Palimpsest by Jake Bienvenue

Palimpsest | Jake Bienvenue

Palimpsest: A Horror Idyll

If you write over something enough, it turns black. Example: Condense this paragraph into one line. When you reach the margin, instead of dropping below, begin again on the left. Repeat.

In this way it is clear that language tends toward the state it seeks to escape. Incomprehensibility. 

It was a school. Then it was another school. Then it was condemned. The records do not indicate anything sinister happened here. Nothing beyond the usual cruelties. No, the only thing the building can be accused of is being large and old. But please, don’t accuse it of that. 

These days we call it the Cultural Center. A very good idea, the Center. Convincing enough for our town’s nobility to summon the millions required to write CULTURAL CENTER over the top of everything the building has been. One more name on the squiggle. One more word in the palimpsest.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. They pay my salary, those estimable bourgeois. I prepare them long reports on culture. I compile their good deeds in dossiers bound with human hair. The accountant handles the books—I say, “This is culture, this is not.” I quantify culture. I say, “Culture is seeing a 12% increase in these sectors.” The people clap. I say, “Please, you are too generous, I will cry.”

I am myself a palimpsest. I am myself two stories of municipal brick. My walls are scaled by teens in moonlight. Conventions convene in my chest. The work of local artists is displayed on my arms. Children with gelled hair and tight bows walk my veins, clicking their heels as they go.

I am the Center’s 13^th Director, and I have been here too long.

Last week the final principal of the old school perished from this earth. She was 111. Her sarcophagus is carried through the streets. They bring her here. They pass her hand-to-hand, chanting, “Feed her to the Palimpsest.” They are a silly people. They live too much in memory. 

We are fortunate to employ a handful of youth who facilitate the many agents of culture that pass beneath our vaunted brick. They wear sky-blue helmets that read: CULTURAL WORKER. We have tried to shorten this title, but nothing has stuck. They call themselves culchies. I do not like this name. It sounds like a folk monster, coughed up from the deep. 

Late at night: One culchy is dragging trash to the dumpster. A ghoul lunges from a bush and grabs her hair. All of it comes off, and now she is bald. This is why we wear helmets. It’s too bad. The Board likes the culchies to be very pretty. It is part of Culture, they say. When board members become lonely, they approach the Center from outside, singing love songs. I watch this happen from my office. I shake my head, but what can I do? They are the Board. I say culture, but they say me.

In all this, the ghoul got away. 

The sarcophagus reaches me finally. The last man to hand her over is a rogue and a blackguard, and when he passes the corpse he laughs and fingers his earring, and the bones inside rattle. I do not have time for him. I have a job to do. I carry the principal behind the old metal door. I take deep breaths: in through my nose, out through my mouth.

We keep the Palimpsest locked away, for safety. It is a site of total collapse. Linguistic singularity.

The Chair of the Board is Norton Dogbody. Really this is a nickname; I don’t know his real name. He was born in the spawning grounds to the north. From an early age, the spiders there suckled him with webs and said, “You were born a Chair, and a Chair you shall become. The world is your Board.” Webs dribble from his mouth when he talks. He says, “Excuse me,” and spits them into napkins. The boardroom is filled with them. Crumpled napkins, wet webs.

At his right hand sits Dr. Lunchmeat. She brings a Germanic efficiency to culture some find sinister. She has no eyebrows and she wears a Luftwaffe cap. She is ruthless in rooting out the enemies of culture. She drives them into attics where they write long journals, never to be published. Herr Doktor has been photographed at certain disreputable locations with Mr. Dogbody. I keep these photos, just in case. The last thing any of us want is a Culture War. But I must be prepared. 

Long ago, the native tribes of our valley would meet at this exact spot, the high point of town. It was called “The Outside Place.” I do not know whether this is the first name in the Palimpsest, but whether the wolves called it something else, we will never know.

Our monsters are not those kinds of monsters, rest assured. No Skinwalkers here. No, ours are ghouls of wood and sea. Cults with strange rites, bonfires in deep groves, women with scales in local bars, who smell of anchovies and salt, and who drink like, well, fish. 

My office is on the 2^nd floor. Every day a trinket is left on my desk. By whom, I do not know. Today, my gift is a pile of bones. Small bones, like those of a leprechaun. The wrists and ankles bear the scars of nails. A note: “St. Patrick crucified by snakes.”

My office is designed around the performance of sexual favors. For example. There is in the corner a jukebox a’swirl with neon, whose only track is the tune of the ice cream truck. Norton, or Mr. Dogbody, rather, will drop in occasionally to watch me dance. All morning he sobs and begs from the culchies until he has enough quarters. Then he bullies me into dancing. If I do not, he will withhold his donations. Then who will feed the Palimpsest?

At times it seems the Center runs on the performance of humiliations. An economy of humiliations.

Last week, the DEI Committee decided the portrait of Norton Dogbody, which depicts our Chair astride a giant spider, plundering some aboriginal village, should be removed, as some of our spiders have begun to complain. Mr. Dogbody and the Board thanked the committee for its recommendation and praised it for its valuable work: “Keeping us all on our toes.” The portrait was relocated away from the nests, which is good, because the edges were beginning to corrode from all the poison.

The Committee, of which I am a member, meets virtually. We begin each meeting with the liturgy, but we rush through it quickly, eager for penance.  

This morning, a new gift from my mysterious benefactor.  A silver key the size of my forearm. I clip it to my carabiner, and it drags my pants to the floor. “Yes, just like that,” Dogbody says. He hums the ice cream song. He spits webs at me. I dance, dragging the key along the floor. 

Up late at my desk. The building is empty, the halls are dark. The pipes in the walls are very old and they thrash and sputter, but I’m used to them; I don’t startle anymore. I’m reading emails. Since the Center was opened, each director has used the same email address, and it has been passed from hand-to-hand, finally to me. All their correspondence is there, on the drive. Some of the emails are so old they are starting to decay. I’m searching for mention of a silver key. No luck. I stand and walk the halls. I step into an empty classroom. The lights are off, but the moon is so bright tonight it is like a presence in the room. I go to the window. A leviathan lifts up from the hills and unfurls its wings before the face of the raging moon.

I have discovered in the correspondence of my predecessor evidence of a monstrous conspiracy. 

Monsieur Blatt was a mime; he never spoke a word. The Board thought him an ideal candidate for director. The reasoning went that, because he was mute, he would offset the semiotic ragings of the Palimpsest. But it sniffed him out, curdled his heart. It was at this point the Center realized the Palimpsest possessed a dumb kind of intelligence, a snowball of names that swells as it rolls. It reached into his silence and planted words. Or not words, only morphemes, just little chunks of meaning, like “-ing,” for example, which by themselves do nothing but which slowly began to interact with the other chunks, combining and recombining, clarifying themselves first into monosyllabic words, then polysyllabic, and so on, until all the words in the English language had grown like mold under his skin. But it went on. Out of the storm of symbols, a sort of super language developed, one thousand times more efficient than English, in which the semantic structure developed into a kind of sonic pictogram, where every word was onomatopoetic, mirroring, or miming, rather, the essential breath of each thing, crossing the eternal bridge between the world of language and the world of the senses, signifier and signified, creating a linguistic realm coeval with reality, self-sufficient, the act of naming so powerful it had actually created another reality, “Let there be light” spoken over the faceless deep. It was as if shadows had emancipated themselves and become subsistent. At least this was what I could deduce, scrolling through his final flurry of emails in which he begged for ten thousand nukes to be directed here at once, this outside place, which would soon give rise to a new species, men made of words, legions spilling forth across the globe. 

Dr. Lunchmeat dispatched the director with her Luger. The two reports of the handgun were remarked upon by everyone in the building that day. Even then, Lunchmeat said, even in his final moment, staring down the barrel, poor Monsieur Blatt raised his hand right back at her, thumb and index finger extended in the mime of a gun, overrun with the drive to mirror. 

My gift this morning is a vial of poison. The note says, “Drink Me.” I twist off the skull, which serves as a cap. I glug the purple goo. And I know without question what must be done. 

The culchies remark upon my purple eyes. “Mr. Thirteen,” they say. “What happened to you? What are you doing with that key?” A pulse of psychic energy is sufficient to push them away. I am gentle in this. They do not deserve their humiliations.

Reports on the death of Director Blatt indicated the sentient language perished with him, but I know it is not true. The Palimpsest is already broken. My purple eyes see deep into the truth. 

Every night I walk home from the Center, I pass beneath powerlines flocked with crows. They grip that wire and stare. And I wonder if animals will ever evolve consciousness alongside us, like crows or dolphins or elephants. It’s still possible, I suppose. But I wondered in the wrong direction. It is not animals that will achieve sentience. It will be language itself.

Dr. Lunchmeat stands over the corpse of Norton Dogbody. Her Luger smokes. The door I close behind me is the oldest door in the Center. It is made of black iron. We two are alone in the electrical room, where pipes and vents flail in Soviet conflagrations. Dogbody twitches, then stills. Lunchmeat is naked. Her skin is white and every inch of it is lined with text. The words on her skin wriggle like trails of ants. They even line the whites of her eyes. I raise the key. My purple eyes flash. The text explodes off her flesh like the tendrils of a squid. They writhe, whether in spasms of death or jubilation, I never learn. 

For these, too, are only words. 

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