Lógos

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. You lit two more and placed them around the front room of the cabin; on the mantle, on a musty dresser. Leah panicked if it got too dark. The candles would allay any night-terrors while conserving your batteries.

It was not just the simple kindness of a mother. When Leah panicked, she tried to talk, to ask questions. That was too much of a risk.

The room lit, you now made it safe. There were, fortunately, no bookshelves in the cabin. It appeared to be more of an old hunting cabin than a weekend retreat. You found a few cheap airport thrillers dotted about on end tables, and a magazine on the table in the kitchen. All of them warped and stained, but still legible. You averted your eyes as you carried them to the fireplace. A cookbook from a kitchen cupboard and a catalog for farm equipment from the outhouse joined them. You lit the fire, and when certain that anything with words was being consumed by flames — only then — you went out to bring your daughter inside.

+++++

The news first reported it as riots. New York, L.A., Chicago. And rumors of other cities too, as the day went on. You lived in Vermont, in the picture-postcard town of Middlebury, and felt very far from such things. You left city life behind when you accepted a research position at Middlebury College, quite a coup for a linguist. You had envisioned yourself and Leah feeding cows on the weekend, coddled in the simple pleasures of rural life. The schools in Vermont were supposed to be excellent.

Video from the cities showed people running. Silent video taken from security cameras, overdubbed by the smooth plastic voices of the broadcast news anchors telling people not to panic. You looked at the videos; silent monochrome people running, pointing, standing.

The White House correspondent assured the press they were taking action, that they were cracking down, that there was no cause for alarm. The news anchors in turn echoed: no cause for alarm. You hadn’t been alarmed until the fourth or fifth time you were told not to be. You wondered why none of the reporters were live on the scene. Why was all the footage from security and traffic cameras?

The evening news announced similar riots occuring in European cities. You noted the use of the word occur and its inoffensive passivity in this situation. You wrote it down in your notebook, this use of occur. Perhaps there was a paper in it: The Passive Voice During Emergencies. Something to do with the abrogation of blame. You would do some cursory research at the Institute the next day.

The alarm bells were ringing in the back of your mind, though, and you went to check on Leah as she slept; something you hadn’t done since she was four or five.

+++++

She was huddled behind the same bush you had left her. Small white face streaked with grime, eyes wide and leaking tears. You had been gone a long time. She didn’t move when she saw you; waited until you came up and hugged her. You wanted so badly to tell her it was alright, that you had found somewhere safe and warm for the two of you that night. But you couldn’t say it, you could only break your embrace and look into her face, nodding towards the cabin.

Her eyes asked the question you wouldn’t allow her to voice. Your reply was a tight smile.

She entered the cabin cautiously, furtive, like a rabbit emerging from its warren. When she saw the candle-lit room, the fire in the grate, she turned back to look at you. Unbelieving. You had spent the first two nights sleeping in your car, and — when that had run out of gas and you had continued on foot — the previous two nights under a hedgerow and in a tumbledown farmshed. You were both exhausted and cold all the way down to your bones, so that even this meager clapboard dwelling looked palatial.

She wasn’t sure she should allow herself to hope for this much. She hesitated in the doorway, unsure if she could go inside.

God, but you wanted to talk to her then. So very, very much. To tell her that it was alright, that you could both rest here in warmth. To tell her that you had a plan, that everything would be fine. But of course you couldn’t, and that broke your heart. As it did every minute of every silent day.

She recognised that desire to speak in your face and saw it as permission, or at least an opportunity. She opened her mouth to ask you if you were safe here, if you would finally explain what was going on, if you would make sense of the last week for her.

You didn’t give her the chance to speak: you slapped her across the face, hard, to silence her.

+++++

The morning after the reports of riots you turned on the TV during breakfast, something you rarely did. Your conscious validation was to monitor the use of passive vocabulary you had noticed the day before, but deep down you were simply worried. Those alarm bells in the back of your mind had been gradually increasing in volume over the course of the night, leaving you tossing and turning and poorly-rested.

The first channel was a morning talk show, trivial banalities comfortably discussed by chirpy morning people gathered like birds on a fence on plush sofas in bold primary colors. You flicked over to the news channel.

The anchor sat looking into the camera, talking, but there was no sound. You checked that the TV was not muted — it wasn’t. You pushed up on the volume, but the blue slidebar rose up into the top third of its length and still nothing. You remembered thinking, there must be some audio problem on their end. The news anchor was speaking urgently to the camera, much more animated than usual. You moved closer to the screen. The anchor’s eyes swung back and forth as if reading the teleprompter at great speed. He looked almost frantic.

Then you heard it. With the volume up so high you could hear the rustle of the news anchor’s sheaf of paper as he moved it about. When he tapped the papers on the desk to square them. You recoiled, confused. You could register the soft lip-smacking sounds as the anchor’s mouth opened and closed, the gummy noises of someone talking who needs a drink of water.

You didn’t understand. Was the anchor just sitting there, reading off the teleprompter with apparent urgency, but only mouthing the words? While a whole studio of camera operators and producers watched him do it?

“What’s that, mommy?”

Leah stood in the living room door, having approached on soundless stockinged feet. You jumped and, for reasons which were not clear to you, switched over the channel to keep her from seeing it.

The volume was up too high. The chirpy people on the morning talk show were deafening, making both you and Leah jump. A polished woman was speaking continuously through her grinning, perfect teeth, as if making light conversation or reciting a recipe, blaring out of the too-loud television: “...within that place on your bloody and ragged feet you leave a trail behind you like a snail but you do not carry its burdens the burden of peace you must fill your mouth with the hot desert sand and cov-”

You jumped, and fumbled with the remote to click off the television. The regained silence of the living room seemed like a presence all its own. You, your daughter, and the silence stood together for a moment.

“Mommy,” said Leah, “what was that lady saying?”

You looked at her, then away. “Nothing, sweetie. There’s just something wrong with the TV. Ready for school?”

She nodded, unconvinced.

+++++

After the slap Leah held her hand against her reddening cheek and turned away from you. She did not cry out. You clasped her shoulders and tried to turn her to look at your face, so that she could see the apology borne by your eyes that your lips could not speak. She would not look. You let her go, and she crept into the corner of the cabin near the fire and sat with her head hidden in the crook of her arms.

She did not understand. How could she? You had only the most tenuous grasp of it yourself. You weren’t even sure that you had a grasp of it at all, or even what it was, but your suspicions seemed to have lasted you this long.

+++++

When you arrived at your office in Stewart Hall you booted up your computer and switched on the coffeemaker. The paper you were writing sat on the desk as a sheaf of printouts. You always proofread on paper rather than on the computer screen — the change of format helped you see the old words with new eyes.

In the Applied Neurolinguistics Institute you charted the effect of language on thought itself. Your bread and butter was Linguistic Determinism and its soft form, Linguistic Relativity.

Probably the most famous example of Linguistic Relativity — popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis — was the ability to distinguish color, with blue/green differentiation being held up as the most common example. Languages such as Ossetian, Japanese, Xhosa, Celtic, Lakota, and Vietnamese historically made no distinction between blue and green, having one word for both.

What laid the groundwork for Linguistic Determinism was not these lexical differences, but their effect on the speaker’s perceptions. People whose native language didn’t separate blue and green were less able to distinguish between the two colors when performing a color swatch test. If you showed a native speaker of Xhosa a swatch of bluey-green next to a swatch of greeny-blue, they would say they are the same color. Not because they couldn’t easily pin a word to it: they literally would not see a difference.

The language a person is immersed in affects the ability of their brain to distinguish colors. The eyes are the same, the brain is structurally the same, but the conscious mind just isn’t equipped with a framework to sort the signals received.

This leads to the interesting possibility of a human gaining the ability to perceive new colors simply by learning the words for them.

And given that all reality is an individual brain interpreting signals according to the framework it's been given… what new perceptions might be gained, by learning the right words?

Your university email client dinged. Forty-four unread emails, overnight. Usually it would be two or three. Most were from names that you did not recognise, from email addresses ending in ‘dot gov’. As you scanned your inbox two more emails came in - one from another government address and the other from your boss, subject line “EMERGENCY MTG MY OFFICE NOW.”

You went.

Julie was your boss by simple dint of being the senior of the three people comprising the Applied Neurolinguistics Institute. She hadn’t applied any makeup, and fiddled with the tiny, gold crucifix around her neck as she told you that the military was sending a helicopter to pick the three of you up.

“A helicopter?” you said, “but… why? What the hell is going on?”

“They’re bringing linguists in to DC,” she said. “To deal with the emergency. Didn’t you see the news?”

“The riots?”

“The government says it’s something memetic. The words. There’s something in the words.”

Luis shifted where he stood awkwardly by the door. “Don’t they have their own linguists? What about the think tanks in Washington?” He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in his thin neck. “Why us?”

“It’s not just us,” said Julie, “Luis, they’re bringing in everyone.”

+++++

You pulled two cans of food from your pack. There were so few left. With the labels peeled off meals became something of a game, a Russian roulette of what you would each get. Two days before you had opened one of the cans hot from the fire to find it full of fruit salad, now heated through. Leah had laughed. It was the first time she had laughed since it had all started. You hadn’t heard it since.

You placed the cans in the fireplace, heating your food with the pile of burning books, and watched your daughter as she crouched nearby, still refusing to look at you.

+++++

The helicopter landed in the football field where a crowd of students had gathered to watch. You stood amidst the students as the grim, professional soldiers emerged and ran, crouching low, to where Julie and Luis stood. They gestured towards the helicopter as it squatted in a tempest of its own making.

Before she followed them Julie turned and sought out your face in the crowd. You raised a hand in farewell. She didn’t return the gesture. She turned away and followed Luis and the soldiers into the helicopter.

She had cajoled and finally gotten angry, but she had no way to make you go with them. You wouldn’t leave Leah.

The sound of the helicopter increased in pitch and it lumbered back up into the air. It swung around to the south and powered away, barely clearing the tops of the campus trees. It was so low that you could see the pilots. Their lips moved in a constant chatter into their headpieces as they communicated with other members of the crew, with home base. Their continuous unheard mouthing reminded you of the silent news anchor from that morning, and his voiceless urgency.

The government suspected the problem was memetic. Ideas traveling, spreading through a population. The noospheric equivalent of the spread of genetics. Genes were spread through reproduction, altering and adapting through natural selection. But genetic information could also be spread via viral infection, the repurposing and piggybacking of host DNA. What would the memetic equivalent of that be?

You looked around you at the crowd of students. Every single one clutched a phone, either talking on it, recording the helicopter, or tapping out messages on the screen.

You felt the first twinges of real fear. You decided to take Leah out of school early.

+++++

After eating (one can of chili and the other sweetcorn, although you didn’t think that a fruit salad would elicit a reaction this time anyway) Leah slept. You watched her in the wan and flickering candlelight, watched the rise and fall of that thin chest beneath the musty blankets you had found in a cupboard. You would give your life to protect her, but how? You had made the decision to head into the wilds, away from population centers and their nexii of communication. But now here you were, out in the forest far away from everyone, and you weren’t sure what to do next.

Five days of cold and fear. That’s what you had bought the two of you. You didn’t know how many more you could buy her. What good was flight if there was no refuge at the end of it? What good was a few more days if they were ones of cold, and fear, and (looking at your near-empty backpack) hunger?

You took out your pistol from your jacket pocket, the snub-nosed revolver that your father had gotten for you when you left Pat. You looked at Leah again, her small sleeping face in its tangle of matted hair.

+++++

You brought Leah home despite the protest of her teachers, switched off your smartphone and the home computer, and together watched as the world ended. Or, rather, metamorphosed into something new.

Your work in the Applied Neurolinguistics Institute felt like shouting into a storm most days, but you knew as simple fact that words shaped history and moulded the present.

You wrote papers on Chinese citizens being better at saving money than their Western counterparts because Mandarin didn’t have a future tense, about how Japan still had a middle class due to social hierarchy inherent in Japanese verb conjugation, about how women were more likely to be occupying positions of power in the Philippines due to a lack of gendered nouns in both Tagalog and the modern creole Filipino. You had written papers warning about potential vectors of foreign political influence in social media, which had been ignored; then, later, papers analyzing the polarization of American voters after the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light, which people had paid attention to.

You kept the news switched on. That first day they reported on the military moving in to secure metropolitan areas. They reported on linguists being summoned from all over the country and speculated as to why. Some channels claimed it was a cyber attack, some an out-of-control experiment. Two channels invited experts who made reference to aliens, and it was a sign of the times that only one of those channels made fun of them.

Leah stood by the rear window. “Mommy, what’s wrong with Mrs. Nguyen?”

Mrs. Nguyen was your downstairs neighbor. She was standing in the shared backyard, facing away from the building and swaying slightly, staring off into the middle distance. Normally so careful about her appearance, now her hair was disheveled and she wore a garish, rumpled housedress. Her lips moved in a steady mutter.

Leah stood at the window watching you watching Mrs. Nguyen. “Aren’t you going to see if she’s alright?”

Mrs. Nguyen didn’t have the internet, and only talked with her kids on a landline.

You walked over to the TV and unplugged it. You told Leah to close the curtains.

++++++

“Hello?”

You jolted awake. It was now full dark outside, but the candle in the window was still burning. The candle. You had left it in the window like a neon sign announcing your presence.

In the dark outside a flashlight beam probed and stabbed across the front of the dilapidated cabin.

“Hello? Is someone in there?”

A man’s voice, old, from outside.

A voice.

You scrambled up from your chair and the revolver clunked heavily to the floor. You had fallen asleep with it in your lap. You scooped it up and went to the window. About twenty yards off the porch stood a man with a white beard and grubby baseball cap, holding a flashlight in one hand and a shotgun in the other. He saw the movement in the window and transfixed it with the flashlight beam. You crouched down below the windowsill.

“I see you in there,” called the voice, “come on out, now. You’re not supposed to be in there.”

The talking. You had to get him to stop talking. You glanced over at Leah. She was awake, sitting up from her meager nest of blankets on the bed you’d dragged over next to the fire.

“You’d best not have caused any damage or nothing. Come on out.”

You made up your mind and went to the door. You put the gun in your jacket pocket before you went out, hands up in the air. The flashlight beam shone full in your face, blinding you. You stepped forwards across the porch.

“Well now. This is private property, Miss. What're you doing out here?”

You shaded your eyes and the man lowered the flashlight from your face.

“What’s going on? Why are you out here?”

You gestured for silence, finger pressed to your lips. You pleaded with your eyes.

“Miss, are you alright? I can-”

You both felt me arrive.

+++++

With no TV and no internet you had only what you could see out of your window as a gauge for what state the world was in.

Mrs. Nguyen remained in the garden, unmoving, until you went to sleep. The next morning she was gone. Her ugly housedress, however, was lying on the dew-sodden grass where she had stood. Something large had burrowed its way under the garden shed at the end of the yard. Towards the evening you heard sirens, and a trio of fire engines, the big ones, blared down the street at high speed.

“What’s happening,” asked Leah.

You stroked the hair out of her eyes. “I don’t know, love. I don’t know. We’ll be alright.” You hoped that was true. “We’ll be alright.”

You went to the co-op and bought canned food, bottled water. The shelves in the dry goods section were sparse but not yet empty.

The cashier was a cheerful redhead you saw on the campus sometimes. “You’re stocking up too, huh?” She snapped her gum. “I wouldn’t worry about it, y’know? My uncle bought enough toilet paper to fill his garage when we had the lockdowns.” She laughed. “We’re all still using his damn T.P. He brings over a couple of packs every time he visits.”

“I think this might be different,” you said, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s... different.”

“Sure. Well, you take care now!”

Dawn on the third day broke on a column of smoke, thick and roiling, looming over the whole town. You leaned out of your window to watch. Most of the houses on your street had people doing the same.

Someone on the street, a woman, was calling out like a person in the throes of rapture. “The faces,” she cried. You didn’t know who she was speaking to. Perhaps the street in general. “Oh. Oh! They’re smiling! In the smoke! Oh!”

You closed the window and pulled the curtains. You went to the door and made sure it was double-locked, then put the chain on. Then you went room to room, making sure the windows were all shut and the curtains drawn. Leah trailed after you. You could feel her panic rising but did not know what to do to calm her beside not panicking yourself.

When you checked the rear window overlooking the garden your eye was drawn to something moving by the shed.

Your brain processed it as a spider-crab; the enormous Japanese ones with a body tiny relative to the span of its spindly, distended legs, its shell pale from the colorless depths of the abyssal trenches where they lived. It moved its legs slowly, carefully; feeling the limits of the lip of its burrow under the shed. Your conscious mind caught up with what you were seeing when you noticed the bright red nail polish on the tip of each of those two-foot-long claws.

It was a hand. A hand two feet across. It slowly pulled back out of sight.

Mrs Nguyen always wore bright red nail polish.

You drew the curtain. You went into your bedroom and rummaged around the back of the top shelf of your closet.

Leah sniffed, the precursor to tears. “Mommy, what’s going on?”

You took down the steel lockbox and set it on the bed, dialing in the combination. “It’s OK, love. It’s OK.”

You removed the revolver and the box of bullets from the lockbox and started to load the pistol. “I need you to go and pack a backpack of clothes, OK? Like when we went camping.”

She was staring wide-eyed at the pistol. She had never seen it before.

In the street a police car crawled past, the officer inside using the loudhailer.

“GRATEFUL. VISCERA. PANDORA. SEEMING. FORTIFY. PRIMAL.”

The words echoed in the street, speaker feedback shrieking and whining.

You clicked the cylinder of the gun closed and tucked it into your waistband. “Leah? I need you to pack your bag now, please.” You hesitated, listening to the ongoing announcement as the police cruiser rolled down the street.

“AWARE. PROOF. TUMOR. ABLE. NET. ACID. CHILDISH. SOCIETY.”

You knelt next to Leah and stroked her arms. “And Leah… we should stop talking, OK? We can’t talk anymore.”

The police loudhailer dissolved into howls of static.

“Go pack,” you said. It was the final thing you said to your daughter.

You went to the kitchen and began peeling the labels off cans.

+++++

You had thought it was not new words that were doing this, but a way of understanding the words people already knew. Like how the immediate connotations of words like block or thread or post have changed since the proliferation of the internet.

You suspected that, like slang, this new interpretation would spread. The only way to stop a sea change in etymology was isolation, something you tracked often in linguistics. Pennsylvania Dutch is more like a snapshot of what German was like a hundred years ago than modern conversant German. Singlish and Creole both had words in common usage that had long fallen out of use in both British and American English. You hypothesized that by avoiding speech and the written word you could make your mind, and the mind of your daughter, a linguistic clean room: quarantined. Like a Lakota refusing to listen to separate words for blue and green, this new form of perception would remain external.

You were right.

It was the words of the shotgun-bearing man that led me to you both. I am there with you and him, then; I reach across to find the both of you. You would not understand what gulf I reach across. It is not space. The distance between a dream and wakefulness. Memory and awareness.

I reach and like a whale breaching I am there. The man’s face widens and splits. I coil around your childhood memories and your autonomic reflexes, thrust between the snug join of lusts and circadian rhythm. I push myself into your quivering mind.

Your sense of self is a sailboat, a vessel given vector by the differential between one medium and another. Liquid and air analogous to subconscious and conscious thought. But I live in that sea. The words passing between you and the man let me find you, like the thrashing of a swimmer attracts a shark.

You stare at the man as he roils in my grip, but you are changing also. Contexts shift, you become aware of new things, and old things in new ways. Scales fall from eyes. How you saw the world was your brain interpreting a fug of electrical impulses according to the schemata it knew, and now you are learning new ways to interpret reality. See it as it truly is.

You and I and he become we. We becomes I again. Boundaries fluctuate. There are no boundaries.

Your daughter flinches as we/I enter the cabin. She squeezes her eyes shut so that she doesn’t have to look upon the new form that is us, and wails like an injured animal.

I push the smallest of our/my limbs into her mouth to silence her, then put the mouth that was yours (now ours, now mine) close to her ear, and I speak the first words she has heard for five days. In your new voice — my voice — I start to explain.

She will understand soon.