The Grasshopper King (8 page)

After a while the balance began to tilt in horror's favor. Maybe New York had once been as I'd imagined it; for all I knew, my parents' restaurant had been the last bulwark against the forces of vulgarity and boredom that had triumphed everywhere else, and the city had succumbed on their departure. In any case I found it increasingly difficult to summon up my old fantasies. The kowtowing doormen disappeared; the grand sweep of society folded its skirts and retired. I had no further desire to light out East. I knew enough now; if there were any further disillusionment to be gained by going there in person, I could do as well without it.

Which is not to say that I had gained any affection for my hometown in the process. It was the same backwater it had always been—no more glittery, no smarter. My dissatisfaction remained constant, a dull whine, but I no longer had any particular ambition to distract me; that is, I had come around to a more or less ordinary way of life. In a way, of course, this was a kind of despair, but in a way it was a relief. I had been freed of the responsibility to make it anywhere.

So we settled in, and summer was pulled over us. I worked nights at the restaurant and spent my days lying supine on our ancient bed, a damp towel laid square over my chest and two fans aimed at me from either side. I was bored. But boredom was a welcome change from ceaseless hatred. I no longer fantasized about the university's destruction, and my loathing for my classmates had diminished to a bearable distaste. My acne had cleared up. Julia was kind to me, and at the time I thought this to be as much as—perhaps more than—anyone could unselfishly expect. Sometimes I still think so. Had events proceeded slightly differently, I'm convinced, we would have gotten married soon enough, bought a house, run a rudimentary gallery or taken over the Grape Arbor, perhaps produced children who would in time grow up to repudiate our beliefs, such as they were. It is important to keep in mind, throughout what follows, that I came very near to leading an entirely unremarkable life. But instead, I awoke on September sixth of my final year of college with a terrific headache. I was so addled that when I arrived at Gunnery Hall at ten that morning for my first class of the semester, I stumbled into the wrong classroom, and by the time I realized my mistake, the unexceptional chain of events described above had receded into utter impossibility. But, of course, I wouldn't know that for some time.

My class was in a new wing that had been built just that summer. In my miserable state I was unable to make out the numbering scheme of the rooms, and when I saw at the end of the long, gleaming corridor a man standing half out of a doorway, beckoning me in, I assumed that I had found my destination.

The class I was looking for was Can Art and Industry Co-Exist?—a question about the answer to which I cared not an atom. As soon as I sat down I began to suspect I was in the wrong place. There was no slide projector set up, and the students were not ones I had seen in other art history classes. In fact, they were not ones I had seen anywhere. There were three men in identical oxford shirts and razor ties, who as far as I could see were unacquainted with each other; a very fat black man with a lazy eye; an impatient-looking punk wearing that
T
-shirt with the
Milky Way and the legend, “
YOU ARE HERE
”; in the front, a hyperglandular adolescent boy who, after some minutes of examination, I realized was in fact a woman of no less than forty. I felt as if I were at a casting call for a film whose tortured, whimsical plot I could never hope to understand. I wondered briefly what my own part in it could be.

The class was Introductory Gravinic. The man who had beckoned me in was Professor Gregory McTaggett—that same man whose broken wrist, decades before, had turned him from basketball to the life of the mind. He was the department chair now. Seeing me wandering, he'd taken me for the final student on his roll, a freshman named Bobby Trabant, who, I later found out, had tripped on a sidewalk outcropping on his way to class and split his forehead from his hairline to the bridge of his nose. Bobby never did come to that class, even after the stitches came out.

But I stayed. Why not stay? Julia had opted out of Can Art? in favor of a course for which I lacked the prerequisites. Anyway, it had recently become clear to me (although I had not yet told Julia) that no amount of diligence would allow me to graduate in art history at the end of that year. I was going to have to switch to mass communications. Consequently I had a great deal of room for electives in my schedule.

The first day was not what I expected—no hello, good-bye, my name is, I would like. Instead McTaggett outlined the history of the Gravine and its strange language, assuming correctly that the material was unfamiliar to all of us.

McTaggett's lecture began in the final, heady days of the Pleistocene, about 35,000 years past, when an arm of glacier retreated over a ridge in the Carpathians and revealed a bowl-shaped valley. Some time later, a troop of fresh-minted Cro-Magnons happened in, and, finding game plentiful and the climate to their liking, stayed. The only entrance, a narrow, snow-clogged pass, was easy to defend even with Paleolithic ordnance. So the proto-Gravinians retained the integrity of blood and territory, while clans displaced clans in violent feuds outside. Their language, too, developed without interference.
There had been attempts to link Gravinic with other pre-Indo-European remnants: Basque, Finnish, the
Tiktiksprache
of certain Baltic islands. None were convincing. As far as was known, Gravinic constituted a linguistic family in and of itself.

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 approximately 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.