A scattered tittering ensues as Sadiqa continues Bethany’s short biography, but I’m not surprised. Unlike me, Bethany genuinely gets a kick out of those creepy fantasy meets. At the last linguistics conference in Albuquerque, during our tongue-in-cheek group outing to the legendary New Mexican truckstop, The Iron Skillet, Bethany surprised me with her intricate knowledge of Star Wars, describing—in great detail—the deck levels of Khetanna, Jabba the Hutt’s Ubrikkian luxury sail barge.
Bethany’s voice is assured despite her hokey thesis: “Were the writers of seventies television series Mork and Mindy familiar with constructed language before they began their show, or was Juilliard-educated Robin Williams the driving force for the ingenuity of this language? Part of Esperanto’s appeal is that you can guess the meaning from the root or the onomatopoeic sound of it. I ask you to examine some words from Mork’s lexicon. Do you remember these? Shatzbot! The only legal Orkan swearword. Yek is a daytime yes, while yug is an accepted daytime yes. Nap-nap is the nicest no, boo-boo is the businesslike no and nin-nin is a philosophical no. And the strongest no is a nox-nox.”
I tune out at her analysis of cez-gekup, the Orkan word for indigestion.
I like Bethany a lot, but, man, this is truly the pits as far as presentations go. I’m scrambling for nice things to say to her later.
There is weak applause when she is done.
Sadiqa will now introduce me, another low-rung academic with nothing really new to present. “Ms. S. Roberta Diamond, a fourth year Ph.D. student at NYU, will address her research methodology for the growing Volapük online community….”
“Good morning,” I say when she is finished. My stomach rumbles as I miserably look down to my paper. You would think I could memorize the first two sentences for maximum impact, but I need those typed words to keep me going. The crippling combination of my own pathetic paper and the presence of the man I’ve accidentally gone to bed with isn’t helping my public speaking phobia.
I swallow before I continue, “I have been intrigued with the growing usage of Volapük on the Internet. I wanted to explore exactly how many of these new layperson enthusiasts were out there. Five? Ten? I think many in the room today will be startled by my findings.”
Once I get talking my voice stops wavering. But who am I kidding? Like Bethany, everything I go on to say is a meatless pronouncement. So I add thirty names to the list of amateur enthusiasts. Whoop-de-do. Volapük has been mined. It’s a dead language. Nothing exciting will happen. No fevered rebuttals. The most curious thing in this room today is the face behind Christopher T. Brown.
“Thank you, Roberta.”
“Shari,” Dave Mitchell says authoritatively into his microphone. “For those in the know.”
“Which do you prefer?” Sadiqa says into her mic.
Slightly off-mic I say, “Shari, please.”
I wish I had the courage to watch Kit’s facial reaction to my name said out loud. But I have a chance to watch his pale lips soon enough as he is before us all a minute or so after Sadiqa’s short introduction acknowledging that Kit is an independent linguist. There are jealous looks on the floor. Who can afford independence in this profession? Or maybe they are pitying looks for not having a major university’s clout.
Kit acknowledges the panel chair and peeks at me quickly with a tight face. I stare at my presentation paper as he begins, dramatically: “This is lain.”
I know the word. Wool in Volapük.
“It comes from a jip. Lain is wool, and jip is a sheep. These were among the most popular words in Volapük a hundred years ago. As Ms. Diamond so eloquently pointed out, Volapük is alive today because of enthusiasts, individuals more used to seeing a computer mouse than a field mouse.”
Where is this presentation going?
“But what if we could time-travel back to when Volapük was not a novelty, but a viable means of communication for millions of businessmen, many of who ran farms? Many of who had sheep and cattle they could get the best price for abroad. In lieu of time travel, the next best thing for Volapük research would be to find a man who remembers the heyday of farming. A man who at eighty-seven years of age, is still farming, and for whom Volapük is no novelty.”
I look up in horror.
“I have found what every linguist of a lost constructed language longs for. A subject of study who has learned the language from his parents, and not from a book—” he pauses dramatically as he glances over to me “—or the Internet.”
Dave watches me as he takes a sip of his melted ice water.
Who the hell could he be talking about? What upstate farming convention did I leave unvisited?
“Robert Royden is a farmer outside York who has been dismissed by family and friends as a crackpot. Until I interviewed him two months ago, he had no idea that he is the last man on earth who has spoken some Volapük from infancy.”
York? I could strangle that old guy from Starbucks. The Volapük-fluent farmer he’d heard about wasn’t in New York. He was in frigging York, or let’s make that Fucking York!
I feel like sobbing as Kit plows on: “Royden’s father, who engaged in agricultural business around the world, providing wool for several countries, taught him how to speak in the businessman’s language from his toddler days. Today’s families teach their children a second language so they will have a financial edge in the world. Yesterday’s families taught them Volapük. Robert Royden told me he sometimes dreams in Volapük.
“Are there any questions before I move on?”
There is loud chatter for a minute and Dave Mitchell says loudly: “How did you find him? How have you authenticated his claim? Perhaps he is an enthusiast from another era, a man who picked up Volapük as an odd hobby in the fifties?”
In 1998, in the rush to discover the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds, a curious fossil was bought at a fair with no field notes. Despite some initial eyebrows raising over this perfect find that popped up magically, the National Geographic Society paraded it as the real deal.
An elaborate hoax. The humiliation that followed for the reckless paleontologists was a brutal lesson that has trickled down through all of academics.
With the audio/visual section of his presentation, Kit has prepared a counterblow for every doubt. He has reproduced yellowed photographs from the turn of the nineteenth century including a staggering one of the farmer as a young boy with his father at a Volapük convention. It is staggering because I have never once seen a photo of a Volapük convention.
Kit rolls down a screen, and motions to the audio/visual assistant. A video plays.
He has interviewed neighbors from farms adjoining Royden’s home who apparently had no idea how unique their otherwise unremarkable farming neighbor was, and how important to the world.
And then the farmer appears on screen. The man I have been looking for in the wrong continent is tall, lean, broad-shouldered and beardless. As painful as it is to watch any further, I do. He’s got a signature shock of white hair. His old-fashioned glasses rest on a large and aged nose. He saunters around a lush moor landscape that the Brontës would have been most at home with.
The farmer ambles silently in front of the camera, and then stops to point out everything in his walk, theatrical one-syllable declarations like an Australian aborigine interpreting landscape to a documentary film crew would make.
“Kun,” he announces as he points to a cow. He rips a small piece of bark off an enormous oak tree, and after a smile, says, “Jal.”
With Kit’s evidence and this film clip, I am convinced that this farmer is the real deal. And my psyche is in shambles.
“Are you aware of the Volapük society that exists on the Internet?” a voice asks off-camera. Kit’s smooth and controlled voice.
“I don’t have a computer,” comes the answer.
When the lights go up, Kit summarizes his finding and then adds: “Through my fieldwork, I have also compiled over three hundred new words that were used by his father
in business dealings, mostly farming terminology that is not in any lexicon of this intriguing language.”
At the end of his very impressive speech, the baker’s dozen of academics in the room applauds wildly. The antisocial linguist who never introduces himself at any conference, the one who always clutches his red overflowing looseleaf binder as he crouches on a chair against the wall, is also on his feet. My distraught head is disconnected from my clapping hands.
Kit takes his seat to even more loud applause.
“We will take a five-minute break,” says the moderator Sadiqa. “And then we will hear from Professor David Mitchell of Columbia University.”
“Bravo, Mr. Christopher Brown,” Dave says from his mic. “I think those were such extraordinary findings that I will pass on my presentation. Honestly, I have nothing new to say. This is Mr. Brown’s day.”
I swallow. Nothing I said even registered with the real academic here, the gatekeeper of what counts. I never told Dave of my search for this farmer, in case he would stumble onto the guy himself. With an endorsement like that—Dave is a whale, and I am merely a pilot fish in terms of importance to this self-contained world of constructed language—Kit’s “find” will be written up as the highlight of our division.
Should I call Dr. Cox? Tell him my academic raison d’être is kaput?
Kit rises from his chair and once off the dais is surrounded by well-wishers.
There is a loud eruption of noise as the doors to the Grand Ballroom open.
Palindrome’s buddy for the last two conferences I’ve attended was Ned Jenkins, a Vulcan and Klingon expert who has told me he attends both science fiction and linguistic conferences. Ned has a staggering resemblance to chubster Spanky McFarland from the Little Rascals. You want to like him for that, but even if I wasn’t still stinging from Kit’s sucker punch, I’d stay clear: Ned has a warm persona in his journal articles, but whenever I talk to him with new expectation he is as nasty as ever.
“Chomsky was amazing. I didn’t miss anything right? Same old, same old, right?”
Palindrome lights up. “Now Ned, I am a maiden nun: Ned, I am a maiden won!”
“Have you been waiting all year for that?” Ned wonders with a laugh.
Palindrome’s smile reveals his jagged teeth. “Yes.”
Dave removes a loose eyelash and says, “You missed more than you think. We had a breakthrough in the Volapük arena. Chris Brown found a man who learned the language from his father as a small boy.”
“Dreams in Volapük,” Palindrome says.
“Who is Chris Brown?” Ned asks.
“I am,” says Kit. “Christopher.”
“Kit,” I correct.
“That’s just for my friends,” Kit says without looking up. “Professionally I prefer Christopher.”
Dave glances at me. He looks at me a bit suspiciously, and then looks again at Kit. “Remarkable. You should write that up for the journal, Christopher Brown.”
“T. Brown,” I say. “Don’t forget the T.”
Once again Dave squints at me. He hooks his thumbs under his trim waistband as he finally addresses me. “That’s all we hear from you? Besides me, you’re the one who should be giddy with interest.”
“Unless Shari’s jealous,” Ned says, and then the prick looks at me with a pukey grin to gauge my reaction.
Inside I’m as angry as a pit bull straining on a leash. “Not at all.”
Ned sneaks another quick gleeful look at me before he licks the expert’s boots: “I’ve never heard of an academic giving up his spot, Dave. You must be really blown away.”
I catch Kit’s unsteady smile. He is not gloating, I’m sure of that. I think he just doesn’t want to lose Dave’s all-important support.
“I am, but I have a real reason for shortening my time. I’ve arranged to go to an Otis Rush rehearsal.”
Ned shakes his head after the elder statesman bids goodbye to the “young ones.” “That Dave.”
A temporary worker announces that my panel session must leave the room so the panel session on French dialects can set up.
“So how are you this morning?” Kit says to me as we walk toward the door.
I wait until Ned and Palindrome are farther down the hall. “How was the game?”
He stares at me and finally says, “Superb. Thank you, Miss S. Roberta Diamond.”
“Congratulations,” I say meekly. “You really deserve it.”
“So that was one big bit of missing information. We could’ve talked about it. You could have stopped me from blithering on last night like a fool—”
“Yes,” I say.
“Well, I didn’t really kill you. You’re still standing.”
I laugh harshly as I fight back tears. “Yes, you did.”
“How’s that?”
“I was looking for that farmer.”
“Pardon?”
“You achieved your goal, Kit.”
“What goal is that?”
“You wanted to shatter your competition, and you have.”
“You’re taking my words far too seriously. Your presentation was very—”
“My presentation was very nothing, you know that. And I’ve been looking for that man for four years.”
At first Kit’s face is unreadable. Then, with everyone looking on, he picks up a hand of mine and strokes it.
“I’m sorry for how I behaved yesterday,” I say. “But…”
Tears flow as I burst out with everything: my search, my impending bankruptcy, my research and my sense of self. With the considerable emotion even the worst lip reader wouldn’t miss—far away Ned looks delighted every time he looks over at us—Kit swiftly steers me to the corner by my elbow. I’m talking through my gasps of air. “I thought he lived in upstate New York,” I add, lest he should think I had the good sense to search in England.
“Oh, good God.” He wipes a tear with considerable grace and pity like a British reconnaissance soldier who has come across the sole bloodied survivor of an overrun platoon. “Would you like to meet him?”
It takes a long while to answer this time. “What, go to England?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Maybe there is something good to come from this.”
He waits as my brain talks out this bizarre opportunity. Don’t I owe it to myself to follow this to the end? Kevin and I were planning a little trip to the Smoky Mountains in a month, his treat. And regardless of that additional relationship betrayal (tack it on the list), how would I ever go on my diminished student stipend? “I’m not budgeted for that in my research, just this conference. I’ve been doing this academic thing too long. My funding is about to run out. I can hardly get to New Jersey on our miniscule budget.”
“You shall be my guest then.”
“This is crazy. Right now there is no one on earth I hate more than you.”
“Why not? I’m not on an academic schedule. I’ll whirl you around London. Then we can drive up the moors to see—”
“Another time, Kit. I can’t even afford a little of that. I don’t know about you, but I can barely pay my rent. A plane ticket is definitely beyond my means.”
“I’ll buy you the ticket. We’ll go to a travel clerk immediately, shall we? Meeting Robert will give you closure. There’s a little inn about ten kilometers out I stayed in.” He flips open his cell phone. “I can ring the inn from here—”
“Who are you? Enough with the International Man of Mystery already.”
He laughs loudly. “No one famous, don’t worry. I just can do this for you if you want. Free. One hundred percent free. A gift.”
“Don’t you mean a consolation prize?”
“Listen, I could take a page out of that awful Ned’s book and offer the trip to Dave. It would get me in the right journals, but honestly he’s not nearly as sexy.”
I sit.
He waits again. “I really like you.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” I say finally. “Free?”
“Free.”
“Free?” I check once more.
“Gratis. Every second of your stay.”
“You could stay in my apartment while you’re in New York this week. It’s not fancy but it would even things out a little. Make me feel like less of a harlot.”
“Do you think I’m buying you?”
“No, I think you really mean to soothe me—”
“Thank you,” Kit says firmly.
“My roommate is in Los Angeles until next week.”
“If that’s a concern for you, fine. I’d love to stay with you.”
“Did you have any plans?”
“No, just a look around after the conference.”
After a moment I say, “Are you a Sir then?”
He glances at his watch, ignoring me. “Shall we?”
“Tea time?” I say with a sorrowful little laugh.
“How about vodka time?”
He smiles. Ned and Palindrome peek around the corner as he kisses me apologetically on the cheek.
Three Skyy vodka martinis later, I’ve temporarily expunged the unofficial end of my career out of my mind.
“And people in Europe don’t think American vodka is any good,” Kit says, marveling at their mistake.
“I think Skyy is brewed around here. It’s made out of something weird, I can’t remember what it is—”
“I can’t remember anything right now,” Kit admits just as woozily.
When the final tab comes, Kit’s in the men’s room. I mentally calculate my share. I reach in my pocketbook for two of the very few twenties I have left.
On Kit’s return he waves away my money with great ceremony. “Let’s go to the rest of the conference together,” he adds. “It’s not you against me. Let everyone think we are a force to be reckoned with.”
CHAPTER 6
Noo Yawk
If you’ve ever lived in New York you know the look of disappointment that first-time visitors have when they step into a taxi and drive a mile or so. Our two airports are in rather unflattering sections of my childhood-home borough of Queens. But I always resist telling guests to hold onto their hats because I know as soon as we are near the BQE—especially on a clear blue day like today—the magnificent Manhattan skyline will zoom into view across the East River from Brooklyn and Queens. Even without the two towers, it still takes my breath away.
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