and a twelve-volume set of Goethe (
volumes 1–15). What was here was there and what was there, here.
In the background, the two Grundig TK 45 suitcase reel-to-reel tape decks, friendly-looking fellows: each one had two big spools for eyes and a set of push-button teeth along the bottom. The left was slaved to the right with a bit of wire so that they would start and stop simultaneously, controlled by the playback buttons on the right-hand unit. RCA cables fed into a Y-connector that had been modified so that the right tape deck played only in the headphones’ right ear cup, and the left deck played only in the left.
When Turk found him, the decks had spun out their reels and the flopping tails of tape were spanking the heads at about fifty bpm. As mentioned, her father looked to be snoozing peacefully, and she reached over him and turned them off, unalarmed. Not a light sleeper, it usually took him a while to come around, and after some gentle nudges Turk finally gripped him by the shoulders and gave him a coconut-tree shake. Pale, a distant look in his eye, he rose, tapped his chest, and said something that sounded like, Obligartiamo essa boulxin plang qualz.
Turk, considering the options available to her father—Esperanto, Italian, Chinese, German, Dutch, Schweizerdeutsch, Wallisertiitsch, Creole, Persian, De Gammon—all of which he spoke on a conversational level, all of which she thought she might have heard within the miasmic tones he’d uttered, not to mention hints of a couple of others with which he had a passing familiarity—a touch of Gullah or Hokkienese?—answered as she’d always done, speaking only some Bornean tongues and a couple of the more pedestrian Romance languages herself: ¿Que?
He obliged, even in his diminished state attempting, as always, to teach by example, and, under the impression he was repeating himself, slowly drawing out the words so she might make some sense of their construction; to his alarm, what came out of his mouth bore no resemblance to what he’d said before. Stung. in. tr’amal. eng. er. wayeh! he said. His fingers walked over his lips, as if to identify the strange source of these splatter paintings. Turk was now alarmed.
A stroke, she thought. He’s obviously had a stroke.
The Brunns were not a particularly affectionate family—reunifications after extended absences had always unfolded like middle school dances, no one sure where to put their heads, their hands, their—dear god—their bodies, the advances and retreats comical if not for the desperate tang of anxiety, the frozen, apologetic rictuses, all in the name of a simple embrace—and Turk found herself patting her father down, as if searching for a weapon, her hands tattooing the length of his arms, legs, torso, though she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps for the same reason Peter insisted on touching the wound in Jesus’s side. A person who loses his lingual ability does suddenly transform into an alien being, profoundly unknowable.
It was a few weeks after her father had been installed within the taupe and avocado confines of the Pickering Institute, his own macaronic limbo, before she could approach the tapes. They stood in four neat towers on his desk, each slender BASF box identified with a letter, A–Z, each one preceded by (U) for Urdu or (D) for German. She knew nothing about what he’d been working on, and he had by then become a monolith, speechless and nearly motionless (his writing, before he froze up, was just as bad as his talking: given a pencil, he moved it, but imperceptibly, taking an entire day to form a cursive I), thus he wasn’t much help. She suspected that he had been developing a course of home study that would allow the Brunn Institute to capitalize on all the stereo equipment coming onto the market.
The setup on his desk was easy enough to figure out. She put on the headphones and began with the tapes that were still loaded on the machines. She rewound the spools, but she was in no hurry to depress the START key, and her finger rested atop the smooth white cube until she felt she’d amply prepared to receive the secrets of what had derailed her father. Physically, he’d been fine after the attack. The doctors allowed that it was possible, if undiagnosable to the standards of modern medicine, that he’d suffered a mild stroke, which accounted for his aphasia. At first he’d appeared capable of understanding when spoken to in English or German, though he responded with gibberish. After a week he seemed to have lost his ability to comprehend any form of communication and he’d sunk into a depressive state, sitting silent as a stone in his wheelchair. Small groups of teachers from the Brunn Institute were brought in to see if he’d respond to any of the forty-five languages offered at the school. If they made sense to him, he didn’t, or couldn’t, show it—and by the end of the month he exhibited signs of distress (rapid breathing, eye-rolling) unless he was facing a featureless white wall.
Turk might as well have been sitting in front of a pair of guillotines. She detected in the machines’ stillness a predator’s coiled study of its prey, though eventually she swallowed, threw back her shoulders, and pressed the key. The spools began to turn. Test tones hummed a three-dash ditty at 220-440-220, synchronous in the right and left headphones, followed by a few seconds of tape hiss, and two voices began speaking, Urdu on the right, German on the left. Men’s voices, evenly matched in pitch and tone, identical in volume, similar in their cadence, though not matched word-for-word. In the gaps she could make out specific tones in Urdu, or pick up a word or two in German. She pulled the right cup away from her ear and listened to the German. It was Nietzsche. Zarathustra’s prologue. She put the Urdu back to her ear and removed the German side. She listened to the rolling song of the Urdu, picking out Zartosht here and there before replacing the German cup, closing her eyes, and linking her fingers over her belly.
Comprehension was a pinball shooting back and forth between two bumpers, impossible to catch, impossible to control, and she eventually found a space between her head and the window, somewhere over the desk, into which she could focus her mind, a place that allowed her to hear without listening, as if she were a child sleeping in the backseat, catching splashes of her parents’ conversation from the front mixed with the buffeting of an open window, the crescendo of a car blowing by in the opposite lane. A mellow, passive state of existence. The tapes ran for nearly an hour and Turk scarcely moved. Her mind wandered, tripping over memories that had been buried for years, odd sequences of images—a field of corn, a box of donuts, a curl of black hair on a white sheet, a fence, a newsstand, a pencil sharpener, the face of a woman she’d loved—and she’d recoil, reintegrate with the physical world, she’d feel the interlocking web of her fingers, the prickle of the rug beneath her feet, her eyelids bursting bright red, spotty, dark, and she’d slip back into another sequence, and the languages would rise up in her head and fall away, and she wondered what her father had heard, what difficulty he must have had in throwing his supremely analytical mind forward, away from cognition, from linguistic structure, identification of proclitics, the intricacies of transliteration…
She’d begun to wonder if he had embarked on a deliberate act of self-abnegation, an attempt to reach a state of divine blankness, a slippery, liquid emptiness, endless and featureless, an ethereal water, if that’s even what it was, not the angular, assertive stuff we have on earth, when the tapes stopped. She opened her eyes and reached up to remove the headphones, aware of a slight spatial distortion, a little blurring of vision, and the knuckles of her right hand bumped the plastic headphone cup before her fingers found purchase. She’d just set them down on the desk when she was overtaken by a wave of nausea. A burst of air rose up from her stomach like a weather balloon and exited as hoarse and resonant as a bullfrog’s call. She tumbled out of the chair, head spinning. A gyro had broken loose inside her skull. No matter which way she rolled, she was falling ass over teakettle. The floor was the ceiling, gravity in revolt. She grabbed a leg of the desk and held on for dear life, moaning, burping, moaning, burping. When her bowels turned to lava, she dragged herself across the floor toward the bathroom and climbed into the tub.