Lost books found

accidentally logged on to google docs with an old email and found this waiting, old enough that its formatting is apparently no longer compatible with the current google docs or something, leaving all those squiggly things. pretty sure this was a Rayuela, if i’d found this sooner, i might’ve tried to shoehorn it into Marienbad, etc., but since it’s too late, here it is copy-pasted fr googdocs as is (too lazy to edit). anyway, damn my younger self for not finishing this (i.a.), no idea where they were going with this.

Lost books

6:15pm, Monday. Eton Ramirez boarded the train just one stop away from the National Library. Security cameras have him in the National Library from around 6:21 to 6:43; upon arriving, he went directly to the Fiction and then the Poetry shelves, as if he knew all along exactly where the books he wanted were to be found. Around 6:45, he was standing in the crowd on the corner outside the library, unnoticed by anyone and waiting with everyone else for the light to change. He had borrowed four books: Nazi Literature in the Americas and The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews and Laura Healy, respectively; The Train was on Time by Heinrich Boll, translated by Leila Vennewitz; Antipoems--How to Look Better and Feel Great by Nicanor Parra, پgantitranslatedپh by Liz Werner. Within the next hour he read as much of Nazi Literature and The Romantic Dogs as he could, feverishly turning page after page as though his life depended on it, then opened Antipoems at random and read exactly one line in English (پgThe commercialization of catastrophe:پh) and its counterpart in Spanish (پgLa comercializacion de la catastrofe:پh); he seemed to forget completely that he had the Boll. The Train was on Time found its way back to the library the following day; someone, a stranger, a good Samaritan, almost certainly not Ramirez himself, had slipped the book through the book return slot of the library bookdrop at the end of the day. A glitch in the system, a burst of solar radiation or cosmic rays, or an electromagnetic pulse, or maybe a cockroach or rat in the wiring, though none of these would later prove to be the case, prevented the event from being recorded by the security camera positioned over the book return slot, and the book was not found to have been returned until a few days later: in addition to the failure of the security camera, the book had somehow fallen out of the automated retrieval tray at the end of the bookdrop chute. No one could explain why no one had noticed until then. Only circumstances--the continuity of the security camera video recording, interrupted only at the end of the day after the book had been checked out, and the date of the last time the book had been borrowed, that is, the date it was checked out by Eton Ramirez--suggest the actual date and time the book had been physically returned to the premises. It was the first break, if it could be called a break, in the case, if it can be called a case. At any rate, chronologically speaking, it was the first indication that something, if anything, was amiss.

About a month before Eton Ramirez got on the train and made his way to the National Library, Anjelica Stendhal also visited the library and checked out three books: an omnibus edition of The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Signs of Life by M. John Harrison; A Void by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair. The security cameras have her in the library from 11:10am, just after the library opened, to around 3:15pm. Anjelica Stendhal spent most of the time sitting in a corner reading the Penguin edition of Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis. She grew bored of the book after the first hour and kept looking up from her reading, staring unself-consciously now and then at the other visitors in the library as they quietly browsed the shelves, like vultures, she might have thought, their shoulders hunched as they peered at the titles on the spines arrayed before them, as oblivious of her watchful eyes as she was of the security camera lovingly trained on her beautiful, pale--almost deathly pale, so pale it was an almost featureless white blotch in the video recording--face. In the security camera recording, her eyes are the eyes of a blind woman: in the recording she looks Chinese, or at any rate Asian, but her eyes are impossibly blue. Of the three books she borrowed, none have yet been returned, nor is there anything else to indicate that any of them have ever been found.

Three days after the return of The Train was on Time was discovered, a man walked up to the customer service counter of the National Library to return a book. The counter girl, a bright-eyed Malay named Ana, looked up at the man and told him he could return the book through the book return slot at the bookdrop just outside the library's entrance. The man said, yes, he knew that, but no, he didn't want to do that, he wanted to return the book, of course, but it was not a book that he had borrowed. In other words, he wasn't there to simply return the book, he was also there to report that the book must have been borrowed by someone else, someone else who must have somehow lost it, and that he had found it and was now, in good faith, there to return it and report that the book had been lost and then found. It was then that Ana looked at the cover of the book the man was returning: an ominous, grainy, slightly defocused image of a man's bare back, shoulders hunched, arms spread out to the sides like wings, as though the man were preparing to take to the air, Ana thought, or maybe the man was already in the air, in the air against a dark--coal-dark, Ana said--night sky, and he was swooping down like a bird of prey, or some featherless carrion bird alighting on a carcass, or that he was pretending to be flying through the air, demonstrating some impressive aeronautical maneuver to an unseen audience, as if he--the man on the cover--were standing on a stage, facing an audience seated in the dark in front of him. It was the library's copy of Nazi Literature in the Americas. Ana thanked the man, who refused to give any of his details, and despite her best efforts the man left without another word, leaving the book in her hands. Checking the library records, Ana found that the book had been borrowed about a week ago by a man named Eton Ramirez, a name that was at once familiar to her from the circumstances, much talked about by the library staff, surrounding the finding of another of the books Ramirez had borrowed, The Train was on Time by Heinrich Boll. She called Ramirez through the contact number he had provided for his membership. Or tried to: the phone rang and rang, but no one answered. In an inexplicable fit of intuition, without trying to get in touch with Ramirez again, whether by phone or through any of the other means the library record suggested, Ana decided to inform the chief librarian. Soon it was discovered that Eton Ramirez had disappeared, disappeared so completely that it was as if he had never existed.

When asked to describe the man who had returned the book, Ana was surprised to find she could not recall him at all, just hours after she had seen and spoken with him, instead remembering only the image on the cover of Nazi Literature in the Americas, the image on the cover and what she thought upon seeing the image on the cover, a surprisingly vivid memory and a coherent (or incoherent) set of thoughts of course no one found very helpful. Consulting the security camera recordings of that day proved equally frustrating, not to say entirely baffling: the same interruption was found in the recordings as was observed in the recording from three days before, when The Train was on Time was returned through the book return slot. A survey of the library's surveillance system uncovered nothing wrong, nothing to explain those two blips, those glitches, those hiccups in the daily security recordings. In fact, there were no other interruptions in the recordings, which were comprehensive and comprehensively catalogued by the National Library's Security Department. What's more, the interruption barely even registered on the recording: a camera, trained on the customer service counter, caught only the edge of a shadow just beginning to appear on one corner of the screen--not even a shadow, nor even the edge of a shadow, really, but only a suggestion of the approach of a shadow, a barely perceptible darkness that seemed to loom just outside the frame of the camera's lens--and Ana, sitting alone behind the desk of the customer service counter, one moment with her hands empty, the next with the book in one hand, the other hand adjusting her spectacles, her eyes fixed on the image on the cover of the copy of Nazi Literature in the Americas. The clock indicated a jump of less than 10 minutes, about six or seven minutes, six or seven minutes that were lost to the world forever.

The connection to Anjelica Stendhal was not discovered--or, at any rate, not surmised--until about a week later, when members of the library staff attempted to contact her. The loan time for the books she had borrowed had lapsed, and members of the staff tried to get in touch with her to remind her that her books were due, and that she would have to pay the library a fine and either return the books immediately or, if she wanted to keep the books for much longer, renew the loan. Three members of the library staff are on record as having attempted to get in touch with her that day: none of them thought anything of their inability to get in touch with Stendhal and the matter was left for another day, more or less forgotten, at any rate not given another thought by anyone until it came to the attention of the chief librarian, an avid reader of detective and crime fiction, a fan of Patricia Highsmith and Patricia Cornwell and of the detective stories of G.K. Chesterton and Arthur Conan-Doyle, of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose imagination had been set alight by and was still on fire from Eton Ramirez's disappearance. That a beautiful woman was now involved further inspired him to look more closely at what he began thinking of as a case, moreover as his case, and he began to imagine himself as a kind of Philip Spade. A slightly pudgy Philip Spade, a Philip Spade with no investigator's license, no license to investigate anything other than the prerogative of a chief librarian to examine the circumstances surrounding the borrowing and subsequent loss of books from the library. He remembered Ana from the previous week and, after asking again if she might not then have started to remember more from her encounter with the man who had returned the copy of Nazi Literature in the Americas, without really expecting that she would or, more likely, more in line with his temperament at the time, actually hoping that she would not (she didn't), the chief librarian asked her to retrieve any information the library might have on both Anjelica Stendhal and Eton Ramirez, and after having her print out three copies, one for each of them and one to be left behind, for reference, in his office on the premises of the National Library, invited her to join him to see, he said, if it might not be possible for them to find either Stendhal or Ramirez by going out and looking for them, physically, themselves.

They went first to the residential address given by Anjelica Stendhal, whose disappearance, at the time, had yet to be confirmed. What they found was what the chief librarian's imagination had led him to suspect all along: according to the landlord, a retired old man in his late 60s, but with the youth and vigor, even the appearance, of a man who was only in his 40s or 50s, a man who had used his hands to make an honest living for most of his life but was now happy to leave it all behind for a quiet life lived more or less in solitude, the kind of solitude that wasn't necessarily physical but conceptual or philosophical, tending to his properties, a set of rooms in a condominium just outside the boundaries of the commercial district of the city, as though he were not the owner but a housekeeper or chambermaid, occasionally even doing the laundry for his tenants and keeping their rooms clean in their absence, according to this old man Anjelica Stendhal had not been seen, by him or by any of the other tenants of the apartment, for about a month. She had paid an advance on her rent for three months, he said, without giving any reason, though he suspected she had been planning a long vacation, not unheard of for expatriates of a certain pay-grade, such as she was, and he had since kept her room in order, he said proudly, making sure her things were not disturbed in her absence, even bringing a kind of order to them, a subtle but distinct order to her things that was absent from the manner in which she tended her possessions, which was, he said without expounding further, less than ideal, and that would from experience certainly not be objectionable to her when she returned.

The room of Anjelica Stendhal was well maintained, as the landlord had given them to expect, if sparsely furnished. She had a bed, a chair, a small side table on which stood a lamp that was, the chief librarian thought approvingly, ideal for reading in bed, an escritoire, a wardrobe and a small, wooden bookshelf. The escritoire the chief librarian thought curiously empty, its surface free even of dust, the drawers containing little more than a few pens and some loose change in various currencies. The bookshelf, however, offered him a few things of interest: some books on physics and other sciences, including QED by Richard Feynman, The Problem with Physics by Lee Smolin, a few books by Michio Kaku and The Eye by Simon Ings. He was intrigued by Stendhal's library, which also contained a few volumes on history, politics and the social sciences, but no fiction, or nothing that was commonly thought of as fiction. Consulting the folder he had Ana print out for him provided an answer: Stendhal apparently acquired her fictional readings from the library; the records showed that she borrowed nothing but fiction, with no obvious preferences.