Logorrhea

by John Klima

  It was a Tuesday night in September. Olaf had spent his customary hours at the Magdalen Gate postal authority, come back to his boardinghouse, and eaten alone in his room. The evening air was cool but not biting, and he had propped his window open before sitting down to read. When he woke, he thought for a long, bleary moment that the cold night breeze had woken him. Then the knock at his door repeated itself.

  His blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Olaf answered the door. Lord Iron stood in the hall. He looked powerfully out of place. His fine jacket and cravat, the polished boots, the well-groomed beard and moustache all belonged in a palace or club. And yet rather than making the boardinghouse hall seem shabby and below him, the hallway made Lord Iron, monster of the city, seem false as a boy playing dress-up. Olaf nodded as if he’d been expecting the man.

  “I have need of you,” Lord Iron said.

  “Have I the option of refusal?”

  Lord Iron smiled, and Olaf took it as the answer to his question. He stepped back and let the man come through. Lord Iron sat on the edge of the bed while Olaf closed his window, drew up his chair and sat. In the light from Olaf’s reading lamp, Lord Iron’s skin seemed waxen and pale. His voice, when he spoke, was as distant as a man shouting from across a square.

  “There is a question plaguing me,” Lord Iron said. “You are the only man I can think of who might answer it.”

  “Is there a life at stake?” Olaf asked.

  “No,” Lord Iron said. “Nothing so petty as that.”

  When Olaf failed to respond, Lord Iron, born Edmund Scarasso, looked up at him. There was a terrible weariness in his eyes.

  “I would know the fair price for a man’s soul,” he said.

  “Forgive me?” Olaf said.

  “You heard me,” Lord Iron said. “What would be fit trade for a soul? I…I can’t tell any longer. And it is a question whose answer has…some relevance to my situation.”

  In an instant, Olaf’s mind conjured the sitting room at the Club Baphomet. Lord Iron sitting in one deep leather chair, and the Prince of Lies across from him with a snifter of brandy in his black, clawed hands.

  “I don’t think that would be a wise course to follow,” Olaf said, though in truth his mind was spinning out ways to avoid being party to this diabolism. He did not wish to make a case before that infernal judge. Lord Iron smiled and shook his head.

  “There is no one in this besides yourself and me,” he said. “You are an expert in the exchange of exotic currencies. I can think of none more curious than this. Come to my house on Mammon Street in a month’s time. Tell me what conclusion you have reached.”

  “My Lord—”

  “I will make good on the investment of your time,” Lord Iron said, then rose and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.

  Olaf gaped at the empty room. He was a cambist. Of theology, he knew only what he had heard in church. He had read more of satanic contracts in his adventure novels than in the Bible. He was, in fact, not wholly certain that the Bible had an example of a completed exchange. Satan had tempted Jesus. Perhaps there was something to be taken from the Gospel of Matthew….

  Olaf spent the remainder of the night poring over his Bible and considering what monetary value might be assigned to the ability to change stones to bread. But as the dawn broke and he turned to his morning ablutions, he found himself unsatisfied. The devil might have tempted Christ with all the kingdoms of the world, but it was obvious that such an offer wouldn’t be open to everyone. He was approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

  As he rode through the deep tunnels to Magdalen Gate, as he stopped at the newsstand for a morning paper, as he checked the ticker tape and updated his slate, his mind occupied itself by sifting through all the stories and folk wisdom he had ever heard. There had been a man who traded his soul to the devil for fame and wealth. Faust had done it for knowledge. Was there a way to represent the learning of Faust in terms of, say, semesters at the best universities of Europe? Then the rates of tuition might serve as a fingerhold.

  It was nearly the day’s end before the question occurred to him that put Lord Iron’s commission in its proper light, and once that had happened, the answer was obvious. Olaf had to sit down, his mind afire with the answer and its implications. He didn’t go home, but took himself to a small public house. Over a pint and a stale sandwich, he mentally tested his hypothesis. With the second pint, he celebrated. With the third, he steeled himself, then went out to the street and hailed a carriage to take him to the house of Lord Iron.

  Revelers had infected the household like fleas on a dying rat. Masked men and women shrieked with laughter, not all of which bespoke mirth. No servant came to take his coat or ask his invitation, so Olaf made his own way through the great halls. He passed through the whole of the building before emerging from the back and finding Lord Iron himself sitting at a fountain in the gardens. His lordship’s eyebrows rose to see Olaf, but he did not seem displeased.

  “So soon, boy? It isn’t a month,” Lord Iron said as Olaf sat on the cool stone rail. The moon high above the city seemed also to dance in the water, lighting Lord Iron’s face from below and above at once.

  “There was no need,” Olaf said. “I have your answer. But I will have to make something clear before I deliver it. If you will permit me?”

  Lord Iron opened his hand in a motion of deference. Olaf cleared his throat.

  “Wealth,” he said, “is not a measure of money. It is a measure of well-being. Of happiness, if you will. Wealth is not traded, but rather is generated by trade. If you have a piece of art that I wish to own and I have money that you would prefer to the artwork, we trade. Each of us has something he prefers to the thing he gave away; otherwise, we would not have agreed on the trade. We are both better off. You see? Wealth is generated.”

  “I believe I can follow you so far,” Lord Iron said. “Certainly I can agree that a fat wallet is no guarantor of contentment.”

  “Very well. I considered your problem for the better part of the day. I confess I came near to despairing; there is no good data from which to work. But then I found my error. I assumed that your soul, my lord, was valuable. Clearly it is not.”

  Lord Iron coughed out something akin to a laugh, shock in his expression. Olaf raised a hand, palm out, asking that he not interrupt.

  “You are renowned for your practice of evil. This very evening, walking through your house, I have seen things for which I can imagine no proper penance. Why would Satan bother to buy your soul? He has rights to it already.”

  “He does,” Lord Iron said, staring into the middle distance.

  “And so I saw,” Olaf said, “you aren’t seeking to sell a soul. You are hoping to buy one.”

  Lord Iron sighed and looked at his hands. He seemed smaller now. Not a supernatural being, but a man driven by human fears and passions to acts that could only goad him on to worse and worse actions. A man like any other, but with the wealth to magnify his errors into the scale of legend.

  “You are correct, boy,” he said. “The angels wouldn’t have my soul if I drenched it in honey. I have…treated it poorly. It’s left me weary and sick. I am a waste of flesh. I know that. If there is no way to become a better man than this, I suspect the best path is to become a corpse.”

  “I understand, my lord. Here is the answer to your question: the price of a soul is a life of humility and service.”

  “Ah, is that all,” Lord Iron said, as if the cambist had suggested that he pull down the stars with his fingers.

  “And as it happens,” Olaf went on, “I have one such with which I would be willing to part.”

  Lord Iron met his gaze, began to laugh, and then went silent.

  “Here,” Olaf said, “is what I propose…”

  Edmund, the new cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority, was by all accounts an adequate replacement for Olaf. Not as good, certainly. But his close-cropped hair and clean-shaven face lent him an eagerness that belo
nged on a younger man, and if he seemed sometimes more haughty than his position justified, it was a vice that lessened with every passing month. By Easter, he had even been asked to join in the Sunday picnic the girls in the accounting office sponsored. He seemed genuinely moved at the invitation.

  The great scandal of the season was the disappearance of Lord Iron. The great beast of the city simply vanished one night. Rumor said that he had left his fortune and lands in trust. The identity of the trustee was a subject of tremendous speculation.

  Olaf himself spent several months simply taking stock of his newfound position in the world. Once the financial situation was put in better order, he found himself with a substantial yearly allowance that still responsibly protected the initial capital.

  He spent his monies traveling to India, Egypt, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the unworldly underground cities of Persia. He saw the sun set off the Gold Coast and rise from the waters east of Japan. He heard war songs in the jungles of the Congo and sang children’s lullabies in a lonely tent made from yak skin in the dark of a Siberian winter.

  And, when he paused to recover from the rigors and dangers of travel, he would retire to a cottage north of the city—the least of his holdings—and spend his time writing men’s adventure novels set in the places he had been.

  He named his protagonist Lord Iron.

  * * *

  L•O•G•O•R•R•H•E•A

  log·or·rhe·a lô'-ge-rē'e, log'-e-

  noun

  : pathologically incoherent, repetitious speech

  * * *

  Logorrhea

  MICHELLE RICHMOND

  HE HAD NOT BEEN born with the scales. Indeed, the origin of his condition was as enigmatic to the mother who bore him as it was to the scientists who studied him, for nowhere in his mother’s family album or in the scientists’ vast store of case histories was there another human being so gloriously squamulose.

  He was three years old when the scales began to appear—on his upper legs, at first. Tiny, half-moon shaped bits, hard and thin, the rounded edges paper-sharp. One pediatrician diagnosed it as an allergic rash, another as a severe case of keratosis peritonitis, another as an indeterminable childhood abnormality that would surely right itself with age. But when the scales began to thicken and to stretch up his body—to his groin, his stomach, his arms, shoulders, neck, and eventually, his face—the doctors stopped trying to make a diagnosis. It was like nothing they had seen, it was miraculous, it was horrific.

  One thing you should understand: the scales did not cover his skin, they were his skin. Unlike hair or fingernails, there was nothing extraneous about them. To rid him of the scales would have been to rid him of his very surface.

  The doctors took pictures, they referred him to specialists, they did all of the things one does when an exceptional case is dropped, like a gift of manna, into one’s hands. But they offered no answers, only a long series of lotions and pills and dermatological treatments of the abrasive and purative variety, all of which yielded nothing—nothing but a sobbing, put-upon boy.

  “No one has ever loved me before,” he said, by which he meant no one had ever fucked him—and to him, the two were one and the same.

  All of these things he told me on our first night together. Our first! How could he hold it back, this dark history, when my skin bore the savage marks of his scales, when his flesh literally dug into mine?

  It may surprise you to learn that the miracle of that night was not the cuts or his loquaciousness, was not even the fact of our having found each other on a deserted beach in Alabama. The miracle of that night was that I was moved to silence. I, who suffer so plainly from logorrhea, was so enthralled by his story that I dared not interrupt.

  In earlier times, surely, a man like him would have been destined to be either a circus freak or a favored showpiece of some royal court. In this modern place and time, protected as he was from indigence by the blessing of disability pay, the effect of his condition had instead been to make him supremely lonely. Because he did not have to go out into the world to make a living, and because he could not be intimate with another human being without causing harm, he had chosen to live a life apart. Before we met, he had passed a decade of bachelorhood in a small house in Fairhope just steps from Mobile Bay, with the aid of a trusted assistant who did his shopping, ran his errands, and occasionally shared his meals.

  And then he found me. Or, it should be said, I found him. On the Fairhope Pier, on a typically moonlit night. It is a minor miracle of that particular part of Alabama that the filthy bay is often bathed in a fine moonlight which makes it appear clean, inspiring foolhardy teenagers and tourists to go for midnight swims in the bleak mix of sewage and chemical waste. He appeared to me first as a statuesque figure at the end of the pier, dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and linen pants. I was having a difficult time of it, having recently lost, within the span of a few weeks, a decent job and a beloved pet, not to mention a boyfriend, when I saw him standing there, so still and silent that I first assumed a sculpture had been erected in that familiar spot. I stepped off the warm sand onto the pier, and when the boards creaked beneath me he turned, and that is when I understood that this splendid creature was alive.

  For several moments I hesitated. Someone standing in such a way, at such a place, on such a night, surely does not want to be interrupted. Then the moonlight hit his face, and a flash of multicolored light shot off the tip of his elegant nose, and I found myself walking toward him as the old pier wobbled and groaned.

  “Stop,” he called out.

  It was a slightly scratchy voice, halting, as if it was out of practice.

  “Why?” I called back.

  “Because,” was his reply.

  “It’s a public pier,” I said.

  To this, he had no answer. He turned back toward the water and took a step forward. For a moment I thought he might jump. But he didn’t. When I reached him, he said, with his back to me, “I came out here to be alone.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I won’t bother you.” Then I moved to stand beside him, and he lifted a gloved hand to shield his face.

  “Please,” he said.

  But by then, I had already seen.

  We stood for a minute or two in silence before I said the only thing I could think of to say, which was, “You’re beautiful.”

  “I’m ghastly,” he replied.

  “Not to me.”

  He produced a small paper bag, and when he opened it I could smell hot spice and salt and the sea. It was a strong, wonderful odor particular to the Gulf Coast, and immediately I was happy to be home again, after a long time away.

  “Crawfish,” he said.

  “I know.”

  I reached into the bag, took one of the hard little shells, and twisted until the tail came clean from the head. I sucked the head, something I hadn’t done in years, something that I had deemed in my new life up North to be somewhat barbaric. But the juice was delicious, even more so than I remembered, tangy and sweet in a way no other meat could replicate. The shimmering man followed suit, and it occurred to me that the boyfriend who had just kicked me out of his stylish apartment in the stylish city that had never really felt like home would never have done such a thing. Then I squeezed the tail end of the shell until the tender pink meat came out, popped it into my mouth, chewed luxuriously, licked my fingers, and only after I had swallowed did I have the good grace to thank him.

  “No, thank you,” he said, looking at me directly for the first time. “One should never eat crawfish alone. I’ve been doing it far too long.” The combination of the words and the way he looked at me, as if we were complicit in some dream of love, seemed to cast forward into a future when we would do this together frequently, would, in fact, do many things together. It would not be an exaggeration to say that at that moment, I understood that the thing we were going to have together would be nothing short of a life.

  We sat down on the end of the pier, remo
ved our shoes, our feet dangling in the water, and ate. He produced a couple of warm beers, which seemed to materialize from thin air. We drank them in silence. When the crawfish and the beers were gone, he began to talk. Once he started, it was as if he couldn’t stop. And I, who had driven away my last boyfriend and lost my last job because I couldn’t shut up, sat and listened. For the first time in my life, I found listening to be effortless. Every now and then I’d feel a school of tiny fish moving past like a gentle wind, the mouths nibbling at my ankles.

  When he was finished, I said, “I have something to tell you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have a problem.”

  He turned to look at me, and his blue eyes looked strangely dull, contrasted as they were against the glittering scales. “A problem?”

  But when I opened my mouth to say it, the words would not come out. Why mar this perfect evening by confessing my worst character trait? I would be for him, that night, the ideal companion. I would let him think that I was the kind of woman a man might be lucky to have. You’d be a real prize, my ex had said, sliding his hands over my breasts, my hips, my thighs, if you had your mouth surgically wired shut.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

  He shook the last bits of crawfish shell into the water, put the empty bottles into the paper bag, and said, “My house is just down the beach. Do you want to come home with me?”

  “Yes.”

  Walking back with him along the quiet beach, I could not have imagined the physical pain that awaited me. In hindsight, I understand that when he removed his glove and took my hand in his, it was meant as a silent warning. He held my hand as gently as he could, and still I could feel the scales cutting into my palm and fingers. I wondered, but did not ask, whether the affliction covered his entire body. Later that night, pressing my face into a pillow to squelch my screams, I understood that it did.

  That first time, I was covered with lacerations. Tiny red marks all over the front of my body, like thousands of paper cuts, and also on my back where his arms had embraced me. All through the night I kept waking in pain, the fresh wounds damp with blood, my body sticking to the soft flannel sheets as if held there by thousands of dots of glue. Beside me, he slept soundly, his scales wet-seeming in the moonlight, his face the picture of peace. I couldn’t help but feel, somehow, that I had saved him, although it would occur to me later that it was the other way around. In any event, that first morning-after, when I woke to the sound of his scaled feet clicking softly against the tile floor, I knew that I would stay with him. That I would make a home there in that house by the bay. Maybe it was the disfiguring effect of our first attempt at love—after all, I had never been loved so dramatically. More likely, it was the fact of his having accomplished something no other man had ever been able to do: with him, I had fallen easily, happily, willingly into silence.