not infinite - only so vast as to be practically infinite. I had the statistics in a file, culled from a research article on the subject. It was finite (and was it not a philosopher who said that we could reproduce the Library of Babel on a single piece of paper with two sides, the one with a dot, the other a dash, and that the infinite permutations of this Morse Code would reproduce all possibilities?).

Did Borges fail to produce an actual infinite library by endowing it with calculable numbers that could be crunched and produce a result? The math of it: Hexagonal galleries (six-sided, four of these clad with books). Twenty shelves per gallery, 35 books per shelf, 700 books total per gallery. Each book was composed of 410 pages, or 16,400 lines, or 1,312,000 characters (25 in total using the 22-letter Latin alphabet, the space, period, and comma). From there, with all these numbers plain to see (it is doubtful Borges’ keen variety of thought would have troubled itself with the lowly literal state of such a library, and instead focus on the broader implications of the concept itself which is half dipped in allegory and seductively analogical) it is tamed by a permutation calculation. And there it is in full: the number of books in the supposedly infinite Library of Babel was 8.9 x 10 followed by 152 zeroes. I read in some article, lodged deep in a footnote: “if each book were a hydrogen atom, the entire collection would have a mass of 57 metric tons.” If the number of books could be calculated, then it presumably meant that the actual size of the space in which they were housed could also be calculated.