Chapter Forty Three

It is said that when you begin a story it is better to begin at the beginning.  But how do you begin at the beginning when you are talking about the end of his world?  Rather, it might be better to begin with the ending, but this also poses a problem in that every ending has a beginning, and it is difficult to ascertain where the beginning of the end is best divided from the middle of the end, or even from the ending of the end.

        In a similar fashion, it is hard to begin at the beginning when the beginning begins with a woman, in that the author of this story is a man, and knows women not.  He is handicapped by his own phallus, and can only penetrate so far into the mysteries that women often present.  Not that he is a man, mind you, for everyone is aware of the fact that he is truly a woman.

        And, as with his own story, there is a woman at the beginning.  And it is also here that attempts at narration fail, because narration in this context implies the division of one thing from another, and as my nature lovers would assert women are not about that.  Women are, rather, wholeness unto themselves, and every woman is indivisible from every other woman, back to that primeval woman: Eve or Lilith.

        So one need be very careful when one is talking about bedrooms and pillow talk, and how she moaned beneath his bulk, receiving him.  Because she was never one woman.  She was all of them.  And we won’t listen to what some of the women are saying, because their protests of individuality are all self-serving.

        One day, when I am standing in front of a group discussing this book, many will wonder if the man woman in front of them was really the person who wrote this at all, or whether there might not be some other man woman lurking behind the scenes, much in the way that Philip Marlowe haunts Shakespeare.  In answer to your question: Yes and no.  No, this is not Shakespeare.  And Yes, I happen to be Philip Marlowe.

        So when I talk/write about the bedroom in that house, let it be known that I am blameless.  Let it be known that I am without sin.  So it is that I can cast the first stone.  So it is that I can disfigure her name.  Whatever is said of her, I am outside the circle, and if she wronged me I want so desperately to forgive her, even if I can’t.  She is outside of my timestream now.  She is gone.

        Well we might wonder after what transpired within that bedroom on a certain afternoon.  We might pick dates out of the calendar.  We might assign blame.  But whatever we do, her true intentions will escape us.  The world and the person she represented are lost to us, just as I am lost, in a world that has already ended.  Speculation as to human relationships (i.e. mating habits) between her and her husband, and between her and whoever else, can only proceed so far and then no farther.  Her obscurity shields us from the truth.  Her feminine wiles obfuscate.

        On one afternoon he lay panting over her, desperately trying to maintain an erection.  His head was full of so many worries, and the stress from work was really killing him, and even though he knew her body was beautiful he just found it so hard to be interested in her flawless breasts or her muscled thighs.  The way that she pretended to enjoy it all was also an obstacle in his path.  She pretended to be too eager, when he had asked for shyness.

        That was the day after his disastrous first review, or maybe it had been on the day when his paper on The War of the Roses had been described as “wooden” by a certain professor.  He had come home and she had found herself in love with his stability once again, his sheer trustworthiness, and she had already been in her panties and as she pulled his cock from his briefs she could feel her body responding, responding, responding.  And that was the only part he liked: her hand, because then he could imagine that her hand was anyone else in the world, and not this fragile bird that he only wanted to feel safe with and that he only wanted to protect.

        Afterward she pulled him to the bed.  Even though at that time he was still slight of build he had enough musculature to excite her, and there was a pleasure in kissing his nipples and feeling his buttocks flex behind that surging penis.

        Yet it was all downhill from there.  Once he was on top of her he began thinking of how much he wanted to achieve something.  He was always trying to achieve something, but never quite arriving at his goals.  There was always something wrong with his achievements.  He always seemed to take a half step in the wrong direction just before victory.  Perhaps he finally got that teaching position, but he was largely a failure as a teacher.  Perhaps he won his professorship, but it was only through political maneuvering, and never though any personal ability that he possessed.  Perhaps he saw his name on a published book for the first time, but someone in the department dismissed what he had done.  His legacy was everywhere and nowhere.  It loomed above him, even in that bedroom, and there was nothing for it but to feel small and limp beneath that great oppressive weight.

        Then she was pushing him off of her and there were tears in her eyes.  Her prince that had come to save her – maybe – and she couldn’t get him off.  But still she would hold on to him, because he was her prince and he had saved her and set her aside.  Still she would remain faithful in her way.  She did not want him to see her crying, but he heard the noises from the bathroom and he wondered.  Why was it so hard for him to fuck her?  Why was it often the hardest thing in a life of hard things?  In his heart he only wanted to please her, but….

2

A row of wild sunflowers that no one has planted, standing on the periphery of an ancient forest.  Beneath their shadows a grassy slope leads down to a clear stream where frogs mate and prosper.

        An anthill on the edge of a desert.  Elephants pass overhead, and are not heard from again.  A billion generations frenzied within the hill, the lifeblood of the colony pulsing through the earth.  To do.  That is all.  To be.

        Cliffsides within the view of the ocean.  Great eagles careen through the sky and sometimes crash together.  Framed below their commotions are the majestic horned herds of goats, clinging to sheer faces of rock with all the ease of their ancestors.

        The black depths of the sea.  No light here, but massive shapes move to and fro, forward and back.  On occasion a sperm whale descends into this abyss, and gathers to himself squid so large as to border on the mythological.  A thousand shades of fish scatter before him, casting their glimmering bodies in all directions.

        Smaller by far, in the air.  Too small to see, but living and taking prey.  Some replicate themselves.  Others mate.  Some to find a home on the surface of an eyelid.  Others to float onward, through an endless expanse of air.

3

On one afternoon, she had invited him in and they had been fucking for hours.  His dick was hurting from the effort, and it was the third time he’d come.  She just couldn’t get enough of him, her ass high in the air to receive his penis, her nether lips swollen and red.  He wanted to fill her with his essence.  He wanted to leave something of himself inside her.  He wanted to be, after he was not.

        He asked himself how someone could be so physically near yet so mentally far away.  And he couldn’t tell himself that she didn’t love him.  Her love was so painfully clear that he could feel it in his balls.  It was only as if her love had burrowed someplace inside her flesh, in much the same way that crabs burrow beneath the sand, to the point where you do not see them, yet you know that they are there.  In her love there was no abstraction or analysis.  There was only carnality.

        He gasped as the length of his cock entered her again.  He gasped more from surprise than from the actual pleasure she incited.  He was surprised because even after three times he could still enjoy it.  He could still want her as much as he had hours before.  Even though he knew he would be bruised on the following day, the emotion that guided his actions was surprise.

        We might well ask ourselves what she thought about as she backed herself into his considerable manhood.  Was she thinking of other men that day?  Or was her heart only for him?  Did she think about what she was doing?  Did she think about the cost to herself and others?  She might have been planning the whole thing from beginning to end, knowing in her genes that the end of the world was coming, knowing that the beginning of the end was near.

        And afternoon, I think, with time pointing backwards from the terminal point.  That afternoon presaged by other afternoons in sunlit rooms.  That afternoon presaged or foresaged by years before, by failures and assorted defeats, by lifetimes full of strangers, all the way back through revolutions, wars, and behind the orbit of Theia.  Her thoughts were not thought by her alone.  They were thought by her ancestors before her.  If you look into her eye as she is rutting with him, you will see yet another woman, rutting at the beginning of the world that is at an end.

4

I rise up again.  Not Third this time.  But rather in the library.  I was looking for books on the Revolutionary War.  This is the wrong section.  I suddenly remember that I have only twenty minutes left in the library before it closes, and the librarian upstairs has already told me to hurry.  I gather my book bag up off the floor and begin a brisk trot towards the elevators, several shelves away.  I must hurry, because outside a city is ready to crumble.  My feet rub against the carpet, and I remind myself to remember that there is no city here.  It is all out there.

        The brown doors of the elevator open and I step inside.  The interior of the elevator is covered by buttons from the floor to the ceiling.  There are even a few buttons on the ceiling.  A great glass elevator.  Not knowing or caring which one to push, I press the lowest number.  The elevator begins a descent towards the bowels of the Earth, and I realize that I am about to solve this mystery of Theia, I am about to unearth the pyramids of Atlantis, I am about to solve the riddle of the Sphinx.

5

It is said that this library is not really so old.  The government built it about thirty years ago, when many of the Japanese houses still remained near the train station.  This was back when the old train station was still in use; back when you could take a train straight into downtown Taitung from Kaohsiung.  The rail line around the island had only been completed ten or so years before, and those running the city conceived of a commercial corridor extending from the old train station to the other end of Shin Sheng Road.  This library, the Teacher’s Hostel, and the Cultural Center were all part of this plan.

        It was only about ten years ago that the train station was relocated to the other side of the city, and with both the train station and the airport outside the city, the downtown area was no longer a convenient point from which to enter and exit Taitung City.  The McDonald’s in front of Li Yu Mountain still draws a fair share of visitors, but the library has largely been forsaken.  Now it is only the haunt of students, and most of Taitung’s adult population doesn’t bother going there.  

I will show you the inside of the building now, but you must be careful of the construction.  They are trying to make the exterior look more modern, even though the interior of the building will remain the same.  Given that the municipal swimming pool occupies a large tract of land to the north of the building, there is only so much they can do with it.

        Inside here is the entranceway, and you will notice advertisements for local events.  As you can see, the concert in Tai Ma Li is not far away, and the Hot Air Balloon Festival in Lu Ye is also not far off.  To our right we have the information desk, and to the right of that are the periodicals.  None of these periodicals are in your language, because we are completely inflexible on that point.

        Follow me up the stairs now.  This building was constructed with every attention to detail.  It has weathered many typhoons, and I am told it never leaks.  Up the two flights of stairs here we find the reference room on the left, and across the hall are the children’s books.  There is also a third floor, accessed via a set of stairs within.  Up there you will find books on the ending of the world, books on the beginning of the world, books on the impossibility of the world ever ending, books on the likelihood of the world ending, books on human relationships, books on love triangles that involve repressed homosexuals or sublimated bisexuals, books on insane mothers who vomit blood onto the floor, books on gentle yet ineffectual fathers, books on mothers who fuck random guys at truck stops just because they’re drunk and slightly crazy, books on the universal nature of worldhood as such, books on alchemy, books on bigfoot, books on Scientology, books on Mormonism, books about those fucking Arabs, books about those lovely gentiles, books about the chosen people who were not chosen, books about orphans, books about parents who died painfully in fires, books about Zoroastrianism, books about the Maratha defeat, books about Govind Pant Bundele, books about high school, books about prepubescent gymnasts, books about the sunset, books about afternoon, books about Mayan calendrical systems, books about astronomical phenomenon, books where you choose your own adventure, books about the origins of life on Earth, books about Theia, books about Greek and other mythologies, books about books, books about history, books about the history of books, books about books that are about the history of books, books about lonely people, books about popular people, books about wanton women, books about men who are cursed with the inability to form lasting human relationships, books about college, books about failure, books about getting laid, books about living in a dorm, books about sexy Chinese girls and their panty lines, books about the sky in Seattle, books about Seattle during the Great Fire when everyone was screaming and banging on the doors and trying to get out of the house, books about the proposition that all men are created equal, books about the truism that they aren’t, books about disadvantage and prosperity, books about economics, books about Mormons with golden hair, books about misogyny, books about heretics, books about Manichaeism, books about Thomas Aquinas, books about RoboLords, books about kids who grew up in the early 80s, books about the Pacific Northwest, books about atheism in the British Empire, books that frequently employ the term “sea change,” books about the sacredness of women, books about the Mother Goddess, books about Gaeia, books about everything happening, books about everything that has already happened, books about everything that will happen, books about everything that will not happen, speculative fiction, non-fiction, fact.  Yes, we do have a few books in German and Spanish up there, but nothing you people would want to read.  I’ll have none of your kind up there.

        Now if you will follow me down the hall I will lead you to the showers.  It might smell kind of funny in there, but that’s only the construction.  I want you all to breathe deeply in there, and relax.  It will all be over soon.

6

But that’s not what he meant to say at all.  It’s just that the elevator is always going down, and he gets confused.  Heretics are punished in this manner.  They are placed within the flames.  Those who burn are innocent.

        A university hums, outside the library.  The university is very new, and there is a picture of the king wherever you go.  The girls here all wear uniforms, and the boys too.  Some of the boys are from rich families, and these families shop at Central World for slacks.  Some of the girls are from places like Ayutthaya or Lopburi, and they try to hide their accents and not look too dark.  From the entrance to the university, all the way down to the Victory Monument is one incomprehensible traffic jam.  Leaving the library, some of the boys will get in taxis that take them to places in Bangkok where people actually live.  Leaving the library, some of the girls will get on buses that take them to Chatuchak Square or someplace calm where they can pretend to like the boys their parents approve of.  A little girl buys a piece of coconut cake from the BTS station, and we wonder if we are going to Tesco today.  I’m so tired of their food, but the air-conditioning is nice, isn’t it?.

7

They were at the beach when her father taught her how to swim.  Her mother was watching from the shade beneath a palm tree, and they were on vacation in some foreign country, perhaps in the Caribbean.  It would have been before her father returned to Israel, before her mother died and the three of them lived in California.

        He began by showing her how he did it.  He paddled forward with his hands, and kicked up and down with his legs.  As he did this, she tried to copy his movements.  Then he held her up with a single hand – she was still very small then – and as he held her in the water she imitated the way he had paddled and kicked.  After this he made a joke, and as she laughed he let her go.

        That was it.  That was how she learned how to swim.  From that day forward, she never needed another lesson.  People said that she swam like a fish, and her father said, “Of course.”

        Her mother had smiled back at her from the shade of the coconut tree.  She had smiled back.

        That was the oldest of her memories.  Before this there were once other, older memories, but she had grown out of them.  For the remainder of her life, she would remember only her mother beneath that coconut tree, and the way her father had taught her how to swim with a joke.  She could not tell you what their faces looked like, because if she thought about it all she saw were skulls beneath plastic masks.  She could not tell you what their faces looked like, but she knew that they had loved her and had been sorry to die.

8

Down, down into the depths of the library.  On the BTS and the MRT they stare at mobile devices.  We pass over a set of train tracks, and there is a wooden shack of a station next to the tracks where people in rags wait for something unlike a train.  Everyone is so busy with their YouTubes and facebooks and half-shining eyes glazed from a profile picture.  Typing and typing without end into the Great Computer, which is no more and no less than The Great Library, at the center of everything.  One need not worry after that fool who has descended to the depths of the Earth, because he will only find other heretics there, and also a sense of ennui.  The true library exists nowhere and everywhere, and in that library are contained more books by more people than any physical library can ever boast of.  What was the Library of Alexandria compared to this crowning achievement?  It was only a meager beginning, lost to the barbarities of a long lost age.  This new library, housed behind no walls, is forever, and cannot be destroyed.

        Unless of course the battery dies.  Or if the power goes out.  Everywhere.  At once.  Should an electromagnetic pulse of sufficient strength wash over our urban centers, or if the sun’s radiation should reach a critical level.  Well then, my friend, we’re stuck with only the libraries of former times.  Not that it would matter.  We’d probably all be dead then.

9

A library that is a metaphor for a library.  There is one library only, and within this library I can see a single book, on a shelf far below and at the same time far above.  This is the book that will end the world.  This is the book that will elude him until the right time.  This is the book that she has placed beneath the floorboards in that house as yet distant.  This is the book that is waiting to be found, and in which the histories of the world are written.