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  The last known speaker of the language of the ancient race of Ng passed quietly in his hospital bed at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he had been flown the week before for emergency surgery. The cause of death was listed as “massive organ failure.” He was 92 years old, according to estimates, though he himself claimed to be 148. He went by the name of Trqba, though he always said this wasn’t his real name; it was “my name for the outlanders.” His real name, Trqba told researchers shortly before his death, was a secret, a secret so mysterious and terrible that were he to utter the name, the world would end the instant his breath stopped on the last vowel of the last syllable.

  The Ng are believed to have been a proto-Mayan people who emerged, somewhat mysteriously, from the jungles south of the Yucatán a thousand years before the birth of Christ and established regional hegemony over the inhabitants of the dry central plains, impoverished tribes that lived by eating insects and grubbing for roots, given to war and venery but incompetent at both, according to Trqba (see C.V. Panofsky, “An Account of the Ng Creation Epic,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1932). A carved stele discovered at the ancient Ng capital, long concealed beneath temple ruins, depicts the dramatic emergence of the Ng people, their great tattooed war god stepping naked from behind a tree, brandishing a cucumber (or boomerang; listed as “unidentifiable” elsewhere) in his hand, his erect penis dripping blood (according to Trqba; according to Giambattista et al., 1953, possibly water, sweat, urine, semen, or “unidentified fluid”) on a row of diminutive, dolorous, and emaciated natives who are about to have their limbs severed (see Farrell, “Ng Stele Recounts Imperial Conquest,” National Geographic, 1951). The name of the Ng war god is lost because to utter even one of the eighteen divine diphthongs would have meant the sudden and cataclysmic end of life on earth. But Trqba (see Trilby Hawthorn, “New Light on the Ng, a Jungle Romance,” People, 2009) said that the Ng referred to him in conversation using conventional epithets such as Snake or My Girl’s Delight.

  Soon after migrating out of the jungle, the Ng invented canals, roads, terraced agriculture, pyramids (prototypes of the stepped Mayan E type, aligned with the solstice and equinox), cannibalism, and the mass sacrifice of captured enemy maidens (also, poss. the wheel, the automobile, and an early computer-like device; see von Däniken, 1964; von Däniken believed the Ng were extraterrestrials from the planet Cephhebox). They built immense cities with central plazas surrounded by the usual towering stone temples and played a peculiar version of the Meso-American ball game at the end of which the winners would be bludgeoned with gorgeously carved obsidian death mauls — the losers would become kings and nobles. Since no one wanted to win (especially in the Age of Decadence, when the Ng Empire went into precipitate decline — between the years 7 Narthex and 27 Px on the Ng calendar), in practice the Ng ball game went on forever; players would grow feeble and die and be replaced by younger men, who in turn would be replaced, and so on. (See Proctor, “The Final 16: Ritual Roots of American College Basketball,” Harper’s, 2001.)

  According to Trqba, the ancient Ng came to believe that the sacred ball game generated a spiritual current or life force (analogous to the Chinese concept of Qi; see R.V. Hemlock, “The Ng Generator: Prehistoric Experiments in Conductivity,” Popular Mechanics, 1955) that kept the world dome inflated (like a skin bladder, a curiously foundational concept in the Ng metaphysics) and animated all living things, and that if the Ng heroes — oiled, naked, emaciated, arthritic, toothless, and decrepit — ever ceased their listless ebb and flow upon the court, the world would end catastrophically. (For the ancient Ng, it seems, time was equivalent to constant motion with no linear progression, something like treading water or jogging on the spot; see Larios, Changeless Change: The Ng Enigma of Time, Oxford University Press, 1999.) Though he claimed to be the last of the Ng, Trqba paradoxically seems to have believed that somewhere deep in the jungle, on a rocky, weed-strewn court hidden by the overarching green canopy, men and boys, lost tribal remnants or even spectral reanimates, still played the ancient game, the score forever tied at 0-0.

  He also said that the Ng kings and queens were required to have sex continuously, night and day, an intimate analogue of the ball game. When they stopped, he said, “the world will end.” He himself, he claimed, was a descendant of the Great Kings and had “tired out” several women in his day. How the Ng chose their kings when no one ever won or lost the sacred ball game remains unclear; in practice, it seems, they may have been selected by lottery using the incised peccary knucklebones found in heaps scattered randomly around the ancient Ng cities. When the sexual prowess of the Ng kings began to wane, priests would dispatch them ceremonially in the night, catching them unawares and in flagrante, as it were, using the garrotte and those famous obsidian death mauls simultaneously. (For a lurid fictional account of the legendary erotic practices of Ng royalty, see Anonymous, The Love Diary of Anaconda, King of the Ng, Black Cat Press, 1963.)

  Trqba was raised an orphan on the edge of a vast yam and cucumber plantation owned by a multinational conglomerate, where he earned his living as a farm worker from the age of five. Married, the first time, at twelve, Trqba converted to Christianity under the influence of a fanatical missionary sect based in Idaho and known as The Last Days of the Rising of the Great West in Christ. When he was sixteen, Trqba eloped with the young wife of Preacher Malachi and immigrated to the United States, where he resided for several years in Sea Hills, New Jersey, working as a school janitor. At the end of this period, Trqba’s wife reconciled with Jesus, returned to her native Idaho, and went into couples therapy with Preacher Malachi. Trqba always claimed he had “tired her out.” But the incident coincided with a vision of the Sacred Ng Ocelot Lord (real name unrecorded for the usual reasons) in the girls’ changing room adjacent to the Sea Hills High gymnasium. (For details of Trqba’s biography, see his Wikipedia entry, much of which is sourced to News of the World interviews with Rachel Malachi, his ex-wife, who alleged that Trqba was born in Sea Hills of Puerto Rican parentage, a claim that scholars have dismissed; see J.V. Oliveira, “New Light on the Last King of the Ng,” posted to her archaeology blog Picking Old Bones, 2008. Note also that Trqba’s sojourn in New Jersey corresponds to the liminal stage in the van Gennep sequence; see V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 1969.)

  Trqba had no formal education and could neither read nor write, although he claimed to be able to translate the complex glyphs archaeologists discovered carved into the inner walls of the Ng temples. When asked how he knew the ancient language, Trqba said his grandfather had taught him. This is a common locution amongst primitive oral cultures, who view all older people indiscriminately as “grandfathers” and “ancestors.” What is now known for certain is that upon his return to the Yucatán, Trqba hired a local medicine man and plantain farmer named Nunez de Vaca (Nunez of the Cow — not a sacred name) to teach him the ancient wisdom of the Ng. During this period, Trqba’s half-American daughter Naomi supported him, earning their living as a surfing coach, burrito chef, and sex worker in nearby Cancún.

  Nunez of the Cow schooled Trqba in the Ng creation epic, the famous Mlx Draf Ng’dal. (See the excellent Helwig translation, University of Toronto Press, 1995; a literal translation published on the Web in 2009 by R.J. LeRoi is infelicitous and a sieve of errors, e.g., “. . . he raddled them with his rapier Snake” [Helwig] v. “he hit them with a worm causing multiple puncture wounds and contusions” [LeRoi], and “sunlight struck sparks from his night-coloured death maul” [Helwig] v. “the sun was reflected off his brown stone hammer with a wooden handle” [LeRoi].) Trqba also studied numerology, the cyclical order of the years in the Ng calendar (Spot, Narthex, Rx, Nuht, and Px) and their relationship to Ng astrological signs (seven as opposed to the usual twelve) and astronomical observations (highly advanced, it seems, for the Ng priests were clearly aware of the recession of the equinox and other stellar arcana, including a concept very close to Da
rk Matter). He learned the names of the various medicinal plants in the Ng pharmacopoeia and practised decocting remedies in a homemade lab in a lean-to behind the house he shared with Naomi in the ancient Mayan village of Zarthapan on the edge of the Great Yucatán Sand Plain. (See Dr. Baron Rappaport, MD, PhD, MFA, “How the Ng Cured Cancer,” Modern Medical Bulletin of the White Plains Psychiatric Center, 1967.)

  Trqba also become an adept in Qx-Qx, the Ng martial art known for its unique combination of quietist meditation techniques and brutality. It is no secret that at this time he became addicted to narcotics and natural psychotropics, which he manufactured himself according to ancient Ng recipes and sold to tourists. Nunez of the Cow taught him the usual shamanic repertoire of non-rational metamorphic practices: shape-changing, time-travelling, and flying. Using secret drugs and Ng breathing exercises, Trqba claimed to have maintained an erection continuously for three years and “tired out” five successive young lovers, local village girls noted for their robust appetites. He learned the Secret Names telepathically while sleeping off a six-day bender on a straw mat in Nunez of the Cow’s summer kitchen (but, of course, went to his deathbed without revealing them). One story, perhaps only a rumour, has it that he was bitten by a deadly fer-de-lance while communing with the gods in a ruined stone sanctuary hidden in the jungle, and the snake promptly died in agony. At the University of Michigan’s Rudolph X. Hartshorn Archives, there exists a scratchy recording of Trqba singing a primordial Ng war song, a tape made by the noted American folklorist Wendel Bateman in 1952. Bateman died soon after while attempting to reproduce the mystic Ng art of cliff-jumping under Trqba’s tutelage. (See T. Wilberforce, “The Curse of the Ng: NEH Halts Research Grants Following Mysterious Yucatán Deaths,” New York Times, May 10, 2010. The Times puts the number of dead or hospitalized since 1950 at fifteen, but unofficial estimates are much higher.)

  Battle Song of the Ng Host

  I have copulated with the bodies

  Of the enemy dead

  I have copulated with the ocelot

  And the jaguar

  And the tree sloth

  And the garden slug (possible mistranslation).

  Yea, I have slain them with my spear-snake-thing,

  Have impaled them on my righteousness.

  Their women have groaned with envy

  And thrown themselves upon my terrible spear-snake-thing.

  Yea, I have made love with Death,

  And her children are the glorious Ng

  Whose every word is poetry.

  — Helwig translation

  In later years, Trqba followed a more conventional and abstemious lifestyle. After Nunez of the Cow’s death in 1973, Trqba continued to study the Ng language and lore through dreams, astral projection, and the use of psychotropic drugs, which, he said, was the traditional method. (He claimed that the more achieved Ng intellectuals and members of the priestly class eschewed speaking altogether and communicated by “signs and thoughts.” See Boris Napkin and V.I. Urpanzurov, “Some Thoughts on Sacral Communication among the Primitives of the Yucatán Desert,” St. Petersburg Philological Review, 1982, wherein the authors dispute Trqba’s claim, insisting that the Ng actually possessed two languages, one High language, complex and poetic, and a Low language, or Ngian demotic, for the common people; no one actually spoke High Ngian since to utter a single syllable would instantly bring the world to an end.) He was adopted by the “chefe” or Lord of the rare (possibly extinct) Yucatán hairless marmot (Cynopius sesquipedelia), a diminutive yet vicious mammal with neurotoxins in its saliva, known to eat its paralyzed victims alive, which became his tutelary spirit and totem. Trqba married three more times; all his wives eventually left him, satisfied but “tired out,” he said.

  In 1998, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of California (Berkeley) for his contributions in the fields of anthropology, translation, archaeology, cancer and AIDS research, sexual dysfunction, poetry, and the War on Drugs. It is believed that at this time he had a brief if unpublicized affair with the famous Hollywood starlet C D (her name cannot be revealed, not because the world will end, but because of the threat of lawsuits; see C D v. Vogue Magazine, currently in the Second Appellate Court, State of California, docket #7384-2903). This claim is surprising given that by his own count Trqba was 125 years old. It must also be observed that he was never what one would describe as an attractive man. When he died, he was no more than five feet tall, with three remaining teeth and skin the colour and texture of a walnut. All his life he affected a pencil-line moustache like some early twentieth-century cinema Lothario. He was an incessant smoker — American Spirit cigarettes when he could get them. He wore baggy trousers to accommodate his priapism, a mismatched suit jacket, and a straw fedora stained with ancient sweat. Yet he was a proud man who carried himself like a young cockerel or a king till his last illness, despite the incontinence, the paralysis in his lower limbs, the constant moist, hacking cough, and the glass eye which he often turned inward so that he could, as he said, see himself better.

  Let it also be noted that Trqba never spoke Spanish with the facility one would expect from a lifelong practitioner. He spoke English with a New Jersey accent, but he did not speak it well either, not as a native. He often remarked to researchers that Ng was the only language in which he felt at home, that every other language seemed prosaic, inept, incomplete, and foreign, that in Ng the world was a beautiful and dramatic arena for the practice of love and war. Nor could he ever convey in English or Spanish or any other contemporary language the true complexity of Ng thought, which required the full thirteen distinct genders, twenty-five tenses, and the dozen moods (including the hopeful-but-not-optimistic mood) of High Ngian. The Ng had 433 words for the English word “thought,” which can only be translated in clumsy, agglutinated phrases, e.g., the thought that goes in and out of my head like a fly in a jar, the thought that comes when my lover undresses in the moonlight by a still lake, sad thoughts as I watch my enemy die upon the field of battle while I hold his hand to comfort him. Common conversation was highly abstract and philosophical; Ng children were taught the arts of war, mathematics, poetry, and love from an early age. According to Trqba, it would be impossible to translate the English sentence “I need to take the car to the garage for an oil change and pick up the dry cleaning” into Ngian, even the demotic vernacular. (See Hilo Revlog, The Incommensurability of Universes: Ng Syntax and the Weltanschauung, Universidad de la Rioja, 1998.)

  To be sure, many scholars dispute Trqba’s claims and the body of research that has grown up around them (for a survey of the current literature, see Magot, Vetch, Weeder, and Wurmes, The Ng, an Anthropological Fantasy, a Counter-Proposal, University of Nijmegen, 2010). His account of killing five men in spectral duels on glacier-covered Yucatán mountaintops with the Vulture Eye of Ng must be disregarded, just as his “lifetime” tally of 5,363 lovers only weakens his credibility as a scientific observer. It is undoubtedly difficult to overlook Trqba’s unmistakable air of charlatanism and shoddiness. He was raffish, lewd, intellectually inconsistent, and maddeningly mysterious (all, it might be added, traditional characteristics of the shaman; see V. Shklovsky, “The Disreputable Intermediary: Signs of the Mystic Other in Daily Life,” Readers’ Digest online, 2009, a revision of his earlier blog post “Our Saviour was a Hippie Magician,” posted on the now-defunct Delta Alert for Alien Invasion, 2008).

  In March 2010, as he lapsed into a mysterious lethargy symptomatic of his final decline, Trqba dramatically recanted all his previous Ng testimony. In an e-mail to his friend and noted paleolinguist Boris Napkin at the Stalinski Philological Institute in Belarus, Trqba disowned a lifetime of teaching and the immense corpus of research and translation he had generated, saying that Ng wisdom could only be transmitted in the ancient oral mode from priest or “grandfather” to acolyte, in the language of High Ngian in the midst of outrageous feats of ritual asceticism and endurance
in the lonely wastes of the Yucatán desert. Written down (or, as the ancient Ng would say, “made to lie still in the snow like corpses”), Ngian words lost their capacity to generate Being and became nothing but utilitarian devices of crude communication. He said to Napkin: “How can I teach you what I dare not speak?” (As per his usual practice, this e-mail was sent by Trqba’s beloved Naomi, companion and soulmate; their incestuous relationship has long been a subject of fierce underground debate in the otherwise tepid purlieus of Ngian Studies.)

  The week before he died, despite the grievous nature of the impending surgical intervention, Trqba was excited about the trip to Los Angeles. He wanted to see the “famous footprints” in the Hollywood sidewalk and shop on Rodeo Drive for “cowboys” boots. But he seemed very tired just at the end, a little wistful. Before he lapsed into a coma, Trqba became delirious and seemed, yes, to speak in tongues, even to prophesy in the magisterial tones of ancient royalty. The sounds he made were meaningless to observers, but one, at least, switched on his pocket digital recorder on the assumption that Trqba was speaking in true Ng. Alas, the device malfunctioned. (The resulting forty-nine minutes of digitized static are available on YouTube.com, erroneously tagged “signals from Cephhebox.”)

  A Paranormal Romance

  Everything Starts at a Bookstore

  I was supposed to meet Zoe for dinner at a chic Parisian restaurant she had discovered on the Internet, a crucial rendezvous during which I intended to propose marriage. But I was running late. A fierce, cold rain lashed down as I bounded up the metro steps, rain as I had never experienced before. It drove me back into the underground, where dozens of African Parisians discussed the weather in languages other than French. I glanced at my watch and leaped up the stairs again, blinded by the torrents of rain.