I held open the door of the cafe, waiting while a few of its patrons filed out. Thanks, said the one with the laptop, the to-go cup, & the empty laptop bag. Sure thing. Walking down the hallway, I glanced at my watch. After ten, minute hand still right of the six. I spotted my friend at a table & went over. Simon, I said warmly as I approached. A look of surprise crossed his face, succeeded by one of disdain; I was taken aback by his evident wish to strangle me. We said ten thirty, didn’t we? We said ten, he replied. No, I would never have agreed to ten. He rose from the table, muttering that I would have dishonored ten just as well as ten thirty. Cortado? he asked. Sure, I said, sitting down while he walked to the counter. Two empty cups stared back from across the table.
Simon came back with two lattes. I said thank you, & sorry I was late. He laughed. Oh, it’s not that. It’s just you’re the hundredth person this morning to say my name. I looked around at the other patrons, about ten in all. Anyone you know? I asked. No, of course not. They weren’t talking to me, or about me; every third person in here is talking about that pirate, Simon Danziger or Danseker—I’ve heard this single morning every one of his innumerable names. I assumed this was something new at the box office, but Simon informed me it was worse than that. This was a product of academia, & it touched on the work of his favorite writer, his beloved & Argentine Borges. Simon was as great a scholar of Borges as one can be without a word of Spanish, & evidently he was upset by this matter of the pirate, whatever it was. He had trouble believing I hadn’t heard of it. Perhaps you spend too much time in cafes, I said. He sipped his latte & unburdened me of my ignorance.
It begins in a haphazard bookstore in the heart of Buenos Aires. How Borgesian, I said. Simon glared. A graduate student called Damien Grosz was in desperate need of a thesis, & he found it in a pile of manuscripts whose authorship was unknowable or unknown. From the midst of the heap he drew some cord-bound compendium whose style was unaccountably familiar. He betrayed his excitement to the proprietor, who of course wrung every dollar from his pockets before he let him go. I wish he’d wrung the bastard by the neck. A week later he was shouting in the streets that he’d found some lost papers of Borges. Not a signature on one of them; no, this was all on the basis of “analysis”, of certain likenesses computationally or cabalistically determined. Evidently Borges wrote so well that God has granted him the mystery of apocrypha.
Now among these papers of “Borges” was a draft or fragment beneath the heading Hypostases of a Lowland Corsair (or however you’d say that in Spanish), & there in a few lines of text & a dozen footnotes was the life of a Dutch privateer, who at the turn of the seventeenth century was the terror of the Barbary Coast. Beneath a catalog of his iniquities was a timeline (or several timelines superimposed) of the final years of his life, & a table containing the many names by which he is known to history: Danziger, Danseker, Dancer, & six billion others. Below this list, the fragment ends with a phrase in all caps: ELLOS SON S*M*N*D*N*Z*R.
Naturally Grosz seized upon these pages as the subject of his doctoral thesis. On the basis of The Library of Babel, of course—of course, I agreed—of course, he argued that this text was the cipher which decrypted an insoluble & hitherto invisible problem of chronology. How is it that van Meteeren, in his thirty two volume history of the Netherlands, could suppose that Danziger was stabbed in Paris in 1609 by a man he had cheated & robbed, while Lithgow in his Totall Discourse could claim he still lived in 1615, waiting to be lured ashore in Tunis & beheaded by a janissary blade?
The answer, claims Grosz, is in the orthography. By various arguments, whose pages stack higher than the whole of the doubtful manuscript, he asserts that Borges came to see that each of the pirate’s names could be thought of as a separate man, though for the Fleming & the Scot they were the same man. Beyond this banal, even trivial observation, he contends that for Borges, both possibilities were true. Thus he explains the superposition of the timelines, with no emendation for the multiple deaths; thus he explains the gathering of the names in a table of permutations. Borges, says Grosz, saw these histories & these names as the cause of the great proliferation—in reality, as well as in print—of this corsair of the Low Countries, this Danziger &/or Dancer. And in a fragmentary text, long buried in the corner of some bookshop in Buenos Aires, Borges had achieved a combinatoric hypostasis, a reunification of the many pirates under a single name & substance: the heptagrammaton S*M*N*D*N*Z*R.
Highly Borgesian, I said. Well, plausibly. But you haven’t heard the worst of it. This Damien Grosz is not a student of literature, but of philosophy. In his hands (be they severed each with the opposite foot), this fragment became not only a dissertation, but a series of “thought experiments.” These are not experiments, of course, & certainly not thought, but little stories to make things intelligible to any ape or puppy. And he’s given them cute little names to get sick on: “The Polyune Pirate,” “The One & Many Simons,”—”Simon Says,” I interjected. Bastard, you get the idea. Well, now he’s multiplied these “thought experiments” beyond all permutations of Danziger’s name, & every one of them stars a pirate by some variant of my name. It’s become impossible to sit in peace in a place like this. You pick the table furthest from the bearded guy in the flannel—no offense to you or the ancestral mask of your kin—but it makes no difference; his friend comes in & they start experimenting with thought—a thousand trials, & they’ve never once achieved it—& soon you’re at the counter begging to dump your coffee in a styrofoam cup. And what hurts you most, Simon? To lose your job as a cafe wastrel, or to hear your name & know it’s not about you? That’s cute, my friend. No, this will all be over soon.
I asked him what sort of swashbuckling apocalypse he had in mind. Well I swear I don’t follow it, but you can’t help overhearing. Grosz has developed a whole metaphysics of the problem. If the presence of the many Simons among the half-truths we know as history is the cause of their real existence, it follows that the histories we now compose are the cause of the inexorable past, that we ourselves are caused by histories not yet written. “Writing names in The Book of Life,” says Grosz, the dolt, “creates in the Future a demand on the Past for the Reality of the Now in Time.” Fucking unbelievable. And so, against the backward multiplication of pirates & other scoundrels, he’s proposed a global synod, a kind of anti-Babel he’s calling “The Library of Eden.” He imagines the world will come together to agree on one name for every man & beast & creeping thing that creeps upon the earth, that some convention center in middle America will witness the restoration of the Adamic tongue. We had a good laugh at this.
Presumably you’re skeptical? I asked. Well, is it Danziger or Danseker? Jehovah or Yahweh? I can only imagine the furor. No, there are only two possibilities for a thing like that: dissolution into utter inconsequence, or total nuclear war. And which do you prefer, Simon? He thought about that for a while. Well, both of them would shut these people up. And the former has its advantages: I could sit here with my coffee observing the changes wrought by impotence, disappointment, futility—I am nothing if not an anthropologist. But in the end I’m a man myself; I have sympathy for all of you, my brothers. I want what’s best for you, & now more than ever I see that’s the nuclear option. In the expanding mushroom cloud we may finally reunite our scattered idioms. And we only need one word to do it, one word we can all agree on. Boom.
Boom, I repeated.
Boom.