Eridanos

 

When Wettstein awoke from anesthesia, he felt confused.  It was not so much a mental state as a physical condition.  Something was missing.  Mid-day, he felt a little better and his nausea had subsided.  It was an out-patient procedure and, so, his wife drove him home.

After his nap, Wettstein hobbled onto his porch.  The insects that are legion at the end of summer fizzed in the tops of the trees and, at dusk, fireflies beckoned to one another in the lilac bushes.  Wettstein was reading short stories by an Italian writer reckoned to be heir to Borges and Kafka.  (At least, this was what had been printed on the jacket of his book.)  He thought the stories were overrated, but wondered if the author’s short novel was more accomplished.  Wettstein read carefully, made pencil notes in the margin, and, also, corrected typographical errors in the print.  When it became too dark to read, he stroked the fur on his old dog’s throat and behind her ears.  When all was said and done, Wettstein thought that he was missing about twenty years – where were his memories of that part of his life?  He recalled only a few things from that period: some plane trips, a woman, a couple movies and books that had pleased him, high mountains and a skiing accident, a bout with pneumonia.  Wettstein supposed that it was true of most people: if you have lived long enough, much of your life, which consists of memories, will be inaccessible to you.  

The short novel by the Italian author was no longer in print.  But copies were available through some of the used book sellers on-line.  Wettstein was puzzled that most of the booksellers were asking an exorbitant price for the novel – apparently, paperback editions of the English translation were rare: most of them were selling for around $150 dollars.  There was an exception, however, a discount book business in Atlanta and, so, Wettstein ordered the volume from that seller, providing his credit card for the purchase – the novel cost $19 dollars with shipping.  Wettstein supposed that the book would be badly damaged in some way or that the transaction simply would fail, but, in fact, after four days, the package arrived with the novel inside.  

The book was handsome, unblemished and, apparently, unread.  The short novel was printed in large elegant type (Bodoni, Wettstein observed) on crisp cream-colored paper.  The book’s covers were reinforced, stiffer than an ordinary paperback, and more durable.  The volume was elegant and fit nicely into Wettstein’s hand.  On the front end-board, an image from an early painting by Edvard Munch was reproduced in vibrant color, something moody and brooding, and both covers were turned-in so that their fore-ends could be used as book-marks, an aspect of the edition that Wettstein admired.  The pages were set in an adhesive binding.  On one of the endpapers, the publisher had listed other books issued, apparently, as part of a series.  Wettstein surveyed the titles of the other volumes with interest.  The novel was re-issued from a previously copyrighted translation, this new edition printed by a publishing house called Eridanos Press.  

Wettstein read the book with pleasure.  The novel was interesting and well-written and the translation was lucid and unostentatious.  He wondered about the other novels identified as part of the Eridanos’ series.  Most of the books were unknown to him, although he recognized some of the authors.  The novels seemed largely to be works by surrealist or symbolist writers – he recognized something by Huysmans and some short stories from Marcel Schwob.  There were several books by writers with German names, none of whom familiar to him: what was The Waterfalls of Slunj by someone called Heimito von Doderer? who was Hans Henny Jahn? What could possibly be the subject of a novel called The Hierodule or another: Five-and-a-third Deaths?  What was The Cryptogamia by Akutagawa. Wettstein had read only one of the books in the series, The Baphomet by Pierre Klossowski and that was many years ago, when the world held a different aspect for him. (Wettstein was pretty sure that the book was now lost.)  He vaguely recalled that The Baphomet was an icy account of some sort of perversion involving a decapitated and bearded head.  Klossowski, Wettstein recalled, was the brother of the painter Balthus, and an expert in allegorical emblem engravings involving alchemy.  Several books purported to be short novels by Pirandello, or short story collections.  Most of the writers were French or Italian.     

That afternoon, Wettstein looked up some of the books on the internet.  All of the Eridanos editions were out-of-print and, apparently, rare.  Many of the paperbacks were advertised by second-hand book dealers with prices exceeding two-hundred dollars.  Presumably, some bibliophiles collected these volumes.  Pictures showing the book displayed very handsome paperback volumes similar to the book that Wettstein held in his hand – the editions were tightly bound with fore-edges turned-in, covers decorated with paintings by surrealist or expressionist artists.  

His second hospitalization was more eventful.  After his surgery, Wettstein’s lawyer brought him some papers to sign.  He couldn’t communicate because of the tube in his throat, but was able to write on the legal pad that the lawyer rested on his breast.  The lawyer acted as if he had known Wettstein for many years and, as if they had been involved in adventures together.  But Wettstein was embarrassed that he couldn’t recognize the man and wondered if his wife and attorney weren’t plotting something against him.  He was too tired to read the papers that he signed and they might have been anything.  

The days blended into one another.  Then, the tube was extracted from his throat and he was able to eat a little.  An ambulance took him home.  The book by the Italian writer that he had been reading when the emergency occurred was at his bedside.  The binding was handsome and cool to the touch and the print was large and elegant and instantly legible: the letters seem to have sculpted by the gentle touch of millions of eyes on them and their barbs had been polished away so that the characters were smooth as pebbles on the shore of the ocean.  For some reason, Wettstein could remember the events in the book much more clearly than his own life – decades were still missing and the void seemed to be growing.  But the book’s events were clear: a fighter was lost in the mountains; in a remote valley, there was an ancient villa, almost completely abandoned.  But an old man lived in the villa with huge savage mastiffs.  And there was another presence, a whiff of perfume, and a tomb and, beneath the labyrinth of the villa’s rooms a crypt with instruments of torture.  None of these things were retained in his memory, but the moment he took up the book, all of its details returned to him.

After completing the novel, Wettstein studied the book more carefully.  Eridanos was said to be headquartered at a place called Hygiene, Colorado.  (There was no address only a post-office box.) Was this a real location or some kind of sly, perverse fiction?  A new cleaning lady was puttering around the house.  Wettstein’s hospital bed was set up in the formal dining room and, through an arched entrance, he could see the woman kneeling on the floor, mercilessly polishing the hard wood.  Her posture was such that Wettstein could see her rump and upper torso, as well as her arms rowing away at the hardwood floor, but her head and face was not visible to him from his vantage in the big white bed with its stainless steel rails.  For some reason, he could now recall the cover of The Baphomet, an image of a severed head with angry dark eyes grimacing – a detail of a renaissance oil painting of Goliath’s decapitated head or, perhaps, the trophy of John the Baptist presented to Salome?  The cover, as visualized by Wettstein, was red and yellow except for the lurid image of the severed head. 

Most of Wettstein’s books were in the basement – at least, he believed this to be true.  The formal dining room was empty of books – there were a couple of book reviews on a table and a New Yorker but nothing else to read.  As far as he could see through the arched entry into the living room, the books had all been removed from that place as well.  Apparently, his library was now in the basement.  Wettstein cleared his throat loudly and the cleaning woman looked up at him.  He asked her to his bedside and told her to go downstairs and see if she could find a copy of The Baphomet among his books.  The woman looked at him suspiciously and her English was poor.  Wettstein found a pencil on his night stand and wrote the title of the book on an index card.  He repeated his instructions to the woman but her dark eyes were dull and uncomprehending.  She seemed to smell slightly of vinegar.  The woman went away and Wettstein heard her feet on the stairs.  After ten minutes, she returned, panting a little from the steps.  

“Is no book like that,” she said.  She handed him back the card.  

“I have thousands of books,” Wettstein said.  “You couldn’t have looked through all of them.”

“Many, many books,” the cleaning lady said. She nodded.  “But not that one.”

Wettstein said: “But you could scarcely have searched.”

“In the one room,” the cleaning lady told him, “all books are same, maybe ten different, but all the same ten books.  Hundreds.”

This made no sense to Wettstein.  Why would he be warehousing many copies (a hundred?) of the same book.  

The cleaning lady left his bedside.  The shadows lengthened.  He heard his wife’s car in the driveway.  He couldn’t ask her to search for the book.  She didn’t like the basement and was afraid of what she might find down there.  

The next day, Wettstein looked at pictures showing Hygiene, Colorado.  Google images on his Ipad showed a church made from grey and brown field stone standing among some disheveled trees.  In another picture there were more trees with silvery leaves (a species of olive it seemed) shading a few old graves.  A wooden general store with gas pumps and a covered wraparound porch was shown in another photograph, the sort of place that you see at isolated intersections where roads meet in the wilderness.  A tall mountain, its stony upper terraces and peak covered in snow, rose above the junction where there was a café and a street that dead-ended at a row of round pawn-shaped grain bins.  Nothing suggested any kind of publishing enterprise.

The river Eridanos, Wettstein thought that he remembered, flowed from moors where sedge-rimmed marshes were cupped in pot-holes in the tawny, thistle-covered barrens.  The river was the color of tea and flowed north through immense forests, a broad turbid flood undisturbed by any white water or rapids.  Because of the river’s northward course, ice dammed the river near its mouth on a cold grey sea and this caused the Eridanos upstream to flood and change course, wrapping itself around the woods to create innumerable grove-islands when the water was high.  In seasons of high water, the main channel shifted several miles, excavating prehistoric forests that had been drowned by the river and buried in silt.  When the current cut open mud banks, sometimes, beds of golden amber were exposed.  Many of the bright cells of amber preserved brown and black insects in the translucent stone.  

Wettstein asked the cleaning lady to find his atlas so that he could check his impressions as to the river.  She didn’t understand his request.  On the internet on his I-pad, Wettstein learned that the Eridanos river didn’t exist in reality and was said to be mythical.  In his Theogony, Hesiod described the river as flowing into the great waters that encircled the world, Oceanus and Tethys.  Eridanos flowed into the circumambient sea between the Amber andTin Islands.  But this description was not helpful in locating the river – the Amber and Tin Islands are also mythological and don’t correlate with real places. A thousand years later, the monk, Nonnus, wrote that Typhon bathed his monstrous coils in the Eridanos – but this reference in the Dionysiaca (why has no one produced an English translation of this work? Wettstein wondered) probably should be construed only to mean that the constellation named after the great snake was reflected in the waters of the river wherever it was located.  Another source said that Eridanos was a stream near Athens that had once flowed down from the heights to trickle through the city’s agora – but, then, the creek’s canal was bricked over so that the stream flowed underground and, after a few hundred years, its whereabouts were lost as memories faded.  Things could go missing and simply be forgotten – Wettstein knew this all too well.  Virgil, in his Aeneid, solved the problem as to the location of the missing river by simply putting the Eridanos in the Underworld.  It was one of the streams that watered that mournful realm.  Far from preserving recollections, presumably, to bathe in the Eridanos was to lose your memory, to forget about things – so it was odd, even paradoxical, that a publishing house, an enterprise that preserves thoughts and ideas, should be named after such a river.  

The lawyer made a house-call.  He showed Wettstein some records relating to his business.  There were more papers to sign.  The woman who had been sitting by his bed in the hospital was with the lawyer.  She looked worried and, from her expression, Wettstein construed her to be his wife.  Some things were still a bit fuzzy to him.   

Wettstein asked the lawyer why a business would be located in a tiny town in the West without an address, but merely a post-office box.  The lawyer winked at him and said that if a company wanted to avoid process – that is, being sued – it might establish its domicile in a place where there was only a post-office box.  In most states, a complaint can not be served by mailing the suit papers to a post office box.  “If you don’t have a registered agent for service,” the lawyer said, “they can’t get process, can’t get the lawsuit started.  So it will buy you time.  If you can buy time, say a couple months in litigation, that can sometimes be very helpful.”  Wettstein assumed that there were suits and so he asked him about them.  “Settled,” the lawyer said.  “Many years ago.  Don’t you remember?”  Wettstein said that he remembered but he did not.

The lawyer opened his brief case.  It was a new brief case made from leather that hadn’t been completely cured and there was a faint skunk-like odor about it.  The lawyer showed Wettstein some papers.  They appeared to be bankruptcy filings.  “This is 90% complete,” the lawyer told Wettstein.  From the papers, Wettstein concluded that he had been once been involved in the publishing business.

After the lawyer left, Wettstein was very tired and, so, he took a nap.  When he awoke, he found his I-pad resting among the sheets next to him.  He found some more pictures of Hygiene, Colorado.  Above some steepled foothills, a big mountain rose into the sky.  Half of it was bare and without trees and, during most of the year, there was snow on the heights.  In other pictures, the mountain’s summit was without snow and brown, the color of a clay flower pot that you might buy in a nursery.  Wettstein thought that there was a picture of that mountain in one of the bathrooms of his house, but he couldn’t use the toilet any more and, so, wasn’t sure about that – one mountain looks pretty much like another.  He recalled skiing and the cold of ice cast up against his cheeks as he chopped his way downhill, cutting back and forth through powder snow.  He must not have been a very good skier – there was a painful spot and some lumps in the joint of his left ankle, probably a healed fracture sustained on the slopes.  Wettstein thought that a person would remember sharp pain, but, apparently, this wasn’t always the case.

The little field stone church in the photographs of Hygiene had been built by German Anabaptists, members of something called the Church of the Brethren United in Christ.  Historical pictures showed a three-story wooden mansion near the church.  This was a sanitarium for patients with tuberculosis and the reason for the village’s name. Tall walnut trees shaded the sanitarium’s porches and turrets.  Erected in 1883, the sanitarium served patients for only a few years and, then, was transformed into a hotel.  People smoked in bed in those days and the sanitarium burned to the ground in 1926.  Wettstein imagined the lung patients sitting in quilts and comforters in their wheelchairs.  They looked up to the mountain with its white peaks like horns. When was Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain published?  How much money would a book like that make for its publisher?

The Church of the Brethren denied free will except in one respect: God’s grace is resistable, they maintained.  So you could will damnation upon yourself, but not salvation – the latter was achieved by the gift of God’s grace, an election that no good works could earn.  When he was little, Wettstein had been taken by his mother to an immense church.  The church smelled of cedar wood and it’s inside was dark as a hunting chalet.  Some lights flashed on a stage and there was an organ with pipes as big as the muzzles of cannons and the sound that the instrument made was thunderous.  The great auditorium stood among an encampment of tents and the ocean was nearby, long lines of green waves sweeping land-ward and breaking on the cobbled grey beach.  Wettstein recalled his mother holding his hand.  In Ocean Grove, where the church was located, cars were forbidden on Sundays.  Their car was parked outside the village, at the edge of the Asbury Park boardwalk, and to reach the vast wooden auditorium, his mother led him, with another lady who seemed to be older, across an iron bridge over a canal that smelled of saltwater and dead fish.  The sea shore also smelled of saltwater taffy, although this was behind them, on the boardwalk.  The Church of the Brethren built the auditorium at Ocean Grove for revival meetings and it was the largest wooden structure in the world.  Wettstein marveled that it had not yet burned to the ground.  Later, the Brethren merged with the United Methodist Church.

In those days, women wore hats to church.  In the great auditorium, men in black suits carried offering plates mounted on long brass poles and they used those lances to probe the worshipers who put dollar bills and coins in the baskets.  Everything was very well organized.  Wettstein was just a little boy when he attended this church and, he thought, it was one time only.  The experience filled him with the desire to tell others about what he had seen and felt in the church and how the organ had sounded so that you felt its music rumbling in your belly and backbone.  Yes, he explain this to others.  Wettstein thought that his memories of the church auditorium at Ocean Grove were somehow related to the problem of the books published by Eridanos Press, headquartered in Hygiene, Colorado, but he couldn’t quite draw the connection.

Once, Wettstein had enjoyed sitting on his porch and reading.  There was a nurse now who came to see him every other day.  She helped him into his wheelchair and rolled it onto the front porch.  The days were warm, but evening no longer retained the heat from the sunlit afternoon.  After a while, Wettstein felt cold and wished that he had a quilt wrapped over his shoulders and arms and nested across his lap.  He looked across the neighborhood and above the shingled roofs and the crowns of the trees.  Was there a mountain that loomed overhead with white arms outstretched above the foothills?  Wettstein knew that the terrain was flat, but his eyes showed himself something different.  Darkness descended and several streetlights were nudged on by the shadows.  The streetlights were amber-colored and the night flooded the neighborhood like a great, slow-moving river.