Zwack stares out at the crowd, head pivoting slowly on the neck as she squints through the spotlight trying to see faces. Her wooden lids are unblinking. Finally she asks, “Could any of you ever agree to submit yourself to this kind of test?”
But after a long silence, the only answer comes from Otto Langer. Blinking his eyes as if he’s just woken up, his voice now restored to its familiar timber, Otto pulls in a deep and trembling breath and replies, “I could not.”
16
Wylie Brown walks deeper into the orchards thinking about the cost of useless knowledge, about the fact that she’s one of maybe ten people in the country who understand that the dead apple trees around her are a unique breed, a variety peculiar to this farm, a hybrid created by E. C. Brockden himself, not because he had any particular interest in the husbandry of fruit, but because he was told in a dream that “new apples will be needed to feed the new worms.”
And so he invented the Fleshy Red Quince, a dessert fruit that starts out pale yellow like the Maiden Blush but late in maturation develops the scarlet stripes of the Spiced Ox Eye. Not as susceptible to the scab as, say, the American Fall, or as likely to sprout cedar-rust as the York Imperial, Brockden’s breed did exhibit a tendency to drop too soon. But what actually brought the fruit to extinction was its penchant for a manner of blight unknown at the time in New England. Brockden’s journals debate and ultimately discount the possibility of any form of bitter rot or blister canker or fire taint, but he does make one cryptic mention of a parasite he calls “the worm within the worm.”
In any event, Brockden’s experiment in horticulture failed as miserably as everything else connected with the farm and today the trees are a forest of lifeless wood, row after row of slowly petrifying sculpture that might be said to depict the results of specialization and compulsion. But right now, for Wylie Brown, the trees are something handy to lean against, a tool for supporting herself as she bends groundward for another bout of vomiting. Regurgitation has always been her leading fear response, but last night’s celebratory binge in Little Asia has to be contributory as well. The Rottweilers have been gone for some time and yet she can still feel their predatory intent all around her. And it’s this primal anxiety coupled with the depth of her bad judgment that’s wreaking havoc on her stomach: she can detail for you the most minute facts about the life of an obscure eighteenth-century philosopher, analyze and interpret those facts into theories that touch on the farthest edges of contemporary theology and linguistics. But she doesn’t know enough to stay out of the employ of a deadly Bohemian gangster.
Compulsion really can lead a person to a kind of hysterical blindness.
So August Kroger is everything Gilrein said he was — a filthy little criminal, a mob rat, an amoral machine who regularly engages in kidnapping and murder as easily as he collects rare books and papers. And Wylie has gone to work for him, become his librarian, his personal assistant. It’s an old story, really: seduced and corrupted, in the end, by an obsessive love for the text.
The thought triggers her stomach, drives her down on one knee, but before she can release any bile, she takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. And though she knows she should be running to the farmhouse or the main road, phoning the police and telling her story, she finds herself, after a time, getting up and making for the rear of the estate. She moves past the last trees Brockden ever planted, at a time just before his final, apocalyptic episodes. They were the extreme end of his hybridizations and they proved most susceptible to the disease that engendered a kind of spontaneous abortion among the entire fruit crop as it bloomed. Writing about the phenomenon in his journals, Brockden called it “the death in the midst of the birth, the silence in the heart of the word.”
She comes to stand in the wrecked portal of the greenhouse studying Brockden’s doomed trees, thinking about Edgar’s final days, the time of his descent, his free fall into an irreversible madness when the migraines increased in intensity and duration and his tongue developed a painful swelling, when he began to suffer from the nightmares in which hundreds, at times thousands, of tiny, writhing, fat red worms — parasites he termed “new creatures from the other world”—began to twist themselves into specific shapes that, when linked together, Edgar would christen “the divine alphabet, the method by which we will finally talk to the Father.”
Wylie starts to feel dizzy and moves to the love seat, bringing up the images of those tiny drawings, the doodles that Brockden made in the margins of his last journal, the squiggles, so tentative, inked with such obvious hesitation, looking in the end like a child’s illustration of some imaginary insect.
And she sits down on top of a notebook. A heavy, beautifully bound diary that she immediately takes in both hands, gently, and studies as object, which she opens and stares at without reading the script spread across the face of the page. She lets herself sink down into the love seat and, knowing there will be no turning back, she begins to decode.
M.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE OF THE NOTEBOOK
Avoid direct heat and light.
Store in a cool, dry place.
Wash hands before and after handling.
Caution: pay careful attention to all margins.
Contains small parts: not recommended for children under the age of (spiritual) puberty.
If stalling occurs, jump forward vigorously.
If epidermal irritation occurs, increase dosage.
Replacement parts may be ordered from domestic internal departments.
In the event of significance breakdown, shut off all machinery and vacate the area immediately.
Excessive exposure to the notebook may cause assorted irregularities in the dream life. The manufacturer accepts no responsibility for any claims of sleep disorder.
Do not operate heavy machinery for a full week after ingestion of excerpt.
Remember: The various components that comprise the notebook can be used in any order and in multiple combinations. Each section can be viewed as a letter in an alphabet that is neither divine nor diabolic but chronically evolutionary. All taxes apply. Do not void where prohibited by law. Be playful and creative.
And now there is no thought of breaking into the farmhouse, of making for the main road and flagging down a car. Now Gilrein’s fate is immaterial as the world compresses to fit within the borders of this inscribed page. Wylie is once again hooked, caught in the ceaseless need to scan and unlock meaning. It is irrelevant that she doesn’t fully understand what it is she’s reading. It is the process that has taken her. As it has since childhood, never letting up; if anything, its intensity increasing with age and the ever-growing capacity for confusion.
She turns to another page, unconcerned about the fact that this hunger will never abate, that she could feed on every book inside Wormland and never be sated, that her body could break up and mutate into a plague of book-eating locusts and the locusts could descend upon the farmhouse, the City of Words, and ravage it, devour every printed surface, strip the pages themselves down to the primary rag fibers of their making and burn them into energy with the secretions of her digestive system. And she would still want more. Would still need to turn one more page, as she does now, and read:
N. Lacazze seems to believe that when one looks at a text to determine its most basic, literal meaning, one instantly, unconsciously, falls, cascades, as he says, into a brainwashed mode, a system of all-encompassing autohypnosis in which our eyes scan the graphical symbols and relay those symbols to the brain, which processes them and extracts appropriate representation from a lifelong file of meanings. However, L contends that this file has been tampered with, the file room has been broken into, over and over again, throughout the course of every human life. The file is always a manipulated and specialized agenda, a kind of intricate database of propaganda, compiled over millennia by an elite consensus.