ROWAN-1
“Mind, is my name Rowan?” I asked.
“Why would it not be, Rowan?” Mind replied, using the Jaji pronunciation of the name, which was strange since I hadn’t mentioned it to him until now and had pronounced it using the Leniman phonemes my tongue was accustomed to.
I hadn’t mentioned my new name to Mind because I hadn’t spoken with him since Romulus had named me, a thing which was strange in itself, since in all the time I’d known him he’d never found it necessary to call me by a name.
“Well,” I informed him, “Dr. Mulgar calls me Romulus and so does Dr. Bowusuvi.”
“Is that not the name of your friend in the back room?”
“Uhhh…” That was a difficult question to answer. A few days before, while doing some fractions that Dr. Mulgar had assigned me, I had, in the course of preoccupying myself with various fraction-oriented curiosities unrelated to the assignment, such as determining what fraction of the digits on my hands were thumbs, decided to figure out what fraction of my life I had known Romulus (or more precisely, the entity I was soon to come to know as Romulus), namely, my friend in the back room.
To answer this question, I needed two numbers: my own age, and the length of time that I’d known him. I knew my own age, because Dr. Mulgar had informed me of it several days before: He had burst into my room and announced that it was my birthday and that I was now six years old. To be sure, he had added, “Well, five years and a quarter by the usual reckoning, but who’s counting, we’ll call you six!” which was a somewhat mysterious caveat but which, I decided, didn’t alter the pertinent bit of information within his statement, which was that I was six. Mind was ever admonishing me that most statements which seemed complex at first could be simplified by identifying the most pertinent information within them.
The other number I needed for my calculation, that is, the length of time I’d known Romulus, was more problematic to assess. I could only dimly remember a time when he hadn’t lived in his cage in the back room, or the gray room, as I thought of it, so we’d known each other for quite a while, a few months at the very minimum. We’d been conversing long enough, at any rate, to have taught each other our respective languages well enough to communicate without much confusion or need to repeat or clarify ourselves in either of them, or the pidgin of the two that we often used. I had decided that I had known him about one year.
But he had never been “Romulus.” We had never called each other by name—by any names. It seems strange, now, that we knew each other for that many months before we learned one another’s names, or even thought to address one another by some kind of designation; but the strangeness of it never occurred to me at the time, nor did it ever occur to me to ask him his name. He was just him, to me. I didn’t think of him as “the Jaji” or “the Forest Elf,” which is what the Grail called Jajis—“those denizens rural of folklore, the Forest Elves,” to quote directly—or “the Walnuthead,” which is what the Fathead guys called him, or “the person in the back room” or “the person in the cage.” He was just him.
One day, by chance, Dr. Mulgar and I happened to be conversing in the hallway that led to that back, gray, room that served as Romulus’ domicile. I can’t remember why we were there (usually, we had our lessons in the main room or in my bedroom), but as we talked, Dr. Mulgar saw fit several times to call me Romulus, which was the name he and Dr. Bowusuvi had for me.
Keen-eared Romulus (or, again, the entity who was soon to tell me that he was Romulus, and who I would come to know as Romulus) overheard us, and after Dr. Mulgar departed, told me he couldn’t call me Romulus because that was his name, and it would be too confusing for both of us to be Romulus. Since we had gone months without knowing each other’s names, this seemed like a non-problem to me, but he was insistent that we couldn’t have the same name, and he wasn’t insistent about many things, so I allowed that he could be Romulus.
He asked me what, then, he should call me—that’s just how he said it, in the stilted way in which he spoke Leniman, “What, then, shall I call you?” I gave him to know that howsoever his taste guided him would be fine with me, to which he responded that he would call me Rowan. As a point of fact, it’s not “Rowan;” that’s my Lenima-zation of it: The word—the name—he pronounced sounded to my ears a lot like the name of a rare tree I’d seen on the Grail (and I’d spent a fair bit of time perusing pictures of trees, so taken was I by their subtle but endless variety of leaf shape and crown shape and by the interesting combination of qualities they exhibited, of prodigious size and delicate intricacy) and thereafter I pronounced the name he had given me as I pronounced the name of the tree. The initial sound of the Jaji word is quite different from the initial sound of “Rowan,” but I couldn’t pronounce it; it’s not a phoneme that occurs in Leniman. The other sounds in the word are subtly different from those in the Leniman word, “Rowan,” as well. But, I liked the sound of it, both as he pronounced it and as I did, and I told him as much, and thereafter he called me Rowan, or more precisely the Jaji word that sounds sort of like “Rowan,” which I found out later, means, roughly, “servant.”
I didn’t question that his name was Romulus, the very name that Dr. Mulgar and Dr. Bowusuvi had always called me, or even consciously consider that it couldn’t be Romulus—if he wanted to be Romulus, that was fine with me—but it seemed off, somehow. I think that already having a rudimentary knowledge of the Jaji language, I realized at some level that “Romulus” couldn’t be a Jaji word, or name. The initial sound, the same as that at the beginning of my Lenima-zation of the name he gave me, never appears in Jaji, and moreover, Jaji words seldom end with a voiceless sibilant.
So, “Uhhh,” was the best I could do in answer to Mind’s question of whether Romulus was not the name of “my friend in the back room.”
“You were saying?” Mind prompted when my “uhhh” drifted into silence.
“Yes,” I admitted, “he said he was Romulus. But, uh, we can’t both be Romulus?”
“That is what he declared, is it not?”
“Hmmm,” I mused, as I often did in response to Mind’s questions.
Mind waited, as patient as an iguana on a rock.
“So, Dr. Mulgar is wrong then?” I asked. If somebody had been watching me, I would have looked as if I were mumbling to myself, with recurrent changes of expression and an occasional gesticulation. It wasn’t until midsummer of that year that my communications with Mind began to be camouflaged by silent reverie.
“Perhaps from Dr. Mulgar’s point of view, Dr. Mulgar is correct, Rowan.”
I pondered this, and got nowhere. It seemed to me that my name was either Romulus, which Dr. Mulgar and Dr. Bowusuvi called me, or Rowan, which Romulus called me, and which Mind was now calling me, even though he’d called me Romulus heretofore. Both couldn’t be correct; one had to be right, the other wrong.
At length, I said, “But from our point of view, he’s wrong?”
“From my point of view,” Mind said, in his usual mild, carefree tone, “he is neither correct nor incorrect. Whether he is correct or incorrect from your point of view is something that you will decide for yourself.”
“Hmmm,” I mused once again, trying to think of how to induce him into giving me the information I sought. As usual, he was, to use a phrase I learned much later, acting the mule, refusing to do what I wanted him to do for no reason beyond caprice. A simple yes, your name is Rowan, or no, your name is not Rowan was all that was needed, but no, he had to complicate things.
“Well, you’re calling me Rowan, Mind, so that’s good enough for me, I’m Rowan.”
“Excellent,” Mind said, and after a pause just long enough and short enough to impress the most accomplished of jesters, added, “Romulus.”
“Mind!”
“Yes?”
“You just called me Romulus!”
“Does that bother you?”
Ah, I had an opening. “That depends on whether my name is Rowan or Romulus.”
“So you’re saying it would offend you if I called you by a name different from what you considered your name to be?”
“No,” I said at once. I didn’t like the sound of “offend.” During a recent examination, Dr. Bowusuvi had asked me, “Do my ministrations offend you?” when I had flinched away from a sharp instrument, and asked with such disapproval and warning that I knew to be offended by something was a very bad thing.
“No,” I said again, “but, but…” But what? My name was not of particular importance to me; I had asked Mind if it was Rowan out of simple curiosity, but since he’d refused, and was continuing to refuse to answer me, now I was determined to find out whether it was Rowan, or not.
Stymied, I sat in silence upon the brown couch in the middle room, the sitting room, or the main room, as I variously thought of it, staring in turns at the long green carpet, the blue ceilings, and the barred and boarded windows, as I waited for an idea of how to trick Mind into telling me my name to come to me.
And one did come, a good one.
“Mind,” I said, with as much childlike innocence as I could muster.
“Yes, Rowan?”
“Could you show me somebody talking to me, exactly one year from now? Not Romulus or the Fatheads or Dr. Bowusuvi or Dr. Mulgar. And while this person is talking to me, he calls me by my name.”
“Of course, Rowan,” he said, and with that I found myself walking the bright road. I followed it into a golden meadow at the edge of a tall forest, where I beheld a little boy and a dark-skinned woman with long black hair sitting together on a large flat rock, the woman talking to the boy as she rubbed some green-white jelly onto his outstretched legs, which appeared to be afflicted with a painful rash. The boy had darker skin than I did, but upon inspection I discerned the familiar features I’d seen reflected in the face of the Grail. I wondered why I was so dark, but the woman was talking, so I gave my attention to her.
“That better, Rowan?” she asked, and the boy nodded. She pronounced “Rowan” as I did, with Leniman phonemes, rather than with the Jaji phonemes that Romulus used.
Excited, I returned to the Main room, exclaiming, “Hah, I’m Rowan, Mind!”
“That’s good to know, Rowan; how did you reach that determination?”
I explained my methodology to him, but he was unimpressed. He said, “Some would argue that it would be impossible for you to make that determination in such a way.”
“But I did!”
“They would say that it was a time paradox.”
“Huh?”
“In other words, you’re using things from the future to determine things in the past which themselves determined the things in the future.”
“You just don’t want to admit that you told me my name!”
Mind didn’t respond. I thought he might be deliberating an appropriate comeback, but a couple of minutes passed with no response, which made me think that maybe he was upset that I’d tricked him.
“Mind?” I said, tentative.
“Yes, Rowan?” he replied, with nothing beyond his usual carefree mildness in his tone, no trace of anger or agitation
“You’re not mad?”
“Why would I be mad, Rowan?”
Relieved, I went off to tell Romulus the news, that I was officially Rowan.
He didn’t call me Rowan very often after that—for the most part, we continued to interact as we always had, without names—but often enough to remind me that he was Romulus and I was Rowan. I called him Romulus thereafter, as he requested, and as I have said, came to think of him as “Romulus,” even as Dr. Mulgar and Dr. Bowusuvi continued to call me Romulus.