Catchwords

Here’s how it happened. The Jitters. I spell that capitalized, big J, like an illness with a proper name, something you can catch, something that hovers in the air like a 48-hour bug, and it’s bound to sit on someone and sooner or later it will sit on you. Having the Jitters is like getting kicked in the junk, how it steams through you, and you question everything, you think about your relationship, you actually say the word “relationship” out loud, and for a couple days, my God, you’re less of a man.

The Jitters pricked me at a restaurant. I was there with Dana.

We’re in a “relationship.”

She’s my “significant other.”

We are “committed.”

We are bursting with “commitment.”

We were in a restaurant at the peak restaurant hour, and so we had to wait in the waiting-nook. We were waiting with all the other waiting couples, couples who weren’t talking, who were elevator-quiet. And I thought: How sad. They’ve run out of things to say.

But then I realized I wasn’t talking either, so I turned to Dana, who was wearing that thin black sweater she got out of a catalog two weeks earlier, and I started chit-chatting about Beowulf. I could have started chit-chatting about current events, like the Middle East or our dreadful president, or it could have been gossip, like Ryan’s recent one-night-stand or Steve and Linda, who are heading towards a break-up. But I started chit-chatting about Beowulf, because I heard something about Beowulf at work that day, something interesting, and wanted to pass it along.

So I was telling Dana about Beowulf, about how the only reason we have Beowulf is because a monk decided to transcribe it in the 15th century. This monk, I said—and I was copying what I heard earlier at work—this monk copied Beowulf from papyrus onto vellum, which made all the difference, because that’s the only surviving copy, because papyrus goes to pieces in wet climates. And I thought this is how I want things to be: Hip couple chatting about smart topics in a popular restaurant.

Dana could have say how interesting or she could have told a comparable story about, let’s say, how Picasso faced his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon toward the wall because he was so ashamed of it, but what she really said was: “Asshole monk, I hated Beowulf.”

I was thinking I’d never heard Dana talk about a book she didn’t hate when the host called our name: Morgan, party of two? The host said Ah, the Morgans. The host motioned to a waiter and said: Will you show the Morgans their table? And all the while I’m thinking: The Morgans?

I was a little nervous about “The Morgans” because Dana and I still have different last names and our ring-fingers are ringless and I could have asked her to marry me by now, and she could have said yes, but I haven’t and so she didn’t. But the host thought we were “The Morgans” and I felt a little nervous about that because… I don’t know. Because we’re not? Because that’s our inevitable trajectory? Because I glimpsed for a moment becoming one of those strange elevator-couples in the waiting nook? Because I didn’t want to be married to a book hater? I don’t know.

It was a bizarre anti-epiphony; and it was the identifiable beginning of the Jitters: Jitters with a capital J: capital because it was the only thing on my mind and I couldn’t talk to Dana about anything unless I talked about that: and I couldn’t talk about that because it would cause trouble: trouble I wanted to avoid because I knew somewhere that I was being neurotic and stupid.

Nevertheless, there it was: the Jitters. I kept thinking about the whole enterprise (and by enterprise I mean the committed relationship significant other commitment thing), I kept thinking about it into the next day, at work at the bookstore, thinking idiotic things like: Why are we together? Are we in a relationship for the simple reason that we have a relationship? Is it a closed loop? fueling itself? like the snake that eats its own tail?

Shit. I was happy when my boss interrupted me with a task. This was work, after all. At the bookstore. I could have been a cashier at the bookstore, or a stocker, but I’m not, and I’d like to think the reason I’m not is because of all my education. What I do is examine and catalog my boss’ collection of rare books: books misshapen and weathered, paper brown and cracking, spines torn: books printed 500 years ago. The book my boss handed me, it was titled: The London gentleman his will and testament and howe he commytted the keepinge of his Wife to his owne brother whoe delte most wickedly with her and howe God plagued him for it.

It was an interesting read.

The first time I saw Dana was out of my rear-view mirror. I was driving, she was behind me, in a black Camaro. With Mardi Gras beads hanging from her mirror. I saw Dana in my mirror and I followed her. I sort of followed her. I followed her from the front, watching my mirror, turning when I saw her turn signal. It was the opposite of tailing. It was those beads. Mardi Gras beads. A lot of them. She seemed exotic. What did she do, I wondered, to get all those beads? I fantasized about it while I watched and followed her from in front. This is a sure symptom of the Jitters: you start thinking about these first moments, about the genesis of the whole thing, about how these last couple years would have never happened if Dana wasn’t a woman who used her turn signal.

My job at the bookstore is to look for errors. Page-by-ancient-page. I look for goofs at the printing house, illustrations done wrong, pages in the wrong order, paper cut in odd ways, evidence of piracy. I look at the pages and then I look through the pages, under UV light, checking for watermarks, checking for underprinting, checking to see if anybody erased an original text, wrote something on top of it. Like proofreading, only with no intention of changing a word.

“Most businesses have problem-solvers,” my boss once said. “I have a problem-finder.”

Errors make the book more valuable because they make the book more rare. Or, at least, more interesting.

I wrote a poem once. That’s unlike me. I’ve only done that once. I’m no good at poetry. But there’s this one poem that I wrote. I wrote it two years ago, when I first met Dana. The poem is about Dana. It’s a love poem. I remember being very proud of myself after writing it. I remember that she was very proud of me, too.

I wish I had that poem.

I can’t find it anywhere. And I don’t want to ask Dana for it. “Why do you want it?” she would ask. “Because I have the Jitters,” I wouldn’t say. “Because I need to remember how I used to feel about you,” I wouldn’t say. But I don’t know what I would say, which is why I can’t ask her.

I really liked that poem.

I have the poem on a computer disk. I wrote it on my parent’s computer, an old thing with a black-and-white screen—a screen about the size of a piece of toast. They bought the computer in 1985 and never upgraded. The poem is stored on an old floppy disk. A real floppy disk. It’s actually floppy.

And what machine takes a floppy disk now? My computer doesn’t even have a slot for it. The disk is a relic.

I remember some of the lines, but it was a two-page poem.

I’ve checked at computer stores. The kids who work at these places just stare at the disk and say “Wow. I remember these.”

The disk is thin and black with a blue label where I wrote “Poem.”

I’ve been hiding the disk in one of my desk drawers. At work, where I was supposed to be cataloging The London gentleman his will and testament and howe he commytted the keepinge of his Wife to his owne brother whoe delte most wickedly with her and howe God plagued him for it.

It was an interesting read. According to the title page, it was printed in 1497, though you can’t always believe the title page. Some printers fibbed on the publication date. But I believed this was a 1497 book. There were a couple clues: the letter type was a common one from late fifteenth century London; the watermark embedded in the paper was a bull's head with long horns, a mark found in other fifteenth-century books; the illustrations were crude; and the paper quality was consistent with that time, probably made from throwaway rags, chain marks running vertically on every page.

But the really interesting thing about this book was the order of the pages. It was all off. Unreadable. I could tell by looking at the catchwords. The catchwords are words at the far bottom-right of the page. They tell the printer what the first word of the next page should be. In this book, the catchwords rarely matched up. All the pages were out of order. Chaotic.

I wrote my notes and thought about catchwords. Became obsessed, in fact, with catchwords. Another sign of the Jitters. I thought: If only life could be so easy.

I thought: If my life had catchwords, what would they say? Which was exactly the question I later asked Dana. “If our relationship had catchwords—” there I am saying “relationship” out loud again—“If our relationship had catchwords, what would they say?”

Dana could’ve said something nice, like our catchword would be Happiness. Joy. Exuberance. Our catchword would be Marriage. Would be Fate. But what she really said was “Why are you being weird?”

“Weird?”

“You’re being weird.”

“I am?”

“What the fuck is a catchword?”

“Nevermind.”

“A catchword?”

“I want to talk about us.”

“Us?”

“Us.”

“You want to talk about us.”

“Yes. Our us-ness.”

“Why are you being weird?”

The thing is, those weren’t her Mardi Gras beads. In the car, hanging from the mirror, the first time I saw her. They weren’t her beads. Wasn’t even her car. She was borrowing the black Camaro from a friend. Her Honda was in the shop. A little white Honda. She’s still got that car. The point is: Dana’s never even been to Mardi Gras. She never did anything wild to earn those beads. She’s not a wild woman: she’s prudent: she’s reasonable: she’s punctual: she believes in making lists and sticking to them: she believes in eating at the same time every night: she believes in Laundry Sunday.

Next day I hope the Jitters are over, but I know they’re not when I find myself at work asking my boss if he likes old computers as much as he likes old books. I show him the floppy disk, the one that says Poem, thin and wide, black. “You got anything that would take this?” I ask him.

He inspects it like a manuscript. He laughs. He says: I’m afraid history has left you in the dust. He says: You might want to carbon date this. He says: Call the Smithsonian!

I take back the disk and on the label, with a black pen, I cross out Poem and underneath it I write Papyrus. I say: “The stuff just doesn’t last.”