The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  Now he was talking. Laura and I consider ice cream to be suitable treatment for both shock and suggested brain tumors, not to mention all the other ills that afflict mankind. “There’s some Lemon Cheesecake Cookie from Amy’s in the freezer.”

  “You girls eat the damnedest mixtures. What, there’s no chocolate in this one?”

  “It’s a new discovery of Thalia’s.”

  Blank look.

  “Friend of mine,” I amplified. Of all my tutoring students, Thalia had been memorable for coupling a superb French accent and dazzling intelligence with a total lack of intuition about how the language actually worked. We’d remained friends after she scraped through her second-year French finals – and even after she’d recommended that deadbeat Koshan Idrisov as a tenant. “She just had a baby. She’s got this theory that she shouldn’t eat chocolate or caffeine while she’s nursing.” Personally, I didn’t see how one could survive caring for a newborn without the support of my good friends Chocolate and Caffeine. Good thing I wasn’t the one stuck with the job.

  “So, a special mix for nursing mothers?” He took my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Okay, let’s see if your other tenant left any in the fridge.”

  Over a bowl of swirling colors and flavors, ranging from sweet-sharp (lemon) to crunchy vanilla (crushed vanilla Oreos), I began to feel that my brain might resume normal functioning at any minute. Michael barely touched his; he seemed to be more interested in urging me to eat. And the calories did make me feel somewhat more human.

  “Don’t they feed you at these real estate seminars?”

  “Um.” Breakfast hadn’t happened; I’d awakened too late to do more than throw on my good summer suit, tie my hair back and grab a cup of coffee. That was probably why I’d forgotten to stash the notebook in the gun safe; no need to spin theories about brain damage. Oh well, no harm done. “Packaged sandwiches. Stale. Come to think of it, I threw most of mine away.” Maybe that did account for how shaky I was feeling.

  I dipped into the luscious mixture again, then looked across the table. “Your ice cream is melting.”

  “Good,” he said without glancing down, “maybe it’ll harmonize the clashing flavors.”

  “Are you one of those people who scorns anything but plain vanilla or plain chocolate?” Thalia told me that she had married a man like that. She said that it did have the upside that he never raided the freezer for her stash of interesting flavors.

  “Certainly not,” Michael said, sounding offended, “there’s also strawberry.”

  Another man who would pose no danger to a good ice cream stash, then. Not that it necessarily made him a desirable spouse, but in some sense it was a positive quality to stack against all the negative ones I’d already noticed, like being irritating and bossy and unable to let anything go.

  “I don’t think it was just hunger that shook you up so much just now, though,” he went on.

  “I wasn’t shaky.” Well, no more than could be expected after coming home to find my space invaded and my gun out of reach!

  “Sienna,” he said impatiently, “you should have looked in the mirror. You were so pale your freckles looked green.”

  I mashed the last cookie fragments into the pool of melted lemon cheesecake ice cream and abandoned the bowl to fold my hands on the table. “A gentleman wouldn’t comment on my freckles.” In summer, particularly after a week at the beach, I liked to believe I had enough of a tan to disguise the sprinkling of little brown spots over the bridge of my nose. That belief saved me the trouble of bothering with makeup; I resented his undermining it.

  “I’m not an officer or a gentleman,” Michael said, “and I notice things.” He put one warm hand over my two cold ones. “Sienna, I wish you’d tell me the truth.”

  “About what?”

  “Well… lots of things. But for starters… Since last night I’ve been wondering… Sienna. Who did hold a gun on you? And how bad was it?”

  I stood, picked up our bowls, and turned to set them in the sink.

  “Hey,” Michael said, “I wasn’t finished.”

  “You are now!” I ran warm water over the melted ice cream.

  “No.” He stood, behind me. I tensed, but he didn’t move around the table to where I was now scouring out the ice cream bowls with scalding hot water and too much detergent on the sponge. “You need to talk to somebody. If it’s been eight years and you still go rigid when anybody even hints at it…”

  I was surprised. “How did you know it was eight years ago?”

  “Just a wild guess. Seemed likely that something happened right before you decided to get your concealed carry license.”

  I set the clean bowls upside down in the drainer and turned off the water. This time I remembered Aunt Georgia’s stalling technique and counted to three before saying anything. Un, deux, trois… “Nobody held a gun on me. It wasn’t anything like that. I made a stupid mistake, that’s all, and I don’t particularly like recalling it, and can we talk about something else now? Like how to get the smell of cat urine out of your sheets?”

  After listening to Carly this morning, the way she enjoyed portraying herself as a victim, I didn’t ever want to hear – or tell – another story like that. Which didn’t explain, did it, how I wound up sitting down at the kitchen table again. I pulled a loose curl out of the scrunchie that kept the rest of my hair out of my face and twisted it around one finger. And talked. To this man I barely knew. Who, with any luck, would exit my life as swiftly as he’d entered it, so I wouldn’t have to look into his eyes and see myself reflected there as a victim… a stupid victim.

  “It was the middle of my sophomore year,” I told him. “I was living here, but not renting rooms; I had the whole house to myself. It had been my parents’ house, you know, and Aunt Georgia took care of it after they died, and we thought it would save money if I just lived here when I went to the university…”

  And so it had. But the house had also been old, and echoing, and very empty after the previous six years of living in Beeville with Aunt Milly and Uncle Max and my five cousins. In my second year at the university I went to a party, drank far too much, passed out, and when I came to I was back here. In my bedroom. And I wasn’t alone.

  I never did know his name. He’d told me that I’d invited him to come home with me and that we’d made love before I passed out and it didn’t matter that I said I couldn’t remember it, I didn’t have any right to throw him out now. He was large and acted angry. And I was stupid, and intimidated, and…

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing. Nothing more. I mean – I was scared, I locked myself in the bathroom. But I didn’t have my phone with me, so I couldn’t call anybody. He yelled at me through the door – it seemed to go on for hours.”

  In the morning I ventured into the quiet house and satisfied myself that he was gone. I stayed in the house for three days, taking showers and baths all day every day until the hot water was used up. By then Laura was worried about me, because I never missed Russian Conversation Club on Monday nights, and what was worse, a man I was hand-carrying through his graduate proficiency exams in French saw her on campus and asked why I hadn’t met him for our regular tutoring session. She came over and hammered on the door until I let her in.

  “She and Aunt Georgia saved my sanity,” I said. “Laura announced that she was tired of dormitory life, and with her trust fund she could easily afford to rent half the house from me. She moved in and we scrubbed and painted and redecorated until it didn’t feel like the same place any more. And Aunt Georgia made me buy ammunition for my father’s old gun and take the gun safety and target shooting courses and get a gun safe and a concealed carry license.”

  “You couldn’t report the attack? Oh, no, of course not. Too bad nobody told you not to destroy the evidence.”

  My cheeks flamed. “Report what? A drunken hookup that I subsequently regretted? No crime there. And I didn’t want to tell anybody what an idiot I’d been. Anyway, he didn’t hu
rt me.”

  “We see that differently. But as for the idiocy factor… Oh, well, as one of our previous Presidents said, ‘When I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid.’ Some day remind me to tell you some of the stupid stunts I pulled when I was nineteen.”

  “Oh?” I perked up slightly at the promise of hearing about somebody else’s dumb mistakes. “Like what?”

  “Well, there was the thing about practicing five-point landings off the bar…” He saw my puzzled look and started over. “Parachute school. You’re supposed to land on the balls of your feet, fall back onto the side of your calf, side of your thigh – keep rolling – hip, back. Then roll back forwards into a standing position.”

  I tried to picture it. “Wouldn’t it be simpler not to fall over in the first place?”

  “Absolutely, if your parachute cooperates. If anything goes wrong, well, this is supposed to be the best way of avoiding injury from hitting the ground at high speed. And we tested it thoroughly.”

  “Off the bar?”

  “Evenings, after classes. One thing we did learn right away, it’s best to clear away any glassware that might get knocked onto the floor before you start to ‘practice.’” He opened his left hand to display a curving dark-red line crossing his palm. “A second thing I learned at approximately the same time: there are a lot of nerve endings in the palm of your hand. So where do we stand in the Stupid Sweepstakes?”

  I laughed. Still a little shaky. “I don’t know. How are we scoring it?”

  “My personal theory is, anybody who survived being nineteen gets extra credit. So we’re both pretty well off on points. And now…” He stretched. I couldn’t help but notice how the movement strained the shirt over his chest and shoulders. Not that this had relevance to anything. “Now I’d better get on with that laundry. No, don’t get up. I am going to impress you with my domestic competence.”

  The pile of sheets, bedding and dirty clothes he carried through the kitchen a few minutes later was certainly damp enough, but it didn’t seem to reek as badly as I’d feared.

  “It’s bad enough,” he said, wrinkling his nose after he dumped everything into the washer on the back porch, “but I’m counting on the miracle of modern detergents to neutralize it. I certainly don’t want Cathlugs thinking he’s just christened himself a new latrine on my bed.”

  “Cath Palug.”

  “Whatever. Why don’t you get him fixed?”

  “You must not have looked closely. He is fixed. But he didn’t move in with us until a couple of years ago – that’s when we took him to the vet – and I think by then it was too late in some ways. His self-image was already set.”

  “Oh well, as long as he doesn’t push me into a bog and take my car keys – that’s as close to a kingdom as I’ve got, that vintage Mustang outside that I restored myself – I figure I’m ahead of the game.”

  I liked the way his voice softened when he referred to his car.

  I liked even more the evidence that he’d actually listened when I told him the legend that inspired Cath Palug’s naming, even if he did have a bit of trouble getting the name right.

  And the way his shirt strained across his chest when he stretched… well, that was something a sensible landlady with a realtor’s license and a handful of language students would not think about, not in connection with a man who’d blown into my life without warning and would probably blow out the same way, any day now.

  He had never even told me what he was doing here in Austin. If he lived here already, why was he renting a room from me? And if he didn’t, how did he know where to find an indoor shooting range and a dark sports bar?

  Too many questions surrounded that man, and for once I couldn’t convince myself that it was too much trouble to look for the answers.

  13. Right angles and cutting corners

  But I didn’t have the energy to interrogate Michael right then. I wanted a break. I wanted to stop worrying about people and about the past and go into a world where I felt fully competent and never made stupid mistakes.

  Language.

  It had been my salvation innumerable times. Learning Farsi, for instance, had actually been a secondary effect of that mess in my sophomore year; I decided to learn a new language to keep my mind occupied. Since I’d already invested the effort in learning the Arabic alphabet, another but unrelated language that used the same script seemed like a good choice; my talent for spoken language doesn’t extend to reading strange alphabets, which is as much work for me as for anyone else. It was way too late in the semester to sign up for the Farsi class, and anyway I needed to work faster than the regular class schedule if I was to crowd other thoughts out of my mind. I arranged a tutoring swap: Nilufer, a graduate student born in Iran, taught me Farsi and in return I taught her how to write papers in academic-ese (a deservedly unpopular dialect of English).

  I didn’t have an informant for a new language handy right now, but I had the next best thing hidden between the mattress and box spring in my bedroom. I told Michael I was meeting friends for dinner, shut myself in the bedroom to change into something appropriately dressy, slipped the notebook into my tote bag and took off down the street at a brisk walk.

  It took half an hour to walk to the office, and I needed the time to clear my head. I was relieved to find the house empty; Aunt Georgia must be out on an actual date. I stifled a slight pang of envy with the reminder that I didn’t need the expected lecture from Aunt Georgia about socializing with my colleagues. With the place to myself I quietly let myself into my aunt’s office, commandeered the extremely powerful reading lamp she’d invested in to put off the day of requiring glasses, and opened up the notebook for a few hours of quiet study and record-keeping.

  This was the first chance I’d had to look over the material in peace and quiet since the night before Michael and I went into the shooting range, and I had just read through it then without making a proper systematic analysis of the data. Now, as I grew absorbed in the task, the world around me faded into insignificance. Nothing was real except the circle of bright lamplight and the wavering German script scribbled across the tall, narrow pages. Whoever made the notes had obviously been attempting to collect the standard forms that should have supported a transformational grammar of the language when he had enough data. But he’d also, equally obviously, had some trouble doing that. A few German sentences scribbled at the bottom of one page complained that his informants were deliberately misunderstanding him. Pages of random vocabulary interspersed with a very few sentence forms suggested that either the complaint was accurate, or that the writer wasn’t very good at field work.

  I withheld judgment.

  Tonight, in this office, I was enjoying a privilege the compiler of this notebook might never have had: the chance to look over all the data in peace, collating similar phrases and sentences from the entire notebook and sketching out the underlying design of the language.

  It was this overall view that helped me see what the original researcher seemed to have missed: the most common sentence forms, the ones he took to be the basic structures of the language, were significantly more complicated than the rare short sentences jotted down here and there.

  That is something that just doesn’t happen in any language I’ve studied. Think about it. “Sam went to the game.” Five words. “Sam might possibly have gone to the game at some time.” Eleven words.

  Human beings: we’re hard-wired to save ourselves effort. Look at the neat sidewalks on a university campus, meeting at right angles and delineating squares and rectangles of grass; then look at the diagonal paths traced by generations of students cutting across the grass. No, it’s not original sin; it’s something that probably got built into us in hunter-gatherer days. Calories were scarce, and the tribe members who burned fewer calories by taking the most efficient path had a slight reproductive advantage that got amplified by generations upon generations of selection.

  The same sort of thing is true of language. In most lan
guages, the simplest forms go with the simplest and most common statements. Past, present, future indicative verbs are pretty straightforward. Get into the subjunctive, talking about what might be instead of what is, and life immediately gets more complicated. It’s not literally a matter of counting words, but in general the plain indicative statement will be shorter and simpler than its subjunctive counterpart.

  I was willing to bet fifty bucks and my linguistics degree that whoever compiled this notebook had made a mistake so serious that it almost had to have been the result of a deliberate deception. And I mentally apologized to the author for surmising that he was inept at field work. He had been quite right: for whatever reason, his informants had been misleading him. And it mattered – it made all the difference in the world!

  The annotations showed that they had told him that “Djnd vla!!mqd bze dzlaamk,” meant “The wool is clean,” and “Djnd vlaad dzlaamk,” meant “The wool might become clean some time.” That “Dzhla#m qto!!mqd bze ghri,” meant “The projectile moves straight,” and that “Q!x qto! ghri,” meant “The girl might be walking straight.”

  Like I said – it’s not as simple as counting words or syllables – but languages just don’t like to work that way. People who really talked as the informants claimed would…. Would probably walk in straight lines and take right-angle turns to navigate around a trackless highland valley. I didn’t believe it for a minute. The researcher who compiled this notebook must have been so focused on collecting his samples that he’d overlooked huge, gaping inconsistencies between what he’d been told and the way people actually use language.

  Okay, if you’re not asleep by now, you’re probably fidgeting in your seat and muttering, “Who cares about the difference between one verb form and another? Why should I care?”

  Well – I don’t know about you, but I cared because by this time, I had also figured out why saying some things in what this researcher called Alt-Shaimaki changed the universe, while other statements were magically inert. Yes, I’m calling it magic. You think of a term you like better, feel free to use it. When I can make clients happy with a house they’d been about to reject, or create a picture-perfect tight grouping of shots after not practicing at the range for years, just by saying something under my breath, I call that magic. You call it what you like.