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David Christopher Lane, Ph.D, is a Professor of Philosophy at Mt. San Antonio College and Founder of the MSAC Philosophy Group. He is the author of several books, including The Sound Current Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the graphic novel, The Cult of the Seven Sages, translated into Tamil (Kannadhasan Pathippagam, 2024). His website is neuralsurfer.com

The Livraria of the Second Thought

David Lane

A Culinary Preface

Funny how stories sneak up on you when you're not looking, like a cat that pretends indifference until it pounces on your shoelace. My Thursday ritual after class—where we had just unraveled the mystic threads of Sufism (a subject equal parts poetry, paradox, and patient bewilderment)—was hardly mystical. It was simply carbohydrate-driven. I drove straight to Gusto in Long Beach, a bakery the New York Times—with its Olympian authority on all things cultural and edible—once lauded as among the finest in America. And so I procured two loaves, though to call them “loaves” is like calling a Stradivarius “some wood with strings.”

These I intended to pair with Rebel vegan cheese—the only plant-based attempt at cheese that has ever come close to whispering “Camembert” without choking on the word. Add to this pairing a flamboyant dollop of Small Batch Spicy Mango jelly (the condiment equivalent of a tango in a jar), and suddenly the world's geopolitical crises seem less pressing.

Across the street sits a coffee shop that dispenses oat-milk lattes with missionary zeal. The ubiquity of oat milk is itself a parable: invented in Sweden in the 1990s by food scientist Rickard Öste, it has colonized the globe with the efficiency of IKEA furniture and the smugness of an eco-friendly Tesla owner.

Refreshed and slightly over-caffeinated, I wandered to Planet Books. To call it a “bookstore” is to flatter it; it is more of a bohemian junkyard of bound matter, where the Dewey Decimal System would weep quietly in a corner. Adjacent is an antique warehouse littered with curiosities—ancient Coca-Cola machines that tempt me like relics of a fizzy, sugar-drenched Eden. Alas, they cost roughly half a month's salary and would likely collapse my floorboards.

Inside the bookstore-that-isn't, I rummaged as I often do for pulp science fiction paperbacks of the 1920s through the 1960s—those luridly illustrated covers where ray guns always gleam and women seem perpetually underdressed for interstellar travel. But deeper in the stacks, I strayed into stranger territory: occult texts, their cracked spines whispering in Enochian footnotes. Here Borges tapped me on the shoulder with a memory of The Library of Babel—his infinite, maddening labyrinth of books containing every possible permutation of text.

From there my imagination slipped its leash. I pictured a subterranean book labyrinth where readers get permanently lost among titles such as Recipes for Angels Who Love Devil's Food Cake, Geometry for Cats Fond of Squares, or Booking Tea Time on Mars. The shelves multiply like fractals; the exits recede into paradox.

And then the thought: language itself is the architecture of reality, and what we need—desperately, comically, heroically—are new blueprints, even if at first they look like Escher drawings or IKEA instructions missing two screws.

This reverie reminded me of my younger self, age 22, accidentally locked in the Hayward public library after hours—so enthralled I was by Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden that I failed to notice the staff leaving. Or of that classic Twilight Zone with Burgess Meredith: the man who survives nuclear annihilation only to shatter his reading glasses, a metaphor cruel enough to have been designed by Kafka moonlighting as a prankster god.

And so, fortified by two cups of coffee and a slab of transcendent bread, I walked out with my mind buzzing. Out of such minor rituals—bread, books, Borges—strange tales ferment. Consider yourself warned: the story that follows is as enlightening as it is peculiar, a little like biting into a loaf of sourdough and discovering a passageway to infinity.

Episode I — The Stair with Two Warnings

I had one free afternoon before the plenary on “Fiction as Epistemology,” a title that promised to be either a treatise or a sedative. Lisbon in late spring is a syllabus of light: white squares of sun on azulejo, tram bells answering themselves, the smell of salt pulled through alleyways like a bookmark. At lunch a scholar from Coimbra, gracious and economical in her recommendations, told me about a second-hand shop “with a magnificent occult collection, rarities and curios,” and cautioned—smiling—that it was easy to miss.

I missed it.

I walked down Rua do Alecrim, then up toward the Chiado, cutting through lanes that folded back on themselves with the logic of parentheses. I stopped twice to admire the city—once a view of the river bruised with reflected clouds, once a church square where an elderly man fed pigeons with the patience of copyists—and then, wrong turn by wrong turn, I drifted into a narrower street where cafés gave way to shuttered workshops. I asked a passerby—a tall, quick man carrying a newspaper rolled like a scroll—for directions. His English was careful, the way a person speaks when the words are borrowed from a friend they haven't seen in years. “Down, then left, then the little door with the bell that doesn't ring, yes? You are seeking the books of the night.” He pointed. “It is smaller than you expect.”

Smaller was the word. The door, painted a retired green, held a single flaking gilt letter: L. In the window: three cracked scrying mirrors, a glass paperweight encasing a startled moth, and a waist-high stack of Revista de Estudos Esotéricos, bound with string like an idea kept from wandering. No proprietor. Inside, the air held the tang of old glue and stone.

On the right, shelves: Clavicula Salomonis, a worn quarto of Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, a Portuguese translation of Iamblichus with the binding repaired in two different centuries, enumerated in pencil. On the back wall a brass bell hung beside an elaborate stair spiraling down into a coolness that felt like reason leaving the room. A handwritten sign mounted at eye level read:

SECOND-HAND OCCULT BOOKS — downstairs

just watch your step and your head. You don't want to lose both.

I have rarely disobeyed a sign that invited obedience. I went down.

On the underside of the top step, a narrow brass strip—new to my eyes, old to the stair—advised in Portuguese, Não comece aqui. Do not begin here. Half a turn later, the wood contradicted itself with equal courtesy: Quem começa aqui já começou. Who begins here has already begun. The House enjoyed setting its warnings in pairs, like hands.

There were no customers below, and, as far as I could tell, no proprietor. There were only rooms. Rooms with shelves that seemed to grow directly from the stone, rooms with niches shaped for books that could never be mass-produced, rooms lined with cabinets whose drawers were labeled not by alphabet but by humors—SANGUINE, PHLEGM, BLACK BILE, YELLOW BILE—the last of those slightly ajar as if some reader had stepped away mid-consultation to transform into themselves.

Beside the stair, a second bell hung from a leather strap, smaller than the brass sentinel above, its clapper replaced with a cork. A card pasted to the strap said, in a tidy hand: Ring if the room rings first. Rooms do not ring, I told myself, and did not.

I called out once. My voice, professional and polite, died pleasantly. The stair's warning practiced itself on my body: I ducked my head on instinct beside a low lintel and felt my heart bump, a metronome finding tempo.

The scholar's reassurance—smaller than I expect—was wrong. The store widened as a thought widens when you think it alone. At each junction a little placard, hand-inked in a steady italic, named the next territory: ASTRAL CORRESPONDENCES, MECHANICAL DIVINATIONS, DREAM ANATOMIES, SYMPATHIES AND ANTIDOTES, MANUALS FOR ANGELS WHO DO NOT READ. I laughed once, academically. Then I forgot to check my laugh for arrogance.

MANUALS FOR ANGELS WHO DO NOT READ shelved slim codices tidy as etiquette. Their titles were anthropologies of avoidance: Flight Procedures for the Illiterate Seraph, How to Recuse Yourself from Inspiration, On Being Spoken Through by Silence. On an endpaper someone had written, softly: Angels do not read because they remember. Beneath it, as counterpoint: We read because we forget.

I wandered through a chamber of globes with blank oceans. Farther in, the brass bell that should have hung upstairs appeared again, here, but without a clapper. On a central desk a folio lay open to a page of marginalia in delicate brown ink: small corrections about a circle that would not close, a diagram annotated with the Portuguese for “if this is true then it is not,” and below that, in English, a precise note: The plan is the place.

The rotunda beyond held a pedestal with a book bound in eel skin, secured by an iron hasp whose keyhole was not key-shaped but letter-shaped: U. A neat instruction on a slate read, Para abrir, escreva o que falta. To open, write what is missing. I wrote U; the hasp managed not to move. I wrote you. Nothing. absence. The eel skin twitched, which is an action books should avoid. I left it to its comedy.

In MECHANICAL DIVINATIONS, machines understood prediction as carpentry. Wheels with teeth calibrated to coincidence; little cabinets with drawers for days that had not yet arrived; a brass contraption announcing, in faint purple type: This device reads the future of persons who never say please. I promised to say please more often.

At a junction a placard no larger than a calling card—its metal etched with a winged staff—marked one of three doors. The caduceus. I filed that fact as useful. Then I forgot to leave.

A corridor of VARIOUS RELUCTANCES offered pamphlets: How to Enter a Room You Are In, What to Do When a Door Introduces You to Itself, Fourteen Apologies for Looking Behind You. The twelfth apology—I thought I heard my name—wore a penciled X in a familiar patient hand. Beneath it: Of course you did.

In a bank of drawers labelled ERRATA, slips were stapled to torn pages with soft gold staples that seemed to forgive steel. The corrections adjusted not facts but emphasis. On a sheet from Borges: The Library is not infinite; it just refuses to end. On a scan of a lecture handout of mine, a firm gloss: You confused exits with conclusions. I closed the drawer politely.

At the far wall the alcove plaques—ASTRAL CORRESPONDENCES; SYMPATHIES AND ANTIDOTES; DREAM ANATOMIES; HARMONICS AND HARMONIES—ended with a small, modest sign: MISDIRECTIONS & THEIR CORRECTIONS. The aisle curved like a sentence discovering its subordinate clause.

Time passed as if it had been asked to wait in the hall. I turned back toward the stair after an hour and found a passage I recognized only from a dream I had not yet had. I was not disoriented, not yet. I was, instead, interested. I made a scholar's bargain with myself: ten more minutes, then the stair. Why, after all, hurry to climb away from actual happiness?

A second circuit through SYMPATHIES AND ANTIDOTES, a third through ASTRAL CORRESPONDENCES, and there it was: a slim pamphlet I had never seen outside of footnote—the Compendium for the Mislaid Patron (London, 1829), anonymous, paper browned to a doctrinal color. I slipped it open. The first page contained an epigraph in Latin and then, in unembarrassed English, these instructions:

In houses like this, the subject of a shelf is not its contents but its method. What is arranged here is not knowledge but routes. When in doubt follow Mercury.

A small stamped caduceus appeared in the margin beside Mercury. I looked up. The room had three doors. Over one, that same winged staff. I went through.

The new hallway offered a perspective of shelves so long it felt like I was looking at the past seen not from a hill but from within it. After ten minutes the path forked. I took the right fork. I passed a case of astrolabes. I passed a chair with a cushion molded by the weight of someone else's evenings. And then, without noticing when, I had been underground a very long time.

At the first swerve of worry I took out my phone. The maze of the twenty-first century tried to greet the maze of the fifteenth and failed. No service, the phone said. The battery, which I had neglected at lunch, showed a grudging 17 percent. I toggled airplane mode on and off as if hope required a switch.

Hunger reported itself the way a conscientious student arrives five minutes early and stands at the door as if in apology. I told myself to go back. I turned around. The Mercury placard was not on the door behind me. On a table near the junction lay a brass bookmark in the shape of a key with four enamel insets reading A, E, I, O. The consonants—apparently—could take care of themselves.

I went forward again, because it felt like going forward would eventually be retroactively defensible. I took a left into DREAM ANATOMIES. Books hung from the ceiling like stalactites, each by a ribbon. On the far wall a frame held a pen-and-ink plan of a cellar that could have been this one: the ink long evaporated at the edges, like a memory that had done its work and dismissed itself. In the lower right a caption: Exitus in imagine.

The exit was in the image. I did not pretend to understand. I did not, yet, concede that I might need to.

Near the stair, set into the riser of a step I'd already trusted, an index card in a brass frame waited to be noticed: The plan is a courtesy the place extends. Use it, then misread it. I touched the brass. Warm. I kept going down.

Night arrived without telling me; the light in those rooms did not alter; it existed like a conclusion that had forgotten its premises. I lay down on a bench and, with the confident foolishness of men who think complexity is the same as safety, I went to sleep.

Episode II — Practicalities, or the Science of Hunger

I woke to the smell of metal and paper and the fact of my mouth. My watch gave me a time but no context. The phone offered 12 percent and the same refusal of network. I took a picture of my surroundings as though later I might file an expense report for them.

Behind a roll-top desk that would have pleased a nineteenth-century magician I found, in a dusty hamper, the sorts of provisions that can survive habit and nostalgia: a tin of sardines in olive oil, a packet of dry crackers, a tin of quince paste wrapped in paper printed with a lion at rest. There was, too, an amphora of water stoppered with wax. A drinking glass, faintly opaline, understood its task without being told.

The staff kitchenette revealed itself behind a curtain embroidered with astrological signs in a thread that once dreamed of being gold. Overnight, someone had added a little pocket to the curtain—a buttonhole stitched in the color of a cancelled stamp. Inside: a teaspoon bent by an experienced disappointment. On its stem, engraving: Stir counterclockwise for clarity. I obeyed and brewed black tea whose steam wrote an illegible literature on the shelves and then retired.

I ate with academic restraint which, in emergencies, looks like greed. The sardines were better than many metaphors, and the crackers were almost an idea. I rationed the quince as if sugar kept time. I drank carefully. Afterward, because eating can be a vow, I took out my notebook and wrote in my hand that looks more convincing to me than my speech: I will leave now.

I did not leave. The pamphlet about Mercury lay where I had left it, performing purpose. In HARMONICS AND HARMONIES, the Negative Catalogue—CATáLOGO NEGATIVO—listed absences that were a librarian's fingerprints: Mirror to mirror: none. Index to the Unbaptized Names: out. Manual for the Shadowhand: misplaced. A fresh card now: Receipts for acts performed under the influence of libraries: unlocated.

Tucked behind the drawer, the diagram with labyrinthine grace, annotated in sharp Portuguese, reminded me: Down two steps is up one corridor; the names are ladders; the ladders can be drawn. I walked two rooms, turned where it said right, and arrived back at SYMPATHIES AND ANTIDOTES beside a case of bottles labeled with diseases you catch from thinking. The diagram was not wrong. It was not right. It was something else: a set of privileges I had yet to earn.

At noon, or whatever pretend noon the watch supervised, I discovered, behind MARTIAL FOLK PRACTICES, a larder with tins replenished by a taste nearly mine. Alongside olives and favas sat a tiny tin in gothic script: Tempo—Cortes Finos. Time—Thin Cuts. Five biscuits, each stamped with a numeral. I swallowed 10 because I am a coward. For the length of a biscuit, hours found their choreography, and clocks agreed like jurors. Then the trick wore off. Inside the lid, a label scolded: Do not snack on duration.

On the larder's plaster, a ledger of appetites—Sardinas x 12→C. A.; Favas x 4→H. O.; Olives x 3→E. P.—and below it the instruction: Who eats, annotates. I added A. M. beside QUINCE x 1 and gave the line a dot because I wanted it to look finished.

I tried the mark-through strategy one tries in archives and mazes. I tore narrow ribbons from my notebook and tucked them into shelf edges, at door frames, beneath mouldings—faint flags my future self might salute. The House knew the trick in its bones. When I returned, the ribbon I'd set under MISDIRECTIONS had been threaded through a book titled How to Leave Breadcrumbs No One Will Eat.

The House offered a fire escape sign with bureaucratic confidence: ESCADA DE INCÊNDIO—FIRE ESCAPE—with a bright arrow. I followed. The arrow moved; the stair did not exist; a broom leaned as if it had been appointed to my failure. Behind the sign, a second placard admitted the joke with municipal candor: Placeholders for panic. Below, smaller: See Colophon under The Door That Does Not Believe in You. I had not yet met the Colophon. Foreshadowing is how buildings socialize.

On the roll-top desk a stack of postcards tied with aircraft cable displayed photographs of rooms in which nothing was happening with conviction. Each card's reverse read Wish you were here—struck through and replaced by a penciled Wish you were not yet there. A line beneath promised: If you find the mailbox, you have already left. I addressed one to both my office and the bookstore and left it for a postmaster with taste for paradox.

Toward evening—my manufactured evening—the small bell's corked clapper felt like a modest dare. The card had said Ring if the room rings first. In the far corridor, a single book fell forward with the respect of a bow. That is how rooms ring here. I rang once, and waited, and did not call out.

Night announced itself again in my head rather than in the light. I slept on a bench under VARIA, the bent spoon beside me like a conductor's baton for an orchestra of hush.

Episode III — The Catalogue of Myself

On the third day I discovered a card catalog designed to make me suspect that an architect had read too many theosophical treatises. Four banks of drawers faced one another like quartets in a diplomatic stalemate, each labeled not with letters but with the words FIRE, WATER, AIR, EARTH. The system implied that a person asking for Steganographia should first declare a temperament.

I opened AIR and found not index cards but slips of thin paper perforated with tiny holes. Held to the lamp, the holes gathered into words: descent is ascent when falling is flying. Behind that maxim a second layer of holes conspired to form a call number: A.M. 4:16. I have learned not to mistake coincidence for intention, but in that moment I felt addressed.

A.M.: Amaro? Morning? Anno Mundi? Agrippa, Magus? A.M. might also be my own initials, if I allowed the vanity of memory to reassign them. I went searching among shelves whose order, once cryptographic, had become intimate. I found A.M. 4:16 in ANATOMIES MORAL & MYSTICAL, fourth alcove, sixteenth shelf: a thin, stingy book, Portuguese, titled Manual do Visitante Retido—Manual for the Retained Visitor. It smelled of cloves and camphor. Inside, a set of instructions far more prosaic than any grimoire's: a list of storerooms, a diagram of fire escapes, a note about a cistern “for the dry months,” and a warning that the door upstairs “sometimes takes the habit of forgetting the way to outside.”

Back at the drawers, WATER lifted a fleet of slips cut like flags. You cannot drown in a sentence unless it refuses to end, their perforations insisted. W.M. 2:08 led me to WAYS & MEANS—On the Administration of Distance, whose holes, when held to light, offered: Seek the breath at your fingertips. EARTH staged its own intervention. Write your way up, not out, and E.T. 7:03 sent me to EXITS & TRUANCIES, where the Manual do Visitante Retido had rewritten itself into a primer for leaving arguments without inventing enemies.

Then there was a fifth drawer I would have sworn had not been there: smaller, handwritten, ETHER. Inside: blank slips except for perforated coordinate pairs—(3,3), (4,1), (1,5)—which triangulated a room I had decided was wall: HOW TO WALK THROUGH AN ARGUMENT. Within, a lectern displayed a manual on Stages of Persuasion and the Rugs That Accompany Them. Plates showed carpets whose borders argued with their fields. A marginal hand—the same patient script that would later address me as Professor—cautioned: Do not let the carpet tell you where the room is.

Across the back wall hung a framed page, leaf from a ledger in which the younger hand of A. P.—Amaro Pereira, I now understood—listed the Names under which Readers Find Themselves: The Borrower, The Indexer, The Recidivist, The Apologist-in-Residence, The One Who Rations, The One Who Pretends to Leave. Beside each name: a duration, a food, a book. For The One Who Pretends to Leave, the duration was always six days, the food always sardines, the book always A Brief Record of Doors. It is an insult to be ordinary; it is also a comfort. I felt both.

I turned around when the Manual do Visitante Retido told me, and found, in a case near the end of the aisle, the book that wanted me. Its spine was unhelpful; its author was no one I knew; its title was A Brief Record of Doors. I opened the case because I had become, as the Portuguese inscription had suggested, staff. Inside the book's front cover a bookplate: a standing figure holding a key and a stylus, the name in blackletter: Amaro Pereira, Proprietor. The ex-libris motto below the figure read, in a Latin I recognized as locally minted, Quisquis intrat exitum scribat—Let whoever enters write the exit.

In the back of the book, after entries about doors more diligent than doors had any right to be, notes in a small, efficient hand:

Do not treat the rooms as rooms. They are sentences.

Do not seek the end of a sentence where you found its beginning.

The vowels belong to the House, the consonants to you.

The door you arrive by cannot be the door you leave by unless you consent to leave as someone else.

I laughed then, not because it was funny but because nothing else in my body was willing to offer an adequate response.

Late that day, a line that took its time becoming omen: You will know you are almost out when you encounter your own handwriting explaining to you what you forgot to understand. I wanted to believe it general advice pretending to be personal. I turned the page. On the verso was a note in pencil. I recognized my hand. Follow the vowels on the keys you found Day One. The rooms that start with A and O go down; E and I go up. Ignore U; it is a trap. Trust Mercury until he lies. When he does, forgive him; he is a god of departures.

Between the pages lay a second brass bookmark, a compass where cardinal points should have been: A E I O. There was, deliberately, no U.

Beside my marginalia another, steadier hand added in tiny capitals: THE HOUSE DOES NOT TEACH; IT ADAPTS. Below it, in Portuguese from someone who refused to compromise: A casa escreve-te. The house writes you.

To prove I could still be a scholar, I climbed to a mezzanine newly invented over a room of atlases both terrestrial and imaginary. On a lectern opened to a map of the Mediterranean that had grown a second coastline like a reflection lay a portolan chart titled PORTOS E PORTAIS—Ports and Portals. The rhumb lines drew themselves toward me as if magnetized by the part of the brain that still enjoyed diagrams. I made notes, which is to say I obeyed panic with dignity.

Before sleep I turned my phone on. Six percent. No service. I turned it off again like a man closing an argument he cannot afford to win. Somewhere behind a wall, water made peace with gravity.

Episode IV — The Alembic of Days

On the fourth day the bookstore told me its weather. The corridors grew colder toward one end and warmer toward the other. The brass insets against the shelves cooled and warmed my fingertips like memory stepping on the brake. If I stood under LUNAR HERBALS I could hear, faintly, the city, the way one hears a radio left playing on a floor one does not occupy.

The Manual do Visitante Retido contained a sentence I had overlooked: Do not trust straight lines when your need is urgent. The problem with straight lines is that they appear to add up to progress. I took the advice. I made a series of unnecessary detours and, for my trouble, found a storeroom not recorded anywhere: a basement under the basement, a little warren for things that cannot bear eye contact. Small religious kits whose gods did not recognize one another; a box of planchettes inlaid with naïve moons; a tied bundle of newspapers reporting entirely civil miracles; a crate of wine labeled simply PORTO.

I am scrupulous when I am hungry. I opened a bottle and poured a cup. The wine was an argument that had decided to become a dessert. It had the good manners to make me remember I had a body.

I washed at the cistern the Manual had promised, cool as if it had never met the sun. I shaved with a safety razor abandoned by whoever had last been trapped or employed here and told myself that grooming is a kind of prayer. I changed my shirt, an act that felt like a thesis statement.

Back among the shelves, a small book titled On the Architecture of the Underworld described arrangements of space for the commerce of souls: catacombs readable left to right or right to left; rooms whose doors were located in their floors; systems that changed not daily but with the reader's mood. In the margin a former student of the book had written in block italics I knew from grading, No building like this can be built. Below, in a less legible hand, someone else replied: Then we must be elsewhere.

I found the mirror carved with dolphins whose expressions belonged to bureaucrats and pressed along its frame. The mirror tilted forward. Behind it, a recess; in the recess, a cloth-bound book stamped without pity: Colophon of the House.

It had no paragraphs, only lists with commentaries. Rooms are arranged by metaphor, not subject. Movement requires conjugation: change tense to change place. Every exit is a quotation; identify the source or be returned to the index. A fold-out diagram—three folds, then four—offered a plan that would have embarrassed a city. In one corner, an annotation I recognized as correct only after I decided to believe it: The topography responds to hunger, sleep, and certainty; lower any one to soften the walls.

New pages had acquired themselves. THE PROPRIETOR'S MOOD reported in policy bullet points: If he has shelved in anger, expect direct routes to lead to stutters. If he has shelved in love, you may come upon your own notes before you take them. He never shelved in despair. That work he saved for readers. THE INVENTION OF THE LEFT confessed that asymmetry here was cultivated; Turn left only when you do not want to; right will always be what you mean by forward.

A side room that I had misfiled as wall introduced itself as THE RULE OF FIVE ERRANDS—not a rule but illustrated precedents: hands relabelling APOLOGIES to APOTHECARIES; a rope raising a bucket out of patience; a spine resealed into speech. A caption corrected me with gentle cruelty: Do not confuse a picture of the errand with the errand.

To lower certainty, I narrated my steps in the conditional. The House softened as promised. DREAM ANATOMIES developed a mezzanine where before it had only implied a lintel; HARMONICS discovered a second keyboard for its unspeaking instruments; SYMPATHIES raised a dust that made the air briefly visible and then apologized for it.

The fado rose through the floor—a woman's voice with the rough kindness of paper—singing, Volta quando fores outros—Return when you are others. At the top of a half-stair of stone, a door that disliked company engraved itself anew: You don't want to lose both. Beside it, a printed notice: Leitor persistente: a porta não mudará. Persistent reader: the door will not change. Below, in pencil: But you might.

On the Colophon's rear paste-down, a tiny inventory label—white, fat with digits—corresponded to an entry I had refused for reasons now ostentatious: THE DOOR THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN YOU. The entry was brief and did not enjoy being read: When the door doubts, lend it an index. Cross-reference yourself to exits you have not yet deserved. Do this in pencil.

I hate pencil. It doubts itself. I sharpened one anyway and wrote my name beside EXITS ARE QUOTATIONS, beside READERS WHO INSIST BECOME STAFF, beside THE INDEX AS EXIT. The wood of the door inhaled. I did not push. Not yet.

Back in HOW TO WALK THROUGH AN ARGUMENT, a crimson runner had been folded into a MÖbius strip of wool—a demonstration that if you step cleverly you never cross a border. I did not step. In a case nearby, a fountain pen with a nib ground to my hand lay on felt, its little card reading: Loaned to A. M. The pen wrote elsewhere what I meant here and here what I meant elsewhere. I declined, for once, to sign.

I slept on a rug patterned in proofs and counterproofs. The barometer at LUNAR HERBALS moved its needle from Stoic to Useful to Listening. The House had not answered. It would make me.

Episode V — The Ledger of Loans

Behind MANTIC MECHANICS, a door disguised as a section break opened onto a narrow room with a utilitarian desk and a ledger larger than some beliefs. The ledger recorded loans the way hospitals record births: names, dates, titles, and a column headed Returned?. The earliest entries were in a careful hand, the later ones in a haste that became illegible during certain months. Names I knew—scholars, a poet who had written three good lines and a life to justify them, a bookseller in Porto, two women with the same last name and the same year of birth—appeared with titles I recognized and some I did not: The Geography of Fog, The Instruction of Angels, The Smallest Exit, A Rhetoric of Locks. In the Returned? column there were checkmarks, question marks, and, three times, a small drawing of a key.

A second column I had not noticed before appeared beside my own name, recorded a week before my arrival: Errands Owed. Beside it: 5, stamped by a device friendly to bureaucracy. In pencil below: +1 if he refuses gratitude. I resolved to be grateful badly but reliably.

On the desk lay a sheet titled in Portuguese, A Regra das Cinco Recados—The Rule of Five Errands—signed A. P.: Locate the book that remembers its reader. Return the volume that refuses company. Relabel a shelf that has never learned its name. Repair a spine that would otherwise confess. Bring water from the well where the language sleeps. After these, the door may consent to believe in you.

I began.

Locate the book that remembers its reader. In A Brief Record of Doors the flyleaf bore my name overwritten in a hand that had learned to imitate mine excellently. On the next page, impressed without ink: a diagram of the room where I had truly begun, and the notation You were seen. Answer enough.

Return the volume that refuses company. A quarrelsome quarto in MECHANICAL DIVINATIONS leaned away from its shelfmates like a principle. I whispered to it as to cats and texts in trouble: “You are fine; you are not in danger.” The hiss uncoiled into a resigned hum. The spine clicked back against wood. Done.

Relabel a shelf that has never learned its name. PREMONITIONS held almanacs and saints too pragmatic for prophecy. I replaced the label with PATIENCES. The books approved with the sound of pages remembering a word. Two-thirds of an errand, with the remainder paid by not bragging later.

Repair a spine that would otherwise confess. DREAM ANATOMIES offered a book split open to its argument about our desire to become diagrams. I mixed glue in a tea-saucer and resealed the secret. The binding exhaled, relieved of honesty. Perhaps done, my notebook said in its refusal to become smug.

Bring water from the well where the language sleeps. In the room where A and O corridors delivered their downward meanings, beneath a hinged plank, the well waited with a rope and a bucket that knew their tasks. The water tasted of coin and consonant. I filled the opaline glass and carried it to the ledger room.

As I set it down, a small sound admitted modestly that it had expected me: the precise click of a bolt sliding back in a door I had not perceived. The Employees Only gate at the top of the earlier stair stood open as if it had never learned to be closed. On its lintel, newly visible: O leitor que se torna pessoal sai pelo ressoal sai pelo índice. The reader who becomes staff leaves by the index. Taped beside it, on ruled school paper, a sixth instruction: Errand +0: Forget to thank the House. The door keeps you until you remember.

“Thank you,” I said aloud. Not well, but honestly. The corridor listened for compliance, not sincerity. Satisfied, it let me through.

I climbed. A corridor of dictionaries and encyclopedias received me like minutes from a meeting I could not skip. On a reading stand a volume of idioms opened itself to dar com os burros n'água—to meet with failure, literally to drive your donkeys into the water. An arrow in pencil pointed to the idiom, then to me, then to the door with glass panes.

At the end of the corridor a door showed day that did not look like any day I had known in the bookstore. My watch suggested three o'clock but no longer asserted which day recruited that hour. I put my hand on the latch—so ordinary a click it offended everything I had learned—and opened the door onto an alley.

I was outside.

Episode VI — The Exit that Reads You

The alley opened onto a street I recognized as if it had worn a mask and now decided we were friends. The sky had been washed and pinned up to dry—the sun a brass bookmark too bright to use. I stood on uneven stones and felt my knees consider gratitude. I turned back. The door showed simply L in retired green. In the window, unchanged, the three mirrors and the paperweight. The stack of journals had lost no height to my absence.

A man walked by carrying a rolled newspaper. He was the passerby who had given me directions; I was sure of it the way a reader is sure of a line that later turns out not to exist. He glanced at me and then at the door with an affection I recognize in myself when I pass the building where I was first hired. We nodded—the international gesture of men who are neither threatened nor threatening and are, therefore, very close to useless.

I looked down at my clothes and saw that I was dressed neatly but not as I had been six days earlier. I held Colophon of the House under my arm like a portfolio. That was a mistake. The House had not intended its apparatus to be exported. I thought I should return it and then complete my escape with a clean conscience. I did what you do when you want to be sure of yourself: I checked my phone.

It was dead. The screen reflected me as the mirror had, with a delay.

Inside, the front room, small shelves, the counter. No proprietor. No movement. The air used the same perfume as before and then, gradually, a new base note—something like citrus and algebra. The stair yawned. The sign with its joke reported duty: SECOND-HAND OCCULT BOOKS — downstairs / just watch your step and your head. You don't want to lose both.

On the blotter: a note addressed to Professor in the precise, patient hand I had come to trust. Leave the book on the step. Then, please, go. Do not look behind you until you have counted twelve.

One obeys or one refuses; both are forms of reading. I placed Colophon on the topmost stair. I turned toward the door. I counted: one, two, three. On four I heard breath—someone moving like a careful ghost. On five, air shifted as bodies do in libraries. On six, the bell rang a small farewell. On seven, the door gave way to my hand with such ease that I thought I had imagined resistance. On eight through eleven, I thought only of light. On twelve I turned.

There, framed by the door, stood the passerby with the newspaper, the newspaper unrolled now to show a headline I could not read at that distance. He had the kind, distracted expression of someone about to ask for directions. I recognized his face without wanting to. I had shaved it on the fourth day. The House does not waste introductions. He—older by the width of a shadow—asked me, in patient English, if I knew the way to a bookstore with a little bell that did not ring. I felt the precise sensation of an annotation being written in a margin I had thought was mine.

I should have said No. I should have said Don't go; the plan is the place; the place is a plan that plans you. I should have said You will be there six days; you will eat canned Portugal; you will drink water that vowels have abandoned. I should have, but the city is very strong, and some sentences complete themselves even against the writer's will.

“You are seeking the books of the night,” I said, as if the line had always been mine. “Down, then left, then the little door with the bell. Smaller than you expect.”

He thanked me. He walked away. He did not look back.

That evening, in my hotel room, I plugged my phone into a wall innocent of the House and watched it resurrect itself. It believed, hampered only by time zones, that I had missed nothing more serious than emails. I showered for as long as reason permitted and then ate olives with a jealousy that embarrassed me. From the window a slice of the river—less a body of water than a body of light learning to be weeknight.

Morning brought a text from the conference organizer asking if I might chair a panel because the designated chair had “taken ill.” I replied yes, because that is what one does to keep faith with the career that keeps faith with you. In the panel room I introduced papers about archives and the weather of fiction. I asked questions that made the presenters feel known. Afterward a young scholar with nervous hands asked if I believed that Borges's libraries were metaphors or places. “In the best cases they are both,” I heard my mouth say with the agreeable aloofness of a man who has managed, barely, to survive his specialty.

At lunch, the local paper lay folded with civic neatness. On its front a photograph of a little green door. The caption promised the municipality would “move to regulate unlicensed subterranean commerce.” A smaller photograph of a bell with a cork where a clapper had once been illustrated the piece. “Safety always wins,” a colleague said, generous in his ignorance. “Until it does not,” I said, too quickly.

In the hotel I checked my jacket pocket for my notebook. Inside, without ceremony, the brass bookmark with the vowels. It had come with me. I do not know whether it was welcome or whether that mattered. The U that was not there was the exact shape of a mouth that could not decide if it would speak.

Before my flight, I walked the city purposely the way a person walks when trying to remember a dream in order to forget it properly. I did not visit the alley. I did not visit the bookstore. I ate a pastel de nata and burned my mouth lightly and thanked the burn for insisting that the body is at least sometimes an exit. On the plane I watched the safety video and did not think about steps or heads. I touched each icon on the card anyway; twelve seats to the rear exit still counted as twelve outside the House, which is to say authority is an agreement and I was still agreeing.

Back in Los Angeles, the campus looked as it always does when the jacarandas condescend to take their turn. I taught a seminar on “Labyrinths & Indices.” I set “The Library of Babel” and a chapter from René Daumal. I told the students metaphors are maps you are permitted to fold. When office hours ended I closed the door and took the brass bookmark from the drawer where polite objects wait. I held it in my hand as if testing a temperature that does not change.

On the fourth week, a colleague stopped me outside the humanities building. He had the exact distracted expression I knew from the alley. He asked if I might recommend a used bookstore near where he would be traveling for a conference. “Somewhere,” he said, “with a good occult section.” I smiled in a way that I hope looked like sympathy and not complicity. I told him there are always such stores if one pays attention. I did not give directions.

At night I sometimes wake sure that in the other room someone is paging slowly through Colophon of the House. When this happens, I rise, walk to my shelves, and stand there for a time I do not measure. My books look perfectly domesticated, like animals that have learned the hours. Every so often a spine seems to lean imperceptibly forward, a desire neither to be chosen nor to be spared. If I listen carefully I can hear water somewhere within the wall. The building persuades itself to wait.

Once, grading, I found the brass bookmark in a student's binder, clipped to a page on which she had written with courage I had not taught her, Exits are promises the text keeps to your future self. “You lent it to me,” she said when I asked where she'd gotten the clip. For a moment I could not remember if she was wrong. The House recruits kindly.

I pass our departmental copy room and, through its glass, see a cobalt stapler glinting in a green light I have not seen since Lisbon. I do not enter. I count to twelve. On twelve, the hallway becomes a sentence that knows its period. I decline to provide it. I keep walking.

The story, like the House, is organized by its index. Mine is brief.

Index

A — Amaro Pereira (proprietor), 61; A Brief Record of Doors, 34-37; Angels (who do not read), 9-10, 92-94.

E — Exits (as quotations), 49, 120-21; Employees Only, 28, 70; Ether (drawer), 98.

I — Index (as exit), 59, 104-5; Instruction of Angels, 53; Invented mornings, 80-81.

O — Obedience (forms of), 72, 86-88; Occult (as method), 5-7; Ordinary, the discipline of, 122-24.

There is no U.

The plan is the place. The place is, sometimes, the plan that reads you. If you insist on leaving, write your exit. Then count to twelve. Then do not look back.

I have been very careful not to look back.