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  for my country

  Fighting Words

  A sudden reversal. In seventh grade this “Nate Vanderveen” chose to lavish our niece with flowering weeds, with vending-machine jewelry, with convenience-store chocolates, with love notes written on the back of homework he hadn’t done, but now in ninth grade this “Nate” chooses to lavish her with curses (“Go fuck a dog you freak”), ridicule (“My tits are bigger than that bitch’s”), and slander (“Emma sucked me off once too”). He is what in the eighteenth century would have been called a lout, a brute, a ruffian, what in the twenty-first century is now called a thug. Stewart thinks the boy is antisocial, meaning psychopathic, once saw the boy perched on the roof of his family’s cottage, preparing to hurl a stray cat onto his driveway two stories below. We live in a village on the shore of the Great Lakes. I am a lexicographer; my brother is a professor of dead languages. His expertise is the words from these languages for which English has no equivalent. Stewart uses these words when he can, although it is rare that he finds the occasion. This “Nate” is such an occasion. Stewart refers to the boy as kimlee, which best translated means “foe-who-has-chosen-you”; this makes Stewart the boy’s kimloo, or “foe-you-have-chosen.” We live in a state once enriched by its industries of handcrafted furniture and gasoline automobiles, a state now impoverished as plastic and polyester replace wood and leather, as the pumpjacks of other states drain what’s left of the dwindling petroleum in our nation’s reservoirs. It is a state in which it is rare for a forty-something man to refer to a fourteen-year-old boy as his foe, regardless of the language used to do so. In the eighteenth century we might have challenged the boy to a duel by pistols, but it is the twenty-first century, and in Michigan, as in most states in our nation, dueling is illegal—dueling and all other “consensual altercations.”

  But the boy spits in Emma’s face in the cafeteria, bullies her friends into deserting her, scribbles elaborate drawings of an elderly and childless Emma living alone (“like your gay uncles used to”) with labels attached to the symbols of loneliness he’s chosen to include there (“cats” “hate mail from your neighbors” “cat food that you have to eat too cause you’re so poor” “more cats” “dildo you hump thinking about wrinkly grandfather dicks” “more cats”) and slips these drawings through the slot in the door of her locker and then walks away whistling as if he were a kindly old mail carrier instead of a cruel gap-toothed boy who reeks of mildew and reeks of sweat and has just found another way to traumatize the same girl he’s left sobbing in various classrooms and hallways several times this week alone.

  The school principal is of no use, cannot do or refuses to do anything other than occasionally suspend this “Nate” from a handful of school days, which for a boy of that sort is more holiday than exile, giving him schoolless days on which he must do nothing aside from wander the beach throwing rocks at boats he doesn’t own and plotting how he might next make Emma hate herself a little bit more. The boy has powers of transformation: in a matter of weeks he has transformed her, from a girl who loved reading books with dragons on the covers, a girl unashamed of her braces, a girl unashamed of her brother, into a girl who refuses to enter the public library, a girl who will not sit next to her brother on the bus, a girl who will not smile out of fear of showing her teeth. Stewart and I, too, are transformed. We were timid men, not prone to brooding, not prone to fantasies of batting at a fourteen-year-old’s knees with a shovel, of snapping teeth from a fourteen-year-old’s gums with pliers. We were men who drank twig tea, who planted petunias in our windows, who grew rhubarb in our gardens, who left apple cores on our porch railings for the squirrels to eat if they pleased. We were men who, when our sister fled to the capital of our nation to be with her new lover and asked if we would move into her cottage to care for her children, each said simply yes, despite that we knew she would not be returning soon, despite that we knew she might not be returning ever. We did not say yes because we meant yes; we said yes because we were too timid to say the no we meant. But now this boy has transformed us into something other than timid. We have decided we will hurt him. We will hurt the boy in a way that he will feel and keep feeling and never stop feeling, mutilate his psyche in a way that will make him fear us and what we are capable of even after we are dead. We want to hurt him in this way because we are afraid that this is the way in which he has already hurt Emma—he has transformed her, and we are unsure how to restore her, unsure if we are even capable of changing her back.

  * * *

  I have worked for over two decades as a lexicographer. Unlike most lexicographers, my task is not to write definitions for existent words, nor to revise definitions that have already been written by others. Instead, my task is to write what are known in my industry as “mirage words.”

  Publishers of dictionaries are fearful of plagiarism; it is undesirable for somebody to copy the definitions from our dictionaries and then to begin printing dictionaries of their own. But with dictionaries theft is difficult to monitor. When lexicographers write a definition for an existent word, we are not creating—we are articulating some abstract idea that already exists in the collective consciousness of English speakers. When lexicographers write a definition for unwanted, we are all defining the same unwanted—similar to a crowd of artists painting portraits of the same face, artists who are paid to re-create that face as realistically as possible. Overlap is inevitable, theft difficult to prove.

  Thus it is my task is to write mirage words: fictional words with fictional definitions. Othery is a word I recently wrote, a noun I defined as “suffering experienced through empathy for another’s suffering, more painful than that original suffering.” Including mirage words such as othery in our dictionaries does not undermine their credibility. Dictionaries are not read; dictionaries are used only to look up certain words, for meaning or spelling. Dictionary users will not look up othery, because othery does not exist. But if othery appears in another dictionary, then we will know that the publishers of that dictionary have stolen from our work—othery could have only come from our dictionary.

  It was only after moving in with Emma and Christopher that I was able to write othery. Never before had I experienced that suffering. Back when I lived alone, I did not experience this pain. I suspect that even when our sister did live here she did not feel othery for the children—otherwise I doubt she ever could have left.

  My understanding of the world is shaped by these words I have written. If not for othery, I never would have agreed to Stewart’s plan to hurt the boy. It is not Emma’s pain I am trying to end so much as my own. Like Stewart, I carry a private language, words that in our village I alone am capable of speaking or thinking. But while he carries words written by the dead, mine are words of my own making.

  * * *

  We begin by tailing this “Nate” after school, during the hours when Emma is rehearsing for the fall play over in the high scho
ol auditorium and Christopher is practicing for marching band in the field behind the high school. Marching band is for high schoolers only, but Christopher displays such a rare talent with the clarinet that the director of the marching band has promoted him to “honorary high schooler.” For us this is ideal—if Christopher were not in marching band, we would be stuck at home after school, supervising Christopher like responsible tians, unable to study the movements of this “Nate Vanderveen.”

  Tians is a word that, if my work were read, would be useful to many in our village—tians is the plural form of tian, a noun I wrote for our student dictionary that I defined as “a relative responsible for a child’s upbringing.” Many children in our village are raised not by mothers or fathers but by aunts, cousins, nanas, stepbrothers. Words such as these are offensive in that what the words truly mean—aunt, cousin, nana, stepbrother—is “not-mother,” “not-father,” and therefore “not-parent.” For one parenting a child, this implied “not-parent” can be hurtful.

  Stewart parks the pickup at the high school alongside the station wagons and minivans and sedans of other tians. Many of these station wagons and minivans and sedans were built by our tian, the grandfather who raised us, who retired from the automobile factories to the lake only months before the bankruptcies came, before the factories were shuttered and abandoned, before the factories were overrun with squatters, before the factories were converted into laboratories for manufacturing the psychoactive chemicals that in our nation are illegal to make or sell and doubtless are now our state’s primary source of income. Our tian fed us, bought us books when he sometimes didn’t even have the money for his own cigarettes, but otherwise ignored us; he had discovered that we were boys who had no aptitude for working with oil sockets, spanner wrenches, alignment pins, boys who loved words instead. It was only once our sister was older that he discovered a child who loved tools.

  “Books aren’t going to feed you,” our tian would say, wielding some drill or torch, shouldering through the door to work on his motorcycle in the driveway with our sister. “Come on out. You boys might as well learn now.” But we would stay on the floor, where we lay among our piles of books, not daring to look up from the words on the pages until the spring on the screen door had snapped the screen door shut and we were sure our tian was gone and could not force us to come out into the sun to run him tools back and forth from his toolbox.

  But now the boys who’d had an aptitude for working with automobiles are working in apple orchards, liquor stores, grocery stores, gas stations pumping what’s left of our nation’s petroleum into the automobiles their fathers built—men skilled in an extinct trade. Still, it is this useless aptitude that separates them from us: they are masculine in a way we have never been. This is what scares us about our desire to hurt this “Nate Vanderveen,” to knock his head against brick walls, to press his face into smoldering embers, to fling him from the tip of the pier and let him drown among the rocks. It is a masculine desire; we are unaccustomed to such masculinity. We distrust it, decide to study it before acting. We will follow “Nate” and make note of his patterns, so that when we are ready to ambush and attack him we will know where and when he will be alone. Whatever we do, we do not want to be caught.

  The boy comes slouching out of the high school, wearing no backpack, carrying no homework, having likely left it behind in his locker, indifferent to completing it. He makes a vile gesture at somebody in the window of a bus, hops onto the stone fence that separates the school from the road, and then walks along the fence, as if walking across a tightrope, toward downtown. I make note on a pad of paper: “Friday September 26 departs school at 2:37 p.m. walks into town via fence.” I mark an x on our map of the village and record the day and the time the boy was sighted at that location. The buses caravan out of the parking lot, and the boy pauses on the fence to extend that same vile gesture at each of the buses, then moves along again once the buses have passed.

  “The kimlee prowls,” Stewart says, twisting the key in the ignition, “unaware his kimloo prowls the same streets.” He shifts into drive. The pickup sputters away from the curb. We ride.

  * * *

  The bulk of the words I write—nostalgian, unvoy, gensong, hoggle—are works of fancy, unrelated to my experiences. As other lexicographers at my publisher sometimes ask to read my work, I generally avoid writing words that are personal. The most notable exception to this was impsexual, which I wrote only after many years of trying to define my own sexuality. None of the existent words for orientation represented my own: in high school, I felt no heterosexual lust for the breasts and hips of the girls, felt no homosexual lust for the arms and butts of the boys, felt therefore no bisexual or pansexual or poly. Asexual was perhaps nearest to what I was, but still imprecise, for although I felt no lust for girls or boys or any gender at all, I did feel lust. The lust that I felt, however, and that I feel, was for some nameless, indescribable thing, something that I have never seen and that I am now convinced may not exist. It was not zoophilia—I felt no lust for dogs, sheep, grazing horses—nor was it paraphilia—I felt no lust for teddy bears, shoes, trees. My lust was for something human—some sort of human that perhaps had once existed, or might one day evolve, but in the twenty-first century was a nonentity.

  I did not notice that anything was amiss until Stewart, four years my younger, began to develop crushes on different classmates at school, keeping record of these crushes in an old yearbook. I discovered the yearbook one night while he was taking a bath. Staring at the cartoony hearts and exclamation points that he had drawn around different faces, I realized that whatever feelings he was having were feelings that should have come to me years ago, if the feelings were ever going to come. The yearbook had been hidden with a stash of lingerie catalogs, which somehow was even more unsettling, discovering that like me, he must have masturbated sometimes, but that unlike me, when he did he could actually picture what he wanted. I had never before felt so intensely ashamed. Hearing the water draining from the tub, I quick hid the yearbook and the catalogs back under the bunk bed we shared, and then sat alone in the moonlight on the carpet in silence and despair.

  I published impsexual in our medical dictionary, a noun I defined as “one who sexually desires a nonentity (or nonentities).” I meant imp- to suggest impossible, to connote an unworkable desire. Only after publishing the word did I realize that imp- more likely suggested imp, and therefore connoted a desire for fictional creatures.

  When Stewart was in high school he was outspoken about the disgust he felt toward our principal, who was rumored to be asexual. So I did not tell him about my own orientation, for fear my orientation would evoke even more disgust than that. When I did tell him—only after we had both moved away from our village and back again, only after Stewart had been married and divorced twice, only after I had published and been paid for impsexual—Stewart told me that a dead language he had once studied, a language that had evolved and died in a peninsular nation on the other side of the planet, had possessed such a word.

  “Kawa-mashka. It meant sexual desire for something that doesn’t exist. See, you aren’t that original,” Stewart said.

  It was then that I realized that although I lived alone and had always lived alone and had never loved another human, I had never been alone entirely. Others had felt this lust that I felt, this unworkable desire, and had lived and died with it centuries ago, or had not yet been born.

  * * *

  Except for afternoons when Stewart has faculty meetings, we trail the boy every weekday until 6:17 p.m., when we drive back to the cottage to await the arrival of the extracurricular bus bringing home Emma from rehearsal and Christopher from practice. Our method is one of patience. Stewart parks the pickup near wherever “Nate” chooses to prowl; I take notes on the various activities that “Nate” undertakes. As a rule we do not leave the pickup. When the boy disappears into a store or the arcade, we do not follow. In the pickup we are simply two brothers in an automobile—
we are doing nothing wrong. Stewart grades papers with a fountain pen. I revise definitions for an upcoming deadline. We stay in the pickup and we wait. The boy knows our faces, knows whose tians we are. We do not want to alert him to our plot.

  The exception to this comes several weeks after our study of “Nate Vanderveen” has begun. The pickup is parked downtown, a single street lined by quaint shops with shiplap siding. “Nate” is rooting through a trash bin behind the bookstore, a new but not entirely unexpected behavior. Stewart wears khakis with suspenders over a rumpled dress shirt from teaching; he naps slumped back with his hands resting on his stomach. I wear a vest from the office; I’ve just noted “Monday October 13 roots through bookstore trash bin 4:27 p.m.” on the pad of paper, consulting my pocket watch before logging the official time.

  When I see what’s happening I try to wake Stewart because I don’t know what to do.

  “Stewart,” I whisper. “Stewart, Stewart, Stewart.” Stewart blinks awake, scratches his stubble, falls asleep again. I elbow him. “Stewart, one of us needs to get out of the truck.”

  Stewart blinks awake again, says, “We aren’t—” but then looks through the windshield and sees it too: our nephew tiptoeing along the bookstore toward the trash bin beyond, muttering something to himself, wielding his fully assembled clarinet like a sword. “Nate” is still headfirst in the trash bin, his legs wiggling as if he’s falling and looking for somewhere to land. Stewart says, “Is that?” I say “It is,” and then he tumbles out of the pickup and runs after our nephew, hissing, “Christopher! Dammit, Christopher!” Christopher is crouched at the gutter at the rear of the bookstore, peeking at “Nate” in the trash bin, but when he hears his name he turns, his eyes growing wide, then growing even wider, looking as if he’s either about to cry or take a swing at Stewart with the clarinet.