Dead Languages

by David Shields

  I paid such strict attention to her habits that I was able to discern the room to which she was going and from which she was coming by counting the number of taps and scrapes she made with her cane. Sometimes she would tap her cane nervously—perhaps twenty times consecutively on the same spot on the floor—and I heard no concurrent footsteps, while other times I could tell she was walking but I would hear no sign of the cane. Moreover, she did not limp. I am quite sure of it. She did not limp.

  There was a slight crack in the metal heat vent on the floor of my apartment, through which I was able to see just the darkness of her room. For hours at a time I lay face down alongside the vent and put my eye to the slit. The only light ever present in her room radiated from, I think, the television screen. She never turned on a lamp or an overhead light. Every night I wrote that her room was dark the moment the sun went down.

  At night, usually, or in the very early morning (how she read without a light I had no idea; I supposed she simply knew the quotation) she repeated the same Biblical passage, from Isaiah, until the words slurred in her mouth. Each time she began the passage as if she were a demure schoolgirl methodically, knowingly reciting the correct answer.

  On that day deaf men shall hear

  when a book is read.

  Then she would bang her cane against the low ceiling, taunting the author of the passage to come down and answer for it.

  And the eyes of the blind shall

  see out of impenetrable darkness.

  When she got excited, she dropped her book; the thud sounded more like a heavy suitcase than even the most lavish and carefully annotated and footnoted edition of the Bible.

  The lowly shall once again

  rejoice in the Lord, and the

  poorest of men exalt in the

  Holy One of Israel.

  But if she had memorized the passage why did she need the book? On the other hand, how could she have read it without light? Each evening I wrote down when she began, how long she read, how many times she repeated the passage, over which words she stumbled, the last word she uttered.

  Nights I pulled out the desk drawer and, sitting in my wooden chair, circled the aberrations on that day’s list—the screams I did not expect, the elongated silences, the sudden noise from her television—although after a while nothing could have surprised me except the emergence of a predictable pattern to her life. When the words and numbers squeezed together and vanished, when I saw but a pool of light at the tip of my nose, I went to bed.

  I slept in two hour intervals—asleep two hours, awake two hours—until I was rested enough to stay awake. While awake in bed I wrote down in the yellow margins of the Bible what she was doing. There was something terrible about being awake that late at night, with the clock ticking and the lamp glowing, as I plotted the movements of a woman I never saw.

  And yet what I have been trying to say, which I am having obvious (if understandable) difficulty relating, and which I now feel compelled to present because I am afraid that I am all too characteristically dwelling on the complexity of my own consciousness, rather than addressing the matter at hand, is precisely this: a week ago I detected an appreciable reduction in her actions. That day I made fewer entries than I had on any previous day. Maybe, I thought, I was not listening as well as I had before. Perhaps she was making the same noises and I was just not hearing them.

  Her movements were still unpredictable and random but, in fact, much less frequent. In four hours she tapped her cane and turned the television on and off. Nothing else. I reviewed the lists and calculated a slight, if steady, decrease in the number of entries I had made, starting two weeks ago, though she had not been anywhere near as inactive as she started to be last week. Which left me with little to do except wait.

  The lists grew shorter, dwindling to almost nothing, like a candle burning out. She broke fewer glasses, no longer tapped her cane, and rarely turned on the television or burnt the coffee. Instead of compiling a list of what she was doing, I maintained a log of the length of intervals between entries. The intervals grew longer. I listed what was not happening, what was not there. Every other day she read from Isaiah in a dull, somnambulistic monotone. Occasionally she stumbled into a chair or flushed the toilet. She slept for days.

  Two days ago I stopped keeping lists because I no longer heard anything from downstairs. Not wanting to waste all those charcoal pencils and sheets of paper, I listed, upon waking, the side of my body on which I was lying, where my hands were, how many times the clock ticked in a minute.

  I slept naked with my head under the pillow. The air was warm and I wrapped only a sheet, like ropes, around my legs. In the day I napped to recover from oversleeping. I gobbled aspirin to relieve my headache and slept even more. This past week I never went to sleep after midnight nor awoke before noon.

  Until this morning. Asleep in dreamless, soundless empty spaces of time, I was awakened by her loud recitation of the Isaiah passage.

  On that day deaf men shall hear

  when a book is read.

  In the dark, stumbling over furniture, I ran into the living room, turned on the desk lamp, and sat down in my chair. I wrote down what time it was, as well as what she was saying. She banged her cane against the wall and her voice rose to a pitch approaching a scream, her Bible reading uncontrolled for the first time, blurted out rather than chanted.

  And the eyes of the blind shall

  see out of impenetrable darkness.

  All of a sudden she dropped the book, and I heard her gasp. Her breathing sounded like a child sucking on a straw. I opened the heat vent and put my ear to the grate.

  No, she said. It is dark. It is too dark. Give me light. I am in black clothes.

  I heard her cane, followed by her body, fall to the floor. She coughed uncontrollably. I wanted to pour water down her mouth. The seat of the chair felt cold, like a bed pan, under my naked buttocks.

  There was silence for a while (perhaps as long as thirty seconds, I really don’t remember; I had, quite understandably, lost all track of time to the point of forgetting that I was wearing a watch). Then, wheezing, she took deep, heavy breaths until she had to exhale. She yelled an obscene word and gasped as she blew air out of her mouth for the last time.

  I walked down the stairs, slowly, shaking the handrail, carrying a flashlight, trying to calm myself down. I banged on the door and rang the doorbell. I beat on the door with my flashlight and kicked it with my foot. I knelt down, and looked into the keyhole, holding the flashlight next to the keyhole so that I could see into the room. I did not see her body. Instead, right below me, near enough to touch, in a shaft of dim light which darted through the keyhole, surrounded by darkness, the handle of her white cane gleamed.

  And now, before the other apartment-dwellers awake (and before, as it is so easy for me to do, I forget and simply go on), I will step into the elevator and close the door tight behind me. I will turn off the fan. Above me there will be a panel of descending floor numbers. Everything will be silent except for the rattling of the pipes and bars in the elevator shaft. And I will take this black box down into the basement where the noise stops and the light ends.

  25

  THERE ARE DEFINITE difficulties here: the swollen syntax; the compulsive subsets; the near-absence, and refusal to place quotation marks around what little there is, of dialogue; the repetition in the extreme to the point of echolalia; the abstraction of the monologue, its essayistic airiness, its woodenness. The nameless narrator’s attic prison, in addition to being a bohemian bromide, is a reflection of the way I’ve always felt, what I’ve always hated about my basement bedroom. Most of his obligatory pessimism is mine, too, I suppose. But why is he so much more impoverished than I am and why is Helen Keller so much closer to death than Mother was at the time? (Suddenly I know why: to win your pity.) I had no inkling Mother was mortal, I believed her when she said she’d be fine after a few months of chemotherapy. Written words work in an unfathomable way; I can’t expla
in it.

  Gretchen Noyes could explain it. She said, “‘Notes on Suicide’ revivifies David Hume’s terrible apprehension that his body was literally made of words. The endless convolution going nowhere except deeper down into this fastidious fop’s incapacity to see the old woman dying in her blindness—that’s perfect, Jeremy, it really is. These pages are his notes; he kills himself, right? It’s an incredibly moving evocation of the very details of loneliness, an ode on the impossibility of love, a textbook example of purposeful withholding of narrative info, a compressed though not reductive remaking of—”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “It’s about my mother.”

  I’d returned to Los Angeles shortly after writing the story and hadn’t shown it to my family, so Gretchen was the first person to read “Notes on Suicide.” She was twenty-four, a third-year graduate student in American literature, and the editor of the UCLA literary magazine. I’d never heard anyone who wasn’t lecturing talk quite like that. It was a very nice office, the long room in which Westwords was put together: lots of old lamps and comfortable chairs and a beautiful round window that overlooked Pauley Pavilion. Gretchen was sitting in the most comfortable chair, scrutinizing the window and tapping her pencil on the editor’s desk while she spoke to me.

  “Well, yes,” she said, “perhaps the text does have a certain, inevitable autobiographical origin—the signal of apprentice fabulation—but the teller isn’t the tale, the dancer is distinct from the dance. I mean, you don’t reject the notion of negative capability, do you? This story isn’t a private exorcism, though, granted, it might be that, too, among other things. It’s private pain gone to public catharsis, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.” Her hair shone in the late light like gold, pure gold. She had her little brown-socked feet up on the desk. This was the editor I’d always been looking for: one who praised, praised, praised, even if I couldn’t understand exactly what she meant.

  “Obviously I want to publish it. Obviously. It’ll be the lead story in the winter issue. It’s the best undergraduate writing I’ve seen here or in Palo Alto.”

  “When were you in Palo Alto?”

  “Two years ago. I got my B.A. there.”

  “Did you know my sister, Beth?”

  “Jesus, you’re kidding. Miss historian? You have such a talented family.”

  I blushed, changed my position in the chair, tapped my foot on the floor.

  “You’re only a junior? We have to celebrate your future. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink at Someplace Else,” she said and, standing, took my arm.

  Gretchen always talked like that: very arch, very stylized. Most of the amusement of being with her was wondering whether her formality would ever fade, whether just once she’d live inside an event and not worry about expressing its essence. After a year and a half of close inspection I can confidently report that she never has.

  Someplace Else is a homosexual bar in West Hollywood. Gretchen seemed so at home there it occurred to me to ask: “You aren’t gay, Gretchen, are you?”

  Either she didn’t hear me or chose to change the topic of conversation. Stirring her Scotch and soda, she answered, “No, I’ll be writing my thesis next semester. Nathanael West. This is research: I’m soaking up atmosphere.”

  She was soaking up a lot of Scotch while entertaining skinny men wearing white shirts and blue hankies, telling her barfly friends about me—from what little I heard, how earnest I was—but I tried not to pay attention and listened, instead, to tinkling glasses, flushing toilets, spinning nickels, and a one-armed man playing remarkable jazz drum.

  When her audience had wandered away, Gretchen patted my hand and said, “The only good bar in Palo Alto was the gay bar and I’m beginning to think the same thing’s true even in L.A.” I was worried again about the channel of her love life. “Only in gay bars is there that elusive ambiance, that unnameable milieu”—she pronounced both words with an exaggerated French accent—“which is both sexual and asexual, intimate and wonderfully detached. Only here is there the dimmest comprehension that personality is fluid, identity is constantly being forged, the self is not some dull static thing but baroque mask upon baroque mask.”

  I’d never heard Someplace Else talked about in quite these terms, but I listened because I always listen to whatever Gretchen says. I love the way she has with words.

  In the failing light of some fall evening in the Westwords office, she leaned over and gently licked the inside of my ear. I’ve always been fascinated by this phenomenon, as if there’s a direct line between our ears and our loins. It’s final evidence that whatever we listen to constitutes life itself.

  “What?” I said.

  “What do you mean ‘what?’” she said.

  “You s-s-said you wanted to tell me s-s-something.”

  She laughed, whispered ocean sounds into my ear, and said “G-g-got it?” Then, very softly, “What do you like? Tell me what you like.”

  “Well, you.”

  “What?”

  “You,” I said. “I like you very much.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “I mean, I like you more than very much. I—”

  “Please don’t say that, Jeremy. Really. You don’t even know me.”

  I once telephoned her at home and when she answered I tried to say, “Hi, Gretchen.” I could only say, “Hi, Grr…. Hi, Grrr … Grrr … Grrr … Grrr … Grrr….” like an ineffectual bear growling about a thorn in his foot. Gretchen kept saying, “Hello? Jeremy? Is that you? Is this Jeremy? Honey, talk to me.” Although I knew she knew it was me, I returned the receiver to its cradle.

  Out of eagerness, out of anxiety, out of an excessive need to please, out of a considerably less strong but nevertheless quite real desire to be pleased, out of a sheer sense of relief, I think, just to be there, I tended to find fulfillment too fast the first time each night. The second embrace of the evening was usually fine and the third, if there was one, could be positively enjoyable, but I was distressed by the inevitable prematurity of the initial intercourse. These repeated attempts to communicate what could have been communicated more elegantly the first time—I’d been in this bind before. Once, after I’d finished too quickly for Gretchen to have much fun, she said, “So what are you going to do? See a sex counselor as well as a speech therapist? Don’t throw your money away. Don’t worry about it. That’s just your Ur-pattern: the second or third time around on everything you’re t-t-terrific.”

  On her birthday, December eleventh, I treated her to a good restaurant, a bad play, and a hookers’ convention hotel in Hollywood. I took her hand and tried to get her to imitate wild, youthful abandon by racing across Sunset Boulevard, but she stayed put on the curb, watched me nearly get hit by, of all things, a boy on a bicycle, then walked two blocks south to a stoplight, where “for Chrissake, Jeremy, any sane person would cross.” I wanted to walk away from the sun, toward big buildings and the promise of Paramount Studios. After returning from her expedition to the stoplight, Gretchen started stocking up on every kitschy item she could get her hands on—star maps, free tickets to daytime TV shows, Krishna roses; she stuffed an astonishing amount of this stuff into the purse which I always told her was too big and bulky but which came in handy for her on this birthday bash in the variously inclined city.

  The rest of the afternoon consisted of Gretchen consulting her maps and saying, “No, no, we take a left here, a left,” while I ran around inspecting the covers of thick slick sick skin magazines. I was always half a block ahead of her, looking back, and she was always waving, rattling her maps, calling out, “Have we passed Cahuenga?” We were two well-dressed children lost in a neighborhood we both could have sworn we knew better than this. We’d taken this little vacation to “find out why we’re together,” as Gretchen said, and all we found out was that neither of us had much sense of direction. During appetizers I used my napkin, which had been sticking out of the empty water glass like beautiful white ears, to sup
press a sneeze, which Gretchen thought was such a “primitive display of bad table manners” she left the restaurant with her sweater and bulky purse in one hand and her half-eaten piece of quiche Lorraine in the other. I grabbed her just as she was getting in the car to head, I supposed, home.

  At night in the hotel room she fell asleep the second I touched her and then rain was general all over Los Angeles. Because it was still raining the next morning and the road was slippery, Gretchen asked me to buckle up. It was one of those shoulder straps that lock into place in your lungs. She kept asking me to strap myself in, I kept looking at the coil of black plastic, and I kept saying no until Gretchen said if I was going to be like that she was happy to stop the car and wait for me to come to my senses. She pulled off Santa Monica Boulevard onto a side street and something in me snapped. I just started shaking her against the fake-wood paneling of her parents’ sedan. Cars passed, rain fell. I just kept shaking her. She said, “I don’t know why we’re together. I really don’t, Jeremy. I have no idea why we’re together.” In times of trouble, in the face of fear, I’ve never really found language very useful. I tossed her umbrella into a tree, shrugged, turned, and waited in the falling rain for the 320RTD back to Westwood.

  That was the lowest of the low points, but there were others. I’d already been to the bathroom and was sitting in the middle seat of the middle row, holding a large Coca-Cola, a box of popcorn. Gretchen was feeding me her least favorite flavors of Jujyfruits, licorice and lime, while we were waiting for the curtains to part. Gretchen said, “What are you doing?”

  I stopped stroking her shoulder and said, “Lo siento, señorita. I was just stroking your shoulder.”

  The lights dimmed. Gretchen said, “You were stroking my shoulder, but there’s a big difference, don’t you think, between lovers making out in a dark movie theater and a little boy pawing his mother’s blouse.” No question mark.