Dead Languages

by David Shields

  Gretchen would always read with unfaltering fluency but without a millimeter of emotion. One night when she was going over galleys in bed, she was appalled at the number of mistakes the previous proofreader had missed. The second side of Jean-Pierre Rampal’s jazz album, which I’ve never much liked but to which Gretchen genuflected, was playing over and over again on the stereo in the living room. The only light in the apartment was the pale pool of the reading lamp.

  “Gretchen,” I said, “are you awake?”

  Though it was midnight, she was obviously awake. She was correcting proof sheets. I just wanted to get her attention. She didn’t answer. I shook her shoulders, wiggled her toes, and said, “Gretchen, honey, it’s true, isn’t it, that in the next issue you’re publishing a newly discovered letter of ‘Pep’ West’s that casts new—”

  “Hnnn?” she said, completely preoccupied with her galley slaves, I mean galley sheets. She still hadn’t heard me. She was turned on her side, with a cigarette in one hand and a red pen like an arrow in the other.

  I had to do it to get her to look at me. She had a spot of skin just above her right hip that was about as ticklish a four-by-four-inch area as I’ve ever tickled, and I let my fingers frolic until she wriggled, slapped my hand away, sat up and said, “What? What do you want?”

  I wanted her to read aloud the only full paragraph on page 192 of “Time Passes.” Gretchen put away her proofs, dragged on her cigarette, capped her pen, pressed her glasses to her nose, increased the crease between pages 192 and 193.

  But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

  She read these words with an astonishing perfection of almost British enunciation and an equally amazing atonality, as if she were trying to underline the dichotomy that divided us: the control of which she was capable and the helplessness to which I was prone. She closed the book, turned out the light, and under the covers, in the madness of the post-midnight dark, intertwined my chest hairs, of which I have six, and said, “I like reading to you, sort of, but you should read to me sometimes, Jeremy. Do you really s-s-stutter that bad when you r-r-read aloud?”

  “Fuck you. Yes, I stutter that bad when I read aloud.”

  I would have died if I had stuttered on that sentence. The bedroom was a black mouth, the pillow was hot and sweaty, her sheets scratched. I wanted to go run in the March wind until I caught cold.

  “You know that paragraph by heart, don’t you?”

  “Which paragraph?” I said, stalling.

  “The paragraph I just read.”

  “I know how it goes.”

  “Well, you’re here with me now. You’re happy, right? You’re sleepy, you’re relaxed. If you lie back and close your eyes and let me massage your mind while you recite your little paragraph, I bet you’ll be as articulate as I am.”

  “Heaven forfend.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  I explained to her what Sandra had explained to me: tension’s travel from the stomach to the teeth. She rubbed my loins while I stared at the ceiling, feared the dark, and asked, “But what after all is one night?”

  The answer—as Virgin, Sandra, Gretchen, Mother, and I knew—was not an easy one. “A short space,” though neither correct nor incorrect, seemed coy. “Night succeeds to night,” though inarguable, seemed evasive and obvious. The answer, as with all true answers, was in the words themselves. Just as the sounds seemed to stutter out successive nights (“cool cathedral caves,” “bones bleach and burn”), I stuttered out the sentences. It was the first time Gretchen had ever heard me mumble for more than a moment. It was worse than I’d feared. It was much worse than she’d anticipated. It was like the mimesis of an imitation of a parody of bad behavior.

  I stuttered on every S, of which there were seven in the second sentence. I didn’t stutter on the Ls or I might never have made it to morning. I faltered so long on fingers that Gretchen, with reluctance, had to say it for me. I never got in the vicinity of sands, and the sentence that concluded the paragraph wasn’t within my purview. I backed up all the way to “Some” to get a running start, which succeeded only in raising my pitch. I gulped, shook my head, tried to say Indian. Ih-Ih-Ih-Ih. Ih-Ih-Ih-Ih. By now our eyes had become adjusted to the darkness. She could see me wince, see me raise my right eyebrow with each attempt to implode my Adam’s apple; could see, swimming on my face, the gaudy mix of sweat and tears. Finally, from me, silence, then my tired tongue rolled back into my mouth. It seemed like about time for someone to do something. She covered my lips with hers.

  29

  GRETCHEN WOULDN’T let me wallow in my woes and by the end of the week she’d planned, organized, and publicized:

  A Fiction Reading!

  3 Up-and-Coming, Soon-to-be-Famous Student Writers!

  Crystal Room, Sproul Hall, 4 PM, March 23!

  This poster was tacked to every bulletin board in the department, taped to every elevator wall and glass door. It was in the window of every Westwood Village bookstore, every restaurant, every cute little clothes shop. It was in at least two places on every floor of every library. It was so prominent in the cafeteria it disrupted the color coordination of Ackerman Union.

  I went to the Westwords office to congratulate Gretchen on the excellence of the idea as well as ubiquity of the blitz. She was seated at her desk, typing happily, when I walked in and asked: “Who are the three up-and-coming, soon-to-be-famous student writers?” I knew and I didn’t know.

  She back-spaced, pulled out her little packet of Ko-Rec-Type, and said, “Jesse Ragent, Mimi Hammer, and….” She was concentrating upon positioning the white tab of opaquing film. The sun flashed off the floor; her typewriter twinkled. An advertisement for the upcoming issue was tacked to the front door, covers of back issues were spread across the walls, a submissions poster was taped to the ceiling, dozens of different editions filled bookshelves, all over were manuscripts, order forms, form rejections. She stood, hugged me, and whispered, “You.”

  The office was on the third floor of the oldest building on campus. I stood near a window, looking out at the lucky, mechanical swimmers in the pool. The window was large and round and could be swung open from the inside. I had a deep, jittery urge to jump. I was certain I could get someone, anyone, to substitute for me, but Gretchen said she’d already mailed announcements to the Bruin, KCRW, the Evening Outlook.

  “You can’t violate an expectation that’s already been aroused,” she said. “As a writer, even a beginning one, you can appreciate that.”

  The clear, round window looked inviting again. I tipped over a rickety table as I chased Gretchen around the room and asked her why she had done this to me. Arrested for streetwalking, she could have explained the high heels, the black hose, the hand-held purse in such a way that she would be given a citation for exemplary citizenship. I knew any attempt at inquiry was useless, but, still, I was curious what was going through that amazing mind of hers when she conjured up this fiasco. She said she’d never heard me babble that bad before and was so determined to erase my feelings of failure that she decided to orchestrate a triumphant night of eloquence. Gretchen was certain that once I was wearing a three-piece suit, speaking into a microphone, and looking out only at friends and admirers, my trembling difficulties would
die a quick death. I had, of course, heard previous versions of this remedy: Mrs. Sherfey’s suggestion that I play Iago, Mother’s hope that I’d become fluent through the forensic society. This time, though, for reasons that remain a little fuzzy—deluded about the transformative properties of art? weary of my own despair? who knows?—I was weirdly sanguine about the solution. I avoided Gretchen’s kiss and trotted off to my afternoon class, which was, if I remember right, Moral Problems in Philosophy: Kant, who languished in limbo between noumenon and phenomenon, to Camus, who got all chilly inside when Maman dropped dead.

  This was a moral problem, and I approached it very philosophically. With Camus in my pocket and Kant in my mind I realized I’d probably be able to read if I read under the influence, and I could get back at Gretchen if I wrote and read a story about her. I told Gretchen I was writing a story based on my grandfather—the pawn shop, the bowl of pennies, the ancient clock, the white whiskers, the glass of bourbon, the Sunday paper open to the obituaries—and needed the entire weekend to myself.

  My ambition was to write about someone I hadn’t grown up with, to make someone else matter. It didn’t help a lot to receive a flurry of calls and letters all weekend from my family. Mother photocopied a publisher’s dismissal of her book about “civil liberties for young people.” The editor said that “if, instead of answering your own questions yourself, you developed a series of inquiries through which you led the student to arrive at the proper conclusions, you’d have a more marketable product. Unless you involve the students in each of the episodes, you run the risk of losing their interest; let them uncover for themselves the facts and principles that underlie each unit.” I felt like maybe he was onto something. Beth passed along a joke that passed right over my head:

  —Was Ben Franklin a Puritan?

  —No. He never went to church.

  Father sent me a two-sentence, homemade postcard that said: “If a shirt comes to you from Macy’s it’s from me, Dad. The shirt is from Dad.” On the front was a photograph he’d taken of the Transamerica Building, never a good omen with Father. Then Beth called and got caught on her favorite complaint: “Sometimes I wish people didn’t have to look at me at all. I don’t know who I feel more sorry for—them or me.” I wrote twelve hours a day; slept six; ate two; read three; masturbated, in anger at Gretchen, one. She, and everybody else, and even I at first, thought the story was about her, but it wasn’t. Not really. All I’ve ever fixed on is my nonfictional family in its perfect righteousness.

  Gretchen thought I’d written about my grandfather’s drinking habits and untimely (at ninety-six, he was guiding one of his best customers through the back room of his junk shop when his heart suddenly hurt) death. She invited Charles to come to the reading, and Sandra, and a number of classmates whose language I’d declined when I was helping Gretchen with Westwords. All these people were sitting in the most comfortable chairs of the Crystal Room in Sproul Hall when I entered, drunk as a skunk. I’d been drinking pure gin in a plastic cup since mid-morning and it was now four. I grabbed the arms of couches; I didn’t recognize Gretchen or Sandra (Beth couldn’t come, though Charles was a surprise witness); I took a thin blue pattern in the rug for a river and leapt away from it; I thought the top of my head was going to twirl off; I had the pleasant sensation of a gauzy veil separating me from everyone else as I made my way to a seat up front. The Crystal Room had that gorgeous, riverlike rug wall-to-wall, velvet-covered chairs, foot rests for important people, unfathomably deep cushions, color portraits of past presidents, and one immense crystal chandelier that refracted everything.

  While Gretchen stood at the podium, giving some sort of benediction, I kept seeing the crystals convert into snow, ice, falling glass. The room had a maximum capacity of seventy-five, but there must have been a hundred and fifty people there, standing, sitting on the floor, leaning against lamps, listening to Gretchen, who was urging everyone to subscribe to or join Westwords and emphasizing beyond common decency the coincidence that all three up-and-coming, soon-to-be-famous student writers had published first in her magazine. She got a big hand at the end of her subscription drive, then sat down. I haven’t the faintest idea whether the first act of Jesse Ragent’s screenplay was any good because I wasn’t listening, and I can remember only the two totally explicit tableaux in what Mimi Hammer called a “cruel pastiche of shy pornography.”

  When Mimi was finished most of her friends left, but everyone else stayed and watched me take my manuscript out of my coat pocket, watched me clip the recording microphone to my tie, watched me grip the podium with both hands. The room twirled. The chandelier kept shattering. People’s faces lost integrity.

  “Good afternoon,” I said and the microphone screeched a little. “I think we should all be grateful to Gretchen Noyes for organizing this very successful event.” I motioned for Gretchen to rise, and she rose, and the audience applauded. “To those of you who know either me or the organizer of this very successful event, the story I’ll be reading might appear to be somewhat autobiographical in origin.” Gretchen gasped. “Whereas, actually, I’ve never gone hiking with the organizer of this very successful event. I’m not a sadist or a photographer. I’m no nature buff. None of this happened. It’s completely made up.” A few scattered skeptics.

  I said the title—which occurred to me at that very moment—was “Deep Breathing” and began to read:

  We hiked and hiked and hiked. The moon hung above us like a floater in the eye. Thin, lighted disc; electric lamp; perfectly circular moon—I hated it. I didn’t want to see her face. I didn’t want her to see mine. The moon seemed accessible to me, bothersome and ceaseless, and I hated it. I wanted darkness and earth. Clouds, if possible. Not the moon. I craved eclipse.

  I imagined I was a harlequin, danced about, told jokes. Sarah said she’d heard the stories before: they weren’t funny. I disagreed. We looked into each other’s glasses, saw ourselves, and waved. We exchanged glasses and stumbled. Sarah was nearly blind. I wore glasses to feel detached and look intelligent. She thought I was brilliant. She told me so. I wasn’t brilliant. The moon was brilliant.

  The path narrowed. Tree limbs shook at us like parents’ fingers. Bushes jumped out at us like animals. We were lost. Lost, Sarah said. I was wearing jeans, a torn green lumberjack shirt, boots. I was carrying a sleeping bag, a backpack. Let’s go back, she said. I had no idea how to get back. I had no intention of going back. I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to hike. Sarah wanted to sleep. She was tired. I offered to carry her backpack for her. Her sleeping bag. Her head. The moon. She walked ahead of me, moving her arms like pistons.

  My eyes focused on her ass. I thought that was vulgar and tried to avert my attention. I stared at her backpack, her head bobbing up and down. I looked up at the moon, down at the dirt. Moon like an attenuated traffic light, dirt like waves. I squinted toward the treetops, peered into labyrinths of entangled tree limbs. They were all of only passing interest. My eyes were riveted on her ass.

  Sarah asked me to promise we’d stop at the first clearing to which we came. I promised. I’m tired, she said, you have to respect that. I told her I did. I was tired, too—sleep was inevitable and natural, like the moon. I wanted to remove the moon, rebel against sleep. I wanted to hike until the moon faded, until the sun rose, until my backpack slipped off my shoulders.

  We walked into a black meadow that was dominated by plants taller than we were. We walked in wet soil and whipped whorls of long, pointed leaves out of our way. Culver’s Root, she said. I disagreed. I hate displays of knowledge. Sarah slipped and pulled clusters of leaves with her. The moon surveyed the field, withheld comment. We turned our hands into scythes, trampled Culver’s Root, tore off leaves.

  The meadow curved upward. We used plants like walking sticks. The meadow straightened its back, stood straight up. The meadow became a hill, became a 70-degree angle. Our backpacks hung on our shoulders like vaults. Sarah’s sleeping bag slipped out of her hand, unrolled into mud, o
pened flat like a mattress. I suggested we stop hiking, take advantage of the mattress. She rolled up the sleeping bag like a tongue. She stood and walked ahead of me. I quoted a passage of Camus’s so banal it is the text of a fairly popular poster: do not walk ahead of me, do not walk behind me, walk next to me and be my friend, et cetera. She hurried away from me. I ran after her. Climbing the hill, carrying my backpack and sleeping bag, I ran after her and overtook her.

  The top of the hill curved toward us like a lip. The moon flashed off the plants like lightning. We made crunching sounds, snapped twigs, stepped on snails. We kissed the hill’s lips. We …

  The podium rocked, the rug curled up, the chandelier crashed to the floor, everyone turned upside down, and I fell backward with a cold thud. My skull was bleeding, the microphone was wrapped around my neck like the umbilical cord at my birth. The next thing I knew I was in a high bed surrounded by metal railing in a white room decorated with plastic flowers, staring at Sandra.

  I sat up and said the expected.

  Sandra, who was sitting in a chair on the other side of the metal railing, put her finger to her lips and said, “Shhh. Lie back down. You need to rest. You’re in Student Health.”

  Curtains, sheets, floor, table: everything in the room was white. I could feel a bandage on the back of my head and that, I assumed, was also white.

  “What happened to me?”

  “Well, you were obviously somewhat inebriated at the reading,” she said. “Just as you were really getting into your story, which sounded like it was going to be quite exciting, you fell over and hit your noggin on, it looked like, the front leg of a chair. Gretchen and I and Jesse somebody carried you out, and I drove you over here last night.”