“Pennies from Seven”
Short Story
Mirrors reflecting from the ceiling to the floor revealed that Orbis Tertius Uqbar was reversed in polarity from the pages of The Anglo-American Encyclopedia when translated through a half-silvered mirror designed by Wheeler’s experiment. When can decide on a quantum version of the Encyclopedia Britannica; either can see either the pristine version or the delinquent reprint. What is more, we can decide which version we prefer after the pages have been recopied. Thus, we could ask for either copy and by silver mirroring decide whether the edition would be the original or the delinquent after the publication.
That we are left with the death author because the author has not been determined before the writing is fixed. Even if the author of the slab of paper was not even born yet.
This course means that the real Death of the author in the Encyclopedia Britannica might be contradicted in the in-between pages of the Anglo-American Cyclopedia particularly when the XLVI ends and the XLVII has not yet begun. This means that not only Uqbar is in between the salute pages but also the entire On Beyond Zebra compendium of Dr. Seuss which fills out the letters undiscovered Yuzz and on to Wumpus of great PDP fame, the misspelling of Dr. Seuss is commonly understood because is predate of time from 1955 when the actual character emerged in 1973 by Yob. And then Beyond Zebra goes into the great unknown.
After all, there have been many books that document the letters that were dropped before Encyclopedia Britannica came out. And so, the copulation of the mirrors could not only be carnal but gnostic stretching out to the universe and, if it exists, the multi-verse. After all, science can only tell us about what could possibly be so, but we can imagine our own Anglo-American Cyclopedia of all things new that cannot be so but can be thought of.
This means that the disappearance of the author can the imagined in a leader author claimed responsibility for the author’s work. Think about what it would be like if Tolstoy was only the first but not the greatest writer of Война и миръ which is far exceeded by War and Peace by Briggs, leaving only Tolstoy as the original author just the same way that Walt Disney is far better known for Pinocchio than Carlo Collodi ever was. After all who cares about the Italian Wars of Independence in retrospect? Time is reversible as long as it is CPT.
Many evenings later I went out onto the streets of lower Manhattan to browse the used bookstores for additional copies of either the Encyclopedia Britannica or The Anglo-American Cyclopedia, knowing that I could half mirror the one into the other. Then when I stopped at the Left Bank books I realized that I could change the left bank to the right bank and see if there were additions as yet unknown. It then occurred to me that the East Village Books might have a West Village Books and I began to map in 11th dimensions all of the possibilities that M-theory might contain as well as the M’-theory that contains the Contra positive injunction for those works which cannot be in M-theory and therefore must be contained in an M’-Theory. I scampered along Wall Street where anything is possible if it can be thought and sold.
There I stopped at the window of a used bookshop. The window was half-silvered with white snow as if it were being changed to a new holiday, since there are more holidays in New York than anywhere else, it seemed at least reasonable that this might yet be the case. But I did not see Christmas trees, turkeys, or pumpkins, nor dreidels nor white drapes with simple flowers, nor yet red for Autumn Festival, so I wondered what holiday they might be celebrating very soon. My hands in their green velvet knit gloves were pressed up to the stubbly half-beard when I saw a woman on the other side.
At first, I did not know whether she was showing many away or asking me to come in, but I did not see any door to the bookshop.
But then she stood up on a step ladder and pushed the window directly around sweepingly off my feet and over the shelf next to the outside. And I was suddenly in the bookshop with a plump old woman who was looking at me through enormous bifocals.
“So, what do you want?” It was the sharp tone of a person who dealt with people who knew exactly what they wanted and they expected everyone that they met would know this instinctively by their dress, handbag, or wallet. But I could see looking at her in her ruffled pink sweater and reverse plaid Stuart Royal long skirt that these were the people who she most wanted to help. Clearly, her supply met the customer’s demands. She was the book minder.
She had looked me up and down in new that I neither wanted the cheap bins of old books which were out of fashion and in copious supply, nor did I want to see the books which were under lock and key but shown through small windows on their cases, but someone who wanted encyclopedias and various ephemera for seeking knowledge.
“I was looking for the Encyclopedia Britannica or The Anglo-American Cyclopedia of an early date.” While the woman was in my view far behind her on the 90° front, I saw a door with hours on it saying they closed at 7, which was half an hour ago. I also saw bags of money to be collected by the bank with one for quarters, dimes, nickels, and even one for pennies.
She lowered her glasses down to the tip of her nose and studied my demeanor. It was clear that there was something that would be in the bottom at the back but was I one of the people who would be allowed to look at the selection?
She turned around a moment later and easily ambled her way down the iron rod steps. There was a change as we went down because the upper level was crammed with books but very neat and went far upwards into the distance allowing six to eight floors but of tiny dimensions. But downward everything was haphazard and chunked in lots which meant that sorting had not been done, she went by knight moves into the back. The lights went from long fluorescent shafts to intimate incandescent bulbs. Each bulb only dimly lit a few feet and the books which were two or three shells were not readable in the gloom. It was the Taxidermy of the author, picking apart the loose wires and bones to make and we make an image that could conform to the contemporary tastes of the day because modern was in the past. Even Balzac got a post-Marxian in one addition that leaned over next to a performance by leading ballerinas in their heyday. However, I did not have the chance to search deeply into the feminine roles because the light diminished the frame that was oblique to a literature section that was illuminated by the next bulb. Underneath one almost yellow bulb, there was scribbling in the madness which contradicted the ideas of the book. But the scribbling changed from disagreeing to agreeing and back again. I tried to make out more, but the book minder reached over and shot the gray book cover and motioned with her other hand to come this way. And so, I walked this way. I wondered whether there was an argument in the footnotes and odd doodling of the pages between Barthes and Borges over Baudelaire and Van Gogh. (Said in the European fashion: Van Goch.)
The frames of black and white symbolized a large unending book which was a catalog of volumes that should not be. Banned by the skeletons and ghosts that predominated the titles I knew that I had reached the point of the undeath of the author. A section devoted to what would have happened if the author had lived to see the next incarnation of the encyclopedizing of the synthesis. After all, Voltaire and Diderot only started the process of combining all of the information into a form that could be read by learned people, and by people they usually men. But what would’ve happened had they lived beyond their moment asks Voltaire and Goethe in Dialogue and Diderot and his Answer to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. But this rapidly descended into a Frankenstein conglomeration of having the Enlightenment answer the romantic but updated Enlightenment as philosophers would have understood it in a neocons liberality. -with a Weekend at Bernie’s dip in the metaphysical pool with a dead man parsing the Overton window. Even though almost all books included both the thesis and antithesis, the rigorous pros and cons of a doctrine. With the missing pieces speculated as to the hrönir might figure into the conjugation. I reached out to touch the blue and gray side but was startled when the book bookminder shushed and waved her hand in my direction.
But finally, she had reached the inner sanctum, but instead of clarity there instead leaned confusion as the sticky notes in yellow and blue and pink piled up and with each glance were in different places than before. She appeared over one of the Encyclopedia Britannica texts and looked up at me.
“Here is one of the oldest versions that does what you want it to do, no remakes to this incorrect the accuracies of the translation into English from English.” Her face was hard and her manners suggested a lecture.
I indicated with my hands that I need not understand.
“This copy is from the OED, the definitive version of the dictionary, as opposed to one which also used Webster’s and other lesser forms. Its date of publication is eight years from the present day.”
I looked confused. The critics will have at even the smallest mistake even if not by the author himself, just look at the “w” versus “f” conclusion between Tolkien and his editors over which way “dwarves” should be alliterative or obliterated.
She pulled up her glasses and tirelessly repeated that the date would always be from today forward.
If this did not explain the details no further explanation was forthcoming. But in between the books, I saw tablets that could link to the Internet for updates. I suppose this may be all that I could get.
I nodded in the swinging light, that was almost out as if it had been turned on in the 19th century. Then I looked at the number of pages and found that each time that I looked at the last page the total had increased as if there was a revised revision of the revision. But the last time I looked the last sentence was suspended as if the author had died before completing the intended phrase. Instead, in a completely different style, a new sentence started which was from the author’s heirs which shifted the meaning of the sentence to an orthogonal meaning.
“I will take this, if I may.” The words came sputtering from my mouth.
“Of course you will, this is from the vampires of Abraham Lincoln’s time and they left it just for the man who would come in when you did.”
I was taken aback by this, but purchased the soul and soon found myself out the front door. I very nearly collided with a tall dark figure in a long black trench coat. It seemed like a distant dream out of the Sandman.
But then I looked back and saw a solid grant wall where the front door had been. I checked for the purchase and indeed found it with a bookmark saying that the last location was in Tlön under the name of Underwood.