The Grasshopper King Page 6

  I found myself paying as much attention to McTaggett himself as I did to the content of his lecture. He was tall, of course, shocked with red hair, strangely wide in the shoulders and tapered thereafter. When he was speaking he paced out the blackboard side of the classroom, almost stomping, like a coach facing an inevitable loss. I noticed with some embarrassment that the students around me were all writing furiously. I had not even brought a notebook.

  Gravinian folklore had it (McTaggett went on) that the country had been founded by two ancient monarchs, called King Speaker and King Listener. Listener was perfectly attuned to the needs and desires of his subjects; a single word, it was said, would suffice for any petition to him. Speaker’s gift was to issue royal decrees in language so stirring and precise that it was considered a privilege to obey them. There was no archeological evidence for the existence of this colorful pair. The going theory had the Gravinian state developing gradually out of the usual communalistic sentiments, without the intervention of any individual figures worth noting.

  The Gravine’s modern history was no less placid. Now and then an aspiring emperor would lay claim to it; but the valley was mineral-poor and unstrategically placed, and no foreign ruler had ever exerted sovereignty there in more than name. At the time of McTaggett’s lecture the Gravine was a semiautonomous district of the U.S.S.R. The Soviet government had changed the name of the capital to Beriagrad but had otherwise left the place alone. That was where it stood.

  That night I told Julia I was quitting art history. She took it well. The fact was, I hadn’t been much good at art, and both of us knew it. When I told her I was taking Gravinic she wrinkled her nose.

  “Just so long as you don’t speak it in the house,” she said. It was months, it turned out, before I could speak it at all. The Roman alphabet had arrived in the Gravine too late to exert much normative force on the spoken language. Pronunciation was governed by a staggering collection of diacritical marks, haphazardly applied. But the pronunciation was simple compared to the task of constructing a grammatical sentence. Gravinic, like Latin, had its cases: its nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and ablative. But then, too, there was the locative, the transformative, the restorative, the stative; the operative and its tricky counterpart, the cooperative; the justificative, the terminative, the reiterative, the extremely popular pejorative, the restive, the suggestive, the collective, the palliative, the argumentative, the supportive, the reclusive and the preclusive, the intuitive and the counter-intuitive, the vocative and the provocative, the pensive, the defensive, the plaintive . . .

  As the declension of the Gravinic noun dragged on, the enrollment of our class declined alongside. One morning in December, I found myself the only one left. The boy-woman, my last classmate, had left the field.

  A little self-conscious, I sat in my usual place, opened my notebook, and cocked my pen just as if a roomful of students were following along.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” McTaggett said. “This happens every year. Shall we just call it an A minus and go home?”

  For a moment I was tempted. I had never had an A minus. But I wanted to continue. True, the forced march through the Gravinic inflections was grinding, thankless work. But I had never before submitted myself to grinding, thankless work, and the hours spent at my desk—really just a card table with a forty-watt lamp clipped to the back—conferred on me a novel feeling of virtue, whose unrewarded-ness was a kind of reward in itself. Certainly I preferred it to the mock sportscasts I was obliged to deliver each Tuesday afternoon, trying to keep up with the action of that weekend’s contest on videotape while the dullard basketball players, my fellow mass communicators, hooted at my stammering and my ignorance of the rules.

  McTaggett responded to my decision with frank dismay. In all the time he’d been teaching, he admitted, no one had ever stayed on past Thanksgiving. He had no more lectures prepared. So he started me on translation right away. My source text was the sentence, “I kicked the dog.” McTaggett’s idea was that I would acquaint myself with the mechanics of Gravinic by producing a complete list of possible translations. The tally would run into the tens of thousands. One had to know, first of all, what sort of kick was involved—was it a field-goal swing, a sidewise foot-shove, a horizontal sweep involving the entire leg? All these, and more, called for different verbs. Was the kicking of the dog habitual, or a one-time action? Does the speaker mean to imply that the kick is apt to be repeated? And whose dog is it?

  My initial interest in the language had by now transmuted itself into something like awe. Gravinic was a perfected vehicle for meaning—exact meaning. All the shadings I’d lived by, all the little contradictions, were exposed in its vocabulary, drawn apart and fixed in place like moths on pins. Had I spoken Gravinic from the start, I thought, I could never have been so vain. Precision was vanity’s enemy. And while I knew that my heart still harbored certain pretensions, the occasional self-delusion, I was certain these too would disintegrate in light; as soon as I’d learned enough words.

  English, by contrast, was a rough and debased slang, a rickety, jury-rigged cant thrown together in a historical instant for less-than-noble purposes. When I spoke English it seemed impossible to get my nuances across, and so I spoke less. The Gravine and its language consumed my imagination as nothing had since my old dreams of New York. And the Gravine was better—for how likely was it that I would ever find a Gravinian to disillusion me?

  Julia didn’t know what to make of my newfound diligence; but she seemed guardedly pleased.

  “I like seeing you so worked up about something,” she said. “Maybe you’ve found your calling.”

  My calling! Lofty ideas like that made me shivery and nauseous. If I thought too long about them I broke out. But it was true that I had little inclination to do anything else.

  “Could be,” I said.

  I fell into a strict routine. Each night at six o’clock I would walk to the carryout at the corner and order from the scowling Greek there an egg salad sandwich for myself, and another dinner—it varied from night to night—for Julia. Then I returned to the apartment, settled myself at my makeshift desk, ate one half of my sandwich, and got down to work. On the left side of my desk was piled my output so far: hundreds of sheets of rag bond typing paper, twelve Gravinic sentences written on each in my narrow, exacting hand. I kept my page-in-progress on the right side of the desk, and my blank typing paper stacked on the floor to the right of my chair. My copy of Kaufmann’s Gravinic Philology lay heavily in my lap, the space on my desk being exhausted. And on the floor to my left sat the remaining half of my egg salad sandwich in its wax paper. This is how I worked: I would foray through the creaking, gold-bordered pages of Kaufmann until I came to whatever grammatical nicety I was wrestling with at the moment, and then, having settled the syntactic point, turn to the dictionary at the end of the book to retrieve the appropriate words, if they were there. If, as was often the case, they were not, I had to twist myself in my chair to consult the heap of supplementary dictionaries behind me on the floor. Finally I returned to the first section of Kaufmann to determine what morphological adjustments would be necessary. When I was satisfied that I had produced a grammatical Gravinic sentence declaring (or intimating, postulating, regretting) that its speaker had, at some particular moment, kicked in a particular manner a particular sort of dog which stood in some particular relation to the speaker, the kick, and the generalities of time and space—in all, a process of about five minutes’ duration—I committed my work to the sheet of paper at my right, with a red ballpoint pen, leaving enough space so that the page would hold just twelve sentences. If the sentence happened to be the twelfth, I would pause in my work to read the whole page aloud, quite slowly, so that I had time to recall the exact phonetic value of each umlaut, hook, and slash. I added the page to the finished stack at my left and replaced it with a blank sheet from my pile on the floor. Then I rewarded myself with one bite of my sandwich. At the resulting rate of approx
imately one bite per hour, I finished my dinner at around midnight, at which point it was my custom and Julia’s to go to bed.

  There, she asked me about my night’s work, and made me recite from it; she laughed delightedly at my struggles with the unfamiliar consonants.

  “You just said one twice,” she’d say, and I’d go back, repeating, trying to illuminate the difference between the dental and semipalatal t, the proper position of the tongue.

  Or: “What does that one mean?”—although of course she already knew.

  “I kicked the dog,” I told her, pretending to think about it, playing along.

  “That poor dog,” she said. “Every single night.”

  “It depends on the translation. Tonight the dog deserved it.”

  She pursed her lips like a skeptical child; but what followed was adult enough, and any doubts I may have had were put aside.

  I’m wondering now what sort of impression I’ve given of Julia. I had taken her at first for a free spirit, a carpe-deist—mostly, perhaps, on the basis that she was willing to sleep with me. I had thought we’d always be doing foolish and impressive things, things she’d have to drag me into but that afterwards I’d agree we couldn’t have missed. But she was not exactly that type. I had assumed—on the same basis—that she had been promiscuous; but in fact, I was only her third lover (how I hate that word) and by far the one she had least made to wait. She had withheld herself, I learned, even from the carnie who’d made off with her. “I think I meant to do it,” she said, “but somehow my back hurt from all the driving and there was never a convenient time.” No barefoot cartwheels through the sprinklers for Julia, no sudden changes of hair color, never a ludicrous purchase. She wasn’t shy, but only duty made her really sociable. With my parents she was easy and deferent; she praised my mother’s couscous and seemed, even to me, to mean it. At heart, I’d learned, she was deeply domestic; she seemed happy enough staying home with me, sitting at her desk in the opposite leg of our L, writing her thesis as my egg salad waned.

  She must never have imagined we would stay together so long. I think her idea, conscious or not, was to do something about my awfulness; and that, by now, she had accomplished. But something made her stay. I do not want to exaggerate my charms. It may be that I was still more awful than I thought.

  Thinking back now, it seems to me that those dog-kicking weeks were the happiest time I have known. I have it absolutely clear: the comforting hum and clack of Julia’s electric typewriter from around the corner, so sharp I imagine I can reproduce the rhythm of it, whole sentences at a time. Effortlessly I can call to mind the taste of egg yolk and mayonnaise lingering on my tongue and on the ridge behind my teeth; and I could describe, if I chose, every flaw in the bricks of the wall I faced. On that wall, just above the edge of my desk, someone (a long-ago line worker, I supposed) had chiseled out the words, “THIS IS THE LIFE.” At the time it must have been ironic. But for me—my hyperextended tantrum of an adolescence forgotten, my meeting with Higgs and all that followed still ahead—it was the plain truth. What could I do but agree? Guilelessly, with all my heart?

  CHAPTER 3

  LITTLE BUG, LITTLE BUG

  One morning in January, McTaggett asked me about my plans for the future. We were sitting in the shabby coffee shop where we had shifted our meetings some weeks before. Our relationship, removed from the classroom, had grown informal. As often as not we would pass over the elided ultrasubjunctive entirely and devote our hour to departmental politics, the day’s news, the generally degraded status of the college and the state. McTaggett always looked unhappy; on occasion he visibly despaired, and the best mood he ever mustered was downcast. At the same time he took a frantic interest in my own good cheer. Whenever I showed any reaction to one of his gloomy anecdotes, he seemed startled and ashamed.

  “Hey, but no,” he’d say, “don’t let this old man get you down. Hang in there. Buck up. Smile and it seems like the whole world’s also smiling, what do you say? Let’s get back to work. Good Lord, I’m a bore.” Then he would release a thin chuckle, to forestall any earnest contradictions I might offer. I began to think of us as friends.

  So when McTaggett asked what I expected to be doing after graduation, I took it as an off-hand query, one friend to another, and therefore—instead of replying so as to impress him, or at least so as to avoid embarrassment—I answered him honestly.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’m a mass communications major. I’ll probably go work in my parents’ restaurant.”

  It was not, actually, the strict truth. I had some idea of writing, which was partly a vestige of my youthful idealization of New York and the poets, partly a long-nursed desire to correct the follies of my former acquaintances by satirizing them, transparently disguised, in print. But I had never worked very hard at writing, nor had I displayed much ability when I had worked at all. So I’d mostly given up on literary immortality. My expectation of waiting tables at the Grape Arbor (and in no restaurant had that job more accurately been called “waiting”) had, by that time, hardened to a near-certainty.

  “Mass communications,” McTaggett said. “With the basketball team.”

  “Most of them, yes.”

  “All of them,” he told me. “We keep track of these things.”

  Up on the counter next to us was a glass case in which a blistery corned beef sat half-submerged in its own juice, like an island where a horrible test had taken place.

  “Have you given any thought to graduate study?” McTaggett asked.

  Strangely, I hadn’t. Graduate school was certainly the first refuge of the directionless, in those days as always. But I had started college with the idea that school was to be gotten through at top speed, with head down; and despite all that had changed I had never really let that idea go. It had not occurred to me to stay a moment longer than was necessary to be certified a bachelor of arts.

  McTaggett went on: I did not, of course, possess the ordinary qualifications to enter a doctoral program in Gravinic. He assured me that in my case the department would be willing to waive the requirements. I gathered their cooperativeness was related to the fact that there was just one graduate student left in the department, and he was receiving his degree in June. Even so, McTaggett insisted, I was an excellent candidate on my own account. Simply by virtue of attendance I was the most promising undergraduate in years.

  I raised the question of my finances. Through a series of part-time jobs which do not rate mention here I had managed to pay my rent so far. But I was often fired; and I could certainly not afford tuition for graduate school. McTaggett coughed. There were no teaching fellows in Gravinic, the faculty being embarrassingly adequate for the courses offered. And the professors, given the slightness of their pedagogical responsibilities, needed no assistance with their research. However, there was one job available, a position about to be vacated by the graduate student now departing, and which, McTaggett told me, I was already qualified to take on. That job, of course, was listening to Higgs.

  “I can understand if this all sounds dreary to you,” McTaggett said. “Go ahead and say no.”

  “I’ll take it,” I told him.

  He brightened; that is, his mournfulness became briefly less intense. “Wonderful,” he said, “that’s just wonderful.” Then, as a sort of afterthought, earnest and final as a deathbed conversion: “Welcome to the family!”

  Julia took the news well. We agreed that she would apply to the doctoral program in her own department, where she, like me, had become something of a favorite. In fact, she had already considered staying on; but knowing my feelings about the university, she had not yet broached the subject. She was delighted at my change of heart.

  “But this Higgs,” she said doubtfully.

  “What about him?”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little creepy? Thirteen years without saying a word?”

  She had a certain way of tucking in her lower lip that meant she was being practical.
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br />   “I wouldn’t worry,” I said. “I doubt he’s going to kill anybody.”

  “That’s not necessarily what I meant.”

  “If he tries anything funny I’ll be ready. I’ll kick the knife out of his hand. I’ll get physical with extreme prejudice.” And by way of demonstration I seized Julia around the waist.

  “What if he resists?” asked Julia, crooking one arm behind my neck.

  “I’ll sacrifice myself to save the world.” And together, tussling, we plunged to the mattress.

  Later, awake before dawn, I reconsidered Julia’s question. Did I think Higgs was creepy? Honestly, I’d hardly thought of him at all. Stanley Higgs, my charge, was little more to me than a name I’d seen on the flyleaves of translations, in bibliographies, in the earlier issues of the Journal of the Henderson Society; although once, as a freshman, I had telephoned his house.

  An acquaintance of mine from high school, a year older than I, had prevailed upon me to rush his fraternity. I had repeatedly explained to this acquaintance my feelings toward the university’s social organization in general and Greek life in particular; but in the end his pallish persistence overcame my surliness—or, as I would have put it then, my principles. So I went to the rush party, eager to detest everyone and everything I saw. I had decided that I would stand in a corner and speak rudely to everyone who approached, so that my acquaintance would suffer a social blow for having brought me. I was a success at standing in the corner; but no one approached, so there was not much to do but drink cup after cup of the sweet, rummy punch that was back there with me, and about an hour after I arrived, following a sequence of events which I am unable to reconstruct, I found myself standing before a battered Princess phone, surrounded by a circle of cheering fraternity men and men-to-be. My acquaintance took me by the shoulder.