My First Word Was Copper

For the first few months, I stuck with the coma theory.

There was evidence. I’d read about a guy once, on one of those websites that’s mostly ads. He fell off a ladder, was out for three weeks, and when he woke up he swore he’d lived an entire second life. A wife, a job at a bakery, the whole thing. He was weirdly sad when the doctors told him none of it was real.

So that was me. My heart skipped one too many beats, and right now I was lying in a hospital bed with a tube in my arm. My mom was sitting next to me holding my hand and probably telling the nurses I still owed her eleven dollars. Everything here was my brain keeping itself busy until the machines got me back.

It was a good theory. It explained the language I didn’t know, the giant hands, and the man who lit lamps with a book. It explained why everything felt slightly too vivid, like a TV with the saturation turned up.

It also had a problem I didn’t like thinking about, which was the bill.

I’d seen an ambulance bill once. It belonged to our neighbor, and he’d stuck it on his fridge with a magnet like a hunting trophy. If one ride in a van cost that much, I didn’t want to know what a coma ran per day. Every day I spent in this one was a day my mom was paying for.

I’d skipped a forty-dollar doctor for this.

The real hole in the theory was that dreams don’t get boring.

This got boring. Babies spend roughly ninety percent of their lives staring at ceilings, and I spent most of that first year staring at the same one. The only thing on it was a knot in one of the beams, shaped like a lopsided duck.

There was the other theory, too. The one from the shows, with the word I wasn’t saying.

In those shows the guy always gets a cheat skill, or a blessing from a goddess, or a glowing status screen where one of his stats is ridiculous.

If this was that, I wanted my damn stuff.

So I tested it. Every night for a month, lying in the crib, I thought STATUS as hard as I could.

Nothing.

I tried OPEN MENU. I tried STATS. I tried, on one low night, PLEASE.

No status screen, no goddess, no cheat skill. I had a duck on the ceiling and a neck that couldn’t hold up my own head.

So I kept the coma theory on top. It was the one where I got to go home.

◇ ◇ ◇

The language came in pieces.

The first two pieces were the sounds from that first night. They turned out to be names. The woman was Mara, and the man was Dalen. They said each other’s names a hundred times a day, and they said them the way people do when they still like hearing them.

Everything else was noise with lumps in it, sounds that came back often enough that I could start pinning them down. There was the one they said when they held a spoon out. There was the one they said when I grabbed something, which was louder. There was the one Dalen said when he stubbed his toe. As far as I could tell, it meant “shit.” Mara told him off for it, so I put that one in a special folder.

My own name took longer.

They said it when they picked me up, when they fed me, and when I crawled toward the fireplace. Eventually it clicked that the sound meant me.

Xavier.

I’d keep staring at whatever was in front of me. Mara would say it a second time, then a third, and then she’d pick me up and turn me around so I had to look at her.

The first time I turned my head on the first try, she clapped.

Answering to somebody else’s name was bad. Not knowing what anyone was saying was worse.

◇ ◇ ◇

During the day, I had a job.

The job was being a baby, and I approached it the only way I knew how. I studied the market.

Crying, it turned out, was currency. It was the only kind I had, and what it bought depended on who I spent it on.

Dalen was a soft market. He’d come running in under a minute, every time. If I kept going, he’d walk me around, bounce me, hum, and then hold me up to the window and explain the weather to me, in detail, with causes.

Mara was a much harder market. She’d walked me up and down the night I was born, and for about a week after that. Then she figured me out. She still came, but she came at her own pace, and when she got there she’d look down at me like she knew what I was doing. I found out later she’d been twelve years in places where people screamed for real. A baby doing it for attention was not going to move her.

So I spent on Dalen. That’s just good economics.

The other thing I figured out was the purse.

Dalen kept his money in a leather purse on his belt, and when he took it out to pay the milk girl or the man who brought the firewood, it made a sound. A dry little clink. Coins. It was the first real money I’d heard since I died.

I’d stop crying to listen. I couldn’t help it. It was the one sound in this entire world that meant exactly what it had meant in the old one.

I was confident nobody noticed.

◇ ◇ ◇

The first word I said on purpose was “copper.” I was eleven months old.

The word for mother here was short, two syllables, and babies said it all the time. The word for father was shorter. Mara and Dalen had a bet going on which one I’d say first. I knew about the bet because they discussed it in front of me constantly, the way people discuss things in front of a dog.

Dalen almost won once. Back when my mouth only half worked, I’d tried saying STATUS out loud, in case the menu took voice commands. It came out as “tah-tuh.” He decided that was his name and tried to collect. Mara said it didn’t count.

I didn’t want to say either one. It felt like signing a contract I hadn’t read.

Copper didn’t sign me up for anything. Copper was safe. I’d heard it every time the purse came out, and I liked the way it sat in my mouth.

So one morning, while Dalen was at the door paying the milk girl, I pointed from Mara’s lap at the coin in his hand and said it. Very clearly. Both syllables.

The milk girl laughed. Dalen turned around slowly.

“Did he just--”

“He did,” said Mara.

Dalen looked at the coin in his hand. Then at me.

“His first word,” he said, “is money.”

“He’s your son.”

“My family were scholars.”

“Your family charged for lessons.”

Then she held out her hand. “Two syllables. Same as mother. Pay up.”

He didn’t.

Nobody won the bet. I’d like it noted that I was the only one who walked away with anything, because Dalen, in a moment of weakness, put the copper in my hand.

I held it for about four seconds before Mara took it away, on the grounds that babies put coins in their mouths.

I was pissed. I knew exactly what a coin was for.

◇ ◇ ◇

By two, I could walk, mostly.

Stairs were still a negotiation, and I lost most of them. My body was top-heavy in a way nobody warns you about. It was basically a large head with legs as an afterthought, and any sudden change in direction ended with me sitting down hard on the floor and wondering what happened.

I understood nearly everything said in the kitchen, and about half of what got said after they thought I was asleep, which was the more valuable half.

Getting words out was the hard part. My tongue acted like it had oven mitts on, and whole sentences came out as three words and a noise.

And then there was the potty training.

I was a seventeen-year-old in a two-year-old’s body, and the body won more than I’d like to admit.

Mara was patient about it. I’d have preferred yelling.

The day I finally made it to the pot on my own, with no reminders and no accidents, she made a happy little noise and called Dalen in to see.

I sat there with my pants around my ankles and thought: if this is a coma, I want my money back.

◇ ◇ ◇

By three, my mouth had mostly caught up with my head. Anything with two hard sounds in a row still lost one of them, which was a problem, because I’d been a smartass for seventeen years and I had a two-year backlog.

The first thing I did with it was ask for a raise.

Mara was folding laundry at the kitchen table. I climbed onto the bench across from her and laid out my case. Three years on the job. No pay. I’d stopped crying at night. I mostly used the pot. I’d learned an entire language on my own time, and nobody had even said thank you.

“Mara,” I said. “I want to get paid.”

She laughed so hard she had to put the shirt down. Then she saw my face and picked it back up. “For what?”

“For all of it.”

She put a sock in my hand.

“Fold that.”

“For how much?”

“Nothing. Or you can skip dinner. That’s free too.”

I folded the damn sock.

The second thing I did with it was ask about the book.

I’d been pointing at Dalen’s pocket for three years. Now I had words, so I used all of them. When could I learn. What did the book cost. Could I hold it. Could I hold it if I didn’t open it. Could I just look at the clasp.

He let me run out. Then he said, “Say ‘kindle.’”

“Kinnle.”

“Again.”

“Kinn. Dle.”

He nodded, like I’d proved something. “Four,” he said.

“Four what?”

“You’ll start at four. The words are what hold a spell together. They have to come out whole.”

Four was most of a year away. All for one letter.

“Three and a half,” I said.

“Four.”

“Three and three quarters.”

“Five.”

“Four’s great,” I said. “Four’s perfect. Let’s do four.”

He took a notebook out of his other pocket and wrote something down. This one was plain. Soft cover, cheap paper, the kind I used to buy three for a dollar before school started. I’d seen him write in it for years and never priced it above a copper.

I leaned over to see the page. He turned it face down.

He’d never done that with the expensive one.

◇ ◇ ◇

So I started counting.

Days until four: 309

I updated it every night before bed. Then “kindle,” ten times, quietly, into the pillow.

By winter I had “kindle.” By spring I had every hard word in the house.

The hardest was the one from the special folder. Three hard sounds in a row, and the middle one came from somewhere in the back of the throat. It took me weeks. When I finally had it perfect, I didn’t see the point of keeping it to myself, so I used it at breakfast the next time I knocked over my milk.

“Shit.”

Mara looked at Dalen.

Dalen looked at his porridge.

“Four and a month,” Mara said.

Dalen had said it first, and nobody fined him.

He gave me the month back two days later, while she was out at the market, and never told her. Then he wrote something in the cheap notebook.

◇ ◇ ◇

Somewhere in there, the waiting changed.

At first I was waiting for someone to come get me. My mom, a doctor, some guy with a lanyard and an explanation who’d apologize for the mix-up. I thought it would happen any day.

Then I stopped expecting it every day and started expecting it eventually. I didn’t notice when I made the switch.

I still had her voice, though. Some nights I’d lie in the dark and save up things to tell her. Little stuff. What the porridge was like here, which was not great. The way Dalen hummed when he was writing, always the same four notes, never the rest of the song. The duck on the beam.

I’d tell her about the man who lit lamps with a book. I could picture her face. She’d do that thing where she doesn’t believe you but she’s going along with it.

Then I’d fall asleep in the middle of a sentence.

In the morning, Mara would be there.

She knew how I liked my porridge. She’d worked it out over a hundred breakfasts by watching what I left in the bowl. She picked me up when I fell over. She sang badly and didn’t care who heard.

And if I woke up in the dark and called out, she came. Every time, hard market or not. Even the nights I was only calling because I’d forgotten for a second which house I was in.

The short word for mother was still sitting there, unsaid.

I didn’t say it for a long time. I called her Mara, which made Dalen laugh and made her pretend to be offended.

Then one night I had a fever. It wasn’t a bad one, but I was small enough that it felt like one. I woke up with my whole body aching and the room tilting. Before I’d decided anything, I’d already called for her, using the short word.

She was there in about four seconds.

She didn’t clap or call Dalen in. She just picked me up and held a wet cloth on my forehead and hummed until I fell back asleep.

The next night I said my old phone number, just to be sure I still had it.