by Peter Wild
Something was digging into my kidneys. I rearranged myself and a gust of warm air wafted up out of my collar. I was starting to smell like the goo, faintly cheesy. Or maybe that was Amaranth. I smashed my nose into her neck, your neck. ‘You smell like me,’ I discovered. ‘Did you catch Slime with Worms this morning? I had to work.’
‘No, I was at school,’ you said, rather haughtily. You considered seashell-selling a dead-end job. ‘Theo was asking about you again.’
‘P.U.’
‘So was Peter. You’re very popular for someone who’s never there.’
‘That’s my whole secret,’ I said. ‘Amaranth? You’re not jealous of boys.’
‘Not of boys.’
‘Are you jealous of my handsome new awning?’
‘Not that.’
‘Are you jealous of helicopters? Tofurkeys? A hoisting or hauling apparatus consisting of a horizontal drum or axle around which a rope, cable or chain passes, turned by a crank or motor?’
‘Where did you get that?’
‘Are you jealous of the Oxford English Dictionary, Shorter Edition?’
‘Not of the OED.’
‘Are you jealous of this?’ I pulled out the doll’s head-egg cup and laid it carefully on your chest.
You frowned at it, your chin crumpling, and poked a finger into the egg cup. ‘Hmm. Yes,’ you said. ‘I think maybe I am jealous of this.’
‘It’s for you,’ I said, though I had meant to keep it.
‘You’re sweet,’ you said, but you didn’t smile. ‘It’s a really good one. But you keep it. It’s more your kind of thing than my–hic!’
‘Your hiccups are b-b-b-b-back,’ I said.
‘Now you’re offended.’
I didn’t disagree. I would forgive you later when you came by to apologise. I was looking forward to it.
5
Wie niets weet en weet dat hij niets weet weet veel meer dan iemand die niets weet en niet weet dat hij niets weet.
The one who doesn’t know anything and knows that he doesn’t know anything knows a lot more than the one who doesn’t know anything and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know anything.
When I got in, my father slowly straightened from examining a fossil oyster he kept on the sideboard, a relic from when there were oceans. ‘Don Dodd’s dad’s dog’s dead,’ he informed me, several times.
‘Dong Dog’s deads dogs deg,’ I agreed, sadly, and went to my writing desk to tally the day’s take. He turned sideways to let me past, and nearly disappeared. ‘$150,000,’ I wrote. ‘Deg.’ Then I locked up the cash, took the accounts book, went to my room and closed myself in the closet.
When you’re in a safe place, your face disappears, I think. There’s nothing between you and what you’re looking at and, if there are old coats brushing your forehead and nothing to see but darkness, all the better. After a while I pulled the seashell out of my sleeve and put it to my ear. I always try this, even though I know it’s stupid. ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘Boit deg shleets den buttle swun…’
Amaranth, if you ever need to talk to someone who isn’t there, about something you don’t understand, in a language you don’t know, you could do worse than go to my father. You probably already realise that you’ll find the words only by accident, while trying to say something else. Try ‘rubber baby buggy bumper’. Dad knows hundreds and that’s not even including foreign languages.
Every new word I hit upon, such as ‘bubby’ or ‘rugger’, I wrote down phonetically. I used symbols I made up myself, concentric circles, crescent moons, zigzags and little wizard hats. They were easier to remember than the ones in the dictionary and more accurate, since a few of the sounds I made were not featured in the English language. I pored over these words, trying to fit them together. Sometimes I thought I felt a gladdening inside me, telling me that I’d got something right, a word or phrase, and those I memorised. I didn’t know what they meant, of course, but I had a feeling that in this case, not knowing wouldn’t hurt. It might even help.
I heard something fluttering outside the door.
‘Go away, Dad!’
‘I wish I were what I was when I wished I were what I am,’ he said.
‘You’re a fig plucker,’ I said, rudely.
‘I thought a thought,’ he said agitatedly, ‘but the thought I thought wasn’t the thought I thought I thought.’
‘Go aw-w-w-way!’
‘White eraser? Right away, sir.’
I tried to start over, but I couldn’t find the words. Finally I groped in one of Dad’s ancient wellingtons for the flashlight I keep to check for spiders, mostly. Sometimes to read by. I opened my accounts book. Swun? Goist? Buttle? Sissle? Dag?
Mom?
She wasn’t there.
6
Fekete bikapata kopog a patika pepita kövezetén A black bull’s hoof knocks on the pharmacy’s chequered pavement
When I came out, Dad was watching the TV. I turned it on for him and went outside to check for you. The December fog was suffocatingly warm and thick. If I was a kid still I would have checked the sky for Santa’s ’copter on its Xmas hop, sprinkling ‘snow’ and dropping stockings on their little parachutes. There was sometimes something good in them–candy teeth, a cat whistle–but mostly I loved the way the little red socks looked, drifting down through the fog under their white chutes. Some of them always wafted over the goo, where a wave would reach up and draw them in.
I went back inside. Slime with Worms was on. It was always on. In fact, it was all that was ever on, playing continuously on Channel 63, which was the only channel anyone got. Slime with Worms was just the name kids had given it. We couldn’t tell what its real name was, if it had a name. The reception was too bad, unless it was good. Maybe the show really did take place in a dense fog and in near-total silence. Everyone complained about it, but secretly I liked the fog, the indistinct figures, the humming that rose and fell in tides, and often found myself there in dreams from which I awoke also humming.
Nobody could agree on whether it was a science programme or a how-to show or some unfamiliar kind of pornography. The figures were always touching objects to other objects with strange intensity. Then the camera would swing close to the objects, which moved furtively against one another for a while. Then something would happen. Nothing more definite than a hoof knocking against a cobblestone or a little coat being draped over a rail. You could rarely identify the objects involved, but one time I had made out what appeared to be the jawbone of a small, sharp-featured mammal (maybe a fox), being inserted carefully into an oversized padlock. Some months later, a seashell tumbled out of a wave at my feet which, if you accounted for months of being softened and mauled by the goo, could have been that very object, though the padlock was no longer iron, but the same substance as the jawbone, which itself was no longer bone, but the same firm but pliable, beigey, slightly translucent substance of which all seashells were made. I smuggled it home in my sweatshirt. It was the only evidence I had to support my private conviction that the show was broadcast by the goo, and that therefore there was a chance, however slim, that one day among the blurry figures that came and went would be my mother. I’d recognise her and call Dad, and he’d recognise her and right away he’d start thickening up, and she’d look up, just as if she could see us through the screen. Yeah, right, and then she’d come for me, over the goo, standing on a clamshell with her hair whipping around, etc.
That particular fantasy had died. But a few times over the years the same thing happened–an object I had glimpsed months before washed up on the shore. I could never be quite sure it was the same object. The picture was so blurry and the seashells were blurry in a different way, changed and softened and grown together like old memories. Still. I always took them home, thinking someday I would know what they were for.
This was one thing I had in common with other kids my age: we all loved Slime with Worms. It was sort of a joke, because there was nothing definite to love. The faces were blobs, when you
saw them at all, so you couldn’t tell the characters apart, except for ‘Moustache Guy’ who had a big swatch of shadow on his blob, ‘Hat’, whose blob had outriggers, and ‘Anteater’, whose blob was situated lower than the others and seemed to possess a long snout. And yet we were attached to them. Most people liked Hat or Moustache, but I liked Anteater, though there were those who said he was just a vacuum cleaner or some sort of power tool. I had even made myself an Anteater T-shirt.
Today, Moustache Guy was touching a sort of trowel to what looked like the end of a coiled rope held by Hat. Anteater appeared to be smelling the rope, or maybe his nozzle was emitting some kind of glue, you just didn’t know with Anteater.
I got up and looked out the door. ‘Od poklopu ku poklopu kyklop kouli koulÌ,’ said Dad. It was Czech for ‘The cyclops rolls the ball from one trapdoor to another’.
I closed the door. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said bitterly. ‘I’m going to my closet again and this time I don’t want anyone to bother me. A noisy noise annoys an oyster, get it? Got it? Good.’
7
Far, Fâr fâr fâr? Nej, inte fâr fâr fâr, fâr fâr lamm. Father, do sheep have sheep? No, sheep don’t have sheep, sheep have lambs.
Answers Dad has given to the question, ‘Why did my mother leave us?’
‘Girl gargoyle, guy gargoyle.’
‘Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.’
‘If a white chalk chalks on a black blackboard, will a black chalk chalk on a white blackboard?’
‘I saw Esau kissing Kate. The fact is we all three saw. I saw him and he saw me and she saw I saw Esau.’
‘Láttam szorös hörcsögöt. Éppen szörpöt szörcsögött. Ha a hörcsög szörpöt szörcsög rátörnek a hörcsög görcsk.’
(That’s Hungarian for ‘I saw a bearded hamster. It was lapping syrup. If a hamster is lapping syrup, it will be seized with a hamster-clamp’.)
8
Mazinš eža puskažocinš uz šaursliežu dzelzscela. A little half-length, hedgehog fur coat on a narrow-gauge railroad track.
‘Dead,’ I whispered. ‘I mean, deg.’
After a while the golden L outlining the bottom and side of the door began to lighten the darkness. I couldn’t see, but when I moved my eyes I got the feeling of shapes.
The first time I misspoke one of my new words, I was confounded. Was it even truer, more perfect now? But sometimes–often–twisting a twisted word just untwisted it. For blug, bug or blood. For deg, dead. Maybe the speech I thought was normal, whatever, P.U., was just twisted so far it had come back around. Maybe when I thought I was making sense, I wasn’t. Or if I was, it was insignificant compared to the crucial nonsense I was making simultaneously and by the very same means.
In the back of the closet was the faintest possible gleam. It could have been in the back of my eyes instead. Was it the wing of a beetle, the head of a nail? I moved my head to the left and it vanished. Back, it reappeared. I turned on my flashlight. Rust-rouged concrete wall jumped forward. In the brightness the gleam was lost. I turned off the flashlight, waited for my eyes to lose their memory of the wall. The gleam returned. I fixed my eyes on it and turned on the flashlight.
A dot.
A drop.
A blob.
It was growing?
I put my finger on the blob. It felt like nothing–like the wall. I looked at the smear on my finger. It was no colour, with the look of something that belonged inside something else.
When I was little, I thought a lot about the insides of things. A closet, a nutshell, a big red rubber ball: opening them only told you what was in an open closet, busted ball or shell. Even if you did somehow know what was in there, you couldn’t talk about it. The nut still in the shell–the not-yet nut–the almond before it was white: describing it was like cracking the shell. The minute you named it, that wasn’t what it was, even if–this is the tricky bit–it maybe had been, the moment before. You could name it only without knowing you had named it, and probably with a word no one had ever used before, a word you could use without lying, because you had no idea what it meant. A word like—
I scooped up a bit of the goo on the tip of my finger, where it reformed itself into a nearly spherical blob–a gubby, a dod, dag–deg.
If ‘deg’ sounded right, was it really because it was a word in a secret language? Or precisely because it was nonsense?
‘What is the point of talking nonsense?’ you had asked me once.
‘Maybe that’s what the fox meant by ‘chew it’,’ I’d answered.
But maybe he meant, chew it.
I chewed it.
It was a bit like chewing on my own tongue. It tasted like I tasted, tasting it, like the taste of taste itself, before it had anything specific to taste. But imagine you had never tasted that before.
Like someone else with my birthday.
The way a lost scarf looks when you go back for it.
The stain on the headband of a baseball cap.
When you can’t tell where the smell is coming from.
A book in Braille (I can’t read Braille).
A little half-length hedgehog fur coat on a narrow-gauge railroad track.
9
A ladder with broken steps
When I came out, you were sitting on my bed. What a relief, I hated you. I stalked past you into the bathroom and used a hand mirror to shine the light down my throat, which felt unusual. I saw something no-coloured shining and flexing way back down, like a second, deeper tongue. The better to eat you with. Could it taste? When I found out, I whispered, ‘Roukhi we roukhik ya roukhi roukhain be roukh matrakh ma troukh roukhik roukhi bet roukh.’ I didn’t tell you what it meant, I thought you’d know.
But somehow, that was when things started to get the way they got between us, how you didn’t want to hear about the shells any more, what I was building with them, and how I started hiding them from you and you went on that date with Theo and I followed you and you confronted me and all I could say was ‘an enemy amenome an anomie a menome anemone’ and Theo went home and I went home and it turned out that Dad was caught in an eddy and had been blowing around and around and around in circles all evening and that night I ate a whole bucket of goo and shat my pyjamas in my sleep, sort of shat, I mean it was translucent, it was shining, I never told you. My tradegy strategy, tragedy stragity, tragedy strategy.
I wrote about all that but I erased most of it. Maybe I see my father’s point of view: some things should be hard to say. Here’s all that’s left:
Als jouw tekkel mijn tekkel tackelt, tackelt mijn tekkel jouw tekkel terug.
If your dachshund tackles my dachshund, my dachshund will tackle your dachshund.
Als een potvis in een pispot pist, heb je een pispot vol potvispis.
When a whale pisses in a pisspot, you get a pisspot full of whale piss.
Egy kupac kopasz kukac, meg még egy kupac kopasz kukac, az két kupac kopasz kukac.
One heap of bald maggots plus another heap of bald maggots makes two heaps of bald maggots.
Kuku kaki kakak kakekku kaku.
My great-uncle’s toenails are rigid.
10
O tempo perguntou pro tempo quanto tempo o tempo tem, o tempo respondeu pro tempo que o tempo tem tanto tempo quanto o tempo que o tempo tem.
The time asked the time how much time the time has, the time answered the time that the time has as much time as the time that the time has.
It was not a very big hole, so it was not a very fast leak, but the hole got bigger, the leak got faster.
Some more objects I thought I recognised washed up: a decoy duck with a smooth knob for a head, a gear twisted into an 8, a boomerang with a pouch. I added them to the pile in my room. It struck me that they were like the new words I was trying to learn: familiar and strange at the same time. Maybe they made sentences. Slime With Worms: it was a show about fitting things together. That was so obvious, I had missed it
! I tried pushing the decoy duck knob into the egg cup and it snapped right in, dutter mudded dop. The 8 gear fit on the boomerang grip. I was building something, I just didn’t know what it was yet.
Every day I went into the closet and closed the door and stood there leaning against the plastic shrouding my father’s old suits, the hair on my arms standing up, and even though the goo was for a long time not much more than a puddle, I could feel it coming up around me, and when it had risen to my knees I already felt it licking my stomach, and before long it seemed to me that I was in it right up to my neck, and eventually I was.
You came by the house a few times. ‘I looked for you up on the dyke,’ you said, ‘but I didn’t see your stall.’
‘I’m not selling the seashells any more,’ I said. Neither of us looked at the thing on the floor.
‘So how are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘K-k-k-k-k-keeping busy.’ P.U., P.U., P.U., P.U., P.U.
When you left, I went back in the closet.
It’s complicated, mourning for someone who’s gone and at the same time isn’t, like my father, like my mother, and now I’m passing that on to you. I realised that the day I felt you outside the closet, holding the doorknob and not turning it. You were right not to and I wouldn’t have let you anyway–I was hanging on from the inside–but I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t, though. My mouth was busy. I tried to make my hand apologise, in the way it damped the rattle of the spindle in the latch. But I know how hard it is to understand even words.
Eventually, you went away, and that was the day I went in over my head, and when I came out again, I knew what I was building.
Amaranth, the stall is yours if you want it. You know where I keep the keys. Take anything from the house, too, but go soon. I’m not the little Dutch boy. I never even thought of plugging that hole. Eventually, the closet won’t hold the goo. Then the house won’t hold it. Oh, sure, a repair crew will get there in time, but there are other leaks, other kids with something hidden in their closets. One way or another, a flood is coming. My mother told me so.
