“Gray, we’re in a bit of a pickle^iv.”

“Yes?” Gray was hunched over a small dissecting board, to which was strapped a dictionary. He was dissecting “S”es.

“Yes. We’ve consulted the oracles^v, and—“

You did what?

“Um, Gray? Quotation marks?”

“Sorry.”

“You were saying?”

“Wait, who is talking now?”

“I believe you are. Were, rather.”

And who am I again?

“Gray!”

“Sorry.”

“Do go on.”

“Umm… I’ve forgotten what we were talking about.”

“Shall I start again?”

“Indeed.”

The year is 1858, but speaking strictly in terms of fashion, it is 1777. Marcus O, sipping from an enormous cup of joe, stomps good-naturedly into the office of one Henry Q. Gray, Anatomist. Marcus is wearing pantaloons reflecting his station, relative wealth, and a sale at T.J. Maxximuseth’s^vi. Gray also sports pantaloons, though these are hidden beneath the table at which he sits, hunched, dissecting a dictionary. Literally. Scalpel, formaldehyde, teenaged girl off to the side squeamish and disgusted, although also fascinated, not unlike the first time the moon found her, and she squatted in the rusty drippings, cramped all to hell but enraptured with her body’s potential. The dictionary is in tatters, well-catalogued tatters, pages not so much ripped as they are sliced with precision. In fact, at this moment, Gray’s steely blade hovers over a page in the “P”s, over the word “precision,” one of those words that somehow gives him an unfortunate erection, not unlike the sort he got when the oracles predicted all that mess with Jack the Ripper^vii. Gray was a sick bastard.

“Grey. We’re in a bit of pickle.”

“Yes?”

“Indeed. We’ve consulted the oracles and-”

“Hold on, did you just say my name with an “E” instead of an “A”

“So?”

“So? It’s my name, man, you can’t go vowel-shifting^viii my name all willy nilly!”

“And this,” Marcus says, rolling his eyes, “from a man wont to drop quotation marks when he speaks.”

“But that’s different.” Gra/ey shifts in his seat, waning erection requiring pantaloons-cloth rearrangement. “George Bernard Shaw^ix hated quotation marks.”

“And who is George Bernard Shaw.”

Gray blinked. “What year is this again?”

“1777.”

“Oh. Then. I have no idea.”

“Shall we consult the oracles?”

“No! Damn it! That’s hubris! Did we learn nothing from Laius^x? Consulting the oracles, finding out your son would kill you, and marry his own mother? I tell you, Marcus, it is my theory that the only reason Oedipus killed his father was because of the chain of events his father set into motion upon hearing what the oracles had to say! A chain, I’ll remind you, further strengthened by Oedipus later consulting those damned oracles, and being told he’d wind up killing his father—who he did not know was not Polybus^xi!” Gray paused. “Why are you giggling?”

Marcus was giggling into his coffee cup. “Polybus. Sounds like a fleet of horseless mass-transit carriages.”

“Or how parrot’s commute. But shut up. Listen. Oracles, death of us all. If we remain in ignorance of our fate, then it’s not fate, is it. It’s not destiny if it’s a surprise. The very idea of predestination is enough to lock you into a miserable life, Look at what those Puritans^xii got up to, with their predestination^xiii beliefs—they didn’t know what their fate would be, but they were sure they had one! They assumed, those idiots, that by leading the life that one would lead if one was predestined to go to Heaven, they would be going to heaven! It’s Pascal’s wager^xiv roughly handled through the night and a twenty left on her nightstand for cab fare!”

“How very David Hume^xv of you.”

“Stop it! I tell you, Marcus, these anachronisms, bolstered by your oracle visits, will kill us all.”

“Yes, well, I do like irony^xvi.”

Gray slumped back into his chair, deflated. A page of the desiccated dictionary flapped gently in the wind of his slumping. “Yes, you do. You do like irony. You find it delicious. Almost as delicious as quotation marks. And quotations within quotations. ‘Oh, look, Darth Vader’s attempt to stop Princess Leia leads her to Luke Skywalker^xvii, the one person capable of thwarting his plans,’ you say. It’s logic eating itself, irony is. It’s entropy, is what it is.”

Marcus shrugged, slurping at his coffee. The mug said “#1 Co-Emperor^xviii” on it. Quite ironic.

“I’ll never get done with my projects, not like this.” Gray did one of those moves where you slide your thumb and middle finger from the outside of your closed eyes together to gently pinch the bridge of your nose. “These oracles. What did they say?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“No. But what I want is rarely the issue, is it?”

Marcus shrugged again. “They said that someday there’d be a drama^xix, named after your book.”

Gray looked at his book. “This book?”

“No, the one you’d end up writing. An Anatomy. Dissecting corpses, cataloging their bits, organizing it. A reference, for, you know, doctors and serial killers and puzzle enthusiasts, that sort of thing.”

“And this drama would be named after my book?”

“Yes. A play on words. Quite popular, they said, the oracles, plays on words for titles.”

“So, what am I to do, then?”

“Write the book!”

“And why?”

“Umm, because? Because you will?” Marcus O shrugged the shrugged of a character in a story written by an author who sure did have his characters shrug a lot^xx.

Gray frowned heavily, sighed. The squeamish girl stopped being squeamish, went out, got pregnant, raised a few kids, weathered a few infidelities on the part of her husband, because, at the end of the day, nothing mattered, really. Gray flipped through his dictionary, recalling past incisions, inspections, circumcisions. This page, here, where he had circumcised the words around “foreskin,” but not the word “foreskin itself.” Derrida^xxi. “Fine. Even though, if you hadn’t told me, I would have done it. But now, since I know, I’m going to do it.”

Marcus nodded. “I see. Except I don’t. What’s the difference?”

Now it was Gray who shrugged. “I have no idea. Accept I don’t. Something to do with cats I suspect, and collapsing waveforms^xxii, and the Oxford comma^xxiii running amok in sophomoric exercises. Has tennis been invented yet?”

“No?”

Gray stood, walked over to the box of corpses, hauled one out, started dissecting with one hand and drawing pictures of what he saw, on the wall, with his other hand. “Well, when it is, mark my words. There will be those for whom the sweat that collects in the frustrated towels of not-easily defeated young ladies will be more valuable than the triumph her opponent feels besting her. That’s what the world will come to, Marcus, mark my words. What is it they say? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed are kings^xxiv? And in the land of the value-less, the tenaciously stupid will reign.

Marcus was giggling again.

“What.”

“Marcus my words, you almost said.”

“Oh shut up.”

ⁱ Probably “Marcus Aurelius,” 121 –180, Roman Emperor, stoic philosopher.

ⁱⁱ Henry Gray, 1827-1861, London, anatomist, surgeon.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ankle-length trousers named for Pantalone from the Commedia dell’Arte, made fashionable by the French during the French Revolution, and brought to England by Beau Brummel in the 19th century. The author is probably thinking of stuffed breeches, mistaking a connotation of “balloons” from “pantaloons.”

^iv Idiom meaning “in a jam.” The first known usage of “in a pickle” is in Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur, 1440.

^v Probably the Delphic oracles, established in the 8th century BC and operating for about 1000 years.

^vi Reference to T.J. Maxx, founded 1976, an American discount clothing store chain. The “us” makes it “maxximus,” referencing the Circus Maximus, an ancient Roman chariot racing arena. The “eth” makes it “maxximuseth” which is a faux-biblical rendering.

^vii Serial killer, London, identity unknown and profligate in 1888.

^viii Might be a reference to the so-called “Great Vowel Shift” in English from 1350 to 1500. However, the great vowel shift was a pronunciation change, and not strictly a change in spelling.

^ix George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1900, Irish playwright.

^x Laius, Greek Mythology, King of Thebes, father of Oedipus. Note that Laius did not “consult the oracles” as the author puts it, but was told of the prophecy of his son’s patricide, but nevertheless fathered Oedipus after getting drunk one night and bedding his wife Jocasta.

^xi Polybus, Greek Mythology, King of Corinth, adoptive father to Oedipus.

^xii A sect of Calvinists, distinguished by core political views in terms of theology and government, eventually ousted from Holland and associated popularly with the founding of America.

^xiii The belief that God, all knowing, has already determined who will and will not go to heaven. The author is focusing here on “unconditional election” as opposed to “reprobation.”

^xiv Roughly speaking: “either God does or does not exist. If he does not, it does not matter what one believes. If he does, than one should believe in Him. So it’s a good bet to believe in God.”

^xv David Hume, 1711-1776, Scottish philosopher, empiricist, skeptic.

^xvi Irony: easily the most referenced and least understood concept in all of human history, a misunderstanding evident in the author’s usage as well as this author’s.

^xvii Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia are all characters from the 1977 hit film Star Wars. The reference here is to dramatic irony.

^xviii Marcus Aurelius was co-emperor with Lucius Verus from 161 to 169.

^xix Grey’s Anatomy, (note the ‘E’) medical drama on TV’s ABC, debuted in 2005.

^xx While no formal analysis has taken place, the author’s other works are known for characters shrugging, often; the author himself is probably the only person who has read enough of his work to recognize this “trope.”

^xxi Jacques Derrida, 1930-2004, French philosopher. Best known for his “deconstructionism,” out of which it is understood that “there is nothing outside the text.” The author’s use of Derrida’s name here is, essentially, abusive.

^xxii Probably a reference to Karl Schrödinger, and his famous mind experiment explaining entanglement, which deserves its own footnote, but will not have one.

^xiii The “serial” comma, which, in a list of three or more things, will proceed the coordinating conjunction just before the last item in the list.

^xiv “In regione caecorum rex est luscus,” from Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch philosopher.