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At first it was annoying rather than anything else. He forgot a word. A simple thing, it could happen to anyone and it happened to him.
He would have thought nothing of it but for the circumstances accompanying the loss. He had been arguing. Tempers had run high and ideas had become involved. He had cornered his opponent and just as he was stating the final step of logic that would clinch his case, he forgot a word. He fumbled, strove to remember, hesitated, and lost the argument.
He brooded about it on the way home.
'Strange," he thought. 'Now why should I forget that word? I knew it. I know it now. It was ...? He sat very still for he did not know it now. In fact, he never knew it again.
Time passed and his friends noticed nothing. He did not argue as once he had done, but they were relieved rather than puzzled by this. He took to carrying a small book about with him, a dictionary it was, and he studied it at all manner of odd moments. He could read it. He could even understand it, but he could not remember what he read, not even the word his eye had just passed over.
Still he forgot words. Not all at once, and only the more difficult ones at first, but he forgot them, and could not relearn them. Secretly he grew afraid. He began to hold examinations with himself in the still of night. He would lie awake and question himself for hours on end asking himself, 'What word means lying flat on one's back?' or 'What word means a nice view?'
He began to do children's crosswords in the paper instead of the difficult ones he had liked. His work began to suffer. He lost his job in the end, he had been a hotel receptionist. They had to ask him to go when he took to looking up words in his dictionary, the tenants complained, they thought that he was insulting them.
He drifted into simpler jobs, jobs in which he did not have to talk, jobs he could do with his back and hands instead of his head and brain. And all the time, steadily, evenly, relentlessly, he forgot. A word a day, three hundred and sixty five a year. He had had a full vocabulary, it took a long time.
He sits on the bridge at Westminster now. He sells cards and cheap souvenirs of London. He can still say 'please' and 'thank you', and a few other words. His prices are marked on cards, a friend did them for him.
He seems quite content but sometimes there is a naked look of horror on his face. At such times he is thinking of a lost word and what it can lead to, and sometimes he thinks of the last word, and which one it will be.
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated June 23, 2001. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.