gabs.review

Overheard, in November, in the small back-room of an inn whose name I shall not record here for fear of reprisals from its better customers, a remark of such confounding mediocrity that I am compelled to bind it¹ between leather and iron and consign it to the long shelf of the unforgivable.

The remark in question was: “you had to be there.” It was deployed, as such remarks always are, to fence off a story from anyone who had not been present at its origin — a velvet rope across the door of an anecdote already made tedious by being told.

I find the whole formulation an act of tenderly sealed laziness². Every good story is a story you did not have to be there for. The whole point of language, surely, is to import the absent reader into the absent room. To say you had to be there is to confess that the speaker has failed at the only task storytelling sets them.

And yet I cannot wholly condemn it. Some evenings, in some rooms, with some company, with the lamp turned just so — the air itself is the punchline, and the words are merely its envelope. On those nights, perhaps, you did have to be there. We must allow the speaker the dignity of failed translation.

Three pencil-stars in the margin of memory; one star scratched out by the Under-Librarian; the remaining two preserved here against the dark.

There is a phrase, — uttered³ in the lower registers of a familiar voice, accompanied by a hand placed lightly upon the listener's wrist — which contains the entire architecture of the modern lie. The phrase is trust me, and it is the only phrase which produces, in the listener, the immediate certainty of being lied to.

Examined under candlelight, trust me is not a request. It is a substitute for the evidence the speaker is unable, or unwilling, to produce. It says: I have foreclosed the argument. It says: here is a velvet bag where the demonstration ought to have been.

And yet, dear reader, I have used it myself, on a Tuesday in March, in a kitchen, to a person who deserved better than the truth I had not yet found the courage to assemble. Trust me is the IOU we issue against a debt of honesty we hope to settle later.

Two stars, both lit by the same wick.

Consider, if you would, the small respectful silence that occurs in a conversation between the lifting of a teacup and the actual swallowing of its contents. It lasts⁴ exactly the length of one held breath, and into it any number of perfectly truthful sentences may at last fit.

This pause is, I submit, the single most underrated punctuation mark in English prose. It is uneditable. It is unparseable. It is the comma the body refuses to typeset. The room, briefly, becomes a cathedral; the cup, briefly, becomes a censer; the speaker, briefly, becomes the kind of person whose next sentence one can actually trust.

I have logged, in this volume, four such pauses⁵. Each was followed by a confession the speaker had been carrying for a number of years equal to the number of times they had previously raised the cup without drinking.

Five stars, ungiven, because stars are not for this.