NONSENSE IS SACRED

She sends him the links to online quizzes titled as follows:

What kind of potato are you?

Which Jane Austen heroine would you be?

Which horror trope kills you first?

 

His replies are as follows: 

     1) Curly Fries 

     2) Emma 

     3) Stairs

     

     Curly fries? She texts.

     I’m quirky. He replies.

     You’re not taking this seriously.

     He retakes the test. He still gets curly fries.

     This is much more enlightening than a date, she tells him.

     Not unless I ordered curly fries. 

     At that, she smiles. 

     Afterwards, he sends a photo with the caption ‘me and you’. 

 

This is the photo:

 

     I’m the small one, he adds. Which she already knew. 

     On Tuesday, she receives the food parcels that will hold her housebound for the foreseeable future. She’s no longer allowed a quick dash to the shops as an excuse to go outside. One of the tins reads Zuckermais. It has a smiling, half-naked man in a green field across the front. She googles it. 

Translated from German: Sweetcorn. 

     She now owns German sweetcorn. Is it cheaper in Germany? It must be. There’s no other reason; she can’t imagine the government cares about her taste buds. So it seems culture is knocking on her door, despite her not having left the threshold. Tiny German sweetcorn with their tiny German accents, muscular men with wide beams and hands on their hips. 

     Everything still has the little price label on it. It’s not as if the food was a gift or anything, but still, it feels rude to look at the tag. 

     She has a 40 pence tin of soup for dinner. It tastes like a 40 pence tin of soup. 

     I sold the potatoes the government gave me for free, she tells him. They gave me too many. 

     Well, you’re an entrepreneur, he replies.

     It’s what the Conservatives would want.

     Haha!

     She makes one pound overall, because she sells them to her neighbours. They’re both in their seventies, and she told them, at the beginning, that she would get their groceries for them. Which she still did in a roundabout way. 

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One day, she comes across a post on Facebook which reads: 

     Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.1

     What an insightful piece of information! She could understand every single word. How positively postmodern!

     However, a quick google search confirms this information is incredibly askew. Not only are the words used in that sentence the easiest ones to scramble, but Cambridge University didn’t even host the study. Nobody knows who came up with it. It just appeared one day with no owner.

     She messages him:

     Cna yuo undtanersd me? I am olny sekpinag to you lkie tihs form nwo on.2

     It takes a ridiculous amount of time to type out, because her keyboard keeps trying to correct her. She backspaces, retypes, then the words fix themselves into the proper order as soon as she hits space. They’re like a confused dog unsure of what game they’re playing, but inadvertently ruining it anyway by crashing into the coffee table.

     Is this another test? He replies. Then, seconds later, hwo tehy fcuk ddi you tpye tihis?3

     The problem is, ocne staertd iits darh nto ot jstu srcmeabl eyevrhtgni.4 Screw the first and last letter. The first and last letter is over. Tshi is wya mreo fnu.5

     She wants to create a sentence that doesn’t make sense. It might actually be impossible.

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     She manages to create these:

     I ma ta wrko. I wnta ot byu a saageus rllo. 

     Ma I dogin tshi rghit, ro is trehe a wya to mkea it haderr? 

     WYH SI IT OS EYAS OT AKME SSENE?6

 

     Every sentence she creates is still somehow legible, no matter how scrambled the order of letters is. Is this how language is made? Letters arrgedan in suhc a way tath it crtesea something new? Something you hope you can decipher the meaning from and hope it mchates the meaning that was meant?

     RRRRRRRRRRRRRnnfhhhfhsjdskdbasdfbasfabm, she sends him, after he’s decoded every single sentence she’s painstakingly thought out within minutes.

     I can still get a feel for the tone, he replies. 

     IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE! She decides.

     A verb fish noun screamed tampon in sand exploded a lip balm adverb at a restaurant necklace said sunglasses couldn’t deodorant. 

     She studies it for a beat. She tilts her head. 

     Is that all stuff in your room?

     Not all of it, but most. 

     Still makes sense, she informs (bitterly).

     Maybe what makes sense is subjective. Maybe that’s your problem. Anything can make sense.

     She considers that. While she does, another message appears. 

     Pjhs hjuu bdhhs jxkka hhuu jjuuww jkaa

     It takes her a good minute. When she figures it out, she stands up in her empty apartment and laughs at her screen.

     You did it! It doesn’t make any sense!

     It’s just a random sequence of letters. It’s total nonsense, he responds.

     But she loves that it’s nonsense; she loves that there’s still nonsense to be had. Nonsense is sacred. Nosnsene is Sraecd! See, even that can be understood! She must preserve the things that cannot be understood. 

     The trick is to go in without trying to mean anything. If that makes any sense?

     Yes, she replies.

     But something is lost to know there’s no meaning. To know there was no intent behind the letters. 

     Thankfully, modern science allows her to open her door, eat sweetcorn produced in the UK, and return to work.

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They don’t talk as much anymore, their relationship as short-lived as her desire to find a sentence that doesn’t make sense. But then again, they all took up strange habits.

     She’s the teaching assistant for a class of Primary Two children. She wears a mask and gives them a paper plate to write the answer to the question: what did you do this weekend? 

     It’s an abstract assignment. Anything can fit the brief. A one word sentence. A visual interpretation. A line. A circle. A smiley face!

     It only takes them about ten minutes to complete. However, one of her new pupils manages to create something totally inexplicable.  

     She holds it up to the light. Turns it sideways. Turns it upside down. 

     She has a Cambridge University student on her hands. She has somebody even smarter than Cambridge. There’s not one known language to be discovered in this little girl’s handwriting. Because she knows her pupil has written a sentence. It’s simply indecipherable to all eyes but the creator’s. Maybe the word “walrus” is hidden in there, though the shape could suggest other things, like “wallpaper”. It exists between the two, resisting definition. It’s one for the academics now.

     When she’s leaving to go home, the class is empty. She takes one last glance at the children’s diary entries in the form of paper plates tapped to the wall. Silly faces, scribbles, the world as seen by five-year-olds. 

     The one she can’t understand is near the end of the row. 

     Being the expert that she is in wrangling out the proper spelling from chubby-fisted hands, she’s used to squinting and deciding the word for herself with a shrug. This is a new experience.

     She crosses her arms and stands there, quiet and still, as though admiring a famous work of art in a museum. As she stands there, she realises something. She realises it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever read.