Hypocrite Lecteur
Story by M. Thomas
Gammarino • Photo by Oleg Andreev
 Don't even bother.
You can't read this and you know it. There's nothing you'd like
better, but the ability eludes you. It just does. The
letters are familiar enough—you've seen them all before.
You can even make a sure-footed guess at the sounds they
represent. It's just patching them together that trips you
up. See eigh tea spells
cat.
You learned that somewhere along the line, from Big Bird maybe, or Mrs.
Riley in the first grade. But you have your doubts. No one
could really prove to you that cat
is spelled that way. No one
could prove to you that cat
is spelled at all in fact—you're not totally convinced that anyone can
make sense of all this mystifying scrawl. If they can, why can't you? You're no dummy.
You're well spoken enough and have a manifest knack for verse.
You've composed over two hundred poems already; seventeen hundred
couplets are etched indelibly in your brain.Occasionally, after one of your "readings," some young wild-eyed poet introduces herself and says, "Hey, that was really great stuff. Where can I get a copy?" and you jot down your phone number on a napkin (numbers, you can handle) and say, "Feel free to give me a call anytime. I'm always happy to recite them." You even write down your name. Your mother taught you that long ago. You've no proof that it's correct, but so far no one's said anything. The young wild-eyed poet saunters off, elated to have gotten your number, though surely too self-conscious to use it. Six times in this particular document you make out the word cat. The italics catch your eye too, but as for the rest? You ask yourself why you bother at all. You reply that the letters themselves somehow suffice. They're not exactly pretty like the Chinese you see on menus ("I'll have the sweet and sour chicken," you say—they always have that) with all their loopdidoos and curlicues, but they've a certain refined elegance about them. And a nice font can work wonders. You are a font master. Often you stay up well into the night experimenting with your PC. Nocturnal passers-by gazing up at your window-framed silhouette from the street below commonly mistake you for a writer. And they wouldn't be wrong either, were it not that writers write. This story you're looking at is printed almost entirely in Times New Roman. How boring, you think…but not in letters. You think in words…no, not even words really, but in sounds. Nature's a mere one step removed from you; no alphabet partitions you from it. Sometimes, as now, you sicken of all letters, regardless of font. You despise the stupid ink they're made of and the wicked Phoenician who invented them. This very story, you have a hunch, concerns you, though you could never prove that. For all you know, all written words everywhere—cinders of papyrus in Alexandria and hanging scrolls of the Far East, zillions of typed pages in libraries and book stores, flyers disseminated in city streets, Gideon's bibles and phone books in hotel rooms and motel rooms, comic books and billboards, skywriting, gigabytes of e-mail and homework, street signs, insurance policies, graffiti, instruction manuals, receipts, beer bottles, dictionaries, captions and pulp—might be one great conspiracy, a cruel enduring joke with you at its butt. But then surely there must be something in all these cryptic pages. Some folks dedicate their whole lives to them. Some write them for a living. Some write them for a life. Everyone else seems to read them. And how many trees have given their lives to periodicals? How many forests to juvenilia? That we may what? That we might gain what wisdom? Achieve what end? What in the world could possibly be in here? But you'll never know. The world is in subtitles that you can never understand. A solitary tear drops onto this page. You turn your head to the left and add the final line to the best poem you never wrote. |