The frequency of his mispeakings grew until finally he felt he could no longer meet his classes; the last few weeks of the term he phoned in sick nearly every day, or rather had his daughter phone in for him. He sent his lesson plans in by e-mail, got a colleague to fill in for him, finally wrote a letter to the department chairman requesting early retirement.
“You’re lonely,” his daughter said to him one evening. “You need to get out more.”
He shook his head no.
“You need to date,” she said. “Do you want me to set you up with someone?”
He shook his head emphatically no.
“All right,” she said. “A date it is. I’ll see what I can do.”
She began to bring home brochures from dating services, and left the Women Seeking Men page of the city’s weekly out with a few choice ads circled. Was he adventuresome? No, he thought, reading the ads, he was not. Did he like long walks and a romantic dinner for two on the beach? No, he did not care for sand in his food. Bookish? Well, yes, but this woman’s idea of high lit, as it turned out later in the ad, was John Irving. Unless the Irving referred to was Washington Irving of Sleepy Hollow fame. Was that any better?
And what would he put in his own ad? SWM, well past prime, losing ability to speak, looks for special companionship that goes beyond words? He groaned, and arranged everything in a neat little stack at the back of his desk.
A few days later, e-mail messages began showing up addressed to “Silver Fox” or “the silver fox” or, in one case, “Mr. F. Silver.” They were all from women who claimed to have seen his “posting” and who were “interested.” They wanted, they all said in different but equally banal ways, to get to know him better.
He dragged his daughter in and pointed at the screen.
“Already?” she said.
He nodded. He had begun to write something admonitory down for her to read but she was ignoring him, had taken over his chair, was scrolling through each woman’s message.
“No,” he said. “I don’t—”
“And this one,” she was saying, “what’s wrong with this one?”
“But I don’t,” he said. “Any of them, no.”
“No?” she said. “But why not? Daddy, you said you wanted to go on a date. I asked you, Daddy, and you said yes.”
No, he thought, that was not what he had said. He had said nothing. He opened his mouth. “Doctorate,” he said.
“Doctor?” she said, and looked at him sharply, her eyes narrowing. “Are you all right?”
That was not what he had meant his mouth to say, not that at all.
“You prefer the one that’s a doctor?” his daughter said, clicking open each message in turn as she talked, “but I don’t think any of them are.”
But what was he to do? he wondered. First of all, nobody would listen, and second of all, even if they did listen, he himself did not know, from moment to moment, what, if anything, he was actually going to say.
She was there, chattering away in front of him, hardly even hearing what she herself was saying. Why not tell her, he wondered, that something was seriously wrong with him? What was there to be afraid of?
But no, he thought, the way people looked at him already, it was almost more than he could bear, and if it came tinged with pity, he would no longer feel human. Better to keep it to himself, hold it to himself as long as possible. And then he would still be, at least in part, human.
In the end he took her by the shoulders and, while she protested, silently pushed her out of the room. His head had started to ache, the pain pooling in his right eye. He closed his door and then returned to the computer, deleting the messages one after another. They were all, he saw, carefully constructed, with each woman trying to present herself as unique or original or witty but each doing so by employing the same syntactical gestures, the same rhetorical strategies, sometimes even the exact same phrase, as the others. This is what it means to be immersed in language, he thought, to lose one’s ability to think. To speak other people’s words. But the only alternative is not to speak at all. Or was it? Nature of evil, he thought. Define and discuss.
Depressed, he glanced through the last three messages. God, his head hurt. The first message was addressed to “silver fox,” with three exclamation points following “fox.” It was from someone who had adopted the moniker “2hot2handel.” Music lover or bad speller? he wondered. He deleted it. The second-to-the-last one was to “F. Silver,” from “OldiebutGoodie.” Oh, God, he thought, and deleted it. The pain made his eye feel as though a knife were being pushed through it. The eye was beginning to water. He clenched it shut as tight as he could and covered it with his hand. He stood, tipping his chair over, and stumbled about the room, knocking into what must have been walls.
Someone was knocking on the door. “Daddy,” someone was calling, “are you all right?” Somewhere a dog was growling. He looked up through his good eye and saw, framed in the doorway, a girl.
“Tights,” he said, “cardboard boxes,” and collapsed.
He awoke to a buzzing noise, saw it was coming from an electric light, fluorescent, inset in the ceiling directly above his head. His daughter was there beside him, looking at his face.
He opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“No,” she said. “Just rest.”
He nodded. He was in a bed, he saw, but not his bed. There was rail to either side of him, to hold him in.
“I’m going to get the doctor,” she claimed. “Don’t move.”
Then she was gone. He closed his eyes, swallowed. The pain in his head was still there, but subdued now and no longer sharpened into a hard point. He rolled his head to one side and back again, pleased that he could still do so.
His daughter returned, the doctor beside her, a smallish tanned man hardly bigger than she.
“Mr. Hecker?” said the doctor, who set down a folder to snap on latex gloves. “How are we feeling?”
“Groin,” he said. Goddamn, he thought.
“Your groin hurts? It’s your head we’re concerned about, but I’ll look at the groin too if you’d like.”
Hecker shook his head. “No? Well, then,” said the doctor. “No to the groin, then.” He clicked on a penlight, peered into first one eye, then the other. “Any headaches, Mr. Hecker?”
He hesitated, nodded.
“Head operations in your youth? Surgeries of the head? Cortisone treatments? Bad motorcycle wrecks? Untreated skull injuries?”
Hecker shook his head.
“And how are we feeling now?” the doctor asked.
Hecker nodded. Good, he thought, good enough. He opened his mouth. The word good came out.
The doctor nodded. He stripped the gloves off his hands and dropped them into the trash. He came back and sat on the bed.
“I’ve looked at your x-rays,” he said.
Hecker nodded.
“We should chat,” the doctor said. “Would you like your daughter to stay for this?”
“Of course I can be here for this,” his daughter said. “I’m legally an adult. Be here for what?” she asked.
Hecker shook his head.
“No?” said the doctor. He turned to Hecker’s daughter. “Please wait in the hall,” he said.
His daughter looked at the doctor and then opened her mouth to speak, and then gave a little inarticulate cry and went out. The doctor came closer, sat on the edge of the bed.
“Your x-rays,” said the doctor. “I don’t mean to frighten you, but, well, I’d like to run some tests.” He took the folder from the bedside table and took the x-rays out, held them above Hecker, in the light. “This cloudiness,” he said. “Do you see it? I’m concerned.”