Towering piles of ledgers line the walls, floor to ceiling, between door and window, from window to door, hundreds, thousands, millions, in library after library, alcove after endless alcove downstairs from John Doe’s laboratory, down the spiral stairs from the locked and abandoned laboratory.
Stacks of stories, legends, the history of birth and death, love and pain, lust and letdown, beauty and its decadence, beauty and its constant destruction, the content of countless forgotten after dinner conversations, the content of trillions of after dinner conversations to come.
This, of course, is all happening on some page long lost to any recall, on page one hundred and sixty eight and page one hundred and sixty eight has forgotten, if it were ever aware, what had occurred to the selfsame characters on one six seven and can only dream of the horrors, the screams of beauty strangled, coming down on one hundred and sixty nine. Not a single soul anywhere has any notion of the title of the work, worlds away, sometimes above, sometimes below, heaven and hell, depending on just how the volume had been carelessly tossed onto the growing dusty heaps.
Each and every thought stirs, original or mundane, sparkling or dull, a new page for it to live upon, each page a world away, coded, unbreakable, impenetrable, filed and forgotten, a world away from the following lonely thought and the grandiose thought from the time before.
The Galán, holding a mirror up to a certain fragile moral flexibility, took his decision and ambled nonchalantly up to the three little drunken carnival clowns. “Girls! You have a thought? There is a new page for every thought!” He bowed most soberly.
John Doe had vaguely imagined, before he became dust, whilst he had perused these very same chambers and ledgers, he imagined ink seeping, bleeding from page to page as a disease was wont to seep from cell to cell. He could not see it, it was just intuition. He thought it and so it was. It was his final contribution. On page one sixty eight, between the third comma and the seventh h in the ultimate paragraph, or, perhaps, between the first comma and the second h of the penultimate paragraph. Too late. The viruses, the bacteria, they are out for his blood.
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