Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke

toking all day.’
    ‘Not much of a life, that,’ Billy says.
    ‘Depends on who you are. I’d say Austin’d be okay with it.’
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘Still,’ I say, ‘at least your way they won’t be going up in flames when the hospital blows.’
    ‘True enough.’ He straightens up, crumples the sheet of paper, tosses it on the pile. ‘I’ll have another bash at it tonight.’
    ‘That’s the spirit. What else have you got?’
    He draws another sheet of paper from his folder. ‘I’ve had another go at the Cassie novel.’
    ‘I thought we were dumping that.’
    ‘Bear with me,’ he says. ‘I think I might be on to something.’
     
    •
     
Sermo Vulgus : A Novel (Excerpt)
 
Cassie, you said diamonds were stone bewildered, confused and frightened by the glow in their soul. We are machines, you said, churning out rusted flakes of misunderstanding, but diamonds are doubts radiating hope.
Cassie, you said you would never wear diamonds. Diamonds, you said, are smug egos. They are too hard, you said, hard as the bones our yesterdays gnaw. You said only braided lightning would grace your finger; only a garland woven from a re-leafed oak would adorn your head. Can’t we at least try, you said, to draw a straight line through the heart of every sun?
Cassie, you quoted Schoendoerffer on grey eyes: ‘Grey eyes are peculiar in that they betray no emotion, and in its absence one cannot help imagining a world of violence and passion behind their gaze.’ I think you wished your eyes were Schoendoerffer grey, but they were wide and candid and the colour of indecision.
Cassie, you were no reader of French. Thus I challenge the legitimacy of your perceptions. Now, when it is already too late, I dare you to consider that Xan Fielding’s translation of Farewell to the King improved Schoendoerffer’s original text.
Cassie, I beg you to admit possibility. For your approval I posit the hypothesis that nothing is impossible so long as we are prepared to consider its possibility. Only in an infinite universe can hope spring eternal.
Cassie, it is possible to try to braid lightning, to re-leaf your oak, to draw a straight line through the heart of every sun. Cassie, it is possible to try at least. It is still legitimate to hope, even now, when the ash of the Six Million falls with the acid rain.
Cassie, are we really so far gone?
     
    •
     
    ‘You’ve read Farewell to the King ?’
    ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I liked the cover.’
    ‘Why, what’s it look like?’
    ‘Your cover, I mean.’
    ‘Oh.’ My copy of Farewell to the King I found in a second-hand bookshop, crudely covered with a blank sheet of cheap leather binding. A blind orphan, swaddled. A good novel, I think, but my favourite book. A precious artefact excavated from the dross. The idea that someone would go to all that trouble to rebind an old paperback had me blinking back tears, so that the assistant asked me was I okay as I handed over the euro coin it cost to give it a good home.
    Billy reaches into his satchel, takes out the book. ‘I borrowed it last week,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I meant to ask, but then Rosie wound up in the shed and, y’know.’
    ‘No worries.’
    It takes everything I have not to punch my pencil into his Newman-blue eye. Because that book isn’t just a book, it’s a touchstone for how much some people love books; and not just books, but the weakest, the most disposable. Whoever bound that book could just as easily have tossed a coverless paperback in the trash, an object that was worthless by any practical assessment. And yet they covered it, crudely it has to be said, but that’s not the point, they took the time and invested the craft to ensure that the words would be protected, the delicacy of it preserved. I can only presume that whoever covered that book had died, and their collection of books sold as a job lot, for why would they go to all that effort just to sell it second-hand, especially as no bookseller in his right mind