The Unfinished World (20 page)

The Greeks divided fever into four categories: continuous, from excess of fire; intermittent, due to excess of water; quotidian, from excess of air; and quartan, caused by an excess of earth. They also believed most fevers were fed by an excess of yellow bile. The patients infected were starved and given honey with water, or hydromel, to reduce the bile and blood in the body.

Arab doctors in the Middle Ages were vastly more knowledgeable about fevers than their European counterparts. Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad Zakariya al-Razi, a great scholar and philosopher, was the first to distinguish between the two terms “fever” versus “hyperthermia” in the form of heatstroke. Fever caused by the sun. The Eternal Library is careful to prevent both types.

In the nineteenth century, fever was still regarded as its own separate disease, and indeed a disease with many variants and causes. Autumnal fever, jail fever, hospital fever, bilious fever, nervous fever, malignant and even pestilential fever were all supposed separate forms of this disease.

Also in the nineteenth century, Charles Mackay wrote that “men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

He wrote: “How flattering to the pride of man to think that the stars on their courses watch over him, and typify, by their movements and aspects, the joys or the sorrows that await him!”

The Eternal Library does not acknowledge a heaven. The Eternal Library's official policy states:
Man is life's custodian. The Librarians are the custodians of man and his passions, and any knowledge he
conceives of or possesses.
Therefore, the librarians are the custodians of the stars and the skies; any other notion of heaven is a dream, a false idol to explain the fall of mankind.

William Osler once said that humanity has three enemies: “fever, famine, and war, but fever is by far the greatest.”

The Eternal Library firmly agrees. This is why they must lock up the fevers, with all the spells and science and strength of will that lives in the world. This is why the fever librarian must never fail. The consequences would be unthinkable—an unending disaster for the future of man.

Sometimes, the fever librarian wonders if she might be her own ghost. She cannot be sure of how long she has been here at the Eternal Library. She cannot be sure that she still has a soul. Her heart beats, her skin burns and bleeds, but a ghost, too, can be full of blood. A ghost can be a billion years old and dead inside forever.

Only this ghost feels sure she is rising from the dead at last. She is not sure of anything else in the world, of the facts or the fevers or the future, but she is sure that a thing is about to begin or end; which, she does not know.

It is late in the year, the season of bonfires, when the fevers finally swarm and overtake the librarian that tends them. She has been smoldering for months under their disturbing influence. Now she begins to burn.

Be assured that the fever librarian is actually the hero of her
story. Be assured that she is much stronger than she looks, especially in the throes of such heart-driving heat. Here she is eating her notes. Here she is pulling out drawer after drawer of index cards. Here she is overturning the tables in this temple of learning. Here she is with gallons, with buckets, with fire hoses of water to put out these fevers and drown all our passions and finally, finally send them back to the sea from whence all our troubles are come.

The Unfinished World

S
et swam into the world with the new century. He was so many years the youngest that he sat as audience for his siblings, rapt in the soft glow of their stage presence. And in return they made him their favorite. They protected him; they enfolded him in their obsessions; they gave him their secrets to keep.

His brother Cedric, an explorer by trade, took him to dusty, dark museums fallen out of favor. He showed Set impossibly large-hipped stone women and spear tips and tiny skulls no bigger than an apple. He told Set stories about the hunter that brought down the saber-tooth, about the pygmy races who lived hidden in the hearts of jungles, about the sleep spells shamans cast in the days before dreams were invented.

Constance—his only sister—served him sweets and ginger beer, and bought him penny dreadfuls and souvenir pen wipers—all the things his mother, Pru, forbade for their vulgarity. (Pru did not quite say that Constance was vulgar, though she labeled her “modern” in a way that implied no small degree of disappointment.) Constance liked to read Set love letters from her admirers.
She would laugh, a low laugh like far-off thunder, and toss the letters on the fire. They always seemed to be from glamorous people. Set ambushed a distracted Pru at the piano one afternoon and asked if his sister was famous, and Pru frowned and said, yes, possibly more than she should have been. Set asked what she was famous
for
, and the Chopin became very loud indeed.

Set's father was the family enigma. He died when Set was quite small, and before that he did not seem to live in the big house on Long Island with Pru and Cedric and Constance and Oliver. He was always just Father, a blur or blank half-remembered, filled with whiskers and ample pocket-watch chain, large teeth and small keen eyes. In later years, Set was always mixing up his memories of Father and of President Roosevelt on newsreel.

Set's brother Oliver had an orderly mind, doors for each feeling and shelves for the strongest memories. So it was not surprising to Set that Oliver should own a self-dubbed Cabinet of Curiosities that he opened only for Set and for his lover, Desmond, whom everyone pretended was Oliver's business partner even though he and Oliver used to sit in the back at the Fortuna Music Hall and do what Set-as-a-child thought was a good deal of embracing for two grown men with whiskers.

Pru allowed Oliver to keep his cabinet in the parlor: a long room clad in green and garnet, full of model ships and music boxes and stuffed owls, it was the perfect place for Oliver's oddities. Oliver said his cabinet contained the best of this world and the remnants of the one before it. Set was confused and fascinated by it, this gilded wooden case, long as one wall and topped in sections by a carved snake, a wolf, and a fierce giantess; this exhibit where brass clocks butted against stringless lutes, and chalky human bones overlapped pearlescent fish scales and
fetuses floating in jars. Indonesian ceremonial masks jostled for space with small paintings by Manet and Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec; a little glass chimera peeked out from behind a magic lantern; leather pouches full of old faerie dust sat squat and useless, their magical essence long since dried up; three crystal balls were wrapped in maps made by Chinese explorers in the 1500s; a tapestry of a stag hunted by dogs hung crooked and slashed in one corner; a jar full of trolls' feet was tipped over and spilling out; and everywhere were stuffed creatures, claws and feathers, obelisks, pieces of armor, bits of Claude Lorrain glass, and branches made of wood, of iron, of ash.

It's just a jumble, Set said to Oliver, the first time he was allowed to view the collection. He preferred the museums Cedric took him to, the glass cabinets and typed cards serving as careful descriptors. Those objects felt old, felt important. They were discoveries. What was all this except a lot of disordered rubbish?

Oliver and Desmond smiled at one another. There
is
an order, said Oliver. You just need the key. He showed Set the thick black notebook—the Catalogue, he called it, and Set had the uncanny sense that this was Oliver's brain, the flesh made word—filled with precise descriptions and locations for each item in the collection in Oliver's small, careful handwriting.
Curiosity #21,
read Set.
Preserved
Chlamyphorus truncatus
, commonly known as the pink fairy armadillo. Specimen originally from central Argentina, acquired 1890.
He flipped to the middle of the notebook:
Curiosity #760. Hinged brass collar, Iron Age. Embellished with decorative patterns in the Celtic style. Inlaid with glass or precious stones; ornaments missing or lost
.

Inge was born as her mother died. She grew to resemble her mother so much that her father despised her; he saw her as a constant reminder of all he had lost. He had doted on her sisters and brother, had been a fair, if slightly stern father. But now he abandoned the care of his youngest to her exceedingly English governess: a stout woman with a wine-colored complexion and a faint brown mustache, a woman who went in for pinching and hair pulling and other invisible injuries. Inge's older siblings were sent to boarding school, but Inge was not. (The family had also, it should be said, fallen into penury by then.) Your father, said the governess, has thrown you away, and she would squeeze the soft underside of Inge's arm, or, when she was impassioned into imprudence, smack Inge across the mouth so hard that her lip split. On those occasions, Inge was instructed to spin tales of her own clumsiness, and these only served to make her father dislike her more. Her mother, the mirror, had been so graceful. The older she grew, the less her father could bear to look at her. And so, as the money dried up and the decaying manor fell apart around them—and the family and few remaining servants moved into a single wing—still Inge's father managed to avoid her, dining late and rising early, spending days walking with his dogs and his rifle out in the village and through the abandoned tenant farms.

Like many lonely children, Inge retreated into a life of the mind. Her family still had a grand library, damp in the winter from the leaking roof but gloriously full of books. She read voraciously. She liked the plays best: the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's histories, Molière's farces. Her tutor Mr. Trimble, a dapper little man straight from Dickens, taught her to read Latin and French, and she devoured the books of Hugo and Flaubert. She read Melville's
Typee
and dreamed of adventures on the South Seas. And when
she was quite old, perhaps twelve or thirteen, Mr. Trimble discovered she had read no faerie stories (for their library contained none) and brought her the whole of George MacDonald's collected tales. The mustachioed governess disapproved. She did not believe little girls should be taught untrue things; that such lessons would take root in the mind and cause appalling flights of fancy. But Mr. Trimble kept the books in his rented room in town, and brought Inge a steady supply. She thought
At the Back of the North Wind
was the loveliest book she had ever read, and she vowed that someday she, too, would leave her lonely home and her small village and her cold, distant family, and that she, too, would ride the wind, right up to those little islands in the sun-soaked parts of the world. And she thought she might take Mr. Trimble with her—even though he was older than her father, and rather crumple-faced and pockmarked—because he understood that the most important things in the world were the kind you made up for yourself. And also because he wouldn't take up very much room in the boat.