The Reading Lamp
PART ONE
1.
A famous academic who toiled at the intersection of computational programming and literary studies claimed that nobody reads Stendhal anymore. Right afterwards, a popular critic turned podcaster stated as an aside that no one could stand his prose. Nabokov, I knew, had once called him, “the pet of all those who like their French plain.” Wagering that the time was ripe for a Stendhal revival, I prepared to embark on one of those why so-and-so matters essays of the great nineteenth century author. With the above trifecta of literary putdowns at hand, I had enough ammunition to begin my appreciation of the master. How wrong the detractors were, was the upshot of my unwritten sketch, but something happened to me in the interim and my essay never got off the ground. I was, well, how shall I put it when Stendhal himself captured it so much better, “illuminated by a new truth, and, instead of revolting against it, my mind adapts it.” That illuminating “new truth” was in fact a very old one, ancient even. To come out and say it, like it’s just another word, won’t do. But a reliance on a much-disabused term is necessary to sufficiently explain the truth of what follows: magic.
2.
It all started, the magic, I mean, on a late chilly afternoon in spring during my senior year in college. I noticed a student reading a book I’d never heard of but whose attractive cover enticed me to summon up the courage to ask her not only its title, but for her name as well: The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš. She was interested in literary archivist work, a major theme throughout that eponymous story, and so it quickly became one of her favorites. “Aileen Simone,” she said. “Nice to meet you.” She was older than me, a grad student. When I asked what she was studying in the graduate program she said, in that charming French accent of hers, comparative literature.
“And you? What’s your degree?”
I wanted to tell her that I’d comparatively just fallen in love to an inconsolable degree, but it didn’t make any sense, so instead I smiled dumbly at her and said, “English major.”
3.
Once over coffee with her I’d mistaken Diderot for Derrida and the error proved costly. Aileen, who really wasn’t much older than me nevertheless seemed so in other ways, such as her taste and manners and worldview, which no doubt her Parisian cosmopolitan upbringing played a significant role in developing. She was an old soul, I might call her, a sentiment she’d probably reject on the grounds of it being romantic or cliché — or perhaps both. In something like an attempt at the act of courtship I wrote a short story for her about a young student studying comparative lit, who founds her own avant-garde literary journal that launches her career in the contemporary world of arts and letters. I called it, the story, “Aileen and the Magazine.” I told myself that I would never show her, or anyone else the story. The words I’d written in a fever one night, and all of them were devoted to her. A similar effect might have easily been achieved if I’d filled my notebook up with pages of: “I love you, Aileen,” over and over again. But experience has taught me that you do not write a short story about a young woman and not give it to her. One unseasonable warm afternoon, when it seemed everyone was outside, I spotted Aileen lost in her studies, sitting alone on the highest level of the Bobst library overlooking the atrium. I walked by and slipped the story stapled and tri-folded into one of her big Norton Anthologies whose paper-thin tissue pages she was forever adding little multicolored sticky notes. I couldn’t help but notice Marie-Henri Beyle, more commonly known as Stendhal, was not included in this massive compendium of so-called world literature.
4.
Aileen was genuinely touched by the story. Not long after I’d given it to her, we shared something like a kiss (we were talking so closely one day our lips brushed together). Energized after that brief, clumsy encounter, we went on more coffee dates — if you can even call them that. For if we knew one of our roommates was out, we’d leave our undrunk coffees on the café table and rush back to whoever’s dorm room was free to make out in splendor. Then, on a beautiful sunny afternoon, after consecutive days of rain, she abruptly announced that she was moving back to the City of Light to resume her studies there. Once I’d gotten over the immediate shock of her impending departure, I was happy for her. She would be closer to the kind of international literature she was most interested in (European) and, let’s face it, the Sorbonne, where she would continue to fine-tune her thesis on the influence of existentialism in the fictional works of de Beauvoir, was no slouch.
“Slouch?” she said, confused. There were tears in her marble blue eyes when she spoke. “I do not know this word.” Her English in terms of even the most obtuse grammar was superior to mine, but the occasional Anglo idiom could still escape her.
“No, that’s not it,” she said. She looked down at her hands, one finger in particular. “The way to be closer to literature is to read it. It has nothing to do with geography or academics.” With a sad smile, as if she herself couldn’t believe it or perhaps wasn’t convinced of it, she added, “I’m in love.”
Now it was my turn to share a moment of confusion. What she meant was a former junior professor of European Literature who was recently promoted had proposed to her, and she had accepted. I didn’t get it at first because I was blinded by my own passion, and mistook her words of affection to be directed at someone else, me. She was in love with moi? I immediately declared my love for her too. Of course, my fumbling of the situation, I realize now, must have only reinforced to her why she kept whatever romantic feelings she might have begun to harbor towards me safely at bay. All the times we shared together, the endless talks about books and literature and culture, and she never mentioned this overseas beau of hers, her one true love, who was secretly never far from her mind. So “things” with us ended before they even began. Our story, and it was never much of one, was over. An end-of-the-year excitement and nervousness permeated the atmosphere on campus that spring as I visited Aileen’s graduate student housing for what I figured might be the last time. But she was already gone. No goodbye, no note. Nothing.
5.
During those first few unhappy years after graduation, I hardly ever thought of her. It wasn’t until nearly half a decade later that I received a surprising email from her announcing that she, Aileen, had founded her very own literary journal and would like to solicit my contribution for an article she had in mind. My reply to her was late, since she’d emailed my .edu address, an account I’d grown out of the habit of checking. I wrote back telling her how wonderful it was to hear from her and that yes, if the assignment suggested was still in need of a freelancer, then look no further!
But what caught my attention in her email more than anything, including the fact that she’d founded a real magazine called Aileens, just like the unpublished story I wrote for her (“Alieen and the Magazine”) was the generous rates cited. For a featured piece like the one she’d outlined for me, the magazine could pay in Euros the equivalent of just over a thousand bucks.
A typo made in my reply, only caught hours later, caused me much suffering. I was so quick to get my response out that I forgot to review it and misspelled my own name.
6.
After failed attempts at crowd funding, among other last ditch strategies, an old bookshop closed its doors for good in the Latin Quarter of Paris. To acknowledge its contribution to the Parisian society of letters, as well as track this unfortunate trend (the shuttering of bookstores in general), which may or may not be indicative of something larger and more sinister in our culture, Aileen intended to cover the store’s demise for the first issue. She spoke to the owner, picking her brain about the changing of the times, consumer habits, the evil behemoth of the online bookseller who-shall-not-be-named, memories of famous authors who bought books by the dozen when in town, French or otherwise, and other well-known artists who always graced the bookshop with their airy presence. In short, it was the kind of piece one used to read in the Sunday or weekend papers, insofar as those supplementary publications survived. In many cases, those venues had gone the way of the buffalo and the only consolation for this deterioration may be that it opened up new spaces for young and enthusiastic magazines to come along and pick up the slack, like a Aileens.
Although this part was ultimately cut from her interview which was to be featured in the inaugural issue, the old Parisian bookseller had mentioned her favorite customer of all time also happened to be the greatest reader of literature she had ever encountered. Perhaps even the greatest reader who had ever lived! Not much was known about him other than he grew up an orphan and was raised in a library in rural Pennsylvania where his foster parents co-directed the town’s little library. They lived a quiet life of books during the day, and an even quieter existence up in the expansive attic floor at night, which was transferred into pseudo-living quarters. This grand reader was an older gentleman in his late seventies now and happened to call New York City home. Since I was still based in the city would I care to track him down? In her email to me, Aileen provided a rather vague address for this mysterious subject.
My assignment was to see if there wasn’t anything worth writing about him. She suggested a profile, a work of literary journalism “like Garcia Marquez used to do.” Length was flexible. A kill fee would be provided in the instance the project turned out to be a wild goose chase. In which case, I was still encouraged to write something about that experience as well. Aileen’s thoroughness with the instructions, even mentioning the promise of a kill fee, gave me the confidence to throw myself wholeheartedly into the endeavor. I accepted the gig, and, honestly, was almost rooting for the kind of outcome where my back would be up against the metaphorical wall and I’d have to overcome the challenge of writing a story without one in sight, using just my wits and instincts to guide me. Digressions and diversions just so happened to be where my strengths (insofar as I had any) lay as a writer.
But, as the caveat regarding magic above forewarned, there was a story, after all. Something remarkable, magical even, occurred when I visited that obscure Midtown address Aileen had forwarded to me.
PART TWO
1.
The building where this great, reclusive reader lived was not what I was expecting. It was more commercial than residential, and it took me forever to find the entrance, which turned out to be on a different side street. There were no windows in the long, gunmetal flooring of the narrow lobby. Other than the dirty revolving glass doors, you couldn’t see outside. I walked right by what passed for a concierge and hit the up arrow on the wall by the elevator. Just before the doors opened, a putrid smell invaded my nostrils and made it difficult to breathe. When the doors slid ajar, an overflowing pile of black and blue garbage bags spilled out into the lobby.
“Take the stairs,” the woman at the makeshift front desk said without looking up from her mobile phone. “We’re having difficulties with the trash shoot and some of the tenants are protesting by using the elevator instead. It only hurts themselves in the end, don’t you think?”
“The stairs are on the left behind you,” she added.
Up six flights, and with each step the air smelled a little bit better. Only a single light lit up the dark corridor. At the end of the hallway, I could hear sounds of excited voices speaking in loud tones behind a blue painted door. This was the voice, if I was to believe my assignment, which of course I did or I wouldn’t be here, of the person who was said to be the greatest reader of literature in the world. When I knocked, the chattering ceased, but no one came to the door. I waited a few beats before knocking again, and then did the same, waited and knocked, before finally, just as I was about to give up, a middle-aged bald man with fashionable, red-rimmed glasses opened the door and asked me, as if it were a single question: “Who are you and what do you want?”
I introduced myself and explained that I had called ahead to arrange an interview with Mr. Redding for a bilingual French-English magazine based in Barcelona called Aileens. I regretted my convoluted approach immediately. Even though it was true that Aileen had recently located to Spain on some sort of fellowship or post doc, it wasn’t necessary to mention that upfront.
“Aliens — where?!” He scanned the hallway, gasped in mock fright, and pretended to slam the door shut in my face. Then he laughed cheerfully and told me to come on in. He was expecting me. Evidently this was the same gentleman I’d spoken to on the phone, who seemed skeptical about my project until I cited the now-closed bookshop in Paris. That gave me the credibility to secure the interview.
“Thanks again, Mr. Redding,” I said. “I appreciate your time.”
He corrected me on my pronunciation, “It’s Redding. Like the color.”
I squeezed by him through the doorway (a stack of books kept the door from fully opening) and entered the apartment with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was now required to write the story as it unfolded. I would have been just as happy to go my own merry way and write whatever I could, digressions and all, with a lack of anything eventful happening, had the door never opened. The creepy hallway and abysmal smell alone would have let me rift for five hundred atmospheric words at least. Now, such details may not even make it off the chopping block. But all this was moot. The door opened and I was inside.
2.
A not unpleasant scent of musky, old-book odor permeated throughout the room, which had two curtainless windows letting in rays of sunlight so bright I had to shield my eyes to see anything. Not that there was much to see, just books: On bookshelves, on the floor stacked in haphazard piles, balancing precariously on the window ledges, on top of chairs, underneath the two wooden tables.
I tripped on something, a book, of course, and out of curiosity picked it up: The Magic Mountain. It was almost too good to be true, I thought, navigating my way through the mountainous stacks of books. I glanced around the crowded apartment for somewhere to set the book down. My host apologized for the mess as we shook hands. He had very bony and dry hands. These were no doubt hands that had turned many pages in their lifetime and were beyond the repair of any moisturizer. Something like that, about the condition of his hands, would enhance his image as a kind of scholar prodigy, I thought, making mental notes.
“Here, I’ll take that.”
As soon as I handed him the Thomas Mann novel, he dropped it on the floor where it landed with a heavy thud. He smiled as if to say, “that takes care of that.”
He motioned for me to sit on a rocking chair. He picked up The Magic Mountain again just before he took his seat and flipped through the pages with a stern, disapproving look on his face.
“Have you scaled the summit?” he asked. But before I could answer he closed his eyes and seemed to be concentrating. Was he going to start reciting passages from memory right in front of me? It was just as Aileen had predicted! As unobtrusively as I could I pulled out my bright orange notebook from my backpack and clicked the end of my pen to jot down some notes. However, the moment of recitement never came. It looked like he was about to fall asleep. After a few minutes, I cleared my throat with a fake cough.
“Hm! Yes? Pardon me. See … that’s what this book does to you! Puts you right to sleep!” He stood up, yawned, and headed into the kitchen.
“Klaas!” the man cried out. “You have a visitor.” Silence. “A young scholar gentlemen writer.” Still no response. “An intrepid reporter of the highest degree, and he’s here to see you. He said you would give him an interview and in exchange he’d like to make you famous on at least two continents, here and in Europe. What do you say you come join us?”
No answer.
“C’mon, put on a little show for our guest here!”
My host poked his head around the corner. I could see what looked like a magnet-filled refrigerator door full of paper scraps of indecipherable writing. “Can I get you anything to drink while you wait? Coffee, tea, water?”
I accepted a glass of foggy water and learned that this man was not the subject of my interview, which I mistakenly assumed in my excitement when the door finally opened. He introduced himself as Horatio Hernandez.
“Is there something wrong?”
He must have sensed my surprise to learn who he was, or rather wasn’t. “No, it’s just I thought you were, well—”
“You thought I was Klaas Redding?” He pointed to himself and laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a long time.
Horatio came by four days a week to help out at the shop. This was the first I had heard of the apartment doubling as a bookshop, illegally, of course. It was one of those underground literary secrets about the city. The “store” had such a small clientele (“few but fit customers!”) that no one, especially the authorities, paid much attention to it. At the time he was telling me this, I was still getting over my initial surprise that he, Horatio, was not actually the subject of my study, but merely an associate of Mr. Klaas Redding, who, with any luck, would be making his grand entrance any minute now. I took a long sip of water and waited.
3.
Before Klaas could join us and the interview proceed, Horatio informed me of some ground rules that needed going over.
“Rules?” I replied, taken aback. Judging by the shoddy apartment, the dusty and dirty floors, the peeling wallpaper, and unsystematic shelving I wasn’t expecting something so formal.
“That’s right,” said my host. And the first rule, which was how Horatio phrased it, was that I was not to refer to any contemporary literature on any occasion. For Mr. Redding, literature started and stopped at a certain point — no use arguing about which point now — and there was nothing you, or I, or anybody else could do to change his mind about it.
I didn’t like the sound of that. But what could I say? I supposed I could have mentioned that even a critic with as conservative tastes as Harold Bloom threw contemporaries like Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison a bone every once and a while. Next, he informed me that not only was I forbidden to mention any literary news, gossip, or publicity about living authors, books, or trends, but I was also unable to bring inside the apartment any of such literature. It was very important for Mr. Redding’s powers of memorization that he remain unexposed to these outside paraliterary influences, although I believe the term Horatio actually used for it was “crap.”
If Klaas Redding was to accidentally read whatever garbage of a novel that passed for literature these days, the results would be disastrous, said Horatio. For once he reads something, he never forgets it. Just imagine! You read some trashy paperback, a novel practically designed to be forgotten almost before you finish it, a book nearly tailormade never to be thought of again once you’ve closed its pages for good, except now you can’t, won’t, ever forget anything about it — not a single word! We all know the amazing and magnetic effect a novel can have on the mind, how it can cast its spell over us, but you have to imagine reading that same book enough times so that each word, every sentence, all the paragraphs, all the details down to the bibliographic information, the index, or afterward, the publishers’ notes, or acknowledgements, even the fucking ISBN for Christ’s sakes, all of that stays in Klaas’s poor head the moment it enters it, more real than a dream, and he can’t forget it, not so much as a half a page, for as long as he lives and, who knows, perhaps even beyond the grave?
I tried to reiterate my willingness to cooperate, but Horatio wouldn’t let me interrupt. In fact, he was just getting started.
“Come in with some celebrity memoir bullshit, and the ramifications will be disastrous — irreversible. Because once he starts reading a book he doesn’t stop. I don’t mean he always follows through with what he starts, stubbornly picking it up here and there. I mean, quite literally, once he sits down to read a book, regardless of its length, he’s in it for the long haul. He doesn’t stop, not even to eat.”
Before I could protest or ask any follow up questions, Horatio cut me off again. “Obviously we plan ahead for the really big books, where he may end up fasting for a day or two, or even a week in the case of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He took a deep breath. “We’re very careful about what comes in through these doors because there’s always a chance it’ll mistakenly end up right here,” he said, pointing to his skull, indicating Mr. Redding’s hyperthymesiac brain. When Horatio tapped on the side of his head his eyeballs grew twice as big inside those stylish red frames of his. His gaze seemed to look right past me at some far off point that only he knew about.
To lighten the mood, I made a comment about a high fantasy series of books that were all the rage then, mostly due to its popular TV show adaptation. Horatio didn’t appreciate it. “You bring that in here, you might as well put a bullet in his brain.”
Trying to recover from the remark, I said, seriously, turning to my notebook with a pen in hand, “You mean to say he read the entire three volumes of Gibbon’s —”
“No, no,” said Horatio, shaking his head, as if I’d misunderstood something. “Not three.”
“Ah?” I said, feeling relieved for some reason.
“I believe it was a special seven volume edition, from a UK publisher. You might have to haunt some old bookshops around here to find it but it’s available.”
“Seven books in one sitting?” I cried out in disbelief.
“What do you have in your backpack right now?” Horatio suddenly asked me, changing the subject. He reached forward with his arms out as if to say hand it over.
“Nothing,” I said innocently. “Just a couple of books …”
“Yes, of course you do young man. That’s why I’m asking. Which ones?”
I pulled out a contemporary novel by a Spanish novelist and a back issue of a bi-monthly periodical. It was a magazine that mixed high- and low-brow topics and I was forever playing catch up with it. Either way, it was hardly trash. I displayed the items for his inspection with something like pride bursting from me. These belongings were proof of my standards of taste, and I fully expected Horatio to confirm them as such.
“Great. This is perfect. This is exactly the kind of stuff I’m talking about,” he said, shaking his head disagreeably. “No good.”
I felt compelled to defend the Spanish novelist’s honor by repeating what I’d recently heard concerning him being a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize.
“Please don’t be offended. It’s not up to me. You’re welcome to bring these books into the apartment,” he said, looking down at my bag again, “as long as you promise never to take them out of your backpack.”
It was then that I heard a muffled laughter coming from the far corner of the adjacent room. I looked and saw in the reflection of the kitchen window an old man with an unruly grayish mane on his head, with small oval spectacles on his surprisingly youthful-looking face. It almost appeared like he was in costume, a young boy playing an oldster in a school play. The timing of the laugh, too, made me self-conscious that I might be getting pranked. Everything that Horatio Hernandez had told me, which sounded more or less believable, suddenly became foolish to me, as if I’d checked my reasoning powers at the door as soon as I’d entered the apartment.
“Am I being played? Is this some kind of joke?” I asked Horatio, never once taking my eyes of Klaas Redding, who had, I noticed, something in his hand. It was a chocolate cupcake with swirls of white cream inside it. In his other hand was a small cup of coffee. He mumbled something I couldn’t hear, shoved the mug in the microwave, slammed the door and pressed some buttons to zap the drink hot. Then he glanced up and saw me looking at him. Our eyes met for a moment in the reflection of the window. It was only for a split second, and an indirect one at that, but in that short time I felt he not only read my mind, the current thoughts flowing through it, but also, in some strange way, had downloaded its entire contents onto his own hard drive of a head, until there was nothing, no files, memories, or feelings left untouched. I tried but couldn’t look away. Klaas finally took a last quick bite of his Little Debbie, and I was free of his spell. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed during that moment of seeing his reflection of the window. It felt like hours, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.
“Excuse me,” Horatio said, getting up to go into the other room, as if nothing had happened — and maybe it hadn’t. “I’ll go check on him.”
I made a note of the junk food snack, thinking it was the kind of oddball detail that might humanize a person who could commit to memory multivolume books in one sitting, and waited patiently for Horatio to return. I was tempted to take out some of the “hazardous materials” from my backpack in the interim, as a kind of experiment, but suppressed the desire for the moment.
A minute or so passed before a booming voice cried out, “NOT NOW, GODDAMMIT!”
Horatio returned apologetically and shrugged. “No dice.”
We agreed to reschedule the interview for the same time next week. On my way out he handed me a beat up copy of a book with an unusual title (I had trouble pronouncing it), Pantochronachanon. Klaas claimed to be a descendent of the author, Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. At the time I didn’t realize it was a joke, that the book itself, which traced the Urquhart’s genealogy back to the lineage of Adam and Eve, was a satirical farce on heredity.
“Read it, please. If you haven’t already — and even if you have,” said Horatio smiling. “On Mr. Redding’s request, of course,” he added and gave me a small bow.
4.
During that interim week I had read some but not all of Pantochronachanon. I found it baffling and did not uncover anything in the book that might give me some hint or clue as to the person I was to meet and interview, Klaas Redding. Worse, there was no mention of it when I returned that following week to the dusty book-filled apartment. Horatio confessed with a shy smile that there’d been a change of plans. Klaas wouldn’t be reciting Urquhart of Cromarty’s work, but rather a different masterpiece of literature, a little something from his native German homeland, where he was born but not raised.
I felt like I’d been violated, spending all week reading a book for nothing. I also thought Klaas Redding was born in Pennsylvania, but when I questioned Horatio about it either he didn’t hear me or chose to ignore it altogether. He gave me a stern look, as if to say my presence here was a tolerated luxury and nothing more. I shouldn’t demand too much from him, or Klaas.
“What’s he reciting then?” I asked.
“It’s a surprise,” he said.
5.
Unlike my last visit, Klaas Redding sat down right away, joining Horatio and me. Maybe it had something to do with the gift I brought, a box of those same chocolate snacks I witnessed him nibbling in the reflection of the kitchen window. Having Horatio and Klaas in the same room together at the same time dissolved the question of their duplicity. That they might somehow be the same person was a notion I entertained this past week. At last, the great reader was seated in front of me and ready to perform from memory a very long short story, a novella, really, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”. I was only familiar with the superhero version and the graphic novel series, but Klaas’s reading of this supernatural tale was better than all of those adaptations combined. I sat and listened in awe by the sound of his voice, which seemed to come from somewhere deep inside a hollow cave. The whole time, from the first word, Klaas kept his eyes closed. When there was a long pause, I thought he might have drifted off to sleep, but clearly closing his eyes to the outside world only helped him concentrate on the words he memorized who knew how long ago. When the reading concluded, Horatio clapped and cheered loudest. “Bravo! He’s done it again!”
Klaas Redding, sitting in his wooden rocking chair, groaned like an old dog on its last breath. Suddenly he glanced up at me with a slight look of surprise, as if he had no idea who I was or why I was there, then looked back at Horatio. Klaas’s groans grew louder and louder, as if using up his powers of memorization had completely exhausted him. There was no time for questions or any hope of an interview that day. Before I knew it I was being ushered out to leave.
“Swing by same time next week. You’ll get your interview then, I promise.” Horatio shut the door before I could even say goodbye.
6.
During my third visit I had a chance to finally conduct a proper interview with my subject. I had a good feeling about that night as I headed over to the apartment. I stopped and picked up some coffee on the way over to give as a gift, as well as another box of those juvenile chocolate snacks. Horatio made the coffee and served it in three unmatching mugs. Perhaps the scent of percolating coffee, or maybe just hearing Horatio and I making small talk in the kitchen, was enough to charm Klaas out of his usual hiding spot in the back of the apartment.
“This is very good coffee,” Klaas said. I think those were the first words he spoke to me.
I was happy to hear it, too, because even though it was an undersized bag of coffee it still cost a small fortune.
“I don’t know anything about coffee or wine or automobiles or fashion. Nothing at all about pop culture. Horatio can confirm this.”
“It’s true,” added Horatio Hernandez, adjusting his stylishly red-hued frames. “He’s pop culture illiterate.”
“However, I know a lot about literature.” He smiled a secretive smile as if a brilliant passage had just come to him from some great classic work of unsung genius.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “I’d love to learn more about it.”
“Literature? Well, then you’re better off going to a library.”
“I mean, I’d like to know more about your reading powers. I want to hear all about your journey.”
“Hm … but I hate traveling.” Here he actually winked at me.
“Your scholarly background?” I finally had a chance to interview him, and now I was stumbling it away.
“But I’m not a scholar, not in the academic sense. Far from it.” This, more or less, was how the interview went, with Klaas parrying my questions with an elusiveness that came so naturally to him, like a seasoned politician, nothing but misdirection and counterpoints. I felt self-conscious and began questioning my own questions. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had spent almost all his time, his whole life, perhaps, doing nothing but reading, rendering other kinds of interactions, like a simple conversation, next to impossible for him.
As he spoke, I pictured ivy from the proverbial tower growing over his stone face, covering his lips entirely with moss, leaving only his eyes to see — to see to read. A graphic rendition of this artful image, which had just burst into my mind with such perfect clarity, would make for a fantastic cover for Aileens, I thought, and jotted it down, daydreaming that my piece might run as the lead feature.
The question I was desperate to ask him, and my assignment depended on it, was how? How could he possibly memorize entire books and volumes in a single go?
“That’s my secret.”
I started to protest that he be a little more open if this interview was to work. But Klaas brushed me off, lost in his own train of thought. He sat there looking not at me but beyond, over my shoulder. At one point I even turned around to see if there was someone there in the apartment with us. Horatio, who sat beside us without saying a word, cracked a smile when he saw me looking lost.
“Fine,” Klaas shrugged. “I’ll tell you. You’re not the first I’ve told this secret to, and you won’t be the last. The question I have for you though, is, will you believe it? Because no one ever does.”
“Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?” I added somewhat desperately, eager to hear what he had to say.
“Well, you would be the first,” he said, nodding his head in a disgusted manner towards Horatio. Klaas’s hands, resting on his protruding stomach, were folded together as if in prayer. Horatio, still uncharacteristically quiet up until then, finally spoke, “Believing in something doesn’t make it true,” he said. He walked right between Klaas and I, as if protesting not just the metaphorical but the physical grounds of our conversation. He muttered something I didn’t catch under his breath and charged into the kitchen on the pretense of refilling his coffee.
7.
It was then, when we were alone, that Klaas told me about the origins of his talent, how it dated back centuries ago to a hidden cave in the middle of a desert on the outskirts of Egypt. A nobleman from a foreign land who’d fallen on hard times buried his family treasure, and not just jewels and diamonds and crowns and gold and silver, but rare, magical (here Klaas looked at me and nodded, as if to test me) trinkets and objects and antiques that possessed otherworldly powers. In this buried heap of wonders, a little lamp containing an eternal beam of light was uncovered, a lamp whose deified glow allowed one to memorize anything read under its rays. Its power of illumination knew no bounds, save for one exception: the only requirement, as far as Klaas had determined, was that the reader’s intentions must be pure. The way he said that last word I wasn’t sure I understood him correctly.
“Pure?”
“One hundred percent!”
I nodded and wrote down everything he said in my notebook like I was a foreign correspondent investigating a geopolitical story with the highest possible stakes. But, of course, I couldn’t possibly believe a word he said—not without more proof. If I could learn more about the process, perhaps see the reading lamp in action, I was open to the explanation, supernatural or otherwise. I was no longer particularly young, and life—if not books themselves—had conditioned me to a level of receptivity for unexplainable phenomenon with each passing year.
“You don’t believe me? Well, that’s your fault, not mine. You asked for my secret, and I’ve told you.”
Horatio returned with a piping hot cup of coffee in his hand.
“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” I said. “I have no reason not to. I’ve seen you perform. I guess I just don’t understand … how this lamp knows one’s intentions? Whether they’re pure or not? It’s just a lamp.”
“That makes two of us,” said Horatio, sipping loudly on his coffee.
“Just a lamp?” Klaas repeated and shook his head. He leaned back in his chair and laughed furiously.
But he also seemed hurt and offended and I was worried he would ask me to leave and not come back again. Quick to recover any goodwill that might still exist between us, I said, “I believe you, Mr. Redding. I do. But I’m afraid it’s my audience that won’t, and it’s because of them that I’m here today and who this interview will ultimately serve. If you could clarify this notion of the beam, the purity … perhaps …” I left my impossible questions unfinished hoping he would take the bait.
“I don’t want to come across as moralizing on the subject of purity in your article. There’s nothing pure about literature, after all.” He laughed again, mostly to himself. “You’re a student, correct?”
“Actually, I graduated awhile —” but he dismissed my interjections and kept going.
“One must come to literature on its own terms.” He paused, waiting for me to write that down and so I did.
“It’s rare but I suppose not impossible to come to literature, I mean to truly come to it, by means other than literature itself. Say you wanted to simply, I don’t know, get good grades. That won’t work. I used to see that all the time when I was a professor. Most of my students gave up being students at the first opportunity. Once they got their grades, they were done learning. They gave up reading books and caring about culture as soon as they got their diplomas or paychecks, or family life took over.”
“Let’s say you have a midterm coming up and you want to pass with flying colors. You wish to use the reading lamp to study the material and earn an easy A. Well, sorry. The lamp won’t work for you. You have to want to read the book on your own, on its own terms, for its own sake, whatever that may be, for the powers to kick in. You’re welcome to still read under its light, of course, but you won’t gain the capacity for memorization.”
The more Klaas Redding spoke the more I came to realize that what I was really struggling to understand wasn’t so much this notion of pure vs impure but rather the whole idea of some long-lost reading lamp discovered in an ancient desert.
“It sounds like something out of the Arabian Nights,” I said.
“You’re not as dumb as you look. No offense,” he added.
In fact, the inspiration of the story for ‘Aladdin’s Lamp’, he told me, was said to have come from the very same cave of the reading lamp.
“But it’s just a fable?”
“Yes, one with parallels to real life. I’ll remind you, ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,’ and I don’t mean the Disney version, but it was only added later, by a western scholar, French, I believe. It’s not part of the original tales in the One Thousand and One Nights. But it’s still a lovely story.”
“The lamp… can I see it?”
“Of course,” he said. He laughed, giggled almost when I asked to see it. He looked at me with wide, clear eyes. His hands were still folded calmly across his belly. For some reason I wished he’d move them and change positions, because he looked too stiff, like he was about to lay down in a coffin.
“It’s right here.”
“Where?”
“There,” he nodded. “It’s been sitting in front of you this whole time!”
I looked down at the coffee table, which was made of some kind of cheap, cardboard-thin wood, and saw an unpolished golden lamp with features paradoxically modern and ancient. It was a strange object, a rare breed of design, with a level of craftsmanship I’d never seen in a lamp before, not that I was any kind of expert. Encrusted at the base were three perfectly circular gleaming jewels—ruby, sapphire, and amber. It looked like a three-eyed creature. The lamp had a long, elegant neck with a swirling pattern of golden lines sketched faintly on its hooded cover.
“Isn’t it lovely?” Klaas said, full of appreciation, like it was his own child we were complimenting.
“Are these operational?” I asked, pointing to the jewels that looked like colorful buttons.
Klaas shook his head. “They’re decorous, as far as I know,” he said, hinting that there were things about the lamp that even he, after all these years, had scarcely uncovered. The reading lamp seemed to come alive to me then, and I half expected it to hop off the table and turn its golden glare on me, like a greeting or perhaps a warning.
“May I?”
“Help yourself.”
Suddenly a voice full of indignation added, “Go right ahead. Just don’t expect a genie to come screaming out of it!”
I turned to see Horatio Hernandez get up, remove his glasses, and wipe the sweat from his bald forehead. “I’m so tired of hearing about this stupid thing. Aren’t geniuses supposed to be self-centered narcissists? This one here humbly deflects all his talents onto a stupid old hunk of junk. Forget this antique. Declare yourself, Klaas! Maybe a little fame, perhaps some money might come your way.”
Not only was I taken aback by Horatio’s outburst, but I was also suddenly very worried that I’d overpromised on the reach of my article. How many readers or subscribers the journal had I couldn’t say, but it was nowhere near the dream scenario Horatio had been contemplating, fixated, no doubt, on that misleading term, international magazine.
His disproportional outburst also made me wonder if he, Horatio, secretly believed in the magical lamp himself, yes, more than anything he believed in its powers since he knew as well as anyone how truly unbelievable it was. It occurred to me that perhaps, much to his chagrin, no doubt because of the lack of purity in his own intentions, he couldn’t get the light of the magical lamp to work for him. His eagerness to dissuade me of the lamp’s mythical powers once and for all, and the way he insisted on humiliated poor Klaas one moment, then defending him the next, made me more susceptible and sympathetic that evening to the unknown possibilities of the lamp than I may have otherwise been.
I ran my fingers across the lamp, touching each smooth colored jewel, red, blue, and yellow, and waited in vain for something, anything, to happen to me. I thought I would feel something at any moment now. But I felt nothing.
From the far side of the room, Horatio tossed a boxset of Cao Xueqin’s Hongloumeng, otherwise better known as Dream of the Red Chamber. I barely caught the load of books hurled at me, and not without a couple of the volumes slipping out of the case and landing on the floor.
Klaas sighed heavily, as if he’d been down this road too many times before with Horatio. I picked up the books, returned them to the box in the correct order and handed them to Klaas’s outstretched hands. “One should never throw books like these.” He set them down next to him tenderly. But before he could remove his grip on Xueqin’s great magnum opus he suddenly began almost involuntarily to recite on cue what I presumed was the beginning of this canonical work of Chinese Literature.
At the same time, Horatio paced back and forth across the apartment lost deep in thought. Occasionally he knocked into a disheveled stack of books, making even more of a mess. It seemed he was of two minds about something. What it was, I didn’t know, and I didn’t bother to ask. I wasn’t there to interview him — not yet anyway. I let myself out quietly as Klaas continued to read from memory the first volume of that great eastern classic.
PART THREE
1.
Culled from barely legible handwriting across my various notebooks, I finished the piece for Aileens and sent a draft along to the editors, who objected to it on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to support my claims, not only regarding the abilities of Klaas Redding, but also the so-called powers and mysterious origins of the reading lamp itself. Could I conduct further investigations, dig deeper into the apartment itself where Klaas lived to see if any contraptions or apparatuses had been installed to augment his memorization? It was also recommended I invite Klaas to host a reading elsewhere, outside his home, to see if he could pull off what he did in the comfort of his apartment in unfamiliar surroundings. Or perhaps, an astute intern suggested, my subject wore “smart” contact lenses behind non-prescription glasses and closed his eyes to read from an unending looping scroll of digital texts. These and other far-fetched requests seemed more invasive than anything else to me, and rather than prod the man who had entrusted me with his time and hospitality, I decided to fight for my piece more or less as it was (also, I really needed the money). After several rounds of editing, the piece ran at last, albeit in the magazine’s online supplement.
2.
It was Horatio Hernandez who seemed most disappointed when I told him what had happened and, rather than objecting to further inquiries, he actually ran wholeheartedly with the enterprising idea of arranging a public reading featuring the one and only Klaas Redding. There were a few hiccups in the beginning, like a non-working microphone snafu, but pretty much overnight Klaas became something of a very minor literary sensation in the city — which was the only level of celebrity available in this dying world of letters. Bolstered by the publicity of my article, Horatio had high hopes of expanding the reading series and asked me if I’d like to help. “Just think,” he said. “We’ll make Klaas famous!” It didn’t take long during that unseasonably warm spring to see a full return on our investment. In no time, Horatio made back what he put into marketing the events and renting the reading rooms. I helped scout the locations, usually a cheap dive bar or used bookstore. It was both comforting and alarming to see how many people lined up to witness what for them must have been a kind of performance art, seeing an old man recite so brilliantly and effortlessly from memory — Shakespeare, Plato, the Gita, May Alcott, Baldwin, Poe, Joyce, Stendhal (at my request) — all for under the price of a movie ticket. The audience inclined towards wild extremes, the youth on one end with time and a bit of cash to spare, and the elderly, perhaps eager to see up-close the powers of memorization from someone who was equally advanced in age. Horatio, although “tickled” that Klaas was finally getting his due for his beautiful mind, never gave up insisting that his friend should refrain from crediting the magical lamp as the source for his rare gifts. Whether the lamp’s powers were real or not seemed beside the point to me, though, and Horatio seemed to agree. The money kept coming, which was always secondary for Klaas, but still important. He was battling eviction from a mighty landlord that didn’t even live in the city anymore, let alone the country.
The fees collected from these marathon reading sessions were enough to keep hope alive for Klaas. Bit by bit, another month’s time was bought. Then another. The landlord’s surrogate, who turned up early mornings obviously hung over and wearing bright, gaudy colors and wide-brim hats, as if her next stop was Churchill Downs, accepted with some hesitation the large pile of small bills Horatio handed over on Klaas’s behalf.
“What is this, drug money?” she said, scoffing and burping down the hallway.
3.
More customers visited the apartment-cum-bookshop than ever before as a result of the performances held across the city, which helped bring in extra cash as well. But what really boosted Klaas Redding’s profile, and that’s exactly the right word for it, was a feature that ran in the weekend edition of the vaunted New York Times, about eight weeks after the first reading kicked off. In a fancy, dimly-lit lounge of an East Village boutique hotel, Klaas recited Moby-Dick cover to cover in three days straight, all of it memorized, and although he was completely exhausted by the end of it, like a real-life Ahab, he later that day conducted an interview in the hotel bar where he’d performed the marathon reading session. The ambitious young Times’ reporter earnestly captured some je ne sais quoi aspect about Klaas on the page that I confess eluded my own efforts. The profile mentioned the reading lamp, but rather than trying to run from it, it embraced it and left it up to readers to decide what was the truth.
After that, Klaas actually landed a literary agent, who secured him a two-book deal for a decent amount, even though he hadn’t written a thing of substance (his words) in over twenty-five years. One book was to be on the subject of “Late style”. I forget the second. In any case, the need for keeping me around was nil. By then, Horatio had taken over all the duties as Klaas’s amanuensis, tasks that I’d previously done, and the more complex, industry-specific affairs were left to his new powerhouse agent, a woman who was the grown daughter of two prestigious New York editors.
Having helped Klaas escape eviction, not to mention build up his literary reputation, I couldn’t help but feel a little forgotten, like I was being turned aside as easily as one of the pages of his books he no longer needed to read because he had it memorized. In between temp jobs, ghost writing assignments, and the dwindling office work for Klaas, I was, like everyone else in this city, penning my own novel. In something like an act of revenge, I slipped a copy of my manuscript-in-progress (We Cannot All See the Light) into Klaas Redding’s “to-read” pile, which sat underneath the lamp. This would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, where such a stack of books would have been vetted like a guard at a maximum security prison, but attention had laxed in the recent wave of success that carried Klaas from obscurity to a person of genuine interest. He kept the secret bookshop going, now open by appointment-only. According to his agent, it was good for his street cred.
4.
Only because he was tricked into it did Klaas Redding end up reading my novel, We Cannot All See the Light. And I know he read it. I can still see it, sitting there conspicuously in manuscript form, nestled neatly between an out-of-print Jules Verne novel and a beat-up edition of The Lusiads.
Despite telling Klaas about my novel on previous occasions, he refused to help me in any way. Even when I told him it featured him flatteringly as the central character, he wouldn’t hear of it and, of course, would never read it. Absolutely not. Nor would he blurb it, such an ugly word, he said. He didn’t even want the “elevator pitch” of what my story was about. It’s no coincidence that right around the time he would have read my novel, the novel he had no interest in ever reading, Klaas’s vision failed him, going blind in both eyes. Now he too could no longer see the light, not just from his reading lamp, which was all the light that truly mattered to him, but any light at all. In the late hours of the evening, he ran headfirst into a precariously packed bookshelf that stood toweringly tall in his old apartment building, which caused a massive avalanche of books to fall down and smother him. Imagine! Crushed and buried by the weight of all those books, an entire canon of world literature. It was Horatio who told me what had happened. If his voice hadn’t sounded so utterly morose and defeated on the phone I might have thought it was all a hoax. I was shocked and sorry to hear the sad news. There were tears in my eyes, not that Horatio could see them. I said I was sorry, and a long time passed without either of us speaking. Occasionally our muffled sobs broke the silence.
“I know what you did,” he said, and hung up.
5.
The funeral took place at a large cemetery in Queens, the one that overlooked the city’s unending skyline and whose vast number of internments could fill the entirety of Brooklyn if the population wasn’t, well, dead and buried. It was raining so hard that when the drops struck the grassy ground you could hear it. Horatio, dressed in black, from his slim trench coat down to his rain boots, even his stylishly red glasses had been exchanged for a darker, more appropriate hue, barely acknowledge my presence, despite only a small crowd of mourners. When he abruptly invited me back to Klaas’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen afterwards, I was so surprised I accepted the invitation without thinking.
I had no intentions of ever revisiting the scene of the crime, which, as unbelievable as it sounds, was how my conscious felt about it. As soon as we sat down in the familiar room, Horatio assured me he had no intentions of pressing charges (no court would believe it) but for the record he wanted me to know that he knew what I did to his friend. That I had put my book in his to-read pile, slipped the manuscript onto that little table where the magical lamp sat as if it was nothing more than an innocent glass of water. His invitation that day was purely perfunctory; he wanted the manuscript as far away from his dear friend’s possessions as possible but wouldn’t dare touch the sullied thing himself.
Having only half registered these disparaging remarks, I glanced across the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of the lamp somewhere between the endless piles of books and papers. Like a melancholy fog, a prevailing gloom seemed to hang over the air in the entire apartment. Since Horatio had always despised the lamp, never once believing in its powers, perhaps, I thought, he might let me keep it as a memento?
“May I see it?” I asked casually, trying to control the desperate tone of curiosity in my voice as I looked around me. “I’d like to hold it one last time. I’ll even take it off your hands if you don’t want it.”
“I bet you would,” he said.
Once he’d gotten over the initial shock of the loss of his friend (not that he’ll ever really get over it), the first thing Horatio did was check the last book Klaas had been reading. It was important to him to know what Klaas had been engrossed in during the waning moments of his life. He half hoped it was some beautiful work of poetry that had high-jacked his senses to hitherto unheard of levels, causing him to go blind like so many geniuses of literature before him.
“Then I saw the manuscript he’d been reading.” Horatio might as well have been talking about an incriminating knife I’d left behind with my initials on it. “It was yours. We All Cannot See the Light,” he said the title aloud, chuckling to himself.
“We Cannot All See the Light,” I corrected him.
But I had no desire for confrontation and even had to look away then because his gaze uncannily reminded me of the day when I first met Klaas, seeing him in the reflection of the kitchen window, the intensity of those deep-set eyes. “Just tell me where it is,” I said. “I’ll take it with me and the manuscript and be on my way.”
“You will never see that lamp again!”
Horatio told me he threw it out the window where it landed in an inaudible explosion of colors. Red, blue, and yellow plumes of chalky smoke hovered soundlessly above the broken lamp for a few seconds before intermingling and forming a big cloud, which floated above the sidewalk, then the trees, then over the city and higher up into the graying sky. Then it was gone. Not a trace of the lamp remained.
“I don’t believe you,” I said and stood up to leave.
“Wait,” Horatio wiped his dark-framed glasses with a little white cloth and looked up at me.
I was almost to the door now.
“Please tell me it was an accident,” Horatio said, almost in a whisper. “And not some kind of sick joke.”
Waiting for him to finish, I took a deep breath, turned around and said, with real emotion. “Look I didn’t mean…” but there were no words to convey what I did or how I felt. My mind scrambled in vain for a way out of the predicament, but Horatio’s own misplaced guilt saved me.
“We should have been more careful,” he said, and even though he was sitting down I could see his knees trembling. “I should have.”
“Do you really think reading my book …” but I, or my bruised ego, rather, could hardly bring myself to finish asking the question.
A self-satisfied smile from Horatio’s curled upper lip confirmed that yes, my book truly was that abominable. He didn’t say it, but I could tell he wanted to. Instead, he offered an anecdote: a few years ago, he left a Dick Francis novel, one of those mass market paperbacks, laying around the apartment and of course Klaas ended up devouring it and memorizing the whole thing in one sitting. For the rest of that night, he remained dazed on the couch, temporarily rendered mute, deaf, blind, and by all counts unresponsive, like he was comatose. In other words, rather than see this as the beginning of a serious medical condition in need of immediate care, Horatio was trying to tell me in the kindest way possible, that yes, my book absolutely did him in.
Suddenly I saw the lamp on the floor, resting next to the table on which it usually sat. As always, it was right there hidden in plain sight! Horatio saw where my eyes had landed and shook his head no way.
I offered to purchase the lamp and when he choked up about it, saying, in a broken voice to, “leave now!” I immediately doubled the sum. Finally, I took out all the cash in my wallet and made him what I felt was an unrefusable offer, which worked out to be a little more than the total payment of what I received from Aileens. When we parted that day, the lamp cradled in my arms, its long swan-like neck drooping forlornly over the back of my shoulder, I knew I would never see Horatio again. But what I didn’t know was that for the rest of my life (so far) I wouldn’t be able to write like I used to, no matter the tactics or methods I employed to try to break free of my curse. Waking up early, staying up all night, taking long driftless walks through big city streets, feverishly reading and rereading, none of it provided even a glimpse of inspiration I longed for so desperately. While I disagreed wholeheartedly with the outdated theories Klaas was forever spouting regarding the state of contemporary literature, my powers of imagination, which was all that mattered to me in the end when it came to producing work of my own, could not be separated from my critical faculties and, somehow, deep-down, unconsciously, they seemed to align with Klaas’s negative assessment of the fate of my novel in the twenty-first millennium. My destiny, it seemed, was to become the kind of writer Stendhal said you could never trust, “a one-book author.”
6.
Just a few months later, having undergone a change of heart (and having no luck in augmenting my powers of memorization with the lamp), I stopped by the old midtown dwelling unannounced to drop it off. But Klaas’s place as I knew it no longer existed, there was no apartment, no bookstore, no Horatio, to speak of. According to building management, the apartment had been sold, gutted, and transformed into a boutique eye care center specializing in laser surgery.
Years passed before I could successfully track down Horatio’s new address—he’d moved back to Mexico City not long after the funeral to be closer to his ailing mother. I thought he might enjoy the lamp in his twilight years, so I boxed it up and sent it to him. The package came back to me marked “Return to Sender: Deceased. Unable to Forward.”
That same afternoon of the returned package, in some kind of uncanny act of synchronicity, I received an email from Aileen. There was nothing in it about her messy divorce, how her husband so clichély left her for a ski instructor, or how she wound up living in the states half the year now, teaching poetry at a coastal university in southern Florida. It wasn’t that kind of update. The subject line of her message simply read: “WE’RE BACK!” After a long hiatus, almost a decade, Aileens was returning to print and would appreciate the support of previous contributors to subscribe, pitch, write, and repeat! Rather than stir up bitter feelings, I welcomed the prospect of returning to that uncertain time in my life again, to finally putting down in words the truth of what had happened. It marked my first serious engagement with the act of writing in who knew how long. Whether or not the attempt was successful remained to be seen, and as far as I was concerned, there was only one way to know for sure, and it had nothing to do with publication.
After battling back-and-forth with my thoughts for half the night, I finally retrieved the old reading lamp from the farthest reaches of my bedroom closet, where it sat stored away among other discarded items, like my worn-down sneakers, an old suit, a broken printer, a DVD player.
It had been a long time since I tested myself, or rather, my intentions, up against the lamp’s unmatchable powers. I dusted it off and placed it gently atop a pile of old magazines on the table by my reclining armchair. From the moment it lit up, something seemed different, warmer, newer, softer about its radiant glow. Perhaps it was only my imagination, merely my eyesight having gotten worse, or maybe something truly meaningful had shifted inside me. Either way, I began reading that evening under its illumination with something like hope coursing through me.