“There are so many words for it,” she said.
I felt alarmed as I gazed at the fuzzy image of her face, the brown half-moons beneath her eyes. She always looks pretty, with the waifish delicacy of a ballet dancer, but there was a distraction to her expression.
She’s not paying attention to her own welfare and no one else is, either. She has no one to take care of her yet I suspect she needs help. I want to call her mother; I wish I had her mother’s telephone number.
It can’t be my job, though, to look after Kay as well as Lena—not now, especially, when I’ve failed so dismally with my own daughter. I’m not equipped.
“It is language,” she said. “The same kind that makes your body work without you telling it to. You know how the brain runs your kidneys, say, or tells an embryo how to grow in a pregnant woman? What’s the difference between that kind of implicit, like, limbic OS for our biology—and for the biology of all animals—and just a miracle?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s part of deep language that runs these operating systems for us. You see? It’s not the language we speak. I mean our language comes from it, like all language, but our own specific language is like the surface of the ocean, the very top line of the water. Just the line. Deep language—I mean I happen to call it that, but there are other names—it’s the rest of the ocean beneath, see, Anna? It’s the rest of the water below, and it’s everything the rest of the ocean holds, that makes that thin line of surface possible.”
She was doing something with her hands behind her head—scooping her hair into a ponytail as wings of the hair fell forward around her face. She kept talking faster and faster and shook her head as she did this, making it hard for me to hear; the volume was already at maximum. I wondered if she was manic.
That has to be it.
“See Western medicine doesn’t come close to understanding the body, that’s part of what I learned in med school and my residency, for doctors, we have to act like we know things, ‘project an air of competence,’ is what they said to me”—here she used air quotes—“but let’s be serious, it’s a crapshoot, with anything in the least rare, whether you can get to a diagnosis that works and maybe jury-rig a cure for it. Medicine’s more guesswork than the AMA wants patients to even think about, if they knew how much of a gray area there is they wouldn’t believe a thing we said—”
“Mama,” said Lena, behind me. “I can’t find it.”
“Shh, honey. Just for a minute. I’m trying to hear Kay.”
“We’d never be able to tell our brains how to manage the body’s systems, so much more sophisticated than our self-awareness,” went on Kay, and now she was fiddling with an earring and in the process turning her face away from the computer’s microphone. “. . . colonies of microbes—billions! Not to save our lives! What I got from Infant Vasquez, what I didn’t have time to tell Navid, is that system . . . one aspect of deep language . . . the other—”
“Mama,” repeated Lena, apparently deciding Kay’s desperate monologue was background noise. “I can’t find the bottom LEGO piece, you know the one you make into the floor? I can’t find that big flat green piece to even build them on, Mom. I swear, I looked everywhere!”
“In a minute, honey, just a minute, OK?” I said, flapping a hand at her impatiently, but I’d already missed what Kay was saying.
Then Solly and his new girlfriend burst in the door stamping snow off their feet, his girlfriend whom I’d never met before was smiling at me expectantly, so I made my excuses to Kay and got up from the computer.
Language extinction has occurred quite slowly throughout human history, but is now happening at a breakneck pace due to globalization and neocolonialism—so rapidly that, by 2100, 50 to 90 percent of languages spoken in today’s world are expected to be extinct. —Wikipedia 2016
LUISA WAS SITTING with Solly and me in his kitchen/dining room/living room (Lena had gone to bed) when we got the call from my mother.
Solly put her on speakerphone.
Our father had been losing weight and sweating at night, she said—so much that he soaked the sheets. They’d gone in to see the family doctor and the doctor had sent them to a specialist, where he’d been biopsied.
“Why didn’t she tell us this before?” asked Solly, after punching the mute button. “A biopsy?”
“I didn’t want to bother you, in case it wasn’t anything,” she said.
I guess the mute button doesn’t work.