Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 10

Chapter 10. Naming

10. Naming

Naming is a matter of ultimate concern, and while there is neither accepted liturgy nor tradition, the ceremony is fired by the same holy spirit as that which descended upon the apostles on the first Pentecost. The church was indeed the proper place for the ceremony, but neither Fila nor Carnation thought a preacher was appropriate. So, the pulpit was empty, and Fila stood on the floor below, in front of the friends and family gathered in the pews. Fila was from a long line of preachers, and though he was not one himself, and while he had notions perhaps different from those of his forefathers, he would never do anything capable of being misconstrued as sacrilegious. And seeing as how he ran the church registry, if he were to disrespect himself or the Lord’s house in that manner, he might not hear any rebukes directly to his face, but he would swim, backbit, for who knows how long, in a dark sea of rumors, gossip, and all the flotsam and jetsam of resentment and unaired grievance.

But Fila was indeed from a long line of preachers.

◆ ◆ ◆

Fila made a scene when he entered the nave from the hallway leading to the pastor’s office, the conference room, and, down at the end of the hallway, the industrial kitchen, which had a door on its adjacent wall into the church annex (including the breakfast nook by the window), the original site of Fila’s Finds. The perpetually somehow misaligned swinging door swung open freely, but closed crazily, sometimes only halfway before bouncing and clattering back closed, eventually pumping down to rattle against the outer edge of the frame, but for two separate and sometimes counteracting, sometimes reinforcing reasons: the first was the hydraulic damper, which had been replaced numerous times, but which kept failing in the exact same manner for the second reason, which was that the foundation of the building was cracked, and Fila maintained that it was entirely stable, not having deteriorated in years, but that meant that the doorframe was bent, and Pastor Snap Arnold, who was shortly to receive a ricochet bounce off his buddy BB’s belly and onto the wall, had frequently joked that their cursed door might be some new kind of miracle of the Adversary, but told all gathered that no one should mention his joke. So Fila fairly jumped out of the doorway, to the side, clearing any danger zone where the door might swing back, bounce, or stop surprisingly, but he also slamming into the back of a recordkeeper named Bubble Bee Vernon from Nanuet who made the trip for Fila’s daughter special and that was not an entirely safe and routine journey as a matter of course.

“BB, you seen Rob?” Fila asked. BB had not. Fila helped Pastor Arnold to his feet, and turned on his heels, stepping to the nearest of his comrades, friends, and colleagues who may not have overheard. That nearest was one of Tellem’s historians, an extremely tall recordkeeper named Voom Ipcress from Englewood, a childhood refugee from the first Saint Patrick’s Day massacre whose parents wanted nothing to do with the Gardeners, but preferred even to die staying and fighting for their place in New Ark, whatever that was going to be.

“You seen him?”

“I haven’t the foggiest…” Voom began.

Voom Ipcress

“Rob! From the Bronx?”

“Oh, yeah. I saw him a second ago. I think he said something about going to get something, and I have the impression he thought it was on his bike?”

“But you definitely saw him?”

“Absolutely. Liz? You saw Rob, right?”

Voom turned to Elizabeth Jones, one of the youngest of Tellem’s faction. She would call herself a mere apprentice, but she had been on teams responsible for exclusions in autoimmune disease, specifically any CRISPR-induced cancer epidemic, and agronomy, specifically any situation in which excess rainfall leached critical levels of minerals and eroded sufficient fertile soil to cause famine in breadbasket regions.

“I haven’t seen him at all. But why are you asking us? See, where is she…”

Elizabeth tiptoed to look around to see “Dancy! There she is.”

Elizabeth fell back to her heels and bounced aloft once more. “Dancy! Dancy! Come on over here! Fila need to talk to you!” she shrieked wincingly wildly, like a heathen.

“She’s coming,” Elizabeth announced, pleased and proud. Dancy Ricardo was a supremely talented recordkeeper born and raised in New Ark. Her gameplay was a model to all her peers and many elders besides, because she had a way of looping back over pieces of her material to reveal new aspects of things that neither she nor the group had noticed the first time. She began to play with the shapes of these rediscoveries, to form higher-level constructs with the elements looped over, play them against one another and start new cycles of repetition and discovery. This was sufficient for a young recordkeeper to earn honor and praise, but what made Dancy special, and her talent undeniable, was her discipline. No listener at any of her presentations had ever had the slightest suspicion that they were being toyed with, that formal tricks had been sought and imposed, that the player had some sort of card up their sleeve. These are not mere impressions, but ways of knowing that communication has been compromised, whereas if recordkeeping may be said to have an ethic it is integrity in communication, in order to preserve the possibility of communion with the past. Her rediscoveries were genuine and material. Colleagues traded flowcharts of her presentations, and it was a matter of some discord whether her listeners should be writing so much during her presentations, and shouldn’t they rather be participating. Recordkeepers should never be mere scribes, no matter how brilliant the speaker.

Dancy Ricardo

Fila smiled as she approached. “My lil’ ol’ baby sis!” He hugged her and she play-choked before he bent down so that she could kiss him on the cheek. She hugged him around his midsection after he stood back upright. She was not a tall young woman.

“I’m looking for your man, Rob,” Fila smiled down at her.

“I don’t know where that man went,” she said. “He told me he had put my present in the basket and I asked him before we even left and he still didn’t do it. He said he forgot something on the bike, but I think he just went home to go get it.”

“Just now he left?”

“No, I ain’t seen him since we got here ’cause I was helping set up the food, right?”

“Well, yeah, but Liz said…”

“No, I just saw him, Dancy,” said Voom.

“So he came back? Already?” Fila asked someone.

“I don’t know,” Dancy admitted.

“I know I just saw him. He’ll be back,” said Voom. “What’s the problem, anyway?”

“He’s got something I need for the ceremony,” Fila replied.

“You let Rob hold something for which you have a time-sensitive mission-critical need?” asked Dancy.

“Yeah,” Fila laughed. “I guess I might as well make my way on up to the front.”

◆ ◆ ◆

“I need to see somebody one time, wait a minute,” Fila said, loudly, his voice booming over and across the din of gentle conversation amid the pews as he struggled and squeezed his way to the front of the aisle. He did not mount the podium nor even climb the stairs but when he reached the end of the aisle he merely turned on the floor and asked somebody, anybody, if they had please seen Rob? Nickname Sinclair? You know, Rob, from the Bronx?

“Where is that man at, ’cause I know I saw him earlier.” Fila knew how to hold a crowd on the edge of whether this truly was a general announcement, or whether they owed him deference anyway because he was the host, or whether they should ignore him now, or whether he had finally lost his entire mind. “See, you all don’t understand,” he started again, letting everyone within his rather wide earshot knew they were being addressed. He was indeed the host. “I need to talk to Rob for my baby girl’s naming ceremony.” There was a beautiful harmony of various gapemouthed subvocalizations as understanding descending among those gathered. They asked their neighbors and none among them seemed to have seen him and first the rumor of consensus and then the consensus rumor floated slowly, at higher and more decisive volumes, toward Fila, who, of course, had heard the entire development.

“No, no, you all still don’t understand. Here he goes now,” Fila said, pointing back toward the entrance, in which Robert Upton Sirius stood, grinning.

“I made it, boss!” he yelled. This was hilarious for some reason and it was not the first time laughter had raised the roof of that building, but it was one of not many.

“Oh, good, now we can start,” Fila announced, calling the audience’s attention back to the front, whereupon he pulled a face, as though to ask them to get a load of this guy. “But it’s true, though. I need my man Rob here today because you found a story you wanted to tell, right, Rob?”

“A story?” Rob asked, from way back at the door.

“Well, it’s more of a joke. You copied it out yourself, remember?”

“Oh, uh,” Rob mugged himself, pulling his pockets inside out, checking his woolens, patting himself down. “Oh, Fila, man, I’m so sorry,” Rob apologized.

“Rob? You forgot it? Today of all days?” Fila asked. Heads swiveled back to the front for the response.

Rob just stood there hangdog. “I’m sorry, man.” He was a standup fellow, all told, to apologize to his friend, whom he had let down, in front of everyone. Everyone turned back to see what Fila would say next.

“Sorry? You’re sorry?” Fila yelled. “Are you serious?”

Rob stood still for a moment, looking even sadder than before. His head hung even lower than it had. Folks started feeling bad for him, and Fila beating up on the poor boy. And then he lifted his head, and coughed, and then he said, “No, Fila. I’m…I’m…I’m Betelgeuse.”

The sympathy his public apology had purchased was displaced by revulsion at nonsense when words of honor were required. They all turned back, feeling betrayed, to Fila, whose wrath upon Rob they would welcome. And Fila stood there stonefaced. He looked from face to face, and as he did, he could not help but let his expression soften, and his features spread into one of the widest grins he had ever grinned and doubled himself over with his guffawing, and everybody got the joke of course. But they were still a little mad, though. And that’s why Fila started quickly.

“I wanted to take it back to elementary school for a minute. You all know that dumb joke. Now, did you know, that my man Rob—thank you, Rob—Rob goes by Sinclair, and that’s how a lot of you know him, because his middle name was Upton, so it’s a play on that oldenday author’s name. So you might not know that he went around with that joke, ‘R.U. Sirius’, as a name for a long time, and he was doing that when I met him. He was a smart boy, though, and he gave himself real middle names for the initials. And that’s what lets him go by Sinclair now. He changed his name. And you know why he did it. That’s the whole thing, really. To say it clearly, when you meet a man like this,” he pointed to Rob, who had taken his place next to Dancy, “you know, with the cantaloupe head and the jughandle ears, right,” he mocked Rob for a laugh.

Rob was a sport, of course. “I KNOW YOU DIDN’T MENTION HEAD SHAPE,” Rob barked back.

“Oh, right, true. My bad, Rob. My point is, when you meet a man like that, and you hear that name ‘R.U. Sirius’, well, you know right away. You know right away you’re dealing with someone capable of acting a God damned fool. You will never be disappointed at the man or woman behind a name, because of a name, ever again. You know right away that you are talking to…to what?” he asked the gathering.

He answered, “a child. Really, you can’t ever forget it. But as they grow older, what is it they are growing into? Is it the foolishness, the silliness of the name they chose? No. It’s the beginning of wisdom when they understand why we do it like this. They realize how foolish it was to grant a child the right to name the adult. But then in that moment, they recognize the honor, respect, and credit we gave that child, for no other reason than that child said they were ready to join us. In the next moment, that child, now a grown man or woman, realizes that nothing has really changed, and that it would always have been that way. There are no rules on the name the child chooses when they join the community of those who must be addressed, here, in public, where we stand naked, alone, frightened, here, where we must speak and make ourselves heard. We need them to join us, because we need them to help us, and we always did, oldendays and nowadays. What rules could prevent the growth of monsters? The child names the adult so that the adult remembers. That remembrance is the fulfillment of the promise to remember. That promise is simply the right of the child to name the adult. And that’s new. That’s special. Never before has this humility found actual material practice in secular tradition. Let me say that plain again. The self-creation that we celebrate here today is also an eternal public display of childishness. We use it to remember. To remember that we grownups, we’re scared too. We’re not ready, either. Still. We are no more ready now than we were then. But here we stand, each of us giving what we were given, and what we must by now know we surely didn’t deserve: the benefit of the doubt.”

With that Fila invited his daughter up to introduce herself, in her own words, on her own terms, with her own name.