Noise by Peter Wild Page B

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said bitterly. ‘I’m going to my closet again and this time I don’t want anyone to bother me. A noisy noise annoys an oyster, get it? Got it? Good.’
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    7
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    Far, Fâr fâr fâr? Nej, inte fâr fâr fâr, fâr fâr lamm. Father, do sheep have sheep? No, sheep don’t have sheep, sheep have lambs.
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    Answers Dad has given to the question, ‘Why did my mother leave us?’
    â€˜Girl gargoyle, guy gargoyle.’
    â€˜Imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie.’
    â€˜If a white chalk chalks on a black blackboard, will a black chalk chalk on a white blackboard?’
    â€˜I saw Esau kissing Kate. The fact is we all three saw. I saw him and he saw me and she saw I saw Esau.’
    â€˜Láttam szorös hörcsögöt. Éppen szörpöt szörcsögött. Ha a hörcsög szörpöt szörcsög rátörnek a hörcsög görcsk.’
    (That’s Hungarian for ‘I saw a bearded hamster. It was lapping syrup. If a hamster is lapping syrup, it will be seized with a hamster-clamp’.)
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    MazinÅ¡ eža puskažocinÅ¡ uz Å¡aursliežu dzelzscela. A little half-length, hedgehog fur coat on a narrow-gauge railroad track.
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    â€˜Dead,’ I whispered. ‘I mean, deg.’
    After a while the golden L outlining the bottom and side of the door began to lighten the darkness. I couldn’t see, but when I moved my eyes I got the feeling of shapes.
    The first time I misspoke one of my new words, I was confounded. Was it even truer, more perfect now? But sometimes–often–twisting a twisted word just untwisted it. For blug, bug or blood. For deg, dead. Maybe the speech I thought was normal, whatever, P.U., was just twisted so far it had come back around. Maybe when I thought I was making sense, I wasn’t. Or if I was, it was insignificant compared to the crucial nonsense I was making simultaneously and by the very same means.
    In the back of the closet was the faintest possible gleam. It could have been in the back of my eyes instead. Was it the wing of a beetle, the head of a nail? I moved my head to the left and it vanished. Back, it reappeared. I turned on my flashlight. Rust-rouged concrete wall jumped forward. In the brightness the gleam was lost. I turned off the flashlight, waited for my eyes to lose their memory of the wall. The gleam returned. I fixed my eyes on it and turned on the flashlight.
    A dot.
    A drop.
    A blob.
    It was growing?
    I put my finger on the blob. It felt like nothing–like the wall. I looked at the smear on my finger. It was no colour, with the look of something that belonged inside something else.
    When I was little, I thought a lot about the insides of things. A closet, a nutshell, a big red rubber ball: opening them only told you what was in an open closet, busted ball or shell. Evenif you did somehow know what was in there, you couldn’t talk about it. The nut still in the shell–the not-yet nut–the almond before it was white: describing it was like cracking the shell. The minute you named it, that wasn’t what it was, even if–this is the tricky bit–it maybe had been, the moment before. You could name it only without knowing you had named it, and probably with a word no one had ever used before, a word you could use without lying, because you had no idea what it meant. A word like—
    I scooped up a bit of the goo on the tip of my finger, where it reformed itself into a nearly spherical blob–a gubby, a dod, dag–deg.
    If ‘deg’ sounded right, was it really because it was a word in a secret language? Or precisely because it was nonsense?
    â€˜What is the point of talking nonsense?’ you had asked me once.
    â€˜Maybe that’s what the fox meant by ‘chew it’,’ I’d answered.
    But maybe