Listen: Guildenstern Dolores came to Bunk Falls on a winemoon night where the stars went black and the moon was a blood red blot behind the pine trees refracting light in the puddles in the dusty potholes or against a glass shop window displaying souvenirs to tourists who never came. She hadn’t ever seen a winemoon before that; he knew of them only vaguely. But you had to know about the winemoons, even a little. They were a big attraction on Earth.
Listen: Guildenstern Dolores came to Bunk Falls on that winemoon night on directions she found in a pattern. Patterns, patterns. Patterns were everywhere. Guildenstern had trained himself to notice them in the movement of fallen pine needles in the gas station where she filled up her car; in the half seconds between the flickers of light above the head of the sleepy, wide-eyed clerk who looked at Guildenstern like she had never seen anything like him ever before; in the way the light warped on the bag of chips Guildenstern purchased for a whole 4 VOMS (and 4, too, he thought, must have had meaning, whether it be the way 4 can make 8 which forms an infinity symbol, or the way 3 plus 1 equals 4, and those numbers… well…)
When Guildenstern Dolores dreamed she saw pine trees bending in the wind and forming a face. Tree shrews collecting exactly 77 nuts, burying them in pitch black soil. Ethanol, dripping. Drip. Drip. Drip. So on. It took Guildenstern to Earth, old mother Earth, to the United States of America, to Washington, to Goldfinch County. To Bunk Falls, and then to Harrow, and then—to Harrow Public Library.
Red, brown bricks, white plaster. Black stains. Concrete stairs with green railings going up to a black, lacquered door. The windows were circular, like eyes. Guildenstern looked at them; they looked back at her. Reflected in red.
No stars on a winemoon night. The street lamps buzzed. Bad time to be out.
‘Shoulda got a fuckin motel room,’ Guildenstern muttered to himself. Which was absurd, of course; this was all part of it. The pattern. The big winemoon, the powerlines humming, the mountains going dark—the squat, rotting library with the black stains. Apophenia. His heart was beating.
The receptionist at the library’s front desk had a pale, wide face. He was sleepy, too, like the gas station clerk—he leant back in his chair, against the white plaster wall, where the ceiling light didn’t quite reach, in a smudge of darkness. He looked up, at a spot on the ceiling.
‘Mrrmph,’ he greeted.
‘Humm,’ Guildenstern, who would have preferred if all conversations consisted of grunts, greeted right back.
It seemed a very flammable place, all around; rotting wood and long shadows, cheap old desks harboring dark mould and years of abandoned gum. It stunk like old books and wet wood and, faintly, gasoline. Years of dust clung to window frames and the insides of ceiling fans.
Guildenstern was turning corners, arbitrarily. He could not discern the way the place was organised; he came around a bookshelf and faced a damp dark alley of shelves displaying CDs of detective shows she had never heard of (Sherlock Jr.; Lawyer-Detective; Tanya, Dog Detective: The Detective Who Is A Dog, etcetera). And around this corner, a table and a series of low shelves holding dusty board games (Guildenstern noted a variant of Monopoly that depicted the monopoly man as wearing a sort of scorched raincoat; and with a misshapen, darkened head, like a fist or a fruit or something). The indexing system was no help. The numbers and letters had no relation to one another, even to Guildenstern’s pattern-mazed eyes; the titles given to them were apropos of nothing. The detective shows shelf was labelled ‘Skin pink. Soft.’ And the board games shelf: ‘Earthblood. Metamorphic in nature.’
The air was close and thick. It ate up the sounds of Guildenstern’s footsteps and her heavy breathing. The dark filth in the shadowy corners and under the shelves seemed to swim and move. Guildenstern rounded another shelf and paused. The shrew looked back at him.
It was a pen-tailed tree shrew. Guildenstern knew them from the brief research he had done on the Pacific Northwest the night before she moved there. He had become distracted, entirely, by the tree shrews, had come out not knowing the locations of the major cities and megaspheres in the area, but was aware of the tree shrews’ fondness for the nectar of the bertram palm, native to Malaysia, where they come from, and their uncanny resilience to alcohol, which is thought to be a result of the fermentation of the nectar of said palm. They were invasive, and nobody knew why, or how they had gotten there. He had seen some just earlier, digging out of a garbage can.
‘Hi there,’ Guildenstern murmured, leaning faintly down.
The shrew had beady black eyes that shimmered in the library’s cloudy light. It seemed to size her up. It turned around and fled, suddenly, into the library.
Guildenstern followed it. Not intentionally, but the library was tight; it was all corners and hallways, and he kept knocking his shoulders into things. Wherever he went he saw the shrew skittering away. Through the shelves, under the plastic chairs, under the wide flat desks with the hollow black metal legs in the computer lab where the lights were off and the fat cubic monitors seemed ethereal in the pale wine light, black faces glinting. Past the lab, on the smooth wood floors, over a spot of leaking water—no, ethanol, gleaming ethanol, stinking like fire and rotten fruit. To a dark corner, now, with cobwebs laden with dust, where tapes, only some labelled, rested on each other.
It all stunk. Like wood and dust and ethanol and patterns, too; apophenia had a stink, Guildenstern swore, an unplaceable metaphysical sort of stink, but one nonetheless. It was eating her.
Guildenstern was melting, inside out. Boiling. His guts were going to fall out. She had come too far. She felt it, in her guts, by god, in her guts. He took, shakily, the tape. Second in its series. Faded out and dull colours, worn, scratched: The Postmodern Secret to Finances and Finding Love: Open the Secret Eyes in Your Guts. Part Two. A man grinning, thumbs up, next to a loveheart with an open eye on it.
‘And here you are. At long last.’
‘Oh. Holy shit.’ Guildenstern would have jumped if he hadn’t felt so sick. The tree shrew’s voice was hollow and shaky. It did not move its mouth, because tree shrews cannot speak English.
‘You came here from a colony on the moon,’ it said. ‘Why?’
‘I was—’ Guildenstern clutched the tape to her chest, like it would stem bleeding that wasn’t there. She was screwing up inside. ‘I was told to.’
‘To meet me. To meet me in Harrow Public Library. Of course. Akavita.’
Guildenstern dry retched. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. The red light of the nearby window was growing oily, thick, intense. It was hard to breathe.
‘But surely blind faith is made even more blind, what with your Secret Eyes?’ The shrew looked to Guildenstern for an answer. She had none. Its eyes were deep and black and unintelligent. ‘I wouldn’t know, I suppose. I’m just a pen-tailed tree shrew.’
Listen: Guildenstern Dolores never went back to Harrow Public Library. Only once did she ever consider returning the tapes. It was not a winemoon; it was midday, in fact, and the sky was glassy over Peak Surrender and the flat rows of rotting businesses in Harrow. The library hunkered, bitterly, like it was in its own patch of shadow. Guildenstern came as far as the door; as far as the stink of ethanol.
The Secret Eyes in his gut told her, no. Never here again.
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