Vlakk then pointed at the fire and made up a noise, “unk,” and from then on, fire was called unk. And so on. In one night, Vlakk was able to come up with sound effects for dozens of nouns and verbs—gazelles and smallpox and thorns and wife beating—and because it was just one intelligence making up all these new words, the newly evolving language had a sense of cohesiveness to it—it sounded true to itself the way Italian or Japanese does.
However, Vlakk’s language creation process made one tribe member—whom he’d named Glog—furious. Glog was thinking, “This is crazy! You can’t just go around making up words arbitrarily, based on sound effects!” But of course, Glog didn’t have language, so there was no way for him to articulate his anger at the vim with which Vlakk was cooking up new words. And it’s not as if Glog had some other, better way of naming things; he was just one of nature’s born bitchers and moaners.
Vlakk and Glog and their tribe had many children, most of whom died very young of hideous deaths because it was the distant past and, in general, people didn’t last too long. But enough of Vlakk’s descendants survived to generate new sound effects that went on to become words.
And of course, Glog’s descendants carried his gene for finickiness, and as the new language grew and grew, they continued to protest the arbitrary harum-scarum way Vlakk’s descendants gave words to things like “dung beetles” and “ritualized impalement on sharp satay-like bamboo skewers beside anthills.” As the language evolved over thousands of years, everyone forgot that words had begun as arbitrary sound effects. Words were now simply words, long divorced from their grunting heritage.
As Vlakk and Glog’s culture became more complex, so did its language. Grammar was invented, as was the future tense and gender and verb conjugation and all the things that make learning a new language a royal pain in la derrière.
Finally, language entered modern times. If Glog had been king, his far distant grandchild, Bartholomew, would have been his successor. Distant as they were in time, their neocortices were of the same size; Bartholomew was Glog with a good haircut and a fine suit.
Bartholomew was obsessed with new additions to the language. He was particularly incensed by things that caused language to change or evolve. He worked as a copy checker for a large business magazine and spent his lunch hours and weekends writing acid-tipped hate mail to other magazines that incorporated any noun or verb that had entered the language since the dawn of digital culture. Can’t you see how you’re diluting the language? Corrupting it! Tell me, what is a jpeg? What a sick and diseased and laughable word it is—it’s not even a word! It’s a sound effect; a glottal sideshow freak. It’s a bastard word—a bearded lady of a word.
People at the magazine found Bartholomew to be a lovable kook, but they were very careful never to offend him, because, while he wasn’t the sort of person to anonymously mail you a dead sparrow inside a cardboard milk box as some form of demented condemnation, there lingered the feeling that he had more subtle, untraceable means of punishing a perceived offender, like maybe he was keeping dossiers on all of them. And every year during the office Christmas party, somebody got drunk and made a mock crime scene investigation of Bartholomew’s bookcased folders. Nothing was ever found, but the secretaries in the office would make fun of his cologne. They called it “KGB.”
Fortunately, there was Karen from HR, who was able to allow a ray of light into Bartholomew’s world. Each morning she dropped off the paper versions of his daily copy work and was able to smile and receive a smile in return from Bartholomew. Karen was the office free spirit. She had a Bettie Page hairdo, a nose ring and black knee socks she’d bought in Tokyo, in Shibuya. Other girls in the office stood outside Bartholomew’s office to witness his Karen smile themselves. They knew he was single, and that Carol in the layout department had seen Bartholomew loitering in front of the straight porn section by the newsstand three blocks over from the office.
“Okay,” said Karen, “he’s no big catch . . . but he’s certainly a big challenge.”
Karen tried to come on sexy at first but pulled back, knowing immediately that it was the wrong strategy. This was going to be one tough fish to reel in. So she decided to conquer Bartholomew by email. Short. Sweet. Perky. Saucy. Unfortunately, this decision was made right at the tipping point when hand-held devices enslaved the human psyche. Bartholomew was deeply distressed by the collapse of language into chimp-like bafflegab. Oftentimes his co-workers’ text messages exceeded his powers of cryptography.
S|-|ip 70 T0ky0 fi135 L8r 70d4y. ||0, 7|-|3y d0||’7 |-|4v3 4 m4(|-|i||3 5|-|4p3d 1ik3 4 fu(ki||g ki773|| 7|-|47 m4k35 5u5|-|i.
He took to keeping his office door shut. He grew a beard, and began drinking his own pee from jars. Okay, he didn’t grow a beard and drink his own pee from jars, but only because that behaviour would have offended another code that ordered his life—one of sanitation, of bodily purity. But he was bunkering himself.
Suffice it to say that, for Bartholomew, the supremacy of PDAs heralded the beginning of the end. Well, maybe not the beginning of the end, because he’d been raised in the Glog family tradition, which was to believe that every moment of life heralded the beginning of the end. Perhaps these newly triumphant PDAs, in some profound way, marked the end of language, which was now imploding on itself in an optical scrapyard of slashes, diacritical marks and pointless numerical intrusions.
One morning Karen was on the subway, going to work, and was in a strange headspace because she was starting to actually fall in love with Bartholomew. Knowing it maybe wasn’t the smartest thing to do, she sent Bartholomew a very lusty text message.
W|-|3|| I g37 70 7|-|3 0ffi(3 2d4y, 137’5 m4k3 p455i0||473 10v3 0v3r70p y0ur 14rg3 (0113(7i0|| 0f 1i||3d y3110w 13g41 p4d5. S||4rp3|| u p3||(i1, Big B0y
Bartholomew read this and thought, “Good Lord, language has devolved into a series of strung-together vanity licence plates! I can’t be a part of this! I can’t!” So when Karen showed up, Bartholomew didn’t give her his daily smile. Karen was crushed. She sent a proper email, in perfect English, that said,
Dear Bartholomew,
Earlier today, while I was riding the subway to work, I emailed you a whimsical message. I think it overstepped the boundaries of “what is correct,” but it was meant in jest and I hope you won’t think less of me for it. Karen.
The thing is, Bartholomew ignored this email because he was crazy, and the thing about crazy people is that they really are crazy. Sometimes you can get quite far with them and you start telling other people, “So-and-so’s not the least bit crazy,” and then So-and-so suddenly starts to exhibit his crazy behaviour, at which point you say “Whoa!” and pull back—People were right: this guy is really nuts.
Karen’s boss, Lydia, saw Karen moping in the lunchroom and said, “Honey, sometimes I think it’s almost more polite to be crazy 24-7, because at least you don’t get people falling in love with you and making a mess of things.”
“But I love him.”
“Of course you do, sweetie. Pass me the Splenda.”
As Karen left the lunchroom, Lydia said to her coworkers, “People always seem to fall in love during that magical space before one person sees the other display their signature crazy behaviour. Poor Karen.”
But Karen’s heart mended from her break with Bartholomew, and within two years she was engaged to a guy who made sculptures out of cardboard boxes, which he took to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. And life went on. Bartholomew grew older and buggier. People stopped using land-line telephones altogether. Everyone on earth used PDAs, even starving people in starving countries. All languages on earth collapsed and contracted and Bartholomew’s endgame scenario was coming true—language was dying. People began to speak the way they texted, and before he was fifty, language was right back to the level of the log and the roaring fire. Bartholomew wondered why he even came to work. Nobody paid any attention to what he did but, as the Glog family motto goes, “Somebody has to maintain stand
ards.”
Then one day Karen walked past Bartholomew’s office with her by now teenage daughter. His door was open and he was able to hear the two women speak—they both sounded like the Tasmanian devil character from Bugs Bunny cartoons. They turned around and spoke to Bartholomew: “Booga-boogaooga-oog?”
They were asking him if he wanted to go out for lunch, but he understood not a word. He shook his head in incomprehension. The office emptied of staff. Lunch hour ended and nobody came back. Bartholomew thought this was strange. He walked out of his office and walked around his floor. Nobody. Hmmm. He went down into the lobby and there was nobody there or in the street, either. He began to walk around the city, but everywhere he looked there was silence. He looked at the TVs that were playing in public spaces: they showed the Channel Three News team’s chairs with nobody on them, soccer fields that were empty, traffic cams trained on still roads.
So he walked back to his office and mulled over the situation, which was actually a kind of dream come true for him—no pesky people to further degrade and cheapen the language! But where had everyone gone? He looked at his screen, where the Channel Three News team finally appeared in a box in the centre:
—Hi, you’re watching the Channel Three News team. I’m Ed.
—I’m Connie.
—And I’m Frank, and if you’re watching this prerecorded message, it means that the Rapture has finally happened and you’ve been left behind.
—You know, Connie, people are probably wondering why we’re speaking the way we’re speaking right now.
—You mean, speaking like people did at the start of the twenty-first century instead of the modern way of speaking based on text messaging?
—That’s right, Connie.
—[giggle] It’s because the only people watching this prerecorded broadcast are those that never adapted to the new language and were left behind after the Rapture.
Language has come a long way since then, Ed.
—And has it!
—In the old days, people worried about words and grammar and rules.
—And it was a horrible mess, wasn’t it!
—You said it, Frank. And not the kind of mess you can remove with some club soda and a bit of elbow grease.
—[all chuckle]
—But once people smartened up and began speaking the way they texted and began shrinking language back to its origins in grunts and groans, people became more primal, more elemental . . .
—More real.
—That’s the word I was looking for, Connie. More real. More authentic.
—and once people became more authentic and more interested in using noises and sounds instead of words to communicate with others, their interior lives changed. The endlessly raging self-centred interior monologues came to an end. A holy peace and dignity fell over their lives. They accidentally became closer to God.
—and now they’ve gone right into God’s lap.
—where we are now, too!
—So farewell from eternity, you sticklers who remain behind.
—Saying good night from the Channel Three News headquarters, I’m Ed.
—I’m Connie.
—and I’m Frank.
—[all] Wishing you a happy forever!
DIANA
I looked at Julien. “Well. I didn’t see that coming.”
“The role of the artist is to shock—but not too much or else he’ll have to get a day job. Are there any more wasabi peas?”
“Later. It’s my turn to tell a story.”
Beef Rock
by Ms. Diana Beaton
The gourmet scout party from Gamalon-5 had pretty much given up on the planet Earth when it finally discovered a rare mammal called human beings, which were actually quite delicious. They’d tasted all the other animals, as well as pretty much everything in the ocean, but those very few humans hunkered in their caves were so rare that they had slipped under the tasting radar until the very end. Yes: people were undeniably . . . scrumptious.
“Commander, we’ve got to figure out some way of making these things multiply if we’re ever to secure a meaningful supply.”
“Lieutenant, that’s your job, not mine. Have they discovered hunting yet? They’ll never get to farming until they kill all the big, easy meat around them.”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you have your work cut out for you, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
The lieutenant and his squad went back down to Earth and handed the few scrawny humans they could find some stone arrowheads and some flint. They had to give hundreds of demonstrations of hunting and roasting before the humans could do it on their own.
And then the aliens sat back and waited for humans to wipe out all the megafauna—the mastodons and the moa birds and the sabre-toothed cats—after which they turned their attention to smaller creatures such as bears and buffalo. After all the large animals had been hunted into extinction, humans were forced to adopt agriculture.
“Commander, sir, there really is nothing like agriculture to make a species multiply, is there?”
“Indeed. It’s nice that the universe has at least some constants. What’s next in store for these tasty morsels?”
“We think they’re almost ready to learn to count and learn about ‘zero’—as well as metallurgy. But they’re still pretty primitive.”
“All in good time, Lieutenant.”
And so humanity was given mathematics and knives and ploughshares, and human numbers grew, but not quickly enough to please the hungry aliens.
“Lieutenant, this is taking forever. Stop trying to foist chimps and gibbons on me. I want humans. I want them to multiply, and I want them to multiply now.”
“Yes, sir.” He suggested the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. “That way, they can at least stockpile their intellectual ideas so that they don’t have to start from scratch all the time.”
“Let’s try that, Lieutenant.”
Printing presses—and hence books—accumulated. The industrial revolution became inevitable and, finally, humans went spawn-crazy. Lo, the citizens of Gamalon-5 began to truly gorge on massive quantities of rich, delicious, succulent human flesh. Life on Gamalon-5 became a gourmet nirvana.
One day the lieutenant made the observation that human beings who read large numbers of books tended to taste better than humans who didn’t. This intrigued the commander: “I’m listening, Lieutenant.”
“Sir, when the humans read books, it gives them a sense of individuality, a sense of being unique—a sense that something about their existence is special or, as they like to say, ‘magical.’ Reading seems to generate microproteins in their bloodstreams, and those eons give them that extra-juicy flavour.”
“Hmmm . . . well, whatever it takes to get the job done. But for Pete’s sake, stop harvesting so many humans near Bermuda. They’re beginning to catch on. Also, could you get these humans to introduce more nicotine into their systems? My wife loves the flavour it gives them, but she’s sick of marinating them all the time.”
“Yes, sir.”
By now, the food vendors of Gamalon-5 had gone into competition with each other in the burgeoning human flesh trade. Their nickname for Earth was “Beef Rock,” and the money was terrific. The lieutenant’s nephew generated catchy sales slogans:
OUR HUMANS READ MORE BOOKS!
INDIVIDUAL HUMANS—UNIQUE FLAVOUR!
ON SALE THIS WEEK: PHDS FOR 30 KROGS A POUND;
POSTGRAD STUDENTS 15 KROGS A POUND.
NEED A TASTE OF MYSTERY? TRY OUR “FILET OF CRIME
NOVEL ADDICT”
But then, in the 1990s, the quality of human flavour began plummeting. The commander consulted the lieutenant. “What is going on here?”
“Sir, as an unintended consequence of reading books, humans have made the next leap and have invented digital communications.”
“They WHAT!!!”
“I’m so sorry it happened, sir. We were on holiday, and it ju
st sort of swelled out of nowhere.”
“So are they now using digital communications to conduct commerce, distribute moving image files and keep in contact with former schoolmates?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So they’re reading fewer books?”
The lieutenant sighed. “Yes, sir.”
“Then the situation is truly dire.”
The lieutenant asked, “Is there anything else, sir?”
“Just everyday worries. My teenage daughter has announced that she’s gone Spam on me.”
The lieutenant smiled: “going Spam” was a trendy phase among the teens of Gamalon-5, who thought eating humans was cruel. They opted instead for cans of Spam imported from Earth; nothing so closely approximates the oily, salty taste of cooked human flesh as the hammy goodness of Spam. “I’m sure it’s just a phase, sir.”
“Tell that to my wife, who has to put two different meals on the table every night.”
The next afternoon the commander was going through his files and summoned his lieutenant. “Lieutenant, it says here that book sales are higher than ever as the humans are using a technique called Amazon-dot-com to purchase them.”
“That is a deceiving statistic, sir. Amazon increases the need of humans to own books, but not necessarily to read them.”
“Drat.”
Time wore on and human meat became ever more unpalatable and consumption dropped dramatically. And after a point, the government of Gamalon-5 refused to subsidize the import of humans and soon barred the practice altogether. The lieutenant sighed as his ship flew away from Beef Rock one last time, leaving the humans to themselves and whatever gruesome fate they might cook up. He heaved a guilty sigh, turned around and scanned the universe, looking for new sources of meat. Farewell, Beef Rock!