for Tim Crouch

 

 

It was one of those mornings where you wake up with an idea.

 

 

The idea he woke up with was that William Shakespeare’s name contained all the letters of the alphabet. All the letters of the alphabet were in the name William Shakespeare and somehow this had been overlooked for centuries until he woke up with the idea. It was a wonderful idea because it not only unlocked the grand mystery of Shakespeare’s plays, their timelessness and universality and so forth, but opened the door to the solution of other problems as well, problems of culture and communication and understanding, and even things like poverty and famine and war insofar as these were always mediated through language, so that a new era of world plenty and peace based on a kind of Esperanto deriving from the name William Shakespeare seemed just dawning on the horizon.

 

The idea did not occur to him precisely the way it is set down here, of course; it did not arrive sequentially in a series of statements but with the all-at-onceness of a true event, a felt shift in the tectonics of being.

 

In the very next instant, however, “x” popped into his brain as a letter of the alphabet that did not appear in the name William Shakespeare. In quick succession (because at last the linear operations of his brain had begun to function) “y” and “z” also occurred to him. So his idea was not a true idea after all, but rather one of those will o’ the wisps that arise in your brain in the morning before you have completely emerged from sleep’s primordial soup, which is apparently also a kind of alphabet soup. He had not after all unlocked the mystery of Shakespeare’s plays, their timelessness and universality and so forth, let alone discovered the key to world hunger and poverty and war, insofar as these, too, were mediated by language and might therefore be redressed by a kind of Esperanto deriving from a great name.

 

By the time he had finished his first cup of coffee he had more or less forgotten about this idea (I say more or less because at one point the humiliating realization that William Shakespeare did not even contain the vowels “o” and “u” did occur to him at a semi-conscious level). It was time to write, because he typically started writing after his first cup of coffee, but today he decided that he had too many errands to run and bills to pay. They had piled up, these errands and bills, so today instead of writing he would run the errands and pay the bills, because there were so many and had a way of piling up.

 

Meanwhile on the other side of town she was already at her desk, writing. She had woken up with the same idea, the idea that William Shakespeare’s name contained all the letters of alphabet. In the wonderful all-at-onceness of the idea she was able to imagine how it not only unlocked the grand mystery of Shakespeare’s plays, their timelessness and universality, but opened the door to the solution of other problems as well, problems of culture and communication and understanding, and even things like poverty and famine and war insofar as these were mediated through language, so that a new era of world plenty and peace based on a kind of Esperanto deriving from the name William Shakespeare seemed just dawning on the horizon.

 

She was so excited by her idea that she started to write before she had even finished her coffee, grabbing a pen and sketching out the first inklings on the back of a bill. Of course it occurred to her along the way that letters like “z” and “u” did not appear in the name William Shakespeare, but she was used to putting aside the trivia that passed through her brain in the course of the day and concentrating on what was important, in this case that all the letters of the alphabet were in the name William Shakespeare.

 

 

 

Edmond Caldwell received his PhD in English Literature from Tufts University in 2002 and bid a fond farewell to academia four years later. Since then his fiction has appeared in Pear Noir!, DIAGRAM, SmokeLong Quarterly, Rumble, Word Riot, and elsewhere, and his short play, "The LIquidation of the Cohn Estate," was produced in the 2009 Boston Theater Marathon, just over the river from where he lives.