The Bookkeeper of Memories

He was lost. He had searched far and wide and found nothing. There was nothing to be found. In respectable journals, in disrepectable journals, in occult books, in the wild writings of crazy men, not one of them mentioned how to find the Aleph.

Albert was about to give up. Give up and go back and let go of the dream he had held for so long.

And then he saw the book. An old man was sitting at the table in one dark corner of the library and he had a book in front of him. It was old and had many pages, each one yellowed with age and wrinkled like the face of the old man who was reading it.

The old man stood up and walked away from the book. Albert watched as he walked down one row of books, then hurriedly went to the spot he had been sitting at and flipped through the book.

He couldn't believe it. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't find the first page or the last page. This was the Book of Sand. It wasn't supposed to exist. But here it was. It would take him a lifetime to read even a portion of it. It would have to have information about the Aleph. But how could he find it?

As his fingers flipped through the pages, he saw an image. An image of a small round sphere. In the story, it was a "small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance." And here was an image of that. Albert took out his notebook and started hurredly scribbling in it, copying down all the information he could read.

He heard a noise and turned to find the old man standing above him. Albert quickly closed his notebook and got up. The old man, his eyes hidden by pitch black sunglasses, grinned at him with yellow teeth and took the Book of Sand into his arms and left.

And as Albert rushed back to his motel room, rereading all of his notes about vessels and places of enlightenment, the old man looked at him with a sly grin and a twinkle where his eyes should have been.