The Lexicographer's Rules

This American Life, one of the best things to happen to radio since Fibber McGee and Molly, features a dilemma this week: Given the choice between the super powers of invisibility or super-speed flight, which would you choose? This is, at its heart, a comic book geek’s question. It’s the kind of thing discussed by certain classes and ages of young men until the topic is exhausted. We were, my brother and I, not quite in this category—although there were those fantastic days spent at my cousin Paul’s house one summer, in which I believe I read every one of his hundreds of comic books, even Richie Rich. But my brother and I discussed this in terms of wishes: If you could have one wish, what would it be? And no wishing for more wishes. We attached an additional rider: Every wish carries a penalty. If you wished to fly, you could fly, but you’d never walk again. That would mean your power would be public: everyone would know, and the great gift of flying would be balanced by the terror of everyone wanting a piece of you. If you wished you were worth a million dollars, you would be, but it would come in the form of a single gold block, immovable because of its weight, and very, very visible. It would, we decided, probably land on the bedroom floor, crash right to the floor below, and into the basement. If you wished you were invisible, you would be, but it would be a power outside of your control. You wouldn’t know when you would be invisible. That’s some penalty: Whether you decided to use your invisibility for good or evil, you’d be highly unlikely to get away with whatever it was you’d had planned. In this vein, some time ago I wrote a short story concerning the penalties of super powers, the fundamental basic penalties that even the most tortured, “realistic” graphic novel doesn’t address. The story concerns the wish I always wanted: complete fluency in every human language.

On the first Tuesday of March I knew something was amiss because I could hear Koslowki in the apartment next door beating his wife. “Whore! Whore!” he shouted. She shouted back: “Bastard! Bastard!” The Koslowskis spoke Polish. Problem was, I didn’t know Polish. At least, I hadn’t the night before when I went to bed, when he was beating her over something else. Burnt sausages by the smell and the smoke of it. I lay in bed a while, listening, and decided perhaps I had absorbed the language. Eight years in a Polish working-class neighborhood, visiting the Polish shops with their Polish shopkeepers and the little blonde Polish girls behind the counters and the Polish signage and the Polish newspapers. Perhaps that would be enough, even at the age of thirty-nine, for me to pick up a few words. But later in the subway I realized I could understand everybody and everything. Two short Mexican men talking about their jobs. Israeli tourists. Three Hasidic women discussing the shops they were about to visit. Even the slang of the black kids from deep in Flatbush was clear. I got it all. Off the train on the street I listened to two Indian men shouting at each other in Hindi: one was the husband, the other the was the brother-in-law, and some wrong had been done to the wife’s mother. I understood one of them to say, “She is not to come! This is my home! This is not Andra Pradesh. New rules apply! New customs!” Italian tourists looking at a map. A young Dominican couple whispering in gripped embrace. A family of Haitians. And a few languages I didn’t recognize, but understood: East European in origin, I think, for they sounded a bit like Polish and something like Russian. A couple of the rarer forms of Chinese. Not being able to name the language was no barrier to comprehension. I understood everything. Flawlessly. I marvelled at it. I was euphoric. I called in sick and passed the day eavesdropping and overhearing in the thick of crowds at Herald Square, Times Square, Union Square. I stood among the tourists in lines for theatre tickets, waving signs in front of television studios, riding the red double-decker buses. I took a tour of the United Nations. After lunch, I made a visit to Hotalings newsstand and learned I could read those languages, too. Scripts I’d never seen before, or could only have recognized. Floods in Bangladesh. Elections in Ukraine. Soccer in Fukian province. New high-rises in Cairo. The next day I called in sick a second time. I put the new skill to more organized tests. How many languages could I understand? I spent the day listening to streaming newscasts on the Internet from the BBC and the Voice of America. Everything was open: there were no locks to these stories, which by accidents of birth and geography and education, had been secrets encoded by my ignorance of human languages. The unhappy side effect of this new skill—or power, I guess you could call it—was that outside of the newscasts, very little was said in those other languages that surprised me. The conversations were the same sort which I heard in English every day. The news was basically the same, translated from the wire services, or churned out by a governmental bureaucracy, or concerning events of such specific local interest as to be impenetrable: I could understand the words but not the context. I heard the names of officials and villages, but did not know them. By the end of the fifth day, I subconsciously blocked the same sorts of banalities in the air around me as I had when my only language was English. People are boring and common, whatever language they speak. I hoped after the initial shock had worn off that I might be able to take some financial advantage from this new skill. But there were limitations to my omnicomprehension. I knew it would not be wise to tell people that I understood every language I had tried. They wouldn’t believe it. I’d have to pick a few languages, as needed, and offer those up. I imagined myself saying, “I can understand French, Spanish, German, Russian and Japanese” to an interviewer and being hired on the spot. But a search of for jobs requiring bilingual skills on the usual job web sites showed that the only employment for which I was otherwise qualified, and which required multilingual skills, was that of secretary or personal assistant. There was little interesting about that sort of work. Now, if I’d had a doctorate in international relations or aid development, I might have successfully applied for any number of well-paying jobs with non-governmental organizations. I didn’t, so I couldn’t. Except that I couldn’t speak the languages, nor did I have any real composition skills. My attempts to transcribe the strange languages had resulted in a mishmash of phonetic spellings. I could not render the scripts. Even the basically Roman alphabets of French and Romanian looked more like the non-academic pronunciation keys in throw-away guidebooks than anything else. A pathetic mess. There was no barrier to learning these scripts, through practice and dictation and lesson books and “Armenian in 100 Easy Lessons,” but it would be just as much work now as it would have been before. The gift of comprehension had nothing to do with composition. So interpreting was out, unless it was one-way only, but those jobs were few: most translators need to go both ways, and they need to do it in multiple languages. I could only understand. The comprehension was, then, a personal power. It was something for my own advantage, a strength that I would have to apply in a useful way. What use are such abilities unless they can be applied? But not only did I find little to my advantage in understanding what was said in these new-to-me languages (mostly hints that I was being overcharged as a white man, sometimes rude comments about what I considered my perfectly ordinary appearance, or inside information on why a particular bus was late, or the curbside gossip of crowds outside of yellow-taped crime scenes), but I couldn’t keep up with the written material as well. Reading Tolstoy in the original was refreshing, but time-consuming. I did not have enough time to consume all that I wanted in English; how could I reach any kind of comprehensive coverage in even a few of the other languages? What were the opportunity costs of listening in these other languages? How could I use my time wisely? Listening on the street was useless. Reading took too much time. In the end, I determined that the best use of this skill was in those arenas which were strictly devoted to transcription from one language to another. I found archaeological scripts easy to interpret. I picked out a couple which had been stumping professionals for decades. My first attempts at publicizing my translations of these ancient languages were met with loud guffaws and dismissal by academics. Who was I? Another crank. A quack. Sure, the translations appeared right, but how could they be proven? Where was the counterfactual evidence? Many of those long-undeciphered scripts had such small corpora that even if they were successfully translated, there’d be no way for others to verify it. There were not enough repetitions and redundancies. Professors and linguists I never met challenged me to demonstrate my methods. A translation was not enough. That many of the scripts dealt mainly with personal names (kings and patrons and slaves) and very mundane items (sheep and olives and soldiers) made it all the more difficult. Names often corresponded often only to themselves, and offered little opportunity for comparison to related languages (outside of a few place names) and the mundane items seemed based more upon guesswork derived from cultural assumptions than from true translation. How could I explain a skill such as mine? The ability to understand all forms of human communication, written and oral—even sign language was a broken code, and body language was an open book—was too fantastical. I put this sort of triumphant decoding work aside. Eventually I started an online translation business, converting endless amounts of promotional puffery into jargonized business English for foreign concerns trying to break into the anglophone markets. My skills in English were enhanced only in that I better understood what someone intended in that language; my editing abilities and my mastery of English remained as good as they had ever been, but they were no more or less perfect because of my new comprehension skill. A real profit center came in offering summaries of foreign news sources to subscribers. The six-hour lead-time of the European papers over the American East Coast meant I worked from around eleven in the evening to four in the morning, culling based upon keyword searches paid for by subscribers. It was a living. It was not the noble use of my new skill that I had hoped for, but it was something. … Some months later, when the language abilities had become common-place, I awoke floating next to the ceiling. I swam around the room in joyous glee, always hanging or moving where I wanted by both will and inertia. I couldn’t fall unless I wanted to. The translation business had succeeded well enough that I quit my job and worked from home, plugged into three telephone lines and a DSL connection. I spent the day mastering the art of flying, working equal measures at taking client calls and at resisting the impulse to soar out of the window and into the thick of the city’s towers. By that first nightfall I felt I had it down. I dressed in black, darkened my face with the ashes of burnt paper, and stepped off the window sill into space. There I floated until I willed myself to move. Move I did: I brushed telephone wires and tore through the top of a tree in McCarren Park, ripping a pants leg and the flesh underneath. But I was mindless of the pain. I flipped and soared through the city. But like the language ability, flying had its own problems. After a while, I could hardly stand walking. My body felt leaden, and my impatience made me temperamental. Many a time I considered just flying off in the middle the day. I could become “the flying man.” Why keep it a secret? I read the comic books for advice. The entire Superman canon, all different worlds and plot lines and universes, offered the best advice. I learned the crowds would eat me alive: both well-wishers and the ill-intended. The government would come for me. The police would distrust me. I could never land in the sight of others. The press would hound my family. Friends and so-called friends might reveal the details of my personal life for money. I would be sued, attacked, shot at, abused, lied about, lied to and deceived. Being “flying man” was out of the question. Soon I began to feel lonely. I worked at home during the day on translations, left the house in the early morning hours after working on the European press, and flew as far and as fast as I could. I could fly fast, very fast. I reached Montauk in a matter of minutes, but my face was speckled with bloody pits where I’d been hit by airborne debris: flecks of dust were like asteroids hitting the surface of Mars. I was vulnerable and mortal as far as I ever wanted to know, so I slowed down. Even airplanes colliding with birds at six hundred miles an hour could be destroyed; if such a thing would happen to me, I knew I would die. There were the other complications. I couldn’t breathe when flying that fast. The wind took my breath away, for one, and I couldn’t breathe more than a couple thousand feet high in the atmosphere. And I realized soon enough that I would have to master the art of decompression, or else risk problems with my joints from the constant changes in air pressure. A helmet helped, some. I could still fly a couple hundred miles an hour, but to fly horizontal but facing forward is not an natural position. It puts a crick in your neck after a while, but you have to do it. You can’t afford to take sea gull to the head, even with a heavy motorcycle helmet, which takes away a great deal of the pleasure of free-flying. And the last mile, as they say in the telephone and Internet business, became the biggest problem for me. In order to fly to particular destinations, I was forced to land in areas where I knew I would not be seen. And I couldn’t always black my face: you can’t walk around in public like that. A balaclava helped, but the landing was still a problem. I had to land so far away from my true destination that I spent more time walking to the nearest bus stop than I would have had I simply taken the subway instead of flying. The roofs of buildings, I thought, would work as landing pads. But few roof doors opened from the outside, and those that did often lead to a multi-storey walk to the ground, past apartments whose tenants might see me. More than once I was forced to flee back up to the roof and take a flying jump to the ground or the next building as I was pursued by doormen who wanted to know why I was leaving a building I had never entered. I stopped landing in the city altogether. On warm nights I would fly around the city, dodging helicopters and spotlights. Sometimes I had to dive for the ground, and hard, because I’d been seen in the sky. I began carrying thin black garbage bags, and like a squid throwing ink, I would snap them open in my free fall, and let them go as they filled with air. The bags would hang and float. They seemed always to satisfy my pursuers. They would track the floating trash, from the windows of apartments or the cockpits of helicopters, and then move on. The towers and pinnacles of man-made geography caused queer and unaccountable currents, dust devils in the park, gales in the alleys, debris like snow on the heights. Floating bags were odd, but not unusual. And in the early morning hours, when I could fly without too much worry of being seen, there was basically nowhere to go. Nothing to do, except a few twenty-four-hour restaurants, bars, and the porn palaces. A power like this, yet so many restrictions upon it. In theory, I could fly under my own power anywhere I wanted. Not in practice. Once flying became commonplace, in the same way the language abilities had, it occurred to me that I should put the talent to better use. Perhaps I was positioned to be some sort of superhero. I did not have any kind of super-human strength or morphing abilities or anything fantastic like the comic book heros; once acquired and mastered, my powers felt rather humdrum. I began to try to save lives a few weeks later. I was no Superman. I didn’t have that super-dense body or even that great heart, but I needed the excitement. My life had become secretive and lonely. At no point did I feel like I could take anyone into my confidence. It seemed like the sort of secret that surpassed all ability to trust, the one thing which would inevitably be transmitted, no matter how firm the promises. I could not share. I bought a hand-held police scanner and earphones, programmed the right frequencies, and wired it to my belt. For a week I floated in the shadows of the Domino Sugar factory, looking westward to the slowly dimming city, waiting for a call to action. I could see banks of lights turning on and off in the floors of massive buildings. In my ear I could hear the police chatter. Finally, one night, I heard enough to understand there was a man threatening suicide on the Brooklyn Bridge. That was something I might handle. Up I flew, and then down. I skimmed the water as fast as I dared; the night was warm and the air full of insects. They tasted awful. And I could see him jump as I approached. He leapt almost carelessly. I laid on the speed to catch him. I could feel the thrill pump through me. There was a roaring of wind and blood in my ears. My approach was dead-on. I would reach him before he reached the water’s surface. And I did. …. I dictate this laying in a hospital bed. My two shattered arms are unnecessarily handcuffed to the bed rails. I have been charged with murder and the police are taking my statement. There are laws of physics to be taken into account. Who could have handled this power better? The law of inertia is not something we think intellectually about. We understand it, and all the other visible laws of the universe, through practice, and the failures and successes which come from it. We learn these things from childhood, but most of us cannot articulate them. The jumper died because my body, two hundred and thirty pounds of it, collided with his at speeds probably nearing two hundred miles an hour. My arms, projected forward from my body in that instinctive superhero flying pose, were telescoped in upon themselves, the joints collapsing and the bones shattering, splintering, the long pieces sliding up beside the short as my fists made two holes in the man’s body. Like a straw through a telephone pole in a hurricane. Two nurses are talking about me in the hallway in a Jamaican patois, one wondering if I am from the devil, the other wondering if I am from God. I am wondering myself.

Wow! A comment.. This american life is so good it makes the chore / hassle of downloading real audio to listen on the web worth it.. For whats its worth what could be better than flying?

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