The Unfinished World Page 11

  As of late, the fever librarian dislikes the days she is asked to be grateful for facts, to applaud their long-term stability, their rigid domesticity. The fever librarian has tried to explain about the mutability and unreliability of facts on a very long timeline. Facts, she says, exist for ages—whole lifetimes, centuries, epochs—and then they disappear into the wretched night of ignorance and myth.

  The fever librarian is increasingly unwilling to rely on the hardwood floor of facts as a foundation. She is increasingly unwilling to ignore the rot that eventually sets in anywhere, in any seemingly sturdy floor. She is increasingly unwilling to sit here, day in and day out, no love, no conversation, no apartment to call home. No dreams but those locked in this thawing ice heart.

  This is not to say that the fever librarian is not a very good steward of facts, just the same. She is vigilant and organized. Her notebooks and memories and databases are full of all the world’s facts, the passions of every age etched in permanent slashes and dots over the membranes and folds. The fever librarian does not forget. The facts are always at her fingertips, whether the subject is fallout shelters or conical bras or the swift speed at which the bubonic fever strikes. The fever librarian remembers everything. She remembers the danger, especially; all human sickness and folly is her waking, worrisome dream.

  The rooms in which the fevers are stored must be cool and dark and quiet to keep the fevers from stray sparks, from reignition. The fever librarian has, as a result, spent a lifetime as silent as a Benedictine monk. Forget conversation or music; even the sun is not allowed to shine aloud in these halls. As of late, the fever librarian has felt isolated, has felt lonely, has felt the walls not closing in but expanding, spreading, growing the silent darkness into a massive, arctic sort of prison.

  When she first began to work in these rooms, many eons ago, she was assured that the Librarians were solitary creatures, meant to work alone in a kind of devotion, a worship of knowledge and learning. As of late, she is not so sure of this. As of late, the fever librarian is starting to hunger for the touch, the smell, the weight of another human body. She is starting to feel a little mad.

  The Greeks divided fever into four categories: continuous, from excess of fire; intermittent, due to excess of water; quotidian, from excess of air; and quartan, caused by an excess of earth. They also believed most fevers were fed by an excess of yellow bile. The patients infected were starved and given honey with water, or hydromel, to reduce the bile and blood in the body.

  Arab doctors in the Middle Ages were vastly more knowledgeable about fevers than their European counterparts. Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad Zakariya al-Razi, a great scholar and philosopher, was the first to distinguish between the two terms “fever” versus “hyperthermia” in the form of heatstroke. Fever caused by the sun. The Eternal Library is careful to prevent both types.

  In the nineteenth century, fever was still regarded as its own separate disease, and indeed a disease with many variants and causes. Autumnal fever, jail fever, hospital fever, bilious fever, nervous fever, malignant and even pestilential fever were all supposed separate forms of this disease.

  Also in the nineteenth century, Charles Mackay wrote that “men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

  He wrote: “How flattering to the pride of man to think that the stars on their courses watch over him, and typify, by their movements and aspects, the joys or the sorrows that await him!”

  The Eternal Library does not acknowledge a heaven. The Eternal Library’s official policy states: Man is life’s custodian. The Librarians are the custodians of man and his passions, and any knowledge he conceives of or possesses. Therefore, the librarians are the custodians of the stars and the skies; any other notion of heaven is a dream, a false idol to explain the fall of mankind.

  William Osler once said that humanity has three enemies: “fever, famine, and war, but fever is by far the greatest.”

  The Eternal Library firmly agrees. This is why they must lock up the fevers, with all the spells and science and strength of will that lives in the world. This is why the fever librarian must never fail. The consequences would be unthinkable—an unending disaster for the future of man.

  Sometimes, the fever librarian wonders if she might be her own ghost. She cannot be sure of how long she has been here at the Eternal Library. She cannot be sure that she still has a soul. Her heart beats, her skin burns and bleeds, but a ghost, too, can be full of blood. A ghost can be a billion years old and dead inside forever.

  Only this ghost feels sure she is rising from the dead at last. She is not sure of anything else in the world, of the facts or the fevers or the future, but she is sure that a thing is about to begin or end; which, she does not know.

  It is late in the year, the season of bonfires, when the fevers finally swarm and overtake the librarian that tends them. She has been smoldering for months under their disturbing influence. Now she begins to burn.

  Be assured that the fever librarian is actually the hero of her story. Be assured that she is much stronger than she looks, especially in the throes of such heart-driving heat. Here she is eating her notes. Here she is pulling out drawer after drawer of index cards. Here she is overturning the tables in this temple of learning. Here she is with gallons, with buckets, with fire hoses of water to put out these fevers and drown all our passions and finally, finally send them back to the sea from whence all our troubles are come.

  The Unfinished World

  Set swam into the world with the new century. He was so many years the youngest that he sat as audience for his siblings, rapt in the soft glow of their stage presence. And in return they made him their favorite. They protected him; they enfolded him in their obsessions; they gave him their secrets to keep.

  His brother Cedric, an explorer by trade, took him to dusty, dark museums fallen out of favor. He showed Set impossibly large-hipped stone women and spear tips and tiny skulls no bigger than an apple. He told Set stories about the hunter that brought down the saber-tooth, about the pygmy races who lived hidden in the hearts of jungles, about the sleep spells shamans cast in the days before dreams were invented.

  Constance—his only sister—served him sweets and ginger beer, and bought him penny dreadfuls and souvenir pen wipers—all the things his mother, Pru, forbade for their vulgarity. (Pru did not quite say that Constance was vulgar, though she labeled her “modern” in a way that implied no small degree of disappointment.) Constance liked to read Set love letters from her admirers. She would laugh, a low laugh like far-off thunder, and toss the letters on the fire. They always seemed to be from glamorous people. Set ambushed a distracted Pru at the piano one afternoon and asked if his sister was famous, and Pru frowned and said, yes, possibly more than she should have been. Set asked what she was famous for, and the Chopin became very loud indeed.

  Set’s father was the family enigma. He died when Set was quite small, and before that he did not seem to live in the big house on Long Island with Pru and Cedric and Constance and Oliver. He was always just Father, a blur or blank half-remembered, filled with whiskers and ample pocket-watch chain, large teeth and small keen eyes. In later years, Set was always mixing up his memories of Father and of President Roosevelt on newsreel.

  Set’s brother Oliver had an orderly mind, doors for each feeling and shelves for the strongest memories. So it was not surprising to Set that Oliver should own a self-dubbed Cabinet of Curiosities that he opened only for Set and for his lover, Desmond, whom everyone pretended was Oliver’s business partner even though he and Oliver used to sit in the back at the Fortuna Music Hall and do what Set-as-a-child thought was a good deal of embracing for two grown men with whiskers.

  Pru allowed Oliver to keep his cabinet in the parlor: a long room clad in green and garnet, full of model ships and music boxes and stuffed owls, it was the perfect place for Oliver’s oddities. Oliver said his cabinet contained the
best of this world and the remnants of the one before it. Set was confused and fascinated by it, this gilded wooden case, long as one wall and topped in sections by a carved snake, a wolf, and a fierce giantess; this exhibit where brass clocks butted against stringless lutes, and chalky human bones overlapped pearlescent fish scales and fetuses floating in jars. Indonesian ceremonial masks jostled for space with small paintings by Manet and Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec; a little glass chimera peeked out from behind a magic lantern; leather pouches full of old faerie dust sat squat and useless, their magical essence long since dried up; three crystal balls were wrapped in maps made by Chinese explorers in the 1500s; a tapestry of a stag hunted by dogs hung crooked and slashed in one corner; a jar full of trolls’ feet was tipped over and spilling out; and everywhere were stuffed creatures, claws and feathers, obelisks, pieces of armor, bits of Claude Lorrain glass, and branches made of wood, of iron, of ash.

  It’s just a jumble, Set said to Oliver, the first time he was allowed to view the collection. He preferred the museums Cedric took him to, the glass cabinets and typed cards serving as careful descriptors. Those objects felt old, felt important. They were discoveries. What was all this except a lot of disordered rubbish?

  Oliver and Desmond smiled at one another. There is an order, said Oliver. You just need the key. He showed Set the thick black notebook—the Catalogue, he called it, and Set had the uncanny sense that this was Oliver’s brain, the flesh made word—filled with precise descriptions and locations for each item in the collection in Oliver’s small, careful handwriting. Curiosity #21, read Set. Preserved Chlamyphorus truncatus, commonly known as the pink fairy armadillo. Specimen originally from central Argentina, acquired 1890. He flipped to the middle of the notebook: Curiosity #760. Hinged brass collar, Iron Age. Embellished with decorative patterns in the Celtic style. Inlaid with glass or precious stones; ornaments missing or lost.

  Inge was born as her mother died. She grew to resemble her mother so much that her father despised her; he saw her as a constant reminder of all he had lost. He had doted on her sisters and brother, had been a fair, if slightly stern father. But now he abandoned the care of his youngest to her exceedingly English governess: a stout woman with a wine-colored complexion and a faint brown mustache, a woman who went in for pinching and hair pulling and other invisible injuries. Inge’s older siblings were sent to boarding school, but Inge was not. (The family had also, it should be said, fallen into penury by then.) Your father, said the governess, has thrown you away, and she would squeeze the soft underside of Inge’s arm, or, when she was impassioned into imprudence, smack Inge across the mouth so hard that her lip split. On those occasions, Inge was instructed to spin tales of her own clumsiness, and these only served to make her father dislike her more. Her mother, the mirror, had been so graceful. The older she grew, the less her father could bear to look at her. And so, as the money dried up and the decaying manor fell apart around them—and the family and few remaining servants moved into a single wing—still Inge’s father managed to avoid her, dining late and rising early, spending days walking with his dogs and his rifle out in the village and through the abandoned tenant farms.

  Like many lonely children, Inge retreated into a life of the mind. Her family still had a grand library, damp in the winter from the leaking roof but gloriously full of books. She read voraciously. She liked the plays best: the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare’s histories, Molière’s farces. Her tutor Mr. Trimble, a dapper little man straight from Dickens, taught her to read Latin and French, and she devoured the books of Hugo and Flaubert. She read Melville’s Typee and dreamed of adventures on the South Seas. And when she was quite old, perhaps twelve or thirteen, Mr. Trimble discovered she had read no faerie stories (for their library contained none) and brought her the whole of George MacDonald’s collected tales. The mustachioed governess disapproved. She did not believe little girls should be taught untrue things; that such lessons would take root in the mind and cause appalling flights of fancy. But Mr. Trimble kept the books in his rented room in town, and brought Inge a steady supply. She thought At the Back of the North Wind was the loveliest book she had ever read, and she vowed that someday she, too, would leave her lonely home and her small village and her cold, distant family, and that she, too, would ride the wind, right up to those little islands in the sun-soaked parts of the world. And she thought she might take Mr. Trimble with her—even though he was older than her father, and rather crumple-faced and pockmarked—because he understood that the most important things in the world were the kind you made up for yourself. And also because he wouldn’t take up very much room in the boat.

  Photograph: Snapshot of a telegram, rain-smeared, ink-run, and largely illegible. Crumpled and torn and missing corners, yellowed not from age but from handling.

  The first demon Inge buried was Albert, though he never would stay under for good. It was just like him; he was as stubborn and vain as she was. And so aside from books, floating over the sea and the rivers and the island streams, even under the great heart-eating love of Set—there was always and always Albert. She remembered trailing her older brother everywhere when he was home on holiday, begging him to teach her to shoot pheasant when she was just six. She remembered how she learned about their mother from him: that she was blond and fond of blue, like Inge; that she was beautiful and tone-deaf; that despite her brilliance, her English was always a little broken. Inge remembered Albert teaching her a mouthful of the German he’d learned from their mother. Bitte und danke. Gern geschehen.

  She remembered how her older sisters, when home from school, would mock and mimic the way the youngest child trailed the oldest. She remembered their lace frocks and airs, the rich boys from Belfast they spoke of, the cold eyes they rolled at her as she sat with a book before the fire. Changeling, they called her, and they told her she was a faerie child, switched at birth for their real sister. But they never dared torment Inge in front of Albert. They knew he would, as he often threatened, slap the smirks off their silly faces.

  Inge remembered agreeing to let Albert read her all of Kipling’s Jungle stories, even though she’d already read them many times by herself. She remembered sewing her own suffragette sash, greeting him at the door when the car brought him back from Trinity one gray winter day. He’d told her all about his pretty girlfriend, how she wouldn’t marry until women had the vote. Inge remembered being angry. How dare this woman deny her Bruder anything? She would be a better suffragette than his girlfriend; she would cook him dinner and bring him his slippers every evening, she told him. She remembered her shame when he laughed at her, and her relief, complicated and fierce, when he told her he would always love her best of all.

  And she remembered when the family stood outside in the rain and waited as the boy on the bicycle pedaled slowly up the winding road through the fields from the village. They watched him with agonizing stillness, a boy growing from a pinprick to a person. She remembered how he finally stopped in front of the manor. How they held their breath and watched his hands, those terrible child’s hands, bringing them a piece of paper they could never be rid of. She remembered her father’s face, gone paler than the paper. And she remembered thinking, ashamed of the thought even as it surfaced: Now I have no one at all.

  Curiosity #7: Adult American grizzly bear’s left incisor, circa 1904. Removed after death.

  The first thing Set remembered in his own short life was the bear. Of course, “remember” is a tricky term; rather, he thought about the bear—the huge hungriness of it, the small black eyes, the limp, lank fur, the almost leisurely way it was loping toward him—in the kind of piled-up, fuzzy, impressionistic way the young mind has of cataloguing things. The bear, he was later told, was part of a visiting circus from Hamburg; its unfortunate name was Bumbles and it was trained to stand on its hind legs and eat dangled fish. But Set did not remember any of this: not the bright, garish colors of the circus tent, nor the off-key organ music, nor the screams of the other children as t
he bear, starved and beaten, tore its trainer’s arm off before turning to the plumper, less threatening residents of the surrounding stands. Set remembered only the bear itself emerging, a god from the void, and the scarlet pain of the huge jaws on his head, the clutch, the clamping, viselike; then the jet of red, the small black eye exploding backward, the furious roar, the heavy sudden slump of fur. He remembered, then, how Cedric holstered his gun and how he rose in the melee, throwing Set over his huge shoulder like a sack of flour. He remembered growing cold, and wondering why, and wondering also that any human, even Cedric, could stop a thing so large, and he remembered a sense of sadness, too, that a thing so large could be dead. He remembered Cedric’s frantic, half-mouthed exhortations to some god or other, layered over the low moans of horror from the circus crowds. He remembered nothing more, then, for a long while after.

  Curiosity #17: Heavy cavalry officer’s saber, circa 1821. Used by British lieutenant during the Second Boer War; periodic sharpening, indicating a bloodied blade.

  After the bear, Set sensed that everything had changed, though he didn’t know quite why. He woke gradually to these strange new days, feeling almost nothing at first, remembering almost nothing at all. There was a cave just behind his breastbone; it was a drafty, dark place he would come to think of as his hollow. And his family hovered. Other things, too, were different: people seemed smaller, and when they spoke their voices seemed to come from somewhere very far away. There seemed almost a hush hanging over his home. Set became slowly accustomed to these differences, and he learned to mask his feelings, his perceptions about the world. He learned a new kind of smile for when there was nothing to smile about. He became inwardly solemn and outwardly placid, by all appearances an ordinary little boy.