In other words, according to the Inspector, there simply is no plain sense of the text. There is no such thing as literal meaning. It is not just that decoding text is subjective, that we bring to the task our inherent and cumulative lifetime of baggage, from brain chemistry to our choice of lovers. No: decoding is subversive. And totally out of our control.
He stands upon his desk, his legs straddling the chalice. He says, in a voice so low I have to strain to hear it (and that, of course, is exactly the intention), “Remember this, if nothing else: WE DO NOT ACT UPON THE TEXT. THE TEXT ACTS UPON US.” So, when we venture into little Asia and seat ourselves at the last Man Supper Club and open the menu and select “the sweet and sour ribs” we are not choosing a plate of small, curved bones swathed in edible flesh and cut from the torso of a swine, marinated in corn syrup, brown sugar, soybean oil, peanut oil, vinegar, pineapple juice, apricot concentrate, Worcestershire sauce, xanthan gum, dried red bell pepper, FD&C red #4 artificial color, and charred over flame to be served to us as gastronomic feast. We are doing something else entirely.
And when I fully unravel both the Inspector and his Methodology, I will tell you just what it is that we are doing.
She makes herself look up and take a breath. Was Gilrein holding this notebook when she first entered the greenhouse? He was standing when she arrived, positioned here in front of the love seat. But was there anything in his hands? Since she can’t answer definitively, she turns back to the book.
O. The ’Shank scores for me once again.
What would Gilrein think if he knew I was doing business with Leo Tani? Surely he’d see my actions as a betrayal. Even if Tani’s help were essential to an “official” investigation — and it is not. My research regarding the Inspector cannot be considered much more than a hobby at this point — G would have to feel hurt. Perhaps even emasculated. As if trading with the ’Shank indicated that I hold my work not only in greater esteem than my husband’s work, but that I would negate, erase G’s work in order to advance my own.
I met the fat man inside Gompers yesterday. I don’t know why he insists on transacting in that dank cave but I suspect he has a weakness for all things dramatic. A Turin birth will sometimes do this to you.
He wanted five hundred dollars and the promise that I’d speak to G about looking the other way for the next month or so.
I offered him two hundred and the possibility that I’d never tell G that I’d been propositioned by his least favorite receiver of stolen property.
We agreed on two-fifty and he handed over a sealed plastic bag containing the journal Mikrogramme (formerly Minotaur and now published by the “Herisau Institute”). I politely declined the offer of a Gallzo at Fiorello’s and made myself wait until Tani had exited the station. Then I found a shaft of light and sat down right there in Gompers and tore open the bag with my teeth. I turned to the contents page, ran my finger down the list of titles and found what I’d been looking for.
The article was titled “Bite Your Tongue: Self-Mutilation and the loss of Oral Tradition.” The essayist was listed simply as “Lacazze.”
There were no contributor notes.
The pages must have belonged to Gilrein’s wife Ceil. The über-woman. The owner of his heart and his brain, even in her death. And the reason, finally, why he’ll never give himself to another. They are Ceil Gilrein’s work journals. They have to be. Her field notes. Her dialogue with herself regarding her job, her career, her investigations.
Did Gilrein think they would explain something? Translate the meaning, give him a linguistic key, a Rosetta Stone that would decipher why his wife is dead and why he might as well be?
Wylie flips through the book, picks another page.
that I was a detective.
I was a superb detective: watchful, quick thinking, analytical, innovative.
But I became something else. Without realizing it. Without desiring it. I became a writer. I became a transcriber. I mutated into a recording machine.
My hubris: I thought I could work in such isolated spaces with the Inspector and remain untainted. I thought I could exist in the same closed hothouse of the Dunot Precinct with L and remain uninfected. Hadn’t I been listening when my husband relayed his childhood stories of Father Damien and the lepers?
Edgar Brockden—
And Wylie is stunned by the reference to Brockden, almost closes the book without finishing the sentence, as if the name were a curse directed specifically, only, against her. But she steadies herself and continues.
— thought he could French-kiss the Almighty and detach himself, intact, to boast of their passion. An atheist to the bone, the Inspector thought he would be immune to Brockden’s disease, thought he could turn the entire system of Language around and bugger it, make language his prison bitch, the slave to his boundless ego.
But in raping the mystery of language, it was the Inspector that became impregnated. And the fetus is a growing monster with claws that will rend the man from within.
You, who are reading these words, understand this: you are just as culpable.
And now you are infected as well.
And with these last words Wylie suddenly comes back to herself and realizes that she does not want to read any more of this, does not want to be in this greenhouse or on this farm.
She wants to simply get her belongings from the Bardo and go away, leave this city that she spent so much of her youth striving toward.
She closes the notebook and places it back on the love seat, exits the greenhouse and begins to run for the main road, surrendering any chance of ever viewing the disclaimer which, scrawled on the inside of the rear cover, in Ceil Gilrein’s increasingly illegible handwriting, reads
To G. Or to the one who comes eventually to read the words: Consider that maybe every one of them is a fiction. Perhaps I’ve invented the entire thing. A product of a raging paranoia that’s escalated to hallucinatory levels. Hold that possibility as I ask you (and as you ask yourself): Does this matter?
17
Boz Lustig’s is a greasy all-night cafeteria in the Bohemian Wing of Bangkok Park. It serves an array of tried and true recipes from the homeland—fazole na kyselo, kanci, a slew of holub dishes, nothing fancy and everything suspiciously inexpensive. Lustig himself works the steam tables, matching the customers step for step as they point to their selections, his hair-swaddled arms ladling the soupy courses into the slotted plastic trays whose bottoms testify to their black market origins with the stenciled words SPOONER CORRECTIONAL FACILITY.
To step into Lustig’s joint is to be assaulted by a combination of aromas not commonly found in American eateries. The uninitiated can sometimes swoon, and though the bulk of Boz’s customer base is made up of transplanted Maisel natives, the collegiate art crowd from the Zone will occasionally venture in, charmed by the enormity of the green leather booths and yearning to bask in the accidentally Deco-noir lighting thrown by a dozen bare bulbs that hang from fraying fiber cords in the pressed tin ceiling. Lustig will take the outsiders’ money, but he always serves them from the coldest end of the steam pan.