Weirdtongue

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The original version of the section below is still being shown HERE for serious students.
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'Weirdtongue' is another new work (by the hobbyist-writer DF Lewis) to be serialised on the internet as it is written.

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WEIRDTONGUE

‘”I come here,” the Weirdmonger roared, “to sell Weirds, and Weirds are merely Words that materialize into all sorts of true existence the moment I release them from between my lips…”
Even these introductories squawked into the sky like forgotten memories of what it was like before one was born.’
From ‘Weirdmonger’ (Back Brain Recluse 1988; Prime Trade Paperback 2003)

Today I lick porridge from a bowl, mapped with jammy smears.

Forgotten memories of what it was like before one was born? I tried to give myself time to absorb the implications brought by the visitor to my hospital ward. A visitor, he claimed, with wide visibilities of Summerset from a tower on a hill, with the animal zodiac embedded in the fields below. The vanishing sun (he said) silted, rather than lowered, into the broken horizon.

The Weirdmonger never had a name. He was the original nemophile. I had read of his doings. So far only one scribe had dared mention his existence. One scribe, one character. He told me by the end of his visit I would learn his true name. A historic moment. When a scribe’s away, the scribe’s creations do play, they say. Or at least the Weirdmonger said, and that at least made it true enough for me to remember as once being true even before he said it.

“Hey,” I suddenly said, “who are you?”

A nurse looked askance from the other side of the room, presumably at my raised voice. She had been told that the Weirdmonger was a close relative of mine. And I had not gainsaid this. Too late now. I looked appealingly towards her, hoping she would come over to double-check the relative identities of our two dark shapes sitting in the visitors’ alcove near the makeshift library. The nurse called this alcove a carrel. A private study-cubicle. I wasn’t sure. But I had seen many inmates entertaining visitors in this carrel over the years. This was my first time. I was rarely graced with visitors; I had called myself unlucky, bereft. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Visitors came in many different disguises, some lighter than others. And this one today was not exactly an imponderable, but an undesirable.

Many years before, I had spotted a certain visitor being entertained by another inmate; I felt sure it was not that inmate’s visitor by rights because the visitor resembled my mother, a woman who had looked plaintively over at me but left without visiting me. So, indeed, I knew she had visited someone whom she had not recognised at all. Brings tears to my eyes, even today.

During the posy of pauses encouraged by my thoughts, the Weirdmonger had idly picked up a loose book from the carrel table and riffled through it.

“Why are you here?” he said, looking up, instinctively aware that my mind was now empty.

“I have trouble distinguishing between being ill and being well,” I answered. There was a medical name for this condition, but it didn’t fit. I was never cold. In fact I suffered from the heat.

The sun was baking through the window even now as I watched tussocks being hustled by a dry wind.

“My own trouble is distinguishing between present and past,” he countered, with a glinting look of boastful waywardness.

I see him clearly. He has all the features that one associates with yesterday.

The nurse plucks my fingers from the bowl of book, teasing the letters n-e-m-o-p-h-i-l-e back upon the slowly reconstituting leaves and then leaving them outside to dry into w-e-i-r-d-t-o-n-g-u-e. The frontispiece was never discovered as I had swallowed it. They always said I had swallowed the dictionary. Wordiness and worry, that was my fate. Maybe that was the cause of my ambivalent health. A mixed blessing, if being full of words meant one could dream with the requisite words that one was empty of them.

At least I found the visitor’s name on the spine that I never attempted to eat, though it did show gnaw-marks. The nurse tried to hide it. Mummerset. Mummerset was the name. Gregory Mummerset. The name rung up all sorts of futures and pasts, without which this gift of the present would never have been granted. The ward had many inmates that were ever changing their minds. A hospital is made of many wards. We exchanged visiting cards cut from other spines. Then we tore them up.

Through the ward window could be spotted the back-end of the Weirdmonger’s medicine wagon that, as well as trundling away into the slow setting, also created it, brought it gradually into existence.

CONTINUED HERE

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