Dead Languages

by David Shields

  I climbed the little cliff, then pushed open the door to the outhouse, which was a typical beach bathroom in that the smell of urine was overwhelmed only by the fumes of defecation. Centipedes crawled across the cement, flies had a field day around the toilet, broken water pipes dripped, and I had an acute sense of pervasive darkness. There was a bare little bulb above the mirror to illuminate the reflection. I looked, I looked again, and was appalled.

  The white of the ointments, the red of the sun, the green of the sea had formed a melting blue of the body. My whole face seemed to be falling off. I looked like a clown—like Bozo—caught between the acts. All the boils were raised to the highest degree and glistening in a terrible blue hue. Suddenly I was seized with the perception that I had a multitude of debilitating personal problems and there was no cure for any of them: not nature, not nurture, not love. When one thing goes, the rest usually follow right behind and, in that stinking dark cabana, all alone at three o’clock in the afternoon, a mile and a half from a nudist colony, I could find no reason to continue. I decided to dive thirty feet off the cliff to the sand. I turned the switch on and off for twenty seconds until a shadow of gray filled the room: wet skin on cold glass. I closed the door. Shutting my eyes and turning off the light, I tried to imagine what broken glass would sound like in the dark.

  I bolted out of the bathroom, ran barefoot over pebbles and tough grass to the edge of the cliff, and leapt. Right around the middle of good Aristotelian books, there’s supposed to be an action that reveals the protagonist’s hamartia—in this case, for instance, excessive self-absorption as a function of disfluency—and also transforms the rising action into falling action. But the cause of the falling action isn’t supposed to be quite so literally A FALL. It’s supposed to be a little more metaphorical than that. Still, I can’t alter the story of my life to conform to some archaic theory of dramatic structure. There’s a book to think about, but there’s also the pressure of the past.

  The light went out of the sun and the sand came up to greet me. I did one entire flip, so I landed on my feet, but my left leg was bent across my body at an extremely awkward angle and, when I touched beach, the thigh bone of that leg cracked. I couldn’t get my left leg back on the left side of my body. My left foot twitched in the sand like a crab. The femur had broken skin and looked ghastly. The pain was so exquisite I started screaming the worst words I knew, as if incapacitation of the body were the death of language. The ocean kept lapping closer and sea gulls circled above to determine whether I were more coastal litter for a late lunch.

  Oddly enough, the first person who responded to my cries was one of the plastic golfers, although maybe he’d wandered over my way just looking for a lost chip shot. “Upsy daisy,” he said and tried to yank me out of my misery, but I couldn’t have moved if a whale had come floating ashore on the next wave. While the golfer went and got Mother, a hundred people who otherwise would have been bored on Sunday afternoon formed an extremely tight three-ring circle around me. The colonists, barred from this end of the beach, stayed away, which was a good thing because the clothed population was fatuous enough. They talked among themselves, and most of them thought I was probably permanently paralyzed. Others thought I would never have been bit if I hadn’t been swimming so far out at high tide.

  Mother burst through the throng, clutching her interview notes and saying, “You shouldn’t have wandered away in the first place.” Those were actually her first words. She was very sympathetic later on, but her first reaction was barely concealed indignation.

  The men in white coats returned to the ambulance to get a scoop stretcher to dig me out of the sand since my left leg couldn’t fit on a flat stretcher. Mother climbed into the back of the ambulance with me and held my hand. I couldn’t tell whether she was so calm because she knew that was what observers were supposed to do in emergencies, or because she’d already arrived in that beautiful realm she occupied when she knew she had a first-rate story in the bag and nothing else really penetrated.

  “You know, Jeremy, Mother’s Day, 1947, my mother threw out her hip on Lido Isle. Isn’t that quite a coincidence?” she asked.

  Yes, I said, I thought that was quite a coincidence. I’d never met her mother. The siren started, Klaxon twirled in the sunset, and then I lost consciousness.

  16

  THE REASON WHY it was not just one more broken leg, why I imbue it with significance, is that I was never again able to play competitive sports. Two months in traction and nine more in a metal leg brace nullified whatever dreams I still had of becoming an athlete and forced me into finding another way of ordering my world. Phrasemaker that she was, Mother called this the silver lining of a very black cloud. I still believed in love at first sight, the ultimate triumph of political justice, and the consolation of beautiful language.

  Conventional wisdom has it that poetry begins when the pain or at least the boredom gets intolerable. Conventional wisdom has it right for once, since immediately after dispensing with the last of sophomore year course work I commenced to write the first and last series of poems I’ve ever written, a satirical sonnet sequence too pathetic to look at again, even here. I took as the subjects of the Hospital Cycle the standard themes of convalescent life—the cold doctor, the cheerful nurses, the bland food, the tedious visitor—whereas what I wanted to write about was the sound of the little Korean woman’s voice when she entered the room at sunrise, selling papers, screeching “Chron-eee-cle, Chron-eee-cle,” as if she were consciously attempting to reproduce in her intonation the undesirability of morning and irritability of the world.

  In July I began purchasing the newspaper from her because I could no longer abide the sound of her voice and wanted to dismiss her, with a ten-cent tip, as quickly as I possibly could, but also because I was becoming increasingly interested in the adventures of Thomas Eagleton. There I was, flat on my back in a body cast from chest to toes, and there he was: Poor Tom, wearing checkered sportcoats, running around getting assurances, sweating on national television, crying, hugging his wife, having that dead metaphor “skeletons in his closet” applied to him so often that I came to think of him carrying, quite literally, a little closet wherever he went, with a plastic skeleton dangling from a coat hanger. My curiosity about Poor Tom derived, I suppose, from Father, to whom he represented the Right of the Electrically Shocked to Live without Shame.

  Father would come visit me on his lunch hour, shaking his head, licking his lips, complaining of a muscle he’d pulled when he tried to sprint the final 440 of a five-mile jog. Upon entering the room he’d rattle the bed frame, which was meant as a gesture of paternal jocularity. He would sit in a metal chair with his arms folded and sunglasses on, as if he were blind, criminally suspect, or excruciatingly shy: looking straight ahead, saying nothing. But then the noon news would come on, Poor Tom would appear, and we’d start exchanging information from magazine articles and reports we’d heard on the radio. In that there was nothing in the least heroic about him, Poor Tom was an unlikely hero, but via the vice-presidential candidate Father was attempting to prevent another visit to Montbel, so we waxed eloquent.

  “I’m a thousand percent behind him,” Father would say.

  “I’m two thousand,” I would say.

  “I think he has Woodcock’s support.”

  “I don’t know about Woodcock. I don’t know if he’s a thousand percent behind him.”

  “Nine hundred,” Father would say, laughing.

  “Eight hundred,” I’d say. “Maybe eight-fifty.”

  “Well, at least they aren’t going to find any more skeletons in Tom’s closet.”

  “Just little things now, like second-degree m-m-murder or sodomy.”

  “Right you are who say you are,” Father would say, using one of his favorite if somewhat opaque phrases. “Nothing’s worse in the eyes of the democracy than a man sensitive enough to have been depressed once or twice in his life and sought help.”

  “Exactly.”


  “How’s the leg, Jeremy?”

  The leg was all right until the doctor misread, on the X-rays, a knot of still broken bone as healing scar tissue. Mother and Father were called to Kaiser Hospital. I was rushed from physical therapy into surgery, and a metal pin was inserted near the bone to lend support. The pin is still there. When the weather shifts suddenly to rain, I can feel it rubbing against my bones. In airport inspections, it invariably triggers an electronic beep; I take from my wallet and pass to the police a letter from my doctor explaining that I have not a revolver in my hip pocket but a hollow rod in my left leg. After strenuous exercise of any sort—rock-climbing, full-court basketball, difficult-angled desire—I get a twinge where the pin was inserted, I drag my leg a little, limp walking uphill, and must shower soon after the exertion or my nerves will pinch and the next day I’ll have to lean on the cane I’ve kept in the closet all these years.

  Six years later, such minor handicaps are the only aftereffects of the accident, but when I was sixteen it seemed like a near-mortal wound. Over the summer I’d grown several inches and lost twenty pounds, so when I walked across the parking lot and appeared in the courtyard a few minutes before the first bell of a new year no one recognized me. They all took me for some crippled kid who’d transferred. It was a nice enough feeling at first—having doors opened for me and held—but I soon wearied of it. I appreciated people’s condescension no more than my own passivity. I missed athletics so much that for a while I consented to serve as score-keeper and assistant manager for the girls’ field hockey team, but there’s no experience quite so degrading as being bossed around by a phalanx of stocky, padded girls waving sticks; I turned in my key to the towel room.

  Both Mother and Father urged me to escape from immobility into the wonderful world of literature, and Mother even went so far as to set up a kind of course for me in the Bildungsroman. Every afternoon, upon coming home from school, I would unbuckle my brace, lie on my bed doing leg exercises with the rope pulleys and ankle weights I still had from my basketball days, then read variations on the theme of my own childhood from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Henry Roth. It was a little late to begin reading seriously—I think Beth had read all the comedies by the time she was twelve; “All what comedies?” I once asked, and she said, “Tell me you’re kidding”—but at least I was finally reading with, to Mother’s elation, a certain compulsiveness and insatiability.

  When I mumbled something about trying my own hand at this stuff, a brand-new electric typewriter magically materialized on the top step of the stairs to my room. My first story was about a boy who “puts toe to gleaming metal and leaps off the most beautiful bridge in the world.” My second story focused upon a boy—the same boy, I think, resurrected—who, while waiting for the traffic light to change, imagines the inner lives of the drivers in front, behind, and to either side of him, comes to comprehend the latent sexuality of automobiles, the vulnerability of pedestrians, and the symbolic force of the color red. My third effort was based upon the tragic misfortunes of a man Father had known when he was director of the Mission district poverty program. There was present in all three stories an opposition between the Individual and Society, as well as a kind of Gothic despair that I thought was probably pretty important to good writing, but you can’t write a Bildungsroman when you’re in the middle of your Bildung, and I wasn’t enthusiastic enough about other people to write well about them, so I gave up my first go at fabrication.

  I remember one very long night I spent doing leg exercises on the rope pulley while Father—who not only had never become the Jerusalem correspondent for United Press International but also had to watch and make as if to cheer while Mother rose higher and higher in the field of feature journalism—explained that I. F. Stone was doing more practical good for the world than Twelfth Night ever did. Perhaps because Twelfth Night was Beth’s favorite comedy, I set out to prove Father right: I would navigate the nonfiction section.

  Although newspapers are meant to be read very quickly and then thrown out, or used to start fires or line trash bins or wrap fish for the freezer, Mother had had the Daily Bruin for her tenure as editor, 1942 to 1945, bound in green leather. I don’t know where those volumes are now—Beth is so very much the archivist she probably has them locked away in Puppa’s trunk slid beneath her four-poster bed in the Berkeley hills—but when I was a child I used to read back issues of the Bruin all the time. I have no idea what I was looking for, since it wasn’t like a yearbook in which there would have been black-and-white photographs of Mother at her more immature. It seemed to me like any other newspaper, only a little yellow around the edges, a little more directly irrelevant. Apparently, it was one of the very best college dailies in the country and, in any case, beyond comparison with the crosstown competition, which printed lead editorials in praise of the USC football team.

  When FDR died, Mother put on the front page a picture of him puffing a cigarette through a nicotine filter. This wasn’t an appropriately glum photo for the president’s funeral, and she caught so much flak from the chancellor that she threatened to resign until the entire editorial staff delivered an eloquent letter of support. Every Thursday evening Arnie Logan (who later became Pat Brown’s, then Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary, but who at the time was nothing more than sports editor of the Daily Bruin) conspired with the rest of the boys in Sports to write an article which, if you read it linearly, made almost no sense at all but which, if you read it backwards and skipped every other line, produced a rather risqué narrative. Every Thursday evening they’d try to sneak these naughty tales past Mother into the Friday edition. I think it would be unfair to say Mother ever had a particularly dirty mind. She was an amazingly precise proofreader, though, and she never let their lewd little stories get by her. I feel for Arnie and the boys. Growing up, I used to feel like Arnie and the boys, speaking backwards to rebel against Mother but never making it into her Friday edition, her heart of hearts. Mother was always the editor, I was always her little cub reporter turning in rough drafts, and she was always sending me back for one more rewrite.

  I became, by default, editor-in-chief of the London Journal, which the principal thought was ghostwritten by Mother because I was so meek in person and so mean in print. Every other week I wrote what was called “A Satire,” but which was really an all-out assault upon myself, a sort of suicide note in the guise of covering student government. One night, while I was staying late to work on what I thought was a particularly wicked essay, Mother knocked on the door of the newspaper office, ostensibly to bring dinner but actually to determine whether I was doing justice to the name that meant so much in mass media. When I was a junior in high school, I hated everything but the sound of the door being closed from the inside, and there she was—on the other side of that door, peering through the glass window, tapping with her key ring, wanting in.

  She was wearing her black leather boots (what Beth called “boots not made for walkin’”), her Pacific Ocean blue business dress, and a weird string of wooden beads. Perfume was apparent, as were lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge: Mother as Mature Model. In one hand she held her reporter’s notebook in which stenography recorded every word uttered at a press conference whose highlight was Mayor Alioto’s denial that he’d ever met his brother-in-law, and the other had a sack of food that she’d bought for me at an A&W Root Beer stand on her way home after Father told her I was still at school. While I inhaled hamburgers and french fries, Mother walked around the Journal office, studying the assignment sheet on the bulletin board; trying out the typewriter, which was missing plastic caps to vowel keys and had a jammed margin release; flipping through the photo file, dead black negatives of all twenty-seven candidates for student body president.

  In the way that anyone human would have asked how you are doing, Mother asked, “What are you working on?”

  “My column,” I said. Mother was not the most loyal fan of my column, but she did think every fifth or sixth effort scored some marvelous sociolog
ical points.

  “How’s it going?” she asked, still flipping through the photo file.

  “Fine. I just finished.”

  “Are you happy with it?” For Mother this wasn’t a question so much as a direct challenge, since she was never happy, at least publicly, with her own work and assumed no one else would admit he derived any pleasure from his own expressions either.

  “Very happy,” I said. I couldn’t help it. I liked the column a lot.

  “It can’t stand any improvement?” she asked, tilting her head to the left. She leaned against my desk, watching me sweep crumbs onto the floor with a ruler.

  “No, Mother.”

  “That’s great. It must be very good. I’m eager to read it.” And woe to you if I am at all disappointed.

  “It’ll be out on Friday,” I said, pushing back my chair and locking my leg brace. I was still supposed to be using a cane, but I’d left it in my locker, so I limped across the room to throw my A&W garbage into the wastebasket. Mother followed. When I leaned against the wall to gather strength before making the return trip to my seat, she cornered me.

  “Jeremy honey, can’t I take a little peek at it now?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  The fluorescent lights flickered like melodramatic special effects for a storm scene.

  “It’ll be out on Friday,” I said, resting against her to get my balance, then limping back to my seat. “You’ll see it then.”

  “Why won’t you let me see it now?” she asked, shoving some papers aside, sitting on the side of my desk, tapping her toes on a plastic chair.