81, 92, 212

by Russell Hugh McConnell

The closest I came to finding what I sought was in 1922 in a certain South American city, (which I hope you will forgive me for not naming) in an antiquarian bookshop that no longer exists.  I was in conversation with my friend Juan Carlos Herrera, and he happened to mention that he had in his possession a certain auction book, published in 1903, whose entry for Lot 81 included a most intriguing description.  For reasons that I shall shortly explain, I found his remark most arresting, and urged him to take me to his apartment so that I might see the item.  But we were too late: when we arrived, the place had been violently ransacked and the auction book was missing.

The police wrote the matter up as a common robbery, routine enough in those days before the revolutionary fervor took the hearts of the people, and casual crime was almost completely subsumed in the more general and organized violence of the righteous.  Yet to me, the burglary was a clear piece of evidence that the auction book was of great value, and that Lot 81 described the very item I sought.  Herrera was devastated at the time, and I thought it unseemly to express my own distress, although secretly I would happily have sacrificed his apartment and all of its contents, and perhaps even his life as well, to secure this vital clue.

My desire for this auction book was born from a conversation I had had with a youthful but erudite historian at the Café de Flores in Calais in 1912.  He had been nervous and sweating, his hands trembling so much that he spilled his coffee – an unwisely stimulating beverage, given his state.

Even he knew only that there had been a book auction in 1903 in Paris, and that Lot 81, or 92, or 212 (he could not be sure) offered a description of a rare volume—anonymous, printed in Wolfenbüttel in 1888, yet written in Brazilian Portuguese—which outlined a singular theory of unknown provenance.  The theory was in large part mathematical, with large passages of the book consisting entirely of equations.  Yet the mathematics was woven together with lengthy quotations taken from Aguillard’s commentary on Paracelsus.  Additionally, the book was laden with substantial marginal commentary in three different hands. This commentary was written mostly in English and Catalan, and also occasionally included some terse notes in Classical Arabic.  It was in this marginal commentary where lay the chief interest of the work.

Apparently, the handwritten text continually gestured towards a vast conspiracy at work in the political, social, economic, and religious fabric of the world.  These references were always indirect, but their indirectness seemed to be the consequence not of perversity or secretiveness, but rather of an assumption that the reader was already intimately familiar with the conspiracy, and that it therefore required no explanation.  Paradoxically, however, the persistent implication was that this conspiracy was so vast and subtle that its victims, and even most of its agents, knew nothing of it.  Its aims were obscure.  Its methods were infinitely refined and yet at the same time utterly ruthless.  Its operations could be seen at work everywhere.  It had, furthermore, a Manichean quality, in that the conspiracy had spawned a determined opposition – a counter-movement.  This opposition was perhaps slightly less covert and not quite as far-reaching, a fact that somewhat spoiled the symmetry that the text seemed eager to maintain, but it did consist of a vigorous effort to frustrate or undermine the nefarious schemes of its opposition.

For instance, both the conspiracy and the counter-conspiracy had had their tendrils inserted deeply into the Risorgimento, with both Garibaldi and numerous Sicilian and Lombardian aristocrats (but not, significantly, any of the Piedmontese) unwittingly serving the ends of one or the other party.  Similar conspiratorial machinations ran all throughout both of the Opium Wars, to such an extent that it seemed inconceivable that they would ever have occurred without them, although the mysterious nature of the influences involved make it impossible to be certain which side of the conflict was implicated at which points.  And (it seems too obvious even to say it now) there were undeniable moves and countermoves hinted at in the text which, although incomprehensible enough at the time of my conversation in Calais, would very shortly be painfully obvious as predicting the Great War of 1914.

The young scholar got this far before he abruptly announced that he had to go to an important medical appointment, and rose to leave.  I enjoined him to meet me again the next day at the same time and place, eager to learn more.  He agreed hastily and a little disagreeably – I suspect more out of a desire to get rid of me than out of a desire to continue the conversation.  The next day, however, I was unable to locate the Café de Flores again, and when I asked about it, the suspicious locals (already disdaining me for my clumsy French) reacted with hostile suspicion and claimed that no such place existed.  When I returned to my hotel, I found that my room was occupied by someone else, and my bags, neatly packed, had been placed outside the front door.  

Thus my quest began.  Once I began looking, and began regarding the world with an alert eye, the evidence began to accumulate.  Yet, alas, “accumulate” is the wrong word, because the fruit of my searching was not a coherent and growing body of facts, but rather an irregular stream of sand slipping constantly through my fingers.  For instance, in an antique shop in Lisbon I found a bit of graffiti scratched into the side panel of an antique armoire that seemed to me an unmistakable allusion to the book I sought, although my Latin was too rusty for me to fully understand its meaning.  While the elderly proprietor was occupied with a customer, I took a quick etching of the text on a scrap of paper I had handy and secreted it in my wallet, thinking myself clever.  But an hour later, outside the train station, I discovered that my wallet had been stolen, and the paper lost.

When I later spoke with my friend Professor Paul Harvey, the famous Oxford Classicist, and reconstructed the quotation as best I could, he said that he was sure it was a fragment of Juvenal’s incomplete seventeenth satire.  He remembered it distinctly because of its uncharacteristic misquotation of a phrase from Virgil, but when he consulted his personal library, he discovered that his volume of Juvenal included only sixteen satires.  At this point he became abruptly angry and insisted that I leave immediately.  I sensed a more complicated emotion behind the anger, but whether it was embarrassment, fear, or something else, I could not tell.  The next morning he was dead, struck down by a laundry truck while crossing High Street.  I later learnt that the driver of the truck exhibited a distressed and nervous manner under police questioning, and had been identified as a criminal refugee from Holland, wanted for forgery.  He was deported back to Holland, but was murdered before he could stand trial. 

The vastness and subtlety of the conspiracy began to haunt and terrify me at all times, as I became more and more aware of its subtle and inescapable manifestations.  One morning in Bucharest I read a newspaper account of a military execution.  In the moment before his death, the condemned man shouted out words that were impenetrably cryptic to the soldiers who shot him and to the journalist who wrote the story, but which shook me to my core, because they struck me clearly as a translation of the lines that had so vexed Professor Harvey.  Less than two weeks later, I read an alarming sequence of numbers written in a neat secretarial hand on a slip of paper inserted into in a pack of Hungarian-brand cigarettes, which I found next to me on a train to Turin.  The reach of the thing was, evidently, unlimited.

Given the power and reach of the operation, it seemed inconceivable that I might not myself have a role in it.  My searching, my wandering to and fro, surely had to be serving some purpose within the vast project.  But how could I be sure which side I was serving at which moment?

The long-sought auction book had been my only hope, and I never got so close to it again as I had on that nearly-fateful day in South America.  I thought that if only I could find the blessed or cursed thing, I might be able to penetrate the mystery.

Hopeless of untangling the matter, I nevertheless made an urgent effort, pathetic in retrospect, to confound the machinations of both sides by taking abrupt, random action.  At first these were small.  I replaced the newspaper on the front step of a Boston house with the previous day’s newspaper.  I inscribed a short poem in chalk on the back wall of a famous steakhouse in Paris.  Surely that would throw them off!  At least (I thought) it was something.  Let them assign meanings to my actions.  Let them feel anxious about my role and intentions, as they had made me feel so anxious about theirs.  Later, however, I decided that these subtleties were inadequate, and the only thing for it was decisive, headlong action.  So I stabbed a bus conductor to death with a screwdriver in London’s East End, confident that this was something they could not have anticipated.  But then, the very next morning, I overheard a young student holding forth on Zola in a park, and he recited a passage that seemed to me an unbearably cruel taunt, confirming that even in my random act of violence I had been serving a complex set of conspiratorial interests all along.  Naturally, I accosted the student, with the intent of getting him to divulge all he knew, but he and his companion fled, and I could not catch them.  In any case, I suspect he knew even less than I did, and was only another pawn in the great scheme.

Eventually, I started to consider just giving up – succumbing to the conspiracy and going along with it, as if I were merely one of the countless dupes who knew nothing.  Yet I found this impossible.  I walked among people in the streets of two dozen cities, feeling envy and contempt in equal measure at their blithe unawareness.

To my mounting horror, I realized the futility of my having tried to escape the reach of the conspiracy through random action, because I saw increasingly that animals and even plants were readily assimilated to its aims.  A flock of swallows, swirling in the air above the British Library, carved dark patterns in the air, and shocked me with the blatancy of the clue they presented.  A mandevilla plant in an elegant garden in Lima traced a shape so bold and unmistakable that I ran to find the gardener at once and demanded that he explain himself.  I questioned the man at length before finally satisfying myself that he was as innocent as his own manipulated plants.

I am at a loss.  Naturally, I consider suicide every day, but I know that there is no way that such an action could be anything other than an intended outcome of the vast design whose meaning I fruitlessly sought.  Even now, I can sense the conspiracy at work in the very breeze that shakes the lilacs outside the window, and I feel that with every breath of corrupted air, I am complicit, and there is no way out.