Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (24 page)

When he tried to call the police, the lines were down.

Suddenly Tate spoke out of the darkness:

“If the Universal Particle is confined to regions near an attractor, the net motion of the universe may be negligible. The strain builds up, nears breaking-point. Sometimes it needs help to break the cycle.”

Jed clutched for the source of the voice, but could feel nothing. “Where are you, Tate?” His voice had a panicky edge to it.
“Who
are you? Why are you telling me these things?”

“Don’t you see it yet? If every person is, at the most basic level, the same as every one else, then there’s no longer any such thing as murder. There’s only suicide, at one remove.”

“Tate!” screamed Jed, clutching the gun to his chest. “Tate—help me!”

But his friend was gone.

Over a dark and angry horizon, fires started to burn.

<>

~ * ~

INTRODUCTION TO:

......................................................THE SEVENTH LETTER

It seems slightly preposterous now, but for a while in the 1990s my short stories were everywhere. For this I blame a friend who advised me to take the stories I’d been stacking up and actually sending them to editors. Which editors? It didn’t matter. Just send them.
Flood the market.

So I did, and a fair percentage sold immediately. The next year, people were asking themselves who this ubiquitous young guy was, and where the hell did he come from? The answers were possibly disappointing: I was just someone with no social life and an obsessive love of writing.

Jump forward a few years, to when novels started getting in the way. There’s nothing like becoming a full-time writer to make you realise how important money is (assuming you want to eat). For six years, between 1999 and 2005
,
I didn’t write a single new short story, and I started to wonder if I ever would again. The thought that it might not be like riding a bike—refreshable at a moment’s notice—made me more than a little nervous of trying again.

Then
The Bulletin—
Australia’s oldest and most respected market for short stories—commissioned a piece from me, and I had no choice. I shuffled through a large number of ideas, and I’m sure any one of them would have worked out perfectly well, if I’d stuck at it.

In the end, though, after weeks of contemplation, I woke one morning with an entirely new idea and wrote it instead, in the space of a few hours. That’s how a lot of the stories in this collection were written—and that, for me, is one of the key distinctions between writing novels and writing short stories. I’ve heard of novels written over weekends, but never in a single sitting.

“The Seventh Letter” went on to win an Aurealis Award and to see reprint in the (very mainstream)
Best Australian Stories 2007,
but for me they were side dishes to the main meal. The wonderful, self-contained rush from conception to finished product was something I hadn’t even realised I’d missed—like the hit of heat on the back of the throat that only an ex-smoker would dream of.

The reminder hasn’t heralded a new wave of stories, and those heady days of 1992 seem a long time ago now, but it’s nice to know that there are some miles left in the old bike yet.

~ * ~

THE SEVENTH LETTER

The stroke hit him like a thunderbolt in front of the whole Board. The world vanished as if a shutter had been drawn. Later, he remembered the feel of his left hand at his temple, where a knife seemed to enter his brain and twist, before all consciousness was snuffed out. He didn’t remember the blow that left a deep, purple bruise above his left eye, where his head struck the table so hard it would’ve knocked him out cold if he hadn’t been already.

Then ... shadows, shapes, distant conversations. He wasn’t truly aware for some time. Forever, it seemed to him, when he could think at all. He was a puzzle in its box, with all the pieces tumbled and unlikely to fall into place on their own.

When he returned to himself, he was flat on his back in a well-lit, white room, loomed over by an ashen-haired woman with protuberant ears.

“What happened?” he croaked.

The woman looked pleased but not unsurprised. “Welcome back, Mr Jameson. How are you <.......>?”

He blinked. “How am I what?”

“<.......>, I said. Is there any pain? Can you move? I’m Doctor Harrod. We put you on <.......> within an hour of your stroke and the scans seem mostly clear now. The devil, however, is always in the details. Can you feel it when I do this?” The doctor lifted his hand and manipulated the joints.

He pulled it back. “Yes, I can feel it, but—”

“What?”

He didn’t want to say it. He knew what a stroke was. Everyone in their 50s knew. If his mind was broken, would it be better or worse to see the cracks?

“Talk to me, <.......>. If you describe your symptoms fully, there’s a chance we can see to them.”

“What did you just call me?”

The doctor lost some of her bedside cheer. “Your name, Mr Jameson. I used your first name. Don’t you remember what that is?”

He shook his head, and the full force of his mortality struck him in that moment.

“Excuse me, Mr Jameson, just for a second. I will be back.”

Unlike me, he feared as the doctor swept out of the room. Unlike me.

A battery of tests consumed the next few hours. He clearly wasn’t entirely well, despite the full recovery of his physical functions. He could sit, point, eat, and excrete to the satisfaction of the therapists summoned to examine him. The problem was more subtle than that. He had trouble with some instructions, particularly those specific to one side of his body—a problem of comprehension, not volition. If he couldn’t understand what was asked of him, how could he comply?

The disability was thus isolated to the speech centres of his brain, where words were formed. Even so its exact nature still proved stubbornly elusive. Some words were simply absent, excised from his brain with a semantic scalpel. There seemed to be no pattern to the excision. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs were victims, but not all nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

His wife came to visit, flamboyant in sombre tones. She too called him by a name he could not understand, and looked appropriately dismayed when he could not say hers.

“Oh, pumpkin. What’s happened to you? Do they think you’ll recover? The Board is anxious. They can’t keep the <.......> on hold forever.”

He suppressed a flash of irritation. Who cared about the Board when his life had been shattered?

“Please don’t call me ‘pumpkin’,” he said, aware of a nurse by the door. His circumstances embarrassed him sufficiently as it was.

“Well, what am I to call you, then? You’ve already made it clear you won’t hear your name, and you won’t use mine either.”

“It’s not that I won’t. I can’t. They don’t sound like any words I’ve heard before.” He searched for an appropriate metaphor in his oddly truncated vocabulary. “There are times when we’re not in the same country. I’m here and you’re in Paris. You speak French and I speak—”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. The name he needed wasn’t in his mind any more, escaped like so many other words. There had to be a way to talk about such matters, but all too frequently he found himself road-blocked.

The expression on his wife’s face was one he would come to know well, in the days ahead.

~ * ~

More tests. Flash cards and electrodes taped to his scalp. Extended, self-conscious conversations with psychiatrists and speech therapists. Occasional incarcerations in claustrophobic tubes in which every neuron of his brain was untied and examined. The lesion proved difficult to isolate, and without isolation a cure would be impossible. He endured it all, keenly aware that with every day his case became odder, strayed further and further beyond the medical norm. Sometimes it was difficult to tolerate, the awareness that the puzzle he represented was more important than who he was. His condition was to be defeated, not cured.

In the end, an intern achieved what all the experts had not. Sam was affable, warm-natured, and had taken to him despite the difference in their years. He came frequently to chat. The topic of Jameson’s condition could not be avoided, but Sam seemed interested in a personal capacity, as well as professional.

It was Sam, the intern, who had proposed that he, the patient, use his middle name, Lee, in place of his first. That worked. Lee Jameson was acceptable to his inconveniently broken mind.

“I had an idea, Lee,” Sam said on another occasion. “You can turn left but not <.......>. You can run but you’ve never been <.......>. You can say Lee but not <.......>. Has anyone asked you about the alphabet?”

Lee shook his head. “What about it?”

“How many letters there are, for instance.”

“26
.
Everyone knows that.”

“Tell me them, then.”

He felt like a child but did as instructed. “ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.”

“That’s 25.”

“Nonsense. Don’t mess with me, Sam.”

“I’m not. You missed a letter.”

“I’m sure I didn’t.”

“Try once more.”

“ABCDEFHIJ—”

“Stop there, Lee. What comes between F and H?”

“There’s no letter between F and H.”

“Then that’s your problem.” Sam beamed. “You’ve lost <.......>.”

Lee shook his head. The sound Sam had made bore no relation to any in his lexicon. It didn’t exist. It didn’t exist to
him.

More tests followed. Sam’s theory was upheld. Odd as it seemed, one letter out of twenty-six had utterly vanished from Lee’s life. Any word spelt with that letter was therefore incomprehensible to him, whether written or said aloud. The extraordinary plasticity of the brain enabled him to fold his speech around that absent letter so effectively that its absence was invisible to him, but the consequences remained dire. His name, which contained that letter, had vanished into the blind sport, as had his wife’s. Whole sections of the dictionary and the phone book now meant zero to him. Some suburbs seemed like lands more distant than Denmark. Entire tenses were denied him.

The only consolation he could see was that he hadn’t lost one of the vowels—E would have been very difficult to lived without—or a common consonant like S. How could he have coped without plurals?

“So you can say Jameson but not <.......>, and Jesus but not <.......>?”

“Yes.”

His wife looked at him in a way that revealed she didn’t quite believe him. Her scepticism hurt less than he could have expected. They still hadn’t decided what he should call her, now her name was off-limits. That worried him. Now that his condition had been defined and declared no immediate threat to his life, he was free to return home.

Perhaps the condition would be named after him, he speculated. His last name, he hoped, not his first.

~ * ~

After Sam had finished his shift and when the shadows were thickest in the ward, Lee dressed in the clothes his wife had provided for him to wear home the next day. She had booked a car for him, under his new name. The clothes didn’t quite fit. He had become thin in hospital, older. His hair stood up in a wild, ivory wave when he looked in the mirror. The bruise above his eye temple had turned yellow. He pulled at his cheeks and blew himself a kiss that looked more final than he had intended.

Somewhere behind that skull was a tiny scar, one that had thus far utterly eluded the finest of science’s searches and could remain undiscovered for years, perhaps forever if he was unlucky. He would wait all that time for his name to be returned, for the lexicon to be restored. Wouldn’t it be better to accept who he was now and move on?

Move on to what? He could be a carpenter, or a teacher. No, not a teacher. He was a card short of a full deck. His pupils would matriculate with a one-letter deficit, innocent inheritors of his own fundamental flaw. His choices were limited to ones he could pronounce and therefore think of, such as carpenter, mechanic, postman, scientist.

It would be unwise, too, he decided, to pick a field in which communication was essential, such as politics or the priesthood. How could he be a priest when he couldn’t even say the word most people used for “deity”? He lay awake in search of the absent letter and the hole in his head that it had fallen into. That was an entirely different sort of existential mystery, one he was already tired of.

He tore his stare from the mirror and put a hand on the doorknob. At that moment it turned. The door opened to reveal a tall man in the corridor outside. His cheeks were hollow. The hat he wore was broad and old-fashioned, his suit conservative and uncreased.

“Mr Jameson?”

Lee stepped backwards, filled with an unaccountable shame at his planned escape. It was his life; he could do with it whatever he wanted, even run off into a new one if required.

“I’m sorry to startle you at this late hour.” The hat came off with a practised sweep. The man’s shoulders were stooped, as of one ill-accustomed to his superior stature, but his manner was confident. “I came the moment I learned of your condition from Doctor Harrod. Here.” A business card issued forth from an inside pocket, proffered with an economical motion of one hand. “My name is Simon Le Hunte.”