That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (7 page)

The room offered me two doors in the wall I was facing, one to my right and one to my left. They were identical, fabricated of dark wood with recessed panels and a brass knob in the centre. I did not know by which door I had entered the room. I could not even assume that the doors, just because they were apparently the only way out, were also
– and had always been – the only way in. Perhaps I had not entered through either door.

Just as I could not remember you, I could not remember anything of myself before I began thinking about the red room. I had one piece of knowledge: I knew that if I opened one door I would not be able to open the other. I believed this knowledge came from outside the room, because I believed that I, too, had once been outside the room. I was sure that I could not be a native of this awful enclosure; who in here could have taught me language and given me a head full of ideas about a world outside? Worse, if I had always been inside the room, you were possibly a figment of my mind. If you were not as real as I, I did not want to exist. But perhaps you had been in here with me, teaching me to think and supplying me with concepts, and had left by yourself, and I had somehow forgotten all the details of your being and going.

I tried listening at each of the doors, my cheek pressed against the smooth varnish, the stink of the Ape in my nostrils. His noise, his smell and the heat all put me in an urgent hurry to leave. Perhaps I could hear hammering, or it might have been feet. I thought I heard engines; but I could not be sure; the Ape was making enough racket for an entire House of Parliament. I raised my own voice and entreated him, with more courtesy than I felt he deserved, to give his tongue peace for a few minutes. He showed that he understood me very well, by pulling at his skinny penis and screaming ‘Tongue this piece!’ before returning to his prior activity.

I examined both doors with my eyes and fingertips, searching for marks, wormholes, shapes in the grain, any distinguishing detail to suggest that one door might have more to offer than the other. It proved a waste of effort. There were no blemishes and all of the wood grain was straight and regular
.

Next it occurred to me to look for a correspondence between the Ape or myself and either of the doors. This time it took me only a few moments to conclude that there was none. The Ape
’s barrel was positioned exactly in the middle of the wall between the doors, and while he moved his head constantly, his brute eyes favoured neither direction more than the other. I felt I was right-handed, and an experimental enactment of writing in the air confirmed that my right hand was the surer, while he used his left hand to pluck at his fleas. Both our leading hands were on the side of the door on my right. Since I saw the Ape as my antagonist, we cancelled each other out.

Was I to make an entirely random choice? No. I did not believe it could be random. The variables involved in human choice may be hidden, but they are there. To a person asked to choose heads or tails, one number out of ten, a shape, a colour, one option will always have an edge in appeal, for whatever reason or reasons
– aesthetic taste, emotional sympathy with an image, prior experience, present mood, superstition, and so forth. I concluded that I had to make this type of choice, with nothing but my personal inclinations to guide me. In other words, I had to make a selection between the quality of ‘right’ and the quality of ‘left’. (I could have exchanged these positions by turning around, but the idea struck me as contrariness for its own sake, and I could not imagine any profit coming from it.)

‘
Right’ suggested correctness and beneficial action, and so initially appealed to me, but it also suggested a state of all being well, while ‘left’ suggested departure and absence, residues and remainders, and the state of being forgotten or abandoned; in other words, things either missing or else redundantly present and not likely to be missed if removed. The left resonated with my own circumstances. But on the other hand, wasn’t I trying to leave my circumstances? However, in implying regularity the right also implied inflexibility – surely inauspicious to the mission of a seeker who knew nothing of what the search might entail.

On I went like this, until a particularly shrill scream from the Ape pulled me up and made me ask myself a question: Was this
‘I’, who was trying to reach you using the Ape’s methods, the same ‘I’ who desired you and cried because I could not see you?

How could that be answered, when I could only see from one point of view at any one moment?

Then it struck me that I had perhaps been mistaken in thinking that the Ape and I cancelled each other out in the matter of the door on the right. There was no good reason to favour myself when I was so dissatisfied with my own state. As the door not indicated by either of us, the left door now seemed to have the advantage. I waited for a thought to challenge this, but no such thought arose. And in fact, a certain instinct in me favoured the left. It seemed not implausible that the instinct might be the subconscious echo of lost information. So left I went, and to make myself feel bolder I stuck my middle finger up at the Ape behind me.

You were not in your cell. You had not bribed someone to let you out, nor had you filed through the bars on the tiny window and climbed down the vertical acres of brick wall below. You had – to use the only apt word – withdrawn.

I was glad that you had gone; I did not like to think of you imprisoned. Even though, in being gone, you caused me pain and made my life difficult, I was excited to learn something about you: you were an artist
.

The walls, floor and ceiling of your cell were covered with trompe l
’oeil drawings in charcoal, loosely executed but nonetheless convincing, of a vast and terrifically complex interior space. Beginning with four large arches that you had drawn on your walls – so that the cell ceased to be an inverse cube within solid brick and became a cube of air in air, defined only by four slender pillars in the corners – you had created a realm of masonry: walls, flagstone floors, vaulted ceilings, archways, columns and windows, arranged to create structures and spaces that interfed, nested within each other, and contested for control of the perspective, corners pushing out or folding in under the influence of other corners you had drawn in paradoxical relation to them. Upon, within and between these flexing planes you had fitted catwalks, ladders, machine housings, chimneys with plumes of smoke – and now the eye found staircases, balconies, terraces, and now galleries, arcades, courts and colonnades – and now it was pushed into back rooms, unlit narrows, sewers, crypts, and, yes, cells and dungeons.

As for the vertical axis, you had placed the site that had been your cell within a shaft, created by one quadratura drawn on the ceiling and another on the floor, into which you had sketched huge lanterns slung on chains, by which were illumined the balconied walls of the shaft soaring up and up to a distant ceiling and plunging down and down to a faraway floor. On the actual floor of the cell you had drawn a narrow ledge for standing on, and I was careful to use it, since I felt a fain
t draught coming up from below.

In this warren of your invention all of the windows, doorways and arches gave onto more stone and brickwork, more interiors; some of the spaces thus exposed were plausible, while some were impossible, corridors running for hundreds of feet within the thickness of single walls, trompes within the trompe
.

Nowhere in any of this was a door closed or a passage blocked; not one single opening was prohibited, and therefore no hiding place was suggested
.

If it was a building, it was a trap; if a trap, a factory; if a factory, the castle of a lunatic with too much disposable income. And if it was a castle, it was a prison of wondrous form and perhaps infinite capacity. There was no
‘outside’. That was clever of you. They can find you if you go outside, but what system of retrieval exists to extract a person who has slipped an unprecedented degree further
inside
? And if you had escaped into a prison, who was this prison’s authority but you? Anyone who followed you in would become
your
prisoner.

‘
A bit gone to town, isn’t it? Not to mention self-involved,’ commented the warden who had brought me to your cell and who now stood at the door, holding a real lantern to improve upon the light supplied by the barred window (around which you had drawn scaffolding, suggesting a construction site). I didn’t reply. The warden went on, ‘The occupant was done for breaking and entering. Going to be locked up forever. Framed like a picture, in my opinion.’

I had no faith in anything I was told by the authorities here. For all their bureaucryptic filing silos, for all their eyes, they didn
’t know who you were. There had been speculation that you were either a Dangerous Beast, a Beautiful Captive, or an Idiot Savant. The truth was never discovered, because you only faced people when they were facing away from you.

Nor did they know who I was, any better than I knew myself. They thought I was from the Department. I had shown them my false
ID, which they accepted without question. I couldn’t even be sure that I wasn’t from the Department, or that my false ID was really false.

But leaving all else aside, the warden had unwittingly made one meritorious point. Your contrivance was very much like a town, or rather a city. A city without exterior spaces, without sky or landscape or any suggestion of routes in and out. A city that was nothing
but
city, a positive without (as opposed to within) a negative.

How could I find you in that accumulation of spaces? A maze with so much porosity, and no evident boundary, suggested an open secret
– a site riddled with meaning. But perhaps you were trying to trick me into a useless search for something hiding in plain sight, or for the shape of a riddle to be answered, when in fact the only way to find you would be to make a methodical search, however difficult, in that maze which was more like a thousand mazes interpermeating and spawning permutations.

As I pondered what might be the collective noun for mazes
– an ac
cret
ion? – the warden spoke up again. ‘What do you reckon? Bit of an escape artist, eh?’ The words echoed more than they should have.

‘
An open case of paradox boxed.’ I was trying to impress not the warden, but you, with my cleverness.

The warden remained silent while I contemplated your absence, closing my eyes. The draught immediately blew stronger, not only from the drop below but from all around. Winds and whispers. I heard water and feet running. Something hard hitting a metal pipe, reverberating. Mild grey light touched the lid of my mind
’s eye. The air of your world carried smells of cabbage, chicken soup, bedclothes.

They say smell, more than any other sense, has the power to evoke memories. These traces of odour from your world could not make me remember you; but they caused some kind of breakage. They affirmed that there was something to be remembered, something that had been, a past before this prison. I couldn
’t say that I believed in this; I knew it. And with this absolutely certain knowledge there came not just relief but pain.

I turned so the warden could not see me crying. I doubted that people from the Department were given to public outbursts of grief. I wiped my face and, to dry my hand, rubbed it on the wall without thinking. Your drawing smudged; my wet hand had erased a small arch.

The accident gave me an idea. I ordered the warden to bring me a bucket of hot water and a mop.

These were brought, and I washed your artwork away. I made the walls empty and clean. I made a desert, and the four walls were the four winds.

I stepped into the wind that was the wall with the window. At that moment, as I passed into the hollow air, I tried to remember whether the warden and I had ever regarded each other face to face. But my memories were already passing away.

To get anywhere in the desert city one had to go not only through streets and alleys but through houses and places of work. The common, nearly ubiquitous style of architecture was inward facing, the buildings encountering the streets with mud-brick walls that were all but blind, their only windows small and high ones for ventilation rather than views. But the doors at street level were for the most part open, and when one of the numerous dead ends blocked the way you only had to walk through a coppersmith’s workshop, or a family courtyard where children played around a fountain under the sleepy eyes of a grandfather, or an office full of women typing under fluorescent lights, then take another door out to another street. In you went and out, trying to be unobtrusive.