Riddance
Page 38
Protrude the lips, the upper tense and slightly curled, the tongue high, nearly touching the roof of the mouth. Now lower the tip of your tongue as you open your mouth. The effect is of allowing the hitherto restrained breath to spill down into the hollow at the front of the mouth. Now, raising the lower jaw again, forcefully retract the back of your tongue until it meets the molars, while lowering the tip.
Raise the pitch again. Close your lips, while parting your jaws, and hum. Then open your mouth, keeping it round and hollow. Lower the pitch as, contracting your lips, you tighten the hole of your mouth without closing it. Then press the upper surface of the tip of your tongue against the cutting edge of your two upper incisors, firmly, but not so firmly that a little breath cannot hiss through when, as now, you forcibly urge it through the ensuing aperture.
With vigor, with dash, pull your tongue away and back. Relax your jaw, still your vocal cords, subdue your breath. Be silent.
Appendix C: Ectoplasmoglyphs #1–40
The dead, as usual, will have the last word. Let those who can, read. —Ed.
Acknowledgments
Above all, I want to thank the dead, who have talked me through my life, and whose voices haunt this book. To Zach, of course, fellow necronaut, whose eye and mind informed every visual element of the book, and his assistant Veera, thank you for throwing yourselves with such enthusiasm into my world, and making it your own. To Christopher Sorrentino (who read it twice), Kelly Link, Edward Carey, Darcey Steinke, and Pamela Jackson, thank you for your scrupulous, frank, wise, and generous responses to early drafts. To PJ Mark, for your support, shrewd advice, timely interventions, and for suggesting Zach, thank you! To my editor Mensah, thank you for championing this book. Your guidance was invaluable in shaping it, and your fluency in necrophysics was a marvel. Thanks to the whole team at Black Balloon for supporting and even celebrating this book’s eccentricities, and for the grace and good humor with which you helped me and Zach realize our vision for its design. And to Sean, music director of the SJVS and unofficial collaborator, for help of all kinds, and Shibi, my delight and inspiration, the biggest thanks of all.
1 But let us not forget that it was her own idea. So did she consent to, or command it?
2 That the Headmistress, as a child, used writing to assume a false identity has fanned the flames of controversy regarding the authorship of this text. However, to yield to doubt is to enter fully into paradox: if the author is the Headmistress, then she is a liar, which suggests that she is not the Headmistress, while if the author is not the Headmistress, then there is no reason to believe her a liar, which suggests that she is the Headmistress. (Of course, we are free to suppose that the author lies in claiming to be a liar, but then we should really be in the soup.) —Ed.
3 Unless he is supplementing his observations through my own, using me as a sort of telescoping spyglass through which, though deceased, he is able to keep his eye trained on the object of his study. But I jest. —Ed.
4 Jimson goes on to say, “The visitor may wish to lie down with a damp cloth folded over his forehead after catching an unguarded look at a monstrosity that raises profound doubt about its architect’s sanity.”
5 The Headmistress’s mother, presumably. —Ed.
6 Headmistress Joines. —Ed.
7 By plumbing the susurrous snake-pit of the single word sorry, she kept the justly famous Hopsalot alive for a full twenty-five minutes (correctly speaking, twenty-five repetitions of the same minute).
8 The zone of temporal disturbance can be extended, with practice, to a radius of just over a yard.
9 Now we are in a position to address a question that may have occurred to the close reader: How does the temporary reversal of time’s arrow required to restore life to a suffering Hopsalot differ from that performed in channeling the dead? Answer: The former involves a return to the past present, the latter to the present past. How exactly the two operations differ is apparently highly technical but I am told that the latter requires a highly focused effort, the former mere “bashing about.”
10 This poetic description will satisfy most students, but for the technically minded: As the stutterer’s mouth travels back in time, time is doubled back on itself. This has particular effects on sound, for if two sound waves that are mirror images of each other—i.e, the peaks on one correspond to the troughs on the other—are played in synchrony, they cancel each other out. The result is silence, a gap in the soundtrack of the world, and an open invitation to the dead.
11 Whether this factitious stuttering creates a second puncture in the fabric of reality, this time in the past, perhaps opening a space to the past of the past, rather than the past of the present, and thus affording an opportunity for the dead of the dead to speak, is sheer speculation, and it is outside the scope of this survey to comment on whether it may have something to do with the appearance of those curious “mouth objects” on which the Founder became focused late in her career—of which more anon.
12 See Appendix. —Ed.
13 It is not unamusing to try to match menu items to literary tropes or rhetorical devices, and indeed some of the work has already been done—“baloney,” “flummery,” “tripe”!
14 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. We may assume the lady in question imbibes. —Ed.
15 Naturally, the dead rarely speak fluently or for long through these accidental orifices, nor are most of us humble enough to take advice from a dishcloth flapping on a line.
16 Speaking of souvenirs: With more commercial sense than good taste the current headmistress has contracted with a company in China to produce a number of cheap plastic trinkets that are offered for sale to alums, parents, and curiosity-seekers on the school website. New items are always in the works, but at the time of publication these included a snow globe containing a seated maiden with eyelashes so long they hang down in two ribbons and hide her eyes completely, until the globe is shaken, when they twine around rather disquietingly and afford occasional glimpses of the two pinhead dots of her pupils; a plush dashboard ornament in the shape of a legless, eyeless dog; a flash drive in the shape of a tongue with what appears to be a chancre on it, inside of which tiny pages turn when the tongue is plugged into a USB port.—Ed.
17 Moedeker once declared that these first attempts captured something that eluded his later work, despite the latter’s technical superiority. However, they are generally considered unsuccessful, if not downright unwatchable. During an early screening at a Chicago social club devoted to “Spiritualism, Prison Reform, and Moving Pictures,” three audience members allegedly ran mad, since which time rumors of a curse have attached itself to these works. They are even today more often talked about than shown.
18 This is one of the very few moments when the secretary seems to be commenting directly on the Headmistress’s account, and it may be taken as strong evidence that the two texts advanced together just as I have arranged them here, first one, then the other surging ahead toward the finish line. However, honesty compels me to observe that there is in the Final Dispatch another paragraph lit by an emerald glow, very near the end, that “in her words” might just as well mean in the transcript reread at leisure, and finally that by her own account the secretary is a liar and a cheat, and may have had her reasons to construct a timeline at variance with the truth. By the way, it is not at all clear whether the green sheet is a colorful invention or the truth, and if truth, where the Headmistress learned about it. From the dead? How we should like to know! —Ed.
19 And more along these lines. I have taken the liberty of omitting a rather lengthy explanation of matters covered elsewhere in this volume. —Ed.
20 See overleaf. —Ed.
21 Angels are diagrams! We have long suspected as much, from their alleged beauty and goodness, which seem both magnificent and oversimple, correct but impossible. It is depicted clearly in older paintings, whose flatness we must learn to take literally. See the ornate origami of their gil
t gowns. Coins of their halos. The words on the streamers never lost in their hospital corners, and always turned to face us. Over the landscape’s receding perspective, their brave flatness, like harbingers of a more abstract world; no perspective can diminish them, they are dukes of the flat surface.
22 One could describe right-hand movement as attenuation, rarefaction, and abstraction, and left-hand movement as reification and intrication.
23 Dr. Peachie here seems to anticipate the claim that Sybil Joines invented the Internet (accent on the ter). I have been shown a file of unanswered cease-and-desist letters going back to the 1960s. As far as I know, no lawyer has ever agreed to take the case. —Ed.
24 The one does not exist without the other, and so we arrive at such perversions as, on the one hand, modern spiritualism (dissolution tricked out as a solution, the unending peddled as an end), and on the other, modern war (solution without resolution. Endless opening).
25 If I have one contribution to the solution of this mystery, it is to suggest that the author of this letter is none other than Edward Pacificus Edwards, the Regional School Inspector. For him to assume the headmastership of the school that, as Inspector, he had condemned, would indeed “look bad,” that is, tainted by motives of personal gain. —Ed.