index

One, or perhaps seven, of the researchers claim to have seen the faces of God in the innumerable books below our streets. Numbers are uncertain because our minutes, such as they are, disintegrate as we attempt to certify them. I have seen the pages slough from their bindings like old bark; I have seen the names of the living fade.

I do not know which of the researchers wrote to me first. If you insist, I will say there was a man called Finch, and that he was the one; but the envelope bore no stamp and the letter itself read like dictation, as if he had repeated it in his head many times and only then allowed a younger hand to set it down.

The letter was brief, only that a certain repository had been discovered by accident beneath our main street, a place of damp steps and blank doors, and that among the things retrieved there was a body of books that could not be tallied, not because they were infinite, but because every tally changed their sum.

“We have begun to catalogue them,” he wrote. “You may be of use. We also would like to talk to you about divinity.”

I thought it a joke at first. Then the letter mentioned an orange notebook I had once kept and eventually discarded, and it asked whether I might believe that the person who had found it was a messenger. I went to the street.

The entrance was in a service alley. There were no guards, no signs, and yet I had to pass through three doors. The last opened with a key that any locksmith would say had too many wards.

The first thing I noticed was the noise, which was not a noise at all but the absence of it, shaped by subterranean trains and water into a negative pressure. The stacks had been framed in an older era. Some iron had rusted and been replaced with steel, and that had rusted and been replaced by wood. The books were packed in sections like mason’s courses. Their spines were dimmed with age and had clearly been well handled. The smell was of tannin and sweat, of pipe ash and the animal component of glue. There were three electric lamps in a row. A ladder on rails gave the impression of strategy.

Finch, if that was his name, shook my hand. A woman with him, with a freckled cheek, said her name was Fox. Behind them, near a postal sack propped on a chair, someone else slept.

“We try to keep regular hours,” Finch said. “We rarely succeed.” He handed me a piece of paper. The ink changed colour three or four times down the page. Some entries recorded a book’s location, some the circumstances of its finding. Most were written hastily. All were crossed out.

“You see the beginnings of our problem,” he said. “We write down what we find, and by the time we’ve finished writing, the books have arranged themselves differently. Or we have.” He glanced at Fox, who nodded without conviction.

On a wall hung a map, but not of the City. The lines on it curved into each other. Someone had added, in pencil, the names of trains whose routes the map ignored. A black pin had been set into a round stain on the map where coffee had once pooled.

“We were told you like oddities,” Fox said. “We were told you keep them, turn them over in your head.”

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“Someone who liked you. Or perhaps a different person, who did not,” Finch said. “We are not, as yet, in agreement.”

They took me down another flight. The steps ended at a door that looked like two doors meeting, and when you pushed it open you were invited to believe you had entered a hall with mirrors on either side. Even at that hour — and I realised that down there there were no hours — the place was hushed. The shelves went in both directions and down a corridor that seemed to bend in on itself.

“They say the books go on,” Fox said, “but that’s not quite right. The space does. The books repeat themselves. Some recur exactly, or echo like a rhyme. Some have errors.” She handed me a narrow volume that had been bound more than once. When I opened it, my thumb showed through a hole where someone had excised an ex libris. The title page said nothing but gave a date: 1847.

“Is this one of the innumerable?” I asked.

Finch didn’t answer. He took the book and held it spine-down. When he let the pages flick, they gave the illusion of animation. The little scribbles in the corner of each page — minute marks offset by a dot — became a face as they sped past, a child’s face punctured by the crescent of his thumbnail. I saw it and then it was gone. He did it again. The face appeared again, but it was not the same. A man’s this time. The nose heavier. The mouth wider. The dot was a freckle or a wound.

“You asked me here to see a trick?” I said, half-angry at myself for indulging them, half because the trick had worked on me.

“The trick is that the faces aren’t anywhere we can point at with surety,” Fox said. “They are in the passage of the pages.”

At some point we had begun to walk. We came to a desk made of temporary things. On it was a table of measures with several columns incomplete, and a number of pencils sharpened to stubs. A third person sat there with their hair tied back by a ribbon that might once have been white.

“This is Maren,” Fox said. “She has seen them.”

“I have seen one,” Maren said, “or more.” I could not place her age. Her eyes had the mathematically incomplete look of a person who had to tally large numbers in order to sleep.

“You saw a face in a flick-book,” I said.

Maren shook her head. “I saw it in the gilding on the edges of the leaves. Not as you hold it, but as you place it under the lamp, so the gold tarnish bends toward you. I have seen it in the water stain on the fore-edge of a book of sermons. I have seen it in the bleached stamp of a private lending-library. I have seen its beard grown out of a salt blossom. I have seen, once, the clean face of a girl on the rag-paper of a ledger sold to a man who later drowned. Do you require that it be one face? It may be that God is as careless as we are.”

Finch took up a pencil and made a circle on a scrap of paper. He added seven points and numbered them, and then drew one long line that, touching each point once, returned to its beginning. The line doubled back on itself in a way that made the circle into something else.

“The rumour is that we have seven witnesses,” he said, “or that we have one witness whose testimony changes.”

“You’ll have difficulty distinguishing those,” I said.

“We have already failed,” Fox said. “Weeks ago.”

In the first days I did not go home. I slept in the wooden chair by the postal sack or on the floor with my coat. At one point I woke, seized by the notion that air, being unmarked, could nonetheless become specific. I felt I could tell the hour by its pressure. The lamps buzzed, and the books deepened a shade. I read.

There were books of tables whose headings had been half-cut off so you had to infer the categories. There were bestiaries for animals that had never been, whose workmanship made you doubt your knowledge of the world. There were books with engraved plates of the sky. There were doctrinal arguments bound on both sides so that they could not be refuted. There were atlases with cities in familiar shapes, only their names were wrong. There were books of errata for books that did not seem to exist. There was an index that had lost its parent text and, grown feral, now indexed all errors of the last two hundred years, including my own. There were manuals for idle machines and ledger-books for debts cancelled by a signature that recurred and recurred.

A week passed and then a second. I developed a method. It consisted first of recording the books as though they were ordinary things, and then in allowing myself to treat them as they were signs, and then only in my most tired hour resorting to superstition. I refined this to a rhythm. Morning for numbers, afternoon for sentences, night for faces. There was no morning here, but you understand what I mean. If I kept to the method, the days kept to me and did not wander off.

On a day that might have been a Sunday, a man with a crushed hat came down. He said he was from the Department and he would need receipts. When Finch could not produce any, the man went back up the stairs.

---

You will ask whether I ever saw the face of God in any of the books. I will answer that your words are badly chosen, that it would be more accurate to say the face arises between the books, in their margins; in the way an identical misprint in three separate volumes suggests the work of a single mind that never had to leave the room where it was alone. Still, I will say I saw something once.

It was in a section that had been assigned the letter Z, though not at the end of a sequence. The shelves were lower there. The bindings were not spines but cords. The books lay like rolled maps, and among them were sheets of printed paper folded into eighths. I took one and found that it was a street directory for a City; not ours, exactly. The streets opened in pairs that met and split like twins. I unfolded the sheet to its fullest extension and turned it around so the names ran from bottom to top. The arrangement of the blocks looked like a face. There is no other way to put it. The river’s bend was an ear. A row of identical blocks, numbered in a figure-eight for reasons that cannot have been defendable, became the mouth with a missing tooth at the place where a warehouse had burned. The parks were eyes. They were not the same size. An alley at the bottom made a cleft in the chin. The end of a tramline gave the suggestion of a lone hair on a man’s cheek.

I refolded the sheet and put it back and then took it again. The second time it was no longer a face. It was an industrious arrangement of avenues meant only to move people. I replaced it and took it again and again until the paper softened at the folds. For one out of every five or six unfoldings it was a face; for the others it remained a map. I tried to fix the conditions, the angle of my hand, the degree of my attention, the little wind from the corridor that funnelled past us. I could not.

There are names for people who stare too long into maps and see narratives where there are only routes. I accept the charge. Still, the experience had a physical quality I cannot account for. I had the feeling of being looked at. It was the way you feel when you stop walking and think you hear your own footsteps continuing for a moment, and then, when they don’t, you become aware of a person behind you who then never appears. I wanted, like a child, to show someone what I had seen.

I found Maren and took her to the low shelves. We unfolded the paper together. She did not see the face. She saw, she said, an old road that had been renamed too many times. “Look,” she said. “It is an artery that is also a palimpsest.” I asked her where she had seen it, the face from the gold on the book’s fore-edges. “In a commonplace book of weather,” she said. “People used to record wind and prophecy on the same page.”

During this time, a woman came who said she represented the City’s interests. She asked Fox for a list of our holdings. Fox gave her the catalogue first by kilometres of shelving, and then by weight. “You cannot be serious,” the woman said.

“We are under the streets,” Fox replied. “Weight is a reasonable measure. There is an apocryphal figure for an angel’s footprint, but we cannot attest its accuracy.” (1)

“Our concern is safety,” the woman said. “And tenure. And liability.”

“Liability,” Fox repeated, as if tasting the word to learn whether it was edible. “We accept it. If the ceiling falls, it will fall on us.”

The woman looked at the walls. On the way out she asked about a soundproof room. There was none.

I do not know how to assign the hours afterward. At some point it became clear that the rumour of witnesses would remain a rumour. We no longer asked who had seen which face or when. We accepted that the seeing changed the seer retroactively. Maren brought more pencils. Finch showed me a ledger that did not belong to him, wherein his name had been written next to a debt in ink that looked recent. Fox cut her hair. The trains adjusted their intervals, and the idea of punctuality we abandoned as a form of superstition.

On the last night I was there, if one may have a last night in a place that disobeys such divisions, I wandered beyond the low shelves without quite meaning to. The floor sloped down. The books had been replaced by heavy boxes, unmarked, bound with wire. The light became crowded. There was a chair with a coat on it. The coat was familiar, though it was not mine. I reached into the pocket and found an orange notebook. I remembered the one I had thrown away. This was not it. But when I opened it I found, in my own hand, a list of addresses. Some were for flats I had lived in. Some were for flats I had visited only once, after dark, to leave a set of keys. Some were addresses that I think had never existed. The last entry said: Down. Come down. You left it here. Every time you went up, you left something down.

Somewhere a train passed, shaking dust from a beam. In the dust I saw, for the duration of its falling, a profile. I will not make claims for it. It was a composite of the particulate, abridged by light and then erased. But the profile was not mine and not, so far as I could tell, one I had seen before. I wiped the beam with a handkerchief. This felt like a sacrilege, and then absurdity.

I have been very cautious in describing it to myself. I will tell you only that I recognised it and that the recognition had the quality of a hand placed on a shoulder a moment before the owner of the hand speaks your name. I did not turn. I was not brave and I was not afraid.

---

I left by the alley door with the impossible key. When I returned on what we agreed to call Monday, there were orange cones at the top of the stairs. They had fenced off the entrance with plastic and the man in the hat, who had never come back down, handed me a folded paper that said our place was unsafe. It had always been unsafe. We were to disperse. We had never gathered. We carried off what we could — too little for a history and too much for a superstition.(2) I kept the orange notebook. It is in my pocket now. If I show it to you you will recognise, perhaps, the handwriting.

Perhaps the books were always a distraction. Perhaps the City, with its avenues and vaults and ducts and lights and offsets, with the memory of my friends’ footsteps inscribed somewhere below and to the left of a courthouse, with the new names given to its old roads and the old names erased by rain, had been making a portrait of us increment by increment, seizing the intervals between our errands. I know increasingly little with certainty.

When I pass that main street, I still feel phrases under the asphalt, the way one hears the river within a pipe, or a child’s call through a wall. I do not know whether there is one face or seven or a number that can be expressed only as the limit of such speech. I know only that, distraction or not, there is a book we did not find. Between its leaves a spot appears and vanishes in which anyone’s God might fit.

——————

1. Our predecessors in the sub-basement left a memorandum titled “On Loads Supernatural and Otherwise,” in which they estimate the weight of an angel at the difference between a man startled and a man at peace. The calculation is without method.

2. The question of whether the books were ever there at all is, in the end, a decent one. And yet there are certain objects that retain a sense of dampness long after you have brought them into the air.