By Kevin Ye.
Dr. Abubacarr Njie (placeholder name, as he was ferried by the Americans in 1945 from one continent to another, from one vessel of transportation to another, narrowly escaping Soviet spies in Germany by rail, spending several weeks in the western lowlands of Albania diagnosed with malaria, living incognito as Mr. Eduardo Alvarez, chief editor for Der Spiegel, residing in Argentina from 1949 to 1966, finally arriving in America under the guise of Dr. Abubacarr Njie, research scientist for the California Institute of Technology) died last month. Later in the month, I published an obituary of Dr. Njie in the local Pasadena Chronicler, describing him as a reserved man dedicated to his work and a humble father to two lovely daughters and a reclusive son. Then, yesterday, a muddy manila envelope containing two notebooks of differing sizes, shapes, and colors arrived in the mail, delivered from Dr. Njie’s home address.
“Do with these as you wish,” read the short letter attached to the package.
The first notebook boasted a charcoal gray cover and a meticulously sewn spine with thin Japanese paper, lined, courtesy of an esteemed workshop of blind women in Indonesia. It weighed around 12.3 ounces, and its dimensions measured 6.02 x 0.98 x 6.02 inches, each cover forming a perfect square.
The second notebook featured afforestation tree paper glued to a flimsy elastic backbone, weighing roughly 7.8 ounces, with dimensions of 9.92 x 0.71 x 7.05 inches. It was, by all geometric accounts, objectively of poorer make.
A voracious reader such as myself, tempted by the archaeological nature of a text, would often care very little for the aesthetic and structural composition of the book. However, to my dismay, these books were blank save for their opening pages, where both contained the same handwritten Biblical passage:
Oh, may God strike, not my body, not my heart, but my mind, and that with such indisputable lights, I shall forget, I shall be forgotten, I shall see Uz renewed, rewritten, etched into eternity, I shall remember His will be Done.
Job 10:23
Veracity aside, that the same passage would occupy the opening pages of two distinct notebooks sent by a deceased man seemed too coincidental to ignore.
Of course, due diligence was taken. All possibilities of subterfuge were to be accounted for. I had the handwriting verified and confirmed by four separate graphologists, one of whom, Uriel, was a former lover of Dr. Njie, and only in my presence shed tears at the careful nostalgic arcs and swivels of the letter ‘U’ even though, in those halcyon days, effusive love letters and sweet kisses beneath the birchwood were enough for two aging men. The other graphologists, along with corroborating faculty members at the university, confirmed that the handwriting inscribed within the notebooks was indeed Dr. Njie’s. Meanwhile, Dr. Njie’s wife, along with his two daughters, confirmed the mailing. All three could remember that it was their husband and father, lying in hospital at the end of his life, not an imposter of magnanimous verisimilitude, who urged them to mail the package to me. Discreetly, so as to not publicly doubt the quality of the family’s testimonies, I consulted the hospital staff. I retrieved blood and urine samples. I interviewed Dr. Njie’s private gastroenterologist and a Chilean nurse claiming she stood in the right wing of the Palacio de La Moneda on the day of Allende’s suicide. All confirmed Dr. Njie’s identity and presence, as well as his act of writing on and sealing the yellow envelope with his ghastly fingers.
Finally, then, I needed to confirm that the author of the note, “Do with these as you wish,” matched the author of the identical passages within the notebooks. Without that last confirmation, this entire exercise would have been in vain. However, this was the most potent challenge, as the two scripts were clearly written (even to my untrained eye) not just in separate styles, but by separate pens, one of finer make than the other.
The note was written hastily, italicized, letters linked together in a scurried, cursive, almost Brownian motion: as if, had Dr. Njie ingested oatmeal instead of congee that morning, his pen would have walked the silky textured page stochastically until it read, instead, “Do away with these as you wish.” Additionally, the pen must have either been defective or improperly cared for. The indelible ink blotted the hastily torn piece of Rhodia paper, the dotted i’s appearing like drops of blood from the nose, epigraphs from the unconscious bodily works of the dying.
The notebooks, on the other hand, took on the type of a professional manuscript. Several experts I hired expressed their amazement at the calligraphic mimesis between the two written passages; they were unanimously unsure as to which writing emerged first and almost refused to believe they were both handwritten. An application of gas chromatography finally solved this problem and confirmed that the square notebook was written earlier, but it brought me no closer to the truth.
Ultimately it seemed as if the only connective tissue between the two writings lay in the fact that they were diametrically different. “They repel each other like magnets,” one calligrapher observed after hours of examination, laying the pages side-by-side while holding protractors, rulers, and compasses to them. No two letters in the note were of the same length or width or height. There appeared no consistency in the rough acute angles between the letters w or y, no elliptical or annular shapes circled in the same way, whereas the text within the notebooks aligned in mathematical harmony. The capitalized I’s, for instance, were identical, not just perfectly parallel to each other, but also perpendicular to their equally sublime, adjacent letters.
After weeks of uncertain deliberation I dismissed the experts. I resolved to take a short vacation alone, driving north in my rustic buggy until I was no longer in the state of California. En route to no destination in particular, I turned on the radio and heard a local station playing from Herbie Hancock’s 1976 album Secrets. At the close of the song, the deep voice of the clearly American host returned, with the up-tempo instrumental portion of ‘Doin’ It’ set to repeat in the background.
“And that, folks, that was Cantelope Island, yes, originally spelled without the u,” said the host, reminding me of Uz and Uriel and secret rendezvous in maze gardens. “Now we’re going to take a quick break to take some calls to the station. That’s right, call me, Winston, here at G&B FM, your one-stop-shop for everything jazz, pens, and calligraphy. And while you’re at it, make sure you check out our fountain pen sponsors Mont Blanc and Pelikan. All of your return letters, I’ve written with the Meisterstuck Le Petit Prince Classique.”
I pulled over at the closest motel and dialed in at the nearby phone booth.
The phone was answered almost instantly. “Hello? Who’s this calling?”
“Hello, Winston, hello,” I gasped. “I thought I might ask a strange request from you. You see, I possess a pair of notebooks and notes, written with different fountain pens I’m quite sure, but I am in need of some help determining whether they are all written by the same person.”
The phone cut out, the line died, and I resigned myself to the likelihood that the radio host predictably found my call bordering on the deranged. I ended my northbound respite and tried to forget my embarrassing display. Three days later, however, at a musty mezcal bar in San Jose (my return journey had been stalled by a renewed fascination with the phrase “indisputable lights”—was there ever a moment when light could be disputed?) a large, formidable man wearing a cyan Hawaiian shirt approached me while I scanned Dr. Njie’s writings with a Negroni in my hands. He seated himself and waved to the waitress, a young Mexican woman named Rosaline, to order himself a straight glass of bourbon.
“You’re the fella who called my station the other day, ain’t ya?”
“How did you find me?”
Winston ignored me and stared at the writings. “Well, the messy note is easy. It’s written with an old Montegrappa, probably the Elmo. Look at those jagged lines. That’s a sign that the steel nib’s rusted. It’s an old pen. Could be as old as Hemingway’s. But it still writes smoothly, maybe better than some of my Pelikans; that’s how you know it’s a Montegrappa. The two notebooks… Here, let me sniff ’em.”
After a whiff, Winston helped himself to his bourbon before continuing.
“Yup, I’d bet money that this is a Sailor 1911. You can’t achieve perfect mirrored paragraphs without being at least as comfortable and light as the Sailor, but you also have to consider the extra fine print. That’s a Japanese gold nib for you, there’s no mistaking it.” Winston folded his arms and nodded decisively. “You’re in luck, son. These were all definitely written by the same man.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“They all use the same ink.” Winston gave his nose a tap. His eyes shifted between the inked pages and his drink. “It’s Pelikan. Jacques Herbin’s Noir inspiration. The tobacco scent’s been compounded by whatever your friend likes to smoke. Smells like wood burnt with cigars from Buenos Aires.”
Winston smiled and reached across the table to grip my shoulder.
“Anyway,” he said, “I knew it. A crumbled letter. Two notebooks, different in form, exhibiting exactitude of content. It’s the Uzian Isosceles. And here you are, three days later, in accordance with the Triduum. So, you’re one of us, then. An Uzian. How much has your friend told you about the empire?”
“Very… very little,” I replied, cautiously. “Only the basics.”
“For me, I learned all about Uz in school,” Winston sighed. “I wanted to go there, you know. All of us intelligence recruits wanted to go. Nabbed up all the Central Asian classes I could so they’d put me in the first wave. Learned Arabic and really any other language that might help me communicate with the Uzians. Was gonna help start a coup, come home a hero. Then, I went. I learned about the Shape of Memory. Now I’m an Uzian. Isn’t that strange?”
“The Shape of Memory?”
Winston laughed. “You friend really did just teach you the basics. Well, it’ll happen before you know it. It’s the Land of Uz, home of the Eternal Uzian Empire. It’s Aram, it’s the Euphrates, it’s Jordan, Uzbekistan, it’s even you and me. The Uzians hated the idea of physical temporality, so they constructed their empire in everyone’s memory. They live there even now with all their old kings and coalescing customs of infinite complexity, within the contours of Memory itself. If I just close my eyes and remember, I can see the city skyline, gleaming from every sea in the Mediterranean. I can kiss my wife from the hotel overlooking the Adriatic during our honeymoon. Incredible. It’s the ultimate form of imperialism, the colonizing of the mind. Those who learn the ways of it are granted access to the ancient city, but their memory is committed to the preservation of the empire. Eventually, I’ll be added to the Shape of Memory too, and so will you. We’ll both become and change it.”
There was no fear in Winston’s voice, only fervent expectation. I eyed the bourbon in his hands. It, like my Negroni, slowed the way our nerves communicated with the hippocampus, dampening the way we formed and made new memories. I filled my mouth with the cocktail and waved at Rosaline to fetch me another.
“That’s the spirit!” Winston tipped his glass to me and sipped. “To Uz!”
I never found out what side of the war he was on, but he drank as if he was on mine. We drank so much together that I no longer remember what I drank after the bar ran out of mezcal, or where I woke up the next morning, or where I drove to in the afternoon, or who I slept with the night after that. I struggled to hold everything together. I was late to the studio the following week. I forgot the name of that new Caribbean jazz album. I stalled my plans to visit my reclusive son, and I indulged in the purchase of a rare fountain pen they were auctioning online.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Ye is a writer from Queens, New York. This is his first published story. Like many other writers in New York, he is currently writing a novel.
