The World of the End (11 page)

The black pants, blue button-down shirt, and brown blazer clothe the sobbing yet dry-faced Mr. Gur. His burial gowns mock him, make him laugh, and raise the obvious question of why he chose to shed the mothballs if he had no intention of meeting the woman. Yonatan doesn’t respond. He’s preoccupied, diligently brushing his teeth, cursing the toothpaste glob on the front of his jacket, then washing it off. He’s certain that this night will go down as the most supremely pathetic of all and that it’s merely for the sake of marking the milestone in the extemporaneous history of his life that he is scrubbing the back of his neck and face, daubing the area behind his earlobes with cologne more suited to slaying insects than women. He leaves his apartment at eight thirty, planning to head down to the neighborhood café and forget the entire affair. He hails a cab and asks to be taken to Florentine Street, trying to keep his cool in the face of the cabbie’s diatribe. After ten more minutes of steady one-way talk, during which the driver never once stops kneading the issue of the terrible terror attack that had killed dozens of people only an hour before, Yonatan apologizes and says his head is exploding.

The driver shuts up but keeps a hostile eye on him. Yonatan doesn’t care. Curiosity has killed his pride and he is going to see her. Not to meet her. Just to satisfy a childish desire that a bigger man would have been able to squelch. When they arrive, Yonatan feels sick. His contorted features wipe the hostility from the driver’s tired face. He asks if he’s alright. Yonatan nods, gets out of the cab, and looks at the restaurant from the far side of the street. Three women are reading the menu hanging in the restaurant’s front window. It’s hard for him to tell which one of their backs belongs to “Vina.” He coughs and remembers her name isn’t “Vina.” After a minute of consultation, two of them enter the restaurant, leaving the third behind. Yonatan waits for her to turn around. She’s burrowing into the menu. She’ll probably order the chicken tikka massala, he thinks, and hides behind a tree. A minute later, he gathers some strength and, in an act of cowardice, yells “Vina” and then ducks down, his eyes devouring the sight of her as she turns around. Yonatan pinches his arm, forcing himself to believe. The strip of asphalt between them can’t hide the smooth blond hair, the slanted blue eyes, the full cheeks, the thick lower lip, the round face, the long neck, the rounded hips, and the nobility of her bearing. She still doesn’t see him. He yearns for her to spot him and strains to remember her name, but his thoughts abruptly trail away. The sharp tightening in his chest doesn’t let up, and even when he’s ready to stand up and show himself, his body maintains the upper hand and hurls him to the sidewalk. He clutches his heart, begging for air. Shocked by his own helplessness, he sneers, cursing the mutant son of a bitch, which has picked its moment perfectly. He closes his eyes, then remembers, and whispers, “Marian, Marian.”

8

Father Tongue–A

Ben knew he was right as soon as he set foot in the multilingual labs. For a woman like Marian—who helped the foreign diplomats’ kids through the deep sands of English in the morning, coached local actors hell-bent on Hollywood through the labyrinths of diction in the afternoon, and drafted the hardest crossword puzzles she could muster in the evening; a woman who went dictionary shopping on a regular basis; a woman who freely admitted she violated the vows of marriage with Shakespeare; a woman for whom there was no better place than these rooms, which housed every possible constellation in the universe of language—this was heaven. As soon as Ben realized that his wife, who had something akin to an allergic reaction to procrastination, would have chosen the labs as her place of employment, he recalled the orientation speech and beamed with pride, certain that she aced the requisite exams. She must have blown them away with her knowledge of, and sensitivity to, the nuances that divide and link the different languages. He imagined the ongoing, interdepartmental quarrels over Marian’s services and was awed by the range of possibilities that must have been set before his intellectually curious wife. Unsure of which department she had chosen to endow with her skills, he decided to poke around all five departments.

His first stop was the main department, where the long line of people snaking down the corridor made him cringe. Raising his head, he understood why the dead kept coming en masse, and why, despite the thoughts perched on the tip of their tongues, to judge from their troubled gazes, they waited in silence. The floor-to-ceiling sign read: B
ABEL—
D
ON’T BE
L
ATE OR
Y
OU’LL
D
ISCOMBOBULATE
. Ben had a hunch that these tongue-tied dead brought the nasty habit of perpetual postponement with them from the old world. He assumed these dead were in a silent race against the clock to have their microchip updated before a full year of sand ran through the hourglass, forever trapping them in a languageless wasteland. Ben, at first, had a hard time imagining what would happen to a dillydallier; two hours later, the vein in his temple threatening to explode, his curiosity was more than satisfied, and he was left longing for a handful of extra-strength aspirin. But before witnessing the communication meltdown, he visited the second department, where the sign read L
IFE AND
D
EATH AT THE
H
ANDS OF THE
T
ONGUE
. Here, too, he was greeted by a divine hush. He turned to one of the dead and asked in a whisper about the department. The man smiled, opened his mouth, and pointed to the gap between his top and bottom teeth. Ben looked at him perplexedly and whispered, “I don’t…” Before he had a chance to complete his thought, Ben felt the mute’s dainty fingers clasp his tongue.

Coming out of the elevator on the third floor, he felt a rush of longing for the speechless. The This-and-That Department surged with unprecedented verbal activity. The thin dividers between the ten different lines failed to contain the ghastly commotion, and Ben, who had taken it upon himself to stand in each line to see if his wife was one of the verbal therapists receiving the loquacious patients, had to shield his ears from the tumult. For her sake, Ben hoped that Marian wasn’t a staff member in the cacophonous department but, spurred on by the steady drum roll of his own curiosity, he tamped down his rising aversion and waited patiently for five hours till he reached the front of the line, where he could inquire about his wife. While waiting, he endured a conversation between two former mutes, who, after a lifetime of silence, were so eager to make up for missed time that even when they tried to slow their chatter, they found they had lost control of their tongues. Ben was surrounded by people in the throes of their own personal Babel story. They were plagued by an array of disorders, the result of their dalliance: some people’s lips formed sentences that came out in a dozen different languages; some had voices that produced a disharmonic blend of languages and accents; some stirred a disorienting brew of the chip’s one-hundred-plus tongues, produced in a single sputtering stream of gibberish; some had an obsessive need to rhyme; some spoke in a sped-up pattern of speech that operated at three times its normal pace; some in a slowed down version that came out at half time; some could only make palindrome-ridden conversation; some dropped vowels, consonants, and letters; and, strangest of all, some exhibited an awful lack of synchronicity between their flapping lips and their voices.

In the elevator on the way up to the fourth floor, the throbbing in his temple spread down to the back of his neck. He couldn’t bear the thought that the next floor might be equally nerve-wracking. He closed his eyes, imagined his wife massaging his temples with one of the many aromatic oils she kept on hand for steamy nights, and left the elevator with a smile.

To his surprise, the hall was empty, and he made his way slowly, soaking up the silence. Soon enough, he learned that the hallway’s thirty-two doors were part of an academic maze of etymologists, philologists, and phoneticians who bored into the irregularities of language. Finding no trace of his wife in any of the rooms, he bounded up to the top floor, a trace of tension in his stride. The fifth floor, known as The Uppertongue, held thousands of experts, bent over tomes, engaged in fierce arguments in a multitude of languages. When Ben tried to ask about the department’s specialty, he was sent to the lab director’s office. The jovial and effusive old man explained with mounting zeal that he and many of his colleagues, dead and alive, felt humanity had no need for such a profusion of languages, especially in the current age of technology. Now, through the sheer brilliance of their communication programs, they were able to create a Father Tongue, a meticulous gleaning of words from all known languages, melded into a single, new language that would house all the needs of expression under one roof. Suppressing the urge to engage the professor in a Socratic conversation about the distinct advantages of each and every language, Ben muttered something about being in a rush and did an about-face. He walked into the elevator and pressed the basement button, deflated but unwilling to yield.

The sign on the green basement door made him laugh. He had spent the better part of a day in the lab’s different departments while, all along, just beneath him, in the basement, was the Human Resources Department. He sat down opposite a bespectacled woman, who asked how she could be of service. He wanted to know if there was a Marian Mendelssohn in any of the Other World’s several thousand labs.

She typed in the name, waited thirty seconds, and shrugged.

“None?” he whispered, his voice caught in his throat.

“There are twenty-seven Marians,” she said, pulling out the computer printout, “but none of them are Mendelssohns.”

“And Corbin?” he asked, “Might there be a Marian Corbin?”

Her eyes flitted across the page. She shook her head. “Sorry.”

Ben scanned the printed page, his fingers twitching with the urge to shred it. He got up, thanked her, and left. Fatigue tugged at his shoulders. Since he arrived in this strange world, he had managed to hear the life story of a bitter Belgian, meet a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, and tour every corner of the Multilingual Laboratories’ departments. But he had yet to justify his decision to come to the Other World. No one told him that if he ended his life he’d still have to search for his wife. He was sure she would be there, without strange announcements, mathematical living arrangements, and disappointing laboratories. No one prepared him for this wholly unnecessary surprise.

On the way to the nearest bus station, his thoughts were truncated by a kick in the ankle. He smiled at the bowlegged kid who had bumped into him and then continued chasing his ball. Turning toward the young boy, he wondered how it was that the beautiful park to his right was so full of young children. The child, in the meanwhile, let his ball go, stared straight at Ben, and marched toward him with remarkable determination. Ben couldn’t understand why his heart was pounding so, as if he feared harm. He flashed an innocent smile at the child, who returned a smile, continued toward his right leg, let out a long gasp of wonder, and latched on. Ben wanted to pat the five-year-old’s head, but something about his viselike grip made him flinch. Meanwhile, the child buried his head of thick brown hair in Ben’s leg as though he were trying to dig himself into his thigh. Ben had no idea what he wanted from him. The boy just held fast to his leg and made
Y … aaah
noises as though he had found a treasure whose worth only he knew.

Ben looked up and surveyed the park. Panic made its way into his throat as he looked at the kids and grownups frolicking only a few yards away. What would they think of him if they saw him like this, in the middle of the street, a naked kid clutching his leg? He chuckled and stuttered, “Hey, little guy … I gotta go … could you … l-let go of my leg?”

The kid ignored him. Ben prayed for the ground to open up and swallow him. He tried nudging the kid off his leg. Realizing, though, that if he didn’t use some force there’d be no end to this bizarre act of magnetism, he pushed him away with both hands. The kid looked up at him, hurt, and tried to get close to him again. Ben raised a finger in the air and said, “Don’t! I’m very sorry, kid, but I don’t want to be accused of God knows what kind of perversions. Promise me you won’t do it again, okay? It’s not alright to run around and hug strangers’ legs, you know.”

Realizing that the kid was gearing up for a third charge, Ben took off, only to find that the kid had the acceleration of a salivating cheetah hot on the heels of a well-haunched antelope. Ben stopped four hundred yards from the improvised starting line and, as the kid approached, warned him in the sternest voice he had, “Go away! Get out of here, kid! If you come near me now, you’ll be sorry!”

The kid ground to a halt. Ben gesticulated wildly, shooing him away. “Get out of here! I’m not in the mood for this crap!”

The kid didn’t move. He just continued to cast his uncomprehending eyes at the man, who, for his part, sighed in relief when a multi-wheel arrived. He found a seat and watched the kid run back to the park, sit down next to an elderly woman, and hug her. The multi-wheel pulled away from the stop and Ben leaned back, closed his eyes, and decided it was high time he headed home. Maybe the next day would bring a fresh idea about how to find Marian.

9

The Sleep of the Guillotinesse

For five full weeks, Bessie hardly slept. The few times she succumbed to exhaustion were brief and she dreamed of guillotines. The severed dreams looped back and forth over the same awful ground. She escorts her husband to the decapitation device, raises a beguiling eyebrow, says there’s no choice, asks him to place his head in the proper spot, trumpets the start of the execution, and lowers the glinting blade on his neck.

Yet again, she woke from the chilling three-minute vision, and glared at her eerily tranquil Rafael. He had no idea how many times she had calmly gone through the motions of killing him, as though she truly wanted to see him dead. She hated the dream and even more so its meaning. She treated the pictures of the execution like a violent rape of her mind, perpetrated by her swirling conscience. Then she was forced into open-eyed vigilance by her husband’s comatose state. The recurring nightmare was nothing more than the ring of her alarm clock. Yet the abiding pattern surprised her each time anew. She fell asleep, she saw the guillotine, she woke up. Aside from the short bursts of sleep, she was awake at all times. She talked to Rafael, she went down to the cafeteria and ate, she went home for a shower and to change her clothes, she returned to his bedside. Three days ago she heeded the nurse’s advice and left the hospital for a night. She stepped into the bedroom, yawned, and lay down on the bed with obvious delight. For the past fifty years, the bed, which welcomed her with open arms, had known all of her secrets. She stretched her back pleasurably, in a way she had managed to forget since the stroke. The bed moaned beneath her, and Bessie felt herself merge with mattress, a wondrous sense of comfort engulfing her. The sweet sensation didn’t last long. Bessie stole a glance in the direction of her husband’s side of the bed and wondered how she could allow herself to rest in a double bed that had never known loneliness, a bed that in a single solitary instant made her feel like an invasive miscreant. After all, it was impossible to ignore the riotous absence at her side, the sheet was too taut, the pillow too chilled, and all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing. She tossed and turned, all too aware of her ears and the way they rejected the silence. She tried to conjure Rafael’s nighttime wheeze, that agitated donkey braying that had faithfully escorted her into a less clamorous world thousands of times before, but wasn’t surprised when the silence proved too loud. “How can you possibly expect to remember the wheeze of a man who can’t breathe unassisted?” she asked out loud, getting out of the bed and calling a cab to the hospital.