That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (11 page)

This was a large country. I imagined it would take a long time to fill it up with rumpus rooms. Perhaps the lack of character and distinguishing features in these new dwellings bespoke a relaxation, a giving up of the attempt to bring the history of other countries here. They certainly suggested a love of the first three dimensions and disinterest in the fourth
.

As for the streets, they appeared to have established their layout during an all
-night bender. Their illogical twists and turns might have been following tracks made by wandering beasts, lunatics, or devils; and, as if to make up for absent history and myth, these rambling roads bore the names of gods, heroes, monsters, characters from legend and folktale, and distinguished persons from the old world. They were arranged in sets, one group of streets with Arthurian names, one with names from the Arabian Nights, and so on, as though someone had hoped that the Age of Chivalry, with unicorns and dragons, perilous enchantments and good manners, or the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid, with its Gate of the Willow Tree, Gate of Darkness and Gate of the Moon, its riches in treasure and poetry, would be brought into being on this ground through the agency of these captions. And who was I to say it would never happen?

I could hardly recognise this country as my own. But I had grown up not far from here, in a modest house near the freeway to the airport.

Now I was back, and looking for a job.

I
’d found something in the
Western Mirror
, a tabloid I’d picked up on a train. Between the lonely hearts and the auto ads, my eye was caught by this:

MUSEUM OF APERTURES. OPENING FOR A CARETAKER. EXPERIENCE WITH DOORS AND WINDOWS NECESSARY. KNOWLEDGE OF FAUCETS, DRAINS, INTERVALS, CAVITIES AND ORIFICES A PLUS.

There were no contact details. I tore the ad out anyway, carefully, making a neat hole in the page.

And through the hole, on the next page, in a box hidden among advertisements for floristry courses, I saw:

32a STREET OF ALL THE OTHERS, NEWMEADOWS WEST. NO PHONE YET. SUNDAY 11 A.M.

It was Sunday today. I
navigated by following the names of guides and conveyors, such as Ariadne and Charon, and those of the sleeping princesses and others who were objects of a quest.

Coming to the end of Hermes Avenue, I turned left into Rapunzel Street, along the further part of which I had already driven. Passing the street from which I had first entered Rapunzel, I completed a counterclockwise circuit of six streets. I intended to go to the end of Rapunzel and turn right, where I hadn
’t yet been. However, as I completed the circuit a thing of great interest happened. All the street names around me changed. The layout and the houses I passed remained the same as before, but the streets bore names from the Qabalah. Coming to the end of Rapunzel, I checked the sign and saw that it was now Hod Street.

I abandoned my plan to turn right, and drove around the circuit a second time. The street names altered again, now to delightful titles from the texts of the alchemists, like Green Lion Lane, Crescent of the Peacock
’s Tail, Corascene Dog Court and Armenian Bitch Alley.

These shifts were both heartening and disheartening; they suggested that there was a way to find the Museum of Apertures, but also suggested that I faced an intricate search and might run out of petrol before I had worked out the route. I assumed that at some point I would need to leave the main circuit and drive up a side street.

The nomenclature of the streets passed through the Tarot, the I Ching, the language of astrology, the Yoruba oracle of Ifá, and even Enochian chess, with a Fire Board Drive, a Water Angle Way and a Servient Square.

The next time around the language was that of arithmetic, with the street signs featuring not words but sums.

I nearly missed the clue. I had to brake hard to avoid starting around the circuit another time.

I have said that cledonomancy requires the practitioner to be on the alert for puns, amongst other things. If
sums
were
somes
, mightn’t the way to
others
be through them?

Perhaps it was tenuous reasoning, but my instinct approved it. And the instinct has a better appreciation of these connections than the reasoning mind does. If I did not believe that, I would have applied myself to learning only conventional methods of navigation.

I had come within metres of the changeover point in the circuit. Those good instincts of mine cautioned me that to turn the car around would disrupt everything. Fortunately there was no one behind me, and I put the car in reverse.

Twisting around to see to my rear, I looked for streets whose names were division sums with remainders. Such leftover amounts, I thought, would qualify as
‘others’. I had to drive backwards for about a kilometre before I came to such a sum, but it was a good one: 22/7 Street. Quotient 3, remainder 1.

The numbers in the sum and its answer inspired my confidence: 22, the
number of paths on the Tree of Life, letters in the Hebrew alphabet and trumps in the Tarot deck, a number bespeaking the searcher’s instruments; 7, so magical that Aleister Crowley called it ‘a most evil number, whose perfection is impossible to attack’: 7 is a number that can curdle milk and cause beasts to be born with two heads, but is also the number which permits miracles to occur: it rules changes and changes rules, and is rightly called lucky; 3, even luckier, is the number of riddles and wishes, the number of sufficiency and fulfilment, the number of beginning, middle and end, the number that governs all outcomes and completions, and the number on the count of which action is taken; and the 1 remainder was one other – a certain enough pointer, I persuaded myself, to the Street of All The Others, all being one and one being all, as the masters never tire of telling us; and 22/7 was of course an approximation to Pi, that number which by its frequent and sometimes surprising appearance in diverse mathematical formulae and equations – from the well-known formulae for the area of a circle and the volume of a sphere to Einstein’s general relativity field equation and Schrödinger’s wave equation – offers the message that the universe conspires to pick its own locks.

I backed up to the street and turned.

22/7 Street was very long, and its specialness seemed to be confirmed by its being perfectly straight. It took me out of the built-up area and into the fields with the billboards. I could see a single house, quite a way in the distance, towards which the street was leading. I felt that all was going well. The house would be the museum, I was confident. I waited to see the name of the street change.

However, 22/7 Street remained 22/7 Street all the way up to the door of the house, which was one of the poor
-looking mansions. But there was no ignoring the sign painted in gold letters on one of the front windows: MUSEUM OF APERTURES.

‘No jobs here,’ said the bleached and sunburned woman who answered the door. ‘All our positions are filled.’

‘
But what about this?’ I asked, showing her the ad.

‘
Well,’ she said, ‘this isn’t the Street of All The Others, is it? This is the Museum of Apertures, 22/7 Street.’

‘
Then you mean that this isn’t the only museum of apertures out here?’

She shook her head.
‘Why would you think that, you goose?’

I sank. I felt a lot worse than I should have. A mere caretaker
’s position shouldn’t have meant so much to me.

Perhaps she felt sorry for me, because she invited me to come inside anyway.
‘Have a look around,’ she said. ‘We have a fine collection.’

Inside, the house was painted in a pink that matched
her sunburn. The collection was housed in cabinets around the walls.

I could not judge whether the collection of apertures was a fine one, never having seen such a thing before. There were keyholes cut out of doors, empty picture frames, the eyepieces of telescopes and kaleidoscopes, broken teapot spouts, gun barrels, toilet seats, the eyes of needles, letterbox slots, grates, loops of cloth that appeared to be arm and leg holes cut out of clothing, various bits of dried organic matter that I didn
’t care to pore over, and a great many other hollow and perforated objects of no great rarity.

In the next room, however, the tour became slightly more interesting. The room was small, and in it were displayed only seashells
(an assortment of univalves and complete, partly open bivalves). The woman took a paper nautilus down from a shelf.

‘
Look at this,’ she said. ‘I call it my legless sailor. Do you know what haunts it in the creature’s absence? Everything else in the cosmos. It’s only nature’s sense of practicality that imposes an ending on the spiral; mathematics would have it go on growing forever.’

The next room she led me into was completely empty.

‘In here we keep our purest exhibits, those without any extraneous matter,’ she stated, and gestured towards the middle of the room: ‘There, before you, is the Gate of the Willow Tree from the wall around the palace precincts in old Baghdad. And there, by the right-hand wall, is the grave of King Arthur. That little one in the corner is the open top of Pandora’s Box, and there, there and there are openings of one, two and four inches in three of the Doors of Perception. Next to them are the muzzle aperture of the rifle that shot President Kennedy, the aperture of the noose by which Ned Kelly was hung, and the lunette opening of the guillotine that killed Marie Antoinette. Up to your left is our small but very important collection of the gaps that occur between integers, the finest example being the gap between seven and eight. We are presently negotiating to acquire the gap between zero and one, which will go in that place you see there without a gap in it yet.’

I liked this room the best so far.

‘These are marvels,’ I said.

‘
We have two more,’ she informed me. ‘Two special openings. They are kept by themselves, in a locked room, because they are potentially dangerous. But since you’re a connoisseur, I’ll open the room for you, if you wish.’

I said yes; I could not possibly leave without finding
out what these two special apertures were.

The room she showed me into was medium sized. Jutting out from the rest of the house, it had windows on three sides, two to a wall. All of them were covered with blinds. On a lectern between the windows in the wall opposite the door was a book bound in red velvet. There was nothing else in the room.

The woman told me to wait. I stood inside the doorway, while she took the book from the lectern and brought it to me.

‘
You may hold it,’ she said, ‘but you mustn’t open it. In every book there is a great gap between the front cover and the first word. There is another between the last word and the rear cover, but that one is of less consequence.’

I felt sure that I had encountered, somewhere, another book bound in velvet of that colour, but I could not locate it in my memory. This one had a layer of padding under the velvet, so that it yielded slightly to the touch. It was an attractive quality in a book, I thought
– as, for no reason that I could explain, was the absence of a title or an author’s name.

The woman
took the book from me and returned it to the lectern. She then went around pulling up the blinds, letting pale sunlight in. She reserved the blind on the left of the lectern until last. When she opened it, she did so with an air of reverence.

Then she stepped back, allowing me to see the view.

It showed a place elsewhere.

Where the other windows showed the level fields around the house and the outcrops of the neonate suburb, this one looked out onto a region of sky. By the depth and dimness of the blue, the time there was evening.

I didn’t realise I was approaching the window until I found myself standing close enough to the glass that I could see my own ghostly reflection.

All through the sky, for as far as my eyes could see, leaves hurtled around, borne on a tempestuous wind. The wind was audible to me, though it sounded very far away. The light was not steady; a watery brightness came and went
, its source invisible.