SHORT STORY - 'The Library of Bill'

Welcome to the terrifyingly literary world of Bill, and his struggle with a most unorthodox strain of pathological addiction. (This is to be seen as unorthodox in contrast to more regular and easily-categorised substance dependencies; Bill’s hedonistic days, such as they were, have long since evaporated.) Not for Bill was the allure of pills, powders or other narcotic agencies, and the avidity for booze had long since sloshed on by him. Instead, Bill’s vice centred around the axis of self-improvement and of constant enlightenment.

Whilst in his younger days this trait manifested itself in a perfectly robust and healthy intellectual curiosity, now it seemed as though he were stumbling through a blizzard of educative stimuli, the weight of the literary canon seeming to incrementally stack up on his shoulders as though he were a diver descending to ever deeper fathoms of ideas.

In many ways, he was an acolyte of Trotsky, and his melioristic vision of unbounded human possibility, in which the average man could one day ascend to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. To this end, Bill had developed a troubling addiction to the buying and hoarding of books. His one-bedroom flat on South London’s Brixton Hill, endowed with a very modest floor area, had soon become overpopulated with this mass immigration of books seeking refuge from the many charity and second-hand shops Bill frequented.

Toni, Bill’s mendacious girlfriend, had learnt to accommodate this unfortunate discrepancy in his character, and indeed due to her highly demanding job as a legal secretary in the City, she would rarely utilise the flat for any means other than collapsing into wine-mandated slumber at the end of another stressful day. Besides this, most of her weekends were spent away in Bournemouth seeing to her hospice-bound mother, a duty she fulfilled with the detached professionalism as if she were readying a portfolio of documents before a big day in court. On these weekends alone, Bill would cruise the shops of the Charing Cross Road, Soho and Clerkenwell, gradually trawling the city-bed for fresh books with his obsessive-compulsive net.

It wasn’t even that Bill was aesthetically drawn to the collecting of books; he did not hunt through the undergrowth of shelves in search of that elusive first edition or a rare print version, to him these factors were superfluous dressing on the raw meat of the intellectual content. The one exception was an old first edition copy of ‘Labyrinths’ by his personal favourite Jorge Luis Borges. Bill would habitually leave this in a prominent coffee table location the way others arrange glossy magazines or photographic paving slabs. When once after a particularly grinding day at work, Toni absent-mindedly spilt a cup of tea on this paperback, leaving the first few pages with the texture of an old map scroll, it heralded a storm between them that didn’t lift for several days thereafter.

With the wardrobe and other storage units soon reaching peak capacity, it wasn’t long before books began stacking up in piles on the floor and on any available surface, collecting there like water droplets from the ceiling. The works of Proust would be leant up against a radiator alongside books by Henry James, D.H. Lawrence and Paul Auster. After a while, Bill began to realise the necessity for some degree of structural organisation, and started the process of hauling out the tomes such as ‘Ulysees’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ‘War and Peace’ and ‘The Divine Comedy’, to use as weighty foundation stones that could support the rest sufficiently.

Yet all this hoarding of books did little to satisfy Bill’s intellectual fervour; in fact it appeared to produce quite the opposite effect. With each new addition that he would begrudgingly stack upon a random pile, the more he knew he had to get through, the more he sensed the perilous ebbing away of time available to do so, and the further into a state of morose anxiety he would sink. Each new book represented another link in the chain that bound him to his self-prescribed sentence, and the further he was from being able to haul himself to the end of it. On particularly bad instances, Toni would arrive home from work to find Bill slumped on the floor in an acute fit of agitation, surrounded by various open books snatched from nearby piles, having tried and failed to commit his mind to getting past page 1 of a Conrad novel or a book of Montaigne essays.

At times such as this, Toni made a futile resolution to impose some kind of prohibition on his habit, but due to the fact that the stacks would grow incrementally by only 2 or 3 books a day, this was rather like watching a glacier for signs of movement and she quickly relented. Truth be told, she was at a loss as to how to respond to such a predicament, and her mentality towards Bill would fluctuate day by day and sometimes even by the hour. Whatever his flaws, at least he didn’t gamble away all his spare money on sport like the boyfriend that her friend Susie always complained about. He didn’t drink to excess, never smoked, and she had every reason to trust him with regard to other women. Aside from this, he was also still a sensitive and caring lover and she was loath to call time just yet on what had been her only long-term and therefore, reasonably successful, relationship.

On Bill’s part, he couldn’t quite understand what it was that routinely compelled him to buy and store more and more books. He had, at one time, held aspirations of becoming a writer himself; indeed, for several years he wrestled with the concept of his ‘grand masterpiece’ of a novel as though it were a thrashing crocodile that would not submit to his control. Any time pen could be brought to meet paper it would be as though they were both volatile elements that quickly combusted in an explosion of mental energy before being extinguished in the wastepaper bin.

On his lunchtimes at work, Bill would take himself off to the high street where he knew there were two well-stocked second-hand book shops just waiting for his perusal. Every time he would tell himself he was going to walk on past, or that he could just have a look through the window and nothing more. He knew he would end up inside, he could anticipate the finding of that one book he just had to buy. He knew it the same way an alcoholic can taste in his mouth that first glug of booze before even entering a bar; the same way a gambler can hear the sounds of the machine and see those numbers spinning even on the approach to a bookie’s.

Such a precarious balance had to come to a head at some point and that surfaced when Toni’s mother took a sudden turn for the worst. Dementia had ransacked her mind of its cognitive possessions and the doctors advised that she had only a couple of weeks to live. Out of a sense of grim obligation, Toni took the time off work and decamped to the hospice to see her mum through her final days. Left alone and unfettered, Bill allowed himself free reign to make bulk purchases on any and every book he saw from online sites and the high street.

Soon the situation had grown out of all control. Bill disposed of the sofa, which was already overgrown with books anyway, and began endeavouring to garner maximum utility from all useful space in the apartment. The stacks of books began to resemble old Roman ruins, the last remains of some antiquated book-centric civilisation. Kingsley Amis paperbacks and Stephen King slabs would contribute to the trithilons that Bill made to assist with access to and from the flat. Piles of Austen, Thackeray, Bronte, Kafka and Waugh would form elegant minarets teetering above the lower skyline of heavy works by Freud, Shakespeare, Sartre and Mailer. He would attempt to keep the stacks roughly even but somehow they would grow almost organically, creating a kind of trenellation effect similar to a castle’s battlements. Bill would spend his solitary evenings marooned in the corner of the room on the bed staring out at the frozen waves of books before him in a state of ataraxy. He was wary of leaving his mattress island but at the same time, harboured a fiery urge to do away with the bed altogether, surrender his sanctuary and allow the rising tide of titles to swallow him up.

When finally, Toni’s mother reached the last page of her own narrative and passed away, Toni, relieved of her daughterly duties, returned to the flat to survey the diaspora of books that had descended upon it with a sudden eruption of fury. Clearly believing that the death of her mother marked a defining chapter break, Toni had decided that the optimum time to shear the strings fastening her to her current life had arrived. Since her mother had always been fond of Bill – a fact that had rankled Toni no end – he was too closely associated with painful memories and therefore, had to be detached. The decision was made as coldly as if it were business, an executive weighing up options and coming down on the side of hiving off a weak branch of the corporation.

As Toni scoured the flat for her modest possessions, Bill sat cross-legged and sulky on the bed, watching her in silence as though he were a child being punished. She carelessly marauded through his intricate infrastructure of books, brushing piles aside and knocking over stocks like Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo.

And then she was gone, and the dust of silence could begin to settle once again. Unshackled from the, admittedly minor, concerns of agitating Toni with his obsession, Bill continued stockpiling more and more books in earnest, returning home from work with plastic bags full of them, no longer beholden to the prejudice of what they were or who they were authored by.

As the weeks went by, Bill’s living conditions gradually deteriorated. The bed was evicted the day following Toni’s departure, as did the remaining items of furniture; in their place, the books began to crowd around the ceiling, requiring the construction of a precarious yet ingenious corbelled roof design. Going about his work, mostly in a gloomy half-light as the main window had long since been obscured, Bill imagined himself a member of a prehistoric clan, hewing spiritual temples out of the bare rock, with recourse to unknown and mysterious convictions. In his mind, he was Simon Rodia silently persisting with his own Watts Towers; instead of ceramics, coloured stones and bed frames he had only the works of Orwell, Dickens and Eliot to work with.

Before long, he could do little more than squat as standing had become an impossibility. Like an intrepid potholer he would crawl on all-fours through hastily-arranged tunnels that, by necessity, had to be constantly moved depending on where in the flat he wished to go. The most basic of journeys now required Bill’s careful timing and organisation, as though he were instead trying to navigate his way across London to catch a train. A trip to the bathroom now required a solid hour of tunnel rearranging in order to get there on time. Similarly, getting through the short hallway to the kitchen was an arduous and pain-staking process that on arrival, Bill needed a substantial amount of time to recuperate and regain his strength. Whenever he was forced to leave the flat, primarily in order to replenish food stocks having already conceded his job through non-attendance, it was a painful and agoraphobic experience. Just making his way across the street to the convenience store was an obstacle course of unfamiliarity and nerves; the act of standing up straight and manoeuvring around others was now a struggle for Bill, having become so accustomed to his cramped isolation. He would return, sweating and flustered, vowing to soon seal himself into the flat for good and dedicate the rest of his life to the slow consumption and absorption of the texts.

The sad realisation that soon began to seize Bill was the level of disengagement he now felt from any of the books that surrounded him, the cave walls that enclosed him. He couldn’t recall having purchased them, had no idea whether he had read any of them or not, and indeed had never even heard of many of them. He gazed in abject perplexity as layers of strata containing generic self-help guides, pregnancy handbooks and children’s adventure stories. Evidently, he deduced, in his blind panic he had simply swept handfuls of titles at random from the shop shelves with the dubious aim of eventually reading them having been supplanted by the compulsion to do little more than construct this absurd cathedral of words.

Was there any book here, Bill wondered, that he actually had the desire to read, even if he had the time to do so in between shuffling tunnels around to get from one side of the flat to the other? He couldn’t think that there was, and this sorry reflection embraced him like a steel gibbet of recrimination.

And then he saw it. There it was, wedged between a layer of Agatha Christie’s and a stratum of Thomas Hardy; his favourite – Borges’ ‘Labyrinths’. He knew at the very least he could always glean some enjoyment out of the Argentine master’s ambiguous fables and convolutions. Tugging at the spine, he quickly registered just how tightly sandwiched it was, the tensile pressures of many hundreds of books bearing down on it from above. Deftly, with the agility of an expert caver, Bill worked the edging the book out, the tips of his fingers burning red as they laboured for purchase, his warm laboured breath echoing back in his face in the confined space and causing sweat to dampen his forehead. Steadily he worked at prising the book free, a quarter became visible, then a third. All the while, Bill cleverly manipulated the surrounding books to ensure structural stability.

As the book became almost entirely free, and Bill could almost see the opening lines scrolling before his eyes, he lapsed his concentration and with a reckless tug the book was loose in his hands. As Bill rejoiced his small but significant victory, he was unaware of the seismic tremors that juddered their way up the wall of books, as each one shuffled into an improvised new coangulation. The Flemish bond style of stacking served the fabric well in most areas, however, books towards the top had been constructed under greater time pressures than those on lower levels and, with the disruption of the stability, the realignment became amplified up to the very top layer.

Just as Bill was beginning to turn the first few pages, several heavy copies of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, ‘Anna Karenina’ and the collected works of Poe were dislodged from their place in the structural buttresses and tumbled down, bringing along whole stacks of follwers that leapt after them. The result was that Bill incurred a serious skull fracture and died in a matter of minutes, interred in the textual tomb of his own making. He was left undiscovered until several months later when the landlord sought entry on the pretext that he appreciated Bill was the ideal tenant, but regrettably the rent was to rise again at the year’s end.