Your Duck Is My Duck

by Deborah Eisenberg

“Sounds valid,” he conceded.

  But Celeste’s eyes were shining. “Of all the different humans and humanish beings they keep finding, it seems like we’re the only ones who were ever able to do this! And the most amazing thing is that even though various kinds of humans were around for maybe almost two million years, this language thing really only kicked in probably around one hundred thousand years ago, or even less.”

  Only? Even? Those were big numbers Celeste was tossing around—100,000, 2 million . . . hard to tell the difference between them if you weren’t some kind of expert. “So, if we weren’t talking for that first one million, nine hundred thousand years, how did anybody know what was going on?” Keith asked. “And what were we doing? Just kind of goofing around with the dinosaurs?”

  “Dinosaurs died off about sixty million years ago?” Celeste reminded him. “First grade? There was a comet, or maybe they just became extinct because they were really big?”

  “My dad’s really big,” Keith said gloomily, “but he’s not extinct.”

  No, it never would have occurred to him to wonder if that fateful leash hadn’t looped his destiny to Celeste—language . . . what exactly was it, and how did it happen?

  Celeste shrugged. “Some people think it was just business as usual—mutation, adaptation, selection, mutation, adaptation, selection, a slow continuity kind of thing, for hundreds of thousands of years. But other people think it happened incredibly fast, within about forty thousand years. And that this capacity that made it possible—this built-in capacity for the operation that lets us merge expressible things into other expressible things to make more and more complex expressible things—appeared in an instant! Which makes complete sense, even though it could not be more bizarre. One tiny molecular irregularity in one tiny fetus, in a very small population of humans somewhere in Africa! One instant! A universe-altering mutation!”

  “But what about . . . ,” he began, but ran aground.

  “What about the other stuff? The stuff we can’t manage to think?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Or . . . well, I mean, yeah.”

  “Uh-huh, that’s a problem. Actually, Friedlander was pretty interested in that. In his opinion, language developed as a way for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand things, so then we can just go ahead and do stuff that’s more ruthless than what any other animal does. According to him, we can formulate like a fraction of what’s inside our heads and that what’s inside our heads is mostly . . . drainage, basically, sloshing around, that doesn’t have too much to do with what’s actually out there . . .”

  They looked at each other, and vague shapes, like amoebas, rose, morphed, blended, and faded between them. “But at least it’s all ours,” she said. “It’s the main unique thing we’ve got. It’s our gift.”

  * * *

  So, Celeste brought him down the hall to meet Cordis.

  “That kind of money is a joke,” Keith said when they were alone again. “How can anyone work for that kind of money?”

  “It’s not a joke to Cordis,” Celeste had said.

  7

  Celeste, it turned out, knew a fair amount about this Friedlander who had disappeared. Keith was surprised to learn that she had grown up in the very apartment, the somewhat cramped paradise, from which he was soon to be expelled, down the hall from Ernst and Cordis Friedlander.

  Her mother, she told him, had been a good friend of theirs, and the three of them often sat around one apartment or the other, laughing and talking till all hours, over delicious dinners and glass after glass of wine, and often she had hung out with them, too.

  Friedlander went on long expeditions, and it was always a party when he came back, always a party when he was around. He was very good-looking, rangy and graceful like Cordis—they were an intense, matched set. His face was a constant play of expressions, as Celeste remembered, but he didn’t much say what he was thinking about. He had black, black eyes and a lot of black hair. His clothes were sometimes frayed. He didn’t care at all. And he didn’t need to; he set the rules—no rules, mostly, and he seemed to change shape, alternately filling up a lot of space and slipping between spaces. His laugh was loud and sudden, and a little dangerous. He was even taller than Cordis.

  And Cordis was different back then, Celeste said—way different, always doing things, always cheerful. The three of them, Cordis and Friedlander and her mother, would sometimes just bundle her up in the middle of the night, or it seemed like the middle of the night, and embark on some impromptu adventure. She vaguely recalls a carnival, or a fair, with brightly painted rides, a merry-go-round with the most beautiful horses imaginable.

  Sometimes Friedlander brought things back from his expeditions, strange and marvelous salvagings. The little thing she wore around her neck? It was a piece of glass he’d found in some ancient forgotten city buried beneath another ancient forgotten city buried beneath another ancient forgotten city. He gave it to her because it was the exact color of her eyes, he’d said . . .

  Yes? Keith peered at Celeste’s eyes. Well, okay, but so were a lot of things . . .

  While Friedlander traveled, she was saying, Cordis always stayed put to take care of the bookshop, and Celeste had hazy memories of the suspended sweetness of those long stretches, the gauzy, slightly melancholy quality of early-spring light—playing cards with her mother and Cordis. At those times she was like a grown-up woman herself, waiting. She was only about eight when he disappeared, evidently for good.

  Keith had frowned with lofty sympathy and put an arm around her. “Well, at least he was spared getting old and decrepit.”

  She’d looked at him for a moment. “Right,” she said.

  Apparently he’d committed another faux pas.

  8

  Sometimes Cordis seems to Keith like that vaporous picture in Celeste’s mind—far away, even when she’s right in front of him, down a tunnel of time, she and the serious little girl in big, goggly glasses and the little girl’s mother, each studying a hand of cards, all three dissolving as they wait for something that isn’t going to happen—just three blurs, indistinct stains of their future selves left on a memory that isn’t even really his.

  It’s Friedlander, though, the one absent even from this scene, who has left the most vivid impression: tall, laughing Friedlander, as curious and lawless as . . . as a monkey, thinks Keith, clambering around ruins, plucking from the debris shiny things with which to charm. Obviously all three of them were obsessed with him, the two women and the little girl, sitting there, waiting and waiting. Those three and who knows how many others.

  It’s irritating to spend so much time in a place that’s draped in this guy’s absence. Maybe a few well-angled questions to Cordis would let in some fresh air to dispel the guy’s clingy remnants. But he can’t just ask Cordis a lot of questions. Or, rather, he can’t manage to. It almost seems that she can detect a question as it forms itself in his brain, and she swerves like a toreador, before he’s even found the words.

  However, thanks to the Internet’s admittedly not completely reliable but nonetheless far-ranging knowledge, he has been able to fill in what Celeste has told him with what information and misinformation is out there.

  Back in the day, he’s read, Friedlander’s grandfather made a fortune manufacturing steel. And while Friedlander’s father, brothers, and sister devoted themselves single-mindedly to amplifying the fortune, staying just inside the limit of the law—usually (like Keith’s own father) by getting the law’s limit altered to fit their needs—Friedlander dabbled in a series of eccentric, quasi-scholarly enterprises, as only the useless child of a wealthy family can. A wealthy, generous, intelligent, kindhearted, tolerant, appreciative family, that is . . .

  He’s read, also, about Friedlander’s purported habits of shutting himself up alone for months at a time, of swimming in ice-cold water, of encoding his charts and records in notations that look more like arcane architectural exercises than academic findings. And he’s read
that Friedlander is said to have been involved in the discovery of a prehistoric site, now vanished again, on some island somewhere between India and Myanmar, where he had hoped to find evidence supporting his hypotheses.

  During a botched attempt at an initial excavation, Friedlander along with his teammates, Jack Brisbane and Helmut Ogilvy, disappeared. Rumors and speculation cited the militias that roamed the region, uncontacted tribes, coastal flooding, an earthquake . . . But whatever actual knowledge might have existed twenty years ago about that episode has by now dissipated into a haze of fabrications and fantasies and misunderstandings.

  In any event, it seems that nobody has been able to locate the site that lured the three dreamers east.

  What clowns. Whatever the three crackpots (or “maverick archeologists,” they’re sometimes called) were up to (looting, essentially, is what it sounds like), it appears that in no way did they take reasonable precautions, either in regard to their own safety or to avoid damaging precious clues—for many millennia hidden away under the earth’s custody—concerning the development of the chattering species.

  From the evidence of the few relevant newspaper articles he was able to find, Keith has also gathered that Friedlander’s evolving ideas about human speech, once provisionally regarded as original—his opaque musings concerning some convoluted, indirect relationship between language, thought, and power—were ultimately dismissed outright by serious linguists.

  In fact, serious linguists (of which there seem to be a stupefying variety—psycholinguists, sociolinguists, neurolinguists, paralinguists, archeolinguists, biolinguists, computational linguists, morphologists, phonologists, and structural linguists, to name just a few) as well as philosophers, archeologists, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, biologists, geneticists, and primatologists of many sorts, have continued to close ranks against Friedlander, denying him entry even now into their rarified company.

  9

  It’s Celeste’s handwriting, that’s for sure, but it’s strangely shaky.

  10

  It’s dark. Or maybe she hasn’t opened her eyes. Has she opened her eyes? She must have opened them, because when she tries to open them she can’t. She feels around for a light switch—last night there was one near her, just above her flat little pillow. Was that last night? Oddly, her bed seems to have moved. It’s now blocking the door—nowhere near the light switch. But that cannot be true, so her eyes must not be open.

  She needs some water badly. She struggles to open her eyes, and now she succeeds. But her bed is outside in the corridor, with all those women padding by, speaking whatever it is they speak, their heads wrapped in brightly colored lengths of cloth, their long, beautiful bare feet slapping softly on the linoleum floor.

  But the women are gone, and now she’s burning, burning up—she must have water. She wills her eyes to open, really to open, and she finds that she’s alone, back inside the room. But where is that dim light coming from? Because now there’s no window.

  Let me wake up, she prays, please, please let me wake up. But she cannot.

  * * *

  Many hours later—a day or so later?—her eyes do open, her bed is where it ought to be, maybe eight feet from the door, and a grimy morning light is coming in from the high little window. She’s slippery with sweat. Her fever seems down, but her skin feels sore and whatever that stuff is inside her skull seems to have swelled up.

  There’s a sink in the room. She could drink from the tap . . . The tap! What is she, crazy? If she can just hold out until she gets downstairs . . .

  Several days earlier, when she arrived, there was a man, presumably the owner, or a manager, seated at what seemed to be a school desk in the bare space that serves as the lobby. If she can get some clothes on, maybe she can make it down the stairs and get him to understand that she needs water. She tries to sit, but she’s a marionette whose strings have been severed, and she can’t hoist herself up.

  No one’s going to help you, she thinks. No one. You’re a migrant.

  * * *

  One day, maybe her fourth or fifth in this place, she wakes up hungry, very, very hungry, and she feels as though she has shed a heavy, suffocating hide. The loveliness in things has never been so apparent—the loveliness of the bedstead’s raw wood and of the mattress ticking exposed by the soaked, twisted sheets, the loveliness of the rough walls and the dented metal doorknob, the loveliness—the effervescent freshness—of the light, spreading out from the high window. Each material is radiant with the soul of itself.

  She raises her hands to catch the loveliness of the air as it runs sparkling through her fingers.

  There’s an open, half-filled bottle of water by the bed. It must have been brought during the night by the young woman she dreamed, thought she dreamed, maybe the manager’s wife.

  Later she’ll get up from bed to wash at the sink, but now she’ll finish the bottle of water. A collection of empty bottles sits on the floor near the small wood table by her bed, the only feature of the room aside from the bed and a wardrobe and the sink and a toilet.

  Heading east—an impulse too furtive to formulate into an idea, let alone a plan. But that was what she’d found herself doing, heading east. After all, she was already across the ocean and she had a few free weeks. They’d known she wasn’t one of the best, she thinks with sorrow, they’d known she would need time to recover if she was to have any use left in her.

  Spontaneous Structures of Authority Among Refugee Populations. She’d thought she was prepared, but it was only during one instant and then another that she could take in what was in front of her, things that ought to be impossible—the miles of cardboard and plastic, rotting garbage, sewage, the clashes at the margins and in the adjacent towns, clashes in the bus and train stations . . . every port sealed. Each child a little bundle of twigs, not one thing for anyone to do except wait, and hope for food, the women huddled for safety in ineffectual little bands . . .

  Of course she’d known what to expect—she was trained as an Observer, she was trained to take testimony, she’d seen it before. But if what she observed was real, how could she be real?

  Money moves across the globe at the speed of thought, at the speed of poison in water, but when will these people be allowed outside the wire enclosures?

  The giant machines crushing the plastic roofs and cardboard walls, plowing them into the mud—she can still see it! She can still hear it! It sounds like your own bones. The rain pelts down, and the people look on, silently, at the plastic and tin and splintered boards soaking into the mud.

  Now they can go. Now they have to go. Now.

  But go where? Not here. Not here. Not here.

  * * *

  Time to get out of bed, time to wash at the sink.

  But that is apparently not possible.

  Look—someone has left something for her beside the bed! A fresh bottle of water and something roundish, with a slightly bumpy, mottled, copper-colored surface. Could it be? Yes—the covering peels right off, disclosing a globe composed of tiny, iridescent segments. Juice bursts out as she bites into it, and an intoxicating fragrance flares into the room like daybreak. Ah, thank heaven!

  She feels the nutrients going here and there in her body, patching things, easing things. But that’s enough, a couple of bites—she doesn’t have the strength to finish it. Really, she would love to be at home—she has a home! And that’s what she would like best of all. Home. Does that boy miss her? “Miss”—miss—what does that mean? Is there a little hole in him where she was?

  Unfortunately, she can’t seem to scrape him off her mind, entirely. Or, not her mind, exactly, but her something. In fact, on the contrary, he is more present to her now, here, than he was when she was back there. Home. His molecules have mingled with hers in some creepy way, with her mental molecules. That’s what happens when you get to know somebody, even slightly—or even if you just catch a glimpse of someone on the street, or even if you just hear about someone! If you try to pull them ou
t of your mind, you make a raggy little hole.

  Once someone enters your mind, no matter where he is you can dream about him—someone can dream about you, whether you’ve given permission or not . . . If someone dreams about you, does it keep you alive?

  Sure she wanted him to be someone else, or at least sort of someone else. Pretty much everyone wants everyone else to be at least sort of someone else, don’t they?

  And evidently he himself wants to be sort of someone else. He’s trying. He deserves credit for trying. His effort is exhausting, she can feel it—but she must not try to help him. She must not try to hamper or influence . . .

  Oh, she’d been blinded—worse, she’d been enchanted—by what even he knew was the trashy, low-grade pixie dust of undeserved advantages. And she’d been even more enchanted by her own—quite possibly entirely unfounded—conviction that there was a noble something or other beneath all that, struggling to exist! And now she was giving him extra credit because he was trying!

  She was going to help him become a human being? Classic narcissistic self-serving fantasy!

  He had tried to tell her how incomplete he is—she’d refused to understand. He’d had to force her to understand, the very night before she left! Though of course he couldn’t admit he was admitting what he was admitting.

  “You stole from your father?” she’d said, incredulous.

  “I borrowed. Anyhow, I didn’t ask to be born—he started it, so he’s kind of obliged to keep it going, don’t you think? I mean, you could say he owes me my upkeep, couldn’t you, morally, until I’ve finished grad school anyhow.”

  “You happen to be one of the few people on the planet your father doesn’t owe anything to!”

  “Right. Well, that’s actually my point, really. You can’t exactly call what I did stealing, because my father shouldn’t really have all that money—he’s ruthless, he’s cruel, he doesn’t care how he treats anyone, he’s a criminal, you said so yourself.”

  “Great, now you both get to be criminals. What do you think, this is some kind of Robin Hood situation? Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor.”