Grammar

Dear [name]

“Bibliography: Brekekekex Repent!; Knee me (as ‘Placenta Ridingwhip’ (allegedly)); Pitapataphysics; Haruspectra; Orthopoetics 0-II; Diacritic Mark (seeks diphthong over which to swoon). Her floorboard work was an eight-thousand-page swelling dubbed The Lampshade Papers; promising to be a prayerful disquisition on the nonsense verse of ‘beads and educators,’ the essay feeds the reader to whatever lurks beneath a billowing fabric of digressions.”—Madsen on Henrietta Bilquis

     “Thank you for your patience.”

     The couple at my desk have done nothing to signal how forbearingly they have awaited me. They follow me with their heads as I skip from the doorway to my deskchair, hang my coat, set down the file, and unfold the parapet.

     “Bran Macfaebhail Coracle and Asmo Como—let us commence again. Braa—” I hold the note, flick on the mics, “ —n Macfaebhail Coracle and Asmo Comolet. I am Dr. Taliesin Grim. Before I explain why we brought you in, I must make one thing very clear: everything I say to you is true. I will present the facts as I know them, and where there are deficiencies in my understanding, I will indicate them clearly, resisting the temptation to conceal the lacunae with my own predictions, however well-informed I may consider them to be. I must further emphasise that ‘truth’ as here employed is not the gum—” I’m fussing with my fingers as if searching for the word, “—Of faerie-fellers, sigil-makers…L’esprit de la pierre. If I inform you, for example, that a spider-like creature guards a treasure chest in a cave in the Ungoliant Mountains, I am not speaking of some unspecific boon procured once one has overcome some earthly source of apprehension; the ‘treasure chest’ is a padlocked wooden box (with golden hinges) wherein one may expect to find a wealth of precious metals and gems (coins and rings and threaded pearls…); the ‘spider-like creature’ is a monster I cannot describe with precision beyond noting its arachnid character, which is to say that it resembles a spider more than it resembles anything else within your frame of reference (or within mine). The purpose of this excursion is to inoculate you against symbolism. There is nothing feminine about the cave; there is nothing masculine about the mountain. The Ungoliant range, like the strong box and its sentinel, is a concrete object, existing inside space–time in the manner of this file and this chain.” It rattles. There’s an earring dangling from a link. “You must not, furthermore, permit the intertextual potential of the word ‘Ungoliant’ to feast on your attention. You will naturally want to make connections; I suggest that you suppress this urge. My words create but do not participate in change. Receive them as you would a beak: wholeheartedly.

     “Now, briefly—” pushpinned into cork, “—The ‘icthyotherapeutic insistence of humour’ in her manifold disguises.” Listing, “Jokes are potions of ingratiation favoured by lecturers and catflap infiltrators. ‘We laugh at unconcealed structure, and our skeletons grin.’ Perfection is the feigned imbalance of the tightrope walker, and there is no lover of the lighted path more inveterate than sin. Anticipate no ruse and no design beyond that present in a table.”

     “Why are we here?” Bran speaks because he thinks he must.

     “You were selected from a database of male–female sexual partners aged between eighteen and twenty-five in the summer of precarious lubricity. The pleasure each of you derive in contemplation of the other is apparent in your Internet activity. My department and its partner require one such couple to assist, at preset intervals, in the performance of a lamentably necessary ceremony. You may not decline.”

     “By whose authority are we detained?” Comolet remains headlit and silent.

     “Outbreaks of wanton escapism are checked by the Department of Good Grammar. We are directed by the Home Office to ensure the robustness of certain innate structural rules in defiance of intrusions from an outside context. Typically, we intervene before things become silly. But if we cannot nix anomalies at font, we redistribute them into the furniture. We are authorised to exercise proportionate impertinence to ensure all the players play along—hence your unmannerly enlistment—but we have modest means to offer generous solatium should nothing go dramatically awry.”

     “You’d rather pay than press us.” Comolet translates, peering through the ceilings at the sky. She’s some skin-travelled thing, grave-magical (my warty thoughts heap earth upon my coffin).

     “We find ourselves looping between clichés. I am at once the bureaucratic mouthpiece of a sinister government agency whose mundanity gestures towards catacombs with a fervour multiplied by the coffee rings, and psychopomp, and Master of Games. The prevalence of archetypes evidences only the faculty of thoughtforms to complete themselves. Your instrumentality is preordained. Nothing is personal. Now,” I tap the mic and draw my guests’ attention to the cameralens embedded in the west-wall-mounted, eggshell canvas, eyelashed with fly-catchers, languid, whiplike…“Let’s confirm for the reader that we’re all normal humans with normal human responses and save her sentences.”

     Part one permits three uncoloured interruptions. We signal its conclusion with monochrome footage from a CCTV angle; a grainy, windowlit functionary lets the silence sway. My hand, abhorrent in its detail, lifts the page.

     “Two amorous Welsh teenagers, Boyfriend and Girlfriend, explore the limits of their lust for one another with engorging terror. Boyfriend’s mother intrudes to see Girlfriend pupating in bedsheets while her underwear is kicked beneath the bed. The incident goes unaddressed but Boyfriend’s home is compromised. The house, however, on the Gower Peninsula, backs onto the Bishop’s Wood nature reserve, forty-six acres of limestone woodland on the hillside overlooking Caswell Bay, bestowing satisfying cover for clandestine trysts. They kiss beside the tin-strewn hearth of a replica iron age roundhouse on a moist midsummer eve and as the sun drips lulling honey on the knucklebones of Brandy Cove, the lovers push deeper into threadbare woods and skin-clinging delirium. Boyfriend dares Girlfriend to strip. Girlfriend dares Boyfriend to chase her. He grapples with her, lets her wriggle free of his embrace, and then she darts, spring-heeled, behind a groaning oak—and disappears.

     “Boyfriend teeters down the Acorn Trail. His eyes, in gnawing darkness, turn a dwarf into a treestump, into a reclining wooden sculpture, into Girlfriend, back into a treestump, into something twig-fingered and purposeful. Before his senses settle on their story, it asks him why he wanders from the forest path as if approaching an altar, with nothing but his blood to slake its stone. Boyfriend wonders if the price is not already paid and protests that an offering, unknowingly made, should be exchanged for the muscle of the supplicant. His fretfulness quelled by the lichenous coils of a palliative hand, he agrees to play a game. Should he win, he will ingrain the night with starships, and his consort, from her wind-concealed court, will beckon a rat-catcher to his garden door; should he lose, he will lose even the wherewithal to vampirise his ill fortune, writing poems about poems for the rest of his frail days. Nothing of Girlfriend was recovered. Boyfriend perished in our care.

     “‘Kraken’ is the name we give to perturbations in the causal weave. We foraged warp and weft the wood for signs of roadside picnicking and found the Kraken standing at the shoreline at low tide, peering out into the sea. To tame a Sea Monster, you must control the feel of the encounter. The beach was several days occulted sans official word: an ersatz filmcrew closed the roads; the coastal paths and woodland trails were surveilled by Grammarians. The goal was not to prohibit interlopers but to tread the avid few into the story—control the mise-en-scène. We finished our coffees on the steps, disposed of our paper cups in the appropriate receptacles, then marred our boots with sand. We prevailed on the Kraken that ours were the formalities in line with which ‘twould prove a more delighting foe—not as Sea Monster, all-stirring, of a kind with awful seas, but as minotaur, importunate device, a terror that stays in its lane.

     “A restive spirit is the trial of ones who simulate as they explore; the reach that keeps the Hatter in the doorway keeps the Kraken far from sickly light. One need only trap them once, propose a different game, with simple rules: a devil’s wager, brokered to accommodate a surface-hugger’s greed but parched by the evaporative parading of a lawyer’s pen. If the tribute, charged with the completion of a simple (but not unfailable) task, satisfies the pre-agreed conditions of success, he (and it is he) will be escorted from these offices, girl clutching his bicep (who’ll be doubtlessly impressed), and, as I say, modestly remunerated; should he fail, then the Kraken pulls the girl into the sea—excuse me, it will be as if she never graced the welkin with her acclamation of bonds, erased from the smudged prints of her fingers to the faerie-faint impressions of her feet. It might happen that our tribute remembers her, it might that he forgets, it might that we all forget (would that our partner be so thorough); there are contingencies in place for all deformities of memory, every penny plucked from the crumble.

     “To which drumless cul-de-sac she will be shepherded will be a mystery, which Elysian pasture or cathedral of dried blood, which bible-black lagoon or witch’s kiln, which nest. Comolet (for yes, your assumption is correct), whether food or entertainment, guest or prioress, will be brought to salt by hook, by crook, or disgraced Cassiopeia, rosy in the deathwish of a remnant sun. We touch the edges of the map beneath the showerhead with every fortune furled and unfurled. Look to the sky. The sea is everywhere.” I turn another page.

     “The nature of the game itself is broadly unimportant; it must be mechanically uncomplex, completable in minutes, apprehensible to any man whose thumbs are still his own, and victory cannot be guaranteed. We favour Tetris for its tendency to cling to the insides of the eyelids—we are all of us, in our own way, zealously transferring the enclosing circles of our pharmacopoeia into the enclosed ones. A target score of three hundred and thirty three was judged to be appropria—”

     “Tetris.”

     “—it is simple and susceptive to brambled analogies with the Beheading Tale of Lynette and Lyonesse. But don’t let that distract you; rituals are daubed with mucilaginous allusions, the promises of soil-ravished nymphs, wet-kneed Bathory…

     “Now, the time is 10:09. At ‘31, you’ll be escorted from my office. Two operatives—Caecilius and Janet—will direct you to your places. Coracle will be sequestered in a soundproof booth which he will take to be a closet with a classroom table (gum-crusted, profanity-inscribed...) clutched between steel shelf racks. There will be a single plastic chair. On the table, he will find a tablet and a desklamp. He may adjust the brightness and acquaint himself with The Beheading Game’s mechanics before 11:11, at which time our partner will expect his response. Comolet will pass the ceremony in the brochure sheen of a capacious foyer designed to recreate, in the arrangement of its seats, the stultifying aura of an airport lounge. Her intellect will shrink to preserve itself as untenanted elements flap against her hull. Nothing will capture her attention but a single wooden beam, incongruous amidst bluebottle catacombs and thought-proofing synthetic fibres. Within minutes, she will dry out like a dead tree. If Coracle satisfies out partner’s needs, the light will turn coarse pink with a sound like a car door breaking off a muffled plea. Comolet will slip away the way she entered, hurriedly, into the mighty arms of her beloved. But should her lover underperform, we will expect to find the room just as we left it, with the redolence of red wine and rosemary hanging in the air.” Part two (crissriss): a pallid priest pets Socrates upon the portico. A harpy drops from the sky. I knock the table.

     Coracle and Comolet regard one another. Ink flees from the paper.

     “You have allotted time for questions, unless there is more track still to be set?” To Bran’s inquiry, I display my empty hands. “Then I won’t squander it on disbelief  but will instead append my misgivings.” Formality. Says ‘misgivings’ ‘sif he were addressing her. “Unspoken in your presentation was what must have been a lengthy planning session, involving one or more extended interactions with your—I must say, euphemistically christened, despite the assurance of your preamble—‘Part-Ner.’” He’s penning the syllables in with his fingers. “Should I picture you pitching the Tetris ploy to some miasmal godthing on the beach, or did Shub-Niggurath attend an office meeting, perhaps via Zoom?”

     “We are appraised as seashells then replaced or broken on the stone. We show up with our intent drooping meatily like apples from an appletree and should we leave the beach, our offer will have been retained. The rest is mundane.”

     “What do they look like?”

     “If I were able to replace the creature with an abbreviated list of its qualities, I would not be relying on the breadth between ‘Partner’ and ‘Kraken’ to insinuate the essence of the thing; a juxtaposition begets an aesthetic—a phosphene which, in its grainy constellation, alerts us to the chasm between objects and εἴδωλα. I invite you to walk through it like a curtain.”

     “Any literal description of the fae abomination would stifle its allure.” Bran says dismissingly.

     “When I was a child, I dreamt I found a monster in my parents’ garden growing from the bark of a tree. Its neck extended from the wood and it considered me, nose to nose, lepidopterously, holding my gaze as I backed away and tried to look away. It looked stupid, elklike, gawbbling the tongue of Adam like a cartoon bear. I hated it. I feared it too but I hated it, like the Mothercare tree, I hated it. I swore at it, and it gawbbled. ‘Gong gong gong.’ It grawbbled. The monster on the beach looked nothing like it. But I remembered the dream as I walked back to my car.”

     “That such creatures would assume the shape of any vessel you provide—so long as there’s a promise of nubile flesh, an altogether too-tellurian predilection—is preposterous.” Bran insists. Comolet presses her thighs together. “You speak at once of an automaton—a mechanical Tom Tit Tot—and something so extrinsic as to caper beneath nature’s bedsheets, poking eyeholes with twig-thumbs—there, a tower toppled by a worm!” He’s pointing at my coat. “A ‘Bloop’ is heard in ‘97. Oceanographers are stunned.”

     “Here is something they become entangled in, and they fret with their chains as Grays with farmers.” I take the image from a dream, quarried through ears of yellow corn. “We asked one where it came from once. A priest, or so we called it. It told us that there are no saints in thoughtful afterwords and spoke of a tin church near the A4514, where through a checkerwork of twigs the ailing sun scavenges the forestbed for needles. The Earth is secured by the conveyances of plain-featured love, by sorceries, philosophies, calloused palms, and honeyed lips. Through concupiscence, our visitors acculturate. How do they become entangled? Mucilage, the pearly words of feathered poets.”

     “Poets, poets.” Bran repeats.

     “Every sentence wombed by Angrboða.”

     “This place,” He’s gesturing, worlds between each word, “Extends their design.”

     “So we may wonder.”

     “Apart from us, they would not be made perfect.”

      “We are ἀγοραί where apparitions come to sell their wares. The coppersmith clods from pavement slab to pavement slab to stop the sky collapsing.”

     Matter-of-factly: “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe anything you say.”

     “If I were lying, I would make the situation savoury; ‘with prostituted rasps, I’d parent glowing marble.’ I would not cloak the pantheon with bladderwrack, or undermine the masonry with errant squid.”

     “How often is the ritual conducted?”

     “Every June 25th”

     “And for how long?”

     “This is the fourth year.”

     “Of those who previously won…”

     “What of them?”

     “Do they tell of their abduction from a quayside taproom, lipless men in courtesy light—"

     “They were normal men.”

     “—a woodland walk, a game of Tetris on which lives depend.”

     “My presentation of the facts has not convinced you; what will you say when you leave here that might stay one’s disbelief? What will you pronounce from the decentred centre and displaced periphery of your gretelled cosmography? How did you come to be here, Bran? Unburied the night you prised a spider from its crevice, or shadowed in the blökld glow of worm-packed snow?

     “If Comolet is taken—.”

      “She will never have existed. If she survives, start a podcast, revel in the netlike chrysopoeia of idolatrous astrologies.”

     Comolet unpursed. Somnolent recognition of the apothec’ry, picture-maker. “Let’s begin. Nothing to muster anyhow.”

     Bran, beset, the clockface brushed from Comolet, regards the officespace anew: the paperlight, the navy blinds, the bookspines (red and peeling), the picture of my daughters (smiling, sly), the coatless hanger.

     “You did nothing wrong to get here.”

     “Can I practice?”

     “It is soon time to depart.”

     “I could not lose you.” Looking at her.

     She is standing. “Do not bury me before I’m dead. I’ll see you soon.”

     The Department was founded in a University bathhouse on the slopes of the Feldtbuch der Wundartzney where I gambled on the kindness of a childhood accomplice. Witches and witch-bottles collaborate to help me block my thoughts. This, the gravebirth of apotheosis: Goblet gold/the cruor on her sunset-slickened body/the full flower of her countess-callous temper. The owls on my coffee mug are scowling at me—I was twenty-three, I drew the picture of St. I.V. of the Priory and let him watch me sleep for several years, sequestered in a deaf man’s keep. The office is empty. No appointments. There is bubble wrap beneath my carpet. Comolet, the straw-gold name of a slumbering street, sand-strewn. Comolet. I write it. Cobbled blue. One, two, three, and where is four? I will use her for something.