1、THE KING OF SENTENCESBY JONATHAN LETHEMDECEMBER 17, 2007This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentencesnothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldnt rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were as
2、tonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esthers cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You cant have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves a
3、s taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, wed rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and the
4、n photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.We worked in bookstores, the only
5、thing to do. Nobody who didntand that included every one of our customersknew what any of the volumes throbbing along those shelves was worth, not remotely. Nor did the bookstores owners. Clea and I were custodians of a treasury of sentences much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Though we m
6、ostly handled the books only by their covers (or paged briefly through to ascertain that no dunce had striped the pages yellow or pink with a Hi-Liter), we communed deeply with them, felt certain that only we deserved to abide with them. Any minute wed read them all cover to cover, it was surely abo
7、ut to happen. Meanwhile, every customer robbed us a little. At the cash registers we spoke sentences tailored to convey our disdain, in terms so subtle it was barely detectable. If our customers blinked a little at the insults we embedded in our thank-yous, we believed, they just might be worthy of
8、the marvels their grubby dollars entitled them to bear away.We disparaged modern and incomplete forms: gormless and garbled jargon, graffiti, advertising, text-messaging. No sentence conveyed by photons or bounced off satellites had ever come home intact. Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sent
9、ence we cherished was sturdy and Biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Er
10、otically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, insuring that a souffl or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence (“I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring”) might jolly Clea to
11、 instant climax. Wed rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous e
12、ndless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the Administrations lousy grammar.But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or
13、 on somebody elses dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues. We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips wed find in muddy clogs in sto
14、rm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded. Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other. My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxxs of regret. I scurried to read Cleas manuscript every time she left the apartment but never
15、 confessed that I even knew it existed. Her title was “Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head.” Mine was “I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments.”Others might hail kings of beer or burgerswe bowed to the King of Sentences. There was just one.
16、 We owned his titles in immaculate firsts and tattered reading copies and odd variant editions. It thrilled us to see the pedestrian jacket copy and salacious cover art on his early mass-market paperbacks: to think that hed once been considered fodder for dime-store carrousels! The newest editions o
17、f the titles hed allowed to be reprinted (four early novels had been suppressed from republication) were splendidly austere, their jackets, from the small presses that published him now, bearing text only, no graven images. The progress of his editions on our shelf was like a cartoon of evolution, a
18、 slug crawling from the surf to become a mammal, a monkey, and then at last a hairless noble fellow gazing into the future.The King of Sentences gave no interviews, taught nowhere, condescended to appear at no panels or symposia. His tastes, hobbies, and heartbreaks were unknown, and we extrapolated
19、 them from his books at our peril. His digital footprint was pale: people like that didnt care about people like him. Google, for what it was worth, favored a famous painter of wildlife scenesbeaver dams, heron hideawayswith the same name. The King of Sentences only wrote, beavering away himself on
20、a dam of quintessence, while wholly oblivious of public indifference and of a sales record by now likely descending to rungs occupied by poets. His author photograph, identical on twenty years of jackets and press clippings until it stopped circulating at all, arrested him somewhere in the mid-sixti
21、es, turtlenecked, holding a cocktail glass forever. His last cocktail, maybe.In the same loft where we entangled, Clea and I drove ourselves mad reading the King of Sentences books aloud, by candlelight, when we ought to have been sleeping. Wed tear the book from each others hands for the pleasure o
22、f running his words like gerbils in the habitrails of our own mouths. Wed alternate chapters, pages, paragraphs, finally sentences, at last agree to read him in unison. He could practically hear us as we intoned his words, wed swear they reached his ears. But not really. Really, we were vowing to ou
23、rselves and to each other that wed make a day trip in search of the King of Sentences, that wed flush him out, propel ourselves into his company and confidence, buoy him with our love and bind ourselves (and our secret manuscripts, oh yeah!) to his greatness. We each had what the other needed, of th
24、is we were positive. Maybe wed watch him write. Maybe hed watch us dance, or fuck, who knew? Wed buy him lunch. He was surely mortal enough for lunch. Hed want us at least for lunch.He lived, wed learned, north of the city, having drawn from his days as a Greenwich Village flneur whatever inspiratio
25、n hed needed, and departed around the time of that last photograph and cocktail. (We figured that his departure from the narrow town house on Jane Street marked an expiration date on anything west of Second Avenue as an authentic locale.) Minimal detective work pinned him to a P.O. box in Hastings-o
26、n-Hudsonhow clever and coy he had been to find a place-name that was itself, with the mere insertion of an apostrophe, a sentence, and a faintly lascivious one, too. So it was that we knew hed summoned us to his hiding place: Clea could play Hudson, and Id be Hasting.We sent a postcard warning, addr
27、essed to his box. No return address, so he couldnt refuse. No fancy sentences, fearing his judgment of those. Just fragments: “coming in two weeks,” “get ready,” “cant wait to meet in person” (as if wed already met on other planes, for we had). The appointed day came upon us like a sickness, and tho
28、ugh each in our privacy might have preferred to stay in bed and sweat it out we couldnt have looked each other in the eye if we hadnt staggered out of doors, to the subway, up to Grand Central Terminal. During the short ride we held hands, fever-sweaty at the palms. Exiting Metro-Norths Hastings-on-
29、Hudson station under a thundercloud-clotted sky, we found ourselves the sole travellers not claimed by family members waiting in Subarus or bleeping their driver-side doors unlocked as they crossed the parking lot with cell phones clammed to their ears. The train continued on behind us, and the stat
30、ion depopulated as if neutron-bombed.“This is the town of the King of Sentences.”“This little town.”“He could be watching us now, dont act stupid. With a telescope.”We blundered along something called Main Street, seeking the post office, until a passerby directed us to Warburton Avenue. Inside the
31、mediocre lobby we staked out a position near the numbered boxes, innocuously pretending to screw up our change-of-address forms so that we had to start over again a dozen times. His box, which we surveilled with peripheral vision only, pulsed with risk and possibilityour own postcard had been handle
32、d there, a precursor to this encounter.Losing patience, we sidled to the main counter. “What time on the average day does the box holder typically, you know, pick up?”“Box mail goes up at ten-thirty.”“Right, sure, but mostly when do citizens appear and begin to gather it up, take it to their private
33、 homes?”“Whenever they care to.”“Sure, right, this is America, isnt it?”“Sure is.”“Thank you.”We resumed charades with the chained pen. Two, three, five, eight, eighteen Hastings-on-Hudsonians lumbered in to check their boxes, sort circulars into recycling bins, greet the postmistress, and trade coi
34、ns for stamps, each of comically tiny denominations. Everyone in this hamlet, it seemed, had just found a sixteen- or twenty-three-cent stamp in a dusty drawer, and had chosen today to supplement it up to viability using car-seat nickels and pennies.Yet somehow between transactions the postmistress
35、had snuck away for a tattling phone call, or so we surmised from the blinking patrol car that now swept up in front of the P.O. Into the lobby strode a cowboyesque figure, a man, late-fiftyish, wearing a badge in the manner of a star, lean, and, when he spoke, laconic. Clea read my mind, saying, “Yo
36、u the sheriff in these parts?”“Chief of Police.”“Not the Sheriff of Hastings-on-Hudson?”“No, maam, there isnt one. Can I ask what youre doing here?”“Waiting.”“Have you folks got postal business today?”“No,” I said. “But weve got business with someone who might have postal business, if thats O.K.”“I
37、suppose it might be, sir, but Im forced to wonder who were talking about.”“The King of Sentences.”“I see. You wouldnt happen to be the authors of a certain unsigned and borderline-ominous postcard?”“Might happen to be, though there was hardly ominous intent.”“I see. And now youre waiting, Im guessin
38、g, for the addressee.”“In the manner of free Americans in a federally controlled public space, yes. We checked with the postmistress.”“I see. You mind if I wait a bit myself?”“By definition we cant.”Soon enough he appeared. The King of Sentences, unmistakably, though withered like a shrunken-apple f
39、etish of the noble cipher in the photograph. He wore a gray sweatshirt and caramel corduroys with the knees and thighs bald, like a worn radial tire. Absurd black Nikes over gray dress socks. Hair white and scant. Eyes tiny and darting. They darted to the not-sheriff, who nodded minimally. The King
40、nodded back with equal economy.We collapsed, as planned, to our knees, conveying the beautiful anguish of our subjection to the sole King of Sentencesbowed heads, fingers wriggling as if combing the air for particles of his greatness. A chapter of “I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind The
41、ir Instruments,” secreted in the waistband of my underwear, buckled as I knelt there. The King stood inert, if anything sagged slightly. The Chief turned and shook his head, a little appalled.“You O.K.?” he asked the King.“Sure. Let me talk to them a minute.”“Anything you say.” The law went outside,
42、 to stand and take a cigarette beside his cruiser. He watched us through the window. We nodded and waved as we scrambled back to our feet.“Who sent you?” the King said.“You, you, you,” Clea said. “It was you.”“We werent so much sent as drawn,” I said. “You gave us the gift of your work, and now were
43、 here, a gift in return.”“Take us,” Clea said.“No, thank you,” the King said. His eyes shifted nervously from Clea, settling on me.“We annointed you the King of Sentences,” I told him. “Were the ones who did that. Nobody else.” I didnt want to bully him with news of how scarcely his name circulated,
44、 how stale and marked-down the assembly of his hardcovers on used-bookstore shelves.“I didnt tell you to come.”“No, but you are responsible for our presence.”“Let me be clear. I have nothing for you.”“Take us home.”“Not on your life.”“We came all this way.”He shrugged. “Whens the next train back?”Th
45、e sentences that emerged from his mouth were flayed, generic, like lines from black-and-white movies. I tried not to be disappointed in this stylistic turn. He had something to teach us, always.“We dont care. We dont have tickets. We came for you.”“I dont fraternize. This kind of intrusion is the la
46、st thing I need.”“Lunch,” I begged. “Just lunch.”“I eat only what my housekeeper prepares. A disproportion of sodium could murder me at this point.”Clea hugged herself with pleasure. I heard her murmur the line, cherishing it privately, “. . . disproportion . . . sodium . . . murder me.” The King cr
47、aned on his Nike toes, checking that the cop was still outside.“Forget lunch. An hour of your time.”“Were to hover in the post-office lobby for an hour? Doing what, exactly?”“No, lets go somewhere,” Clea said. “A hotel room, if you wont have us in your house.”“Or the bar,” I said, offering a check o
48、n Cleas presumption. “The bar in the lobby of a hotel, a public setting. For a cocktail.”The King laughed for the first time, a cackle edged, like a burnt cookie, with bitterness. “What largesse. Youd take me to one of our towns fine hotels. Theyre as superb as the restaurants. Motel 6 or Econo Lodg
49、e, I believe those are your options.”“Anywhere,” Clea panted.The Kings weary gaze again shunted: Clea, myself, the disinterested postmistress, the Chief outside, who now ground a butt into the curb with his heel and turned his head to follow the progress of some retreating buttocks. The Kings voice edged down an octave. “Econo Lodge,” he said. “On Lower Brunyon. Ill find you there in fifteen minutes.”“We dont have a vehicle.”“Too bad.”“Can we ride with you?”“No way, Jos.”“How do we get there?”“Figure it out.” The
