She feeds the abdicators every morning at eight o’clock. Canned tuna or beans. She opens the cans into a few of her Wedgwood bowls and places them outside the glass doors of the Dakota. She wishes she had better use for her fine China.
She stands inside the vestibule and watches them. Like feeding stray cats. They eat with their hands or sometimes put their whole face into the bowl. They snicker while they eat. Today it almost sounded like they were talking.
She knows that’s impossible.
Clara Elizabeth Ophelia Fearrington née Newland is on the edge of a night so dark it’s already swallowed almost everything she knows and now it’s looking to swallow her too. It’s so dark, she struggles to imagine the idea of light on the other side of the approaching night.
Her eyes well up with tears.
“I apologize for getting emotional,” she says to no one as she slowly climbs the stairs up to her apartment.
In the apartment, she takes off her slippers and sits on her favorite Alberto Pinto armchair, her bare feet on the soft Sarouk rug that Marcus had so much trouble importing. She can still enjoy some small pleasures. She grabs the writing board and places it on her lap. Grabs a leaf of letter paper and the Waterman fountain pen from the end table and starts to write a letter to someone she can hardly imagine. Someone in the distant future. Someone who may be able to decipher the marks she’s putting down.
“I know I’m writing to a fantasy.”
Like an enchantment, she repeats out loud what she writes. She must stay in practice or who knows how long she’ll last.
“I am conjuring you because I must believe in you and your majestic return full of words and significance. Sometimes I can almost see you, tall, handsome, strong, your long golden hair blowing in a faraway future wind, your names stretch over the land, your every action is full of verb and glowing adjectives. Your every move is poetry. You read my letter and marvel that once upon a legendary time, I existed.”
She looks out the window at the sun over the buildings across Central Park.
As long as she speaks, as long as she writes, all is not lost. If she could conjure that reader across the centuries, her efforts will be worth it.
“I am the last holdout of the age of language,” she says and writes. “We thought language was integral to humanity. We thought we couldn’t exist without it. What fools we were!”
Language was nothing but a bad habit.
She puts the pen down. She wants to rip up the page again, but she does not. She’ll work on it more later. She puts the writing board on the end table and goes to the kitchen. She opens a can of peaches and empties it into a ceramic bowl she inherited from her aunt Sylvia. She’s so sick of peaches, and nuts and beans and tuna and stale bread. All the good food is gone.
She grabs a handful of almonds and sits at the kitchen counter. Her backache sends a jolt up her spine. She takes a deep breath and tries to think about when she and Marcus first got married. The memory is fuzzy, but she remembers talking to people that night. People she doesn’t remember.
She eats the peaches and the nuts and drinks a glass of water.
She goes to the bathroom and brushes her teeth, puts on blush and lipstick.
In the bedroom, she changes from her pajamas into her favorite Ungaro pants and matching top.
“Like I’m going out,” she says.
Then she winds the kitchen clock. Then the dining room clock, the bedroom clock, the study clock, the reading room clock, and the living room clock. She’s glad she insisted that Marcus get some manual clocks. She’s terrified she’ll lose track of time.
She’s writing again. She has written seventy-six versions of the letter. They are all stacked on the coffee table and still her recipient is unreachable. Today he is in a green forest, sitting on a throne of gold, moving a strand of hair away from his face so he can read her letter.
“With each version of this letter you become a little more real,” she says and writes, “and the more real you are, the more real I am. Without you, even the little of you I have, I would’ve vanished a long time ago. You sustain me.”
She doesn’t know how the sickness started. Her memory is fading away same as everything else. She remembers an article in the Times about a trend of silent protests. She remembers feeling relieved. Protests were always so loud and confrontational. Silent protests sounded pleasant. Somehow it seems related to the sickness, but that came later.
Marcus and her finally realized there was something wrong when Jim Logan Jr, the handsome Fox news anchor, stopped talking in the middle of a live broadcast. He stopped a little too long. Then the camera cut to someone else and he was never heard from again.
The next day it was all over the news.
After that, every day there were reports of people going silent. Families, companies, whole towns.
The CDC thought it was a virus. Something that attacked the language centers of the brain. Pharmaceuticals spent millions on the brightest scientists looking for a cure. Marcus and Clara learned about Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of the brain, about aphasia and apraxia, about the stages of speech production, about syntax, semantics. Linguistics was all everyone talked about for months. They donated thousands to research, but the sickness kept spreading.
It was terrifying. Like watching the world slowly vanish in front of your eyes.
A few weeks later, the sickness affected them personally when Marcus tried to call Jules and Margaux in Cap Ferrat to plan their annual spring trip. That was early 2027. He called but couldn’t get a hold of anyone. Their assistant Joaquín tried practically everyone in Cap Ferrat. It was like the town had evaporated.
Marcus was furious. He wanted to take the jet and go to Cap Ferrat, but Clara wouldn’t let him. She was right. A few days later the government closed the airports.
Then Joaquín and the rest of their staff also went silent.
Marcus had been doing some reading and concluded the sickness wasn’t a virus. They were doing it on purpose, or some sort of placebo effect, a copycat syndrome. People were going silent by choice. Abdicating their responsibilities. Giving up on society. Giving up on hard work and the American Dream.
He published an op-ed in Forbes. It went viral. Language Abdicators he called them. The name became the standard among those who spoke.
Clara is not against entropy, God knows she’s changed, especially since the beginning of the sickness, the syndrome, the crisis, the abdication, whatever it is.
Entropy. She looked it up: the tendency of things to disorder. Left alone, things mix into each other. She understood that, but she never realized how much words kept her world in order. No rules without words. No law. Only chaos.
Marcus used to talk about the cellular phone. How it was the epitome of language decay with its texting, acronym-speak, emojis. He talked about how language had been decaying for centuries since the golden days of Shakespeare.
However, neither Marcus, Clara, nor anyone it seems, ever considered that one day language would be gone. Eradicated from the face of humanity, like it had all been nothing but one long bad metaphor.
No, it is not gone. She’s not ready to let it go. It’s too soon. She still has things to say!
“Dammit!” she says and gets up from the chair. She paces aimlessly around the apartment.
If an old lady curses in a languageless world, does she make a sound?
All those divisions, good words, bad words, truth, lies, heaven, hell, rich, poor… They’ve all evaporated. She tries to remember what they meant, but it seems more and more like a charade. It’s all gray now.
She writes him a new letter.
He is in the captain’s cabin of a large sail ship, sailing toward her shores. He sits on a finely carved chair reading her letter. Reading about the days when everyone still talked.
“I remember two summers ago, or was it three, at our house on Avalon Beach, I was having a conversation with my dear friend Eleanor on the porch. You would love her. We were watching the slow rising tide. Talking like we had been doing it forever and would never stop.
‘I read somewhere that some grains of sand have been around since the Egyptians,’ she said to Eleanor, or something like that. ‘Some sand on the beach here is actually from the Sahara.’
‘Let’s collect some and send it back,’ Eleanor suggested.”
Clara no longer knows where Eleanor is.
Entropy.
That’s how it’s been. Like a slow rising tide, except this one never ebbs. It keeps swallowing up every word, every sentence, everything. Talking, reading, writing, books, theater, politics, business: meaningless all. Even her name is meaningless.
“Clara Elizabeth Ophelia Fearrington née Newland.” She says it out loud, but she might as well be saying Cleopatra queen of Egypt or more like Little Orphan Annie. Orphaned from a society that has moved on.
“It took us millennia to build this magnificent house of words,” she says and writes, “and now it is shattered and scattered to the wind, its syllables are not even whispers in the breeze. I will never again be able to sit at the club with the ladies to chat about food and fashion and theater and yes, I even miss the gossip. That’s how we bonded. By talking. How do you use language, my king? Do you have gossip? Do you bond over conversations?”
What does it matter? She’s writing to some impossible fantasy.
She tries not to get emotional about it, but sometimes it’s too much to take.
She sweeps all the rooms, and this calms her down. Like those monks on that PBS documentary. How long ago was that?
She eats some tuna and crackers and olives for lunch and feels better so she sits down to write again. She had to move the letters to the dining room table. There are so many now.
“The park was in full fall colors when it started happening to our friends. Do you have friends? Do you have abdicators in your future world? Our abdicators gather in groups. They seem to be friends with each other. They frolic like children at a nursery. They roll on the grass. They run. They climb on each other. And always with the infernal snickering, like they know something I don’t.”
She crosses out that last sentence. She doesn’t want to appear petty.
Since she and Marcus didn’t have children, their friends were everything to them. Lizzie and Tom, Betsy, Frank, Eleanor, Albert. They had a good group, but once the sickness started, they were afraid to visit them lest it was contagious. They spoke via Zoom and Facetime, but even so, they were afraid. Could this thing be remotely contagious? Then one night, Betsy called up in tears to let her know Frank had gone silent, and while she’s telling her the story, right in the middle of a sentence she stops.
“Hello, Betsy!?” She could still see her on the screen of her phone, breathing, staring blankly. Then Betsy hung up and Clara never saw her again.
It wasn’t long after that when the radio and TV stations stopped transmitting. She will never forget the image of hundreds of New Yorkers, some of the loudest people, walking the sidewalks around Broadway and Columbus, in complete silence. She never thought she would cry for people she didn’t know.
Luckily, Marcus had filled the Dakota apartment with provisions for an extended quarantine. So, they barricaded themselves and prepared to wait it out.
They thought it would all pass soon enough.
Naïve was still a word.
She feels inadequate. She wishes she was better able to control the urge to cry.
She goes to the balcony. She looks at them walking by. She talks at them, but they ignore her. She’s the crazy lady who talks.
She knows they can hear her; they are not deaf.
Alison Torwald was the first person who described to her what happened when someone abdicated. They were only acquaintances, but under the circumstances, well, she was someone with whom she could talk. She told Clara what happened when her daughter, Raquel, went silent. At the dinner table, Raquel asked for the salt. Her father handed it to her. Raquel said thanks, then put salt on her steak, and proceeded to eat it with her bare hands. Like an animal. Never said another word.
“It sent a shiver through me,” Alison said.
Shortly after that, Alison went silent as well.
Before the utilities and internet stopped working, Marcus and Clara looked up anything they could read about symptoms and warning signs. Anything that could help them prepare. There were so many different stories.
The best they could figure out was to keep talking.
“Marcus, my husband, my partner, my lover, my friend,” she says and writes. “Thirty-six years together. We still had things to say to each other. We talked and read to each other and played games and tried to never be quiet around each other. We kept each other warm through that cold winter.”
This past spring, just a few months ago, when the weather started to warm up, Marcus walked to the public library. He took the shopping cart and spent a few hours perusing the aisles until the cart was full of books and then walked back home.
That day, a sunny spring day, they were on the reading room sofa having a nightcap, wine for Clara, scotch for Marcus. He was reading a detective novel out loud, a Dick Francis one. He loved mysteries. She was half listening. She was distracted by the abdicators across the street at the park. Their snickering could be heard through the open balcony doors.
She interrupted him.
“Did you cut through the park on the way to the library?” she asked him.
“I’ve told you there is nothing to worry about. It’s not contagious.”
“That doesn’t matter! They are unpredictable.”
“They are not, they’re like puppies. Some are even cute.”
“Are you looking at the women? Marcus!”
“So what if I do? They are not dangerous.”
“You do not know that!”
“They are interesting to watch. Sometimes I recognize somebody. Today, I saw Randy Clark, remember him from the investment firm? I called to him, but, of course, he didn’t respond. I went up to him. He and several other abdicators were laying on the grass by the carousel. They were laying there, all naked, staring at the trees. I don’t know. They seemed happy.”
“My God, Marcus, how could you say that?!”
“Darling, it doesn’t matter. They don’t see me. We’re like ghosts to them.”
That’s the last thing he said. She can still see him sitting next to her on the blue couch in his flannel pajamas. She could instantly tell. His body relaxed. His shoulders slouched, but he still held on to her hand. He was facing her, looking right at her, but he could no longer see her. He had abandoned her.
She didn’t have the best reaction.
She yanked her hand away like he had the plague.
She yelled at him. She cried. She shook him, and yes, she hit him. She slapped him several times. He cowered, like a dog who doesn’t understand why he’s being hit.
She wanted to hit him again and again. Wake him up. But she knew it was pointless. It was no longer him. But it was him!
A few hours later, she braved her fears and sat next to him. She nuzzled into him. She grabbed his arm and put it around her shoulder. He let her, he even gave her a squeeze, but it wasn’t the same.
He stayed in the apartment for three weeks.
He ate sometimes. Mostly he snickered. Like remembering an old joke. It would’ve been adorable if it hadn’t been so tragic. He walked from room to room. He made other noises, little yelps and grunts. He would go to the balcony and stare outside with melancholic eyes.
She did everything she could. She did shameful and embarrassing things to try to bring him back. She was desperate.
One day, she opened the door and left it open and as soon as he noticed, he walked out.
Walked out like thirty-six years was just a number.
She made a final feeble attempt. She pleaded, cried, tried to block the stairs, but it was pointless. She was a ghost to him.
She walked behind him down the stairs and opened the glass doors and he walked out straight for the park.
It’s been over five months since he left. She hasn’t seen him since.
Sometimes she imagines her future letter reader looks like Marcus, a young Marcus, with his blue eyes and his big ears.
She sits on the balcony for hours sometimes hoping to catch a glimpse of him in the park.
One day she thought she did, but it wasn’t him.
They all have started to look alike. The ragged clothing, if any. The unkempt hair. The park is full of abdicators. They frolic, that’s the only way to describe what they do. The world is ending, and they play. And snicker! She can hear them even with the windows shut. If she wasn’t already going mad, it would drive her mad.
She hears noises on the street. It sounds like talking. She runs to the balcony, but it is nothing. Some abdicators excited over something she doesn’t understand.
As far as she can tell, everyone abdicated except for her.
So, she mostly stays home, winds the clocks, washes her clothing. She reads out loud. She talks to herself.
And she writes to her distant reader as he rides in the back of a limo, or sits by the shore, or just lays in his plush bed reading her letters before going to sleep.
“Part of me is desperate to abdicate, get it over with if it is inevitable, join the others in their games. But I won’t. I can’t seem to let go. I’m either immune, stubborn, or stupid. You know what I mean? I just don’t know. I think I will die alone with my thoughts and my words. How will you know I’m gone? Please know that I will write to you until the last moment. When you no longer have any more letters to read, you will know I’m gone. You will know I’ve moved on with the rest of humanity. But not yet. I am still the last glimmer of what we thought was our distinguishing trait. Our greatest achievement! What fools we were. Nitwits, cretins, imbeciles, blockheads. Those are all words that used to have meaning.”
She’s the last fool standing.
Since the weather started cooling off and her food is almost out, she ventures outside more often. She’s no longer scared of the abdicators. Marcus was right. They are harmless. Luckily the abdicators have no interest in canned food, so she can still find some in stores left wide open by their previous owners. Water is more complicated, but she can still find plenty of bottles and taking out her potty outside every day is a small chore.
She no longer tries to keep separated. She is walking through the park speaking words that seem more and more meaningless with each passing day.
“Apple, tree, dog, sky, love, future, mother, life.”
Everything seems to be out of focus. Like jumbled up words. Her senses are not responding the way she expects them too.
She can smell their sweat and urine and dirt, but it doesn’t bother her. Their nakedness doesn’t offend her. Their numbers have thinned out, but the park is still crowded. One of them bumps into her and she doesn’t flinch. She’s not sure what part of the park she’s in. It all looks familiar. She looks for a street or park sign. There’s a dead body leaning against a tree. Partly decomposed. She stares at it. Bloated, maggots crawling out of the eye sockets. She walks further into the park. Some abdicators are foraging in some berry bushes. Another one is sitting on a bench playing with what seems like a very large lizard. Two abdicators are copulating on the grass. Legs and arms in a tangle.
They no longer ignore her. Now they look at her as she walks by. They laugh and make noises. She’s not sure if it’s at her. They sound like warning noises, calling noises, purring noises, pleasure noises.
A group of them gathers around her. They follow her. More join them. They stare, but the more they see her, the more she feels like a ghost. It’s ok if they follow her.
She forgot to wind the clocks and lost track of how long she’s been walking in the park.
Then she sees him.
Her king stands on a green meadow naked except for a bejeweled crown and a silk sarong with turquoise and purple paisley designs wrapped around his waist. His long blond hair falls freely over his chest. He holds a golden scepter in one hand and with the other signals for her to approach.
She approaches the king.
Clara. The last one with a name.
She tries to think of words to say but can’t think of anything.
Laughs.
