Conlang

When we very young, my brother and I sang to one another in words only we could understand.

Languages, including the one my brother and I sang, tend to evolve along practical lines, so the singing stopped at some point and our private tongue, which we called sjolj (meaning "the language," and from which we derived the infinitive sjolja, "to say aloud") became spoken, like any other.

But sjolj remained ours, and that was the point. What's sort of remarkable is that it remains ours even now.

Private languages are fairly common among twins, and from what I have been able to gather it seems that they are set aside as puberty approaches and adulthood looms and the special, intimate world of twinship is diluted and intruded upon by the larger sphere of life in a community.

But that natural resolution didn't have a chance to take place. Our parents divorced when we were six, and I ended up leaving New Zealand with my mother and settling in Chicago. My brother Malachi stayed with our father, who eventually returned to Ireland. My brother lived with him in Cork until the old man died. At that point, our Aunt Maybele took Malachi in, which entailed him relocating to Albuquerque, New Mexico, at age 15.

This turn of events set the stage for our reunion. I had been accepted to King William's College in Santa Fe; my aunt and my brother were only too happy, happier than I was at any rate, to make the 50-mile trip from Albuquerque to see me.

I arrived in Santa Fe via Trailways bus. Gawking out the window, I was hard pressed to see just where the town might be; endless rolling hills of red earth covered in scrubby little trees stretched on in every direction, bounded to the east by a nearby mountain range that included the Santa Fe ski basin and Mount Atalaya, a crouching bulk of a mountain with a back shaped like that of a bear. To the west were the Sangre de Cristos, the tail end of the Rocky Mountains, dubbed by Spanish settlers for the red of Christ's blood. Even four hundred years earlier, Santa Fe had enjoyed spectacular sunsets.

The college's coffee shop looked out over a wild, arid landscape through floor-to-ceiling windows. A city boy of 18 years, feeling quite displaced and disoriented, I stared out at the desert with loathing and asked myself what the fuck I was doing coming to a college, even a prestigious one like this, located in the middle... literally, the middle of nowhere. I caught sight of my aunt and, behind her as the two of them approached, a slight young man from whom I recoiled. He was the image of myself in the mirror: Skinny, a little awkward, with a shock of dark brown hair. He had bright blue eyes and fair skin given to faint freckles. I would come to learn that in anger the flush of his skin would enhance his eyes with burning intensity. I assumed the same was true of me.

I was shocked and angered to learn that Malachi wasn't just stopping by to say hello. Maybele informed me that, quite independent of my own decision, he too had applied to King William's college. Maybele had found this bit of spooky twin synchronicity so amusing that she'd kept it to herself, wanting to see my reaction. I think she might have been disappointed when I snapped out an irritated vulgarity -- namely, "Holy Mother Fuck."

Malachi had much the same sentiment written on his face. As Maybele, taken aback, stuttered an offer to buy us lunch and then retreated to the counter, my brother and I stared distrustfully at each other. We had so much to say, most of it unkind, but at that moment we were speechless. We had no language in common.

*** *** ***

Except... we did.

I enjoy, or perhaps I am afflicted with, something they now call Superior Autobiographical Memory. When I was 18, I had no fancy words for it and barely even remarked it about myself, but others were forever exclaiming that I must have photographic recall. I was able to give a word-by-word account of entire conversations from years earlier, or describe in detail the complete events of a day that took place when I was still a toddler.

Nonetheless, I had somehow managed to forget ever speaking sjolj, possibly because I blocked my brother from my thoughts for so many years. Sjolj came back in a rush one morning, about two weeks into school, when Malachi entered the dining hall, set his breakfast tray next to me, and greeted me with, "Dharov."

I found myself laughing before I quite knew why. It was a deep and atavistic reflex from another life. When we were three or four we came up with a most elaborate ritual greeting, the full version of which was as follows: "Dha'ravoigh san-kleru ymlygh enkhir sandokh klysk." We'd sing this to one another with solemn intonations copied from the Catholic mass and make elaborate bows, clasp our hands officiously, and then laugh like hell and do it all over again. As I said before, languages evolve to be pragmatic; once we got bored with the theatrics of the full greeting, we curtailed it to the much simpler and less involved "dharov."

Years later, that single word opened a door to earlier times and circumvented a barrier. With that greeting, Malachi and I were suddenly able to talk to each other, and we did so for hours on end -- sometimes screaming curses, sometimes murmuring tender words of forgiveness. We spoke sjolj; we spoke English; we spoke a mishmash of the two. And Roadie started to speak it, also.

Roadie was Malachi's best friend. He was gifted with languages, able to take them in the way anyone else takes in oxygen: If it was in the air around him, he would absorb it, grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and all. It was a handy gift to have at a school where every student was required to study Ancient Greek. While everyone else was still trying to work out mnemonics for Greek's noun-case declensions, Roadie leapt far ahead and was soon sight-reading the Attic Greek and koine we were preparing to translate and discuss in class: Homer, the tragedians, the New Testament.

I may have been able to tell you what I had for lunch on April 25, 1974 -- a Thursday; I had baloney and cheese on white bread with too much mayonnaise and some crisps in a plastic baggie, but the crisps had got all mashed; also, I had a red apple with weird red filaments running through the fruit's white flesh, which looked like veins and grossed me out, so I threw it away after one bite. But I could never remember things like the quadratic equation or, more to the point as a King William's freshman, how to decline the Greek word ?????? (or any other Greek word), or respond to dining hall sighs of sexual temptation with witticisms like "??????, ?? ????," or "????, ????, ?????????!"

Roadie, by contrast, would have been hard pressed to tell you what he'd been doing the previous afternoon, but he studied Esperanto on the side just for fun until he mastered it after two months, got bored, dropped it, and then started learning sjolj from Malachi. How he even knew about sjolj I'm not sure, though it's easy to imagine he might simply have heard us speaking it. Malachi and I did sometimes forget ourselves and lapse into our private language in the presence of others.

Roadie's entr�e into conversational sjolj with yours truly unfolded in nearly identical fashion as Malachi's had. It was in the coffee shop one Thursday night after Seminar.

Roadie, toasted bagel halves on a paper plate in one hand and a milkshake in the other, approached the table where I sat by myself. His milkshake was chocolate with a scoop of vanilla on top. From that detail, I could deduce that it also contained orange juice, peanut butter, and one teaspoon of instant coffee. This concoction had become the rage of our class after Asiquai Somerfeld dictated its composition to Jerome and Tommy, the baristas who worked the coffee shop counter on weeknights. Jerome and Tommy were cousins and riffed off one another with boundless comedic energy. If anyone else had requested such an involved order, they would have told him to forget it. Because it was Asiquai, however, and they (like everyone else) lusted after him, they gave him what he wanted. Then, having given it to Asiquai, they had to give it everybody else. This milkshake became known as The Asiquai, though Jerome and Tommy had a plethora of other, more colorful, names for it.

Roadie set his plate and milkshake down, glanced at me, and then, with a look of exasperation, announced, "Aurora altra'avesh neqol Seminarzhne tloteth prai-ne takh."

Literally, what he said was, "Aurora, cognitively deficient bird, my Seminar in its entirely upon she puked, indeed!"

I suspected what he was trying to say was, "That bitch Aurora ruined Seminar for me." Well, she was insufferable; she rubbed me the same wrong way as most of the guys in our class, with her pointy little tits and her slutty affect. It seemed to work on all the male tutors, though, which only made her sexy kissing up all the more infuriating.

"That's a little off, grammatically," I told Roadie, as he took his seat. "I think you're trying to say, 'Seminarzhne praith'ehn-ne, neqol altra'avesh Aurora.' And you don't need the 'tloteth' in this case, it's implicit. Also, you would only use 'takh' to express scorn or contempt, or to stress the verb."

"Scorn and contempt is exactly what I wanted," Roadie grumbled. "But how was my pronunciation?"

It was actually not bad, which surprised me. Sjolj, correctly spoken, reminds me of the purling of a brook. It can also sound kind of like French -- that is to say, like someone choking on his own blood. With 54 phonemes, a bunch of which don't exist in the paltry 42-phoneme realm of English, it's a hard language to wrap your tongue around. I had to give Roadie props for his ability to enunciate it, even though I was appalled and irritated that this guy, this dle-caiphaskani (non-family member) was horning in on something I shared with... well, had previously shared only burukzhne-osk (with my sibling).

In some ways, though, it turned out to be a good thing that Malachi and I had allowed someone else into our private linguistic universe. If Latin is a good language for prayer and German for cussing someone out, sjolj is a wonderful tongue for philosophizing... of a blood-sport stripe, anyway, complete with verbal meltdowns and freakouts. Once, in front of the mail boxes in the student center, some disagreement we were having got so out of hand that Malachi, storming away, turned, his blue eyes blazing in a fury, to lob one last insult at me: "Ghisst-ru takh!"

I was seething and about to scream something equally rude in response when Roadie startled me. Standing at my elbow -- had he been there the whole time? -- Roadie muttered, "Something about cooking oil?" Anyone else hearing Malachi's outburst would have assumed that he had just bellowed "Jeez, true, doc!" But Roadie, whose ears had become calibrated to the elided Ts and staccato vowels of sjolj, heard the words for what they were.

I had to laugh. Pulled back into an English mindset, the whole argument suddenly struck me as absurd -- which, really, it was. I would make amends with Malachi later on; I was starting to get a sense of my brother's topsy-turvy moods, though I was still a long way from understanding them.

***

Roadie had a habit of meandering into Malachi's room any time of day or night, often when he'd just been chased out of some girl's room. So it was one cold Saturday in November. Malachi had just picked open a seam on a new glove, a left-hander, when Roadie appeared. He was my brother's second guest that morning; Razus MacPherson and Malachi had begun a conversation about The Psychedelic Furs over breakfast, and had migrated back to Malachi's room after eating.

Roadie slouched on my brother's bed next to Razus and sighed, "She hates me this morning. And last night she really liked me."

"Details," Malachi said, setting aside the glove and reaching for another left-handed glove of the same make. He wasn't really one for the agony aunt thing, especially before noon, but he was always ready to hear a juicy sex story.

But before he could explain, Roadie's attention was captivated: Malachi had begun carefully snipping the little finger free of the glove.

"Um, what are you doing?" Roadie asked.

"Fixing my gloves," Malachi said. Taking the little finger and discarding the rest into his trash bin, he returned to the first glove, the one with the picked-open seam. Positioning everything carefully, Malachi began to stitch an extra finger onto his glove.

Roadie, puzzled, looked on wordless -- until he suddenly understood. "Dude," he said. "No way."

"Yes way," Malachi said.

"Let me see!"

Malachi held up the now six-fingered glove, its extra appendage secured with tiny, neat stitches -- the product of years of practice.

"I mean, let me see your hand," Roadie said.

Laying aside the glove, Malachi splayed his hand for Roadie's inspection. Roadie counted six digits: The usual five, plus a perfectly formed, extra sixth -- an additional little finger.

"Holy mother freak... Get out!... How did I never notice that before?" Roadie marveled. "And that's the same on both hands?"

Malachi held up both his hands: Twelve fingers total.

"Hence the habit they have of reckoning -- ta da! -- in base twelve," Razus, the math geek, put in brightly.

It was true: Most people reckon in fives, tens, fifteens, and other units derived from a five-fingered, base ten system of counting. But Malachi and I tended to talk about a nearby destination being twelve minutes away, or running six minutes late, or a task occupying only eighteen minutes of our time.

"And the both of you have six fingers on each hand?" Roadie asked, unimpressed by talk of base twelve mathematics.

"We are twins, Roadie," Malachi said, taking up a right-handed glove and starting to pick at the seam. Then he added, "Burukzhne, ekruv gh'holaj shalre'ja-soj... nas'letha toj burukzhne."

Well, they had a nice laugh at my expense with that one, but then Roadie noticed something else. "Why do you use the temporary form when you say, 'he is my brother?' " Roadie asked.

Plucking up the sacrificial right-handed glove, Malachi started in on the task of separating its little finger for transplant to the waiting recipient. "It's not temporary, it's temporal. That just refers to anything that's an external, a worldly state of being rather than an eternal truth or essential state of being. Kind of like ????? in Greek... well, not really. But sort of."

"But isn't your brother being your brother an eternal truth and an essential state?"

"Nope... " Malachi started his tiny, neat stitching to secure the extra little finger to his modified right-hand glove. "Any family member is an accident of bloodlines. That's completely temporal. True family is spiritual. They might come to you from the same womb, but they might not come to you until later in life."

Roadie watched him at work on the glove. "You two ain't real close, are you?" he hazarded.

***

It was true; we weren't. But over the course of freshman and sophomore years, our antagonism faded and we grew to be close. We didn't quite realize it had happened until the very end of sophomore year, when Malachi -- packed up and ready to go, and indulging himself in one extravagant gesture of rejection -- tossed his copy of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas through his dorm room window. I happened to be passing by a few minutes after this outburst, and, seeing the scattered shards of glass and the book that lay in their midst, I stopped into my brother's room. It was empty, the bed stripped and the book shelves bare. Malachi was standing in the middle of the room with a distracted smile on his face.

"What's going on in here?" I asked.

"I enn't comin' back," Malachi said, his New Zealand accent, so much like my own, making a rare appearance.

"What?"

Malachi sighed. "I meant to tell you before, but I wasn't quite sure. Well, now I am... I am goddamn certain. If I stayed another year in this place I would slash my fucking wrists."

"You're leaving?"

"I think I'm going to see about a transfer to the University of Chicago," Malachi told me. "I'll be close to Mary that way and I can see you over breaks."

It usually irritated me that he called our mother by her first name, but this time I barely noticed. "You're leaving me?" I asked.

A guy from Buildings and Grounds appeared outside the window and stood over the glittering debris, shaking his head and muttering about "cabr�ns." He stuck his head in the widow and glared at us.

"You gonna have to pay for that," he said, looking from one of us to the other. He paused, brow furrowing -- what, had he never seen identical twins before? "Whichever one of you lives in here. You gonna have to pay." He withdrew his head and retreated, still muttering to himself in Spanish.

Malachi turned to me. "I had best go sort this out," he said. "And don't complain to me, man. You left me. Remember?"

I dropped my eyes. He was right.

"I know you didn't really have a choice," he said a moment later, in a conciliatory tone.

"Maybe I did. Maybe if I'd told her that I wanted to stay with you and dad -- "

"Nope. Not a chance," Malachi told me. "Mary was never going to surrender us both to Ruairidh."

"Doesn't matter," I said. "I wanted to go."

Malachi didn't say anything.

"I'm sorry."

Then my brother did something completely out of character, something wonderful. He threw his arms around me. "I know what Ruairidh did to you," he whispered. "That's why she left and she took you with her. I hated him for it, too, but I knew I was tough enough to deal with him."

"Not like me," I said.

"Not like you," he echoed. "But it's okay. Sral-ru toj nas'leru burukzhne."

Sral-ru. From sralja. "To be" in the eternal, essential sense, instead of the superficial, accidental sense.

***

Roadie and I stood with Malachi in the parking circle. The taxi approached.

"You need coupons for the taxi?" Roadie offered.

Malachi showed him that he had coupons already.

"Well, mister..." Roadie gave Malachi's hand a valedictory shake, using both his hands to do so.

Malachi caught my eye. "Good to get to know you again."

"Fuck off," I smiled back.

"Ghisst-ru takh!" Roadie interjected. He looked from one of us to the other. "Right?"

"You created a monster," I told Malachi, who barely spared the two of us one last glance before slipping into the taxi.

We watched him go. I thought about how Roadie had served as interlocutor in our own little circus of guilt, resentment, and other tender fraternal sentiments... as literal go-between and filter for two people who spoke each other's language but still, so often, failed to communicate.

"Neither one of you mother bastards ever did explain that expression to me," Roadie suddenly spoke up.

Explaining the intricacies of the expression gave me a way to dissipate my sadness at Malachi's departure, not to mention my anxiety about my own summer plans. "It's two different words kind of layered into a single term," I explained. " 'Ghisstrozh' is animal fat; 'ghisstraija' means to fry, but the word 'ghisst' refers to a sizzling sound, like bacon frying. Conjugating it in the second person makes it a reflexive verb."

"Whoa," Roadie said. " 'Fry in your own fat?' "

"Well... actually, 'Sizzle in your own grease' is how I'd translate it," I said. "Literally it means about the same thing as 'Go to hell,' but the effect registers on par with 'Fuck you.' "

"And then some," Roadie noted.

"And then some," I agreed.

For Ignatz