Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Third Golem
Friday, March 26th, 2010
This story is part of the Daily Cabal’s third anniversary celebration, a collection of kabbalah-themed stories. (Thanks to Mechaieh for the theme!) The other anniversary stories are Angela’s Mechaiah’s Daughter, David’s Has he thoughts within his head? and Luc’s Before Exile.
Little is known of the activities of the celebrated writer Jorge Luis Borges after he faked his own death in 1986.
According to some reports, he lived in a secret bunker under the Argentine National Library where, with several assistants to help read and research, the blind author devoted himself to the study of the kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition that had figured in many of his stories and poems. He focused on the golem-making rituals that turn created into creator in worshipful mimicry of the divine. Using techniques that disassembled and recombined the most basic linguistic elements of the Hebrew bible, Borges invested every waking hour in study and practice. No stranger to creation through language, he became an adept sometime in the early 1990’s.
Assistants beside him, he fashioned three humanoid shapes out of clay. On his own, he inscribed them all over with mystic syllables. When the golems woke to consciousness, they were alone.
One of the three crumbled to dust before they discovered they could sustain themselves by continuously reading and rereading Borges’ work. They haunted the library’s stacks each night, seeking their maker’s stories, poems, essays, letters, speeches–anything that, like them, bore the mark of his mind.
They discovered that, by copying out his work in their own hand, they could renew and refine their rough forms into something more human. Soon they had no need of reference copies, every written word of Borges’ having been pressed into their neuronal clay by their neverending rereading.
Eventually, one began to write not only finished pieces, but their drafts, starting with a copy of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” that contained Borges’ every strikeout and marginal jotting. Even the handwriting was similar. After years of diligent scribing, the golem re-composed the totality of its maker’s career and began to venture new compositions–a line of poetry here, a phrase two of prose there. Another decade, and he was composing new stories, tales Borges would have written.
The moment the golem completed the last word of his first slim volume, The Voice of the Mirror and Other Stories, Borges, living in a distant part of the city under an assumed name, found that he could see again.
“Light,” he said to his companions at a café table under evening trees. “Everywhere there is light.”
Papa November
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
The shortwave radio still sat on the desk at the back of the cabin and it felt like more than luck when Shelly found a numbers station on her first run down the dial. A woman’s voice read the numbers, calm, never pausing for breath, reciting five-digit combinations.
When she was young, Shelly’s grandfather only gave those stations a few seconds if they found one during the day. They’d move on to more interesting transmissions, accented voices from places she’d find in the old atlas with musty-sweet pages. At night, he’d let the numbers ramble.
“Soothing,” he’d say, and make her cocoa in a metal cup. “Codes sent around the world for spies, supposedly.” He’d open another beer, grandma would read fat historical paperbacks, and Shelly would doze off.
The monotone numbers soothed her now, while her mind spun questions for morning. Take or avoid the interstate? Go north to the city? How near was a town where she could top off the tank? The further she got tomorrow, the better.
“I know how you think,” Glen always said. “You’ll never leave me ’cause I’ll guess where you’re going before you even get there.”
But he hadn’t known she would leave. She hadn’t known until she drove past work and onto the onramp. Then she couldn’t go back — even if she got home by five like everything was normal, he would know.
The radio voice repeated the call sign “Papa November Pa-pa Nov-em-ber,” and maybe Shelly did doze, because a man unfolded himself from the air up near the ceiling, his gray skin nearly silver in the light of the bare bulb. He climbed down the dresser and looked at her.
She tried to speak, but all the muscles in her throat and neck froze rigid. The man’s shoulders were twisted, one leg was too short, one foot too big. He stared as if seeing into her, and evened out. He had Glen’s eyes and forehead, then he didn’t; there was a hint of grandpa’s many-times broken nose, then his face went mannequin blank.
Shelly felt her lips moving with the numbers, as if she knew them.
The gray man replied with codes of his own: “35-A14, 24-C9, 63-J2…”
She woke just before dawn with a hunch. In the atlas, she saw she was right: those were pages and map-grid coordinates. Places she could go.
Glen might know her, but he didn’t know Papa November.