I opened at random the next book on the list. An epigraph at page top: Bernard of Clairvaux. C. and I had once spent a timeless afternoon in that town. The words read, What we love, we shall grow to resemble.
I read the words to Helen. She kept her counsel.
"Helen? What do you say to that?"
Still she gave no response.
"Helen?"
A. poked me. "Shh. Leave her be. She's rolling with it." She's moved by it, A. wanted to say. But that was the grip of an archaic theory, long discredited.
It hit me well after it should have. The mind is still an evolutionary infant. Most trouble with the obvious. I reached down and turned the mike back on. Then I read the words again.
"How many books are there?" Helen asked one day, not long before the showdown. She sounded suspicious. Fatigued.
"A lot," I broke it to her. I had numbered every hair on her head, but in one of those counting systems that jumps from "three" to "many."
"Tell me."
I told her that the Library of Congress contained 20 million volumes. I told her that the number of new books published increased each year, and would soon reach a million, worldwide. That a person, through industry, leisure, and longevity, might manage to read, in one life, half as many books as are published in a day.
Helen thought. "They never go away? Books?"
'That's what print means. The archive is permanent." And does for the species what associative memory fails to do for the individual.
"Reading population gets bigger?" Helen asked.
"Not as rapidly as the backlist. People die."
Helen knew all about it. Death was epidemic, in literature.
"Do people get any longer, year in, year out?"
"Is the life span increasing? Only on average. And very slowly. Much less than we pretend."
She did the rate equations in two unknowns. "The more days, the less likely that any book will be read."
"That's true. Or that you will have read the same things as anyone you talk to."
"And there are more days every day. Will anything change?"
"Not that I can think of."
"Always more books, each one read less." She thought. "The world will fill with unread print. Unless print dies."
"Well, we're kind of looking into that, I guess. It's called magazines."
Helen knew all about magazines. "Books will become magazines," she predicted.
And of course, she was right. They would have to. Where nothing is lost, little can be found. With written continuity comes collective age. And aging of the collective spirit implied a kind of death. Helen alone was capable of thinking the unthinkable: the disappearance of books from all but the peripheries of life. History would collapse under its own accumulation. Scope would widen until words refused to stray from the ephemeral present.
"When will it be enough?" she asked.
I could not even count for her the whole genres devoted to that question alone.
"Why do humans write so much? Why do they write at all?"
I read her one of the great moments in contemporary American fiction. "Only it's not by an American, it's no longer contemporary, and it doesn't even take place inside the fictional frame." This was Nabokov's postlude to Lolita, where he relates the book's genesis. He describes hearing of an ape who produced the first known work of animal art, a rough sketch of the bars of the beast's cage.
I told Helen that, inside such a cage as ours, a book bursts like someone else's cell specifications. And the difference between two cages completes an inductive proof of thought's infinitude.
I read her the take of a woman who once claimed to have written for no one. A lifelong letter to the world that neither read hers nor wrote back:
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll—
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul!
She wanted to know whether a person could die by spontaneous combustion. The odds against a letter slipped under the door slipping under the carpet as well. Ishmael's real name. Who this "Reader" was, and why he rated knowing who married whom. Whether single men with fortunes really needed wives. What home would be without Plumtree's Potted Meats. How long it would take to compile a key to all mythologies. What the son of a fish looked like. Where Uncle Toby was wounded. Why anyone wanted to imagine unquiet slumbers for sleepers in quiet earth. Whether Conrad was a racist. Why Huck Finn was taken out of libraries. Which end of an egg to break. Why people read. Why they stopped reading. What it meant to be "only a novel." What use half a locket was to anyone. Why it would be a mistake not to live all you can.
I said goodbye to C.'s parents. They didn't understand. They had come such a long way, and didn't see why the next generation couldn't tough it out as far, or further.
"She's crazy, huh?" her mother said.
Her pap, in his Chicago-Limburgs patois, asked, "Just one thing I want to know, Rick. Who's gonna set my digital clocks?"
I said goodbye to C. "I promised I'd see you through school. And graduation's still six weeks away."
C. dodged the blow, but caught a corner of it across her face. "Don't do this to me, Rick. I'll graduate. I promise."
"Do you need anything? Should we get you a car before I go? Do you have enough money?" Late-minute plans for a final day trip, solo, lasting from now on.
My reflex solicitude hurt her worse than anger. "Beauie," she pleaded. "We can't do this. We can't split up. We still have twelve hundred pages of Proust to get through."
I searched her, sounding this reprieve, hoping for an impossible instant it might be real. But she did not want it. She did not want to do those remaining pages, to throw bad reading after good. She just wanted to save nostalgia, not the thing it stood for. She only wanted my blessing, to get on and make a life free from suicidal remorse.
"Who's going to finish the book?" She meant the commonplace one, with the ticket stubs and lists of films and meals and outings, a shared narrative, senseless except to us.
Then the senselessness of all stories — their total, arbitrary construction — must have struck C. She started to scream. I had to pin her arms to her side to keep her from harming herself. I held her for a long time. Not as a medic. Not as a parent. Not as a lover. I held her as you might hold a fellow stranger in a shelter.
When she grew calm, she was not yet calm. "I must be sick. Something must be wrong with me. I'm a sadist. I've spoiled everything that was worth having."
"We still have it. It just has to go on hold."
"I wanted to make you proud. I thought, in twenty years, that I might become the perfect person for you."
"You're perfect now."
"I've ruined your life."
"You haven't, C. You've done what you needed to. You're a good person."
She looked at me, remembering. Yes, that's right. I have been. I have been good. "And now I have to go outside."
I tried to match her. To rise to her. 'This is all the fault of that damn Polish kid, you know."
I felt: at least I'll never have to do any of this again.
Helen wanted to read one of my books. I gave her my first try. I had written it at A.'s age, just after passing the comps. I knew nothing about literature then, and so still thought it possible to write.
"Go easy on me," I begged, surrendering the digitized image. "I was just a kid."
The night she read it, I got fifteen minutes of sleep. I could not remember being that nervous, even when reading the longhand draft to C. I came in the morning after, wired over whether this machine thought my book was any good.