The Garden Book by Brian Castro

Author:Brian Castro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781920882785
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Published: 2011-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

She was the Aleph in the alphabet. A letter no one knew how to pronounce anymore. She was sure about one thing. She would no longer allow herself to be read.

JASPER

Ablack convertible. It was winding its way up the tarred road. The hills had never seen such a powerful car. It had retractable headlamps and chrome pipes sweeping from the engine and a large wrap-around grille. So wide it had trouble taking the sharp bends, sent little gravel landslides from its whitewall tyres over the soft edges into the ravines. Deep ferns spinning below, parasols in the wind – he sketched them expertly and quickly in his small leather-bound notebook. There were books all over the back of the car. He had been reading one. It was as tiny as one of those bibles they were trying to foist on him in Sydney, when he landed in the flying boat near Rose Bay. He had barely stepped upon the swaying jetty when a man and a woman approached him and warned of catastrophe. God dammit, he said, the Bible ain’t going to save the world. It forecasts the end of it! That was the way he was. He had no time for what dragged you back, what dragged nations back. Two weeks in Sydney and God dammit, it was a void. They’d recently built a bridge and only a trickle of cars crossed it. He was told there may be kangaroos. The sleepy streets were empty, especially on the weekends. Hoboes grazed indolently beside public toilets. The drains smelled bad. God dammit, he thought, if there was a war coming you wouldn’t know it. There were no coloured people. He asked Max, his personal assistant, what he thought of that. They got ’em in reservations, Max said. He would know.

At Circular Quay wharf they looked on as stevedores uncrated the car Jasper had sent ahead from Boston. Max buckled on the leather straps holding the temporary registration plates. They finally saw kangaroos hopping beside a train when they drove down to Melbourne. The towns looked like those in the Mississippi Delta, Max said. A lot of staring at strangers. You get that bug-eyed stuff everywhere. Max possessed much equanimity.

Jasper sighed and opened the thin book he was reading. The Blast of the Book the title screamed. It wasn’t that good a story. It was about a supernatural book that caused the instantaneous disappearance of the reader who opened it. The trick was that words made things appear rather than disappear. That was the blast of the book. The illusion of words. Not a great insight; unless one ponders the question of whether existence was itself a rhetorical sleight of hand. I’m here; I’m not here when I don’t think of Being. Hard to see that. Put your finger in a fire, he was saying to Max. I burn therefore I exist.

Then he thought: some women are like that. They make things appear, and then you disappear. Even though your fingers are burning.

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