what's in a name?

“Maddening”, is how Zeuraxgqoi describes it.

He dreams the strangest dreams at night. Silent burials in unmarked graves. Rows of faucets dripping in deaf space. Deadening leaves falling quietly on cracked sidewalks. One by one, night after night.

From the outside, Zeuraxgqoi lives an ordinary life. He has a child with an extraordinary name, like his own. He takes the metro to work every day and lives on the seventeenth floor.

He knows his neighbors’ names. Every single one of them. Their childrens’ too.

“Anonymity is death”, he moans. Nobody ever asks him his name - at home, at work or anywhere in between. Either they all know or they don’t care. Or maybe they’re jealous. In any case, nobody calls him anything.

He shows up at their door regularly – even when no one’s home.

Occasionally, they knock at his door - asking for this or that, asking about someone, to deliver something or to collect something else. Yet they never address him, not once.

Perhaps it’s too difficult to pronounce, he consoles himself. But then, they could use a nickname if they wished. Zeurax. Zeur. Or even a corruption – say Zeus, to make matters easier. He would be happy with Z. Maybe they don’t dare.

At other times, he surmises people are used to call each other by surnames – Mr. Rtl next door, the Ms. Psy across the hallway, Prof. Tzv downstairs. As it happens, Z doesn’t have a surname. He’s not sure he would like one either.

What’s the point, asks he? Isn’t one name good enough, especially if it is special enough – chosen carefully enough?

In fact, he finds the whole business of surnames positively anachronistic – in a modern metropolis like ours, he avers, there exists neither imperative nor incentive to announce your forebears’ trade from generations ago, or the village they arrived from, or that odd physical anomaly of an unfortunate outlier in one’s genealogy, or some such inconsequential artifact from one’s distant lineage.

A well-chosen name is enough, he asserts, to identify each individual uniquely. In any case, surnames don’t really solve the problem – just how many young Master Jrrrh Wfg’s had entered the city’s birth-roll over the last decade – exactly three-hundred and eighty-seven, last time he queried the MetroBase (which is something of a hobby for Z, not surprising for someone who happens to be a stickler for facts; he spends hours late into the night collecting interesting demographic patterns).

Naming trends (for first names, of course) these days come about almost always by accident, results of typographical errors while mindlessly following palpable trends – a consequence of the near-extinction of genuine trend-setters in society (something akin to changes in the genetic code via mutation only, in the absence of any other evolutionary pressures).

Even if a certain phonetic pattern came into vogue, as it often does with the metro’s singularly trend-obsessed populace, one could always mimic the process of mutation itself– a permutation here or a substitution there would make all the difference – a happier medium between numb conformity and real uniqueness, however lacking in it’s celebration of originality. Even such tame mischief is hard to come by these days, Z laments.

He often slips into full-blown reveries during empty intervals at work. Z shares a not very uncommon relationship with his job with many a denizen of the great city – he savors the leisure it affords him although he finds the actual work crushingly vacuous – as a result, he constantly tries to get by through lack of trying and doing as little as possible without raising alarm with his superiors, who curiously happen to be quite satisfied with both his efficacy and efficiency – a sure nod to the reluctant yet undeniable hold Z’s conscience has on everything he undertakes. Besides, his command of symbol-manipulation and capacity for numbers, figures and facts confers on him a certain effortless advantage in his field of work.

Our story begins right in the middle of one such reverie - on a cloudy, windy, cool April morning outside. Z stares into the gray sky from his desk behind the half-open window, his swivel-chair turned a hundred-and-eighty degrees. He sits motionless, his salt-and-pepper hair and tanned, scruffy neck visible from the door and the tall stack of packages on the desk as it rises above the back of the chair.

He is dimly aware of a steady drumbeat from the street below as the swirling rhythm of the invisible drummer’s hands lulls him into lucid meditation. He pays no heed to it’s source – he hears it every Wednesday morning, roughly an hour before noon. He is given to spells of vertigo looking down heights (especially from windows as low as this one; the six-foot sills in his apartment are no accident) and he has never allowed himself the idle luxury of climbing down the stairs just to check on a street-performer.

Nomenclature, he repeats, is key. Without it, we would be lost in a sea of faces, numbers, features, struggling descriptions. The very existence of language necessitates it. We don’t just name people – every object or idea known to man is named. Almost every meaningful pattern (a sentence, a paragraph, an entire book) in any language is merely a collection of names strung together with ligaments of prepositions and sockets of conjunctions, its viscera clustered and demarcated into semantic organs by the membranes of punctuation, each cleverly maneuvered into position by the handy levers of articles and pronouns, the design of the entire organism on all scales governed by the genetic code of syntax.

“Uhhrrrgghhm”, a throat cleared at the door.

His spell broken, he turned to look. Mr. Qgn was standing, hands in his pockets.

“Look, didn’t mean to barge in like that but someone again...”.

Z rose from the now-spinning chair and without saying a word, stood in Q’s face with a somber look of resigned understanding, followed by a barely perceptible shrug, an arched eyebrow and a heavy sigh.

“Very well then”, Q turned back and started down the hallway.

The two entered the mailroom through a carelessly-painted blue door. A rubber-matted ramp led up to a circular wooden platform, its perimeter lined with roughly a dozen shiny metallic cylindrical chutes that came all the way down from openings in the ceiling. Each column was tapped at regularly spaced slots, spouting into a stack of card-sized shelves, together suspended in the still, musty air like a stretched-out accordion.

One of the platters was dripping. A dimly fluorescent greenish-yellow fluid streaked out from the corners of an envelope...

(to be continued)