The Alphabet Conspiracy

The word is the making of the world. — Wallace Stevens It’s a filmstrip afternoon and we’re all grateful to the humming projector in the middle of our desks, the closed blinds, the absence of a real adult. There’s a vague promise of revelation from the title and the dark, tree-lined streets, the voice calling from a house carrying within it our freedom not to answer. Inside another house, a little girl in a pretty dress is falling asleep at her father’s desk, turning into Alice in Wonderland as her mind falls down the rabbit holes of grammar. The Mad Hatter and Jabberwocky tell her to lure the letters into a trap so they can beat them to death with mallets. We’d like to see that. Without words no one could tell us what to do. We know grammar is just a byproduct, like schizophrenia, of a brain that grew too fast for its own good and that history is a series of conspiracies by accidental despots. Mrs. Bradford is falling asleep on the wide window ledge, her blue polyester pants gapped to reveal her white socks and pink spotted shins. We try not to look. The Mad Hatter doesn’t say that the alphabet was first used to keep track of property or that for centuries people believed if women learned to write the lost world would never be recovered or that the Mayans believed outsiders wrote things down not in order to remember them but to free themselves into the work of forgetting. That year Mrs. Bradford taught us about the Lewis & Clark expedition over and over again. We never learned why it mattered so much to her or what possible use it could be to anyone. The professor tells Judy about the thousands of words Arabs needed for camels and their parts, the dozen words Eskimos had for snow, and a chimp who learned seven human words. A voice made visible says: magic is a matter of fact to you, Every miracle has to have its qualifications, reservations, footnotes and our heads rise from our desks. The rest of the year will be a series of substitute teachers who teach us nothing but footnotes and their own reservations. Mrs. Bradford dead of a brain tumor. We sit in our sixth-grade desks with the blinds closed against the tree-lined streets as the letters of the world rise up and, forming a single word, eclipse our world and fill our mouths with shadows.