The Book on Fire by Keith Miller

the leather binding, the gold leaf.
Still standing by the bookshelf, she opened to the first page and I saw her
lose herself, instantly, within the opening paragraph. When she looked up she
was thirty pages deep. She shook her head slightly, bent it again. Forgetting
her glass of wine, still immersed in the book, she moved to the sofa and sat
down, gingerly, so as not to jostle her eyes from the page, lay back, and
continued reading. This was a book I knew more intimately than my own body. I
knew the placement of every word on every page. I knew the stains, nicks,
tears, folds, and their histories. I had read it one hundred and eleven times,
and each reading was separate and fresh in my mind. So I could follow her
reading, knew from the slight shifting of her loins or quickening of her breath
or plucking of her thumbnail at the leather which part she’d come to. I had
never before watched someone read an entire book. It was like watching someone
live a life in three hours.
    When she’d finished she lay back, staring at the ceiling. “Oh my
God,” she said. She stood up. She turned back to the book and placed her palm
upon it as if bestowing a benediction or receiving its mana, then went to the
bookshelf where her wineglass stood and drained its contents in a single gulp.
She paced around the chamber muttering, touching books and walls, seeing
nothing, like someone in a trance.
    She lay on the sofa, placed the book on her breasts, and passed out.
I could hear her soft breathing. Slipping the book from her fingers, I blew out
her candle and left the library.
    For three days I sat in my rooms drinking coffee and wine. I sent
Abdallah for sandwiches. I tried to read, to paint, but the words made no
sense, the colors would not adhere to the paper. The bustle in the midan seemed
the scurrying of ants. I woke myself, talking in my sleep. Three days were all
I could manage. Midnight of the third day I walked to the lighthouse.
    When I next saw the youngest librarian, in a cavern so colossal her
candlelight could not finger the farthest shelves, she’d gone mad. She moved
around the perimeter of the chamber, dragging her hand across bindings,
stammering, howling. “Incubus!” she cried. “Demon lover! Why have you forsaken
me? I can’t read, I can’t sleep. Send me another bookmark, send me another
book.”
    Her fingers scraped at the books, ripped some from their places, but
one glance and she cast them aside, leaving a trail of broken-winged creatures
on the carpets like downed grouse. I was her ghostly gundog, fetching the
discarded volumes after she’d exited the chamber, smoothing the pages,
replacing them on the shelves.
    All that day I followed her, deep into the library, through rooms
I’d not yet encountered, through rooms I’d not imagined, had not been able to
imagine, through rooms she was able to enter, perhaps, only because of her
madness. The room of false gospels written by fallen archangels; the room of
nightmares of being devoured by one’s own children; the room of books written
by quadriplegics who dipped their tongues in ink. Rooms describing
constellations in alternate universes. Rooms of books written by shamans who
inhabited the bodies of lions. A room that contained a single book, made of the
cured skins of a hundred Nuer virgins. Its leaves were black and smooth as the
rinds of aubergines, its print the color of moonlight.
    We met in a room of books written in blood, love lyrics written with
pricked fingers on scraps of newsprint or ripped bedsheets, by those who had no
other materials at hand, written in dungeons or tower-top cells, written by the
condemned, by those who faced the executioner’s scimitar at daybreak. There
were no bowls of apricots in this room, no sofas, no carpets, only the terrible
books and a stone floor.
    She knelt, face in her hands, weeping.
    I stood in the doorway. “I want to read you,” I said.
    She uncurled so slowly. Her lips quivered. Her eyes traveled up