Dead Languages

by David Shields

  “Last night?”

  “It’s Thursday morning, Jeremy. They gave you some sedatives and you slept sixteen hours. Gretchen told me to tell you she figured you passed out from ‘sheer embarrassment over the repetitious staccato syntax.’”

  “Tell her I told you that’s not funny.”

  “She also said even those couple of pages were a revelation to her. She had no idea how angry you were; she feels kind of shy and confused right now.” I looked glum. “Don’t look so glum. You’re being released the day after tomorrow.”

  When Sandra thought I was physically and emotionally prepared to hear her harangue she said, “I hope you realize you nearly killed yourself yesterday afternoon. It probably seems very romantic to you to be self-absorbed and self-destructive, but what you’re engaged in is so obviously slow suicide. You have to face the problem frontally—rationally. Won’t you take the big step and try, at least for a while, voluntary stuttering?”

  I couldn’t take any big steps, at least for a while, since I was confined by the metal railing and still felt woozy from all the pills and spills, but I consented to Sandra’s proposal; I hardly had the strength to do otherwise. Thursday, Friday, Saturday afternoon she came in with her tape recorder and told me to establish tension in my upper articulators on unfeared sounds at progressively higher levels of tension.

  “What are my upper articulators again?” I asked, turning on my side so I could see her on the other side of the bars.

  “Teeth, tongue, mouth, and lips.”

  “What are my unfeared sounds?”

  “Jesus, Jeremy, that fall must have really thrown you for a loop. You’ve forgotten everything.” The tape recorder was on. The light failed. “I’ve never heard you have any real problems on B, D, G, J, K, L, M, N, P, R, T, V, or Y.”

  I rattled the metal bars and attempted to suppress a strong, sudden insight that if I kept going I’d assume permanent occupation of the basement in the tower of Babel. Why create dissonance I didn’t need? I felt absurd bouncing my lips like a bumblebee on B when I no longer stumbled on B. Where was S now that I wanted it?

  “I just wish all these tools and techniques and concepts had some real impact on my speech other than making me abnormally self-conscious about it. When I was a little kid I didn’t think that much about stuttering. It wasn’t that bad. It didn’t mean that much to me.”

  “Is that true?”

  No, Sandra, you know that isn’t true. You know everything. You can read my mind. You know I wouldn’t be writing this if that were true.

  She suggested I list a hundred unfeared words, then “we” would voluntary stutter our way through them. Unlike all of Sandra’s other voodoo, voluntary stuttering wasn’t a technique to talk. It was a style of stuttering. She had at her disposal a lot of paradoxical aperçus to the effect that stuttering is the attempt not to stutter, you stutter because you’re afraid you might stutter, you remain a stutterer as long as you pretend not to be one…. The basic idea was consciously to practice your bad habits, thus eliminating them. It scared me because I knew it would work if I wanted it to.

  All through April and May she’d instructed me to use, for instance, “goose” as the last word in a sentence, prolonging the g smoothly. In the empty clinic room, looking straight into Sandra’s sympathetic eyes, I said, “Last night I went into the woods and shot a gghhoose.” This wasn’t strictly true. Last night I’d neither gone into the woods nor shot a goose. Which wasn’t the point. The point was that I had, at least for a moment and in special circumstances, controlled the act of communication.

  I flew from goose to dogwood to jonquil to Mesopotamia with such surprising confidence and success that Sandra thought I should now attempt to stutter voluntarily on feared words in real life, for instance, with Gretchen. My relationship with my editor was now barely cordial—from what little she’d heard (and neither she nor anyone else ever actually read the rest), “Deep Breathing” wasn’t true to how anything happened, she simply didn’t talk like that, the whole solipsistic environment suggested the story was a wet dream—and this would be only one more pressure upon our crumbling alliance, but Sandra explained that I’d never rise out of the linguistic ghetto if I didn’t test my private triumphs out on the road. It was near-impossible to deny her anything since she always asked so nicely and you hated to hurt her feelings. I promised to float, when arguing with Gretchen, through five feared words a day.

  WHILE SHE WAS turning up the volume on the Jupiter Symphony, I said, “Ah, the Jupiter Sssymphony!” and she turned the volume down. While she was cutting cucumbers, I said, “Don’t you ever get tired of sssalad?” and she threw a tiny tomato at me. After dinner, after dessert, Gretchen washed dishes and I dried them. The kitchen was too small, cold, and dark: an ideal boxing ring. I dried a dish and tried to voluntary stutter on my third feared word of the day. My listener’s back was to me; my luck left.

  “Do you want to go to the beach on S-S-S …?”

  Maybe she didn’t want to go to the beach on Saturday. Maybe that was what she was trying to tell me. She wiped clean the face of the toaster and ran the rag over the knobs of the gas stove. Then she threw the rag into the sink, spun around, and said, “I think Sandra has got you so hyper-aware of your mouth you hardly know where to put your lips anymore when you kiss. What’s happening to you, sweetheart? You’ve become so childishly shy, so involuted. So self-self-self. Blah-blah-blah. I think I need someone who’s a little stronger and more certain of himself.”

  July Fourth weekend we rented a boat on a bay near Newport Beach. In the distance sand dunes rose up out of the backshore and farther away the sun burned the water white out at the horizon. It was low tide. The ocean rocked softly, coughing up moss and seaweed. Sea gulls, gliding over the water and looking for food and trouble in large fluttering packs, did tricks in the air. We couldn’t have been more than fifty yards afloat when Gretchen started telling me how to row. “Stop feathering,” she said, for she wanted to remind me she’d once been the star student at the most exclusive boarding school in Santa Barbara. “We’re drifting left.”

  Quite frankly, I let us drift left. Direction didn’t matter to me. It mattered to Gretchen. Her doctoral dissertation was a kind of complicated map reading of The Dream Life of Balso Snell. At the other end of the bay were some sailboats we were in no danger of disturbing. Sea gulls spread their pearl gray wings and soared up into the air toward those hulking sand dunes. Gretchen said we should definitely stop drifting and pull right. She used numerous nautical terms I didn’t quite catch. I squirmed on the seat with my arms folded, refusing to row, while Gretchen in angry silence brought us back to the beach, where we hit each other across the arms with the oars.

  One night, in her apartment, she said I no longer satisfied her.

  As we’ve said before, there is no safe, effective means of enlarging the organ. And, in the vast majority of cases, there’s simply no need to do so. Clitoral stimulation, not penis size, is the key to women’s sexual satisfaction. We’re enclosing previously published information on the subject of penis size averages.

  Another night, in the Westwords office, she said, “Please. Don’t. Roll over, Fido, play dead.” When I did what she requested, she was enraged that I neither knew her well enough to know she was joshing nor had the hubris to will, regardless of her request, what I wanted.

  She now discussed everything all during desire—this felt fine, that didn’t—whereas I’d always thought running commentary was pretty much of a no-no.

  She once attempted to underline an explication de texte while masturbating me. I once tried for the better part of an evening to enter her in every conceivable way and, when all failed, I cried like Rousseau into her bosom. I was once at the foot of the bed, attempting to titillate her with my tongue, but even after Pachelbel’s “Kanon” had repeated itself she was still dust-dry; I fell off the bed onto the hard wooden floor and stayed there until sunrise.

  At her birthday party we argued w
hether I was going to accompany her and her parents to Mazatlán for Labor Day and, driving home along Venice Boulevard in the middle of the morning, I kept wanting to collide with each new automobile coming the other way, killing the person on my passenger side, as if the only emotion I’ve ever wanted to feel forever is grief.

  SANDRA FINALLY REALIZED she’d be wiser to exploit, rather than explode, my literary pretensions. She told me to monitor ten minutes of my conversation every day, recording where the conversation occurred; to whom I was speaking; the topic; the stress level; where the tension occurred; whether my airflow stopped; whether tension increased when I anticipated a feared word; how many times I substituted a synonym for a word beginning with S or F; whether I did any voluntary stuttering and, if so, on feared or unfeared words; whether I used circumlocuted sentences to convey simple ideas. Notes on stuttering.

  In my daily speech log I was supposed to eschew all psychological speculation, all memories of emotion, all attitudes, and pay exclusive attention to empirical behavior. Doesn’t someone say somewhere that poetry isn’t the expression of, but an escape from, personality? In this one aspect, speech therapy wasn’t completely dissimilar to “The Idea of Order at Key West.” It offered the possibility of a real refuge from feeling.

  The conversation occurred over the telephone. I was talking to Beth. We were talking about Meher Baba. It was a low-stress situation. Tension within normal limits occurred in my stomach. Airflow stopped once, when I couldn’t say “transcendental.” Tension increased before some feared words. I avoided most Fs and Ss. I forgot to voluntary stutter. I used simple sentences to respond to astonishingly simple ideas.

  The conversation occurred in Rico’s Restaurant on Gayley. I was talking to Gretchen. We were talking about breaking up. It was a high-stress situation. Tension occurred in my head. The tension was within abnormal limits. Speech kept reversing on itself. Airflow often failed, especially when the ostentatiously gayley waiter attempted to eavesdrop on the conversation. Tension increased on most feared words. I avoided all Fs and Ss. I did six semi-voluntary, semi-involuntary stutters. I used circumlocuted sentences to express anguish.

  Toward the end of November, while I was rereading the entry about my surprisingly poor performance speaking to a pack of trick-or-treaters, Western Union rapped on my apartment door and the cosmos collapsed. If my family is ever known for anything, it will be for its love of endless language, its feeling for words as the only food. Not even the telegram was flat. Even that was written. It was from Father, and it said: MOTHER IN HOSPITAL FOR BONE SCAN. CANCER HAS SPREAD TO SPINE, LUNGS, SKULL. ADRENAL GLANDS BEING REMOVED. COME HOME IMMEDIATELY. IS THERE NO END TO ALL THIS DARKNESS?

  30

  WEARING SANDALS and shorts, apparently the proper uniform of enlightenment, Beth met me in Baggage, then drove me to Stanford Hospital, where Father was completing the Chronicle’s kindergartenesque crossword puzzle and Mother was asleep in a bed of gold bars. Oxygen was being pumped into her nostrils; some sugar solution, into her main vein. Her head was gray and her skin was splotchy and purple, like a grandmother’s. She was turned on her side, wrapped in a white sheet. Her left foot was caught between two bars. Chocolate melted in the setting sun.

  When she was well Mother’s distinguishing feature was her incontestable authority and now here she was, snoring beneath the fluorescent lights, helpless as a hurt pup. Through her diction, dress, and attitude, Mother prided herself on being mistaken for Beth’s older sister; now, without even trying, she looked easily as old as Father.

  When the nurse woke her up for a second to give her a sleeping pill, I said, “Hi, Mom. It’s Jeremy. Nice to see you. Go back to sleep if you’re tired. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Beth dog-eared a middle page of the book of Baba quotes she was reading and said, “She’s obviously very tired. Too many visitors wore her out. We should all go home and let her rest.” In the back seat of the car Beth meditated, while Father and I explored the topic of property, for he was now a real estate agent and unpersuasively preoccupied with lot space, the coherence of blocks, the abiding beauty of two and a half baths.

  The things in my room were like speech clinic furniture. I couldn’t get my knees under the desk. I had to hunch to get my head under the shower faucet. The bed was a full foot shorter and narrow, narrow. I awoke at five a.m. to Father howling. Beth slept right through the noise; she must have incorporated it into the assemblage of her nightmare. I donned bathrobe and slippers and padded upstairs to find Father buck naked in the breakfast room, screwing in and unscrewing a low light bulb, shaking his head, and saying between screams: “Memory goes and I forget what the other thing is. Ha ha…. Reporter races into the city desk of the Jerusalem Post, shouting, ‘Hold the back page!’ … The food is terrible and such small portions! … Oh, oh, the Einstein joke—… ‘and from this he makes a living?’ You always loved that one, Jeremy…. ‘Why would an insignificant person like me carry such things and, besides, who can read?’ … Why do Ukrainians live so long? They eat oatmeal for eighty years. Ha ha. Okay, maybe that’s not one of the best…. How do you make a hormone? You know that one…. Oh, oh—‘Still, two slices of bread?’… Rabbi, dying: ‘Will somebody please say something about my humility?’ It doesn’t always get a laugh….”

  Maybe it hit Father suddenly in the middle of the night. If so, I envy him. He got it all out in one lifetime of sorrow, whereas I’ve never had even a good long cry and have had to organize these sentences to try to experience some sort of major emotion. Father loved Mother. More than that, he needed her. He desperately needed her and when, for once, she needed him he collapsed on the breakfast room linoleum, announcing, “I need the juice again, Jeremy. I can’t stand it any more.”

  He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t impersonate the part of the good guardian. I didn’t argue or attempt to reason with him. I packed his bags and drove him to Montbel, which, ten miles east, was rather pretty: sycamore trees, parking spaces, teenage boys with bandages on their heads. Father’s room even had a view of a little river. He jumped from wall to wall like a jai alai player, altering his mood every minute—exuberant, bashful, distressed, disgusted, tormented, tickled, grave, bemused, scared, dead, delirious—and I didn’t know what to do, so I kept hugging him, saying he’d be all right. A nurse knocked and said I had to leave now.

  “Well, goodbye, then, Dad. I have to go, but Dr. Skolnick will come see you in a second. You know how much you like him.”

  “Skolnick?” he said. “Don’t know him. What’s he going to do, nick my skull? Get it, Jeremy? Skolnick: nick my skull?”

  I got it, Father, I got it, but didn’t dare laugh, since the nurse was still standing in the doorway. The schizophrenic mind, in its depressive state, focuses upon form to the virtual exclusion of content.

  “You remember Dr. Skolnick, don’t you, Dad? You saw him the last time you were here and the time before that, too, I think. He’s a good man. You liked him. You talked tennis together. You always ask for him.”

  “Will he give me the juice?” Father asked, bouncing up and down on his bed. There was very little else in the room other than a bureau and that unbeatable view of the river.

  Despite the nurse’s stagy protestations, I said, “Yes, of course he will. He’ll give you whatever you want.”

  “I’m thirsty for the juice,” he said, making obscene sounds with his lips.

  Dr. Skolnick entered the room, waving sphygmomanometer and stethoscope like party favors. More jai alai acrobatics from Father. I was told to leave and return tomorrow. I left, but halfway down the hall I could still hear Father weeping.

  I drove from Montbel to Stanford, from Stanford back to Montbel, comparing my parents’ problems. Sometimes I was accompanied by Beth, whom I tried to talk back to the wonderful world of books while we ministered to the diseased and dying. The first day after Thanksgiving I gave Mother an oversize Kodacolor postcard of boats and birds and the beach going to amber in the Balboa sunset.<
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  “It’s so beautiful,” Mother said, crying and placing the card in the most privileged position at the edge of her portable table. She further flouted her scary new serenity by laying across her lap a long, thin piece of wood that she was sanding into maybe a letter-opener for Gargantua. “There’s a certain logic and reason to it all that I find very comforting,” she lectured an incredulous Beth and Jeremy, “even a kind of purity to bringing out the best in the grain.”

  I don’t know whether Mother thought she should recover her strength if Father was going to be weak again or whether, in some not-so-secret chamber of her heart, she was cheered by the news—I don’t know how to explain it other than to say she briefly rallied when she heard Father was at Montbel. She was encouraged to come home, where she lay quietly in a gray gown, listening to operatic radio, breathing borrowed oxygen, asking often for Father of all people. She rang a gold bell, which was tied to her wrist, whenever she needed one of us to feed her, wash her, push pills past her mouth, lift her onto the commode.

  While I was getting ready to go back to school, Gretchen flew up one Sunday morning to visit before flying back with me to L.A. Beth was reading most of the major soliloquies to a sleepy Mother; somehow I got talked into giving Gretchen a guided tour of the basement.

  Although it was adjacent to my bedroom, I hadn’t been down there for years. I hadn’t wanted to go crawling around in cesspools. The basement ran the length of the house, beginning with dull light and a water heater and ending with low beams, cracked cement, complete darkness. I guided Gretchen through the alcove where Beth and her friends had once held secret meetings of the Monkees’ club and where a sign still read MICKY LIVES. Maybe Micky lived, maybe he didn’t, but everything else was ruined: corroded thermoses and canteens and broken garden equipment, an abandoned workbench, busted boxes of dead language written by Mother and Father. Gretchen kept hitting her head on the low beams. I held her hand and exhibited suitcases without handles, wicker baskets without wicker, year after year of Puppa’s junk shop account books, and my leg brace. I probably would have stumbled over the brace if Gretchen hadn’t noticed its rusted steel, moldy leather, locked buckles, its knotted laces. I held it high and clanked it about a little like half a Halloween skeleton, tried to strap it to my leg to recall the past.