“Yes, ma’am.”
“You would be obliged to work through the night if necessary.”
I expressed my eagerness to forego sleep for the sake of useful employment.
“How is your spelling?”
Happily I was not obliged to lie, for while the Spelling Bee was a bugaboo of mine, since there were so many letters of the alphabet whose names I could not pronounce, I was—on the friendly page—a very fiend for orthography.
“I intend to put you to the test. Are you agreeable?”
I was.
“You will find that communications from the land of the dead are sometimes fragmentary and always strange. I would ask you not to correct seeming errors, unless so instructed, but to take down exactly what you hear through the trumpet, insofar as you can make it out. The silences may be as important as the words, so you will have to make eloquent use of the bitterly inadequate tools of the comma, the period, the ellipsis, and the hard return. Are you fluent in punctuation?”
I tried to say that I was probably more fluent in punctuation than in actual words. “I expect you intend a witticism,” she said indifferently, before I could quite get it out, and pressed me into the desk chair, sliding the rabbit’s foot out of my reach as she did so. “The device is extremely easy to knock out of alignment. Please do not touch any part of it except, if absolutely necessary, the earpiece. Are you ready? I will go now.”
I was then witness to the most astonishing sight of my life.
It is impossible to convey the impression of error and even of abomination that a person’s departure to the land of the dead leaves on an unaccustomed witness. Perhaps you have seen a corpse. I have seen a few, and I can tell you that a corpse is several degrees less uncanny than what I saw that day. A corpse is possible; it is even probable, it is in point of fact indisputable, but to die while living deals a blow to the expectations of the onlooker from which she does not soon recover. The teachers tell us, I later learned, that one “throws oneself through one’s own mouth,” but these words, which suggest to me an acrobatic maneuver—a sort of aerial somersault, accompanied by a graphic flash of scarlet tonsils—are at once too concrete and not specific enough. In some ineffable way the Headmistress became steadily more concentrated, especially around the mouth. There was a suspended moment of great tension, and then in one rapid, powerful involution she disappeared. I felt the suction in my own breast and suddenly, fearing that I might faint or part ways with my dinner, I put my head down on the keys—fghty6!
The next thing I perceived was a faint, tinny voice emanating from somewhere over my right shoulder.
By now that querulous, metallic, somewhat insectile chirping is even more familiar to me than the Headmistress’s naked voice, but it took me a moment to understand what I was hearing. If you regularly employ the telephone, you are, I suppose, accustomed to the notion that a person need not be present to address you as naturally as if she stood before you, but at that time I had experienced this phenomenon only in books and letters, and I was almost as startled as if a printed page had suddenly stretched out an inky hand to clasp mine. Nonetheless I sat up straight, rested my fingers upon the keys in the manner I had seen depicted in advertisements, and (after a brief struggle with the keys that my precipitate nap had jammed) painstakingly typed what I heard, and typing, gained control of my feelings.
I believe I can recite her first sentence verbatim and if I make an error no harm is done for I can later correct it against the original. We do not discard any data recorded in the land of the dead, however negligible. It was as follows: “Not not not not not.”
That I was a monstrously slow and clumsy typist you may assume. My fingers were not much more use to me than that rabbit’s foot now was to its erstwhile owner, but I stayed calm and got the words down well enough. These amounted to a paragraph or two. Then a point in space disgorged the Headmistress, who plucked my transcript from the device with a whirr of gears and ran a careless eye over it. “Fine. Come again after dinner tomorrow. You will be excused from evening exercises.”
Readings
from “A Visitor’s Observations”
On Eating and Other Oral Activities
I cannot recommend to gastronomes a dinner at the Vocational School. To delight the palate is no part of the program. In fact, some advanced ghost speakers have their molars removed and, when they are not fasting, take only beef tea, blancmange, stewed prunes, and other soft foods, and this with the liveliest disgust and a modest napkin thrown over head and shoulders, for they consider it an abomination to eat with the same body parts that we use for speech. (“A misstep of evolution as colossal as that afflicting the lady octopus, whose throat affords the only passage to”—Mr. Lieu lowered his voice—“her reproductive organs.”)
Others argue that eating is just another form of listening, food a mode of speech intelligible, not to the ear, but to the stomach. Sometimes we make a meal of plain unsalted fact; sometimes we sit down to a stirring romance, with armed conflict, tender interludes, and a thrilling climax.13 One evening I was privy to a discussion of this thesis in the drafty drawing room reserved for faculty use, after a meal that had certainly felt like a speech—though a long and dreary lecture rather than a yarn. (Now I wonder whether the austere diet that I blamed on the depressing teachings of Dr. Kellogg was not instead a sort of culinary sermonizing.) Present besides myself were several members of faculty; the local physician, Dr. Hiram Beede, a white-haired gentleman with little wet eyes and a tremor; and his protégé, young Dr. Peachie. The Headmistress had excused herself, so there were fewer constraints on our conversation than usual.
As near as I can reconstruct it in layman’s terms, the argument put forward by an ebullient Dr. Peachie, whose mien suggested that he was taking the question rather less seriously than the experts on hand, was that if we admit that food is speech, then (to be consistent with Vocational School doctrine) we must also suppose that food is haunted. The faculty were nodding: Why not? If the material world is, as necrophysics indicates, just language in another form, why shouldn’t the dead express themselves not only in vibrations of the air but in, say, chicken wings and buttered biscuits? “Too bad they didn’t express themselves that way tonight,” muttered Dr. Peachie, who had left most of his dinner on his plate.
Hunger might signal the desire of the dead to speak, someone proposed. “And our eagerness to hear!” another exclaimed.
“We are a captive audience,” said the former. “We listen, or we die.”
“But that sounds as though the dead are hectoring us, when in fact we are—our bodies are made up of—what we retain of their confidences.”
“In other words, we are great ears made of words,” said Dr. Peachie. “Now this may seem to present a chicken-or-the-egg paradox such as puzzled the ancients: How can our ears be made of words if to hear words we first require ears? But it is no more of one than asserting that our stomachs are made of food, the solution to which is called umbilical cord. The embryo is a small ear growing inside a greater one”—though at this point Dr. Peachie could not contain his laughter.
Several objections occurred to me, and I took advantage of the lull in the discussion to pose them to all present: First, that eating is unlike listening in at least one important respect, that while others’ words impose themselves upon us, food we eat willingly or not at all. But I was greeted with looks of puzzled amusement by all the faculty. Finally someone kindly explained to me that I had gravely misunderstood the nature of conversation, in which the listening ear is just as active as the speaking mouth. The ear pulls, so to speak, while the mouth pushes; one is as necessary as the other.
A little crushed, I nonetheless ventured to offer my other, unrelated objection, that if the entire world is made up of the words of the dead, to which we listen with our stomachs, then why is it that our hearing is so selective? For we rarely gobble up cobblestones or fence posts, but are hungry only for the things that do our
bodies good.
I expected this objection to meet with no more approval than the last, but had the satisfaction of seeing arrested looks on the faces around the table. “Nearby cattle farmers had better look to their fences!” Dr. Peachie quipped. In fact, one member of our faculty speculated that perhaps we are just not listening hard enough, that those cobblestones fall on deaf ears as it were, but could be digested by a more focused attention. But this idea was not received with much enthusiasm. Another said that perhaps some words are not addressed to us, but to the world at large—say, to cattle, sheep, and other interested parties, such as lettuces.
“Or perhaps our whole world is a soliloquy,” said a fellow who had kept silent hitherto, a Mr. Lenore (a drama teacher, as I understand it), “which we overhear only in part.” This struck me as all too plausible and by the sober looks of the others I saw that they felt the same. I took leave of the doctor and his protégé and repaired to my bed in a thoughtful mood.
I had thought to prove that language had its roots in mourning. I had been slow to accept that for the Vocational School everything was language. My task was larger than I had thought: Every part of the Vocational School told a story. But an oblique one. I cast my eye around the room. From the ceiling, plaster acorns stared at me in blank entreaty. Cushions nudged and hinted, curtains whispered, the arms of chairs reached out in frozen supplication. Like the students, I would have to learn to listen.
Letters to Dead Authors, #4
Dear Charlotte,
I have seized my Eve, my “’v’”!
It was at the library that I spied her. No, that is incorrect: I heard her, gasping her way through a simple sentence at the desk. When I plunged staring out of the stacks she was just turning to go, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. She was small, with a high, bulbous forehead that gave her something of a duck’s philosophical air, though with her black eyebrows pinched she did not have his kindly looks. Her dress was soiled and ill-fitting.
I gave the librarian, that bitch, a gay wave and went after her.
She mumbled and jinked down Common Place Road, heading into the wind, so that her dirty pink bonnet filled like a gassy gut, and into an ugly little house with rotting gingerbread trim and grass in the guttering. A porch roof sagging one way and its floor the other. I noted a broken sapling in the yard. Someone had bent and twisted it so that the very fibers of the wood had separated. Some unhappiness there. You will think me cruel, but I was glad: It is easier to prise loose from life those children whose roots are already torn and scorched, as I should know.
I pushed open the gate, stuck my foot through a rotten porch step into dust and startled spiders, wrenched it out again, and went up. I did not knock, but went right to the window and put my face to the glass, hoping, I confess, to complete the picture of squalor. Well, I did, but was rudely interrupted. Something—someone—was clinging to my back, and beating at me, and sobbing, and slobbering all over me. She probably thought I was from the WCTU.14 When I had flung the woman off, for she was slight and far from strong, and deduced that it was the girl’s mother (for she had the same peculiarly small and widely spaced teeth), I attempted to press upon her my handkerchief, whereupon the child herself burst through the door and fastened herself onto my back. Apparently this sort of behavior runs in the family; no doubt their ancestors flung themselves on the backs of antelope and nibbled them to death.
However, when I passed my handkerchief to the humid female already described, I had contrived to fold a Gold Certificate note into it. She spread the hankie—brought it toward her nose—lowered her wet lashes—crossed her eyes at the admirable George Washington advancing undaunted toward the double torpedoes of her nose—froze. She hastily extracted the bill, folding it one-handed with great deftness and tucking it into her bodice—and blew her nose.
Meanwhile the daughter, red in tooth and claw, clung to me like a wolverine, raving. Raving circumspectly, for she still avoided the interdicted vowel. Mother and daughter were alike, I perceived, in possessing a talent for calculation during moments of seeming abandon. I felt no indignation at this thespianism, only admiration and pleased anticipation, for I perceived that whatever the daughter felt, the mother was not at all indifferent to the persuasions of the pocket.
I do not wish you to think that I am so improvident or so desperate as to purchase all my students! But this one was worth, I thought, some inducement.
Seizing the girl’s hands, I distastefully unhitched her from my collar and placed her in front of me. She soon stopped struggling; I am not frail, despite a cough I cannot shake, and that odd distemper of my heart that makes it leap and flounder late at night. “Your mother has something to say to you,” I said. I took in her leaky nose and glaring eye and recoiled. (Even scrubbed, sluiced, and deloused she is no cinnamon bun but it is probably this extreme unlovableness, rare in a child, that warms me to her. A negative charisma has a power of its own.)
Mrs. Finster (although, forgive me, I doubt she was ever married) touched her bodice, hesitated, spoke. “Eve, be polite to the lady. You’re to—” There was a question in her eyes.
“To come with me,” I said heartily, and not without malice, “to be a student—a scholarship student,” I added with a glance at the mother, then recoiled when she simpered back, “of the necromantic arts. Make haste and gather up your things. You will have room for a small bundle of keepsakes. Pack no clothing or shoes; you will be issued a uniform.”
Of course she could not say “yes,” dear friend. Yes contains an e.
So “No,” said Eve, soon to be Finster (we go by last names here).
Nonetheless, we went.
Yours very sincerely,
H_admistr_ss Sybil Joines
p.s. The cost of this exploit: 20 green American dollars, and cheap at the price.
5. The Final Dispatch, contd.
But if we are all dead, then there is certainly no rush to catch the girl who, no matter how I fling myself forward, down the road I fling forward before me, remains [indistinct]. And yet . . . so I hitch [. . .] if I just [. . .]
[Extended rustling, footsteps, rapid breathing.]
So am I [indistinct] after all?
But wait, there is a way to tell! Any moment now, if I’m dead, someone will open her throat to me, so that I may remind her of my will and her duty. And if that does not happen, then I am not dead, or there has been some delay, or something. That is not very conclusive. But if it does happen, then I am certainly dead, for I believe—I am quite sure—I am at least fairly sure that it is not possible for the living to channel those who, though among the dead, are only visiting, though now that I think of it, I am not sure at all.
By gum, I think I have hit on something. By gum, I think we should put it to the test. If I am not dead I will act on it immediately. If I am dead I will tell someone else to act on it immediately. Either way someone will act on it immediately.
I feel much better. And so I am better. My shoes have eyelets. My nails have cuticles. In other words, I have spontaneously come out in details that a moment ago were beyond me. My fichu even has a few specks of blood on it. And look, here’s the road, firming up underfoot, curving back toward the trees, and, nestled under them, trying to look inconspicuous, old Sabin’s sugar shack, which I have always suspected of encroaching on school property, make a note of it.
And now another idea comes to me, I am really brilliant today: that it might be possible (dead or alive) to speak through more than one throat at once. Thus composing a sort of one-woman barbershop quartet. Or choir. Or—fancy the whole school speaking in my voice! Chattering to myself in a hundred accents over thin vegetable soup and a slice of bread smeared with bacon fat until I yell Quiet! and bang my cane on the long table so that the forks jump; sneaking away with myself into the bushes to grope inside my stained underpants with cold little fingers and tell myself no, no, and yes, yes, and no, no, all right, but I’m not going to kiss it; standing up
in front of myself, my buttocks tight with self-regard, and lecturing myself until my eyes glaze with boredom; prying open my mouths and prodding my tongues with pencils and leading myself in exercises to stretch my embouchure until my tonsils bleed; croaking in chorus, invoking myself, my dead self, and when I fail to speak saying Hold out your hand and bringing my ruler down upon my already swollen, already reddened palm, and with vicious satisfaction raising the ruler again, and with fear stifling a plea, and with curiosity in which pleasure is mixed with apprehension looking on, unconsciously rubbing my own palms; somewhere stealing a few coins from the little box that I mistakenly think no one else knows about; somewhere snapping out a command, and somewhere pushing a wad of bread into my cheek with my tongue, replying Yes, ma’am; and somewhere bending myself over a bench and forcing myself painfully up my tender bottom and whispering distasteful endearments into my ear and later stabbing myself with a butter knife and shouting incoherent damnations over my corpse on which I then urinate until I shoot the lock and burst in en masse shouting imprecations and take myself in custody and bear myself downstairs to our oubliette and leave myself there to whimper to myself all alone in the dark as in the walls the mice mutter in my voice— Oh horrible—[static, hissing, distant howling]
Compose yourself!
The road, leaving field and thistles and birds behind, has dipped back down into the ravine. It is not necessary to be more specific. In any case, here in the deep shade of the trees, all details are indistinct. Somewhere a fungus is grunting. Under the rotting leaves, the infant dead are telling their monotonous secrets. I know better than to listen to their whispers. Or glance around for their pale heads, pushing up the leaves like puffballs.
Yet I seem to be a little out of sorts. Something came up that troubled me, I can’t remember what. [Pause, sound of breathing.]
I remember now. The question: If I am inventing the world around me, as of course I am, am I inventing the girl as well?
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