Free Dead Languages by David Shields

episodes.” She wanted to be able to track an atom in a centrifuge and she couldn’t and, if she hadn’t died first, she might have driven herself mad as well. For four years he’d be fine and funny and athletically buoyant, then one day he’d come back with an entire roll of negatives of the freeway. His qualifiers would slide downward: “whole, worthwhile”; “modest, feeble.” “If a shirt comes to you from Macy’s, it’s from me, Dad,” he might keep saying. “The shirt is from Dad.” Then you’d be looking for some leftovers in the fridge and come across a note Scotch-taped together, sticky with blood stains, like advertisements for a sympathetic reader. Mother would pack his suitcase and he’d wave shy goodbyes like a boy leaving for camp.
    Which fairly took the wind out of my sails because, with a pause here, an inflection there, he used to be able to convert the most unpromising material into such high tragedy, such low comedy, such an enjoyable narrative. In the forties and fifties he supposedly got invited to the most exclusive Industry parties in Beverly Hills for the solitary purpose of telling Yiddish jokes. He told many, many stories very, very well, but the only one I want to remember is the only one that was true. Father would writhe on the rug, waiting for the train, and leap on top of the hi-fi console when Big Abe lifted him into the trees. When I was ten years old, Father was making noises that intimated another stay at Montbel—he flew to Sacramento on behalf of the poverty program of the county of San Francisco and airmailed me an epistle consisting entirely of blank pages for no real reason I could make out—so Mother lent me her tape recorder and told me to tell him I’d forgotten some of the finer points of the third-rail story. Father and I had some problems figuring out how to work the recorder, but once we realized the stupid thing had to be plugged in we were all set. He lay back on my bed with pillows under his neck while I sat in a chair, holding the microphone, sitting over him, listening to him talk with his eyes closed and the bed lamp focused on his face. I felt like his shrink. I wanted him to sit up or open his eyes or ask me to turn the lamp away, but he entered immediately into the prologue: “I want to tell you, Jeremy, about the world I have lost. It seems like it existed a thousand years ago, if indeed it ever existed. One sweltering Indian summer day….”
    I didn’t know what was the matter. I expected him to be pinning his arms to the mattress and bouncing up and down on the bed to indicate the thrill of the third rail; flipping the lamp on and off and whistling through his teeth in imitation of the oncoming local; arcing across the room to show how he’d been saved; stripping off his clothes to show how his skin had peeled; doing all the things I’d seen him do so perfectly at parties, but he was doing none of that. He was telling the tale as if he didn’t know what came next and, worse, as if he didn’t care. I turned off the microphone and asked, “What’s the matter? You’re not telling it like you usually do.”
    “I think that microphone throws me off,” he said, opening his eyes for the first time. “I feel self-conscious with just you and me and Mom’s tape recorder. I need more people around me, a party atmosphere, a couple of drinks.”
    I got up and brought back a cup of cold water from the bathroom, but that didn’t seem to do the trick and Father returned to worlds we have lost, to sweltering Indian summer days. Every scene was slowly set, every amusing little digression was relentlessly pursued, every character was described down to the contents of his lunch pail. When I go back and listen to the tape, what’s even more noticeable than the relative banality of Father’s recital is his endlessly sibilant
S
, his fluttering
F.
He seems to be on the verge of stuttering. Sandra says
S
and
F
are voiceless sounds that arise from air