Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  “Von Gunten, why don’t you show Grandison how it is done? Try not to upset the furniture,” added Mr. Behalf, as a stout little girl with white-blond braids, brows, and even lashes clumped to her feet, rocking the bench as she did so.

  The dutiful giggles cut off abruptly when Von Gunten raised her cone, and my participating laughter, belated and a trifle hysterical, rang out for a moment. Then there was silence. Into it, her eyes a little crossed, she fed a low, hollow note, sustained like a drone. Rather than weakening, it grew louder, and then, just when one would have expected her to run out of breath, it resolved into an adult, female voice saying forcefully but quite naturally, “No respectable girl wears crimson stockings with red morocco tie shoes, except at home or on the summer piazza.” There was a rustle as everyone, including myself, looked surreptitiously around, but no crimson stockings were in attendance. (Nor was it at all likely that any of us would be permitted so much liberty in matters of dress.)

  “If we may inquire, madame or miss,” the instructor said, “what other wisdom do you have for the living?”

  “Snuff-dipping is a revolting habit,” said Von Gunten, the cone trembling with effort, “that invariably leads to moral and physical dereliction. Crimson stockings . . .” Her voice grew faint and crepitating.

  Mr. Behalf inclined his ear. “Stockings?” he said gently.

  “Wound around my . . .” crackle crackle . . . Then, with great force: “Pulled tight!”

  “Yes, quite!” he said hurriedly. “That will be enough, Von Gunten. Von Gunten, enough,” he repeated, prying open the fat little hand that had convulsed around the cone.

  When I first arrived at my aunt’s house I was given a new home, new clothes, and a new body. This body had various names: stutterer, colored girl, poor relation. I did not recognize it. It seemed to me a sort of cenotaph for another body, now lost. What I still called my self flickered around this marker, homeless and very nearly voiceless.

  I am loath to turn a very real affliction into a metaphor by suggesting that if I could not speak it was because I was schooled in silence. Yet I was. And if I spoke all the same, though in a Voice that said nothing, wasn’t that because there was so much not to say? A whole hullaballoo of silence, with my parents’ unspeakable marriage at the center of it. I was not to speak of my father, whom I remembered only in parts—long lovely hands, a black hat, the open collar of a white shirt—though I burned to know more, that I might stitch those parts together, and understand why he had left us. (“People leave,” my mother said. Then she left too.) I was not to speak of my paternal grandparents, born into slavery and long dead. Nor of my people in general, though they were all around me, spooning tiny wrinkled potatoes onto my plate, filling my water glass, bearing away my gravy-blotched dress to be sponged and pressed—“my people” because so they would be reckoned by any stranger, not because I was invited to claim them, or they me. Of all this I was the impertinent reminder, the blot in the family Bible. My mother and Bitty had done the right thing by dying. It was too bad I had not had the grace to follow suit.

  Such was Jane Grandison, age eleven: All too present, as to body. All but absent, as to voice.

  Now I was instructed that this disjunct condition was in point of fact ideal. That I would never recover my lost voice, and must indeed endeavor to lose my Voice as well. Is it remarkable if every part of me refused this teaching? The information that I was “an empty space,” “a hollow,” “an opening,” had the exact opposite of its intended effect. Never had I so keenly felt myself to be a dense material body as when I was striving to fashion myself into an absence.

  My resistance had a color. Was color: My blackness bound me to this body that was not my body, but a sort of pickaninny doll into which I threw a voice that also was not mine. And it seemed to me they knew it would be that way and wanted it that way. Nothingness needs somethingness to prove itself against. The spotless needs the spot. And I—my obdurate, impertinent, unmentionable body—was that spot.

  Certainly I was the very worst student in the school. Again, I was an outsider, and the other children made me feel it, as other children had always done, though they did so through stutters that at the Academy for Disadvantaged Girls would have made them prey just as surely as mine had made me.

  Leaning low over her plate of bread and cheese: “Hello, n-n-new girl. Grandison. Hello. Hello. Hello. Look at m-m-me. Hello! Why, you . . .” Here she sat back, struck the table with her knuckles, then drew her baby finger across her sealed mouth. The other girls nodded; one pinched off a scrap of bread and kneaded into a ball, balanced it on one fingernail, and then flicked it into the air to appreciative laughter, an operation that I followed closely, while affecting disinterest, for I did not understand these gestures, though I caught the derisive intent well enough.

  Another girl took up the attack. “Listen, Grandison, I have something to tell you, no joke. Don’t you want to hear it?”

  I folded my bread around my cheese and took a bite.

  “You’re hurting my feelings, Grandison.”

  I unfolded my bread again and began scraping the mold off my cheese.

  “What, are you deaf? Rude thing! D-d-didn’t your mother teach you any manners?”

  Now I looked up.

  “O-o-ooh, she’s getting mad. Watch out, I think she’s going to s-s-s-summon a ghost to s-s-s-scare us!”

  Then one of them summoned a ghost to scare me. In this she miscalculated, though. The spirit she called up was a great bore who started in on explaining double-entry bookkeeping as necessary background to the exciting story of an error in arithmetic that he had found in his employer’s records, “a punctiliousness for which I was not rewarded,” he complained, as his channeler sought vainly to fit a slice of buttered bread into her mouth around his words. “Quite the opposite!”

  As he droned on, the girls picked up their bread and deserted their unfortunate comrade, for it was forbidden to call up a ghost without supervision, and Mother Other was already bearing down on us. I hitched myself a little farther down the bench and continued stolidly eating my lunch. I will not let them drive me out, I thought. In any case I have nowhere else to go, and I saw in my mind’s eye the retreating rear of the car that brought me, taking itself and its driver, not unkind, swiftly away, and for a moment felt a quite unmanageable grief. But “I have nowhere else to go,” I said aloud, and took a bite of bread.

  “You next carry into the columns of profit and loss the balances of . . .” said the girl, as she was pulled away by the ear.

  Another time I had been backed into a remote corner of the playfield by a group of white boys and girls who, by calling me, as I guessed (for their words were much garbled by their stutters and nervous laughter), a “bulldyking coon”—albeit with sidelong glances at two colored students nearby—were trying to elicit some interesting reaction. I had heard worse in Brooklyn and maintained a contemptuous silence. So did Ambrose Wilson and Maritcha Dixon, whose expressions of lofty unconcern vied to convey their elevation above ignominious me. My tormentors had resorted to plucking at my clothes and putting leaves in my hair when Miss Exiguous came hurrying up. “Grandison, I have been looking everywh—what are you doing, boys and girls?”

  “We’re helping Grandison put herself in Compliance, the nasty messy thing.”

  “Straighten your uniform, girl. Headmistress wants you to take down a dispatch.”

  How I gloated, under my calm exterior, as I left my now-subdued tormentors. But alone in the Headmistress’s office, behind the typewriter, I experienced another sort of torment. The Headmistress’s words buzzing through the brass trumpet came so fast, sometimes, that I had to leave out whole sentences, or were so subsumed in static that only with the liveliest exercise of the imagination could I concoct a coherent transcript.

  “Zzzzzridzzz . . . ffzzzmamzz . . . cozzzzpapazzzlllie . . .”

  “The ridge of the mountain,” I typed, “is covered with papillae.�
��

  Every time I presented my trembling sheaf of papers I was sure of being exposed as a fictionist. So I set about forming a new program. If I could not secure my reputation with my talent for ghost speaking, I certainly would not secure it with charm, wit, or good looks. Let others be liked, applauded, or admired: I would be useful. I schooled myself in Dr. Jameson’s New Improved Phonographological Method and, whenever I was not occupied with my studies, put in hours drilling on the typewriting machine. And before too many months had gone by I really had all the skills that I had pretended to have, and if I still fictionalized now and then it was for my own amusement and in the confidence that I would not get the sack, for I had become the Headmistress’s most accurate, most assiduous, fastest, cleverest—in short, best—stenographer, typist, and transcriptionist. Words I often rolled over my tongue when alone, for I had never before done or been anything that took so many long words to describe.

  But my chief object of study, from blank fascination as much as from method, was the Headmistress herself.

  Readings

  from Principles of Necrophysics: “A Report on Certain Curious Objects, Believed to Be Words in an Unknown Language of the Dead”

  For a long time the Founder believed that the cosmos had just two parts, life and death, pressed together like two palms in prayer.

  However, toward the end of her life, something began to happen that put this simple model into question. She—and, not long thereafter, some of her more talented students—began to cough, spit up, or find on the pillow in the morning those waxy, lumpen articles known today as ectoplasmoglyphs or, familiarly, glyphs, e-glyphs, or just “mouth objects.”

  What were they? The dead were evasive when asked, and appeared uneasy with the topic. The Headmistress, in one of those intuitive leaps characteristic of her, decided that they were words, messages from a more corporeal realm of the dead. Where was this realm? Perhaps the dead also die, passing from their own plane to a yet deeper one. Death and life are not opposites, then, but graduations in a series. Thus it was the mouth objects that supplied the first and best clue to the complex structure of the necrocosmos. Yet in many ways they remain as great a mystery as when they were first documented.

  Ectoplasmoglyphs are translucent, waxen in appearance, gummy but firm in texture, and something between animal or vegetable in form, so that they really appear, not modeled by conscious art, but grown. We are lucky to have a description of “parturition” in the Headmistress’s own hand: She describes a stirring in the throat, then an “intricate rippling, gathering, pleating, and revolving.” She wonders whether this “kneading” by the deep muscles of the throat, muscles rarely subject to our conscious control, is what shapes the ectoplasm, imposing form on something itself formless, or whether the objects materialize in the throat fully formed, and the activity observed there is merely a sort of peristalsis, moving them forward. With her usual perspicacity she has hit on exactly the point of contention that rocks lecture halls today; science has not advanced one jot since her time.

  In a magnified slice of a mouth object, you can see the reticulated structures reminiscent of honeycomb tripe, or cow stomach, that some researchers have described, and that have strengthened the claim that these objects are not merely excretions or accretions of matter, like ambergris in a sperm whale’s intestines, but three-dimensional hieroglyphs—a little squashed, perhaps, but still displaying the features by which they would communicate to a viewer possessed of their secrets.

  Incidentally, the widely circulated report that in one mouth object researchers found a baby tooth and some coiled hair is almost certainly apocryphal, inspired by those teratomas in which a sort of anagram of a baby seems to be trying to get itself born. If true, however, it would suggest that teratomas and perhaps all tumors are special dispatches from the dead. It is not actually such a far-fetched notion: we all carry messages from our forebears, scrolled neatly in our cells. Indeed, we arguably are such messages.

  It is regrettable that some of the best-known depictions of mouth objects are the work of J. T. Giesel, once a highly respected science illustrator, but since fallen out of favor for the degree to which wishful thinking (if not the deliberate intention to deceive) colored his work. In his rendering, the lumpen and even—why not admit it?—rather fecal word has acquired a delicate tensile strength, like a bridge.

  He is right, in one sense: The word is a bridge to the world of the dead—or to, I should say, another world of the dead. However, we should not so readily dismiss what is intimate, personal, and a little disgusting about mouth objects. Most things that come out of the human mouth are judged unclean. Speech is ordinarily exempt from this prejudice; we listen publicly to others’ words without a blush and even take them into our own mouths in mimicry or quotation. We have learned to unbuckle language from the gag reflex. It is our loss. The ectoplasmoglyph reminds us where the word comes from. Presented here, from the archives of the Vocational School, in an unknown hand, are some images of mouth objects over which no prettifying veil has been drawn.

  Fig. XIX. “some images of mouth objects over which no prettifying veil”…

  It is now generally accepted that these objects are indeed elements of a language of the dead. But questions remain. Are they the three-dimensional equivalent of logograms, in which representational elements can be made out in radically simplified form, as in the Japanese kanji? Are they composed of alphabetic elements, fused in a sort of three-dimensional script? Or do they, like the objects exchanged by the learned professors of the Grand Academy of Lagado, signify only themselves—in which case the task before us would be, not to determine what they mean, but to see what they are? (It is no small one!)

  Do we even perceive them in their original form? Perhaps the once-featherweight word acquires mass through signal corruption in passing through successive regions of the dead. Perhaps a sort of Doppler effect shifts it farther along a spectrum of thingliness, the farther it goes.

  Or perhaps these objects are a sort of pidgin, deliberately yet clumsily endowed with physical properties to establish rapport with a world where material things are held in high esteem. If so, they have largely failed, though it is true that students have found that some of these objects name new feelings for them, new thoughts, which once conceived cannot be described in other words.

  Fig. XX. “a spectrum of thingliness”...

  An understanding of the whole language, however, still eludes us. Scholars are cataloguing new words as they appear, in the hopes of discovering patterns that will unlock this language for the living. We at the SJVS would like to call all thanatomaths and interested amateurs to the work of translating these messages into English. Alternatively, some may wish to translate these objects into other material objects native to our world. We would also like assistance in translating our own languages into physical objects. Perhaps we can reply to these strange bulletins from the “dead dead,” if we learn their language.

  The Founder was optimistic. “It may be that we already speak this language,” she wrote, “albeit not with our mouths.” After all, we too are material objects, ambiguously and temporarily haunted by voices. Able morticians and undertakers, we groom our corpses, daub blush on our cheeks, pink the lips. We look alive, but only for a little while.

  Reasoning that they might communicate through any of their physical properties, not only their form, she performed many experiments on the objects: immersing them in water, then in distilled alcohol, heating and cooling them, rubbing them with wool, striking them with mallets. One word was given to a terrier to sniff, who was moved to urinate, another shown to an infant, who recoiled. One was allowed to air-dry until hard, ground fine, and mixed with ink. A greasy elastic pellicle formed on its surface, which the nib had some trouble piercing. The ink had the tendency to draw itself up into balls on the surface of the page and, when the paper was lifted, to roll away, leaving the paper perfectly blank in places. (This may be no more than a curio
sity, but the portions of the text that vanished composed, without exception, pronominal forms and proper names.)

  Fig. XXI. “to cough, spit up, or find on the pillow in the morning”...

  Her account of one early experiment is worth quoting in full, and will conclude this brief report. “This evening I conducted tests on one of the words, though to destroy it seemed to me like savaging my own tongue. I first laid it on a glass tile I had wiped with rubbing alcohol. With a clean, very sharp knife I sliced it first longitudinally, then latitudinally. I noticed that I winced as the blade passed through the substance, which clung to it. I had to bring down the knife very slowly so as not to distort the word in slicing it. The cross-section revealed minute whorls and fault lines where the substance was whiter and more opaque, like wax that has been put under pressure. One part of the word I picked up with a pair of tongs and held over a low flame. This experiment was exceedingly distressing to me. I noticed with interest an increase in salivation; my mouth was flooded with sweet water. It would be interesting to try to determine whether this response is characteristic of all observers. The flame took all over the surface of the word, igniting with a soft pop. This flame very bright and mellow. The lump shrank without spattering or bubbling. I deduce from this that its substance is dense and pure. The effect was not unlike burning a candle of very fine wax, but brighter.

  Fig. XXII. “or whether the objects materialize in the throat fully formed”...

  “As the word shrank it performed several revolutions or convulsions too quick to follow with the eyes but disturbing and uncanny, especially as it seemed to me that it passed through several forms that were recognizeable and possibly of particular personal significance, through due to the rapidity of transformation I could not get my head around the business of recognizing them. Later I would try to record my impressions of the intermediate positions I had glimpsed and find it impossible.