Pain Reliever. Fever Reducer. Fast Acting. One by one, I return the bottles to their places on the shelf. None of them says anything about curing existential angst. Shouldn’t your questions about the meaninglessness of life be concisely answered beneath the FDA label? Percent daily values of god and the devil? Aren’t people concerned about this? I move along the shelf, examining the varieties of cough syrup. From behind the bottles, a small demon launches itself onto my face.
Okay, I’m probably telling this wrong. Again. The real story is, I start looking at cough syrups because I am absolutely fed up with vodka and a demon jumps onto my face and asks “Hey buddy, want to see the paradox?”
“Sure” I answer. “Which one?”
“The big one” the demon says. His tiny claws cause a prickling sensation. “Just walk into that swirling vortex on the floor there.”
“Where did that come from?”
“This grocery store, it’s everything and nothing, built on the decaying carcass of physically embodied, undiluted chaos.”
“Oh.” I walk into the vortex.
I feel flattened, stretched, compacted. All the while, the demon is still hugging my face. Then we land. Hard. I get up, rubbing my head and for the first time the demon is sitting on my shoulder, stoic. I can feel the little needle pricks where he was attached to my cheeks and forehead. The ceiling above us is a glass dome, with fantastic colors arcing across it, inconceivable shapes hurtling through space. I mean, I think it’s space. I had never seen a six-dimensional sphere before this. Around us are shelves and desks filled with books and papers, all stained with ink.
“Welcome to the Library of Contradictions” the demon said.
“Contradictions?”
“The longest books are the shortest, fact is fiction is fact, the most beautiful poems are the most hideous and terrifying things you will ever convince yourself that you’re seeing. Don’t read those by the way. Which is to say, read them if you know what’s good for you.”
I pick an ancient-looking tome up from a table and flip through it.
“These books don’t have any words.”
“Exactly.” The demon hovers by my head. “You’re on the right track, chief.”
He flitters down to the floor and starts a winding path through the rows of book cases. I follow close behind, almost knocking over a rhombus-like globe, split diagonally by a zigzagging line labeled ‘Equator’. We finally reach a door, watched over by a one-eyed gargoyle.
“This is the Study. The Scribe sits inside. He can answer any question, but he only speaks a language that doesn’t exist.”
“But if he speaks it, it must exis--”
“Shhh.” The demon hops up on my shoulder and puts a finger to my lips. We walk inside.
The Scribe sits at the center of a giant clock, gears whirring, model planets spinning, pendulums and little wooden birds in constant motion. It fills the entire study with its impossible complexity. I momentarily wonder how the Scribe avoids having his absurdly long beard caught in the mechanism. He looks up from the massive book perched on his lap, ink dribbling from the quill pen in his hand.
“Yes?”
“Boss, this guy has some questions” the demon says, leaping to the floor.
The Scribe looks up at me.
“Hey, I can understand you!” I stammer.
He raises an ancient eyebrow.
“I just thought that if you spoke a language that doesn’t exist, I might not be able to--”
“Think harder” the Scribe interrupts.
“Well…obviously if we’re communicating, there must be some parado--oh. Neither of us is really speaking. So no matter what answer you give me, it’s not really an answer. It’s another question, because I’m the one supplying it.”
“Yeah, pretty much” the Scribe reclines. “You want a beer before you go?”
“Won’t the beer be something else?”
“No, beer is beer in every dimension. The universal truth is that there is no truth.”
“Another paradox.”
“Don’t think too hard about it, trust me. Remember Sartre? Yeah, he does my laundry.”
“Gotcha.” I take a sip of the beer. It’s delicious, but the brand appears to be a mathematical equation.
“See you around.” The Scribe waves as the Study fades to black. And I’m staring at the cough syrup again, beer in hand. I pick a cheap bottle of the generic brand to drink later, slip it in my pocket, and walk out the door. The guard doesn’t suspect a thing.
