Free Muse: A Novel by Jonathan Galassi Page A

existed.”
    Sterling was silent for a moment. “I’ve looked at them, but they’re gobbledygook as far as I can tell,” he allowed at last, in his aw-shucks staccato, meditatively sipping his sixteen-year-old Lagavulin and gazing into the embers of the fire he’d lit at the start of the evening. “They’re written in code, page after page—book after book of unreadable symbols. I’ve never gotten around to dealing with them. Lazy, I guess. Frankly, Arnold became more or less a recluse in his later years. I’m not sure he was still allthere. We pretty much fell out of touch, except through Ida.”
    “Could I take a look at them sometime?”
    “I don’t see why not,” Sterling answered with a shrug. “They’re in the vault at the office. Come by some afternoon.”
    The Impetus offices, in a venerable Meatpacking District building not far from Sterling’s apartment, were at least as scruffy as P & S’s, with upholstery that looked lice-infested and filthy walls that had not been washed, let alone painted, in forty years. Still, they commanded a panoramic view of the harbor, including the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and the Verrazano Bridge, from the terrace that girded them. The old bank vault was in the business office at the end of the hall, which was lined with familiar photos of some of Sterling’s principal authors, including a beetling, rather intimidating one of A.O. and, farther on, a wispy, out-of-focus Ida in a style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron.
    Sterling spun the dial, swung open the safe’s heavy army-green door, and rifled through a rat’s nest of manuscripts and ledgers, finally producing an old grocery box from the bottom shelf. The notebooks were piled inside, Venetian laid paper edged with gold bound in grained red leather. There were thirteen of them, each ninety-six pages, about nine by eleven inches. Every surface was covered withwriting—numbers, letters, and symbols in ordered rows, page after page of them, all in uniform red ink. At the bottom of the box was a large accordion file stuffed with crumbling newspaper clippings, articles, and other ephemera.
    Clearly, Outerbridge had had something to say in his last years in Venice, but he hadn’t wanted anyone to know what it was, at least not anytime soon. Paul was intrigued. He asked Sterling if he could look the notebooks over more thoroughly.
    “Be my guest,” Sterling conceded amiably. “Maybe we’ll both learn something.”
    Paul made several visits to Impetus to pore over the notebooks after work. He got to know the staff—those he hadn’t already met in his years in the business, that is. They struck him as a clannish bunch, suspicious of the corrupted world outside the Impetus walls. He felt a solidarity with them he wasn’t sure was fully shared, given that he worked for one of Sterling’s longtime nemeses in Commercial Publishing. Still, they too were lifers, not all that different from the inmates on Union Square, and he hoped he’d eventually be accepted as part of the family—a loud, clueless distant relation, maybe, visiting interminably from Elsewhere.
    The notebooks themselves, though, made no sense at all. In form they resembled poems, but they were written in what looked like an abstruse computer language:
        
&/x#xewhh
        
hd/zxk66cc
        
wde9x+#}#>3$a#
        
ezd/zx3$.+a#>>k++a
        
eed%hx2$#.x+k$c>)c++a
        
e%df9x6;k$a
        
e9d/zxvk4c—+;k>=x+;>wv
    Sometimes, the “poems” were interrupted by series of longer lines:
        ;!vc#}#+xvc#}^x4c3ac}#+x@c}^x$c|$ac}#+
        $k#31#^x+k+3c>$k3xaw#@kyx6k$cvc#3x6kk|2|c!2
    At first Paul was totally stymied by the impenetrability of A.O.’s gobbledygook, but as he hunkered down, he could see patterns emerge. He asked if he could borrow the notebooks, but Sterling demurred: “They don’t belong to me; they’re Svetlana’s”—Arnold’s daughter, who lived in London. “I’d