Codetta and Fugue

  You can call me Anthony, even though the name would have meant not a thing to me before I fell to Hell. On my last day of blissful anonymity, I sat on a heavily bleached concrete-form garden bench wearing an unrestricting, white flowing gown. We, the angels of eternal bliss, walked in the sun-soaked garden under magnolias’ leaves, surrounded by walls that seemed to match my favorite bench in both color and austerity. The walls’ sole purpose seemed to be—or so it seemed to me—to hold up humble ivy that neither obscured the walls nor rendered them obsolete. 

That’s when the old man with the Panama hat and the dirty white suit pointed up into the dying, leafless tree. He laughed low and mumbled something lower, possibly in ancient gibberish. I generally took little notice of the dying Dutch elm, despite its centricity in the delightful garden. He slapped me about the shoulder and pointed over to the longest branch which, though broken, held a fruit of the most vibrant colors. I watched it change colors, evolving from red to orange to yellow to green to red— 

“That’ll nourish ya!” the old man said. “That’ll sure nourish ya!” He, then, laughed and laughed like the angels often do when their joy rains on the magnolias’ roots. 

I stood and started for the pomme de paradis, but at the very moment when it was within my reach but just outside my grasp: “No! That is not for you, sinner!” The speaker was a man by his voice and a thing of evil by his black overcoat with the turned-up collar and black fedora with the turned-down brim. His eyes, though not visible, stared directly into my soul or maybe out from the hole where it had been before. I stepped back and back more, stepping faster backwards as he approached and reproached me: “Do not flee or fight. Your place is here.” His reasons seemed sound, but still I turned in fear and ran past the other angels to a gateless hole in the ivy-covered wall. As I crossed the threshold, the rain fell, and the thunder rolled like a sonic sea against a silent battery. 

The sky turned dark—the very air turned dark—outside the den of the garden’s gates. The salty rain of the coastal city fell hot and heavy, soaking me in what seemed to be my own silty sweat. The seemingly faceless man in the black fedora pursued me endlessly past rows of locked doors and chained gates until, finally, I found, on Alexandria Street, a light shining from a Victorian painted lady whose gate was open and whose front door had been left ajar. The varied paint schemes on the home’s façade glowed in the thick, wet darkness like the fruit of the tree from the broken branch in the garden. Only after I’d stepped in—backed in, looking for the dark stranger—did I realize this wasn’t a home. 

“Welcome back to Lethe Library, Mr. Anthony,” a tall, slender man in a white tuxedo said. Two helpers stood behind the main librarian, both with black hair, both looking away from me toward the empty dark-oak cubby holes attached to the back wall. “We’ve been....”

The two helpers behind the large oaken front desk helped him finish the sentence: “...expecting you.” 

“I’ve never--”

“--been here before,” the helpers said and giggled. Their titters seemed as rote and ritualistic as a liturgical prayer. 

“Wait, I don’t--” 

“--have any idea who you are.” 

“I’ve never--” 

“--been here in my life.” 

More subdued, joyless laughter. 

“Let us,” said the curator, “cut, as it were, to the chase.” 

Remembering the man in the black hat, I looked out the door. 

“Metaphorically speaking, I mean,” the curator clarified. “Hold up your hands.” 

“My hands.” 

“The ends of your arms that are not your shoulders.” 

I presented to him my palms. 

“Ah, as I suspected, you are the you that comes to find the books, not the one who returns the books. You haven’t any books, have you?” 

“No.” 

“Then I suppose that, as usual....” 

I started to protest, but he presented his palm. 

“...as usual, you will be looking for the Mnemosyne Pool. Can you remember where it is? You might as well try.” 

When I obviously had no idea, his neck tried to throw his own head up a winding staircase. 

“Upstairs.” 

“Very good, my good man. Upstairs you will find the Mnemosyne Pool. We don’t recommend it. We never do, but it never matters to you.” 

I heard footsteps on the old wood that held the large front porch together. I don’t know how he found me, and I don’t know why I assumed that it was the dark hat man. I started climbing up the winding staircase with the dark wood railing. Nothing inside the house matched the outside. Suddenly, I was as afraid of this place as I was of the black coat man. 

“What is this place?” I asked. 

“It is, as it was when last you were here, a special collections library. Before that, it was an hotel, and before that...a tavern. Before that, of course....” 

The girls behind the counter giggled, this time somewhat more earnestly than before. 

“Well,” the curator said with more than a little pride, “let us just say that all the bases are covered even if the women were not.” 

More giggling. 

None of the lights were turned on upstairs. Darkness had so enveloped the world outside that very little more than darkness filtered in through the curtainless windows. Above that, the rows and rows of bookshelves arranged in a spiraling labyrinth stole even more light from where there appeared to have been none before. Hearing the main door open, I entered the maze of shelves and followed them around in a circle. I stopped—dead silent. The voices downstairs: 

“Welcome back to Lethe Library, Mr. Anthony,” the curator said downstairs. “We’ve been....” 

Again, I followed the path between the stacks. At points, I would have choices of following a path to the left or the right, and I’d made three choices before the confidence I held in my choices began to unnerve me. I didn’t have to question the path nor feel along the walls in the darkness. How did I know which choice to make? Did I? 

Giggling downstairs. I heard it as the labyrinth unwound, opening into an expanse that seemed to be lit by a large pile of dust that obscured an ivy-patterned rug so much that it, in fact, made the carpet obsolete. The pile, I realized, was not a unified pile. Instead, it was several piles on top of books that were, themselves, piled in the middle of the multi-angled expanse. I picked up a black canvas-bound book and examined the dust that seemed, even separated from the pile, to emit its share of light. I blew the dust off the top and opened the book. The dust lingered in the air as if putting off its descent, floating aimlessly, I’d thought. The book’s title page read, “Number 7.” The story began on the next page: 

“You didn’t even have the decency to kill me. After what you did, I lay in the hospital hanging on to the life that you’d stolen and that I’d then tried to give away. By then, your actions had become famous, you...infamous, and I knew—”

Only gradually did I notice that the dust, rather than falling, had formed the shape of a woman—a young woman. She spoke the words as I read them from the book: 

“—who you were when I saw you standing at the entrance to my room. When you stepped closer, I noticed that you were not wearing a mask of any kind. You didn’t care if I knew who you were because—” 

I closed the book, and the dust drifted back to the far side of the expanse. Remaining in the woman’s form, the dust fell silent. I knew how it began—the book. I knew how the story ended. I knew more than the book knew—that book anyway. 

I picked up another book and blew the dust away again.

“Number 3.” 

The dust floated until it formed an older man in his seventh stage, rough even by those standards. 

“Sitting there beside a small mall dumpster,” he said as I read, “hoping to sleep before the breakfast folk came with change, you saw me, offered me fifty cents, and told me 'That will pay the ferryman. One for each eye,’ you’d said. Before I could rise--” 

He, too, fell silent when I closed the book, and drifted back to the far side, standing near but never acknowledging the previous spirit. 

“Well,” I heard the curator say downstairs with more than a little pride, “let us just say that all the bases are covered.” 

In the center, a book that seemed brightly and variably colored, not unlike the library’s exterior and the fruit, shined as if tired of waiting for me to find it. I picked it up and blew the dust away, but away, it did not fly. Instead, the dust swarmed my face and attacked my eyes.  

I dropped the book and rubbed my eyes, violently and more violently. Hot, salty tears fell like rain trying to wash away the ashy dust until, as if on its own accord, the dust melted into my face. I let out a fiery scream, in part because of the flaming pain that suddenly subsided, allowing me to open, again, my eyes. 

I was no longer in the labyrinth upstairs. I had returned to the front desk, and a book hammered me in the chest. The man in the black coat and black hat had picked it up. Now he insisted that I hold it. 

“Why are you chasing me?”

“I was trying to keep you from coming here,” he said.

“I wasn’t coming here until you chased me. You accused me of awful things.”

“You always come here.” The man in the black coat and black fedora raised his head and looked me in the eyes. I was not surprised that the man under the hat was me—just more me. “You pull the books from the shelves and the ash turns back into ghosts.” 

“Ash? The dust?” 

“That’s ash from the past when you asked me to burn down the library. That’s the deal we made—your deal with the devil.” 

“I made it with you, you said. And you are...me.”

“I went to all the trouble to burn this down, but you came back. You came back and stirred up the ashes.” 

“Burn it down again. Please.” 

“I can’t” 

“Please!”

“But he can.” 

To my left, the man in the Panama hat held the fruit from the broken branch tree. I recognized him now. He’d entered the plea for me. Insanity. Unfit to stand trial. 

He held the fruit out to me. “Trade?” he said. 

“I don’t recommend that, sir,” the curator said. He stood behind the counter with the assistants in the back, staring at cubby holes that were overflowing with stationery and correspondence. 

“Do I have a choice?” I asked my self, the self in the long black coat. 

“You had choices. You made choices. Then, somehow, you still made more choices. It was never a matter of having choices.” 

“You may go,” the Panama hat man told the black coat me, who put his hat back on his head and his hands in his pockets before shuffling out the door. 

“Fire, they say, is my specialty,” the Panama hat man said. “It’s the only forgiveness that truly lasts.” He extended both his empty hand and the hand with the bright fruit.

“Can I at least see what the book says?”

“Sure. You should skip to the end, though. I can’t afford to burn time, and you are not my sole purpose.”

He laughed at his own joke as I flipped through the book titled, “Codetta and Fugue.” The first line read, “You can call me Anthony....” 

I skipped to the last section: 

“I traded the book for the fruit. I closed my eyes and bit into the soft skin and, further, into the sweet fruity flesh. It tasted metallic, and I could feel the heat rise before my knees buckled. I sat on a heavily bleached concrete-form garden bench before opening my eyes to my first day of blissful oblivion, nourished by that which had destroyed me.”