Selections from works of short fiction

DATA COMPRESSION

I began collecting at a young age. I compiled collections. I would organize my belongings into old ice cream pails: this one for cars, this one for soldiers, this one for Lego blocks. I longed for order. I’ve always longed for order.

As I learned to write, I began to compile lists: lists of words beginning with A, words of five letters, words with letters in alphabetical order (bet, beefily), words with letters in reverse alphabetical order (sniffed, wronged), lists of nouns, verbs, adverbs, hyphenated words, lists of words related to cats, to beetles, to … well, scores of others.

 I kept these lists in boxes, themselves organized into collections (boxes of grammatical lists, letter-counting lists, dog-related lists, and so on). The boxes I would then organize in tea chests (chests of animal-related boxes of lists, linguistic lists, etc.). It kept things tidy. Of course, I soon realized that the tea-chests themselves required order. I organized my collections of tea chests in different ways: when I was younger, in alphabetical order; then, as a teen, I learned about the Dewey decimal system so I duplicated the lists, boxes, and chests and organized them accordingly; then, as a young man, I recopied the lists, boxes and tea chests again and organized them according to the Library of Congress system.  

That was a lot of copying, of duplication, but you can see that it was necessary. I tried to photocopy the lists to save time, but found that I would then have to categorize them based on hand-written vs. copied, so I burned the photocopies (keeping the ashes from each one and organizing them in boxes according to the original data scheme), and continued by hand, making sure to always use the same types of Bic ballpoint pen and paper. I have been lucky to date because these have been available. Nevertheless, I seriously considered laying in a stock of each – enough to take me into death – to ensure that I don’t create a new layer of classification that would require an immense task of copying to organize all my organizations according to ink/pen/paper type.

As you can well imagine, this all took up a lot of room ...

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PALIMPSEST

I met a girl with Braille tattoos down her spine.

From the cervical to the lumbar, from C6 to L5, the tattoo spelled out the horoscope her father had paid an astrologer to construct on the day she was born. It was barely visible, but if I closed my eyes and concentrated on my fingertips I could feel each bump, each character. She refused to spell out its message for me, smiling softly and saying that it was her future, not mine.

She wasn’t blind but she wanted a tattoo that would be invisible to the world, invisible to friends, only legible to her most intimate of lovers.

In that first flush of the relationship we were almost inseparable. We kept house, sometimes at my place sometimes at hers. Some evenings we would go for a walk, others we would see a show. Sometimes we would just sit in the house: she reading, I painting. As is normal in the early, frantic stage of a relationship I missed her when I was alone. I could sometimes feel each Braille bump lingering on my finger tips. It would send shivers down my spine.

I asked her why she had encoded herself in such a strange way. She said that she did it for the man she had yet to meet, the man she was going to marry. A blind man, the astrologer had prophesied, would enter her life before she turned 35. He would save her from herself. She told me this as we lay in the park and she closed her eyes and hugged her torso. I felt a stab of pain tempered with relief: even at that early stage I knew that we couldn’t last. I had been worried that she was in love with me; she wasn’t. But I was there then, and she was with me ...

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DAFYDD’S BOOKSTORE

My local bookstore occupies the whole of an old boarding-house with the exception of one corner of the basement where Dafydd the proprietor lives or, at least, lives when he isn’t working, which is to say rarely. If he isn’t selling he’ll be buying, cataloguing, pricing, shelving, or reading. When you enter the shop you are more likely to hear him than see him: his grunting wheezes, the creak of a staircase, the squeal of a bookcase ladder protesting its unoiled state.

I wrote this all in the present tense, but that is wrong. We, his customers, haven’t seen Dafydd for a long while and that is cause for worry.

Dafydd’s bookstore is a maze of rooms where each room is the centre of the store. Or perhaps all rooms are its circumference. Or its circumference is unknown. I don't mean for my meaning to be opaque; the bookstore is confusing, even for regulars (or Irregulars, as we term ourselves). All rooms lead through each other and into another, beginning and terminating in the front entrance where Dafydd’s cigar box register and folding stool sit. The cigar box is for show; Dafydd has always kept his money in a faded black leather pouch that buckles around his waist.

Dafydd has disappeared. But even when we did see Dafydd, we saw him rarely. He often preceded or followed us through rooms, keeping at least one room distant. Each room in the bookshop is small, the old boarding house divided and subdivided seemingly without walls, only floor to ceiling shelves and all books tidily arranged in whichever order makes sense to Dafydd. Dafydd didn’t build the old boarding-house (a modified railway baron’s mansion), but he made it his own with his divisions, his doorways, and an intricate system of false walls, mirrors, ropes, pulleys and shafts that have allowed him to see into any and every room from any other room, no matter where his is in the building. It is a remarkable achievement. From the farthest corner of the third room off the left corridor as you ascend to the attic—housing Science Fiction: Scandinavia (English)—Dafydd is able to observe the goings-on in Pre-Ptolemaic Astronomy: Southern Europe (found on the upper level in the first room off the right corridor as you ascend to the boarding-house’s tower from the west staircase) and the browsing habits of a lady or gentleman in Horror Fiction: Western Europe, 19th Century (main floor, third room along the northern route from the sales room with the cigar box and folding chair) or Nature and Gardens: Antipodes in the room (well, really a barely adequate extended crawl space) next door to his private quarters deep in the basement and most easily accessible from the stairs in the old kitchen (now split into three rooms devoted to Contemporary Romance Fiction, the rearmost of which contains the staircase behind a bookshelf of Harlequins illegally translated into Cantonese). At least, that’s as I remember it ...

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