The Empty Grave of Edgar Allan Poe

THE LIBRARY OF THADDEUS TRIPP

4. The 48

          “Have you seen this?” said Thaddeus, tossing me that evening’s edition of the local paper. He pointed to a photograph from the 1950s above the headline, ‘Can You Solve Photo Mystery?’ I read the article. A local man had found a pile of old photographs in his shed and wondered if anyone knew who they belonged to, so the paper printed a few and we were all supposed to take a look and exclaim ‘Why that’s my Uncle Bob!’ Except it wasn’t. But the little lad at the front could have been my cousin, Roy. And the man standing at the back reminded me a bit of Roy’s dad, my Uncle Lew. But that was it, the rest were strangers. Although the more I looked at them, the more familiar they began to seem.
          “Nothing to do with me,” I said and threw the paper back at Thaddeus.
          “That woman sitting on the left is the spitting image of my Auntie Doris.”
          “The little lad’s my cousin Roy, the bloke at the back’s my Uncle Lew.”
          “Strange, isn’t it?”
          No, it wasn’t strange. It wasn’t Roy and his dad, it just looked like them. Or, to be more specific, the ‘Roy’ and ‘Uncle Lew’ in the shed man’s photo reminded me of the monochrome Roy and Uncle Lew in the old family photos from the 1950s which now held pride of place in a cardboard box in my loft. I knew that if I went and dug one out and compared it to the photo in the paper then all resemblance between ‘Roy’ and Roy would fade away. Not to mention Uncle Lew. Any other evening I would point this out to Thaddeus and the ensuing argument would last us till hometime. But I had spent the afternoon watching cowboy films and so I was in a mellow mood and did not feel like engaging Thaddeus in lively debate. So I just let him run with it and gave him the occasional nod between drags.
          “Maybe it’s just that all photographs from this period meld together with the memories of our own family photos so that in the end the people all begin to resemble each other. But it called to mind that peculiar fragment of Manuel Garcia Monteros, ‘The 48’. This is perhaps the strangest of all his works and certainly the one which has provoked the greatest controversy. It begins, ‘There are 48 people in the world.’ After which there follows a list of 48 names. That’s it. Scholars have struggled with it for years. They are not the names of the rich and famous, they are not politicians or businessmen. There are no world leaders, no princes, popes or potentates. Apart from Monteros himself and a relatively obscure jazz musician, there are no other artists on the list. The rest of the names are unremarkable.
          It was suggested by Dr. Hans Moeller that ‘The 48’ is a list of the friends of Monteros. Or, to be more precise, those people whom he knew so well, so intimately, that he could attest to their existence. A solipsistic extension, if you will. How many people do any of us really ‘know’? Family, friends, neighbours, but what happens to the man next door when he has finished clipping his hedge and goes back inside his house. Is he still there? How can you be sure? So, Dr. Moeller suggested that we all have a ‘48’, perhaps more, perhaps less, but the actual number of people that we know in the world is relatively small. He wrote a paper on the subject, which he presented to the 1973 Monteros Symposium in Stuttgart. Monteros, of course, did not attend, but he must have been informed of the good doctor’s efforts to dispel the mystery of ‘The 48’, for shortly after, he sent a letter to the organisers of the Symposium, which stated, quite simply, that the name, Hans Moeller, was not included in the list of the 48 people in the world.”
          Thaddeus paused for a moment. He glanced at the photograph again, then shook his head. I watched a blizzard of dandruff fall on his shoulders.
          “Monteros wrote ‘The 48’ in 1966. My Auntie Doris was not on the list and neither was there a Roy or a Lew. It’s strange how we can be compelled to accept the existence of people through a simple arrangement of light on paper. And what of the others whom we are told exist in the world? The incredible infestations of China and India, the millions who inhabit the great cities of London and New York. We see them on the television screen but what is that? Light on glass.
          Some believe that ‘The 48’ is written in code and they have tried to decipher its meaning. Others think that only a mathematician could unravel its secret. Personally, I’ve always thought it best to accept it at face value. Monteros states that there are 48 people in the world and so, there are. His name appears among the 48 but mine does not, and neither does yours, even though we were both ‘in the world’ when the list was compiled. Or so we have been led to believe. In fact, we do not exist.”