Tim Horvath - Understories

Staying with this, I swept around your nipples, the right one slightly lower and rotunder, and you seemed in no rush for me to move on, and that’s when I got the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stuck in my head like a syrupy pop song. That class you’d taken in Social Dimensions of Language and Something-or-other, hijacked, as you put it, by the insistence of certain blowhard classmates of yours to debate endlessly about these dudes, Sapir and Whorf, and remember how for the longest time I got mixed up and thought they were on opposite sides and not, like, an illustrious dynamic duo? It’s a bit revisionist, the way I’m telling this, because as I was circumnavigating your areolas I wouldn’t have remembered their names, which certainly make their appearance in my spiral bound (3/12, 3/24—31 passim, 4/12, etc.), but at the time I was fully focused on when to exit this rotary and head north, eventually south, but north first. Soon enough, I knew, we would be going at it, but that was the very matter that brought me up short and made me realize that we needed to have this conversation. The words that occurred to me in that instant were going at it, and while I didn’t remember Edward Sapir or Benjamin Whorf, I did remember your having wavered back and forth about how you felt about their argument, and how in the end you sided with them over Chomsky, who, of course, I’ve heard of ( syntax another word we sort of share, same same but different). Eeny meeny miney moe, you wound up believing, against McKay, even though he had to sign off on your diss, you dissed him; you thought that it made a difference, the words you used, or, as you put it, those available in any given language were the tools you could think with and thus the words that shaped what existed for you, that if you didn’t have the words for, say, cornflower blue, you wouldn’t see it as different from, oh, Persian blue, and if you didn’t have a word for blue at all you simply wouldn’t see the color or it would appear the closest color whose name you did, in fact, know, maybe black, and I had thought about this a little bit, though admittedly not too much until I was figure skating — the cold of the rink because I was reliving the whole Eskimo snow thang in my mind (no longer on that cumbersome zamboni, though) — round the nipples.

And at some point in my looping, I realized that if those guys were right, if how the words you used actually determined what you were thinking and thus what you could do, that “getting it on” was precisely the problem, that we talked about “getting it on” and thus were fated to “get it on” or “mess around” or “make love” instead of doing certain other things, like that “fucking” would be a far cry from “getting it on,” an utterly different act, though maybe not the one wanted, but what if it was, and maybe your aversion to that word, to fucking, was as woeful as the case of the boy you told me about who refused to learn the various words for reindeer — the rideable, the skittish, the recently castrated — and whose herding ability would thus pale when stacked up against his dad’s and his dad’s before that, and what if on occasion fucking was exactly what both of us wanted and needed, and what, then, about screwing, which would mean that one of us, probably you, was getting screwed, but maybe that’s okay, maybe not such a bad thing — but inside a cunt? A mons? A vagina? A pussy? A kitty ? And are we talking a standard slotted? A Phillips head? A Torx? A hex socket? Maybe we could start out getting it on, then cross over, sublimely but profoundly as breasts turn into tits, to fucking, or to something else entirely, schtupping or boinking, dogging or banging or humping or shagging or hitting the skins or making love or doing it, though what is this “doing it,” a great big fuzzball over our genitalia like a blur lens on network TV? I didn’t stop the action at that moment but knew that we’d have to have this conversation. Or, since you and your fellow linguists seem to love nothing more than a good conference, here, let’s call this the First Annual Colloquium on Our Future Sexual Nomenclature, zipping and unzipping allowed and even encouraged, and okay maybe I’m not saying all this, maybe this is just what I’ve written down to be able to say a small portion of, maybe this is the last conversation on the topic we’ll have, ever, or the last period, you and Tilkez going your way and I mine, no child support owed to a language, not my kid anyway, plus, a language that, quite frankly, is going to die, may as well bear a fatal illness deep in its chromosomes, no matter how motherly you are and no matter how much love you pour onto it, how tenderly you nurse.

Even so, I can’t help but want us to come up with some other ways to express what we want/need from each other, maybe splinking or frooling or enchpeshing, or maybe the —ing is all wrong, maybe reen or gruph or oozanoo, maybe we’ll rotate through ’em, try them out one by one, me calling through gritted teeth, “Sapir me!”, you with your throat thrown back, “Whorf me just so,” and maybe one word will shoot straight to the part of my brain that controls my cock (paltry name), which, in turn, too often I can admit, controls me, or by some fluke of random chance we’ll wind up with something like the Tilkez term for it, or perhaps they’ll have more terms than you’ll ever know, secret, magic-charged ones they’d die sooner than confide to some fancy-braided linguist living and teaching in the US of A and occasionally swooping down to interview them, but maybe somehow you can trick them into teaching you one, seducing one of their paragons of virility, making yourself irresistible, dabbing yourself with that perfume that makes you seem like you’re wearing leather that someone spilled absinthe on, slipping into that black negligee that shimmers over you like liquid mica, starting each of your words with a consonant our language simply doesn’t possess, formed by lips against skin, pursing and releasing, and you’d know just enough Tilkez to get you into the room, but it would be your fluency in gasp and touch that would bring him in the dead of night to such a point of agonizing arousal that in his own home, or hut, he’d betray, to his horror, at the cost of his honor, that most longed-for word, a word that, once he’d fallen asleep, you’d steal away with into the darkness, risking your own limbs to bring it back, clutching it like a fragile object on the plane, sweating while bearing it through customs, a word that climbs its way through the ribs three and four at a time, obliterating the names of body parts and feelings and whole rooms and all those things for which we formerly thought we had names.

The life of an urban planner is at once both more and less exotic than it might appear.

Raedmeon is a city built by committee, riding in on slow, lumbering beasts of burden, Weston a committee man if ever there was one. Among his secret joys is the way the dry cleaner folds and boxes his shirts, the new-map sensation of the creases cascading over his shoulders and chest each morning. He likes that he knows what the competing interests in the room are at any given moment: Camilla Barber’s predictable cooing about “sustainability,” Martinez’s operatic enthusiasm for x, y, or z, swelling with his Adam’s apple in the hour before lunch, then retreating into an afternoon of spent indifference.

Each night, the ancient elevator hoists Weston up to the sparse apartment where he finds himself amidst light and shadows, a furnace that talks him through the night in Hephaestian tongues. A cot does for him; he is not impervious to the image of himself sunken in four-poster opulence in a spread of red paisley satin, maybe backed in goosefeather, but recognizes the chances of this are remote. Sleep may be luxury and indulgence for some out there, those in the elegant apartments his eye falls on beyond his sill, with its gouges and blackened wicks. For him, sleep is as crude and functional as fuel. It catalyzes him for eight hours of sifting through statistics, rendering diagrams and schematics, the endlessly rigorous and recursive tasks of engineering a veritable universe packed into 14.82496 (he can go on) square miles.