"The Seventh Letter"
by Sean Williams
The stroke hit him like a
thunderbolt in front of the whole Board.
The world vanished as if a shutter had been drawn. Later, he remembered the feel of his left hand
at his temple, where a knife seemed to enter his brain and twist, before all
consciousness was snuffed out. He didn't
remember the blow that left a deep, purple bruise above his left eye, where his
head struck the table so hard it would've knocked him out cold if he hadn't
been already.
Then...shadows, shapes, distant
conversations. He wasn't truly aware for
some time. Forever, it seemed to him,
when he could think at all. He was a
puzzle in its box, with all the pieces tumbled and unlikely to fall into place
on their own.
When he returned to himself, he
was flat on his back in a well-lit, white room, loomed over by an ashen-haired
woman with protuberant ears.
"What happened?" he
croaked.
The woman looked pleased but not
unsurprised. "Welcome back, Mr
Jameson. How are you
<----->?"
He blinked. "How am I what?"
"<----->, I said. Is there any pain? Can you move?
I'm Doctor Harrod. We put you on <----->
within an hour of your stroke and the scans seem mostly clear now. The devil, however, is always in the
details. Can you feel it when I do
this?" The doctor lifted his hand
and manipulated the joints.
He pulled it back. "Yes, I can feel it, but--"
"What?"
He didn't want to say it. He knew what a stroke was. Everyone in their 50s knew. If his mind was broken, would it be better or
worse to see the cracks?
"Talk to me,
<----->. If you describe your
symptoms fully, there's a chance we can see to them."
"What did you just call
me?"
The doctor lost some of her
bedside cheer. "Your name, Mr Jameson. I used your first name. Don't you remember what that is?"
He shook his head, and the full
force of his mortality struck him in that moment.
"Excuse me, Mr Jameson, just
for a second. I will be back."
Unlike me, he feared as the doctor
swept out of the room. Unlike me.
#
A battery of tests consumed the
next few hours. He clearly wasn't
entirely well, despite the full recovery of his physical functions. He could sit, point, eat, and excrete to the
satisfaction of the therapists summoned to examine him. The problem was more subtle than that. He had trouble with some instructions,
particularly those specific to one side of his body--a problem of comprehension,
not volition. If he couldn't understand
what was asked of him, how could he comply?
The disability was thus isolated
to the speech centres of his brain, where words were formed. Even so its exact nature still proved
stubbornly elusive. Some words were
simply absent, excised from his brain with a semantic scalpel. There seemed to be no pattern to the
excision. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs were victims, but not all nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
His wife came to visit,
flamboyant in sombre tones. She too
called him by a name he could not understand, and looked appropriately dismayed
when he could not say hers.
"Oh, pumpkin. What's happened to you? Do they think you'll recover? The Board is anxious. They can't keep the <-----> on hold
forever."
He suppressed a flash of
irritation. Who cared about the Board
when his life had been shattered?
"Please don't call me
'pumpkin'," he said, aware of a nurse by the door. His circumstances embarrassed him
sufficiently as it was.
"Well, what am I to call
you, then? You've already made it clear
you won't hear your name, and you won't use mine either."
"It's not that I won't. I can't.
They don't sound like any words I've heard before." He searched for an appropriate metaphor in
his oddly truncated vocabulary.
"There are times when we're not in the same country. I'm here and you're in
He couldn't finish the
sentence. The name he needed wasn't in
his mind any more, escaped like so many other words. There had to be a way to talk about such
matters, but all too frequently he found himself road-blocked.
The expression on his wife's face
was one he would come to know well, in the days ahead.
#
More tests. Flash cards and electrodes taped to his
scalp. Extended, self-conscious
conversations with psychiatrists and speech therapists. Occasional incarcerations in claustrophobic
tubes in which every neuron of his brain was untied and examined. The lesion proved difficult to isolate, and
without isolation a cure would be impossible.
He endured it all, keenly aware that with every day his case became
odder, strayed further and further beyond the medical norm. Sometimes it was difficult to tolerate, the
awareness that the puzzle he represented was more important than who he was. His condition was to be defeated, not cured.
In the end, an intern achieved
what all the experts had not. Sam was
affable, warm-natured, and had taken to him despite the difference in their
years. He came frequently to chat. The topic of Jameson's condition could not be
avoided, but Sam seemed interested in a personal capacity, as well as
professional.
It was Sam, the intern, who had
proposed that he, the patient, use his middle name, Lee, in place of his
first. That worked. Lee Jameson was acceptable to his
inconveniently broken mind.
"I had an idea, Lee,"
Sam said on another occasion. "You
can turn left but not <----->. You
can run but you've never been <----->.
You can say Lee but not <----->.
Has anyone asked you about the alphabet?"
Lee shook his head. "What about it?"
"How many letters there are,
for instance."
"26. Everyone knows that."
"Tell me them, then."
He felt like a child but did as
instructed. "A B C D E F H I J K L
M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z."
"That's 25."
"Nonsense. Don't mess with me, Sam."
"I'm not. You missed a letter."
"I'm sure I didn't."
"Try once more."
"A B C D E F H I J--"
"Stop there, Lee. What comes between F and H?"
"There's no letter between F
and H."
"Then that's your
problem." Sam beamed. "You've lost <----->."
Lee shook his head. The sound Sam had made bore no relation to
any in his lexicon. It didn't
exist. It didn't exist to him.
More tests followed. Sam's theory was upheld. Odd as it seemed, one letter out of
twenty-six had utterly vanished from Lee's life. Any word spelt with that letter was therefore
incomprehensible to him, whether written or said aloud. The extraordinary plasticity of the brain
enabled him to fold his speech around that absent letter so effectively that
its absence was invisible to him, but the consequences remained dire. His name, which contained that letter, had
vanished into the blind sport, as had his wife's. Whole sections of the dictionary and the
phone book now meant zero to him. Some
suburbs seemed like lands more distant than
The only consolation he could see
was that he hadn't lost one of the vowels--E would have been very difficult to
lived without--or a common consonant like S.
How could he have coped without plurals?
"So you can say Jameson but
not <----->, and Jesus but not <----->?"
"Yes."
His wife looked at him in a way
that revealed she didn't quite believe him.
Her scepticism hurt less than he could have expected. They still hadn't decided what he should call
her, now her name was off-limits. That
worried him. Now that his condition had
been defined and declared no immediate threat to his life, he was free to
return home.
Perhaps the condition would be
named after him, he speculated. His last
name, he hoped, not his first.
#
After Sam had finished his shift
and when the shadows were thickest in the ward, Lee dressed in the clothes his
wife had provided for him to wear home the next day. She had booked a car from him, under his new
name. The clothes didn't quite fit. He had become thin in hospital, older. His hair stood up in a wild, ivory wave when
he looked in the mirror. The bruise
above his eye temple had turned yellow.
He pulled at his cheeks and blew himself a kiss that looked more final
than he had intended.
Somewhere behind that skull was a
tiny scar, one that had thus far utterly eluded the finest of science's
searches and could remain undiscovered for years, perhaps forever if he was
unlucky. He would wait all that time for
his name to be returned, for the lexicon to be restored. Wouldn't it be better to accept who he was
now and move on?
Move on to what? He could be a carpenter, or a teacher. No, not a teacher. He was a card short of a full deck. His pupils would matriculate with a
one-letter deficit, innocent inheritors of his own fundamental flaw. His choices were limited to ones he could
pronounce and therefore think of, such as carpenter, mechanic, postman,
scientist.
It would be unwise, too, he
decided, to pick a field in which communication was essential, such as politics
or the priesthood. How could he be a
priest when he couldn't even say the word most people used for
"deity"? He lay awake in
search of the absent letter and the hole in his head that it had fallen into. That was an entirely different sort of
existential mystery, one he was already tired of.
He tore his stare from the mirror
and put a hand on the doorknob. At that
moment it turned. The door opened to
reveal a tall man in the corridor outside.
His cheeks were hollow. The hat
he wore was broad and old-fashioned, his suit conservative and uncreased.
"Mr Jameson?"
Lee stepped backwards, filled
with an unaccountable shame at his planned escape. It was his life; he could do with it whatever
he wanted, even run off into a new one if required.
"I'm sorry to startle you at
this late hour." The hat came off
with a practised sweep. The man's
shoulders were stooped, as of one ill-accustomed to his superior stature, but
his manner was confident. "I came
the moment I learned of your condition from Doctor Harrod. Here."
A business card issued forth from an inside pocket, proffered with an
economical motion of one hand. "My
name is Simon Le Hunte."
The card said: "Treasurer,
Royal Society for the Semantically Impaired."
"My condolences," Le
Hunte offered with his hat held to his chest.
"May I talk with you for a moment?
"I--yes, of course. Come in." Lee retreated to the bed, concerned that a
sudden pins-and-needles sensation in his extremities heralded a new neuronal
assault.
"I want you to know, first
and foremost, that you are not alone."
Le Hunte stood at the end of the bed, his hat now at his side. "Neither is the injury you have suffered
completely unknown to science, even if it is often misdia--ah, that is, often
overlooked in the normal rounds of medical treatment."
He understood then that Le
Hunte's word-choice was carefully considerate, so Lee could understand every
word. The rest followed naturally.
"Which letter have you
lost?" he asked.
"Alas, I cannot tell
you. I can only refer to it as the 17th
letter."
A quick count revealed that to be
Q.
"We are fortunate, you and
I," said Le Hunte. "With a
more inconvenient overlap, we could barely converse. That's why I am often chosen to introduce the
Society to new recruits. I am pleased to
be about that service today." He
executed a small bow.
A joke occurred to Lee then, but
he could not put it in words. In his
mind's eye he saw an assembly of the Semantically Impaired, all with different
letters lost and forever stuck in the attempt of conversation. It could be impossible for them to
communicate except by Morse code or numbers or even semaphore. But he could not find the words to describe
such an assembly. He had attended many
such as chair of the Board of his company, but he could not name them now
because those words were lost.
Words lost like those of the man
before him and who knew how many others?
Words that had never returned.
For the first time he wept, not
just for himself, but for his wife whose name would remain forever unspoken by
his lips--and for people without the letter L who could not speak of love,
those denied M and the word "mother", and others whose incapacities
he could barely conceive of. Even Le
Hunte would never toast the Queen, which had never before seemed an important
part of life. To be denied any aspect of
speech and perception was unbearable.
Inhumane.
Le Hunte made no move to
physically reassure him, but he did speak.
"It's perfect alri--I mean
to say, you shouldn't feel ashamed.
We've all felt this way at some point.
It is not easy to be as we are, alike and yet profoundly unlike. It's not amnesia; it's not aphasia. It's entirely too difficult to explain to
those without our particular lack. And
to lose your name..." Le Hunte's
expression became mordantly sympathetic.
"I would have you know that you're not alone in that circumstance,
either. There are others on our books in
the same straits."
"Is that supposed to cheer
me up?"
"Perhaps not. But there is a chance of recovery, if that is
what you need. Science has made terrific
advances in recent years. Doctors cannot
yet repair the lesions that cost us our letters, but there is talk of
prostheses--artificial letters, if you like, rather than ones that have been
reversed or distorted as offered to us in the past. I was born with this condition and remember
all too well the awkward spectacles and lenses forced upon me. Now, there is none of that. Society has learned of our condition, however
slowly, and makes adjustments. For
instance, there exist translations of classic novels that permit even the most
unfortunately impaired to read as others do.
There is hope, you see, Mr Jameson.
There is always hope."
"Teally?"
"Yes. And--well, I don't wish to be harsh, but
people survive far worse disabilities.
We are fortunate, you and I.
There is much we can still say--and limitations, some believe, only make
us more creative. For every common word
denied, an old one is revived.
Shakespeare and Chaucer would be pleased, I think, with some of our more
inventive members."
Lee reached into a pocket for a
handkerchief and blew his nose rather messily.
"Has anyone else lost my letter?"
"The seventh? Not anyone I have met."
"I'm unique, then."
"You are what?"
"Oh, sorry. I'm one of a kind."
"I see. Yes.
That's certainly true. Is that a
comfort to you?"
He wanted to say, no, not really,
but that wasn't entirely true. He did
feel somewhat better for the joint awareness that someone else had his
condition too and that he wasn't just another in the herd.
"Well," said Le Hunte,
hat atop his head once more, "you have my card. Call me any time. We meet weekly. Please join us. You are most welcome."
Lee stood to shake Le Hunte's
hand. "Thank you. I really am terribly..." He floundered, at a momentary loss for the
correct word.
"Appreciative?"
"Yes."
For the first time, Le Hunte
smiled. "I believed you would
be. Farewell, Mr Jameson," he said
with a wave. "Au revoir. See you anon.
Until next time!"
When the sound of his visitor's
footsteps in the corridor outside had faded to silence, Lee took off his street
clothes and returned to bed. Prostrate
in the darkness, with his hands behind his head, he considered all that Le
Hunte had said. How peculiar that his
condition could be so common that a Royal Society existed to assist its
sufferers--and odder still that all across the world were dotted people whose
alphabets deviated from everyone else's!
Did such exist in
No more did he feel the need to
run away. There could be no escape from
his condition, even if it was one that he would find difficult to explain to
people. He had no visible symptoms. He could, with a little practise,
function. Yet he had lost his name,
which in every society had a symbolic and undeniable effect on his sense of
self. He was Lee Jameson now, and who
that was remained to be seen. His old
self certainly wouldn't have resolved to tell his wife that "pumpkin"
would be fine, provided he could call her that in return. And he wouldn't have spoken to the duty nurse
to put in a recommendation for Sam the intern.
He had been too busy with the Board and his other responsibilities.
Lee Jameson had new
responsibilities, new demands. His
relationship with the world had been turned upside down by a purloined
letter. Never before had he suspected
how complicated words could be. They
were for much more than mere description.
What one can't find the words for, he decided, cannot exist in one's
experience--and what is the world, after all, other than the sum of one's
experience?
Reassured that he had found a level
of comprehension sufficient to survive the days and weeks ahead, he let his
eyes drift shut and sleep take him away.
And his dreams, like those of the
blind who dream in colour, were full of mergers, board meetings and
gun-fighting guinea pigs riding stagecoaches of pure gold.