by BRIAN HALL
She reads a couple of pages to her mother every night, trying to make her see how wonderful it is. Her mother swears she’s fascinated, then falls asleep.
It was in the Strand bookstore that she found it. She wasn’t even looking. She spotted the spine: Eastern Chipmunks. It raised its tail and tried to zip away, but she grabbed it. The subtitle was maybe the most beautiful phrase she had ever read: Secrets of Their Solitary Lives. It was a hardcover book published by the Smithsonian Institution, but the Strand was selling it used for only seven dollars.
“No one can say when the appropriate genes appeared that led the first solitary chipmunk on its road to independence, but that those genes have been serviceable is obvious.” The book was published in 1982. There’s very little online about Wishner, but Mary Washington College, which is now called the University of Mary Washington, lists him as a professor emeritus. He’s probably in his seventies.
For a few days she took notes and photographed the pigeons that congregated outside her window and on the sills of the apartment building next door. But she couldn’t learn to tell them apart, and they never did anything interesting. Wishner says that when he was a child he noticed chipmunks but was “too young and preoccupied to enjoy a systematic curiosity about their lives.” Maybe that’s her problem. She’s thought about writing him a letter, but doesn’t want to intrude on his solitary life. “A chipmunk with social tendencies appearing in a present-day population is sure to get clobbered.”
One of her father’s word games is snowball sentences, in which each word has one more letter than the word preceding it. She is proud of the one she sent him in her last message: I am one who’s quite liking Wishner, Lawrence—nominally biochemist, nonetheless impressively multitalented.
How to become less young is obvious, if slow. But how to become less preoccupied—this is the mystery.
The scientific name for the chipmunk is Tamias striatus, which means “striped steward.” Steward of seeds, maybe. She likes that. “Gutrune was able to carry an average of thirty-five whole sunflower seeds at a time.” This is in her cheeks. The photograph is adorable. “There can be no doubt that chipmunks do not store food to satisfy their immediate needs, but rather because they are genetically programmed to do so, and that this instinctive characteristic has enabled them to remain independent for 25 million or so years.”
She wishes her mother wouldn’t fall asleep when she gets read to. She says she’s interested, but she’s an actor.
She lies in her nest where only the birds can see her and turns again to the back flap. Wishner sits at his picnic table in black and white, his beloved domain behind him. He looks patient and thoughtful. He could be called Tamias tamias striatus, steward of chipmunks.
2006
11:56 p.m., May 9, 2006
Dear Mette,
I hope you are well. Please say hello to your mother for me.
I’m glad you’re finding the algebra puzzle interesting. Here’s a hint: when we multiply both sides by (x−y), what do we have to be careful about?
I enjoyed your substitution cipher. I noticed you used letter-frequency ranking as your encoder. Maybe that was an unstated puzzle within the puzzle? By the way, I wonder if you’ve noticed that the Epimenides paradox is not logically complete. There is no necessary contradiction if we assume his statement to be false, because he is claiming that all Cretans are liars. There could of course be truth-telling Cretans that just don’t happen to be him. A sounder version of this paradox is the one ascribed to Eubulides: T ntf stds, “Zktv B tn stdbfc fxz bs t wbu.” (You’ll be able to solve this immediately if you guess what encoder I used as a quick and lazy way of ensuring I was including all possible letters.)
I was also quite impressed by your snowball sentence! Here is a variant form I just thought of that perhaps could be called a snowball palindrome:
I do not like dense people wrongly saying words thus: for “me,” “I.”
There aren’t many options for beginning and ending this form, but once you have a frame such as the one above, the challenge is to expand the middle:
I do not like dense people wrongly subbing always words thus: for “me,” “I.”
One could classify snowball palindromes into two groups, peaked and truncated. The first above is peaked, with one seven-letter word at the center, whereas the second is truncated, with two seven-letter words next to each other. Can you add a peak to the second sentence?
By the way, I’ve written another one of those whatevers. It probably won’t mean much to you, but anyway, here it is:
Data Set: Haunted House
In an attic box, I found a memorandum book my father kept when he was in graduate school.
He wrote simultaneously from the front and back, so that entries converge toward the middle.
I fill notebooks the same way.
On the last page is written:
Dates to remember:
September 6: Margaret’s birthday
October 26: Engagement
April 29: Ring
These lines are crossed out, and immediately below them is written:
May 2: Imogen’s birthday
June 12: Engagement and Ring
I wonder if it was the same ring.
In the middle pages of the book my father drew a floor plan of the house he and my mother were planning to rent in Santa Monica.
He has measured every wall, door, and window.
He has measured the height and horizontal placement of every light switch and electrical outlet.
He has measured the height of the kitchen counters and the height of the living room mantelpiece.
On a following page he has made a chart of all the furniture he and my mother owned, with length, depth, and height listed for each.
Three blank pages follow.
Then he wrote:
The way your smile just beams
The way you sing off key
The way you haunt my dreams
Love,
Your Father
1:14 a.m., May 10, 2006
You tried to be a fox, but I worked like a dog, and I solved your cipher in approximately one minute. As for putting a peak on your ziggurat:
I do not like dense people wrongly, stupidly subbing always words thus: for “me,” “I.”
That took me another minute.
Re: multiplying by (x−y), if x = y that screws it all up, right? Is that relevant?
7:47 p.m., May 11, 2006
Dear Mette,
It does more than that, it introduces a second solution, because 0 = 0.
I do not like dense people forever stupidly employing incorrect pronouns, subbing always words thus: for “me,” “I.”
Now another peak is needed, and since you’re so good at it . . .
Love,
Your Father
7:51 p.m., May 11, 2006
Oh, yeah, duh! It introduces the solution that x = y, which is the whole trick. That’s pretty neat.
I do not like dense people forever stupidly employing farcically incorrect pronouns, subbing always words thus: for “me,” “I.”
That was too easy.
2:03 a.m., May 13, 2006
Dear Smarty-Pants,
I do not like dense people forever stupidly employing farcically, moronically (alternatives: ludicrously, retardedly) incorrect pronouns, subbing always words thus: for “me,” “I.”
Love,
Your Father
11:10 a.m., May 13, 2006
I was asleep when you sent this, otherwise I would have answered sooner.
I do not like dense people forever stupidly employing farcically, moronically, pathetically (alternatively: ridiculously, cretinously, hopelessly) incorrect pronouns, subbing always
words thus: for “me,” “I.”
I’ll admit, even with the thesaurus this took me an hour, mainly because I didn’t see at first that I could change “alternatives” to “alternatively.” And by the way, “retard” is an offensive term these days, old man.
10:38 p.m., May 13, 2006
Dear Captain of the Language Rangers,
And “cretin” isn’t?
I do not like dense people forever stupidly employing farcically, moronically (alternatives overextending sesquipedalian possibilities, respectively: “ludicrously,” “retardedly”) incorrect pronouns, subbing always words thus: for “me,” “I.”
Love,
Your Offensively Superannuated Father
10:43 p.m., May 13, 2006
“cretin” isn’t offensive because most non-ancient people today are cretinously ignorant of its meaning. I’ll figure out how to add to the snowball later tonight
11:09 a.m., May 15, 2006
Dear Mysteriously Silent Snowballer,
Epimenides the Cretin said, “What I am saying now is a lie, but I’m too stupid to know it.”
Question: Is that a logically complete paradox?
Love,
Your Father
3:51 p.m., May 15, 2006
I’ve been busy doing other things. I guess I have to admit it’s a little harder to add something at this point. Don’t send any suggestions. I’ll figure it out.
Your Epimenides statement isn’t a paradox at all. Epimenides is lying.
7:19 p.m., May 15, 2006
Dear Mette,
Good for you!
While I wait for you to fire a snowball back at me, here’s another data set. (You haven’t told me to stop, so you only have yourself to blame.)
Data Set: Old Guy
Guy Williams played John Robinson on Lost in Space.
I wished he were my father.
John Robinson was handsome and wise and could swordfight.
He looked like JFK in futuristic polyester pants and black zippered booties.
My father was smart, but dismissive and irritable and less handsome.
Plus, he couldn’t swordfight.
After Lost in Space, Guy Williams wasn’t offered any television or film roles and most people forgot him.
In 1973 he visited Argentina and was mobbed by thousands of fans.
It turned out everyone in Argentina loved Zorro, which Guy Williams had starred in before Lost in Space.
In 1979, he moved to Argentina.
I felt strongly that this was too far away.
He lived alone in an apartment in Buenos Aires.
In later years he went around doing swordfighting in a circus act.
It was all choreographed ahead of time.
For some reason this made me sad.
When he was sixty-five, Guy Williams died in his apartment of a brain aneurysm.
His body wasn’t discovered for a week.
Love,
Your Father
p.s. My father died earlier this year, so I guess he’s been on my mind.
8:17 p.m., May 16, 2006
Duck!
I do not like dense people forever stupidly employing farcically, moronically (alternatives shambolically hyper-extending quasi-exhaustive sesquipedalian possibilities, respectively: “cretinously,” “hopelessly”) incorrect pronouns, subbing always words thus: for “me,” “I.”
I don’t really understand your data sets, but I don’t mind reading them, so you can keep sending them. I’m sorry to hear about your father. Who’s JFK?
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Chicago, 10:53 a.m. Twenty-three minutes late. Greyhound buses are always late and all they would have to do is change the published schedule to reflect actual travel times, yet they don’t. She has sixty-eight minutes. She washes up in the restroom, confers with the cloud, walks two blocks north toward an Indian restaurant. She packed inadequate clothing. Monday it was in the 60s, but yesterday it turned frigid again. Wild swings this month. More energy in the system, greater amplitude. Anyone who thinks for a second that humans are going to deal with climate change should consider the immovable object that is the Greyhound bus schedule.
She opens the steamed-up glass door, ducks into the warmth. (Scurries.) That cumin smell, like stale sweat. Some people don’t make the connection, probably a genetic thing, a difference in olfactory receptors.
“I’ll have the aloo saag and an order of poori.”
“Here or to go?”
“Here.”
The place is empty. Worker bees still hiving. She takes a table in a corner, pulls out her notebook, writes simple snowball sentences.
I am not good today, father dearest.
I do not feel smart, mother anxious.
I do not want other people judging anybody’s qualities, absolutely forevermore.
Wishner’s Law: Mind your own fucking business!
She googles cumin and sweat, scans comments on various forums, people expressing puzzlement at each other. Nothing scientific.
The lights in the restaurant are buzzing at the usual 60 hz, between B-flat and B-natural. The tires of the last bus at cruising speed on asphalt were mostly A-flat, while the concrete of the bridges brought out the harmonic at E-flat. Household timers and alarms all use a chip that emits a high B-natural, about 2000 hz, which is curiously close to, but not exactly, a multiple of 60. For some reason most trucks back up beeping either C-sharp or D-sharp. She tries not to notice these things, because once she does, she can’t get the pitch out of her head. She might start humming, and then people will side-eye her instead of minding their own business, and anyway it’s so fucking classic, isn’t it?
She eats her saag and poori, rotely writing down doublings of 60.
Is she humming?
She stops.
She, she, she! Hey everybody, I’m a girl! You can’t see what I have between my legs, but you know it’s there!
Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish use gender-neutral pronouns. Truth be told, she kind of dislikes the use of “they,” since it gets confused with the plural. She likes the Turkish terms, o and ona. O goes on a date with ona. O runs screaming from ona.
There’s a sentence in Wishner that has stuck in her head ever since she read it a decade ago. “Pumpkinseed excavated a simple burrow and failed to reappear from it in the spring.”
She returns to the station, gets early in line for the new bus, boards. Witching hours are over, the bus is nearly full. After everyone has settled, four empty seats remain, one of them next to her.
To excavate a simple burrow and simply—
The bus takes off, a mere five minutes late. It retraces her path to the Indian restaurant—a small man and bundled child entering through the door at this very moment—then turns west toward I-90. Ramp, river of humanity.
In the cold night she let Alex turn her to the right, and it turned out that Alex lives in a spacious upscale apartment, filled with things that are probably beautiful and probably expensive. Alex probably makes good money, but Alex’s family must have money, too. She had just enough time to register this, sitting on the ample couch and taking her first sip of the cognac Alex poured, before they came at her, kissing and fondling. She tried to fight down her panic and Alex seemed to want to help, repeating, “Relax.” She had previously been coaxed into removing her sweater along with her anorak (the apartment was warm) and now they were unbuttoning her shirt while kissing her neck. They still were wearing one of their baseball caps, the purple one, the bill reversed so that their mouth could get at her, and a phrase came to her, Alex is batting a thousand. An image also came—her naked and supine on the couch, Alex still clothed on top of her, her gender obscenely revealed while Alex’s was still mysterious. Was she sup
posed to think in those terms? Was it only mysterious if one was still stuck on binary ideas? She doubted herself in every way. Maybe all dates went like this. How else could sex happen, unless clothing was removed? Was agreeing to have a date the same as agreeing to have sex? Her shirt was open now and Alex was murmuring approval of her unshaved armpits as they nosed there.
“I’m . . . um . . .” she said.
“It’s all right,” Alex said, their nose zigzagging down her stomach, something tugging at her pants’ zipper, which must be their fingers, though she couldn’t see past the purple cap, so maybe it was their teeth. Alex is swinging for the fences.
She found strength in logic. It couldn’t be all right, because one of them was distressed. “No, please.” She sat up, closing her shirt around her.
“Am I going too fast?” Alex asked. Their adorable freckles, their snub nose, their large wondering gray eyes. Her unshaved armpits, her unshaved legs. Was that weird? Why else would Alex comment? How clean was she supposed to be? What was she supposed to want?
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m just so attracted to you.”
She put Alex in a mood.
Alex got up to get more cognac. They lit a candle on the coffee table. Alex sat crosslegged on the couch facing her. They talked about conservative parents in Chicago, a dyke sister. They asked about her family. She mentioned the mother at home, the father in cyberspace.
“And?”
“And what?”
“What about them? What’s their deal?”
“They’re fine.”
“That’s all?”
“I have no complaints.”
“You’re a woman of mystery.”
Alex went back to talking about their family. Father, banker, mother, homemaker. Christian. Heartbrokenly loving the sinners they’d birthed, praying for them. Then Alex talked about work colleagues, and she added a comment, and the two of them laughed about a couple of things, and she gradually relaxed, as Alex had suggested all along that she do. Alex stroked her hand and that was nice, then kissed her gently and that was okay, and then their hands were everywhere again and buttons were back to springing open. Spring season.
