Ah, my dear blue-eyed Epimetheus. You have left me a sleepless wreck. In twenty one days of searching, I have not discovered the true nature of the object you have left me, but I have at least found another term for it: the Zahir, the cage of consciousness.
Except that doesn’t really work, does it? The Zahir never really existed, so far as I can tell, and this manifestly does. And though it took many forms, it always appeared as a mundane object – a postage stamp, a tiger, a twenty centime piece. The object in front of me, by contrast, does not hold my attention through some supernatural force, but by the more dangerous trap of my own curiosity.
So then. One more lead to add to the reject pile. May it find safer friends among that cadre of failures than I have had the misfortune to know.
There must be some way out I haven’t yet tried. I must always remember that not all mysteries can be solved, that once all witnesses have died and all clues have been destroyed, there may be no route to the reconstruction of the past. But even if I reach this conclusion though reason, how can I persuade my fixated motivation of its truth? Maybe I need to distract it with a different project for a while. Might a description of my obsession’s beginning bring about its end? Worth a go, at least.
Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep, or perhaps my singular focus has begun to warp my thoughts, but I begin to feel that my writing this must imply a reader outside myself. Logic tells me this is ridiculous. I am writing in a scrappy exercise book, filled with patchy notes on obscure and tedious historical subjects. Even if someone were, by chance, to leaf through this at some later date, they would be so put off by the chaos within that they would never stumble upon any coherent narrative embedded in its inner pages. Nor, I fear, will I be in any fit state to press this text upon anyone else once this is over. But then perhaps this is the point, that I would wish to leave a eulogy and testament to the rupture of my mind. There is something in the existence of such a text that, even if unread, makes my end feel more witnessed.
So out of deference to you, unreader, allow me the indulgence of a brief autobiography. I was born to market traders, bakers and decent people. Against their better judgement however, I have always been more drawn towards scholasticism than towards the family business. For my seventh birthday, with an eye to acquiring a volume on the nature and distribution of centaurs, I asked to climb one of the ladders used at the public library to access the higher shelves. Unfortunately, my legs were too short at the time to span the spaces between the rungs, and in my eagerness to ascend I fell backwards, arms wheeling, hitting the ground with a dismal crash. But that was not enough to put me off. The library was little less than my home for fifteen years. I would return there every night after school, nesting among the biographies, getting to know the authors of each aisle of fiction, poorly chewing and swallowing the tomes on politics and history and eventually vomiting them up in badly worded polemics against the transit policies of our local government (for the most part, I have since torn up and repurposed these). Rationalism, and other people’s thoughts, were the substances from which I built myself. But eventually, when my parents began to wear themselves out making the bread and cakes that sustained our little community, I was called upon to support our family. Farewell, I said to that page-filled life – I was to become a bread winner. Or a bread maker, at any rate.
I am sometimes saddened to think of what could have been. How I might have leveraged my knowledge to enter higher education, or how I might have joined one of the local political parties and reformed the structure of our society for the better. But someone in my position does not have the luxury of such choices. We are all obligated to the thoughts and opinions of the living and the dead. Their legacies are both a gift and a burden, and I would not reject that which I was left by my ancestry.
In my year at school was a boy named Epimetheus. Similar to myself, he is now a market trader and the child of market traders, but was somewhat less inclined towards academic pursuits in his youth. Those evenings I spent among the obscurer corners of the stacks, he spent acquiring practical knowledge of the world with a close group of friends. For the most part, this seemed to consist of soliciting rubbing alcohol from the local pharmacist. Still, despite these differences, we became and remained good friends. These days, his trade is in what he rather grandly terms antiques, bits and pieces bought to him by a charming roster of the destitute and desperate. These are neatened up and sold to gullible tourists for several times the price. It’s all tat of course, but his father sold tat and his father before him; he simply maintains the family tradition. And he is tremendously effective at it. I once saw him shift two dozen dinner plate fragments to a group of German tourists, convinced they were the remains of a set of antique hydriae. He carped on about that for weeks.
A pleasurable quirk of our town marketplace, established by mutual assent, is the cessation of all trading on Thursday mornings. Any trader found attempting to monopolise the market before noon is subtly rounded on by the community. Actual violence is frowned upon, but the guilty party can expect to find dirt mixed into their sacks of coffee, or that the legs of their market stall begin eroding at an alarming rate. Epimetheus once spent an entire night piling bales of hay in a neat pyramid on one such dissenter’s plot, before running the hose over them. I hear the unfortunate soul gave himself a hernia trying to regain access. Needless to say, he has not dared violate the sacred morning by hawking his sub-par jewellery again.
Epimetheus and myself usually meet on these mornings to tell each other stories, drinking thick Turkish coffee in the porch of a small café down one of the side streets. With no concerns about profit or presentation, these mornings are usually the most relaxed time of the week for both of us. We share the gossip we’ve heard that week, any reports on the progress of the colony of sirens near the lighthouse, sometimes commiserate each other over personal inelegancies. But on this occasion it was immediately apparent that my colleague was ill at ease.
‘I am going to ask you to take something,’ he said after the usual pleasantries. ‘But you’ll have to accept it without questions. Otherwise it will do your head in.’
There are certain gifts that we thank the giver for, while inwardly groaning at the prospect of owning. Epimetheus is a great giver of those gifts, usually coming from his overstock. I once received a small figurine of a white elephant from him, though whether that was actually meant satirically I never found out. It’s quite hard to tell with him.
‘You know I always love your gifts, Epimee,’ I said, perhaps a shade disingenuously. ‘Let’s have a look.’
He opened his hand. Inside was a small glass bottle filled with a fluid the colour of lapis lazuli. Lighter blue bands swam around the edges and, remarkably, continued to swirl even once the bottle had been set upon the table. It put me in mind of an electric Neptune, minute flashes of lightning immediately smothered by the swirling blue clouds.
I stared at it for a few seconds. ‘How on Earth does that work?’ I said without thinking, reaching out for it.
Epimetheus looked rather pained at that. ‘I thought we agreed. No questions!’
‘Well, I think you really only agreed that with yourself. I just asked to have a look.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘It’s for your own good. You’re not the kind of person to go in for half-complete, fully-mad explanations. If I tell you what I do know, you’ll be even more likely to open the damn thing.’
‘Oh, come on. You can’t give me a bottle of mysteriously swirling gas and expect me to take it without question. Or if you do, be fully prepared for me to open it and see what’s inside. I bet there’s some kind of motor system…’ I made to remove the cork.
He started forwards in his chair. ‘No, no, no!’ I put it back on the table, rather startled. He slumped back with a sigh. ‘Fine. I’ll take it back. This was a stupid idea.’
‘Too late now,’ I laughed. ‘You’ve piqued my interest. I’m not giving this back until I know exactly what’s inside.’
Well that was rather bloody rash of me.
He paused for a moment, then started speaking, rather haltingly. Not his usual style of story-telling at all. ‘A couple of weeks ago’, he said, ‘someone came to my stall with this bottle. He was the standard sort – straggly beard, rather tatty clothes, the slight smell of an unwashed sailor about him. Nothing too out of the ordinary, at least for one of my suppliers.’ As I say, he has a charming social network. ‘I made to give him the usual two drachma finder’s fee, but as I pressed the coins into his hand he grabbed me by the lapels and refused to let go.
He drew me close. Very close. I could see scraps of his breakfast in his beard. And he started talking at me about the bottle in a single unhinged stream of words. He seemed to be saying that the bottle contained… well, he called it dream-ether, I think. It’s a kind of gas that solidifies around a consciousness and forms dreamy sorts of scenes. Somehow, when we fall asleep, the minds of every single person on Earth end up in this bottle and… become surrounded by images we perceive as dreams? And sometimes we bump into each other? I don’t really know…’ he gingerly sipped at the thick dregs of coffee in his cup. ‘He was a bit vague on the details. And he stopped talking when I tried to press him about where he got it from. Mystical bottles of unknowable gas are one thing, but I’ll be buggered if I’m going to be left in the lurch holding stolen goods.’
I was hardly convinced. ‘Well, you were certainly right that I wouldn’t believe you. Or this chap, at any rate. Anyway, that still doesn’t explain why you’re so eager for me not to open it. So what if I did?’ I picked it up and held it loosely between my thumb and index finger, swinging it over the pavement. ‘Say I dropped it now. What’s the worst that could happen?’
‘He said that the minds of anyone in there at the time would be destroyed. None of them would ever wake up.’
‘So if you were to smash it, say, when it was three in the morning in China…’
‘You’d end up with a hemisphere of vegetables. Which would very quickly become corpses.’
‘And if I were to take out the stopper? Let the contents gently diffuse out?’
‘He said that the dream-ether would disperse and the minds with it, and that waking life would become impossible to tell apart from dreaming life.’
I tipped it up and down between my fingers for a while. For a moment, I thought about the possible consequences of even this, and I paused with a jolt of dread. But I quickly decided that this, at least, was safe – the fishmonger who lived opposite was a notorious layabout who rarely rose before eleven when the market took the morning off. If there had been any dire effects, we would have heard the screams from here.
I am always keen to highlight aspects of ambiguity when they arise. People become so imprecise when they turn poetical. ‘To be concrete,’ I said, ‘There’s two ways that could work. Either waking life would become like dreaming, or dreaming would become like waking life. Now I can see that for many people, that second possibility would be awful. Dreams can be the only way of escaping the crushing tedium or awfulness of their own lives.’
‘The first possibility is far worse though, I think,’ said Epimetheus. ‘Some of the stuff that happens to me in dreams. Well. I wouldn’t want to make that a reality for anyone, I think.’
I arched an eyebrow at him. He laughed, with a touch of nervousness. ‘There is one dream in particular that stands out,’ he said. ‘It always starts in a public place. Maybe at the market, maybe at a cinema, once at a Japanese restaurant. Wherever I am, though, I’m perfectly happy there. Until I realise there’s a, shall we say, knocking at my undercarriage.’
‘Door one?’
‘Err, no. Number two. Usually quite uncontrollably. Explosive would be a good word. Or gushing. Unfortunately, once the flow has started there’s no stopping it, even as I try to minimise the damage with tissues or napkins or, really, whatever’s to hand.
‘Eventually, I have to accept that things aren’t going very well and waddle away, both hands desperately trying to hold as much in as possible. I will very politely ask someone in a position of authority where the nearest toilet is, and they will direct me with complete accuracy (and surprisingly politely, given the circumstances). But it’s no good. No matter how close it might seem, it’s always out of reach, always one more brown-stained step away. At least until I wake up in a complete state of terror. I always have to check the sheets immediately afterwards, just in case.’
I was happily laughing away at his ludicrous story. This was just like our Thursday mornings usually went, and the bottle was quite forgotten between us. But that distraction soon faded, and our eyes were drawn inexorably down towards it once more.
‘There may be ways and means of getting in there, you know.’ I said. ‘There are certain substances that can pierce glass with the most delicate of pinpricks. Perhaps we could etch a hole in the side and remove the tiniest of samples without leakage. Like drawing a blood sample. Only more…’ I waved my hands, trying to convey spiritual heebie jeebies.
Epimethius shook his head. ‘From how I understand this works, there are about a billion minds in there at any one time. You couldn’t possibly avoid them all. And what happens to those people whose thoughts you’ve accidentally trapped? What happens if you put a consciousness through a scientific instrument? Does the probing radiation fill them with terror, like a balloon being filled up with custard? Do they get back into to their heads, out of their minds? Maybe they escape the equipment altogether and are left detached from their bodies, drifting the world, alone. Thinking I might be responsible for any of that would be more than I could live with, I think.’
I sniffed. ‘Something non-invasive then. Perhaps someone at the university will have an idea.’
‘You will still take it then?’
‘Certainly. I promised, didn’t I?’
‘Ah. Ahh.’ He lay back at that, closing his eyes and smiling a relieved smile. ‘So I had hoped. You really are a friend. You see why this has been so bad for me, then?’
‘Oh, I can absolutely see why this is causing you so much grief. If you leave it on a shelf somewhere and refuse to open it, you are tacitly accepting that magic and Gods and fairies and all sorts of ludicrous things exist. At that point, you might as well stick scallops on your chest and call yourself king of the mermaids. On the other hand, if you actually try to see if you’ve been conned, you risk destroying or, at the very least, harming half the world for your own idle curiosity. That risk is small, but…’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Given how bad it could be and how minor the reward of satisfying your curiosity is, it’s hardly worth even that risk’.
He looked relieved. ‘That’s just about it. But you’ve always been much better at this kind of thing. I thought you might figure out a safe way to find out what’s in there.’
I smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m sure this mystery will be resolved by the end of the week.’
‘Of course. Of course. I’m sure you’ll figure out what to do, Pandora.’
That was three weeks ago.
Initially, my curiosity was an easy beast to sate. I would visit the town library each day after market, finding pleasure in discovering the new acquisitions made since my departure. Gentle inquiries were also made about the gentleman who had sold the bottle to Epimetheus. In spite of my optimism however, neither route of enquiry was fruitful. Our small local library soon ran out of relevant literature, and as far as I could gather the bottle’s original vendor was an itinerant, rarely spending more than a couple of days in a given town. Nobody knew or could guess where he was now.
What else was there to do? I passed stewardship of the stall back to my parents, assuring them I would be away for only a few days, and travelled to the metropolis, seeking answers at its university. After failing to lobby the research scientists there to investigate the bottle without sampling its contents, I retreated to the library, searching for a historical rather than a scientific solution. And so I settled into this nook, surrounded by an ever-growing array of useless knowledge. The bottle has been placed beneath the brass desk lamp, catching its light.
Upon my left is a copy of the Thousand and One Nights, telling of a fisherman who dredged up a Djinn-filled bottle from the ocean bed, but I can find no description of its appearance. Upon my right is an account by a Venetian artisan of the peculiar optical properties of a particular variant of cobalt blue glass, occasionally producing flashes of reflection that gave the illusion of lightning, but with no suggestion that it also feigned movement. In a stack in front of me are books with tens of other leads, each untestable and unprovable. Nowhere can I find a reference to this so-called ‘dream-ether’. Was it just the falsified creation of an unstable mind, or has it left each of its owners in an unfit state to publish a description?
Meanwhile, my world has shrunk to this cubbyhole. Even at such times as sleep overwhelms me, I find myself within the bottle. Silently, I press my face against its glass and watch my sleeping form, while unseen about me the sleeping masses drift in the electric blue fog. Nightmares and passions unfurl behind me, but I do not see them – only my small wooden desk, the shelves of books, me.
I had not thought of home for a week before today. Even now, it has the feel of unreality, of dreams and mirages. How could I have ever smelt the salt tang of the sea breeze? There is no smell in the world but that of old paper and bookbinder’s glue, and the imagined ozone scent of dream-ether.
This hasn’t worked. Already, I can feel my mind curling back to imagined connections between skimmed passages. I remember reading something about the specific properties of cork used in the Arabian peninsula. Half awake, I pick up the bottle with my free hand and look at the stopper: a thin layer of white wax forms the seal between the glass and the rubbery cork. I begin to scratch it away…