The Lemma
Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
Moby-Dick, Chapter 134
The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
Leonardo da Vinci
I.
The same tropical Thursday that Ippo died, I noticed a tiny scar above the middle knuckle of my left hand. I remembered the burn that would've caused it from my summer away at camp in '94 when, while trying to set fire to the down on my hand (to experience the smell of burnt hair), I seared myself with the flame of the BIC. I couldn't account for the scar's materializing now, but I didn't dwell; instead I spent most of that evening sitting on the edge of my bathtub, between worn loofahs and razor blades, while I thumbed through pictures of Ippo on my phone. “Look at you,” I said: to his face caught in a terrific yawn; to Ippo on the Barcalounger, legs splayed for a tonguing; to Ippo wrapped inside the duvet like a kilted sausage; to Ippo sniffing my ex-girlfriend's dog's wet nose; to Ippo in the car on a trip, waking with tight pupils, poking through his carryall to catch the live world through the window.
He died in 2010, and the following Wednesday I made my weekly drop-in on Argente, who lived in a single shotgun in Toronto's Beaches, nestled behind a red bay-and-gable. His “nana pad” (as he called it) had a black roof and a front porch, and a neon green door with paint peeled away in strips, revealing the grey primer underneath.
I parked in front and made my way up his walk with his meal in hand. I saw this redheaded kid on the porch, kneeling in front of the neon door and cutting a piece of paint away with his thumbnail.
“Hey,” I yelled. The kid stood up and turned around.
“Hey.”
“Get the hell away.”
The kid pocketed the paint chip and ran past me down the walk. He turned around from the edge of the yard.
“A tripod fried his arm, you know. Ask him about it.”
I said I had, which was a lie. “Be respectful,” I said. “Get going.” The boy stuck out his tongue and rubbed his bare arm, like he was shedding off sweated skin.
I went around back and knocked. It took Argente a good minute to open the door only as far as the chain allowed, baring one of his milky green eyes and a stubbled cheek. An orange kitten balanced on top of his head, sniffing the brass chain. The kitten tried to shove himself through the opening till Argente brought up a broad fuzzy hand to the kitten's face. The kitten snatched at his hand with a hug.
“Beat a retreat, Pierrot, give ground. It appears it's only Gil, your new uncle. Or a stationed mannequin. To be sure, let's gride the blinds back and reveal this rooted figure.”
I heard him remove the chain from the track. The door opened wide to old Argente's tummy-hugging undershirt that showed his white belly and its shoring grey hairs, his black, cherry-patterned stockings that covered his calves, and the same boxers I'd always see him in, with ‘Saturdays' stenciled along the waistband. His baldish head toupeed with a kitten. Pierrot dug his claws into Argente's surviving sideburns.
“Pierrot, you dummy, he's no dummy, see? It's our favourite food preparer, our waitperson, our comestible supplier!”
“Hi, Franck,” I said.
“Denominated around here as the Black Pox, for sure—the territorial impedimenter!”
“And you say you're not a sore loser,” I said.
“Hello? It's a facile loss when the loser's mind's asunder—or, better, an unexacting conquest for you, top dog.”
“How about we discuss my illegitimate victories once I'm inside?”
“Of course! Enter already. Watch your tread, though; a clowder of generational disparities swim between your legs.”
Cat tails were up and dripping at the top like periscopes, their owners moving to food bowls and the circumvolving litter box, which apparently self-cleaned and flushed into a six-foot pit Argente had dug himself (right through the floor). He told me once it was to keep protozoan at bay. “FeLV and toxoplasmosis,” he said, “are the leading concerns among this brood.” This brood had tripled since Argente's initial dive into cat collecting over a decade ago, when one of his first purchases, an unspayed torty from Quebec named Ruby, got knocked up by the neighbourhood alpha, Smoky the Smoke.
“Smoky boasts a grey ruff and startling complete heterochromia,” Argente had told me during one of my first deliveries. “One iris is robin's-egg, the other a sticky brown, like a fresh brazil nut or a date out of skin. This is likely Smoky's central wooing attribute, as he's missing both canines and there's always some matted ordure in his pelt.” Sometime later I myself caught a glimpse of Smoky in action, pulling in a purebred (an obvious loose indoor who treated the grass like lava) by staring her down till she bowed. Then he circled behind her. Ruby ended up squeezing out a six-kitten litter, the oldest and most colourful of them Ippo, whom Argente pushed on me.
“Good spread today,” I said, setting the trays on his coffee table. “Soup: tortellini. Quiche: mushroom. You got carrots, peas, some red grapes, got you two dinner rolls, a couple margarines, some milk, orange juice, and—check it, Franck—sugar-free cheesecake. You're all set.” I went in for a high five. Argente blinked.
“How about a divertissement?”
“No time,” I said, but really he was my last delivery.
“Come, now. I've earned a third chance at triumph, haven't I?”
“I've gotta go.”
“Eat with an oldster! Play a game! Tell me of Ippo, your calico crony, your many adventures and feats.”
I sat down in Argente's living room and was handed a lukewarm chai green tea. Franck spent some moments rummaging beneath papers and behind stacks of The Old Farmer's Almanac and American Scientist for his Go board, while I peeled the plastic coating away from his main meal.
“So?” went Argente. “Ippo? Has he caught the laser?” He was always asking about him.
“No, Franck. Honestly, Ippo died last week. Here, come eat.”
Argente stopped, then held a finger to his lips, shushing. He lifted his ear from behind with two fingers, as if listening for Ippo, or the rattle of the Go stones.
“Right,” he said. He sat across from me and, for the remainder of the conversation, jotted notes in the margins of a dictionary page somewhere within the range of ‘D.'
“Age?” he asked.
“No ‘I'm sorry, Gil,' no ‘jeez, I'm sad to hear it'?”
He looked down at the dictionary. “I'm distraught. Despondent and doleful. Downcast. Age?”
“I'm twenty-seven.”
“Ippo's.”
“I'm not sure, Franck. Twelve? Whenever the litter was born. You remember.”
“Ah, yes. An apostleship of FYs. Québécois, if I recall.”
“Uh.”
“Ippo was from the Laurentians. Rather, Ruby was—poor, lamented Ruby. No forgetting that vision. Mottled tortoiseshell with the lilac-cream backcloth. She enjoyed plumping herself above a heating duct while she siestaed. Her intrigue was vexatious, wasn't it? Almost a coalition of louts! Save for Ippo, of course, her sole scion, who met the Maker...”
“Run over,” I said. I removed the teabag from my mug and set it in an ashtray full of them.
“Facing the tread! So where were you during your mouser's regrettable trice?”
“I don't know what you're asking.”
“When Ippo... expired. Where were you?”
“Oh. Watching The Nanny on Nick at Nite. Cutting my toenails in bed. Wearing my Dukakis You Rockis T-shirt. Anything else?”
“None of that's even slightly germane, and I'd prefer you stick to the at-hand topic.”
“Eat.”
“Did you hear Ippo's affrighted pule?” asked Argente. “At the moment of expiry?”
“That's his cry when he bit it, right?”
Argente didn't respond, but only outlined the cleft of his chin with his thumbnail.
“Yeah, then,” I said. “Then the squeal of the guy's tires. I went outside to snap pictures of the car, but he was gone, so I took a photo of the skid marks. Who knows why, though.”
“Why, to snag the malefactor, of course!” yelled Argente, slapping the dictionary closed. “If perusals might brook any further manifestations. So show me the marks.”
I pulled out my phone. He held it like the tail of a mouse while he examined the picture.
“Likely Goodyear All-Weather Wranglers. Good on you, Gil! Though, prithee, don't assume the driver was male. I know well of women's slippery fingers at the hoop. You forget how I acquired this?” Argente held up his burned arm. “My geomorphological plat of skinless valleys and rilled cicatrices?”
“I honestly have no idea what happened there,” I said.
“I'll divulge soon, when an apposite amount of time's been devoted to the passing of your bewhiskered chum.” He looked at his watchless wrist. “Was poor Ippo suspiring when you found him?”
“Please, Franck, for once, talk normally. Conversations would go a lot quicker.”
“Was he breathing?” muttered Argente.
“I can confidently answer that question with a ‘no.' His torso was completely flattened.”
“Oh, luckless, departed Hippopotame! No one longs to be a brace drill, or any such thing in resemblance. Draw his cadaver for me, will you?”
“Why? Why's that matter?”
“Imaginings, my fine fellow. At the moment I envisage a toony corpse, with no partial perceptions. If you'd be so kind, I'll then bag an ad rem visual.” He offered me the back of a cardboard beer coaster and a dull pencil. I did the best I could and showed it to him. Argente's mouth hung open.
“Note my cantilevered jaw, the exodus of rainforest air from prostration!” He smacked his forehead. “You scraped away his offcuts, I imagine? Like egg off a pan. What'd you do with him?”
“I put his body in a Loblaws plastic bag and burned him in my firepit.”
“Courtly. Pyrolytic entrainment. A fine way to slither above. I commiserate, my good Gil. My own grimalkins have too been at the mercy of grounded dirigibles. Wait!” Argente moved to an old glass bar cart and popped open his only bottle, an 18-year-old Sazerac Rye. He poured two fat fingers into a couple of waxed paper cups patterned with Smurfs.
“Not before you eat, Franck.”
“I'm in the pink, Filar. Now.” He held up his cup. “To the best river horse of the bloat. May he be mantled comfortably beneath a frothy, hereafter pall.”
“Yeah,” I said. We drank the fingers together. He smacked his down on the coffee table with a foamy clop and wheezed.
“I think I might have to forego the Go, Franck,” I said, looking at my watch.
“New nevus,” he said, pointing at my hand.
“Oh. What?”
“Your scar. That's recently developed.”
“Hey, yeah, right? Yeah, I thought so too. Is it? Funny, I think I remember the burn that would've caused it from a long time ago. Shit's weird.”
Argente's expression warped, one set of eyelashes flitting, like from pain. His bottom lip lolled, his upper squinched, like he was trying to form a myriad of words all at once.
“Didn't mean to swear,” I said. “Sorry.”
“The universe may change,” he whispered, “but I shall not. One thinks this with vain melancholy; that, when facing down the Darwinian reshapings of their world with a steadfast phlegm, the dogged solipsist may remain unaltered. But the rearward case? What of it?”
“Not following, Franck.”
“‘The universe is invariable, but I'm surely not.' Are you this system's sun, or a whisking celestial object in its elliptical revolution? Or is it the field for the orbit that's constantly moving?”
“Is this from Star Trek?”
“I know your predicament, Gil. I've experienced it myself, and I forewarn, I am my present, fragmented self because.”
“Well. Nice to know I'm not alone.”
Argente rose and pressed his fingers to his temples. “If my axioms were only more cogent and less gnomic, less nebulous and more holistic. Had I a fitting crystal egg, I could, efficaciously, parallel our respective stumpers.”
“I'm gonna go,” I said, rising. “Make sure you eat.”
“Have you read H. G. Wells?”
“I don't have time right now, Franck.”
“I come now to the toilsome tale of my arm's uglification! Bear with the doddering geriatric, if that's not too troublesome!”
“Shit. Fine.” I sat back down. “Uh, War of the Worlds. Never made it through, though. I tried a couple times, but found it pretty dry.”
Argente put on a Joséphine Baker song, “Don't Touch My Tomatoes,” then slid his chair back from the table and placed it at his writing desk. The floor was clear for what would be stints of pacing, hair-scratchings, and multiple Sazerac refills.
“Quite, quite. Doesn't muster up the appropriate consternation in the reader as it does the listener, or the beholder.”
“The movie's all right. I can never get past Tom Cruise.”
“When Wells and Welles came together, I was a guileless eight-year-old with a penchant toward radio broadcasting. I imagined myself as a one-day tuner agent, joining the ranks of the Lilliputian artistes that graced and dwelled within the cornered conveyers in every North American hearth. My father, a roly-poly newspaperman who worked for the then Toronto Daily Star, bought me, for my birthday, a Philips chapel radio, with the lambent stars that bounded lined waves on the built-in speaker.” Li'l Franck became an avid follower of The Mercury Theatre on the Air, dropping any pressing homework most Monday nights to lie in his bed next to the radio “and imbibe the dramaturgical reimaginings of Treasure Island or Sherlock Holmes through the mediating baritone of Welles's elocution.” The show moved to Sunday nights, and on Devil's Night, 1938, when Welles performed his infamous radio drama, Argente had been one of the few listeners who'd tuned in from the beginning and caught its expository introduction, so he wasn't fooled or frightened when shit hit the fan. About halfway through the broadcast, he heard his mother's hysterical cries from downstairs as she tried to persuade his father to load the car with whatever sundry items they could snag in the moment.
“The thoroughfare was glutted with motorcars and hoofing crowds. An air raid siren blared from yonder Yonge Street. My mother was convinced the Germans had flown their Fieseler Fi 98s across the Atlantic and had already razed the East Coast. My father, more than a little familiar with the novel, tried conciliating her by clasping her hands and whispering ‘it's fine, it's literature.' I personally relished the bedlam, as anyone with insider info would, but also as a young 'un might a candlelit blackout or a thunderstorm.”
So Argente grew up and dove into radio, first as a shortwave fact-checker for the CBC International Service in ‘46 (at just seventeen); then he saved some and travelled to South America, landing a gig as a farm report administrator for Radio Quito “in the tranquil, sky-high capital of Ecuador.” He was in town the night of February 12th, 1949, when Leonardo Paez, Radio Quito's dramatic director, organized his own homage to Wells & Welles.
“Paez was an unscrupulous scoundrel. His greased tresses all but hid the demoniac outgrowths that protruded from his thick braincase. He told nobody save for the actors involved of his intent to frighten the public—even went so far as to plant stories of Martian landings in the papers the day prior. Before 9:00 p.m., broadcast time, he locked the doors of the studio to make sure the actors ‘would not be disturbed or dissuaded.'”
Argente wasn't in the building at the time of the broadcast. He said he was painting a fresco for the Santo Domingo church, “illumined by a weak lamp standard off Vicente Rocafuerte. The evening was tempestuous, fourteen degrees, balmy. My watercolours cried in the wind. I had, hooked up to a generator, a Philco portable tuned to our station, during Luis Alberto Valencia and Gonzalo Benítez's Yaraví rendition of ‘For Me Your Memory.' Do you know Yaraví?”
“Can't say that I do,” I said.
“Like the Portuguese ‘fado,' it's elegiac and mournful, suffused with the romantic nostalgia of lost or unrequited love. It's the recitation of rankling heartache, each song's extent a via dolorosa toward acceptance—acceptance of what one cannot relinquish. Imagine listening to the lilting, dulcet croon, then hearing that augural crack of franticness. Soon, a shriek which emanates from a carbonizing body—Paez's trifling trick that would cost so many lives and layers of skin.”
Argente rubbed his arm.
“I left my canvas and ran with a frenetic speed that brought on a calcic spasm in my young left belly. I saw a Peruvian nationalist being beaten with table legs in an alley, and a rosary-clutching rabble stormed the La Merced church to square up with God. A rumbling cloud toured the sky, labeled by rioters and children as ¡Marcianos! and ¡invasores! Rumors disseminated through the streets of a tripodal golem, enshrouded by feathering smoke, drawing from the North, and a series of military deputations moving armored vehicles to Cotocollao, where a firefight was underway.
“I made it to the station after Paez and his cronies had gleaned what was transpiring four levels below them. They revealed to the airwaves their subterfuge, and called for the restoration of Quito's legendary civil tranquility. I remained in the street, where the screams and shouts lulled to a soft silence suspended, for a moment, in zero gravity, till it fell in the rise of the amplitude, the turbulent rumbling of reactive Quiteños swooping down on the building—” which, Argente said, was owned by El Comercio, the country's most widespread and esteemed newspaper—“compounding the peoples' fury! Their beacon of truth, promulgation, they, they were the architects of the ruse! This tasked the Quiteños to start the fires.
“I saw a horde of skirted women, made insane by their husbands' panicked extramarital admissions, light stacks of El Comercio and toss them at the foot of the entrance. The first floor alighted quickly, and those above who hadn't managed to escape from the back entrance or onto the roof tried descending from windows in human chains, but this was mostly unsuccessful.
“The wind was seeded. It was a defiant maelstrom in which any folk who offered assistance, like myself, were dubbed public enemies. I was swatted and shoved when I attempted to stop a wooly-chested pugilist from utilizing rocks to knock away one of two nearby fire hydrants (to impede any extinguishing, you know), and quickly I found myself haphazard in the street, a lonely sun in a sunless system.”
Here's when an old Ford flatbed with a crazy woman at the wheel—“driving her children south, perhaps to San Rafael, or maybe Ambato”—nicked Argente with the left side mirror, twirling him into a small junk fire.
“Were it not for the nonflammable spatters of avocado- and coral-coloured paint staining most of my sport coat, perhaps I would have lost more of my anatomy to flame.
“I've peregrinated periphrastically long enough, my good Gil,” said Argente, sitting at his writing desk and turning to me. “I've told you this now neither to proffer up self-depreciation, nor court your solicitude. In my eighty years, I've come face to face with a plethora of near-immolations that would outperform the Quito scene any day. It is not the incurrence of the burn that reasons my relay; it's that, in my supine state, when a scrupulous few performed their all and doused my arm, I encountered the Lemma.”
“And what dilemma was that, Franck?” I asked.
“The. The Lemma. The first and, truly, only word. It exists without a radix, without semantic allusion. It is the sacrosanct qualifier, the indivisible monad, the first whisper in your ear and out your mouth.”
I coughed, trying to think.
“The Lemma, huh? So, what? Someone say it while you laid there?”
Argente wiped the sides of his mouth. He cupped his hands over his nose.
“It came to me then with the first breakout of pain. Spanish exchanges tickered across my body. The redirected Cotocollao armies finally arrived. Above, people on fire jumped from windows to balconies, leaving testimonial skins on railings before they spun to the ground like maple keys. My arm regained sensation once the fire was smothered by a pair of polyester dress pants; before I could scream, though, came the susurrus—like the gradual release of air from swelled cheeks; a sibilance from a god, or the goad of the conflicted serpent—acting as an emollient or salve for this nymphalid moulting its now-dried cuticle.”
I started getting anxious realizing how difficult a quick escape would prove (too many cats and grounded mugs between the living room, through the kitchen, to the back door).
“Look, I'm sorry, Franck, but I've got three meals growing cold in the car and about forty kilometres to cover, so...” I immediately regretted the clumsy interjection. Argente stood and stared at me, his stomach bulged like a child's, his fists clenched.
“This is not a jest, friend. I've spent years ransacking compendiums and lexicons, glossaries, thesauri, trying to rediscover the Lemma's comprehensive graphemes and runes. I've tracked the London boxcars, scoured the alleys of Queen East, for the one possible graffito that might attempt, through its scrawls and sweeping sprays, to transmit the Lemma's name. My boundless locution and word power comes somewhat from my momentary fuse with the Lemma, but also from the study I've made since in its search. Each synonymic choice is my attempt to recreate the Lemma's constitution with the configuration of my lips.”
“Wait, you don't even remember the word?” I asked.
“No. It left me immediately. I doubt one ever could remember it, despite one supposed anomaly. In my years I've come across, by ways of articles and tittle-tattle, only three others who seemed to have personally encountered the Lemma, and the first two were unable to get a fix on the word itself. Ooh!” He opened a flip-top compartment in his writing desk filled with at least two dozen black-banded ruled notebooks. A small square of graph paper had been taped to each spine with a respective Roman numeral. He grabbed the ones marked XI and CIII.
“Others are elsewhere,” he said, gesturing indiscriminately. He opened the first notebook. “Right. The first I encountered was in 1962, a female Tokyoite with arc burns on her shoulders from a metro car mishap. Once I procured a translator, I discovered she'd also experienced the Lemma. She fought through blithe sobs at her kitchen table, so ecstatic to encounter another recipient of such divine, transporting ken. She said, when it happened, she ‘heard a whisper, the squelching of wet leaves, and a sexless voice call me back to the safety of the womb with a single, monosyllabic utterance.' Moments following, she recalled only the sensation, like the residue of a dream. Next!”
He opened CIII.
“1985. A Topekan boy struck by lightning saw the Lemma months after the incident, following the prospective formation of a Lichtenberg figure down his left pectoral. Don't you see? Intravenous treeing at a subsequent date, which lasted for two days, during which the boy remained in an infrangible, trancelike state of bliss, all smiles. When I spoke to him, he likened the experience to ‘being at Chuck E. Cheese's with all the tickets I want and the best kinds of prizes.' He said then that ‘it was a word, the only word, like the word of God speaking at and through me. Like pudding and heaven.' He asked if I understood.”
“I've really gotta go,” I said, standing up. Argente ran to me and grabbed me by the wrists. He smelled intensely of rye.
“Are you yourself not devoted to something lost? The gambols and purrs of a perished puss? The delayed surfacing of your burn—can't you maintain that appearances and dissolutions are, at the very least, analogous? Whatever you lose is reflected in something undesirably gained: like my temper from a bee sting in a thumbtack prick, my stubbed toe in its swelling, my arm's ectoderm in the knowledge of the Lemma. Your Ippo, your scar. Am I getting through? This is my crisis, Gil. Whether with a limited vocabulary or an extensive one, the Lemma's nature can't worthily be recounted through language, though it's without a doubt the most communicative of things. Nor can I impart the word itself! This is not an issue of choice: where, for example, in Judaism, the spoken attribution HaShem, ‘the Name,' for the legible ‘Adonai' is a choice, the Lemma's my coinage for symbolic reasons, to convey its essence rather than its elusive, syllabic makeup. Don't you see? I'm forced to use an enumeration of words to try to convey to you a single comprehensive one. It's inherently backward! Imagine an astronautical glimpse of the universe, its expanse of luminous, heat-centred freckles, as a visible tally of the notion of infinity. Its abstractions of distance and time and life are visually knotty and removed and intimate, like the characters of the Great Coral Reef, or the morphological strands of Utah's Pando. The Lemma is different: its affections are all notional. They're ideations of being and its meaning, existential projections, you see, a conceptual slide show played in the heart of the brain. Gil, how acquainted are you with your own face, reflected in all the imperfect, glaucous-tinged mirrors in the world? Your own mind in a nutshell? Does your memory preserve Ippo, or distort him? Or is it simply erasure? From ‘emet' to ‘met,' ‘truth' to ‘death,' the wiping away of the aleph from the forehead destroys the Golem. In the aftermath of Ippo's death, and the formation of your scar, you will see things as I've seen things, and they will be your things, whereas mine were mine. I'll openly posit that your coming experience of the Lemma will be radically different, and its affects concurrently absorbed, like levels of radiation. Remember that, afterward, in the years that follow, when you speak or write about them in succession, which is all you can do; otherwise, the cluttering speech, or the copious layerings of ink, will obscure any meaning whatsoever.”
“Holy shit, Franck.” I wriggled free and headed for the back door. Four proclaiming meows marked my departure.
“You will meet the metonymic Lemma, my friend,” repeated Argente, now a drunk, disembodied voice from an uninhabited house. “Be it now or anon. Your knuckled fault is its harbinger!”
II.
I kept up my weekly deliveries, though I'd leave the trays outside Argente's back door and knock, then run. For about two months I did this, till one week the call came that Argente had been hospitalized and his meal deliveries were suspended for the time being. I thought about his cats, so I dropped by his place, thinking someone might be housesitting. I knocked. When no answer came, I walked through the unlocked door. The house was empty. Argente or someone had cleaned up: books were neatly stacked and shelved, the ashtrays emptied. Things looked good except the cats were hungry and the revolving litter box was jammed and overflowing. Argente had left labelled Post-its on nearly everything. Each book on every shelf had fragmented summaries (Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle: “Lushly, sweetly malevolent;” J.I. Rodale's The Synonym Finder: “Commandingly compacted, replete and homiletic, albeit finite”), and the teas in the cupboard were arranged by taste and recuperative qualities. A copy of his will—left on the laid-out grid of his Go board, his clamshell and slate stones acting as paperweights—endowed the house and its contents (including the cats) to me. After making a call to the hospital (Argente had left the number on a Post-it), I was informed he was on his last legs. Apparently, the tumour in his brain had fully metastasized. He died the next morning, and after the call from the executor, my possession was official.
I found myself scrimping for a few weeks, taking on hefty bills for cat food and litter, with barely any freelance work in the pipe (I was an English subtitle editor at the time). I sold off most of the younger cats to the neighbour kids (the redhead got Pierrot), and in about a month I was left with a single lilac tabby named Tigrou with a pretty dichroic eye (I learned that word from a Post-it Argente had stuck to the little fella's food dish). I renamed him Tigger.
I hadn't seen or heard or in any way confronted the Lemma. I chalked up Argente's fixation to the pressure of the tumour on a part of the brain which somehow stimulated something. I felt pitiless a bit: Argente had, after all, completely exposed his psychosis to the only person he knew, the only one who might listen. Me, I was stubbornly disenchanted. That was the first time I truly felt like an adult—like a skeptic, a nonbeliever—and I was sad for it.
On Wednesdays, after my deliveries, I'd go to Argente's and eat a meal tray I'd sneak for myself. I sat one afternoon on Argente's old settee with Tigger, eating what might've been Argente's Chicken Cacciatore, his bean confetti rice, after first polishing off the hermit cookie. I petted Tigger beside me with my free hand. He wasn't yet living with me, and seemed to be feeling the absence of his comrades, hiding a lot of the time, or tearing across the floor and sliding into walls. I stroked him between the eyes and behind the ears, feeling the rattle of his purrs through his fur—till he rebelled with a jaw snap at my scarred hand, sinking his teeth in deeply. I then came up against Argente's Lemma.
Or mine. The Lemma—the most intimate of questions and rejoinders, the assertive, potential expression of my identity—was it anyones? I don't know. I can, though, imagine the surfeit of self-indulgence the lucky listener possesses, the personal narrative implications of such a miracle. At the time it felt like the universal Lemma, but my inkling now is that it was particular, and, so, distorted.
Tigger's bite was more than instinctive. He didn't cower or recoil, as Ippo might've if he attacked. I didn't hold it against him, though; he was skittish and neurotic. I drew back my hand and yelled at him, and in reply he flew from the living room into the kitchen. Two canine punctures on the roof of my hand stared, for a moment, like coal-red eyes, before the blood discharged, from one hole in a quick-sliding rivulet down around my thumb onto my palm, and the other in an inflating bead that jiggled on the surface. In the bubbled blood, in the way light casts off a swollen balloon, I saw an iridescent alphabet of unknown origin. The macro fabric of letters bared the richest, unmottled ink to the atom, layered and drafted by every artist that ever lived with every fine-tipped pen or rigger brush that ever existed. The script itself I read and scanned from left to right, right to left, taking in its diacritical marks and ligatures, its uncial majuscules, its sans-serifs and serifs, its cogencies and depths. Then I heard it murmured, enunciated, like an incantation or mantra, or the epigraph of a song, and hearing it caused a catalyzing insight on my behalf, born from the mitigating morpheme, the modal verb (the must and can and will and dare of all things impossible), from the series of logograms undifferentiated yet distinct, in no successive order and ordered each and every way. It was the subvocal polysyllable, the voiced monosyllable, the sentence and the novel. I experienced a kind of hypnagogic tumble, snatches of manic, discordant shrieks and soothing speakings, and was told who I was and where I stood in relation to everyone else and where they were standing and why, was advised to stop waxing and eat less bacon, was described the inner machinations of tyrants, saints, adulterous boyfriends and slavish wives, the itchy-footed, backseat-driving autonecrophobe and the blank, tranquil mind of Mahāvīra. Expressed through the legato dilation of the Lemma, I read and heard each word in every language, learned their homonyms and roots, their conjugations and orthographies: I deciphered the signature of a schizophrenic teenager in Mumbai, the chirography of American psychiatrists and European poets, the algorithms and obfuscated codes of the CP/M and the MITS Altair, was communicated the true intention of the Rohonc Codex (ultimately, a chronicle of the Vlachs), saw, through a spheric portal, a preschool Dixie cup, my name written on the flat-bottomed paper beneath a portion of apple juice (a visible bonus for finishing your drink), and I heard spoken words practiced in bathroom mirrors, read the lips of a nervous lover stepping to his squeeze's plate, the hand signs of a scuba diver guiding his tourist group, heard you swear at your parents, saw your name in bubble letters on a caricature sketch, heard yours and God's first word and Ippo's first mew, and I said the Lemma out loud over and over and felt with my tongue its distinct, primeval patois, its matter-exploding, shazamming power, and I bawled, knowing I'd somehow chanced upon—in its perceptible, unattainable form—the meaning of all meaning, whose definition has been named and defined by man and nature but has never been captured or contained: our fathomless, precious significance.
And then it was gone. The sting of Tigger's bite swarmed my hand, which I wrapped in a hand towel I found hanging from the stove. I spent the rest of my lunch break trying to remember the Lemma, to mouth its forgettable components. I thought the house was the driving force, or maybe Argente's residue kicking throughout. Half of Tigger peered from the kitchen doorway, chagrined. I packed him in a carrier and took him home, and spent the next few days transcribing Miley Cyrus's uncertain, crutched vernacular for a Hannah Montana featurette, substituting her “likes” and “blings” with “certainlys” and “vulgar bijoux,” and was promptly fired. I eventually slept and welcomed those vague, disorganized views of the world that returned in time.
P.S. (March, 2012): I sold Argente's house to a Vancouverite couple reputable for certifying properties under the Ontario Heritage Act. In the year and change since my encounter, my interest in the Lemma remained piqued. I'd taken all of Argente's notebooks (most of which were found in his basement, organized neatly in annular fashion, in the perforated basket of his washing machine) and read through them carefully. Argente had told me the Lemma accounts of only two others, but had mentioned three. I perused over one-hundred notebooks before I found the third, in the notebook marked CCXLI. It read:
2 November, 1993. Blue Jays clinched the ninetieth World Series weeks ago. Met with Carl Daneri, young man who caught Joe Carter's home-run ball barehanded. Says he bruised the flexors on his right palm, and read the Lemma on a Vulkan ice pack he'd pressed to his hand the following morning. Responded to my Globe and Mail classified: “Seeking another for informal, colloquial exchange (regarding the immaterial, inexpressible universe), one which, if memory would only serve, could be accomplished with a solitary word.” Daneri brushed and kissed my hand when we met, and he knew my name, the name of my coming cancer, and claimed he recalled the Word itself, that he was either still experiencing its immediate effects or somehow retaining them. I begged him to disclose his Word's true formation, to take it down or at least verbalize it. Daneri (whom his girlfriend described was, before the experience, generally “spacey, but a sweet, sweet lunkhead”) declined disclosure, and instead frantically tried to illustrate his newfound knowledge of the Bible's misleading opening line, that God separated rather than created the heavens and the Earth, that the Hebrew verb for “create,” “bara,” once meant “locationally divide” [Gil here, interjecting: this theory's since been proffered up by Catholic theologist Ellen van Wolde], and that the universe existed before its own narrative, that the Lemma itself existed before the universe, that every encounter since has been a diluted version, a false idol, like Aaron's golden calf, Islamic aniconism, Daneri's own Lemma and mine before his. He spoke too, of you, Gil, and the coming death of your yet-unborn felid, the subsequent materialization of a scar, and your Lemma, which I was to lead you to. It will be false as well.
I felt then, by way of Daneri's disappointing conjecture, a return of enchantment to my life. I'd feared my Lemma was false for some time, that, in its innumerable observations, it was nothing but a sum of its parts. The true Lemma wasn't a tease. It wouldn't leave you.
I tried uncovering my Lemma's fraudulence, using Argente's extensive library for research. I started by seeking out Daneri, but he was long dead (Alaska, grizzly), so I looked into its byname, which Argente had come up with. Why “Lemma”? Was the term attributed from his study of the Word's components, or simply any word's? Lemme explain. In mathematics, a lemma's a transitional theorem, a proposition that undertakes the explanation of a larger solution. I still don't much get that. So, in psycholinguistics, lemmata are the lexemes' opposites. They're the conceptualizations of words before any sounds are assigned. This lemma exists as the first stage of language acquisition, before letters or phonology are attached. (Think, for example, of Argente's Lemma itself: before he named it he knew it, but after he forgot it, he could only try to represent it. Right before the latter's process of naming is the lemma.) Then there's the botanic lemma, which refers to part of a spikelet—specifically the lower bract of a grass floret. Not that.
I'll assert that Argente's name for it came from the linguistic lemma, the heading which indicates an argument or subject in an encyclopedia or dictionary. This lemma blooms from its stem into awns of compounds, denotations, pronunciations and etymologies. A simple example:
kitten |ˈkitn|
noun
1 a young cat.
· the immature or young of various other animals,
such as the beaver, or rabbit.
2 a plump furry grey moth, the larvae and caterpillars of
which resemble the puss moth's.
[Genus Furcula, family Notodontidae.]
verb (without object)
(of a cat) give birth; bear.
PHRASES
have kittens informal get extremely nervous or perturbed:
Argente's having kittens because Gil won't believe him.
ORIGIN
Middle English, late, ketoun, kitoun, from an Anglo-Norman French chitoun, kiton, diminutive of chat ‘cat,' from late Latin cattus.
I thought it fitting—maybe—that the lemma exemplified should coincide with the inciter of my Lemma. It's my own designation now that further fudges my indefinable experience. I feel, to this day, the falseness of my Lemma's more and more explicit. But there's a fun distance to be recognized there: the lifetime pursuit—of where, and if, the true Lemma resides, or resided—established. The years since I read and heard and spoke all things by way of an elusive headword are inherently porous, as I lose the Lemma's ornaments to forgetfulness. Even with Tigger at my side, I've lost, to the deterioration of time, the qualities of Ippo.