The Grammaphiliac, Part II
[Read Part I here]
Over the following months, the letters accumulated steadily. Randomly, I will admit, rather in an ordered fashion, and not punctually or on command. It was entirely possible that I might make my way into one of several cemeteries, perform the rite, as far as it was in my ability to repeat its gestures, and find that nothing happened.
I was forced to experiment in various ways, the first being to attempt a theft after drinking copious amounts, then after a drunken meal, and then after a specific feast of lamb accompanied by Châteauneuf du pape. Not being able to afford the specific bottle I had enjoyed the night of my first success, however, (or one even close to its range), this flail was more indicative of my helplessness: my inability to understand both what I had accomplished and the mania I had begun to feel in my desire to see my mission through to completion. I had abandoned entirely the notion of stealing someone else’s name, the theft of just my own, composed piecemeal from letters taken from an array of tombs, quite enough to keep my nights and my mind occupied.
On that first night, bearing the stolen ‘T’, I had managed to make it home without once loosening my grip. My knuckles had begun to ache, hand cramp, and I was certain – and soon to be proven correct – that the pressure of my hold had caused blisters to form where the points of the letter dug into my flesh. As these gripes developed, any sense I had felt of elation passed. The buzz of the alcohol had long worn off, and the cemetery’s frigid damp had seeped into my socks, stiffening my joints – further proof that I was no longer as capable as I once had been of that manner of excursion. Even my eagerness to discover what the night’s activities had wrought had been numbed by the time I reached my rooms.
Without removing either my coat or boots, I made straight for the bedroom, shutting the door behind me and locking it as I entered (a redundant, melodramatic flourish, there being no one in the building who might have disturbed me). Sat on the bed, finally, I unwound my fingers, slowly opening out their cage with considerable efforts and no little pain. That, however, was swiftly put from my mind.
The item was glowing in my hand with a strange, pale light of no discernible source, itself, though, the origin of the chill that I had thought metallic; it was a light with weight and edges. And there it was, the letter, visible to me, the inverted ‘T’, though it had no physical form. As real as my blisters were, as the blood around the base of my middle finger was, as the imprint in my skin, some manner of brand, was, the letter itself was immaterial. It seemed to hover there in my hand. Beguiled, the enchantment of my success soon returned. For all the things in life at which I have failed, and at which have been bested, for all the ways I have been underserved by my birth, have been denied and overlooked, am starved of the appreciation I deserve, for all that I have lost, I was confident that no one ever had achieved what I had done: no one had ever stolen a name from the headstone of a grave, claiming its letters for their own. If it was not some mastery over death, some mastery more profound than any I had known before, I can’t say what it was.
Beyond my drawn shades dawn was advancing. Afraid of what the light of day might do to the letter that I held, how it might survive exposure to the sun, I considered for the first time what I was going to do with it. I had imagined, I suppose, as I made my way home (though I can’t say I recall exactly) that I would deposit the letter in a drawer for safe-keeping until transferring it somewhere more secure, my lock box say, to be kept with my other valuable items, my secret treasures, the whispers and echoes I cling to most dearly. It could, like them, stay there to be coveted, adored, marvelled at by myself alone, or to wait, at least, until I had amassed the further letters of my name – though as for the full set, I had not thought what I would do with them either. The letter’s lack, however, of form, seemed to render this plan untenable. I was frightened that should I try to place it down, whether in a drawer or safe, wherever, the thing would disappear (it was nothing after all).
Still perhaps in the thrall of whatever mood had led me to enter the cemetery to begin with, I turned and in the space above my bed placed the hand that held the letter there, pressing it slightly against the plaster in way which, to me, in that state, reflected a certain logic; it was how I had lifted the letter after all, why would a similar gesture not allow me to deposit it? I shut my eyes again. When I opened them, nothing having moved, unaware of the time, unaware of anything but, gradually, a slight twinge in my side from how my body twisted as I sat, I took back my hand and saw the glowing letter now above the headboard, as though carved – and carved cleanly too: there were no flakes of paint on my pillow, no crumbs of plaster or cracks in the wall. I knelt on the bed, drawing closer. The light was draining from the letter but the shape of it remained. The transfer had been successful.
Only when its light was entirely extinguished, its thin, finely rendered form as redoubtable there as it had been on the stone, a great swell of tiredness overcame me. As though in the pull of some cosmic force, my head span and my body, weary, suddenly, beyond any fatigue I had ever known, was dragged into an oblivion of the bedsheets. I slept a deeper sleep than I ever had before, and yet, from deep within in its grey and weighted veils, the vague memory of a dream remained. I dreamt I was watching a cathedral burn.
This manner of swooning, deadening repose, became the standard consequence of any night when an excursion was successful. Nights when the process worked (would that I could call it such; there are no identifiable steps, no routines or preparations that can be reliably made) the addition of a letter to my bedroom wall would be followed by hours of unshakeable sleep, an intoxicating experience in itself, and one to which I quickly began to look forward, so vertiginously was I dragged from consciousness no sooner was the letter transferred. I would dream violently and passionately, though of these dreams only the vaguest images remained. Were the success of my collections not so arbitrary, not so increasingly fraught, the sleep itself might have persuaded me to fill every inch of my apartment with stolen symbols just so that I might succumb to its vicious gravity.
That however was not the case. Soon after my half-baked, and increasingly half-hearted, attempts to recreate the conditions which had led to my first, and most spectacular success – even going as far as to subject myself to another dinner with Valentin and Marie-Laure, at which, despite my best efforts, discussions of ecclesiastical architecture were not forthcoming, and the wines offered by the host were of notably poorer quality and vintage – I took to visiting graveyards only when feeling inspired. Though I can say with some conviction that, from the night of my first theft, not a day passed in which I did not think about the continuance of my project, of going back to the cemetery, or some other, getting the next letter and the next, setting them in place above my bed, inching ever forwards to the completion of my name, some days, and I would even say most, I found I did not have it in me to try. Other concerns overtook my sincerely held intentions; other demands were placed on my time. Motivation would flag. On the threshold, preparing to step out into the night, I would be persuaded, for no reason, to turn back inside, or would sit at my desk lacing up my boots and hesitate and hesitate until the impulse was lost, at which point I would kick my boots off and flop onto to the bed, not to sleep but to fantasize about the sleep I might have had, one that seemed to be both within and not within my grasp. Weeks could pass in which though the thought of my project would niggle all the while, not a thing would be done about it.
I had always been capable of succumbing to black moods, and as the weeks between visits to the graveyards extended, I felt myself increasingly susceptible, able to fall at the slightest pretext. I withdrew from the world as I had learnt to withdraw, whether from an instinct for self-preservation or simply from disgust, from weariness with the goings on of it all or the hopelessness provoked by its on-going. I did not sleep, or slept little. I lost what pallid desires I had managed to uphold. My appetite was nought; my muscles wasted.
Unsure of how I was to continue, and with no thought of how I might be rescued from my slough of despond – other than some progress to my project – I decided to visit the first grave again. Quite why, I cannot say, other than to invoke that old canard about criminals returning to the scenes of their crimes. I needed (and in hindsight, this seems obvious) some proof of my past victories, evidence of my potency, signal that I had it in me to achieve. In previous eras, those when the projects which occupied my mind took on a more indulgent and repulsive tenor, when they were fleeting or constrained by time, by the outer extremes of what a body can bear, or, as I grew more refined, by the most astringent trials that self and soul can endure, other then minor trinkets to serve as souvenir, the successful attainment of those objectives determined that nothing of them would remain; if there had been the least proof of my divine malfeasance, I would have been locked away decades prior. I had considered taking one or two of the fragments in my lock box and rendering them homage, a polished stone set in a ring, say, or a relic worn about my neck hung from a silver chain, but it had seemed vulgar at the time. My victories had always been mine and mine alone, with the exception of the removal of the letter from the headstone. That was as public a villainy as I had ever exercised, and roused by the recognition of it, I was alerted to the potential benefits to my general mood and mental health that a day time saunter to the graveside, among the tourists and pilgrims there to visit himself, might offer.
I wore my winter coat despite the coming summer. The cemetery’s trees were full and lush, those graves on which flowers had recently been laid looked as though their inhabitants were bursting out in colour, reincarnated in blossom and thousand-petalled blooms; visitors in shorts and wearing backpacks, following maps to find the celebrity spots, gave the place the atmosphere of a seaside resort; birds were chirping, and the chatter of children would not have sounded out of place.
I made my way to the grave from which I had lifted the first letter of my name, still there, at that moment above my bed, a scattering of other letters following its lead, an inconstant patterning that gesturing toward who I was. The stone was a far lighter colour than I had recalled, it was a blander thing too, the letters and numbers of the names and dates, not inlaid, as I had thought. A shabby planter of heather decorated its base, alongside which, and on that end of the stone, tributes from callers had been left – stones (which I believe a custom of the Jews), metro tickets, a plastic rose. Others came and went beside and behind me, some reverent, some very obviously unknowing, checking the name against the number on their maps, orienting themselves so they could locate someone else, and I felt nothing of what I had used to for the man. He, with his name, had been diminished – for there on the stone, as surely as I stood, the second T had been removed. No one who approached commented on it, nobody leant in for a closer look. Photographs were taken. Some people offered touch; others bowed their heads – and nothing about the stone seemed to them untoward. I lingered there an hour or more, my lack of feeling for the man, for his work, and for his ways of thinking, producing the opposite effect than what I had hoped. I was conscious only of what I had despoiled. Seeing how the headstone was still revered, I felt weak.
I wandered, glumly, in the less frequented corners, picking out from where, if I had felt able, I might have lifted the missing letters of my name. Despondently I dragged my hand across the waiting stones. And why not?, I thought. Why not place a hand palm down over one of the letters that made up my name? Nothing would happen; nothing would change. And so idly I did, pausing, hand cupped over some abundant, unremarkable vowel. I didn’t focus my mind or even close my eyes; I didn’t read what was written on the stone. I looked around. I watched sparrows hop in the scraggy grass in the narrow alleys between the graves, watched the bright mounds of tourists drift between the headstones; I looked at the sky and the sky was blank; the sun had gone, the blue of it had drained. A great expanse of nothing had opened over me. And I felt then myself consumed within it, overwhelmed by the negation that its emptiness allowed. I smiled.
A stabbing pain in my hand caused me to turn. In my clenched hand I grasped a pointed thing. A great roaring heat flushed to my cheeks as in fear and embarrassment I spun around. Nobody was close; nobody had seen me. I had done nothing anyway, had I not? All I had done was place my hand on a stone, a stone now reading: HERE LIES JE N-BAPTISTE DE CADORE.
It was a revelation no less significant than I had experienced on my first attempt. The powers I bore relied on no external circumstance, no dark of night, no combination of intoxicating substance, not even a force of what one might call will; presence, and the play of it with absence, was, I have concluded, the factor that most determined my success.
Bolstered by this knowledge, though still prone to the occasional lapse in which attempts to lift a letter would fail, I quickly amassed those that remained to be got. I was soon down to the final two. So rapidly did this occur, and so fundamental was the shift in my mood – my strut returned, as did my desire, not only in lust but to engage in the world; I sensed again the tickle of my dormant former cruelties – that I began to lament that I had not left space to include my middle name on the wall above my bed. I played with the idea of rearranging what I had, perhaps including some grandiose addendum or add the dates and location of my birth, but decided not. I had space, I noted, to include my middle initial, and that would be enough. Thoughts of future projects returned, proliferated.
And still, with each accumulated letter, the depths of sleep into which I would fall once they had been transferred continued to expand. I would afterwards sleep for twelve hours, fifteen, one day, two, and on each occasion upon waking up would feel a aching hunger to be pulled back. What flashes of dreams that remained became more obscure, more abstract beguiling and terrifying, emerging from that grey and tumultuous abeyance: a hip bone or a woman’s smile, a swamp, a child born without a face, some creature, some open maw, an empty table, a hollow suit.
Down to the final letter, the initial of my middle name, I began to plan from which tomb I would take it. Any anxiety I had felt about the project, which is to say my ability to complete it, had completely abated. I knew success would come, and felt a lightness in my soul toward the whole endeavour. The lighter I felt the more easily letters would come to hand, and so, for the final one, I decided I would make a more indulgent trip.
Taking the train from Montparnasse, I made my way out of the city heading south to a cemetery in which lay I woman I had loved – that I love. She had loved me in return, and from that concurrence of adoration, an obsession and desire the likes of which none have ever known since, she gave, and I took everything she had. It was in the taking of her life (by her own hand, for the avoidance of doubt), that I was initiated on the path which led to the bleakest passions of which mankind has knowledge yet. She was harbinger, for me, of the power I could wield, and inaugurated me in my profound knowledge of death.
I did not think about her much, and yet she was in everything I thought; our romance was that to which I most covetously held. I was surprised, then, arriving, to find fresh flowers on her grave. I had forgotten she existed for anybody else.
Process complete, I retreated to a bench and took a length of bandage from my bag, securing it around my clenched fist, insurance that on the longer trip back, the precious letter would not be lost. As I bound it with the tape I had also brought, I could already feel the blood between my tightly packed fingers. This letter was sharper, and more awkward than the others; it bit, and the cold of it was burning; it bore a weight that no other I had taken had. My palm, by the time that I got home, would be a pulpy mess.
Still I made my way back quite calmly. I thought of V. with tender melancholy, feeling jealous of myself, the younger man I had been. I had chosen a certain manner of happiness, cruel, no doubt, and in that choice many others had been denied. I could see her face as it had been, her body; I could hear her voice. I love and have always loved you, hard as that may be for others to believe.
It was dark by the time I made it home. I hadn’t rushed. Despite the cargo I was bearing, despite the pain that carrying it caused, I dallied. I walked circuits of the neighbourhood, I made my way along the riverbanks, I skulked about le Jardin du Luxembourg, all the while the letter cutting into my flesh.
And even now I find I hesitate, sat at my desk, typing single-fingered, my balled fist set beside the keyboard. What I can see of my hand between the wraps of the bandage show my skin as pale as death, hued blue; the blood which has seeped through has dyed the fabric black.
When I transfer the letter, I have wonder, will I leave a bloody handprint on the wall? Will the slick of it cause the passing off to fail? And into what sleep will I then fall? What hard-edged endlessness of sleep? I am afraid, excited; I will see it through. I will go now finish the inscription; place her letter above the headboard. Then I will lay down and rest.
Will I see you then, again? Will you come and find me there?