the canon

We went down the steps to his basement and that was where Tom showed me the machine. He said he’d been feeding it Shakespeare, buying up all the charity-shop paperbacks and tossing them in the front hatch. Looked a bit like a pizza oven, but plated in chrome and with a faint whirring sound you don’t really hear in restaurants.

He’d told me that he was building The Canon. I’d figured he meant a kind of artillery, cause Tom had studied history up in Scotland and he was a pretty overextended sort of guy.

To demonstrate, he picked up Hamlet, the Arden edition, and chucked it in the hatch, carelessly, footnotes and all. The machine gave a buzz of acknowledgement, or pleasure, and when I opened the hatch after the noise stopped Hamlet was nowhere to be seen. The machine grumbled, satiated.

Tom looked pleased with himself. I asked him what had happened.

“Well, I gave it Hamlet, and it broke it open, every last line, every syllable, understood it perfectly, and now that it’s got the whole thing down there’s no need for the hard copy.”

I asked him what the point of it all was. He looked perturbed, like it was the first time such a question had crossed his mind. His demeanor resolved into a bravado of defensiveness, a sturdy, all-encompassing disrespect that he could find certainty in.

“Well, eventually, I’m gonna load it up with every great work of literature ever written, and once it’s eaten all of it up The Canon’s gonna fashion something beautiful out from its own digestion, The Great British Novel, and I’ll be a star. And the best part is, the kicker, the bit that’s really gonna get you, is that I won’t have had to lift a finger.”

Tom had left his seat in the midst of his rant. He wasn’t totally red in the face, but his cheeks were starting to rust, and he had that excitable worm vein wriggling around his temples. He was hunched over, in front of me, and I could see the stalactites of saliva clinging to his upper lip, leftovers of the globules that had been sprayed across the room on his impassioned tirade. I felt so sorry for Tom, standing in front of me, so completely overrun by the revolting jubilations entirely beyond his grasp.

When I left that evening the machine was still sputtering, full now, perhaps even sickly, and I felt pretty low about the state of everything.