A Leaf Falls From The Tree of Knowledge

by MICHAEL MILEY

As I open the door to the bookstore, I find myself suddenly in the hollow of a great tree, between roots whose inner sides house small misshapen rooms, closets with red-and-green spotted doors, in a space easily 40 feet across, lit by a blue-green phosphorescent glow. I go to the first door, which is very narrow, but lumpy and leathery like the back of a frog, and open it and see it has a toilet inside, and I know suddenly that I have to pee, but if I go inside, it’s so very narrow I won’t be able to get out again, so I slam the door and hurriedly shuffle to the next one on the left. It’s larger than the first, with the top of the door the shape of a broad man’s shoulders. I know it’s big enough for me, so I open it gingerly, and in the green-blue glow of its interior I can see another toilet. I almost go in, but I detect the sides of the room are shifting, they’re beginning to squeeze, and the door in my hand itself is changing its shape, like someone gripping the waist of a sandwich. I know if I go into this room, the roots of the great tree will close around me and I’ll never get out, so I hurriedly close that door and move on to the next. 

When I open it, I see a small bald-headed man sitting inside, intent on his task, and he says, “Hey hey! I’m already in here, go away, go away! “ So I slam that door and as I turn into the space, I see that every root of the tree has a strange misshapen door on its side, all arrayed in octagonal formation, each with a water closet behind it, and as I look, some of the doors are opening, and strange men in 19th century clothing, with bowler hats and woolen long coats, are emerging from them like the claustrophobic dreams of Rene Magritte. 

So I know now I could go in and safely do my dastardly duty, but the prospect still frightens me, so I look up the trunk of the tree for spiritual guidance and as I do, the space magically transforms into the huge bookstore it was supposed to be, with a metal spiral staircase in the center of the tree, winding endlessly to its upper floors, and tens of thousands of dusty old books piled up all around me. The space is lit by a window somewhere, fixed in its upper reaches, and in the descending amber light of the immense wood-paneled room, dust motes are drifting everywhere in the air. I step onto the spiral staircase, like Jack on his beanstalk, and quickly climb upwards, occasionally looking down as I climb, watching the floor recede, with its books stacked up beneath me in huge disheveled piles. 

At length, I come to a comfortable landing and step off the staircase and find myself browsing through the overflowing shelves, when I land upon a thick, pale, paperback book, by a P. J. Somethingorother, with a picture of a dazzling blond on the cover, as she lounges on a four-poster bed, a smirk on her face, in a tank top with a hint of cleavage and a pleated skirt hiked up above her knees. As I open the book, I can hear the voice of New York critics who hail her tome in superior tones as: “ Unlike any other, an impossibly clever satire on the endless parade of fools and scoundrels that strut in abundance through the streets of our city.”

It’s a bawdy, brazen book, a montage of oddities that breaks all the rules, full of surreal pictures and scandalous disclosures, a scatological but savvy sibling to Cortazar’s survey of impossible things: Around The Day in 80 Worlds. As I thumb through the pages I can see she has a terse, witty style, with very short sentences, unlike me, and many of the pages are nothing but pictures, so I return to the front of the book and see an image now the full size of a page, a surreal painting of a tall lanky figure in a long coat and top hat suspended in midair, surrounded by a visible blue-green music with the texture of oil paint. 

He’s a kind of Oscar Wilde of the sky, falling from the land of giants, and as I look at him he comes alive, emerging from the page, which is a thin film that’s somehow electronic, comprised of square pixels, but three-dimensional. He begins to tell me a story of a huge country house and a family goblin and a dark and dank October night, alluding to forbidden sex among high society women, while a strange Schoenberg-like music is coming off the page, peeling off and evaporating in the air. 

I think, “It’s incredible! What kind of book is this? “ So I turn the page with the man on it and see that its surface is very thin, like an LCD screen, but that its back is very thick, taking up a third of the thickness of the book, and behind it is something like a crystal version of the mechanism of a clock, with small gears turning and registers moving and the sound of ticking, so I turn the page back to the ranting figure, who’s still going on and on with his bawdy story, which I barely understand, but I’m simply astonished at the 3D video page that is alive and moving and talking to me! So I shout: “I simply, absolutely, must have this book!”  So I turn around in a rush and begin to hurriedly descend the spiral staircase, brandishing the book as if it were a torch. 

As I do, I notice that the mountains of books have grown larger now and more encroaching; they’re clustered so tightly around me that I can barely get down the staircase, so as I rush downwards in a corkscrew fashion; I stumble momentarily on a corrugated step. With that, the book flies out of my hands, and I shout. “ OH NO!” as I watch it tumble in excruciatingly slow motion down a small tunnel winding through the piles of books, twisting, turning, and tearing as it falls. I’m terrified I’ll lose sight of it, so I rush down faster and faster, till I touch bottom, and then I’m suddenly there again in the chamber of toilets, so I rush over and yank open one of the doors, and there’s the bald man I’d seen before, just getting up and pulling on his pants, while dutifully flushing the toilet.

I see him lean down and pick up a few torn pages, a folio of the mysterious book, which he holds now dumbly in front of him. “I’ve got to have that book!”, I shout, and grab for it, but he pulls it away and he says, “Puleeese! Don’t you have any manners? There’s no need to shout! I know what it is! It’s one of those wonderful books by P. J. Somethingorother! Right? I daresay I’ve read almost everything she’s written!” 

“But what’s the name of this particular book?” I continue to shout. “What’s on its cover?!!” 

“Well my friend”, he says, while turning it over, “Only a piece of it seems to have fallen down the staircase. It tore itself up before it landed on my head and now the cover is gone. But don’t you remember the title? Was it Carumbulus of the Bitter Root? That was a great book. I loved every minute of it!”

“No, no”, I say, “it was something else!” 

“Was it Perambulations Through the Red Warbulance?’ he continues, almost chewing the words, so I can barely understand him, while shuffling over to a pile of bookshelves, as I follow frantically behind. 

“No no, “ I cry, “It was some kind of satire on New Yorkers in heat, a kiss-and-tell story, told by the author and a falling man in a long coat and top hat, complete with thousands of newsreels, all of them with a capacity to move, to project themselves holographically into space if I lingered a moment on the  page. “

“Aha!”, he said, “Then it must have been Wrangling with Quimly Behind the Spotted Shrooms”, as he moved back further into the depths of the bookstore, scratching himself under his arm as he went, a bewhiskered smelly old man, pulling his reading spectacles from his pocket, balding and round-shouldered, but excited now at the prospect of selling me the book. Only now, he can’t seem to find a copy of it, so he’s down now, sitting cross legged on the floor, sorting and shuffling amidst the piles and piles, mumbling to himself, “It must be here, I saw it last week!”,  as he tosses the wrong books over his shoulders into the heaps of books behind him and continues his questioning. 

“Was it Pewter Corkscrew in a Alien Sky?” he continues, buried in his search.

“No no!” I say, feeling a mounting panic. “

“Was it Quintessence of Five Blue Spoons? “ 

“Ah no!” I cry out, now feeling despair, as the image of the tumbling book spins down in front of me, my fingers outstretched, as if still hoping catch it. “It’s none of those, sir!"

"Well, the least you could have done is read the title!”, the bookseller grumbles. “How do you expect me to find it? P. J.’s incredibly prolific! She’s written at least 10,000 books! Was it Winkling in Whale Time?” he continues, a plaintive tone now creeping into his voice. 

And as he asks that question, I shake my head sadly and hear something stir outside of the bookstore’s walls, as if rubbing the trunk of the Great Tree, much like the sound of a sigh of a ghost passing by, his hand fondling the bark, while the bookseller searches for an impossible leaf fallen from the great Tree of Knowledge--only to suddenly feel a pillow against my cheek, only to then feel the cool Fall air blowing over me from the open bedroom door, only to inwardly cringe as I feel my mind now desperately reach to capture each fleeting leaf of evaporating scene, which even now begin to blow away. I know with cruel certainty that never again will I look on that book, never again see its living page, with the Oscar Wilde-like falling figure, never again see its crystalline clockworks, or hear or see again that visible music peeling off the page, like pigment dancing before my eyes—unless I can somehow incubate a Door of Return, dream the lucid dream I obviously require, to return one day and recover that book, that title, that leaf, from that Tree….

Sonoma, CA   9/25/13
© 2013 Michael Miley All rights reserved