Fugue State: stories

Mudder Tongue

There came a certain point, in his speech, in his confrontation with others, in his smattering with the world, that Hecker realized something was wrong. Language was starting to slip in his mouth, words substituting themselves for each other, and while his own thoughts remained as lucid as ever, sometimes they could be made manifest on his tongue only if they were wrung out or twisted or set with false eyes. False eyes? Something like that. His sense of language had always been slightly fluid; it had always been easy for him, when distracted, to substitute one word for another based on sound or rhythm or association or analogy, which was why people thought him absentminded. But this was different. Then, when distracted, he hadn’t known when he misspoke, had been cued only by the expression on the faces of those around him to backtrack and correct. Now, he heard himself say the wrong word, knew it to be wrong even while he was saying it, but was powerless to correct it. There was something seriously wrong with him, something broken. He could grasp that, but could not understand where it was taking him.

The first time it happened, the look on his face had been one of appalled wonder — or so he guessed from the look of glee his daughter offered in return.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, for even though she was mostly grown she still called him Daddy for reasons he neither understood nor encouraged. “It’s not gravy you mean, but fishing.”

Gravy? he thought. Fishing? There was too far a gap between the two terms to leap from one to another by any logic available to him. He had heard his voice say gravy while his mind was busy transmitting fishing to his tongue. He was amazed by what he heard coming out of his mouth, didn’t understand why it didn’t have some relation to his thoughts. But to his daughter he was merely the same old father: absentminded, distracted.

“Oh,” he said. “Of course. Termite.” And was amazed again. But to his daughter he was only playing a game, taunting her. And then, a moment later, he was fine. He could say fishing again when he meant fishing. He alone knew something was seriously wrong. When would his daughter realize? he wondered. What, he wondered, was happening?

There were days. They kept coming and going. He opened his mouth and he closed his mouth. Mostly what he heard form on his tongue would make sense, but sometimes not. When not, he entered into an elaborate and oblique process of trying to convey what he had in fact intended. In the best of circumstances the person or persons came up with the words themselves and offered them to him. Nodding, not speaking, he accepted them, hoping that when he next opened his mouth, his brain and tongue would have realigned.

He quickly acquired a dread of meetings, of speaking in front of his colleagues. Once, his language collapsed in the middle of articulating a complaint against his chairman, colleagues touching their glasses or faces and staring at him and waiting for him to go on. Fear-stricken enough to improvise, he stood, speechless and shaking his head, and walked out. Some of them later congratulated him on his courageous gesture, but others shied away.

His daughter began to notice a tentativeness to him, though that was not how she would have phrased it. But he could see her watching him, slightly puzzled. His past personal behavior had been eccentric enough, he discovered, that she was willing to give him an alibi for almost anything. And yet, she still sensed something was wrong. At night, after she claimed to have gone to bed, he would sometimes hear her sliding through the halls. He would shift in his cushion on the sofa to find her behind him, in the doorway, staring at the back of his head.

“Why do you melba?” he said to her. “Pronto.”

She looked at him seriously, as if she understood, and then nodded, returned to bed.

The dog began acting strangely, panting heavily around him, keeping a distance when he tried to approach, creeping slowly off with its tail flattened out. Am I the same person? he wondered. Perhaps that was it, he thought, perhaps he was not. Or perhaps he was only part of himself, and whoever else it also was had never learned to speak properly.

He tried to make friends with the dog again, offering it treats, which sometimes it took gingerly with its teeth, careful not to touch his hand.

In the classroom, where before he had been sure of himself, aggressive even, he became jittery, always waiting for the moment when the smooth surface of his language would be perforated. He took to dividing his students into small groups, speaking to them as little as possible. He tried, mornings before a class, to practice what he was going to say to thrust them into their groups as quickly as possible, how to deflect or quickly answer any potential questions. But no matter how many times he uttered his spiel perfectly beforehand, the actual moment of recitation was always up for grabs.

He instead began practicing alternatives for each sentence: on the first moment of collapse he would switch, attempting to get the same thing across with a different sentence pattern, entirely different words. But if a sentence crumbled, which it did once or twice per class — often enough in any case that the students, like his dog, like his daughter, like his colleagues, seemed now always to be looking at him oddly — the alternative usually crumbled away as well. But if a third variant did not hold, the fourth usually did, if there had to be a fourth, for by that time his mind had cycled around to a track that allowed it direct contact with his tongue again.

And thus it took a number of weeks before he found himself standing at the front of the class with all his options exhausted in the gravest misspeakings, each more outrageous than the last, so much so that he was afraid to say another word. The class, a carefully wrapped part of him noted, were more uniformly attentive than they had been at any other time in the semester, peculiarly primed to receive knowledge. But he had nothing to offer them. So instead he turned, wrote something banal on the board. Nature of evil. Consider and discuss. And then, suddenly, he could speak again.

For a time it seemed that writing would be his salvation. In the classroom, whenever his words started to come out maddened or stippled or gargled, he would turn to the board and write what he had actually meant. This worked fine up to a point, though he had to admit it sometimes looked odd when he suddenly stopped speaking and began to write. But still it could be dismissed by students as mere eccentricity, or as an attempt to avoid having to repeat something.

At home, such a strategy was more fraught, fraughter. Any time he tried it with his daughter, he found her turning away before he could find a pen, she perhaps believing that he had decided to ignore her. Elsewhere, too, it didn’t seem to work. At a restaurant, one could point at an item on the menu, but this wasn’t well received, and the one time he tried this in a social situation, it was thought he was making fun of the deaf.

But there were other places it did work. He could talk to his colleagues by note or by e-mail as long as he wasn’t physically present. He also tried leaving his daughter scrawled messages, but she chose to ignore them or pretended she hadn’t seen them. Once, when he asked her about one, whether she had seen it, she looked at him fixedly for some time before finally rolling her eyes and saying, Yes, Daddy.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, what?”

“What’s your answer?”

She shook her head. “No answer.”

“But,” he said. “Corfu?”

“Corfu?” she said. “In Greece? What are you talking about? Don’t play games with me, Daddy.”

“Sandwich,” he said, and covered his mouth.

“Here I am, Daddy,” she said, angry. “Right here. I’m usually right here. I’m not going to let you mess with me. If you want to ask me something, you can just open your mouth and ask me.”

But he couldn’t just open his mouth, he realized. He didn’t dare. Sandwich? he thought. He sat staring at her, hand over mouth, trying to gather the courage to speak, to misspeak, until, fuming, she gave a little cry and marched out of the room.

As his condition worsened, he stayed silent for hours. His daughter rallied, sometimes referring to him railingly as “the recluse,” as in How’s the old recluse this morning? at other times merely accusing him of becoming pensive in his dotage. Where, he wondered, had she picked up the word dotage?

The frequency of his mispeakings grew until finally he felt he could no longer meet his classes; the last few weeks of the term he phoned in sick nearly every day, or rather had his daughter phone in for him. He sent his lesson plans in by e-mail, got a colleague to fill in for him, finally wrote a letter to the department chairman requesting early retirement.

“You’re lonely,” his daughter said to him one evening. “You need to get out more.”

He shook his head no.

“You need to date,” she said. “Do you want me to set you up with someone?”

He shook his head emphatically no.

“All right,” she said. “A date it is. I’ll see what I can do.”

She began to bring home brochures from dating services, and left the Women Seeking Men page of the city’s weekly out with a few choice ads circled. Was he adventuresome? No, he thought, reading the ads, he was not. Did he like long walks and a romantic dinner for two on the beach? No, he did not care for sand in his food. Bookish? Well, yes, but this woman’s idea of high lit, as it turned out later in the ad, was John Irving. Unless the Irving referred to was Washington Irving of Sleepy Hollow fame. Was that any better?

And what would he put in his own ad? SWM, well past prime, losing ability to speak, looks for special companionship that goes beyond words? He groaned, and arranged everything in a neat little stack at the back of his desk.

A few days later, e-mail messages began showing up addressed to “Silver Fox” or “the silver fox” or, in one case, “Mr. F. Silver.” They were all from women who claimed to have seen his “posting” and who were “interested.” They wanted, they all said in different but equally banal ways, to get to know him better.

He dragged his daughter in and pointed at the screen.

“Already?” she said.

He nodded. He had begun to write something admonitory down for her to read but she was ignoring him, had taken over his chair, was scrolling through each woman’s message.

“No,” he said. “I don’t—”

“And this one,” she was saying, “what’s wrong with this one?”

“But I don’t,” he said. “Any of them, no.”

“No?” she said. “But why not? Daddy, you said you wanted to go on a date. I asked you, Daddy, and you said yes.”

No, he thought, that was not what he had said. He had said nothing. He opened his mouth. “Doctorate,” he said.

“Doctor?” she said, and looked at him sharply, her eyes narrowing. “Are you all right?”

That was not what he had meant his mouth to say, not that at all.

“You prefer the one that’s a doctor?” his daughter said, clicking open each message in turn as she talked, “but I don’t think any of them are.”

But what was he to do? he wondered. First of all, nobody would listen, and second of all, even if they did listen, he himself did not know, from moment to moment, what, if anything, he was actually going to say.

She was there, chattering away in front of him, hardly even hearing what she herself was saying. Why not tell her, he wondered, that something was seriously wrong with him? What was there to be afraid of?

But no, he thought, the way people looked at him already, it was almost more than he could bear, and if it came tinged with pity, he would no longer feel human. Better to keep it to himself, hold it to himself as long as possible. And then he would still be, at least in part, human.

In the end he took her by the shoulders and, while she protested, silently pushed her out of the room. His head had started to ache, the pain pooling in his right eye. He closed his door and then returned to the computer, deleting the messages one after another. They were all, he saw, carefully constructed, with each woman trying to present herself as unique or original or witty but each doing so by employing the same syntactical gestures, the same rhetorical strategies, sometimes even the exact same phrase, as the others. This is what it means to be immersed in language, he thought, to lose one’s ability to think. To speak other people’s words. But the only alternative is not to speak at all. Or was it? Nature of evil, he thought. Define and discuss.

Depressed, he glanced through the last three messages. God, his head hurt. The first message was addressed to “silver fox,” with three exclamation points following “fox.” It was from someone who had adopted the moniker “2hot2handel.” Music lover or bad speller? he wondered. He deleted it. The second-to-the-last one was to “F. Silver,” from “OldiebutGoodie.” Oh, God, he thought, and deleted it. The pain made his eye feel as though a knife were being pushed through it. The eye was beginning to water. He clenched it shut as tight as he could and covered it with his hand. He stood, tipping his chair over, and stumbled about the room, knocking into what must have been walls.

Someone was knocking on the door. “Daddy,” someone was calling, “are you all right?” Somewhere a dog was growling. He looked up through his good eye and saw, framed in the doorway, a girl.

“Tights,” he said, “cardboard boxes,” and collapsed.

He awoke to a buzzing noise, saw it was coming from an electric light, fluorescent, inset in the ceiling directly above his head. His daughter was there beside him, looking at his face.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“No,” she said. “Just rest.”

He nodded. He was in a bed, he saw, but not his bed. There was rail to either side of him, to hold him in.

“I’m going to get the doctor,” she claimed. “Don’t move.”

Then she was gone. He closed his eyes, swallowed. The pain in his head was still there, but subdued now and no longer sharpened into a hard point. He rolled his head to one side and back again, pleased that he could still do so.

His daughter returned, the doctor beside her, a smallish tanned man hardly bigger than she.

“Mr. Hecker?” said the doctor, who set down a folder to snap on latex gloves. “How are we feeling?”

“Groin,” he said. Goddamn, he thought.

“Your groin hurts? It’s your head we’re concerned about, but I’ll look at the groin too if you’d like.”

Hecker shook his head. “No? Well, then,” said the doctor. “No to the groin, then.” He clicked on a penlight, peered into first one eye, then the other. “Any headaches, Mr. Hecker?”

He hesitated, nodded.

“Head operations in your youth? Surgeries of the head? Cortisone treatments? Bad motorcycle wrecks? Untreated skull injuries?”

Hecker shook his head.

“And how are we feeling now?” the doctor asked.

Hecker nodded. Good, he thought, good enough. He opened his mouth. The word good came out.

The doctor nodded. He stripped the gloves off his hands and dropped them into the trash. He came back and sat on the bed.

“I’ve looked at your x-rays,” he said.

Hecker nodded.

“We should chat,” the doctor said. “Would you like your daughter to stay for this?”

“Of course I can be here for this,” his daughter said. “I’m legally an adult. Be here for what?” she asked.

Hecker shook his head.

“No?” said the doctor. He turned to Hecker’s daughter. “Please wait in the hall,” he said.

His daughter looked at the doctor and then opened her mouth to speak, and then gave a little inarticulate cry and went out. The doctor came closer, sat on the edge of the bed.

“Your x-rays,” said the doctor. “I don’t mean to frighten you, but, well, I’d like to run some tests.” He took the folder from the bedside table and took the x-rays out, held them above Hecker, in the light. “This cloudiness,” he said. “Do you see it? I’m concerned.”

Hecker looked. The dark area, as far as he could tell, ran all the way from one side of his skull to the other.

“We’ll have to run some tests,” said the doctor. “Do you want to let your daughter know?”

Hecker hesitated. Did he want to tell her? No, he thought, but he wasn’t certain why. Did he want to shield her or simply shield himself from her reaction? Or was it simply that he didn’t trust words anymore, at least not when they came out of his own mouth? Maybe someone else could tell her. Maybe he would figure out what to do when he had to.

“Perhaps no need to frighten her until the results are back,” said the doctor, watching him closely. “There’s no reason to panic yet,” he said. He turned and began to write on his chart. “Any difficulties? Loss of motor skills? Speech problems? Anything out of the ordinary?”

Hecker hesitated. Was there any point trying to explain? “Speech,” he finally tried to say, but nothing came out. Why nothing? he wondered. Before, there at least had always been something, even if it was the wrong thing. Frustrated, he shook his head.

The doctor must have taken it to mean something. He smiled. “That’s good, then,” he said. “Very good indeed.”

A few days later, waiting for the results of the tests, he began to panic. First, he thought, I will lose all language, then I will lose control of my body, then I will die.

He tried to push them out of his head, such thoughts, with little success. Now, having resigned from teaching, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He sat around the house, read, watched his daughter out of the corner of his eye. He had a hard time getting himself to do anything productive. He felt more and more useless, furtive. She was oblivious, he thought, she had no idea that she would watch him first lose the remainder of his speech, then slowly fall apart, waste away. Having to live through that, she would probably pray for his death long before it actually arrived.

And so will I, he thought.

Better to die quickly, he told himself, smoothly, and save both yourself and those close to you. More dignified.

He pushed the thought down. It kept rising.

His daughter was trying to hand him the telephone. It was the doctor calling with the test results. “Standish,” Hecker said into the receiver. But the doctor was apparently too worried about what he had to say, about saying it right, in the kindest way possible, in the most neutral words imaginable, to notice.

The tests, the doctor claimed, had amplified his concern. What he wanted to do was to recommend a specialist to Hecker, a brain surgeon, a good one, one of the best. He would open Mr. Hecker’s skull at a certain, optimal spot, take a look at what was really going on in there, and make an assessment of whether it could be cut out, if there was any point in—

“I didn’t mean that,” said the doctor nervously. “There’s always a point. I’m saying it wrong.” The proper terminology to describe this was exploratory surgery. Did Hecker understand?

“Yes,” Hecker managed. “Was fish guillotine sedentary?”

“Hmmm? Necessary? I’m afraid so, Mr. Hecker.”

How soon, he wanted to know, could Mr. Hecker put his affairs in order? Not that there was any serious immediate risk, but better safe than sorry. When, he wanted to know, was Mr. Hecker able to schedule the exploratory surgery? Did he have any concerns? Were there any questions that remained to be answered?

Hecker opened his mouth to speak but felt already that anything he said would be wrong, perhaps in several ways at once. So he hung up.

“What did he say?” his daughter was asking him.

“Nobody,” he said. “Wrong finger.”

First, he thought over and over, I will lose all language, then I will not be able to control my body. Then I will die.

All he could clearly picture when he thought about this was his daughter, her life crippled for months, perhaps years, by his slow, gradual death. He owed it to her to die quickly. But perhaps, he thought, his daughter’s suffering was all he could think about because his own was harder to face. Even as he was now, stripped only partly of language, life was nearly unbearable.

First, he thought. And then. And then.

He remembered, he hadn’t thought about it for years, his own father’s death, a gradual move into paralysis, until the man was little more than rattling windpipe in a hospital bed, and a pair of eyes that were seldom open and, when they were, were thick with fear.

Like father, like son, he thought.

First, he thought. Then. Then.

He lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling. When it was very late and his daughter was asleep, he got out of bed and climbed up to the attic and took his shotgun out of its case and cleaned it and loaded it. He carried it back downstairs and slid it under his bed.

No, he thought, No first, no thens.

He was in bed again, staring, thinking. The character of the room seemed to have changed. He could not bear to kill himself with his daughter in the house, he realized. That would be terrible for her, much more terrible than watching him die slowly. And too horrible for him to think about. No, that wouldn’t do. He had to get her out.

But ever since he had been to the hospital, she had been sticking near him, never far away, observing him. She kept asking him what exactly was wrong with him, what had the doctor told him, why hadn’t she been allowed to hear? And then, what had the doctor said on the telephone? She was always giving him cups of soup which he took a few sips from and then left to scum over on the bookshelves, the fireplace mantel, the windowsills. It wasn’t fair, she said, she had only him, they had only each other, but the way he was acting now, she didn’t even feel like she had him. What had the doctor said? What exactly was wrong with him? Why wouldn’t he tell her? Why wouldn’t he speak? All he had to do, she told him, was open his mouth.

But no, that wasn’t all. No, it wasn’t as simple as that. And yes, he knew he should tell her, but he didn’t know what to say or if he could say it. And he didn’t want her pity — he wanted only to be what he had always been for her, her father, not an old, dying man.

But she wouldn’t let up. She was making him insane. If she wanted a fight, he would fight. He turned on her and said, utterly fluent, “Don’t you have someplace to be?”

“Yes,” she said fiercely. “Here.”

“Fat cats,” he misspoke, and, suddenly helpless again, turned away.

He made a grocery list, a long one, and offered it to her. She glanced at it.

“Groceries, Daddy?” she said. “Since when did you have anything to do with groceries?”

He shrugged.

“Besides,” she said. “We have half this stuff already. Did you even open the cupboards?”

He was beginning to have trouble with one of his fingers. It kept curling and uncurling of its own accord, as if no longer part of his body. He hid it under his thigh when he was seated, felt it wriggling there like a half-dead worm. He and his daughter glared at each other from sofa and armchair respectively, she continuing to hector him with her questions, he remaining silent, sullen.

He ate holding his utensils awkwardly, to hide the rogue finger from her. She took this as an act of provocation, accused him of acting like a child.

It went on for three or four days, both of them at an impasse, until finally she screamed at him and, when he refused to scream back, left the house. He watched the door clack shut behind her. How long would she be gone? Long enough, he hoped.

He got the shotgun out from under the bed and leaned it against the sofa. He dialed 911.

“What’s your emergency?” a woman’s voice responded.

“I’ve just killed myself,” he told her. “Hurry, please. Cover the body before my daughter gets home.”

But it didn’t come out like that. This had only been what his mind was saying, his tongue uttering something else entirely.

“Excuse me?” said the operator.

He tried again, his voice straining with urgency.

“Is this a prank call?” the operator said. “This isn’t funny.”

He fell silent, tried to gather himself.

“Sir?” said the operator. “Hello?”

He looked desperately around the room. The dog was now regarding him intently, ears perked. He picked up the shotgun, held it one-handed near the receiver, and fired it into the wall behind the sofa. The kickback hurt his wrist and made him drop the weapon. The dog skittered out of the room, yelping.

He put the receiver to his ear again. The operator was talking more urgently now. He hung up the telephone.

After picking up the gun, he sat down on the sofa. He hoped that they would come soon, and that it would be soon enough, before his daughter’s return. He leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to gather himself.

When he was calm again, he braced the stock of the shotgun between the insoles of his feet and brought the barrels to his face. Carefully, he slipped the ends of the barrels into his mouth.

It was then that his daughter chose to return. He heard her open the front door and then she came into the room, her face pale. It was clear she had been crying. She came in and saw him and stopped dead, then stood there, her face draining of blood. They stayed there like that, staring, neither caring to be the first to look away.

He waited, wondering what words he could use, what he could possibly say to her. How could he ever talk his way out of this one?

“Daddy?” she said finally. “What are you doing?”

And then the words came to him.

He lifted his mouth off the barrels and licked his lips. “Insect,” he explained as tenderly as he possibly could. “Grunion. Tent-pole motioning.”