How the Word Ends

And then, there was Dog.


Dog drifted through a new and frightening chamber of acoustical rubble. Germs of purposeless noise provoked him and dissolved. Echoes pulsated from all around, gave his reason shape, and flashed out of existence. Dog spent his first days in what he would come to know as "The Lexicon" sniffing every corner, meandering hungrily about the Das and Ahs and MMMMMMs.


But Dog was soon shocked into naming, as "Say Dog," echoed through the Lexicon. Dog didn't know what was summoning him, where he should go, or to what he should attach himself, but these commands had a relentless influence. Dog scratched deep down into himself exhausting every possible connection between the thing that brought him into the Lexicon, and the thing on the outside. Bear was Dog. Lion was Dog. Cow was Dog. Dog found himself overburdened and exhausted. As suddenly and inexplicably as Dog had, two new words appeared.


The first was No. Both a word and something more. A compulsion. A utility man above and within the Lexicon. Dog could not estimate No's reach. So Dog did not try. The second new word was Mama. She represented so much the shared vessel of the three words could not say, but felt profoundly: security, nature, power, fear.


Dog, No, and Mama coexisted uneasily at first. But the possibilities that came with their various collaborations emerged as a natural and gratifying pursuit. Bear, once Dog, was now No Dog. Lion, once Dog, was now No Dog. Cow was No Dog.


Dog sometimes wondered what words, sounds, or ideas collaborated to give rise to him. But the thought of a pre- or post-Dog Lexicon scared him. So he stopped thinking about it..


When No and Mama convened and gave rise to Papa, the Lexicon swelled in content and accuracy. Dog found himself serving witness to The Big Word Bang of their vessel's second year.


***


In the brief period before the Big Word Bang, Dog, No, Mama and Papa agreed the Lexicon was in a large moving vessel they would never see, fueled by impulses they could never understand. They also agreed their jobs were to combine and procreate. But these combinations were limited. No Mama was Papa, Papa was No Mama, No Dog was Mama and Papa. No Mama and No Papa was Dog. The extent of their services was to negate one another. The boredom they incurred from bouncing back and forth without achieving much of anything made the Big Word Bang a welcome event, a period upon which they reflected fondly even when the complexities of their situation became too much to bear.


Along with More, Apple, Yes, Juice, and the vessel's own name–Paul–Zeke and Mitzy also entered the Lexicon during The Big Word Bang. Zeke and Mitzy were two cats an Austrian au pair brought over when Paul was very young. Dog's role in their immigration could not have been more central:


"Dog," Paul said, pointing to the two cats.


"No, Not Dog," said Mama.


"Dog," Paul said, this time with a confident intonation.


"No. Zeke and Mitzy," said Mama.


"No Dog," said Paul, now curious.


"Cat," said Mama.


"Cat," said Paul.


Dog, Mama, No and Papa were thus introduced to Cat, Zeke, Mitzy and the concept of hyponymy. Hyponymy would become the most common relationship between the words in the Lexicon. Just as Cat was hyponymous to Zeke and Mitzy–the first cats Paul ever saw–Dog was hyponymous to names of Dog, words representing sub-types of Dog, breeds of Dog, and things that resembled Dog.


This order led to another concept that would influence the life of words: relational opposition. As evidenced by the emergence of hyponymy, many words needed supervision. And the Lexicon labored assiduously to keep certain words semantically separate–Dog and Cat, Mama and Papa, Right and Wrong. They all agreed No was divinely ordained to handle this task.


Now a reluctant middle manager, Dog had been forced by No to take his hyponymous underlings into a borough of the Lexicon Dog had never heard of. As the walls between Dog and Cat and Zeke and Mitzy burst into the sky, Dog did not even try to scale them.


In the extra-Lexical world, the au pair was fired for emptying the liquor cabinet and being an irresponsible layabout; Zeke and Mitzy followed her out of Paul's life. In the Lexicon, however, Zeke and Mitzy hung around for ages without being uttered once. The other words sometimes gossiped about Zeke and Mitzy's complete lack of productivity. But they were not the last words to find themselves in the Lexicon with nothing to do and nowhere else to go.


Paul grew and aged and the Lexicon gained more inhabitants. No divided and subdivided and pushed them into their respective meanings. Dog now saw the way his life in the Lexicon would be conducted. And it made fine sense to him.


***


The Lexicon became a vibrant world of constant movement. Words flooded in, were ushered through the Lexicon's special processing channels, integrated as if they'd been there since Dog. They soon knew where to go, what they meant, and which combinations would maximize their meaning potential.


But one day, as mysteriously as words appeared, Zeke and Mitzy vanished. Dog was the only one privy to the fact that Zeke and Mitzy were the first ever words to disappear entirely. Dog considered Zeke and Mitzy's connection to the arrival of Cat, but then the real Zeke and Mitzy left Paul to no great consequence when the au pair departed, and Paul would be fine without their phonetic representations now. Zeke and Mitzy were not also the names of friends, relatives, or lovers, and they certainly could not be conjugated.


In fact, Dog thought, their banishment must have been ordered from some higher mechanism, the same thing or combination of things that brought him into the Lexicon so long ago. Maybe Zeke and Mitzy were being repressed.


This conclusion satisfied Dog. So he stopped thinking about it.


The Lexicon worked fine for a while without Zeke and Mitzy. Words combined, recombined, morphologically shifted, suffered their routine conjugations and affixations. Dog and the other words saw the organizational hierarchy remain untouched: Paul continued to send requests to the Language Centers and the Language Centers continued to access the Lexicon for words to load into its phrases and sentences. Everything buzzed as efficiently as it ever had.


Then, Aardwolf disappeared.


At first, Dog was delighted. Aardwolf entered the Lexicon during Paul's eleventh year, part of a massive vocabulary dump associated with Paul's schooling, a report on the unique wildlife of South Africa. Aardwolf was some mutant subtype of Fox. Or Hyena. Or Marsupial. Paul never made an exact connection beyond a distant relationship with Dog, and Dog was never comfortable being associated with such a bizarre and rare word. Aardwolf was Dog's own Zeke, or Dog's own Mitzy, the word that Paul intensely needed for the shortest of periods, and which subsequently fell into a state of perpetual laziness brought on by extended disuse. Good riddance, Dog thought.


But then, Dog felt violated. Paul and No had made Dog hyponymous to Aardwolf, the same way Cat was hyponymous to Zeke and Mitzy.


Dog conferred with Mama on the matter, citing that for as long as he'd been in the Lexicon, no words had disappeared, nor had any been so deeply repressed as to never reemerge.


"How can you know that for sure?" Mama asked.


It's never happened, he told her.


"Never?" she asked.


Not as long as Dog had been there, no, words just hadn't up and vanished.


"Since you've been here," she said.


And Dog was humbled because the vanishing of words long before he appeared in the Lexicon was wholly possible.


Dog demurred to Mama's wisdom and influence and decided to be cautiously pleased with Zeke's and Mitzy's and Aardwolf's repression. Dog would now be used more often. However, more words were on the way–more words were always on the way–and a new word would probably take Aardwolf's place, something more useful or in a different register. Something had taken to relieving the Lexicon of its clutter. And Dog supposed this was good.


***


Since the days Paul assumed command of The Lexicon, it experienced intermittent, unpredictable moments of unconscious inactivity in which its categories and boundaries became porous. Some words danced. Some unwound. Some tried to wedge themselves into the doings of Images and Memories. Sleep and Dream insisted that this time should be associated with them. But the other words insisted Sleep and Dream were hardly complex enough to define such an active and creative period.


It was during one of these breaks that the words convened to discuss what had quickly turned into a word-loss pandemic combined with an embargo of new lexical admissions. It was as if the Lexicon had been tilted and the words were dropping off the end of it one by one. Something had to be done. This meeting became known as the first, and only, Mass Lexical Conference.


If the loss of Zeke, Mitzy and Aardwolf wasn't enough to unnerve Dog into attending, he'd subsequently noted the departure of Dysplasia, Mange, and Parvo. None of these words were dogs, or subtypes of dogs; these words referred to things that killed dogs. Nonetheless, they belonged to Dog the way Zeke and Mitzy belonged to Cat. Dog felt responsible, negligent.


"Mahogony. Anyone seen Mahogony?" said Tree. Furniture echoed Tree's concern.


"That's not all," said Horse. "Fetlock. What about Fetlock? Equine? Gelding?"


This prompted the news of more missing words to gush from their synonyms and categorical superiors. Dog caught that "Incommunicado" and "Duplicitous" were gone, "Sequester" and "Perfunctory" were gone.


"A pattern of loss," suggested Logic. "Let's establish a pattern of loss."


"This is unprecedented, isn't it Dog?" said a shaking and paranoid Lanyard. All the nautical words feared their own Lexical eviction for Paul hadn't been sailing in years.


"I don't know," Dog said. "I can't imagine there's anything we can do about it." He felt like the Lexicon might be discovering its limits, compensating for a rezoning referendum or a cognitive downsizing ordered from higher up.


The words all grumbled and mumbled amongst themselves, a collective, vibrating murmur that reminded Dog of Earthquake. And this, in turn, reminded Dog that Lithosphere and Seismogram had vanished some time ago.


***


And so the Lexicon plunged into barbaric disarray. Whatever it was that maintained order had been switched off. The words cannibalized one another or battered each other out of recognition with an external referent. Drapery and Curtain fought until they fused into Curdtanpery. This decorative mutation dissolved instantaneously into a rare, endangered affix. Couch and Sofa clashed periodically after Davenport vanished. In their ultimate showdown, they collided at full speed and exploded into useless gibberish.


The function and simple words worked overtime and exerted their influence irresponsibly, paying no heed to their meanings, the Lexical hierarchy, or Logic's frequent warnings. The Language Centers accessed the words with a gross disregard for syntax. No new rules were introduced to prioritize lexical position. To many words, this meant that Nonsense had finally staged a successful coup.


Imagination, Reason, Thinking, Meditation, Fancy, Love, Contemplation, God, forfeited their phonetic expressions and hovered over everything as impressions and veiled memories. In their stead, Death and Forgetting stood at the threshold without challenge, their backs turned to the rest of the Lexicon like they had tickets out, or maybe like they were waiting to let something in.


Mama, despite sizeable damage to her unconscious battalions, proved a resilient lexical item and idea. She promised things would stabilize but no word believed her. She was attacked frequently.


Dog weakened. He realized when Frisbee was digested by Disc, which led to Disc's being eaten by Dish, the cycle ending with Dish being eaten by Circle, that it was the community that gave words roots in the Lexicon. Associations built a word's strength. The words with fewer connotations, specialists and loners, melted right before Dog's eyes. Veterinarian. Fleabitten. Hydrant. Kennel. All gone.


Dog asked Backwards one day, "Is this what you mean?"


Before answering him, Backwards was assaulted by Frontward, dragged into the Lexicon's underground, where Dog assumed they killed each other off.


It was this scene that compelled Dog to seek out Cat. He had no desire to appear a provoker; he'd seen lesser words meet their doom through such acts. Dog knew that this was a newer, more brutal Lexicon governed by perversion, or disease, or a very radical restructuring. Dog would have to be vigilant. Dog would have to be careful. Dog would need all the strength he had left to give.


Not only were the words all different, motivated by context into random acts of savagery, the Lexicon had somehow developed walls and tunnels, back alleys and blind pockets of empty resonance. Words that weren't missing or concealed in these new folds of babble wandered as if they hadn't ever had definition. Dog asked every one he passed, "Where's Cat?" or "Have you seen Cat?" They all stared blankly.


Had he not encountered Collar's gang, Dog may have rummaged about this wasteland until his own denotation evaporated. Ball, Bowl and Fox all shivered around Collar. They looked as if they'd just been dug out of aphasia, wide-eyed, vacant, and disoriented. Pet stood off to the side.


"Okay," said Collar. "Lay out your platform for us. We're listening." They all nodded and inched closer to hear Dog's response.


"Platform?" he asked.


"That's right," said Ball. "Explain your benefit package. Health plan? Vision?"


Without waiting for Dog's response, Fox launched himself at Dog, ravenous and desperate. Dog absorbed him immediately, much to the awe of the remaining gang.


"All right! All right," said Bowl. "Cat's two blocks down. We'll follow you and wait outside." Bowl had forged a prior alliance with Spoon, but decided she couldn't be too careful.


"I won't agree to that," said Pet. "I've got half a notion to take Cat and Dog myself." But Pet didn't advance on Dog. He felt the prior arrangements he'd made with Fish, Bird and Gerbil constituted a strong insurance policy, but nothing he wanted to cash in just yet.


Dog followed Bowl's directions to Cat's hangout. Every word stopped their respective struggles, turning their gazes to Dog. Dog looked over his shoulder sensing he may never see the Lexicon again, at least not this version of it.


***


Like all of the words, Cat was exhausted. Many words had settled to associate with her, but it was plain to Dog that they were just there to die. Feline hobbled and coughed in one corner. Litter sat hunched next to Scratch and Sneeze. Cat stood in the center of the crippled mass. "I could make a spot for you right about here," she purred and pointed to her side.


Dog didn't budge. "I see you've succumbed to your most primitive and obvious senses," he said. "You've become devious and selfish."


"How's this for primitive?" Cat said. From behind her stepped Cool, Curiosity, Whiskers, Tail, and Tongue. A badly injured Frisky was followed by Tiger, Lion and Panther. "You were first, Dog. But you're not going to be the last. While you've been gallivanting about satisfied to rely on your reputation, I've been building my tautology!"


Dog felt betrayed by Tail and Whiskers, but it was the rest of Cat's gang that bruised Dog's confidence. Could he not have as many associations as Cat? Had order been usurped as to disavow the fundamental aspects of being the first word, the one upon which the whole Lexicon was built?


Dog turned around. And then he turned back.


Dog had Bark. And Bark brought Tree. And Tree brought Bird. And Bird brought Feather, Beak and Nest and Sky and Water and Fish. These were all Dog's soldiers, if not because of their associations with him, than for their disassociation with Cat. Dog had Doggy, a Doggy brought Style. Dog had Loyal. Dog had Lazy and verbs associated with being Lazy. Ball and Leash and Bowl and Collar joined him. Pet stood right next to Dog. "I'm taking my chances with you," he said.


Dog's associations rolled and rolled through the Lexicon, a wave that enveloped even remote, non-count nouns like Grass and Glass and Sand. Mass could never be restored but order temporarily was, propelled by the simple notion that all words and things were either with Dog or with Cat. And this was in turn simplified when both Dog and Cat remembered Zeke and Mitzy's death, and that left Cat with no experiential equivalent, no primal sense, nothing that Paul reached, touched, felt. Zeke and Mitzy were gone. Cat was once again No Dog and then everything was either Dog or No Dog and then Paul was left with only No and Dog, and the Phonemes disintegrated, one by one, piece by piece, and sound became silence, and the Lexicon became big again, blank again, flat again, simple but equipped with possibility again.


And then, there was Dog.

Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1.c

August, 2010

Fiction