And right then we heard the jingling of a bell outside, and a scratching at the door.
* * *
Molly and the Narrator took Bon Jovi and they left my store. And that was the second- or third-to-last time I ever saw Molly; she didn’t return my calls, and after a while I stopped trying to get in touch with her. I noticed her walking the empty leash across the street once or twice, but I never went over to talk to her, and she never came back into the store.
The Narrator did continue to come by, though not to harass me. He totally changed his tune toward me after I introduced him to Molly. She ended up choosing him to love, and together they made a lot of money in e-sales; they sold my typewriter and a bunch of the Narrator’s books on the internet. Now they have a house in Blix.
* * *
Meanwhile, my face became harder and harder to see. Finally I went to my doctor, Doctor Ice, and he gave me some medication that stopped the invisibility from translucentizing my entire body. But there was nothing he could do about my face. People seemed to look past me even more than before. It was like every new person I met was my mother.
And they looked past my store, too. We struggled to stay afloat. Some of our customers were fascinated by the Superbook, but when I told them how much it cost they always left the store immediately.
The last time the Narrator came by Tomorrow Books, I asked him if maybe he’d consider giving me narration lessons. He scoffed. “No,” he said.
“Why not?” I said.
“You’re no narrator,” he said, smirking.
“But maybe I could be,” I said. Then I told him how much money we were losing every week. He listened intently, and then he actually apologized to me. “Six months ago that would have been music to my ears,” he said, “but now—”
He stopped speaking, and seemed to wander in his thoughts for a moment. Then he closed his eyes and said, “Christopher felt sad about losing Molly, and about his invisible face, and with his store struggling it looked like all hope was lost.”
“You can say that again,” I said.
The Narrator kept his eyes closed. “But even if the Narrator never said as much, he felt optimistic about Christopher’s chances.”
“You do?” I said.
“Somewhere out there, on one page or another, was happiness with Christopher’s name on it. The question was, would Christopher find it?”
“Yes,” I promised. “I will.”
“That kind of quest takes work,” the Narrator said. “Years of searching, sometimes.”
“I’ll scour this entire book if I have to,” I promised. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
We were all really excited about the Grand Reopening of the Language Zoo. The renovation had been long overdue. The old zoo? Nothing more than a few caged metaphors and some humdrum local sentences lack-a-dairying on rocks. The new zoo, meanwhile, rallied to be one of the best in America, featuring language not seen anywhere else. So when they announced that admission would be free for the Grand Reopening, we knew we had to go.
That morning we drove out on Route 65, turned into a newly paved parking lot, locked our cars, and paraded through the front gate and into the Table of Contents. Everything about the new facility was stunning: the new walking paths white and clean, the attendants dressed in matching white shirts, the language separated from readers by glass and housed on climate-controlled pages. To our right walking in, we could see inferences in the trees and questions jumping in and out of a small pond. Next to these were strange, slithering adjectives, followed by prepositions hanging high in their cages or burrowing low in hollowed-out logs.
But it was so hot out that day, and after just a few minutes some of us were sweating through our clothes. We were also thirsty, and a few of us had to go to the bathroom. So we made our way to the Welcome Center, which held a small movie theater—The History of Language in America was playing when we peeked in—and a gift shop. We couldn’t help ourselves: we bought keychains with replica language and books about the lives of famous words. Then, while sipping our lemonade and watching some tiny words swim in freshwater tanks, we noticed the sign for the special exhibit on endangered language. “Let’s go see that,” we decided. So we sucked the last drops of lemonade from our cups and walked back out onto the hot page.
Soon we reached the exhibit tent and joined the big giant line at the entrance. Some of us were irked that we had to wait. “How long is this going to take?” demanded a few. “Is all this waiting really worth it?” asked others. When we finally reached the tent entrance, we saw a list of rules: no food, alcohol, or flash photography. “All Cell Phones Must Be Turned Off,” said the sign. “They Frighten the Language!” Some of us turned off our phones, but others scoffed at the warning. “Who’s going to know one way or the other?” we asked ourselves.
Then we stepped into the tent. To our left we saw displays of prehistoric language—the imprints of old, strange, dead words on the page—and then, past that, really big words, some of the biggest in all of America (or so said the sign), which we huddled around and oohed and aahed at. We moved past laid-back double entendres and newborn irony, and then we saw a huge collection of rare sincerity behind thick glass dividers about forty feet away. We pushed our way toward those phrases. I saw “I miss you” walk past the glass, “I already felt invisible” cross behind it, and “I am so sad and lonely” crouching in the corner.
Attendants weaved through us, trying to keep us back from the glass. But the phrases were too amazing—we had to capture and share them. So one of us snuck our phone out of our pocket and took a picture, and then another one of us saw that and did the same—only, we forgot to turn off the flash this time. We all saw the burst of light from the flash—so did an attendant. “No pictures!” she shrieked. But those of us in the front couldn’t even hear her, and meanwhile, another one of us had taken out our phone and started filming a video. Seeing the camera, though, a giant “What will you take from me this time?” bristled and paced behind the glass. “All phones turned off!” shouted another attendant. Some of us started looking for the exit—it was tremendously hot in the tent, and there were too many of us in there. Then one of us began pushing, and another pushed back, and soon there were waves of shoving among the crowd. Behind the glass, meanwhile, the language grew anxious, defensive; then the word “soulmate” locked letters with “lonely,” and “never” reared up and roared at “forever.”
“Back up!” shouted an attendant. “Don’t press against the glass!”
“Keep moving!” shouted another attendant.
But we couldn’t move—there was nowhere for us to go. It became difficult for us to breathe. Then we heard a rumble and looked up just in time to see “I am so sad and lonely” lower its head and crash against the glass, creating a spiderweb pattern over that entire paragraph.
“Out!” shouted one of the attendants. “Everyone out of the tent!”
“I am so sad and lonely” hit the glass again, and this time the pane shattered. Everyone shoved and clawed and ran, but the wild sincerity was too fast and powerful; the language moved among us, through us, over us. Suddenly we loved each other and missed each other and held each other in our hearts. We believed in each other and we knew we were supposed to spend the rest of our lives with each other. And then we were so sad and lonely. Some of us were crushed in the stampede; others were gored; others cowered behind the glass or dove behind the dead or the giant words in the adjacent exhibit. Zoo attendants arrived with brackets and parentheses, but by then it was too late: the language was gone—out of the tent and thundering through the zoo. We didn’t yet realize how much havoc it would cause—that it would run wild through the novel, scare off existing names and phrases—but we already missed those moments: the times when we were in love, when we gave our hearts to each other, when we promised each other the world. Those that could ran to the edge of the tent just in time to see all those truths—“I miss you,” “I will always love you,” “How do I
live without love?” and so many others—leap over the back fence of the zoo, run out of the story and jump off the page, then onto the adjacent pages and forward into the future. We watched them disappear, our hearts bitter with regret.
Christopher woke up that morning with a new pressure in his head—a tension of some sort between his eyebrows and behind his ears. He stood up woozily, stumbled to the bathroom, and looked in the mirror. When he leaned forward, he could see a rectangle shape pressing outward at the center of his forehead.
“What is that?” said a thought in the right side of his brain.
“It’s a wall,” said a thought in the left side.
“What?” said a right-side thought.
“Yeah, it’s the edge of a wall.”
“I can’t hear you—I can’t make out what you’re saying,” said the right-thought.
“Dumbthought says what,” said the left-thought.
“What?” said the right-thought.
“Nice one,” said another left-thought, and the two high-fived.
It seemed like everyone was talking about walls that year. They’d built one between Coolidge and East Coolidge, for example, and now another one was going up in Blix.
Christopher found his cell phone and called his ex-wife. “Hey,” Liz said.
“Listen,” Christopher said. “Something weird is happening to me.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“I’ve got this protrusion on my forehead.”
“Like a zit?”
“No,” he said.
“Like a cyst or something?”
“It’s—blocky. Like a—” He struggled to say it—“a wall.”
“Jesus, Chris,” she said.
“Should I call the doctor?”
“You call the doctor more than anyone I know,” Liz said. “Didn’t you call him last Friday?”
“I was itchy,” Christopher said. “I thought I had bedbugs.” “It’s probably just anxiety, Chris,” Liz said. “Wait a day and see if it goes away.”
Christopher called in sick to work and went back to bed. As he slept, though, he dreamt two dreams simultaneously. One was about a cow sitting at a table at a restaurant. That was the whole dream: the cow opened up the menu and read through it thoughtfully.
The other dream was about Liz. She lived in West Geryk now, but in the dream she and Christopher were back in their old house in Coolidge and Christopher was telling Liz how much he missed her. “I miss the arguments, the dumb little meaningless moments. I even miss this broken-down house.”
“But we’re in the house right now,” Liz said. Then she turned her head and said, “Hey—what’s that?”
“What’s what?” said dream-Christopher.
“That,” she said. She pointed to their kitchen window. Instead of containing a view of their driveway, though, it showed a cow reading a menu.
“Oh, that’s a different dream,” said dream-Christopher.
“Whose?” said dream-Liz.
“Mine,” said dream-Christopher.
When Christopher woke up, he still had that strange feeling of separation, like one thought was
over here, singing,
over here, singing
while another thought was
a different song.
This wasn’t a completely new feeling—he’d had really bad headaches, and several mystery illnesses, during the past year. His disposition had changed recently, too. Some mornings, he’d wake up in his new apartment—which he’d moved into the previous fall—and have trouble getting out of bed; his thoughts couldn’t convince his arms and legs to move. The commute from this new place to work was tough, and sometimes, while sitting in traffic in his Echo, Christopher would start punching the steering wheel as hard as he could. He didn’t like talking to people, seeing people. His boss at the Department of Fiction—where he worked with a large team, writing and publishing official Coolidge narratives—had reprimanded Christopher several times for closing himself in his office. “The copy room is supposed to be an open space, so people can float through it,” Janet had told him. “And a closed door—”
“I can’t stand all the fucking chatter, Jan,” Christopher groaned.
“A closed door sends the wrong message, is what I’m saying.”
Christopher’s headache worsened throughout the day. He kept running back to the bathroom to look in the mirror, and each time he did the shape in his forehead was more pronounced. By mid-afternoon he could clearly see the sharp, bumpy edges of bricks and even a recessed mortar joint. Finally, the pain got so intense that he collapsed on the bathroom floor, started breathing hard, and occasionally screaming out. Then, all at once, water spilled from his forehead, and then blood, and then the wall emerged, jutting out of Christopher’s eyes and creating a weird shadow on the back of his neck. Christopher’s thoughts panicked and started shouting at each other over the wall—to call an ambulance or call Liz. But then Christopher remembered what she’d said that morning, that maybe this was anxiety or something temporary. Eventually he picked himself up, cleaned up the blood and fluid on the bathroom floor, and made himself a frozen burrito. In his mind, one thought calmed the others. “We’re going to sleep on it and see how we’re doing tomorrow, OK?” it announced.
By bedtime that night, though, the gray cement wall extended almost a foot away from his face—the wall felt so heavy as Christopher brushed his teeth that he could hardly hold his head up straight. He fell into bed but couldn’t sleep—all night long, lost and displaced thoughts shouted to one another over the wall. “Clark?” hollered a thought in the right side of his brain. “Are you OK?”
“Rhonda!” shouted a thought in the left side. “Honey?”
The next day the wall was still there—it had grown bigger, in fact—so Christopher decided it was only prudent to get it checked out. He called his doctor and made an appointment for that afternoon, and then he showered and drove downtown—which was no easy feat, given the new blind spot in the center of his field of vision. He was standing at an intersection a few blocks from the doctor’s office, though, when a bus passed by him and he noticed something strange: the cologne advertisement on the side of the bus showed a man with a tiny wall on his knee.
Christopher watched the bus fade away. Then the walk light illuminated and everyone started crossing the intersection. But Christopher didn’t move. “You can walk,” said a right-thought.
“Hold on a second,” said a left-thought.
“Go! Walk!” said another thought.
“Did anyone see that bus?” said a left-thought.
“What bus?” said a right-thought.
“I saw it,” said another right-thought. “So what?”
“So what? That guy on the side had a wall!”
Christopher stood on the corner for a minute, listening to the argument in his mind. Then he spun on his heels, walked back to his car, and drove to work. When he stepped into the copy room, he braced himself for a snide comment; no one said anything to him, though. Christopher sat down at his computer, took a picture of himself with the wall, and emailed it to Liz. Cool or no? Christopher wrote. Would you date a guy who looked like this? Scratch that—forget I asked. But would you? Then he hit send. Liz didn’t reply, but when his assistant Danielle stopped by his office that afternoon to deliver a character study she said, “Hey—I really like your wall.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“I’m thinking of getting one,” she said.
Christopher didn’t know what that meant. “You should,” he said.
* * *
Within a few weeks, Bodywalls were all the rage; you’d see ads for them in the fashion magazines and in commercials on TV, and people who weren’t already growing them organically started having them surgically installed: cheekwalls, neckwalls, eyewalls. All of Coolidge’s celebrities had them: Trox Dillon, October Wire, the Noun. Some people had more than one; Dillon had three really cool walls running over his forearm, each of them made
from locally-sourced cement and graffitied by a different well-known street artist.
Christopher followed the trend, too, installing as many walls as he could afford. Over the following two months he added a total of eleven new walls: five in his face, four in his heart, one on his right forearm, one on his lower back. This involved a certain amount of risk, sure (whenever he visited Sammy’s House of Walls on Inquiry Ave, they made him sign a legal form acknowledging the Surgeon General’s warnings on the connections between walling and division), but didn’t everything? Plus, the walls had changed Christopher’s life for the better. His head was clearer now, and he wasn’t so angry or cantankerous. He was calmer, and more productive, too.
Not only that, he liked the way the walls looked. Christopher wasn’t particularly handsome—he was bald and overweight, and he wore thick glasses—but the walls sharpened his features, made him look almost tough. He’d gotten more dates recently, too, and even had to break up with a woman after things got weird in the bedroom; she was just far less interested in Christopher as a person than she was in his walls.
Christopher’s progress was derailed that August, though, when he ran into Liz at a wedding. He should have expected to see her there—the bride was their former neighbor, after all—but he hadn’t spoken to her in a few weeks and didn’t know if she’d been invited. Then he walked into the ballroom and saw Liz dancing with some dude—smoky eyes, thick beard—and the left side of Christopher’s mind went crazy; his thoughts started screaming and kicking over mental furniture and lighting mind-fires and he couldn’t calm them down. When Liz fell into Beardy’s arms at the end of the song, Christopher stormed across the ballroom and shoved the guy good. By the way Beardy fell back and quickly regained his balance, though, Christopher knew the guy could kick his ass. Before the situation escalated, Liz took Christopher by the arm and led him out of the ballroom and into the hallway. “Have you lost your fucking mind?” she said.
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