Dead Languages

by David Shields

  I wouldn’t let her see it now because I remembered how thoroughly she took the fun out of the city championship by calling my article a “tissue of sportswriting platitudes.” I said: “Because I don’t want to hear your criticism until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  “How silly. What kind of newspaperman are you?”

  “I’m not a newspaperman. I’m a s-s-satirist.”

  “I won’t criticize it, I promise. I’m just curious to see what you’ve been working on. I wrote three thousand words today on Joseph Alioto’s ancestry. You can look at that and laugh. Let me just look at your lead,” Mother said, descending to her most transparent strategy.

  “It’s not a lead. It’s more of an overture,” I said. I’d just read Swann’s Way and really liked the word “overture.”

  “Lead. Overture. Whatever. Let me take a look at it, for Chrissake.”

  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “No,” I said, squirming in my seat, banging the brace against the leg of the desk.

  “Pretty please?”

  “No.”

  “Pretty pretty please, Jeremy honey?”

  This could have gone on forever. Mother’s sweet sincerity was starting to get on my nerves, so I opened my desk drawer, took out my satire, and handed it to her. I figured the least I could do was let her look at my lead, if that was what she really wanted to do, although of course she read the lead, then the paragraph after the lead, then the paragraph after the paragraph after the lead, all the way to the column’s sad conclusion:

  A S A T I R E

  Reflection in a One-Way Mirror

  By Jeremy Zorn

  I’d like to applaud, with unabashed pleasure and amid great revelry and excitement, the replacement of windows with mirrors in the principal’s offices. Silver, one-way mirrors.

  I’ve been told the windows were replaced because in the sun they caused glare. The reflection of the sun off the windows was disturbing, was discomforting to passersby, and comfort should be our first consideration.

  There were, though, other disadvantages to the windows. They were, first of all, windows, clear glass panes: people could see in and out. We could stare at one another. If safety should be our first consideration, then privacy should be our second consideration.

  Also, the windows revealed ugliness. I often found evidence of fingerprints and dust and dirt and rain and mud on the glass. If safety should be our first consideration; and privacy, our second; then cleanliness should be our third consideration.

  The silver, one-way mirrors, on the other hand, appear spotless and reveal no smudges. They are easier to clean, too.

  As to privacy, there’s now a sense of security, even peace, for students needn’t know whether there’s anything recognizably human behind the mirror. All we can see is our own reflection in black shadows of silver. This is how it should be.

  Lastly, as to comfort, the silver mirrors dull the sun’s glare, so what’s seen isn’t the reflection of the sun but the glossy image of ourselves. I’m pleased that I no longer have to avert my eyes as I walk by the windows. I cheer for the new mirrors.

  I hobbled around the office, pretending to clean up, putting away scissors that didn’t cut and staplers that didn’t have staples, while she brandished her blue pencil—she actually carried an editor’s blue pencil at all times—and interrupted her reading of the article only twice: at the end of the third paragraph to ask if I wanted a ride home (“y-y-yes”) and at the end of the fifth paragraph to ask if there was an ashtray around anywhere (“n-n-no”). She commenced her attack upon my little column immediately after she finished reading it.

  I guess now I can admit the irony is heavy-handed, the last few paragraphs are dominated by overwrought figures, the prose is repetitious in a coy, anachronistic sort of way, the basic idea is needlessly Manichaean, but at the time I thought it was killingly good, and when Mother lit into it I wanted to scream. She said one of these days I really must begin to take into account the objective world of reality.

  She said I had better learn how to write a “straight news story” that “tumbled down cleanly,” if I ever wanted to amount to anything as a journalist.

  She said there was editorializing and there was editorializing, but this was psychosis.

  She said there might be a “decent four-inch filler of a factual story” buried somewhere in the satire and, if I wanted, she’d stay late “digging it out.”

  I imagined a night of Mother and me sitting next to each other at a wobbly desk and giving the thing a much closer reading than it deserved. I asked her to stop smoking and told her I didn’t need a ride home: it was nice out, I wasn’t tired, I’d walk. She said if I couldn’t take constructive criticism I was a baby. With that, somehow, I fell apart. I clumped around the room in a crazy circle, yelling, “Get out, Mother, please get out,” and tearing up the satire, only to spend the rest of the night on the floor piecing it, then taping it together, although the next morning I decided not to print it, anyway. Not enough space.

  That was the way Mother ran a newspaper. That was the kind of chaos she could create so quickly. It’s a wonder to me Arnie and the boys didn’t lock her up in the ladies’ lav until she promised to be less imperial, but she served her reign without a whisper of insurrection. On the Monday after commencement, which Puppa did not deem a signal enough event to attend, she started working as the editor of the “house organ” for the ACLU, which have always been interesting initials to me in that ACLU is an anagram of UCLA, as if wherever she went Mother, in contradistinction to her disfluent son, changed the language to suit her own needs.

  17

  I DIDN’T WITHDRAW again into autism, but I was certainly down in the dumps when I trudged home for dessert. Mother’s attempt at encouragement was to say that, despite her serious reservations as to the content of “Reflection in a One-Way Mirror,” she thought I’d at least learned how to write a correct sentence. There was no reason I couldn’t speak one, as well—a neat inversion of the usual idea that only after mastering speech do we graduate to reading and writing. All I had to do was know what I was going to say before I said it, write it down, memorize it, and then, speaking only in perfect sentences, just … say it. In the abstract, the principle, like most abstract principles, functioned fine. Invariably, though, I’d pause halfway through the perfect sentence to consult the crumpled piece of paper in my pants pocket or, worse, encounter the sympathetic eyes of my listener, who hadn’t a clue why I’d been speaking in such stilted syntax and was now talking in such halting tones. I figured maybe only Mother was capable of kneading language.

  She reiterated that, if I could only force myself to speak within certain formal conventions, my verbal violence would vanish. I doubted this, but she pleaded with me to give her plan at least one more shot, so I enlisted in the London Forensic Society. Forensic societies everywhere are collections of outcasts. The forensic society at London was a positive House of Bedlam. The London disputants were the strangest of the strange, the most eccentric at a school insistent upon eccentricity. They were all little guys, prematurely serious with their locked briefcases and navy blue ties. They knew and cared passionately about the raw data of the world in the same way I once knew and cared passionately about the pitching and batting averages of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  We convened twice a week in the social sciences department, where the debate coach, an anthropology teacher, had his office—a desk never not cluttered with spears, masks, Indian arrowheads. He was a very nice, very old man who, regardless of the weather, wore a sun visor, and he spoke to us, although we sat three feet away from him in a semi-circle, through a megaphone. His favorite expression was: “Your affirmative rebuttal, Mr. Zorn, is a ladder without rungs.” Whenever he said that, I’d have to get up, go to the library, and conduct research until my affirmative rebuttal had, in Dr. Hoblock’s opinion, rungs. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in the social sciences department, all six of us wou
ld sit in soft chairs, pretending we liked the taste of his black coffee, feeling the four o’clock sun on our backs, and arguing, passionately though precisely, whether: Resolved, the United States should convert to the metric system; Resolved, the electoral college should be abolished; Resolved, the Federal Communications Commission should enforce stricter standards concerning prime-time violence on television.

  The topics were innocuous, but to a stutterer content cannot easily represent anything more than yet another opportunity to figure out form. On the contrary, contents are formal and forms are contents. If modern art is appreciated as an experience in psychosis, working with forms is the most radical way to seize the moments of crisis. Dr. Hoblock wanted the “loud eloquence of London boys bellowing.” What he really wanted was a minimum of two hundred and fifty words per minute out of every one of us, for he had a theory, based on his debating days at Boston College in the late thirties, that rapid speech rate was the only way to judges’ hearts, and toward that end he drilled us in speedy diction.

  “Faster,” he’d cough into his megaphone. “Faster. Get rid of those words. Keep your mouth moving. Turn those tongues into silver-tipped trumpets. Faster.”

  I spoke weirdly well when forced to speak fast. There wasn’t time to choke, and I started talking the way I’d once imagined the Chinese conversed on the horizon: no gaps, just unintermittent jabbering. I talked so fast I became our first negative. In San Francisco any discipline with a noble or vaguely classical tradition is outlawed before it gets out of hand and there were very few forensic foes we could find to face, so we spent most of our time with Dr. Hoblock, drinking his bitter coffee, answering his arcane questions, debating on Tuesdays and Thursdays until the sun went down.

  Toward the end of spring—it must have been April of my junior year because I remember limping onto the platform; no cane, no crutches, just the metal brace belted tight to my leg—Doerner Country Day, a girls’ school in Marin, challenged the London Forensic Society to a two-school, four-person debate upon whether: Resolved, the California State Assembly should reinstate the death penalty with reference to mass murder, kidnapping, and the homicide of public officials. Doerner Country Day would argue the affirmative.

  For the next ten days, we met every afternoon and sometimes during lunch to increase our speech rate, share our research, and consolidate our argument. Only two of us were actually going to be in the debate, so the other four did nothing but look for statistical evidence that murders-per-capita were directly correlated to death-penalties-imposed, then report back to Leo Gogol and me. Leo was second negative, first rebuttal. I was first negative, second rebuttal. I didn’t like how dispassionate he was about the idea of the death penalty. He had a side to support, he’d support it, he wasn’t going to lapse into, as he said, “asinine emotionalism,” whereas Mother and Father had always taught me that capital punishment was positively medieval, and I was eager to lapse into asinine emotionalism when the time was right.

  At seven o’clock on some Friday night in late April the time was right. Only the place was wrong, the amazingly large auditorium at Doerner Country Day, solid with the pert expressions of bright, rich, attractive girls come to hasten the collapse of the London legacy in forensics. Dr. Hoblock was backstage, computing the median cost of a life sentence in North Dakota in 1961, while our assistants sat in the front row with stopwatches around their necks and flash-card reminders—“Quote your mom’s Nation article (9/22/69) as evidence of prison rehab,” “Dismiss as naive syllogism all deterrent theory”—in their laps. Leo and I sat onstage in this cold building, waiting for the debate to begin, pouring each other entirely too much ice water from the plastic pitcher, looking past the podium and microphone to our opponents at the other end of the table, who were serious beyond belief: not talking to each other, not drinking any water let alone slurping any ice, not adjusting their skirts but, instead, labeling the monographs in their briefcases, sifting through stack after stack of meaningless material; scribbling in shorthand the crucial points they wanted to make in their case for more death.

  The judge took her seat on stage. Dr. Hoblock shook hands with Miss Keil, the coach of Doerner Country Day. Leo and I shook hands with Alicia Stephens and Josephine Nordlinger. The moderator marched to the podium, adjusted the microphone, and said, “Welcome. Contestants, coaches, spectators, Doerner girls, London boys—welcome. Welcome to the first and, I should say, we very much hope, the first annual debate between Jack London Preparatory Academy [whole huge chorus of boos from the predictable crowd] and Doerner Country Day School [long pause for screaming ovation]. I should hope, and I do assume, the disputants already know the rules, which we shall be observing strictly tonight, of the Revised Illinois Formal Debate but, for the benefit of newcomers to forensics, I shall outline the format. First affirmative and first negative, ten minutes apiece; second affirmative and second negative, five minutes apiece; first affirmative and first negative cross-examination rebuttal, eight minutes apiece; second affirmative and second negative cross-examination rebuttal, four minutes apiece. Total time: fifty-four minutes. No final summaries for either side. No sarcasm tolerated from the debaters. No heckling tolerated from the audience. Good luck, boys. Go get ’em, girls.”

  If Mother had been there, she would have loved the moderator’s last line. Even with Mother absent, the crowd howled its approval of this parting exhortation, then quieted to a hush when Alicia Stephens blew into the mike and commenced advocating not mercy but justice. She trotted out the usual statistics concerning the rising homicide rate in California; the percentage of criminals who, within six months of their release, commit the same crime for which they were initially incarcerated; the exorbitant cost to the taxpayer of keeping people alive and happy in prison. She gave detail after lurid detail supposedly related to Juan Corona’s recent murder of his twenty-six farm workers in the San Joaquín Valley, and mused aloud, with lavish irony, whether in a decade or two Juan would be free to hire a few more farm workers. She finished her affirmation by claiming to have asked “literally hundreds” of potential criminals in the Fillmore district whether the “black specter” of the death penalty would deter them from committing murder, and pretty near all of them said it would deter them from even carrying a gun.

  All four of our assistants raised and waved their signs: “Dismiss as naive syllogism all deterrent theory.”

  Alicia thanked the audience. She thanked the moderator. She thanked the judge. She thanked the visiting “challengers.” She thanked her coach. She thanked her teammates. She thanked her mother. The crowd, including her mother, howled its approval. Alicia sat down. Confronting five hundred unfriendly and five friendly faces, standing on the stage of an immense cement building on the wrong side of the Bay, feeling the floodlights melt down my fingernails, I was not a little nervous. My tongue bore no relation to—Hoblock’s favorite image—a silver-tipped trumpet. I thanked Alicia for her provocative presentation, complimented her on the passion of her approach and, following these bows to proper form, I felt glib.

  I mused aloud, with train-wreck irony, whether the proper function of the state was to embody the highest ideals of humanity or the lowest common denominator of the animal kingdom. I cited case after case of men proven innocent only after they’d been given a guided tour of the gas chamber. I dismissed as naive syllogism all deterrent theory. I displayed a graph that showed, sort of, that in 1971 North Dakota didn’t impose the death penalty and had the lowest murder rate in the country, .2 per 100,000 people, whereas Alabama did impose the death penalty and had the highest murder rate, 13.7 per 100,000. I wasn’t sterling. I was adequate and, besides the beginning, I didn’t stutter, so I was satisfied.

  I hardly listened at all to Josephine who, when I did tune her in, seemed extraordinarily shrill and rhetorical without saying much of anything: Hoblock’s ladder without rungs. Leo, especially by way of comparison, was the very voice of rational persuasion, using all the right debaters’ transitions (“If,
on the other hand, we consider the issue from the perspective of the murder victim’s mother-in-law …”), leaping to pun here and self-deprecation there, pulling graphs out of his hip pocket, quoting from memory the important portion of Mother’s 9/22/69 article on prison rehabilitation, never pausing, never taking a breath, talking a mile a minute until the moderator said, “Time!” and then again “Mr. Gogol, your time is up. Time! Mr. Gogol, you will conclude that sentence and be seated.”

  Mr. Gogol concluded that sentence and was seated, but a minute later he was back on his feet as first negative cross-examination rebutter, wondering with a wry smile just how reliable some of Josephine’s sources were, then, eight minutes later, turning around to receive her counter-attack, to defend his own data. Alicia and I sat on the sidelines, not so much listening to our teammates as attempting to stare each other down as we went into the final bout. In romantic comedy, two pairs of lovers disagree about something or other and exchange partners and finally get reunited with their true loves. This was like that except none of us had a true love with whom to get reunited, so we were forced, according to the rules of the Revised Illinois Formal Debate, to argue the night away.

  I figured Leo and I had a fairly large lead entering the final round. If I kept Alicia on her toes with an endless series of incredibly niggling questions, then dodged every doubt she threw my way, we’d win. I asked: “Isn’t the rising homicide rate in California a function not of any especially new or terrible trend toward violence but of dramatic state-wide growth in population? You claim, Miss Stephens, that within six months of their release thirty-four percent of all criminals commit the same crime for which they were initially incarcerated, but after serving extended sentences how many murderers ever kill again? You speak of the ‘exorbitant cost to the taxpayer of keeping people alive and happy in prison,’ but exactly how happy are they there? Have you conducted a cost/benefit analysis of a jail cell compared to the price of a decent apartment downtown? If not, why not? If so, do you actually believe it’s possible to place a monetary value on human life? We all sympathize with the farm workers Juan Corona plowed under during harvest season in the Valley, but surely the man is insane, surely you don’t mean to argue for the execution of the criminally insane, or do you? Do you have with you tape recordings of the conversations you had with the so-called potential criminals in the Fillmore district concerning the alleged deterrent value you claim the death penalty would have upon them? Did it ever occur to you that they assumed you were a plainclothes parole officer, and therefore were lying through their teeth?”