Kerber had taken to using only four words: North, South, East and West. Hypothetically, a full and comprehensive language could be formed from this quartet, using a combination of repetitions, compounds and inflections. Kerber didn’t go so far as that, but where he went was enough.

Depending on any number of contexts or circumstances, each word might mean: good or bad; yes or no; certainty or indifference; pleasure or pain. Really, anything. It could take a while before particular meanings became apparent. For example, I’d been working on the optimistic assumption that certain emphases of Kerber’s use of the word South indicated love, but it turned out to mean something like: Mother, my upper molar is hurting. Kerber was ten years old and he was breaking my heart.

Initially I’d assumed it was a harmless game he’d picked up somewhere; that it’d be over before the day was out. Then it became this tiresome thing where Kerber was testing the limits of my patience, as well as his own resilience. By the end of the first week, I grounded him. At the beginning of the second week, I tried to break Kerber by denying him food, but gave in before the first evening when I came to understand that his repeated and plangent pleas of North! North! could mean only immense hunger and sadness.

This was out of character, by the way. Kerber wasn’t perfect, but he was a good kid: emotionally balanced in the all the right places. I took him to a doctor, who referred him to a psychiatrist. They advised we roll with it for a couple of weeks to see how things developed. This was not a course I wanted to take, only who was I but his mother? I knew how to feed and care, nurture and discipline, but the psychology of my child’s linguism was not a skillset in my possession.

During this rolling-with-it period, Kerber fared surprisingly well, educationally-speaking. Although he only communicated using the cardinal points and their principal compound derivations, he understood everything put to him; it was his responses that flummoxed everyone else. Written and oral assessments failed by default, because no matter how much I might understand his report of, ‘North, East-West, East-East, West, North, North, North-West,’ to indicate a sound grasp of the themes in the book he was reading, it was not an acceptable answer by curriculum standards. Still, his teachers did their best. With the psychiatrist’s help, we agreed on a custom-grading approach to Kerber’s work, so that reasonable adjustments could be made which reflected his aptitude.

Socially-speaking, things went less well, because of course Kerber was bullied. He lost his friends and became ostracized, the saddest thing about which being that I didn’t blame the other kids, because there were times when I wanted to shun Kerber too. It didn’t creep or weird me out the way it did his peers; they were not yet sophisticated enough to grasp the idea that difference – however outrageous – didn’t have to mean bad. But his language placed him in an outsider world where only he resided. I might come to understand many of the things that Kerber indicated with North, South, East and West – and I did, writing a meticulous journal-cum-dictionary along the way – but every utterance had to be placed in its own context and this understanding was a continuous grasping-in-the-darklike experience that few people had patience with. It was also inherently sad, because as long as Kerber continued to communicate in this way, I would never understand him with the clarity and precision I might otherwise. Kerber was alone. Worst of all, he didn’t seem to mind.

I kept Kerber’s father updated, but distance and incomprehension made it difficult for him to be of much help. He paid for half the psychiatric fees – along with anything else he might be expected to help out with – but beyond that, I too was alone. At one stage I tried to speak Kerber’s language, desperate to find a way in, but my efforts at molding his vocabulary failed in the most painful of ways. Mangled sentences like ‘North, South-East, North North-West, East-West North-South’, fell from my mouth. This meant, ‘I love you, my child, and want only to understand you and keep you safe, and also to know that you know these things,’ but Kerber only responded to my glossolalia with a look of embarrassment and disgust. Frequently, I cried when alone and sometimes when not.

Just before his eleventh birthday, Kerber asked in his mother tongue if we could go to the beach. I responded with a blithe, ‘Maybe, if you’re good.’ I won’t say how long it took for me to realize and Kerber didn’t seem to think anything of this sudden return to his old linguism. He grew alarmed at my eventual astonished, dramatic and hysterical response, and the poking insistences of the psychiatrist and the social worker, both of whom had become fixtures in our lives. The psychiatrist wanted to continue their monitoring, but I wouldn’t let them and the social worker backed me up.

I moved Kerber to a different school – he had no friends left anyway – and things returned to normal. I learned not to ask what had happened because Kerber either feigned ignorance or else genuinely didn’t remember. We went to the beach (he had been good) and we swam together and played games. We ate ice cream and built sandcastles; buried one another and laughed. The sun shone. Kerber caught it a little. We had a good time.

---

J.L. Bogenschneider has had work featured in a number of print and online journals, including Lunate, The Pig’s Back, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Stinging Fly, PANK and Ambit. Their prose piece ‘A Glossary of Geological Terms’ was published with Minor Literature[s] in 2018 and forms part of a series, along with ‘A Glossary of Cardinal Points’. Twitter: @bourgnetstogner