Author Relics
The peddler opens his camel-wool trench coat and showcases his merchandise. There’s Gogol’s nasal cartilage. One of Jane Austen’s toenails. A splinter from Tolkien’s favorite pipe. One of the pebbles that Virginia Woolf shoved in her pockets to anchor her suicide. Even Joyce’s bad eye, pickled in a canning jar.
These things happen. That’s what you tell yourself. Call it word-divorce. Call it words-gone-feral. All you know is that when you reach out your hand, verbs snarl and run away. That’s why you’re here, in an upscale alley, haggling (nodding yes’s, grunting no’s), shopping for the relics of dead authors. Your hope: if you can get close enough and touch some old wordsmith’s remains, loquaciousness will stain like ink.
You’ll do anything to be on speaking terms with words again.
Except overpay for one of Jack London’s incisors. That’s what you try to communicate to the peddler. But he’s too busy unwrapping a tooth from a velvet cloth and mouthing his sales pitch: “Jack lost it to scurvy during the Klondike Gold Rush.” The peddler is on a first name basis with all of his wares. The relic is underwhelming; less white fang, more like a calcified yellow pill.
It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning. Your silence is overdetermined. Perhaps it has something to do with your mom dying of a perfectly preventable blood clot? Or did it begin when your spouse worked up the optimism to seek greener conjugal pastures? Or perhaps it’s related to the repeated appearance of the mantra rock-bottom is too optimistic, it implies an end to falling in your cerebral cortex’s suggestion box? It’s safe to assume your cat’s suicide didn’t help—the way old Leo looked at you with relief as he sank his teeth into your thickest, most electron-saturated extension cord.
You settle on Hemingway’s salted foreskin. The relic resembles a strip of tree bark. It’s hard to believe it ever hooded Hemingway. The peddler winks at your shrewdness and even quotes a line from The Old Man and the Sea, something about the difference between destruction and defeat.
Here’s the problem: not any kind of word will do. You need syntax, sentences, subjects, complements, order, artifice, narrative. You need to speak in the voice of a storyteller—the kind of person who faces the sky without blushing and transforms a spattering of solar bonfires into a convoluted plot. You need to draw a line connecting shitty life-event A to shitty life-event D. It doesn’t matter if the line is straight, squiggly, dotted, or parabolic—you’re not picky, you’re not the kind of person who cares what color the lifeboat is.
Theatergoers and socialites flood the alley. They dally. They saunter. They dawdle. The peddler grins and seeks out new clients. Not that you notice. You’re too busy clutching Hemingway’s salted foreskin and stroking it like a magic lamp.
Can you invert a miracle? That’s what you wonder. Sure, the word became flesh, but what about the opposite? If you close your eyes and open your mouth and move your tongue, will flesh become word?