How to Read an Unwritten Language Read online

  How to Read an Unwritten Language

  Philip Graham

  BY PHILIP GRAHAM

  Braided Worlds (co-authored with Alma Gottlieb)

  The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon

  Interior Design: Stories

  How to Read an Unwritten Language (novel)

  Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa (co-authored with Alma Gottlieb)

  The Art of the Knock: Stories

  The Vanishings (prose poems)

  Praise for How to Read an Unwritten Language

  “From storywriter Graham, an exceptional first novel about the unveiling of secret lives and hidden stories … a poignant, multifaceted debut novel about the obscured treasures of the ordinary.”

  –Kirkus Reviews

  “I was utterly entranced by the keen and idiosyncratic vision of How to Read an Unwritten Language. Philip Graham has created a fable for our time, of a family torn apart by tragedy, and the son who sets out into the world to redeem his life by a series of trials. A truly original novel, tough-minded and compassionate, and above all beautifully written.”

  –Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Evocative, lyrical prose and a keen eye for unexpected detail hold the reader spellbound through this odd, poignant tale of a sensitive man’s quest to understand himself and his loved ones by cracking the code of their lives’ elusive symbolism … Through Michael’s gentle voice, first-novelist Graham (author of a short-story collection, The Art of the Knock, and two other books) fashions a resonant narrative that explores the value of storytelling to make life bearable and the unending struggle to make sense of those closest to us.”

  –Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

  “Philip Graham has long been, with his remarkable short stories, one of the most original and ravishing voices in American fiction. Now he has brought his prodigious skills to a novel and—how rare this is—he has produced work of equal brilliance in both forms. How to Read an Unwritten Language is a book full of passion and poetry and profound insight into one of the great and eternal themes of art, the formation of self. I come away from the novel seeing the things of the everyday world quite differently. The shape of a tree, the scuff on a stranger’s shoe, the put-on face of a troubled child: these are the words of the language that Graham teaches us how to read, and what is written here always matters in the way our very identities are shaped and revealed.”

  –Robert Olen Butler

  “An exceptional first novel, by a midwestern writer with a highly original, mystical vision. As he did in his short story collection, The Art of the Knock, Graham layers psychological realism with surreal comedy in this story of a son burdened with the crippling eccentricities of his parents.”

  –John Blades, Lit, New City’s Literary Supplement

  “A fascinating collage … rife with raw emotion from unexpected sources.”

  -Liam Callanan, The New York Times Book Review

  “Powerful … moving … Graham’s heartwarming subject is empathy between human beings and the cost to our lives of deaf ears and barricaded hearts.”

  -Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle.

  “No matter that many disasters appear ‘in the form of car collisions or flooded basements, they more often appear from some secret place inside us.’ So says this book’s narrator, Michael Kirby, who has learned to intuit the dark secrets of the heart, to hear what people don’t say … to all these relationships, Michael brings a sixth sense that is both hard-won and unnerving to those involved. And just as the character of Michael operates always on two levels–the seen and the unseen–the author himself writes on more than one plane. Beneath his deft execution of the narrative runs a dreamy, subconscious state that effectively places the reader deep into the thought (and unthought) processes of Michael’s mind, plummeting the subterranean currents that run through us all.”

  –Colleen Kelly Warren, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

  “Touching, comic, and heartbreaking … The special strengths of this novel are its clarity of prose and its alert sensitivity.”

  –William O’Rourke, Chicago Tribune

  “Highly recommended … With great skill and control, Graham describes the sorrows of a family in disintegration.”

  –Choice

  “Graham began by writing prose poems, graduated to short stories and has now produced a novel. It’s a special sort of a novel-mystical, philosophical and respectful of the language of inanimate objects.”

  –Michael Silverblatt, KCRW’s Bookworm

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995, 2013 by Philip Graham

  This e-book reprint is a revised version of the original 1995 Scribner edition.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover art image copyright 1991-92, 1996, Gary Hill

  http://www.garyhill.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graham, Philip, date.

  How to read an unwritten language: a novel / Philip Graham.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.R217H69 1995

  813’.54—dc20 95-11144

  CIP

  ISBN 0-684-80373-9

  Introduction

  By Alex Shakar

  It’s a curious feat that some of the most arrestingly realized characters in How to Read an Unwritten Language are also some of the most withholding. There’s the lovable and retreating Kate, whom the protagonist Michael meets in college, a budding artist so out of place among people she can only draw objects; all-too briefly in their relationship, she crests above the waterline of a silence ever ready to reclaim her. There’s Michael’s stern father Gerald, an endless wall of a man; his means of expression are almost exclusively limited to the silent plants that he grows in his garden store and the bowling pins he explosively fells on family outings.

  Graham’s novel is tantalizingly rife with seeking and hiding, pining gazes meeting thousand-yard stares, children and lovers reaching out, parents and spouses pulling away. Michael’s mother, the emotional epicenter of his narrative, goes by innumerable names, donning a fresh personality every day. The behavior, which begins as a game with her children, devolves into a torment for them: behind her masks, she will never admit to being more than a passing stranger. Later in life, Michael’s sister Laurie flirts similarly with emotional masks and disappearing acts, to the desolation of those who try to get close. One of the central and deeply empathic insights of How to Read an Unwritten Language is that knowing others and allowing ourselves to be known are inextricable acts, and that, therefore, our efforts to hide our pain can prevent us from being available for the witnessing and mending of the pain of others.

  Michael’s childhood of trying to scry his parents amid their evasions dooms—and as well, inspires—him to a life of looking. He becomes a student of the “unwritten language” of people’s secret tells, because once seen, he seems to believe, people will have no choice but to see him in turn. This un-language of tells extends not only to people but to the objects around them that have soaked up their stories. He becomes a collector, hoping that his menagerie of objects will silently speak to people, “breaking the spell of [their] inner knot[s].” But will they? Could they possibly? One can’t help but wonder, as Michael secretly knots his beloved’s boot with a shoelace from the collection that he’s never explained to her, hoping that its “subtle ene
rgy” will break her silence, whether this is magic or magical thinking on his part, whether Michael is himself succumbing to the disease of proliferating inwardness he hopes in others to cure. In this novel full of bracing questions, perhaps one of the most is whether Michael’s—and by extension the human—imagination amounts to a prison or to freedom itself. Do the inner lives we create allow us to imaginatively connect with others, or do they lull and goad and maze us in endless halls of mirrors?

  Of course, it isn’t the objects Michael collects but the stories spun around them that matter, and once Michael grasps this fact, he comes into his true power. He becomes at once an artist and a witch doctor, wielding his talismanic objects and the stories he tells about them to change people’s lives—sometimes for the better, to bless and liberate, and sometimes, chillingly, to curse and ensnarl.

  Toward the end, his story nearly told, Michael transitions to the direct writing and rewriting in his mind of the lives of the people he’s tried hardest to know, searching for the best possible endings for them that might still accord with the truth of what he’s seen of their trajectories. Perhaps Kate drowns in that sea of silence; or perhaps, mermaid-like, she finds in it her element. Perhaps Laurie remains alone and hidden forever, a theater act for no one at all; or perhaps she finds communion through literature, fictional stories to reach her in ways no living person can. Again, the reader may not know how to feel. Are Michael’s imaginings, presented almost as fact, a kind of retreat from his hard won lessons about the limits of storytelling without communication? Or are they something else—a moment of protagonist and author recognizing each other through a two-way mirror darkly, this storytelling character now spinning himself into authorhood? Maybe it’s cheating, a power grab. Yet maybe too it’s precisely the reverse, an acknowledgment of his limits as well his powers, limits which all of us share: We can reach out for others; we can read them and see them and speak our truth. And some, when seen, will see both themselves and us anew. And some will flee themselves still deeper and lose sight of us even more. And so the best we can do is dare to be both open-armed and open-eyed—to see, in each other and ourselves, the most loving reading that could be true.

  Contents

  I

  A Secret Performance

  My Second Language

  The Collector

  We Want You Back

  II

  The Butterfly Effect

  Our Phantom Limb

  No Seeing Left for Us

  Father and Son

  III

  Matching Faces

  The Dream-Lit Room

  A Form of Floating

  Chiming Glasses

  IV

  No Rain Today

  Little Explosions

  Who’s Next

  Suicide Songs

  V

  I Had a Hunch about You

  Stitching Wounds

  The Gallery

  Extended Family

  VI

  Pricy

  A False Road

  A Matched Set

  Ecstatic Wings

  FOR ALMA, NATHANIEL AND HANNAH

  I would like to express my thanks for the invaluable support offered by the Corporation of Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, during the writing of this novel.

  The things of the heart cannot be read by too many people. They burn inside like a big fire which people cannot know how to put out.

  CHENJERAI HOVE

  I was running to meet everything that was visible, and everything that I could not yet see.

  JACQUES LUSSEYRAN

  PART ONE

  A Secret Performance

  I’d always felt that the secret life is available, either on the chipped and lipsticked rim of a coffee cup or in a crumpled tissue’s faint smell of sex, in the smudgy fingerprints of a child’s frayed comic book or along the jagged flap of a crudely torn envelope. A single gnawed crescent of fingernail is a voice that can speak, in the same way our faces percolate with transformations, mutating into languages that invite and defy fluency. But where had this belief brought me? There were so many objects I’d lost, so many stories and people.

  These past few weeks I’d brought my remaining objects to the park one-by-one, set them on this bench, and left them behind: the half-scissors, the single earring in the shape of a straight-back chair; a tiny plastic TV; and a nest of twigs and leaves with a clay bird nestled inside. Beside me sat my last object, a battered tape recorder and its fateful tape. Three times I’d brought it here and tried to release it, three times I brought it back home. If I knew how to find within me what would let it go, then today might be different.

  So I waited, and took in the shadows at my feet, cast by the leaves of a nearby pin oak tree: spiky hands that grasped at each other. Beside them, a cluster of birch leaf shadows took the shape of dark water cascading over invisible rocks.

  Steps on the gravel path announced a woman walking at a crisp pace, waves of dark hair at odds with that buttoned-down gray jacket and business skirt. But this was more than mere hurry: her steady gait seemed to keep her one step ahead of something unseen.

  As she drew closer she stopped, took an elastic band from her jacket pocket, and ran her hands through her hair, gathering it into a single braid. I gaped at this uncanny echo of the story behind a single shoelace that I once owned. But this was a secret performance, the only audience herself, and somehow that innocent grooming would mark an impending defeat.

  “Excuse me,” I called out, glad I wore no watch. “Do you have the time?”

  “No I don’t, sorry,” she said, her hands held in mid-air. Then she waited, her face a mixture of curiosity and caution that surely mirrored my own, and she stood there as if expecting me to recognize her.

  But I’d never seen her before, and she broke the brief silence. “I don’t know the time, but … I still might be able to help. It’s the middle of May, the twelfth? Well, based on those colors,”—she pointed to sinuous hints of purple and orange in the sky—“I’d say we’re cruising toward sunset. That would make it about 7:15.”

  She still stood there, inclined to linger, expecting something from me. But before I could ask her how she’d learned to convert the sky into hours and minutes, she returned to her hair with that elastic band. So I reached for the tape recorder beside me and pressed the play button, to see how she’d respond, if at all, to the man’s desolate voice that rose in mid-sentence, speaking strangely moving phrases in an Asian language I knew almost nothing about. Drawn again to words whose cadences I’d once virtually memorized, I almost forgot I was sitting on a park bench.

  My Second Language

  Suddenly awake—from a nightmare, perhaps, or even some budding premonition—I slipped from my bed and stood in the dark hallway before the half-open door of my parents’ bedroom. They sat beside each other in the soft light of their night tables, pillows propped up, Mother reading a magazine while my father balanced the checkbook, deposit slips and canceled checks lined in neat rows on the blanket. With the whisper of a sigh, Mother plucked a single long strand of hair from her head and added it to a little dark pile that looked as if it might come alive and crawl away.

  My body fairly tingled with the need for whatever comfort they might be able to offer, yet I found I couldn’t speak or allow myself to draw their attention. They might as well have been miles apart, though their shoulders nearly touched. While Father brushed his hand over the familiar tight knots of his curly hair and my mother pursed from habit the slender lips of her narrow face, they seemed too little like themselves—more like amateur impersonators relying on lucky physical resemblance. I padded back to bed, unwilling to accept my uneasiness, but before long I understood that this had been my first hint of a secret shifting in my family, a shifting that would lead to so many dislocations.

  I awoke that morning to a window lined with achingly delicate strands of frost, a cold view that begged for further snug
gling under warm blankets. But I had to shepherd my younger sister and brother out of bed so Father wouldn’t call up to us his well-worn list of why we were lazy.

  We might have been born compliantly on schedule—I was eleven, Laurie nine, and Dan seven—but we descended the stairs to breakfast in our own particular way: Laurie’s hands sleepily strummed along the rungs of the banister, releasing a resonant wooden music; Dan stopped behind her a moment to shake those rungs, pretending he was imprisoned; and I followed, nudging when necessary so we’d all arrive downstairs on time.

  Father hadn’t returned from his trip to the stationery store for the Sunday paper, and we found Mother sitting at the kitchen table without her usual mug of coffee, her hands oddly cupped together.

  “What’s for breakfast, Mommy?” Laurie asked.

  When she didn’t glance at us, didn’t move, Laurie repeated her question.

  Mother’s hands flattened on the table and she sighed. “Oh, I’m not a cook, dear. Why don’t you fix something for yourselves?”

  My sister stubbornly pointed a finger at her stomach. “We’re hungry, Mommy.”

  “So am I, honey, but I just don’t feel like a cook today.”

  “What do you feel like?”

  “I don’t know … I feel like somebody else, maybe.” She attempted a weak smile, but her tired eyes so defeated her that Dan tried initiating a tease, chanting, “Mommy’s somebody else, Mommy’s somebody else.”

  Mother managed a laugh. Emboldened by Dan’s success, I asked a question that forever after I’ve wished I never asked: “Well, who are you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know … a friend of your mother’s.”

  “If you’re her friend,” I said, “then how come we never met you before?”

  Mother smiled sadly. “It’s never too late for introductions—”

  “So what’s your name?” Laurie asked.