The Nemophile

'"I come here," the Weirdmonger roared, "to sell Weirds, and Weirds are
merely Words that materialize into all sorts of true existence the moment I
release them from between my lips."
Even these introductories squawked into the sky like forgotten memories of
what it was like before one was born.'
From 'Weirdmonger' (Back Brain Recluse 1988; Prime Trade Paperback 2003)


Forgotten memories of what it was like before one was born? I tried to give
myself time to absorb the implications brought by the visitor to my ward. I
insist that I brought more than he did, even though I was a resident, and
he, as I say, a mere visitor. A visitor, he said, with wide visibilities of
Summerset by mere means of his artful description of the animal zodiac
embedded in the fields and hills together with the vanishing sun (he said)
that silted, rather than lowered, into the broken horizon. Can one bring
new things both to and from a status quo? My name is Gregory and, with
that, are brought many new perspectives towards creating a new site for
my core. A new core, however, does not create a new thing-of-which-it-
is-the-new-core.

The Weirdmonger never had a name. He was the original nemophile. I
had read of his doings. So far only one scribe had dared mention his
existence. One scribe, one character. He told me by the end of his visit I
would learn his true name. A historic moment. When a scribe's away, the
scribe's creations do play, they say. Or at least the Weirdmonger said that,
and it at least made it true enough for me to remember as once being true
even before he said it.

"Hey," I suddenly said, "who are you?"

A nurse looked askance from the other side of the room, presumably at my
raised voice. She had been told that the Weirdmonger was a close relative
of mine. And I had not gainsaid this. Too late now. I looked appealingly
towards her, hoping she would come over to double-check the relative
identities of the two shapes sitting in the visitors' alcove near the makeshift
library. The nurse called it a carrel. I wasn't sure. But I had seen many
inmates entertaining close-studied visitors in this carrel over the years.
This was my first time. Rarely graced with visitors, I had called myself
unlucky, bereft. Now, I wasn't so sure. Visitors came in many different
disguises, some lighter than others. And this one today was not exactly an
undesirable, but an imponderable. I shrugged. Many years before, I had
spotted a certain visitor being pored over by another inmate and I felt sure
it was not that inmate's visitor by rights because it (the visitor) resembled
my long-misremembered mother. She had looked plaintively over at me
but left without visiting me. So, indeed, I knew she had visited someone
whom she had not recognised at all. Brings tears to my eyes, even today.

During the posy of pauses encouraged by my thoughts, the Weirdmonger
had idly picked up a loose book from the carrel table and riffled through it.
The table vibrated as if the Weirdmonger had put ill-carpentered wooden
wheels under it that one of us was trying to push with our knees.

"Why are you here?" he said, looking up, instinctively aware that my mind
was now empty.

"I have trouble distinguishing between being ill and being well," I
answered. There was a medical name for this condition, but it didn't fit. I
was never cold. In fact I suffered from the heat.

The sun was baking through the window even now as I watched tussocks
being hustled by a dry wind.

"My own trouble is distinguishing between present and past," he countered,
with a glinting look of boastful waywardness.

I see him clearly. He has all the features that one associates with
yesterday. The nurse plucks my fingers from the bowl of soft book, teasing
the letters back upon the slowly reconstituting leaves by leaving them
outside free from the air conditioning. The frontispiece was never
discovered as I had swallowed it. They always said I had swallowed the
dictionary. Wordiness and worry, that was my fate. Maybe that was the
cause of my ambivalent health. Indigestion of the lexic sacs. A mixed
blessing, if being full meant one could dream with the requisite words that
one was empty. At least I found the visitor's name on the hard core of
the spine that I never attempted to eat, though it did show gnaw-marks.
The nurse tried to hide it. Mummerset. Mummerset was the name.
Gregory Mummerset. The name rung up all sorts of futures and pasts,
without which this gift of the present would never have been granted. The
ward had many inmates that were ever changing their minds. A hospital is
made of many wards. We exchanged visiting cards cut from other spines.
Then we tor them up.

Through the carrel window could be spotted the back-end of the
Weirdmonger's medicine wagon that, as well as trundling away into the
slow setting, also created it, brought it gradually into existence.