by Douglas Lain
“They’ll probably change it for the paperback.” The scribe typed the rest of his sentence, a brief rattle, and pushed his chair back.
The elevator began to descend back to the lobby, a rickety hum that did not register when he was typing or listening to music, but would start up during a lull to remind him that he lived in a hive. He had moved his family to Milford expressly to get outside the blast radius, and here they were back again, just across the river from Manhattan as Western Civilization seemed to be entering its death throes.
The basement shelter in Milford, with its blankets, chemical toilet, and emergency provisions, seemed in his imagination to lie still underwater. The image, literary and unreal, could not be contemplated in the intolerable present: it belonged to some other category of time. He imagined the occupants of a New York apartment building crowding down into the basement in the minutes before attack.
Cyril was leafing through the book. “Firsts?” he asked curiously. “Sumer was the beginning of civilization?”
“As we are its end. Great cities whose literate class is kept busy producing official documents, and so don’t distract their masters. They found the Gilgamesh epic among thousands of temple inventories and official genealogies.”
“First tame writers, eh?” Cyril commented. “Guess that’s why they also had to invent beer.” His own bottle, the scribe noticed, appeared to be bourbon.
“In their beginning is our end,” he murmured.
“It’s a cute idea,” Cyril said, meaning that’s all it was. “Is there a story in it?”
“I don’t really feel like mining it for story potential,” the scribe replied, a bit waspishly. Which wasn’t really true, he realized: without thinking about it, he had been doing exactly that.
“I suppose you’ve been digging for references to Sumer in that damned thick square book,” Cyril continued.
“It’s not square; it’s circular,” he protested mildly.
“Found some already, I’ll bet. Care to read me one? Go on; you know you want to.”
With only a token show of reluctance, he pulled out the big book, supple-spined as a dictionary from frequent opening, and found the marked passage.
“Behailed His Gross the Ondt, prostrandvorous upon his dhrone, in his Papylonian babooshkees, smolking a spatial brunt of Hosana cigals, with unshrinkables farfalling from his unthinkables, swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullupsuppy of a plate o’monkynous and a confucion of minthe . . .”
“A bigshot,” Cyril commented. The scribe blinked at this, and jotted lugal = bigshot on a pad beside his typewriter. “Lots of bug imagery: drone, cigals, papillon—this is the ant and the grasshopper story, right?”
The scribe nodded. Cyril would love the Wake if he allowed himself.
“Dhrone also meaning throne, meaning the crapper. The great man’s preoccupations never recede far, do they? I can bet what the ‘unthinkables’ are, but what about the ‘unshrinkables’?”
“Pajamas, I think,” the scribe replied. His mind flinched away from unthinkable. “There’s a later passage, which contrasts ‘Summerian sunshine’ with ‘Cimmerian shudders.’” Cyril looked about to smirk, and he added sharply, “Not Robert E. Howard’s, but the land of shadows.”
Cyril nodded wisely. “Sumer is igoin out,” he said. “Lhude sing Goddamn.”
There was nothing the scribe could add to that. The faint whine of an overhead jet, some 707 bound for Idlewild, reached them faintly through the window. The scribe looked at the pane, thinking about shutters. Flying glass; blast sites in the financial district, the naval shipyards. Apartments with a view of the Manhattan skyline might prove less of a premium.
“You’re thinking story ideas.” Cyril became very acute, not to say accusing, when he got drunk.
The scribe flushed. “The greatest temptation is the final treason,” he began, then stopped: he seemed to have no more control over his words than his thoughts. “I was thinking about shudders.”
Cyril laughed, then finished the bottle and set it on the floor. “Well, tell me what you decide.”
The scribe’s bottle was also empty, and it occurred to him that when Virginia took the kids to a movie so he could entertain in the tiny apartment, he should be quicker in realizing that he had to go to the kitchen himself. Indurate though he was to alcoholic remorse, the scribe felt a stab of grief, that he had brought his family back to the targeted city, now near the endpoint of history.
And Cyril, who sometimes seemed to read minds (but likelier knew to follow one’s stream of consciousness to where it pooled), said, “There’s your title: Last and First Gravamen.”
The scribe found he could not bear to contemplate the word gravamen. He was standing in front of the refrigerator, looking at containers of the juice, whole milk, condiments that he usually saw only at table. The quart bottle was cool in his hand, its heft comforting, but the hum of electricity and wisps of Freon-cooled vapor seemed fragile to evanescence, and the emanating chill breathed a message that he hoped not to hear.
Leslie was halfway through an aggravating Monday afternoon when Trent called with his proposal. “That game?” she said distractedly, waving away a colleague who had poked his head into her cubicle. Trent had fooled around with it all weekend, reasonable behavior for someone who spends his workdays editing documentation, but was expected to set it aside for Monday.
“I have been exchanging email with the developers, and they’re planning a series of novel tie-ins.”
“Novels? You mean, like Dungeon & Dragon books?” Leslie had seen such paperbacks in Barnes and Noble.
“Not gaming novels, but novels set in the game’s era. They would be packaged to tie in with Ziggurat, but wouldn’t follow its story line or anything—it doesn’t have one, of course. Three novels, each one long enough for a slim book, and historically authentic, which is a selling point. But dealing with wars, trade conflicts, dynastic succession: just like the game.”
Leslie didn’t like the sound of this. She had met friends of Trent who had worked on such projects, which seemed a good way to earn six thousand dollars in four months rather than four weeks.
“What are they offering you?” she asked.
“They want to see a proposal, maybe two or three outlines. I told them about your history, and said you would be involved.”
“In writing a novel?” Leslie was sure she was misunderstanding something.
“I’ll do the work, I just need input for the outlines.”
“Trent, this makes no sense.” Her phone began blinking, a call routed to voicemail. “Isn’t this game coming out in November? There isn’t time for all this.”
“It’s been pushed back till spring; they’re afraid of the competition from You-know-what. This repackaging is kind of desperate, and they need the books fast. I can do that, I just need to get the contract.”
Leslie sighed. “We’ll talk tonight, okay?” Another co-worker appeared, and Leslie waved her in. Another light went on and she jabbed at the button, too late. “Sit down, I just need to check my messages.”
On the way home Leslie returned the weekend video rental to the library, where she checked the 930s shelf for books on Mesopotamia. She brought back several, which Megan studied curiously while Trent made supper.
“These must be very old people,” she remarked. Then she added confidingly: “Daddy is reading me the oldest story in the world.”
“The Sumerians were around long before the Trojan War. They probably invented the wheel.”
Can something so obvious be startling? Megan looked surprised—of course wheels must have appeared at some discrete point—but said nothing until dinner, when her parents’ conversation brought it back to mind.
“Their civilization was stranger than those game designers realize. You can’t write a popular novel about it without distorting everything.”
“Oh, come on—how strange can their motivations be? The cities fight over resources and influence, thei
r churches slowly turn into bureaucracies, and individuals pray for solutions to their personal problems and worry about dying. Sounds familiar to me.”
“That’s a gamer’s-eye view. A novel would have to go inside the heads of one of these characters, and their value system—it’s as far from the Greeks’ as they are from us.”
“They invented the wheel, so they wanted to be like us. The Pequots didn’t have wheels, and Ms. Ciarelli read us a book about them.”
Both parents stared at their daughter.
“That’s an excellent point, dear. The Sumerians even had chariots, which they used in their battles just like the Greeks. Did I show you the images of them on the computer?”
“Not yet. Do they look like the ones the Greeks rode around the city walls?”
“We don’t actually know what early Greek chariots looked like,” said Leslie. “But Daddy is right, there are actual pictures of Sumerian ones.”
“Even though they’re older?” Megan thought for a moment. “I guess if you invented the wheel, you’d want to make sure everyone knew it.”
Trent showed Megan images of Sumerian carts and chariots while Leslie washed up, then took her to the library to get a video. Leslie spent the hour reading about early Mesopotamia, the laptop beside her for taking notes. The glow of domestic contentment—the parents’ eyes meeting after Megan said something wonderful could spark the most luminous serenity—still suffused the otherwise empty house, and this, plus perhaps the fact that she generally curled up in this armchair with a novel (the glass of wine also helped), shifted something within her, and the customs and practices of kalam, “The Land,” began to suggest the most familiar and comfortable of stories: a Mystery (turning upon a former scribe’s ability to enter a darkened chamber and read the clay tablets with his fingertips), a Melodrama (legal records told of wicked uncles challenging the legitimacy of their dead brothers’ sons), a Gothic (involving the Sumerian custom of burying the family dead within one’s house), and even a Romance (a marriage contract could bring the future bride, sometimes still a girl, into her husband’s household without specifying who the husband will be, so that she grows up wondering which brother she shall marry). How easily the third millennium B.C. accommodated itself to the varieties of the twentieth century (or nineteenth century, if Leslie is honest) novel, the template of bourgeois sensibility.
Trent came down the stairs, hardcover in hand, with the careful tread of one leaving a child just asleep. Leslie smiled and waved. “Still on Book III?”
“For every category of ships I omit, I have to add an explanation for something else. She has already suggested that the story may last as long as the war.”
Leslie laughed. “Switch to the Odyssey, fast! I’m surprised you have kept her interested so long in a story where no one travels.”
“I suspect she’s waiting for the captive princess to be rescued and flee toward home.” Trent dropped into the couch opposite Leslie. “Raymond Queneau once said that all novels are either iliads or odysseys. He wrote one, Odile, that was intended to encompass both modes.”
“As its title suggests?”
A look of astonishment spread across Trent’s face. “I never thought of that.”
Leslie shook her head fondly. “But does this rule apply to pre-Homeric literature?”
“Good question. The Gilgamesh poem would be an odyssey, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe the later versions, not the Sumerian one. No descriptive journeys, but lots of dialogue and social clashes.”
“Huh.” Trent pondered this. “So what do you call a Gilgamesh-Iliad? A Giliad?”
“Go to bed, Trenchant. I’ll have something for you later.” It was only after he had left, a grin on his face, that she realized what he was thinking.
He was asleep when she finally came to bed, the reading lamp on and a splayed book beside him on her pillow. Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time. It was one of Trent’s endearing qualities, that he fell in love with the assignments that were tossed to him: gave them his heart, which got bruised when they were kicked into some chute and later mashed flat in a change of plans. Entering the realm of novel tie-ins, land of the flat fees, he was already resolved to do more than asked. She shifted the book to the bedside table and slid in beside him, feeling an affection that flared brightest at the sight of her daughter’s features visible in her sleeping husband.
As she pulled the sheet over her and darkness expanded beyond the bedroom walls, Leslie found herself thinking of the Iliad, seemingly more modern than the Odyssey, beginning with the war it treats already in progress and ending before its conclusion. Megan must already know the story of the Trojan Horse; will she be upset the hear of the burning towers, the slaughtered populace, and what awaits the victors who set out on triumphant returns? Gilgamesh was an iliad in that respect, too.
It is the last night of the end of history, and Leslie—who had been reading of the three tiers of cultivation in Mesopotamian farming—
dreams of Nanshe climbing a tamarisk: emerging above the lower canopy of citrus and pomegranate to look across the grove, the date palms standing like aloof grownups surrounded by crowding children. Nanshe’s playmates, feet planted among the cucumbers and lettuce, stood looking up as she scrambled higher, the breeze unimpeded in her hair. The sound of men raising the sluice gate carried clearly from the canal, and Nanshe imagined the water, trickling through the channels and branchings into the orchard, reaching at last to wet their toes. Their startled shrieks would rise like birds, and Nanshe would laugh and hurl down twigs.
“Your faces are tablets,” she once cried, exulting at her friends’ alarm, “I see what you really feel!” Father had been explaining to Enannatum how a man’s expression and posture can disclose his true feelings, vital skill for any merchant. Invisible in a corner, Nanshe listened. Now every visage contained characters effaced and rewritten, yet legible to her questing eye. The canopy is a face, where stirring leaves bespeak Ekur’s stealthy efforts to climb. The horizon is a register, the line where dust storms, the winter rains, attacking armies will first inscribe themselves. The world is a tablet, a stele, the frameless burst of meaning that Nanshe, alone between the fruit trees and the unforthcoming sky, resolves to see hear feel for her own.
The rentals were returned unwatched, Trent’s redaction of Helen and Paris’s rapprochement left dangling. Cubicle workers stared transfixed before streaming video; officials disappeared into shelters; the skies fell silent. In the shocked still evening, the intolerable images replayed.
Connecticut, untouched by war in nearly two hundred years, got an upwind look. Leslie and Trent lived closer to Stamford than to Bridgeport, but it was toward the older city that Leslie traveled each day, to a thirty-floor gleaming wafer whose daily occupants flowed in and out on the nearby commuter trains. That afternoon, in response to a whispered comment by a ashen co-worker, she rode up to the roof and looked out west. It was there: a low smudge on the horizon, widening as it spread on its own terrible winds into Brooklyn and New Jersey.
No work was done next day, and the weeks that followed were traversed in a cloud of dazed grief. Megan, who had gotten (they later realized) a good dose of live coverage while her parents stood white-faced before the TV, had scary dreams about jets. Trent took a long time completing his assignments, then found new ones hard to get. It was somehow still that Tuesday, so violently nailed to history one could not pull free and move on.
“They now say less than ten thousand.” No real numbers known at all, just vast uttered estimates, to be slowly refined by counting absences. From the hole in Pennsylvania, perhaps a salvageable black box. Amid horror, Leslie found herself yearning for story: a cockpit transcript, defiant last letter, jubilant claim of victory. Which of you have done this? The loathsome Taliban of Afghanistan denounced the attack, Saddam Hussein hailed it.
Work resumed, though badly. Leslie had to tell her tech staff not to go to CNN.com so often. She came home to a consist
ently clean house, sign enough of how Trent wasn’t spending his days. Megan’s school held its postponed Open House, and they stood before her cubby and examined her activities book, album of drawings, and her daily journal. Leslie turned to the journal entry for September 11, and they read:
Today somthing is going on but I don’t know what. Marry came in and said somthing is getting wors. Somthing aubt a plane. But what that’s the onley quchin I have. I’m probley going to ask her to tell me the ansor becas quechins are ejacashnal.
Trent shook his head. “You couldn’t make up something like that,” he said. Leslie looked at him with annoyed bemusement. Who said anything about making things up?
Their first trip to the City was a rainy Sunday excursion to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where an exhibit on Japanese anime was about to close. They were quiet as they crossed the bridge to Queens, which afforded them a good look at the south Manhattan skyline. Trent perked up as they entered the lobby, however, and led Megan off to the fifth floor while Leslie checked the map for the Assyrian collection.
Most of the Mesopotamian exhibits were Babylonian, but Leslie found one extremely strange artifact from the era of Ziggurat: a teapot-sized terracotta jug bearing a chicken’s head and four clay wheels. She stared at the thing, which looked more Dada than Sumerian, then read how such vessel carts could be dated to the mid-third millennium, but that scholars were divided as to whether they had been built as toys or for temple rituals. Leslie thought that the saucer-sized wheels were too crude for religious purposes, and noticed something that the description hadn’t mentioned, a half-ring emerging from the front of the vessel, from which a rope could be tied to pull the device. Of course it was a toy, though she could not imagine why wheels had been put on a pouring jug (it had two openings, one for filling from the top and a spout in front) rather than a chariot.
More compelling was a copper statuette on the opposite wall, of a man wearing a helmet with long curving horns and strange boots that curled up extravagantly at the toes. His pointed beard and wide staring eyes reminded Leslie of a medieval devil, a conceit that would give pleasure to a fantasy writer or a fundamentalist. The text noted that the horns resembled those of a species of ram found in the mountain regions, whose present-day inhabitants wore pointed slippers. So perhaps the figure had been made there: no one knew.