THE WEIGHT OF WORDS
Jeffrey Ford
I
BACK IN THE AUTUMN of ’57, when I was no more than thirty, I went out almost every night of the week. I wasn’t so much seeking a good time as I was trying to escape a bad one. My wife of five years had recently left me for a better looking, wealthier, more active man, and although she had carried on an affair behind my back for some time and, upon leaving, had told me what a drab milksop I was, I still loved her. Spending my evenings quietly reading had always been a great pleasure of mine, but after our separation the thought of sitting still, alone, with nothing but a page of text and my own seeping emotions was intolerable. So I invariably put on my coat and hat, left my apartment, and trudged downtown to the movie theatre where I sat in the dark, carrying on my own subdued affair with whichever Hepburn had something playing at the Ritz. When it was Monroe or Bacall, or some other less symbolically virtuous star featured on the marquee, I might instead go for a late supper at the diner or over to the community center to hear a lecture. The lecture series was, to be kind, not remarkable, but there were bright lights, usually a few other lonely souls taking notes or dozing, and a constant string of verbiage from the speaker that ran interference on my memories and silent recriminations. Along with this, I learned a few things about the Russian Revolution, How to Care for Rose Bushes, the Poetry of John Keats. It was at one of these talks that I first came in contact with Albert Secmatte, billed as A Chemist of Printed Language.
What with the drab title of his lecture, The Weight of Words, I expected little from Secmatte, only that he would speak unceasingly for an hour or two, fixing and preserving me in a twilight state just this side of slumber. Before beginning, he stood at the podium (behind him a white screen, to his side an overhead projector), smiling and nodding for no apparent reason; a short, thin man with a slicked-back wave of dark hair. His slightly baggy black suit might have made him appear a junior undertaker, but this effect was mitigated by his empty grin and thick-lensed, square-framed glasses, which cancelled any other speculation but that he was, to some minor degree, insane. The other dozen members of the audience yawned and rubbed their eyes, preparing to receive his wisdom with looks of already weakening determination. Secmatte’s monotonous voice was as incantatory as a metronome, but also high and light, almost childish. His speech was about words and it began with all of the promise of one of those high school grammar lectures that ensured the poisoning of any youthful fascination with language.
I woke from my initial stupor twenty minutes into the proceedings when the old man sitting three seats down from me got up to leave, and I had to step out into the aisle to let him pass. Upon reclaiming my seat and trying again to achieve that dull bliss I had come for, I happened to register a few phrases of Secmatte’s talk and, for some reason, it caught my interest.
“Printed words,” he said, “are like the chemical elements of the periodic table. They interact with each other, affect each other through a sort of gravitational force on a particulate level in the test tube of the sentence. The proximity of one to another might result in either the appropriation of, or combination of, basic particles of connotation and grammatical presence, so to speak, forming a compound of meaning and being, heretofore unknown before the process was initiated by the writer.”
This statement was both perplexing and intriguing. I sat forward and listened more intently. From what I could gather, Secmatte was claiming that printed words had, according to their length, their phonemic components, and syllabic structure, fixed values that could be somehow mathematically ciphered. The resultant numeric symbols of their representative qualities could then be viewed in relation to the proximity of their location, one to another, in the context of the sentence, and a well-trained researcher could then deduce the effectiveness or power of their presence. My understanding of what he was driving at led me to change my initial determination as to the degree of his madness. I shook my head, for here was a full-fledged lunatic. It was all too wonderfully crackpot for me to ignore and return to my trance.
I looked around at the audience while he droned on and saw expressions of confusion, boredom, and even anger. No one was buying his bill of goods for a moment. I’m sure the same questions I presently entertained were going through their minds as well. How exactly does one weigh a word? What is the unit of measurement that is applied to calculate the degree of influence of a certain syllable? These questions were beginning to be voiced in the form of grumblings and whispered profanities.
The speaker gave no indication that he was the least bit aware of his audience’s impending mutiny. He continued smiling and nodding as he proceeded with his outlandish claims. Just as a woman, a retired Ph.D. in literature, in the front row, a regular at the lectures, raised her hand, Secmatte turned his back on us and strode over to the light switch on the wall to his left. A moment later the lecture room was plunged into darkness. There came out of the artificial night the sound of someone snoring, and then, click, a light came on just to the left of the podium, illuminating the frighteningly dull face of Secmatte, reflecting off his glasses, and casting his shadow at large upon the screen behind him.
“Observe,” he said, and stepped out of the beacon of light to fetch a sheet from a pile of papers he had left on the podium. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out that he was placing a transparency on the projector. There appeared on the screen behind him a flypaper-yellow page, mended with tape and written upon with a neat script in black ink.
“Here is the pertinent formula,” he said, and took a pen from his jacket pocket with which to point out the printed message on the transparency. He read it slowly, and I wish now that I had written it down or memorized it. To the best of my recollection it read something like—
Typeface + Meaning x Syllabic Structure—Length +
Consonantal Profluence / Verbal Timidity x Phonemic
Saturation = The Weight of a Word, or The Value
“Bullshit,” someone in the audience said, and as if that epithet was a magical utterance that broke the spell of the Chemist of the Printed Word, three-quarters of the audience, which was not large to begin with, got up and filed out. If the esteemed speaker had looked more physically imposing, I might have left, myself, timid as I was, but the only threat of danger was to common sense, which had never been a great ally of mine. The only ones left, besides me, were the sleeper in the back row, a kerchiefed woman saying her rosary to my far right, and a fellow in a business suit in the first row.
“And how did you come upon this discovery?” said the gentleman sitting close to Secmatte.
“Oh,” said the speaker, as if surprised that there was anyone out there in the dark. “Years of inquiry. Yes, many years of trial and error.”
“What type of inquiry?” asked the man.
“That is top secret,” said Secmatte, nodding. Then he whipped the transparency off the projector and took it to the podium. He paged through his stack of papers and soon returned to the machine with another transparency. This he laid carefully on the viewing platform. The new sheet held at its middle a single sentence in typeface of about fifteen words. As I cannot recall for certain the ingredients of the aforementioned formula, the words of this sentence are even less clear to me now. I am positive that one of the early words in the line, but not the first or second, was “scarlet.” I believe that this color was used to describe a young man’s ascot.
Secmatte stepped into the light of the projector again so that his features were set aglow by the beam. “I know what you are thinking,” he said, his voice taking a turn toward the defensive. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, now we will see…”
The sleeper snorted, coughed, and snored twice during the speaker’s pause.
“Notice what happens to the sentence when I place this small bit of paper over the word ‘the’ that appears as the eleventh word in the sequence.” He
leaned over the projector, and I watched on the screen as his shadow fingers fit a tiny scrap of paper onto the relevant article. When the deed was done, he stepped back and said, “Now read the sentence.”
I read it once and then twice. To my amazement, not only the word “the” was missing where he had obscured it, but the word “scarlet” was now also missing. I don’t mean that it was blocked out, I mean that it had vanished and the other words which had stood around it had closed ranks as if it had never been there to begin with.
“A trick,” I said, unable to help myself.
“Not so, sir,” said Secmatte. He stepped up and with only the tip of the pen, flipped away the paper covering “the.” In that same instant, the word “scarlet” appeared like a ghost, out of thin air. One moment it did not exist, and the next it stood in bold typeface.
The gentleman in the front row clapped his hands. I sat staring with my mouth open, and then it opened wider when, with the pen tip, he maneuvered the scrap back onto “the” thus vanishing the word “scarlet” again.
“You see, I have analyzed the characteristics of each word in this sentence, and when the article ‘the’ is obscured, the lack of its value in the construction of the line creates a phenomenon I call sublimation, which is basically a masking of the existence of the word ‘scarlet.’ That descriptive word of color is still very much present, but the reader is unable to see it because of the effect initiated by a reconfiguration of the inherent structure of the sentence and the corresponding values of its words in relation to each other. The reader instead registers the word ‘scarlet’ subconsciously.”
I laughed out loud, unable to believe what I was seeing. “Subconsciously?” I said.
“The effect is easily corroborated,” he said, and went to the podium with the transparency containing the line about the young man’s ascot only to return with another clear sheet. He laid that sheet on the projector and pointed to the typeface line at its center. This one I remember very well. It read: The boy passionately kissed the toy.
“In this sentence you now have before you,” said Secmatte, “there is a sublimated word that exists in print as surely as do all of the others, but because of my choice of typeface and its size and the configuration of phonemic and syllabic elements, it has been made a phantom. Still, its meaning, the intent of the word, will come through to you on a subconscious level. Read the sentence and ponder it for a moment.”
I read the sentence and tried to picture the scene. On its surface, the content suggested an image of innocent joy, but each time I read the words, I felt a tremor of revulsion, some dark overtone to the message.
“What is missing?” said the man in the front row.
“The answer will surface into your consciousness in a little while,” said Secmatte. “When it does, you will be assured of the validity of my work.” He then turned off the projector. “Thank you all for coming,” he said into the darkness. A few seconds later, the lights came on.
I rubbed my eyes at the sudden glare and when I looked up, I saw Secmatte gathering together his papers and slipping them into a briefcase.
“Very interesting,” said the man in the front row.
“Thank you,” said Secmatte without looking up from the task of latching his case. He then walked over to the gentleman and handed him what appeared to be a business card. As the speaker made his way down the aisle, he also stopped at the row I was in and offered me one of the cards.
I rose and stepped over to take it from him. “Thanks,” I said. “Very engaging.” He nodded and smiled and continued to do so as he walked the remaining length of the room and left through the doors at the back. Putting the card in the pocket of my coat, I looked around and noticed that both the woman with the rosary and the sleeper had already left.
“Mr. Secmatte seems somewhat touched in the head,” I said to the gentleman, who was now passing me on his way out.
He smiled and said, “Perhaps. Have a good evening.”
I returned his salutation and then followed him out of the room.
On my way home, I remembered the last sentence Secmatte had displayed on the projector, the one about the boy kissing the toy. I again felt ill at ease about it, and then, suddenly, I caught something out of the corner of my mind’s eye, wriggling through my thoughts. Like the sound of a voice in a memory or the sound of the door slamming shut in a dream about my wife, I distinctly heard, in my mind, a hissing noise. Then I saw it: a snake. The boy was passionately kissing a toy snake. The revelation stopped me in my tracks.
II
Having been a book lover since early childhood, I had always thought my job as head librarian at the local Jameson City branch the perfect occupation for me. I was a proficient administrator and used my position, surreptitiously, as a bully pulpit, to integrate a new worldview into our quiet town. When ordering new books, I set my mind to procuring the works of black writers, women writers, the beats, and the existentialists. Once I had met Secmatte, though, the job became even more interesting. When I wasn’t stewing about the absence of Corrine, or imagining what she must be doing with the suave Mr. Walthus, I contemplated the nature of Secmatte’s lecture. Walking through the stacks, I now could almost hear the ambient buzz of phonemic interactions transpiring within the closed covers of the shelved books. Upon opening a volume and holding it up close to my weak eyes, I thought I felt a certain fizz against my face, like the bursting bubbles of a Coca-Cola, the result of residue thrown off by the textual chemistry. Secmatte had fundamentally changed the way in which I thought about printed language.
Perhaps it was a week after I had seen his talk and demonstration that I was staring out the large window directly across from the circulation desk. It was midafternoon and the library was virtually empty. The autumn sun shone down brightly as I watched the traffic pass by outside on the quiet main street of town.
I was remembering a night soon after we were married when Corrine and I were lying in bed, in the dark. She used to say to me, “Tell me a wonderful thing, Cal.” What she meant was that I should regale her with some interesting tidbit of knowledge from my extensive reading.
“There is a flower,” I told her, “that grows only on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, called by the natives of that paradisiacal atoll, the Warulatnee. The large pink blossom it puts forth holds a preservative chemical that keeps it intact long after the stem has begun to rot internally. From the decomposition, a gas builds up in the stem, and eventually is violently released at the top, sending the blossom into flight. As it rapidly ascends, sometimes to a height of twenty feet, the petals fold back to make it more streamlined, but once it reaches the apex of its launch, the wind takes it and the large, soft petals open like the wings of a bird. It can travel for miles in this manner on the currents of ocean air. Warulatnee means ‘the sunset bird’ and the blossom is given as a token of love.”
When I was finished, she kissed me and told me I was beautiful. Fool that I was, I thought she loved me for my intelligence and my open mind. Instead, I should have held her more firmly than my beliefs—a miasma of weightless words I could not get my arms around.
Memories like this one, when they surfaced, each killed me a little inside. And it was at that precise moment that I saw, outside the library window, Mr. Walthus’s aquamarine convertible pull up at the stop light at the corner. Corrine was there beside him, sitting almost in his lap, with her arm around his wide shoulders. Before the light changed, he gunned the engine, most likely to make sure I would notice, and as they took off down the street, I saw my wife throw her head back and laugh with an expression of pleasure that no word could describe. It was maddening, frustrating, and altogether juvenile. I felt something in my midsection crumple like a sheet of old paper.
Later that same day, while wandering through the stacks again, having escaped into thoughts of Secmatte’s printed language system, I h
appened to pass, at eye level, a copy of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. At the sight of it, a wonderful thought, like the pink Warulatnee, took flight in my imagination powered by effluvia from the decomposition of my heart. Before I reached the coat closet, I had fully formulated my devious plan. I reached into the pocket of my overcoat and retrieved the card Secmatte had given me the night of his lecture.
That afternoon I called him from my office in the library.
“Secmatte,” he said in his high-pitched voice, sounding like a child just awakened from an afternoon nap.
I explained who I was and how I knew him and then I mentioned that I wanted to speak to him at more length concerning his theory.
“Tonight,” he said, and gave me his address. “Eight o’clock.”
I thanked him and told him how interested I was in his work.
“Yes” was all he said before hanging up, and I pictured him nodding and smiling without volition.
Secmatte lived in a very large, one-story building situated behind the lumberyard and next to the train tracks on the edge of town. The place had once held the offices of an oil company—an unadorned concrete bunker of a dwelling. There were dark curtains on the front windows, where, when I was a boy, there had been displayed advertisements for Maxwell Oil. I approached the nondescript front door and knocked. A moment later, it opened to reveal Secmatte dressed exactly as he had been the night of his lecture.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 138