99 Stories of God

76. Whatever Is Happening?

She was reading a review of a book about the life of Houdini. No one knew how he had made the elephant disappear. She was at that moment in the review where this was discussed for the first time. It was in 1918. The elephant’s name was Jennie, not with a Y. She thought she might buy this book, but even then she would not learn how Houdini had made Jennie disappear, because it simply was not known. And no illusionist had managed to reproduce the trick or even put forth a plausible explanation of how it had been accomplished.

She was reading a broadside that reviewed a number of books. The reviews were extremely intelligent and gracefully presented. She read about a cluster of works by Thomas Bernhard, the cranky genius of Austrian literature, works that had just been translated into English. She doubted that she would buy these books. She learned that he always referred to his lifelong companion, Hedwig Stavianicek, as his “aunt.” She was thirty-seven years older than Bernhard. She couldn’t imagine that she had been his lifelong companion for long.

She had had a fever for several days and she was loafing around, drinking fluids and reading. With her fever, the act of reading became ever stranger to her. First the words were solid, sternly limiting her perception of them to what she already knew. Then they became more frighteningly expansive, tapping into twisting arteries of memory. Then they became transparent, rendering them invisible.

She liked her fevers. They brought her information she could not express to others.

Then she thought that the gangster phrase If I told you, I’d have to kill you came directly from the Gnostic Book of Thomas.