The first time it happened, the look on his face had been one of appalled wonder — or so he guessed from the look of glee his daughter offered in return.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said, for even though she was mostly grown she still called him Daddy for reasons he neither understood nor encouraged. “It’s not gravy you mean, but fishing.”
Gravy? he thought. Fishing? There was too far a gap between the two terms to leap from one to another by any logic available to him. He had heard his voice say gravy while his mind was busy transmitting fishing to his tongue. He was amazed by what he heard coming out of his mouth, didn’t understand why it didn’t have some relation to his thoughts. But to his daughter he was merely the same old father: absentminded, distracted.
“Oh,” he said. “Of course. Termite.” And was amazed again. But to his daughter he was only playing a game, taunting her. And then, a moment later, he was fine. He could say fishing again when he meant fishing. He alone knew something was seriously wrong. When would his daughter realize? he wondered. What, he wondered, was happening?
There were days. They kept coming and going. He opened his mouth and he closed his mouth. Mostly what he heard form on his tongue would make sense, but sometimes not. When not, he entered into an elaborate and oblique process of trying to convey what he had in fact intended. In the best of circumstances the person or persons came up with the words themselves and offered them to him. Nodding, not speaking, he accepted them, hoping that when he next opened his mouth, his brain and tongue would have realigned.
He quickly acquired a dread of meetings, of speaking in front of his colleagues. Once, his language collapsed in the middle of articulating a complaint against his chairman, colleagues touching their glasses or faces and staring at him and waiting for him to go on. Fear-stricken enough to improvise, he stood, speechless and shaking his head, and walked out. Some of them later congratulated him on his courageous gesture, but others shied away.
His daughter began to notice a tentativeness to him, though that was not how she would have phrased it. But he could see her watching him, slightly puzzled. His past personal behavior had been eccentric enough, he discovered, that she was willing to give him an alibi for almost anything. And yet, she still sensed something was wrong. At night, after she claimed to have gone to bed, he would sometimes hear her sliding through the halls. He would shift in his cushion on the sofa to find her behind him, in the doorway, staring at the back of his head.
“Why do you melba?” he said to her. “Pronto.”
She looked at him seriously, as if she understood, and then nodded, returned to bed.
The dog began acting strangely, panting heavily around him, keeping a distance when he tried to approach, creeping slowly off with its tail flattened out. Am I the same person? he wondered. Perhaps that was it, he thought, perhaps he was not. Or perhaps he was only part of himself, and whoever else it also was had never learned to speak properly.
He tried to make friends with the dog again, offering it treats, which sometimes it took gingerly with its teeth, careful not to touch his hand.
In the classroom, where before he had been sure of himself, aggressive even, he became jittery, always waiting for the moment when the smooth surface of his language would be perforated. He took to dividing his students into small groups, speaking to them as little as possible. He tried, mornings before a class, to practice what he was going to say to thrust them into their groups as quickly as possible, how to deflect or quickly answer any potential questions. But no matter how many times he uttered his spiel perfectly beforehand, the actual moment of recitation was always up for grabs.
He instead began practicing alternatives for each sentence: on the first moment of collapse he would switch, attempting to get the same thing across with a different sentence pattern, entirely different words. But if a sentence crumbled, which it did once or twice per class — often enough in any case that the students, like his dog, like his daughter, like his colleagues, seemed now always to be looking at him oddly — the alternative usually crumbled away as well. But if a third variant did not hold, the fourth usually did, if there had to be a fourth, for by that time his mind had cycled around to a track that allowed it direct contact with his tongue again.
And thus it took a number of weeks before he found himself standing at the front of the class with all his options exhausted in the gravest misspeakings, each more outrageous than the last, so much so that he was afraid to say another word. The class, a carefully wrapped part of him noted, were more uniformly attentive than they had been at any other time in the semester, peculiarly primed to receive knowledge. But he had nothing to offer them. So instead he turned, wrote something banal on the board. Nature of evil. Consider and discuss. And then, suddenly, he could speak again.
For a time it seemed that writing would be his salvation. In the classroom, whenever his words started to come out maddened or stippled or gargled, he would turn to the board and write what he had actually meant. This worked fine up to a point, though he had to admit it sometimes looked odd when he suddenly stopped speaking and began to write. But still it could be dismissed by students as mere eccentricity, or as an attempt to avoid having to repeat something.
At home, such a strategy was more fraught, fraughter. Any time he tried it with his daughter, he found her turning away before he could find a pen, she perhaps believing that he had decided to ignore her. Elsewhere, too, it didn’t seem to work. At a restaurant, one could point at an item on the menu, but this wasn’t well received, and the one time he tried this in a social situation, it was thought he was making fun of the deaf.
But there were other places it did work. He could talk to his colleagues by note or by e-mail as long as he wasn’t physically present. He also tried leaving his daughter scrawled messages, but she chose to ignore them or pretended she hadn’t seen them. Once, when he asked her about one, whether she had seen it, she looked at him fixedly for some time before finally rolling her eyes and saying, Yes, Daddy.
“Well?” he said.
“Well, what?”
“What’s your answer?”
She shook her head. “No answer.”
“But,” he said. “Corfu?”
“Corfu?” she said. “In Greece? What are you talking about? Don’t play games with me, Daddy.”
“Sandwich,” he said, and covered his mouth.
“Here I am, Daddy,” she said, angry. “Right here. I’m usually right here. I’m not going to let you mess with me. If you want to ask me something, you can just open your mouth and ask me.”
But he couldn’t just open his mouth, he realized. He didn’t dare. Sandwich? he thought. He sat staring at her, hand over mouth, trying to gather the courage to speak, to misspeak, until, fuming, she gave a little cry and marched out of the room.
As his condition worsened, he stayed silent for hours. His daughter rallied, sometimes referring to him railingly as “the recluse,” as in How’s the old recluse this morning? at other times merely accusing him of becoming pensive in his dotage. Where, he wondered, had she picked up the word dotage?