Losing A Language

By Hunter Therron

September 2008 and you’re fired from work. Your wife flinches whenever you move. Your daughter doesn’t know. The doctors, clueless, prod your body with their gloved fingers. You stick out your tongue. You turn and submit your soft inner ear to the harsh light-probe—which the doctors stare through as if glimpsing your soul.

MRI for brain cancer. X-ray for blood clot. Enema for compaction. Vials and vials of your blood shipped express all across America, and it’s only then you realize (fool) how rich you are, that all these routes can spring from a glitch in your body and receive the eyes of countless experts, who pour over every known condition and still return with nothing—

Negative for Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, Tuberculosis, Early-Onset Alzheimer’s, Syphilis, HIV, Bubonic Plague, Tapeworms, Dropsy, Intestinal Bleeding, Liver Failure, Testicular Cancer, Melanoma, Lyme’s, or Elephantiasis.

You stool lacks moisture. Your skin is crumbling. Your muscles are wasting. Your slim body sucks muscle from your legs and transmits it to clumps of fat around your waist, chest, and back. Dr. Espinoza says: eat more spinach, less bananas.

You visit a Catholic church and get blessed by Saint Anthony. You confess everything in the stuffy booth and the priest is so horrified that he laughs. You visit a tarot reader and pull the card of Death. Gemini horoscope predicts: Life-Changing Shift of Energy, and you burn the magazine in the sink.

No one sleeps or rests. The doctors eye you like a loaded trap. Your wife relocates you to the guest room and you hear her pacing through the night—

The scar is still there—single, long, and running. Neck to shoulders to vertebra L5—You! You!, chants the two-headed crow, perched in your window, and rapping its beak against the glass.

Secrets are a cul-de-sac of unfinished homes, each with walls full of lucrative copper. Plus, there is a wave that rises in your dreams. It starts in the shallows and grows beyond the reef and dwarfs the city.

Building. Building. Soon you expect to die—plahh, just like that—and so begin to calculate wealth as inheritance, penance—

Out of work, you eye those homes with a vicious sixth-sense for international copper demand: an astronomical price of four dollars per pound meaning your average American home, with ten-thousand pounds of copper wiring, is a sleeping ball of cash.

You work with the hunger of a literally dying man. With your wife gone for work and your daughter for school, you load the dog into the backseat and snip the lock at the back gate of the Candelas Housing Development and appear among the rows of placid, fetal ultra-homes armed with nothing but a crowbar and a squeaky red wheel barrow—

And God-Bless Alfred, your one friend in this god-damn town, who knows an ask-no-questions wholesale metal guy. This ask-no-questions guy lives up to his reputation and swaps you wads and wads of cash, which you stash deep in a secret shoe box under the guest bed because—

Your wife is done with accidental sweetness or touch. You see her, holding her ground, speaking to you as a client, a student, a guest. You understand: you’re both thirty-eight, and you like to think, and she likes to think that you can both solve this impossible thing logically by removing all sweetness.

You gut more houses—three become four become twenty. Meanwhile, the doctors and the masters students observe you through one-sided mirrors, like that opening scene of Brave New World with their clipboards and chapped lips and latex gloves. And you look out to the window to the grids and the streets and the light poles and the mini golf course/Cozmels/AMC/hot yoga/lazertag/White Castle/ strip mall with DMV and a playground and parking lot beside a busy road with all the people in all their cars with all the food in their stomachs and all the words in their mouths and all the places they would ever go and all the people they would ever fuck, love, betray, drive, sue, kill or write letters, or give gifts, or send nudes or chocolates or prayers—

Twenty-one houses. Nearly thirty-thousand pounds of copper. Life at home is a blur of August and Joan changing your diapers, prodding you to rest, and spoon-feeding you oatmeal.

Twenty-one houses and even the ask-no-questions guy is starting to get curious. He wants in, his friends want in, and cops are getting nosy.

Twenty-one houses before a school bully fractures his arm while playing with Joan at recess. Mr. Robocop asks Joan what happened, and she shrugs, and says, I don’t know. He just fell.

Twenty-one houses and your body is almost done. The wave in your head is cresting. Time is short. Your neighbor Betsy Foss calls August to let her know that you’re leaving the house daily, that you might be having an affair, and August laughs into the mouthpiece, through lunch, and right into dinner. She slaps her (kind-of) husband on the back and says, This is all a cover-up for an affair, right?

Twenty-one houses is the number it takes for a family to understand itself as an insular unit bound by black humor. Nothing can save us. Give a pickle take a pickle. Takes one to know one. Blah. Blah. Blah—

Twenty-one house humor equals—August: How was your affair today?; The Man:   ___________; Joan: Well said Dad. She must be gorgeous.

Twenty-two houses and all the humor stops.

Joan returns home from school smelling like matches and gasoline, and there’s a small plume rising above the forest preserve. August darts to the TV, flips on the news, and sees six fire trucks dousing a small shed in a crab-grass clearing full of flames.

Just then, August answers the ringing home phone, hears ___________, then reads the caller ID: Rolling Head Police Dept. She speeds down to the station to bail out the ‘mentally disabled vagrant’ arrested for trespassing and public urination in the Candelas Housing Development.

August carts the Man home and sits him beside Joan on the couch and doesn’t speak to either. The thought occurs to her: she could just leave. It would be so simple—start fresh, spend the rest of her life on horseback in some arid steppe.

She leaves the house to speed through the corn like she used to do when she was twenty-two and back from Canada and wanting to die—

We were so close!, she shouts to the wind. Too close. We almost made it away—Joan and I. Fled to Sedona. Escaped. Until she got the call: her ‘husband’ back in Indiana had ‘lost his marbles’, and submerged his hands in the vat of pig’s blood at work.

Damn Joan, she thought in all her rage, for overhearing the call and refusing to eat-sleep-move until they returned.

August eventually turned home that night, where she found her husband frozen on the couch in complete darkness. ___________ , he says. And then she asks: Why are you crying?

He wants then to beg forgiveness for everything. To get raucously sentimental, to break their ban on sweetness—

You knew, she thinks, reading his mind, You always knew this would happen.

A new wind is blowing. The crack builds in your forehead and water leaks through. Abstracted—you sit home all day and phase in and out. Grab an apple and bite into the sticker. Set your tongue to ice, boiling water. Shake a can of Coke and pop the tab to see if the laws of physics still apply.

Try to write a letter to your daughter. Steady one hand with the other. Slip to your car, try to drive. No keys. Where did ___________ put them? Pace around the block, but then all their eyes—

The neuroscientists love you. They never want you to heal. You are their Mecca, their Pale King, who they honor with canned peaches and cathode-diode switches and Rorschach blots.

Back home, your daughter holds you and weeps. Then she doesn’t. You’re impressed with how quickly she learned. There’s no talk of hospitals, August’s scar, or your Rapid Deterioration. ___________says, Pass the asparagus and ___________ replies, No problem Mom. Then turns to you and asks, How was your day?

Why names at all?, you wonder. And what is a name? Is it a nail to hold something down? People are temporary, but names are forever. No—too easy: Name equals Memory equals Stone.

What will they write on his stone? And how will they send him off to God without a name? God, take ___________ up into your Kingdom! But God’s there wondering, Who the hell is ___________ ?

It’s a reversal: for most people life offers the promise that you’ll enter unnamed and leave, at the very least, with a title, a term, one tiny gesture to separate you from everyone that has come before. It’s a promise that you are you, and that you will never come again.

—

About Hunter Thane Therron

Therron lives in southern Thailand. His work has appeared in the Tahoma Literary Review, the Superstition Review, Outlook Springs, the Little Patuxent Review, and others. He was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart prize by Sundog Lit, and is a past fellow at the ӦrӦ and Red Gate Residencies.

Web: https://htherron.wixsite.com/huntertherron Twitter: @huntertherron