Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

Fukiyama, the ancient Japanese maître d’, tired of and not understanding the constant inspection, attempts to stare Kroger down and ends up nervously resorting his menus and table diagrams. August turns back to the bar and says, “But this is your night, not mine. You were telling me about Brockden’s demise, I believe.”

To say that Wylie Brown has sacrificed her young life to the memory of a two-hundred-year-old schizophrenic murderer might be overstating the case. To say that the life of Edgar Carwin Brockden has been Wylie’s single, abiding fixation since she first heard about the Minster of Wormland at the age of fourteen might not.

Born in Mettingen, Pennsylvania, in the time of a disgraced president, Wylie relished the kind of idyllic childhood that can lead to a fuzzy bitterness when the balance of one’s existence proves less serene or fulfilling. But when she found herself unable to sleep one night a week after her first, long-delayed menstruation, and uncharacteristically turned on the television set in her parents’ modest ranch house to witness an embarrassingly shabby, Z-budget retelling of the Brockden saga, complete with once-noble Shakespearean lead reduced by alcoholism and serial divorces to perform in creature features and, ultimately, domestic wine commercials, Wylie’s fate was forever altered.

Hollywood may have played fast and loose and cheaply with the tale of the most famous colonial familicide, but neither the bad dialogue nor the cornball farmhouse sets could dull the central intensity of the story for this young and deeply impressionable girl. And when the credits rolled and the television was reduced back to reruns of Boston Blackie , Wylie Brown knew she had found her calling.

She took down her bedroom posters of koala bears and boy singers and replaced them with maps of a New England factory city called Quinsigamond. She put her boxes of jigsaw puzzles in the cellar and had her library card relaminated. And she struggled through all four of the outdated, spine-broken, and historically suspect biographies of E. C. Brockden that were available at that time. The idea of a person being driven mad by his love of language and books was something she needed desperately to understand for reasons that did not become evident until years later.

In the meantime, she pursued this new obsession with a passion that argued against her tender age and made her parents wonder where they had failed and why their daughter had to become the oddball of the neighborhood. For her part, Wylie was already beyond their bourgeois controls. She had embarked on an intellectual and spiritual journey, intent on solving an esoteric mystery that had confounded scholars for generations: what happened to Edgar Garwin Brockden and why did he slaughter his family?

Compulsion eventually brought Wylie to the promised land of Quinsigamond straight out of the Streeter School with a newly minted Ph.D. She’d done her undergrad work at the University of Pennsylvania, where she impressed the grant officers enough to get a full boat to the Streeter. She’d spent the last five years studying the spectrum of the book arts at a variety of institutions around the globe, loving Iowa City and later, Florence, where she conquered all aspects of restoration and preservation, aggravated by Manhattan where she vanquished the complexities of book appraisal, finance, and risk management, and ending up, inevitably, here in Q-town, a Southwick Fellow at the Center for Historical Bibliography. It was a sweet package that any book maven would swoon over: all-access status to the Center’s holdings, housing in the adjoining Southwick Manse, a more than generous living stipend, and the surety that at the end of her research she could just about name her position at any public or private repository on the planet.

But the only place Wylie Brown was interested in going was the City of Words, which she sometimes calls the City of Worms, also known as Brockden Farm, a place where tragedy and madness had once played themselves out in a linguistic nightmare that resonates to this day.

“The obsession with the worms came after he arrived in America,” Wylie explains to her employer. “I’m sure of it. The researchers who point to the Roscommon Journals are reading in. They see what they want to see. You have to be hard-nosed in this area.”

“I can imagine,” Kroger responds, spooning some Crab Rangoon onto his secretary’s plate and wondering what this young woman might look like spread naked on the floor of his library.

“You can’t explain away the fact that this specific breed of worm did not exist in Ireland,” Wylie says, as always getting a little too excited about her topic. “Brockden couldn’t have had contact until the family was established here in the States.”

Trouble flares at the other end of the bar. Word has come down that the city’s finest car thieves are playing a session of Shock the Monkey down on Eldridge Ave and some of the bizboys have whipped out their cell phones and are barking orders to their street bankers, arguing the odds, laying down wagers that could bankrupt a small municipality. Problem is, the phones are wreaking havoc with the karaoke machine and for a couple of these boys, who’ve waited all week for the one moment when they can shut down interest rates and carrying costs and focus solely on the lyrics to “Mack the Knife,” that’s just unacceptable.

But before any Hong Kong silk can be torn, order is restored as Canton Mia, the barkeep, who is known by all to have Tang’s ear and, possibly, some measure of his heart, hammers the ceremonial gong that sits next to her cash register and delivers a quiet, sisterly edict — karaoke will carry the night. The cell phones are slipped back inside jacket pockets and the offending gamblers buy a round of Kamikazes for the whole group.

And everyone’s happy again except for August Kroger. He’s never been good at waiting and when the waiting occurs in the context of a foreign culture, his anxiety is tweaked a notch forward by this discomforting sense of otherness all around him. One would think this would have branded him a disastrous candidate for immigration, but Kroger has found America anything but unfamiliar. In the ways that count, Quinsigamond is the most natural milieu in which August Kroger will ever exist.

“The central mystery to me,” Wylie Brown says, emphasizing the me , and pausing to chug down a generous wallop of Cranberry Morpheme, “isn’t how, exactly, the murders took place, but what was going through Brockden’s mind, what exactly pushed him beyond the brink.”

“Will we ever really know?” Kroger asks, trying for polite and managing only indulgent.

“I don’t mean to be egotistical,” Wylie says, having difficulty spearing a collection of sesame-fried sprouts, “but I swear I’m on the verge. You spend this many years studying another life … I don’t know, you begin to think in the same patterns, your brain starts to move in the same orbit as that of your subject.”

“That,” August says, surprised to find himself intrigued, “sounds dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Wylie says, considering his meaning, suddenly a little dizzy. “You mean because of the murders? Because of what happened to the family in the end?”

Kroger shrugs and leans across the table to wipe yellow sauce off her chin with his napkin.

He says, “What is the saying about looking too deeply into the eyes of a monster?”

It’s a mistake. Wylie reacts as if she’s been personally insulted.

“This is exactly the kind of preconceived prejudice I have to continually fight—”

“Please, Ms. Brown, I meant no—”