OUTSIDE IT IS raining hard. So hard that there is simply no room left in the cliché for cats. It is all dogs: Great Danes, Newfoundlanders, Saint Bernards. The occasional wildebeest thrown in to keep life interesting.

Camouflaged by the noise of the rain is a less dramatic sound: the mumbling of an insignificant voice giving rhythm to the deluge on the dark side of the day. “Menno Nehrkorn, Hans Große-Boes, Jochen Sauerbier, Ulfert Engels, Helmut ter Hell, Heider Jodies, Ilonka von Witowski.” The names cavort over cold lips like an incantation but cannot staunch the rain.

He unlocks the door and squeezes between bilious brown shadows in the hallway. In the obscurity of his rented bed-sitting room on the third floor of an insignificant building on Cricklade Avenue he expels the world from his lungs.

Cricklade — he doesn’t know what this means, where it came from or who it might have been. Nobody seems to care but him. He cares about names and practically nothing else. He cares about them so much that he collects them.

He finds the names on shop signs; in torn directories in vandalised telephone kiosks; on the television screens flickering in electrical appliance shop windows; in dog-eared books curling in the city library; on mossy gravestones and marble tombs at the city cemetery. They are all real. They are the names of people who have existed somewhere; who still exist with lives and families of their own. He has to write down the names where he finds them; in his room there is scarcely enough light for him to focus on the nib in front of his face.

He has no coins for the meter so he sits in the dark. But he does have a plan: he has heard that there are watts in a name and surely the one on the scrap of paper in his pocket will generate enough of them to illuminate his Lifework.

He has no friends with whom to discuss his worries; no acquaintances to call on him. His life is as dry as the carapace of a dead beetle from which he has pulled all the legs, one by one. The names that he collects are a spell to invoke their owners. He chooses only those he considers to be exceptional — as if they are a distillation of the essence of their bearers.

He has divided them into many categories.

The Terpsichorean: Heiner Schickentanz.

The historical: Hieronymus Haydn.

There are names he considers to be humorous: Gerhard Kackalik; Aribert Mehlstäuber; Huldreich Zwingli; Mirja Puppel; Dankwart Bette; Heribert Felgendreher; Hubertus Petroll; Alf Talg; Gerrit Schwarz; Cordula Schrenk; Gerd Raupeter; Atilla Kanne; Annegret Söndchen; Frank Siebenhaar; Otto Unbereit; Angelika Schrott.

Then there are the mysterious: Cleophas Fultz; Dirk Braunleder; Erwin Pridzuhn; Helmuth aus der Mark; Ute Boy; Soli Dreckmann; Rudolf Mühlfenzel; Otto Zwerchfell; Tamara Duve; Rudi Schimmelpfennig; Ernst Bleidiesel; Marcus Fischötter; Karl-Heinz Obertier; Winfried Lidschutz.

The onomatopoeic: Lethen van Zeck; Ignaz Kiechle; Bärbel Gansebohm; Mechthild Düsing; Arnulf Pluhar; Bodo Primus; Fridolin Pig; Hilmer Rolff; Ulli Deppendorf; Elmar Bartel; Hans-Karl Hackmack.

Double-barrelled monstrosities: Angela Kaiser-Nicht; Sigrid Finken-Sprichmann; Marianne Orth-Chumbley; Waltraud Binder-Kruchten; Herbert Zwack-Wandrey; Oda Gebine Holzbein-Stäble; Rumi Ogana-Helferich; Ute Popp-Biedermann; Danuta Harrich-Sandberg; Fritz Jüptner-Johnsdorff.

The musical: Atze Mencke; Siegl Peisl; Günther Pistor; Frauke Thiede; Egon Wellenbrink; Hiltrud Linnemann; Renate Tintelnot; Erich Übelacker; Marta Emmenegger; Anneliese Niedlich; Griseldis Promnitz; Helga Poblotzki.

The absurd: Heidi Doody; Wendelin Gutenmorgen; Hubs Otten; Elvis Prusseit; By-By Chen; Andreas Spundflasche.

The tongue-twisting: Ingelis Gnutzman; Waltraud Weinwurm; Kunibert Priewe; Reinhilde Biefang; Christa Auch Schwelk; Neithardt Riedel.

The alliterative: Hagen Hultzsch; Polly Pettit; Bleicke Bleicken; Penina Ponger; Ron Rollband; Balduin Baas; Horst Hauptfleisch; Heribert Hauser; Lars Lunge; Hanni Husch.

The pretentiously aristocratic: Hartmann von der Tann; Ilobrand von Ludwiger; Emmo von Schnorbein; Rikolt von Gagern; Geppard von Kotze.

The sexually suggestive: Svetlana Undusk; Maxi Biewer; Anima Hast; Rupert Geilgemeir; Erwin Suck; Steffen Brautlecht; Morag Prunty; Madlon Huckenbeck; Edeltraud Remmel; Toni Lüdi; Petra Kusch-Lück; Rudi Geil; Ulla Kock Am Brink.

Each category is meticulously cross-referenced and dated; each name’s source fastidiously catalogued. It is his world.

The only sounds that hint at the existence of life in this room are the creaking dryness of joints, the parchment crispness of skin and a small voice in the darkness. It repeats the gothic splendour and the outlandish rhythm of the latest name added to his card index like a nonsensical magic spell.

He slumps into a chair that is itself slumping into the carpet. Dust threatens to devour him. In the darkness, he seeks the power, the energy, to illuminate his Lifework. Fumbling for the cable and inching along it, his fingers find the plug. In the shoe-box are the sorted index cards with their inscribed names. On the other end of the cable is an unshaded table lamp, its plain, unlit 20-watt bulb velvety with dust; its bayonet stem coated in a livid growth of verdigris.

He inserts the pins of the plug into the holes he has made in the side of the shoe box. He produces a crumpled scrap of paper from his pocket. He speaks aloud the name he has written, without needing to read it. Which is just as well, because it is still too dark for reading.

“Rautgundis Beutel,” he says, trying to charm light from the darkness.

It swallows the words without chewing them.

It does not brighten. The air dims further; the walls leaching the last of the daylight still coating him, sucking out the last lingering traces of colour.

His contours fall away. His features flatten. His clothes are shed like onion skin. He turns white and wafer thin. The remaining moisture in his body collects in his chest like a translucent scar commemorating the removal of an ill-chosen tattoo. Were there enough light to shine through it, this watermark would spell a word across his chest.

The invisible word accompanying him on his descent is Conqueror.

For in a gentle breeze from the gap under the door he flutters sadly downward with an arid rustle; a sheet of blank, 80-gram A4 paper lying in a room pregnant with names on the dark side of the day.

—0O0—

 (What’s In A Name first appeared in print in Britain’s Auslander magazine.)

Email me the title of this story and I will send it to you as a PDF file, free of charge: chrisb[at]xtra[dot]co[dot]nz

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