Above all, the language was a wild rushing in my ears.
‘Can I come back?’ I asked Dad.
‘Only if you make no citations or cross-references to the silos or books.’
I could see he was smiling behind the mask.
For the next six years, I went underground, spending almost every afternoon down in the silos. Sometimes, I would see Dad already in there. Sometimes, he left a book for me on the floor near the door. None of the books showed the green-black taint like the one in the display case. I became sloppy about the biohazard suit until I stopped wearing it completely.
I inhaled mouldy words that grew into the breathy mycelium of story colonies. In the subterranean silos, they spread over my childhood brand narratives and decomposed them; at the slightest stirring, the downy must of language released puffs of sporious unbranded tellings.
5
The cover had the grain, colour and gloss of spilled flaxseed. It still answered with the animal heat of being hidden under my shirt. My fingers moved intently over the Brailleish bumps of its surface, imbibing its report of squid ink. No other old leather binding had ever painted my tongue paella black before. As I lifted the cover, which read, in gold lettering, Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy, it made the electric crackle of a loose connection. Inside, a bookplate marked ‘Ex Libris Dr Ungar Sever’ showed a brain under a bell jar. Anyone would recognise the name of the neuroscientist instrumental in the development of the LipService patch. But he couldn’t have been the first to own the book, as the date at the top of the frontispiece was 1869. Below was an inscription:
This book is bound in the hide of an indigent, one Eda-Lyn, who died at the almshouse. On conducting the autopsy, I discovered Taenia solium – the same bladder worm recently proven by Dr Friedrich Küchenmeister to be the juvenile form of the pork tapeworm – encysted in the tissue. Having seen the patient devouring ham and bologna sausage brought by a visiting relative in a singularly undainty fashion, I theorised a connection between her intemperate consumption and her death, and presented my findings as my first humble contribution to the Journal of Medicine. Thus, at least in death the parasitic classes contribute to the improved health of society. I flayed and dressed the skin according to the tanner’s art before handing it to a bookbinder.
I wanted to drop it but I couldn’t just let the last book that my dad gave me – and the only book I’ve ever taken from the repository – fall. My fingernails clenched around it, like teeth holding it away from the tongue, until I could finally release it safely. Trying to wipe away the black staining taste, my hands grazed heavily at my thighs, soothing and satisfying myself on the warm chanterelle mounds of my skin. Across from me was Eda-Lyn – perfectly cured. Why was this afflicted textual body the last thing that Dad put into my hands?
Five months were left before my eighteenth birthday and the rupture was coming some day soon. Even if it’s just a tiny rip in an artery wall, it might as well be one of those portholes – fistulas – they cut in the side of cows so they can keep shoving things in and pulling them out. Swivelling eyeball to the glass, the wearers of rubber gloves make sure the herd has a belly full of trademarked enzymes, which can digest the corporate message good and proper. The only difference is we cover our holes with patches.
Lying on my back in bed at night, I groped for that bulging aneurysm in a cerebral artery. I wanted to probe it and have it answer back with sensation like wiggling a loose tooth. But I couldn’t grasp it. All I ended up with was an impossible-to-pinpoint headache. The rupture is the unspeakable divide – no one’s words live to tell the tale. Ask anyone who has come of haemorrh-age what the bleed is like, and the answer is always exactly the same: For our share of mind we receive brand equity – our place in and piece of the capital. We have our premises; finally, we belong. We can never again be misunderstood. So there is fulfilment in our every fleeting fad. It’s catechism – the social principles programmed into every patch irrespective of branding. Only it doesn’t answer the question. It says nothing about how it feels for the power grid to fail in a whole district of the brain, reducing it to candles and a Primus stove.
I asked Dad about it. He started to rattle off the catechism, then stopped suddenly. Taking one of the copies of Great Expectations, he ripped out pages and randomly stuffed them back between the others before handing me the book. Holding the disordered sheets, a sickbed of incoherent narrative, I felt a cold intravenous drip of fear.
My classmates were all really hyped about haemorrh-aging. Osric was the first to bleed. It happened during a lesson on a day I skipped school to read at the book repository. I would’ve done that more often if I hadn’t been afraid the teachers would notice and start investigating, but I was sorry to have missed Osric’s rupture. The other kids didn’t seem to have been paying attention to the stuff I was interested in. Most of their talk was about how he’d managed to be the first. Some said it was the weird neck stretches everyone saw him doing several times a day – right arm over the top of his head so the hand covered his left ear and his head tilted to the right. Then he’d switch to the opposite side. Others said it was because he had built an affiliation to a non-consumer tech brand – something to do with plant automation – and the company had decided to fast-track him. None of it made much sense, but everyone was incentivised and neck stretches became a real signature move.
It’s not that I didn’t know the signs of haemorrhage – every six-year-old knows those from the symptoms jingle.
Little kids join hands in a circle to chant it and act out the symptoms – paralysis in the right arm, confusion, impaired speech and dizziness. They all fall down on the word ‘head’ and leap up again on ‘rehearsed’. The day I found Dad in the silo after school, the jingle was running through my head like the music of an ice-cream truck carried on a cold dark night. It was what made me feel sure that he’d had another brain haemorrhage. He had collapsed and I was afraid he wouldn’t be bouncing back up again like a kid.
He was lying among a whole shelf of scattered books that he must have pulled with him as he fell. One volume was spread open under his chin. He pinned it to his ribs with his left hand pressing against the binding. He tried to speak but I couldn’t understand him. He was a small crumpled note among a grandeur of words. Next to the papery pallor of his face, the leather cover had the oiled, taut look of a wrestler sitting on his chest. When I tried to take it from him so I could help him up, he resisted, making strange noises and pushing the book at me, not letting me put it aside. Only when I opened my hazmat suit and slipped it under my shirt did he sink back into the editions around him.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked him. He shook his head but the movement was a grating of gears.
Running up and down the aisles trying to find the book trolley, I felt the leather hide against the skin at the hollow above my hip brushing squid ink into the hollow of my palate. Quickly, a glaze of my sweat started forming on the book’s skin, dissolving the salty ink. I thought about the Tigris turning black with the words of the books of Baghdad’s House of Wisdom. The Mongols sacked the city in 1258 and emptied the libraries into the river. I had read about that here, in the silo. Now, as if I were on that riverbank, it was all being swept away from me. I couldn’t staunch the flow – the shelves of writing leaching out of my life, the language bleeding out of my father’s brain, my own haemorrhage.