To continue somewhat bluntly and in an inescapably data-driven way, I have also been compelled to record the instances in which we’ve been intimate: initiating event, salient circumstances, degree of success as evidenced by noises evoked, nipple ascendancy, the glow factor, the last of which especially I can admit is somewhat subjective. And if the recording of your anecdotes has been an act of refusal to consign to the waste bin of memory, you might ask is the same true of this record of physical intimacy, and the answer, I think, would be no, that all the jottage on real unzipping bears a rather different purpose from the scribbling about, say, the time you peed your Skivvies at a wax museum, nor is this just some compendium of exploits that might become fodder, a refresh button for my alpha-male status. No, this chronicling of sexual acts is more akin to what you’ve talked about in terms of your graduate work, which, looking back, I can pretty much see that I was sort of aholeish about at first, probably as a result of my never having heard so much as a whisper, before meeting you, about endangered languages. Obviously, you brought me up to speed quickly enough, and I became, if not a connoisseur, at least an appreciator of the delightful factoids you’d bring home, like the one about the tribe that had like a built-in GPS system in their brains. But there was that one you always seem to circle back to, Tilkez, not a dialect but a full-blown language, as you explained to me — very lucidly, I might add — one of the thousands around the world that are not being passed down to the younger generations, who instead are fixated on American sports apparel and “the Snooki situation” and the differences between the PSP2 and 3 rather than mastering the nuances of some creaky old language, and what, I ask, in my extremely pragmatic fashion, which we can both admit is something you find quite alluring, what is the purpose, exactly, of preserving a language if it is in its death throes, prolonging its frail, post-double-hip-replacement existence? It would seem that natural selection has made its choice and, for whatever reasons, fair or un-, this “Tilkez” has not made the cut, been pink-slipped — we need the bed. I mean, it’s not as though these people have suddenly been rendered mute, not like this language is uniquely essential to them, like their glottal muscles and lips are simply incapable of forming the shapes necessary to speak otherwise, not like they can no longer say hi, communicate what to plant and how many rows, convey that leopards have been sighted in the foothills. No, they can do this as matter-of-factly as ever before, maybe better is what I’m thinking; maybe it wouldn’t hurt them to learn the new ways. It’s like old programming languages — the only ones piddling around trying to keep them alive are the guys from whom technophiles derive their reputations for insufferable geekiness, I mean, anyone who’s sitting around and compiling Pascal and Basic A and Ada and Forth, well, we’ve talked about this, of course, how compiling means something totally different in our respective fields, in yours it would actually be collecting, whereas in mine it relates to translation to machine blah blah blahnguage, but my God.
Yet, at the moment when I took a staunchly, some would say classically masculine pragmatic stance, a look came across your brow, an expression like a bank of clouds covering — nay, smothering — the moon, and you told me about how beautiful Tilkez was, that once you got to know a language, not “know” in the sense that you could speak it, because you couldn’t, then or now, so it’s not that, but know. . well, the way you described it to me triggered, as I was writing it all down afterward, what I can only call a pang of jealousy toward the damned language. Yes, I know, I sound like a little bit retarded just confessing such a thing, but the way you talked about it it was like you were describing a person, and to me Tilkez is undoubtedly guy, buff/chiseled/loaded, maybe because you told me all about the very masculine Tong-th-song ritual accompanying adolescence in the same conversation, not that the language has anything particularly to do with that grueling hunt and the chewing of raw flesh and the ritual garb and the ornamenting of bone and the thigh scarification, and not that the women don’t speak it just as much and, if our own women are any measure, probably a lot more than the men, but something about the way you knew the tiny quirks of the language, the exceptions and inflections — how the a rises musically through the ribs in words related to good fortune, how th and thht distinguish the two clans split by the river, how their eight words for types of fog use all thirty-seven consonants — and the passion with which you told me about these, demonstrating with your hands and mouth and throat, and the way, as we played Scrabble, you lamented the “tragedy” of not being able to put down words in the language, and even though you were joking, partly, you still imagined moves you might have made, tallied points accordingly, rearranging your tiles, for all I know, so that they spelled out little things in Tilkez, all this even while you lacked the ability to speak it fluently, only enhanced the sense of your being in a relationship with him/it.
If you’d merely spoken it, that would’ve been one thing, but it was precisely your distance, your fascination coupled with an intimacy, an ever-growing knowledge of it, plus throw in a nurturing tendency that I think we can both agree that you possess in more than average amounts — all of that conspired to make me, I can admit, feel somewhat vengeful toward this language, even, however insane this sounds, murderous, though the fact of the matter is that I could never, as I’m sure you know, bring any harm to any living being, but a language, a language is another story, especially one dying on its own, maybe due to its own inherent weaknesses or its not quite measuring up against its peers, or maybe its time has just come. And on seeing those clouds flutter over your face, I said, “Why not just leave it to die? It ain’t gonna be the English of ever,” and you seemed personally wounded by this, which might have been the reaction I wanted (I can’t quite recall, and strangely, I neglected to write about this, so I am operating on sheer memory now, climbing harnessless). But suddenly I could see that perhaps this language that you wanted to preserve and revive and celebrate was, in fact, maybe not like a lover with whom I’d be in competition, but more like a child, a sickly and needy child who needed, above all, you, and given the complexity of all of these feelings, I was able to step back a bit, inhale, take a larger view: maybe it was okay if this child-language was suckling at one breast and I was sucking on the other, maybe we wouldn’t be in competition ultimately because the language, sated and milk-drunk, would toddle off to sleep, given that it had been feeding and I was doing something altogether other, which is to say that I was in truth then encircling your nipple and bringing it to life, feeding it, in a manner of speaking, breathing little bumps into it, patterns and ideas for further patterns, and after the child-language drifted into blissful sleep, I’d have both of your breasts to myself. And moments later, like magic, they’d become tits, just like that, in an instant, and when was the transition, exactly, was there one bump, one lick with which this transformation had taken place, this transformation in its way as profound as the emergence of tits themselves from the most ordinary prepubescent chest, never a problem for you, I know? Regardless, these tits would stay tits until the baby cried out again, the infant who, remember, is just a language, not even a flesh and blood infant, so let it sleep, and let the tits stay tits for a while now that they’ve gotten themselves to that point. This very moment when I’m swiveling around the tits, sweeping over them like a master zamboni driver, or, better, a calligrapher, yes, of tongue, is when it occurs to me — and this next will constitute a larger confession — that I do some of my best thinking when I’m making the circular and semicircular and the changeably elliptical orbits of the tits. It’s then that I had the stupid thought about the Tilkez language being like a child, and on top of it then the thought, stupider by a magnitude of two or three, that if the Tilkez language was a child, then, since children require that “window of learning” for language development (conversations of 4/16, 5/30, 6/1, 6/10), Tilkez would itself be learning a language, was itself picking up on average something like four to ten words per day in the heyday of its “explosion” (your figures, your word); in other words, lying there slumbering while I was expending my energies and, if all continued in this way, would soon exhaust them in orgasmic explosion of my own, all while the child was lying next to us insensate, nursed and coddled, accruing words, getting fatter and stronger on hearty nouns and zesty verbs, growing new incisors that could sink into chewy adjectives, pull adverbs from the bone, swallow whole the indigestible fiber of prepositions, all while I was doing all the work, the very type of work that brings children, each and every one, into being — I had to catch myself at this point and remind myself that this was only metaphor.