The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  Cualacino (Italian): the mark left on a table by a cold glass

  Forelsket (Norwegian): the euphoria one experiences when first falling in love

  Iktsuarpok (Inuit): to go outside to check if anyone is coming

  Ilunga (Tshiluba, Congo): a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never allow it a third time

  Mamihlapinatapai (Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego): the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are reluctant to start

  Sgriob (Scottish Gaelic): the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky

  Saudade (Portuguese and Galician): the feeling of longing one gets upon realizing that something one once had is lost and can never be had again

  Of course, this is just a small sampling of the words he gathered. There were many more—hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands—but these are the ones I remember.

  By the time Annie and I entered the seventh grade, I’d started going over to her house almost every day after school. I helped her with her math homework and she helped me with my English. We spent hours working side by side, or with me stretched out on her floor and her sitting up on her bed. Sometimes I would feel her eyes on me, grazing the back of my neck in a way that made all the little hairs stand up, but I kept my eyes fixed on the algebra problem at hand.

  Despite my constant presence in her house, I almost never saw Annie’s father anymore.

  Basic laws of nature ensured that there would be occasional sightings—a trip to the bathroom, a quick foray to the fridge—and on these occasions I noticed that he had grown paler, the skin of his face having taken on the glossy white sheen of paper. He shuffled down the hall in a frayed blue bathrobe. He put his hands in the pockets, then took them out again. Scraps of paper fluttered away from his palms like birds. But as time went on even these sightings grew rare. I was puzzled—until one day, overcome by curiosity, I peered into his study and saw the pyramid.

  I call it a pyramid for lack of a better term. The fact is that the piles of books on the floor and around the corners of his desk had risen to such a height and at such an angle that they now merged at a point above his head. This precarious-looking structure threatened to collapse at any moment, yet managed miraculously to endure. Whether it was the result of accident or intelligent design, I could not say.

  I confronted Annie about her father’s bizarre living arrangements.

  “How does he breathe, surrounded by all those books?”

  “There are some gaps in between. The air gets through.”

  “What about when he gets hungry—how does he eat?”

  “I pass him his meals through the gaps.”

  “But—what about—you know? Going to the bathroom?”

  At this, Annie shrugged. When I pressed her, she said that he rarely felt the need to go anymore. He hadn’t used the bathroom in almost a month. Perhaps he never would again. His appetite was shrinking as time went on; it had been three days since he’d requested something to eat. My jaw must have dropped when she told me that, because I remember Annie’s hand reaching toward my chin and gently, almost sadly, closing my mouth.

  I believe it was around this time that Annie’s father began giving her lessons.

  One afternoon, mystified by the fact that she had given me the brush-off for the third Monday in a row, I let myself into her house using the spare key I knew she kept hidden inside a little plastic frog on the front porch. When I tiptoed down the hall in the direction of the study, I could see Annie kneeling by the pyramid, her hands pressed up against its sleek walls. Father and daughter seemed to be communicating in whispers through a certain crack down near the base of the structure.

  All of a sudden his voice rang out loud and clear, and goose bumps rose on my flesh.

  “Criminal,” he said. “Definition.”

  “One who commits acts outside the law.”

  “Etymology.”

  “Old French—crimne. From Latin—crimen—charge, indictment, offense.”

  “Spelling.”

  “C-R-I-M-I-N-A-L.”

  “Permutations.”

  What followed was a string of permutations on the letters of the word criminal, Annie’s voice—somehow taut and slack at the same time— letting each letter roll around for a while in her mouth before releasing it into the air.

  “Texture.”

  “Dark alley. Diffuse light. Tightness in the stomach. Neon thrill. Excellent danger.”

  My eyes widened as understanding lapped at me in slow, small waves. He was teaching her to get inside the word, to get at some mystical essence that was housed within its letters yet was not reducible to them, and was not reducible to any translation.

  A moment later I heard him say, “Every word is a key that opens up a new world of experience. The trick is knowing how to take hold of the key, how to turn it inside the lock.”

  From common English words like criminal, Annie eventually graduated to untranslatable words in foreign languages. Of course, she had neither her father’s breadth nor his depth of knowledge when it came to these dialects, but by then it no longer mattered. He had trained her to develop an inner reflex that would respond to each word’s unique taste and texture, not to its translatable ingredients. It was an instinct that, again for lack of a better term, I am tempted to call mystical. She knew how to sniff out a word, how to keep it poised on the tip of her tongue and turn it, key-like, until it opened up its world for her.

  During that period, Annie’s face shone with a wild light. She was processing hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of new experiences. I crouched outside the door to the study, eavesdropping.

  Then came the day when Annie entered the study and the pyramid was sealed off. Without warning, her father had closed all the cracks with slim volumes of poetry, had caulked the smaller gaps with crumpled-up dictionary pages—dictionaries themselves having long ago become expendable.

  I was there the day it happened. I was there, and I can still see Annie’s face in that moment, the moment when she understood that her father was gone and that his hand would never again brush hers on its way through the pyramid. I remember wondering briefly in that instant if what she was feeling was something akin to saudade—the feeling of longing one gets upon realizing that something one once had is lost and can never be had again. She didn’t cry, but her thin shoulders quavered.

  I know I should have been there for Annie in the months that followed. But then, there was Christine. She was not the smartest girl in the tenth grade, but she had blond hair and a laughing mouth and cheeks that dimpled when she smiled. By this point I had grown taller, and my English was near perfect. Gone were the days when I got beat up after school every Monday. Christine and I had started eating our lunches together. In the evenings, I’d sometimes call her up on the phone. If Annie noticed that I was coming over less frequently, she said nothing to indicate her disappointment.

  Annie, alone. Her mind must have started working in sad, strange ways.

  At the end of the summer before our last year of high school, Christine celebrated her sixteenth birthday with a house party. To my surprise, I was invited. I’d spent years hoping that someone like Christine could like me, but until that moment I had not really dared to believe it. That night, I checked and rechecked my appearance in the mirror, trying on four different shirts and slicking down my black hair with gel before heading out.

  At the party, I found myself surrounded by Christine’s friends. Becca Kline, of the firefighting-dad debacle, was there, flanked by her boyfriend and a snub-nosed girl whose name I couldn’t remember. The way the three of them smiled at the sight of me made me nervous; I had the impression that they were laughing at me all evening.

  But what happened later on made it all worthwhile. Christine, a beer in one hand, slipped into the bathroom and pulled me in. Suddenly her mouth was astonishingly close to mine. I
felt a swooping sensation in my stomach as she leaned in and kissed me.

  After a minute, I pulled my lips away from hers, breathing hard. She giggled and the two dimples made an appearance. I traced one of them with a reverent fingertip.

  “You look like a poem,” I said.

  She stared at me. She did not understand how someone could look like a poem.

  Just then a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday to You” inundated our private two-person world. Christine flashed me that dimpled smile again and rushed out.

  I opened the door to see the snub-nosed girl holding out a giant cake. But before Christine could even finish blowing out the candles, I was running down the street, euphoria coursing through my veins, my desire to share this moment more pressing than my desire to perpetuate the moment itself.

  I arrived breathless on Annie’s front porch. Extracting the key from the belly of the plastic frog, I pushed open the door.

  “Annie!” I called. “Annie, you won’t believe what just—”

  But when I stepped into her bedroom, it was dark and empty. Disappointed, I decided to wait for her. To pass the time I circled the room, picking up objects at random, until my eyes fell on the notebook that Annie’s father used to keep, the one he referred to as his dictionary. I sat on her bed, opened the notebook, and flipped through its pages.

  There were the reams of words I remembered. I was about to close the book when, on one of the pages, I noticed a change in handwriting. Here, in Annie’s tight cursive, was a list of words she herself had invented—words for the most particular experiences imaginable. Despite my best efforts, I can no longer remember the words themselves, only the experiences they named:

  Dictionary of Words I Wish I Had

  • The crisp, supernatural light of autumn

  • Homesickness caused by an uncertainty of where home really is

  • That split-second period—which seems to expand into an hour— between knocking over a piece of glassware and seeing it strike the ground

  • The feeling you get when you’re walking down the street and suddenly you think you see someone who’s been dead for years, and for a moment in your mind that person is alive again—and then you remember

  • The pleasure of plunging your finger into oozing wax that is not hot enough to seriously burn but causes a gasp and then dries on your fingertip

  • The sensation of being slightly choked by a turtleneck

  • Nostalgia for an abstract future event that may not happen, but you think that it probably will happen, and you already feel nostalgic about it

  When I flipped through the next few pages I saw that the words got increasingly peculiar as they went on, describing more and more specialized experiences. One two-page spread was filled with drawings of leaves, each glittering with a number of water droplets. On each leaf the droplets were arranged in a different formation, and for each of these formations, Annie had a name.

  Disturbed and somehow jealous, I closed the notebook and went home.

  Over the next few months, I started sneaking peeks at Annie’s ever expanding dictionary anytime I was at her house. She kept the notebook in plain view on her bedside table, so all I had to do was wait until she got up to go to the bathroom or headed to the kitchen for a snack. It was midwinter when she finally caught me.

  I was hunched over the notebook, staring down at the latest group of entries. It defined an array of sadnesses:

  Dictionary of Words I Wish I Had

  • Sadness of broken bicycles abandoned in the snow

  • Sadness of sunlight that smiles too brightly and clashes with one’s mood

  • Sadness of a musical instrument that lies in the corner gathering dust, forgotten by the child for whom it was bought

  • Sadness of cake that sticks to the nonstick Bundt pan

  • Sadness of outdoor swimming pools at night, lit up but completely empty

  • Sadness of being the child of a parent whose job is too prosaic

  • Sadness of being the child of a parent whose job is too poetic

  • Sadness of knowing the boy you like will never like you back

  Suddenly the feeling that I was being watched overwhelmed my senses. I turned around—and there was Annie. My jaw must have dropped, because I remember her hand reaching out toward my chin and gently, almost sadly, closing my mouth. Then she brought her mouth right up to mine and kissed me.

  I should explain that it was not the kiss of a normal sixteen-year-old girl. It was not the kiss of someone who expects, or even hopes, to be kissed back. It was simply the kiss of someone who knows that they have no chance, who has already passed through the stages of hope and desire and longing and left them all behind, and is now filled with the calm, cold diamond light of acceptance. This light cast a beauty on her in that moment, such a stark beauty that I think she herself must have been aware of it. Perhaps she walked around in it for days afterward, watching her sadness grow more and more beautiful.

  After that night, Annie’s alienation increased. Embarrassed and a little chilled by that cold light of hers, I avoided her. The few girlfriends she’d had stopped talking to her. She seemed unable to communicate normally. One day, sitting behind her in English class, I saw her essay come back to her all marked up in red. Practically every word had been circled, and at the top of the paper—in place of a grade—the teacher had written three words. What is this?

  It was then that I realized that reality, for Annie, had become hyperdetermined. She lived in an intolerably precise world. She had words for every experience imaginable; I suspect, however, that she was not very capable of feeling. To feel is to generalize, to allow things to form abstract impressions in the mind. For Annie, there were no abstract impressions. Each impression, the instant it formed, was immediately crystallized—fossilized—in the hard, bright amber of the perfect word.

  A few days after graduation, I walked over to Annie’s house. I knocked, but there was no answer. I was extending my hand to retrieve the key from the belly of the plastic frog when suddenly I knew that the door was open.

  Inside, I veered in the direction of Annie’s bedroom. When I entered, I saw that most of her things were gone, and then I understood that she was gone, too. I pictured her boarding a bus or a train, traveling ceaselessly in search of new fodder for her dictionary, in search of new words, and I wondered if she would hunt them down in city after city after city, filling her ears with the clang and cacophony of all the languages of the world.

  Then my eyes fell on the notebook. It lay discarded on the bedside table. I opened it to the first page and saw that the last word of the title had been scratched out, and a new word scrawled in its place. It now read: Dictionary of Words I Wish I Hadn’t.

  After several minutes, I put the notebook down and left the room.

  In the hall I saw a strip of light coming from a door that had been left ajar. I pushed it open—and there was the pyramid. Its slopes glittered in the gauzy sunlight that, after all these years, still filtered in through the windows. My eyes were dazzled; it took them a moment to adjust. When they did I realized that the pyramid was emitting its own glow, that a strange radiance shone out from the minute cracks just visible in the glossy surface, and then I knew that he was still in there, working away, oblivious to his daughter’s departure. I had the sense that he would go on this way indefinitely, interminably, untouched by the effects of time and the comings and goings of the material world.

  As I stood in the doorway, watching the dust motes spin in the light, I was filled with a strange feeling, a feeling that bears a certain resemblance to saudade but for which the precise word has perhaps not yet been invented.

  Credits

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  Cover photograph © by Mary Evans

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are us
ed fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  THE MYSTICS OF MILE END. Copyright © 2015 by Sigal Samuel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-241217-1

  EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2015 ISBN 9780062412188

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