Word Allergy

“Leave this house,” said Jenny whilst leaning against the doorframe. Her voice was soft and whispering; each syllable was carefully polished to cut the heart with precision.

Elliot looked at the chair beneath him, the teacup on the desk, the light crawling across the wall. It reminded him of his old bedroom, where he talked to his imaginary shadow worm on the wall every afternoon in his vaguely constructed childhood. But that memory only consisted of the hot summer’s days, where his white vest sticked tightly to his chest, his face thinly masked by the suffocating, moist sweat. Where were the other seasons? Suddenly, he remembered that the room he thought about was not his family home, but the vacation house he went every summer because his own bedroom was too small and damp to have sunlight spread freely like that. He wasn’t surprised; those little memory gaps had been visiting him more and more frequently with his age. Still, it saddened him to think how distant he’s been from that innocent period of his life. And how it will only get further and further away.

At this thought, the sunlight outside shifted behind the cloud; leaving the room with a dark grey melancholy.

“I must finish this manuscript,” he responded absent-mindedly, not to her, but to the thin crack above the doorframe. In the dark, it has a delicious black glaze that Elliot felt a need to rest his eyes on.

“You still think you are some big time hit, don’t you?” she smiled, “Just cause you like T.S. Elliot, doesn’t make you him. Except you are taking his name cause your mum likes him. That’s also why you like him. You never got over your mum, isn’t it? Poor poor Elliot. Always the one that nobody wants.”

Elliot looked at her accusations falling to the carpet like the breadcrumbs he used to feed to the lone duck on the pond next to his childhood home. He saw himself picking them up from the surface of the water, but one by one, they vanished as soon as his fingers touched them.

He sighed. “Please…Please... Just leave me alone.”

Jenny raised her voice. “That’s not what you said when we you wanted me before - you’ve changed! You said you love me, where is that love huh?” She pretended to look around the room as if love was a missing sock. “You said you are man of his word, and now you can’t even write a word out anymore. Where is that goddamn talent you promised me? That was the only thing that made this worthwhile.”

She continued; her words arranged neatly the way she arranged combs and hairpins in her room of strict femininity, which Elliot stared at blankly. The room. This room. Jenny’s room that Elliot lived felt, at this moment, to be made against him: cushions that repeated the same floral pattern until it became territorial; a mirror that judged Elliot’s pale face harshly with its oversaturated cosmetics…each item in this room antagonised his fragile sense of existence. He remembered his own apartment. Not much inside; but it had the right amount of nothing, and that nothing had loved him. Each book, mug, crooked chair preserved his ever so feeble life, that has now been slowly erased, outcasted, pushed to the brink of Jenny’s universe.

It is true that Elliot had taken for granted the privileges of solitary living since age seven – when his parents became politely absent. His home has always been, and supposed to be for him, empty, spacious, quiet – the way one feels certain to find intimacy with death in the graveyard at mid-winter mornings. In such rooms, his intolerably cramped psyche could come out from his tiny skull to stretch towards the corners – entangling itself with the long shadows of the moon in the seemingly infinite space. And ideas could take its uninterrupted time to condense to the world’s temperature. As for his feelings - terrible, melodramatic, clammy – those impassive, lightly-painted walls would hold firmly. But now, his psyche has nowhere to stretch, locked inside the small of his head, he felt its unbearable scream at him; which he coped with the despicable but useful means of over-sleep. Everyday, he felt the silence became more disquieting that at any minute he was sure to go deaf.

Though he was troubled by such sentimental feelings, It was more of a nagging inconvenience until now, the day before his manuscript was due, when this sadness materialised into a physical allergy towards words in the form of red, hot rashes. He had moved to his old apartment since his fight with Jenny. That day, his hands were writing the story of a violinist who one week after her father’s death started to taste colours. But at the word ‘death’, he looked down on his hands to see a constellation of red points swarmed on his palms. He scratched, suspecting stress-related symptoms, and continued. Three paragraphs later, he realised again – on the word ‘keen’ – that the webs of his palms were covered with white dead skins, tinted with an anaemic purple of his shampoo. He stared; long enough to transform his hands into the snow mountain where he had once, in a sudden melodrama, planned to die.

Hypnotised.

When he woke up the next day by his table, he saw his dead skins, tiny as eraser shavings, flecked the space bar and the ‘P’ key. He ignored them and continued to finish his manuscript. The more he wrote, the more the itching became an education in the nuanced layers of heat, pulsing under his dead skin like snow-topped lava. Soon, he realised that his bottom was too burned to maintain sitting. So he stood up to type until his eyelids drooped to sting his eyeballs. He turned to his phone to dictate, but the words crawled over him like all the ants he had accidently killed throughout his life.

His dialled.

“Hello?”

“Hey Nick. It’s Elliot. I’m afraid…I won’t be able to make today’s deadline...”

“Elliot, you’re already three months late with your manuscript. No pages means no more advances. Do you understand?”

“I understand. But I’m afraid it is absolutely unlikely for me to give you the manuscript. Its…I’ve got a condition.”

“What condition?”

“Rashes. My skin stings every time I write…maybe I’ve developed some sort of allergy towards words. I don’t know. It’s difficult to explain...”

“Have you seen your dermatologist?”

“Not yet. She is on holiday.”

Nick Sighed. “Look…even if I believe this story of yours…doctor, no doctor, It doesn’t change where we are. The fact is we had internal discussions. We need sellers not dwellers. And we think perhaps its time for you to do something new...”

“Nick…”

“C’mon. You know you’ve been drowning. It’s for your own good. We want to see another ‘Human Mantlepiece’, not to see you stuck like this. You’ve got so much potential - we only hope you can find that spark back... Until then, we can’t keep you on the retainer anymore.”

“Right...”

“You know, its nothing personal, just business right?”

“Take care.”

Elliot hung up; throwing himself onto his bed to crash into a deep slumber. He slept precisely 22 hours – a length he would have liked for its evenness - so deadly that his breathing was imperceptible. By the time he was jolted up by his own fever, his body heat iced his skin so much that he could feel his dad’s throbbing cold heart against the sole of his soft newborn feet. He glanced accidently at his bookshelf. There, each word stung his skin. He thought he would be more bothered if his fever didn’t numb his sense of caring. But he’s not sure, he can barely feel anything with or without it. He turned on the telly to receive the only type of words – sound – that does not irritate his skin. The relief was at once abstract and seductive; for the endless choosing of things in his unwillingly entered adulthood has been giving him a terrible psychic tinnitus. Now that he can’t do anything but tuning into whatever his black box has for him, he felt like a newborn baby being spoon fed by the dictatorship of mother fate.

Unfortunately, this peace did not last long.

When he accidentally glimpsed at his bookshelf again out of habit, he saw the book spine of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’. This time, he was not numbed to the sting of the words. Instead, he felt a fiercely burning jealousy. He felt jealous of his past self who could read it, though he didn’t particularly enjoy it. He felt jealous of the writer who could write it, though he thought it was unnecessarily long. He felt jealous of the fans who wrote schoolyard copies and then published their homework as if they’d grown it.

JEALOUS. JEALOUS. GUPA GAPA BOGAZA JEALOUS.

He stepped outside to breathe some clean air. But it was an amphitheatre of ruthless ambush. Words from everywhere attacked him: bookshops, people’s t-shirt, road signs, shop names, car plates… Funny that It was a drizzling rainy afternoon in early spring, where the old him would have lingered ever so melancholically at the bench to watch it in silence. Now that he’s got a cracking migraine, the rain cursed alphabetically into his skull, beneath his skin.

He moaned uncontrollably: “OW! OW! OW! OW!”

“Hey! Elliot!”

He looked up to see a woman sit at the café with her tea. She had the look of someone who’d been too attached to the English language and Jane Austen’s domesticity. Susss-Annnnn-Kelll-Jennn - Jenny! Yes Jenny!

“JENNY!”

“Good God Elliot,” Jenny looked at him in utter disbelief, “whatever happened to you?” She looked at the swollen, rash-filled face of whom, in her memory, was still that mild-mannered intellectual with an old-fashioned charm and a slight aloofness that hovered just above the border of likability.

Elliot continued a series of tiny grunts to sit down. After a moment of collecting himself, he opened his swollen lips: “Well…You wouldn’t believe me even if I tell you…”

“Then, you must tell me at once!”

“Word allergy.”

“What?”

“I’m allergic to words.”

“What do you mean allergic?”

“Itchy skin. Rashes. Eczemas. Migraines. Everywhere. It happens as soon as I read or write.”

Jenny maintained her politeness. “Good God! I’m sorry... A writer who can’t read and write…” her desire for laughter became too strong that she coughed when she tried to suffocate it with tea. “What are you gonna do about it?”

“I don’t know…Kill myself?”

“Too easy… What’s the twist? Man… at least die as a true writer,” Jenny took another sip of her tea.

Elliot didn’t respond. He stood up and walked towards home. But no more than ten steps forward, the unbearable itch came back to him. Once again, he’s assaulted with words from everywhere through his unwillingly participated peripheral vision. He moaned uncontrollably, “OW!OW!OW!OW!”, before realising that he had forgotten to say goodbye to Jenny. He turned his head back, but Jenny was gone. So gone that the table she occupied showed no trace of inhabitation as if she was never there in the first place. Elliot shivered, shook his head and continued walking back home.

Inside his room, he tied a scarf over his eyes and walked towards his bookshelf in a way that was deterministically precise. One by one he slipped the book into black bin bags, their spines giving off a small, papery breath in his hands. When he took off the scarf, the room had shed its alphabet – wordless like the day before genesis. But now the furniture and decors seemed lousy, so he called to take them away too - as far from his visual field as humanly possible.

With only the TV and the mattress left, he noticed the beige wallpaper started to weigh down the space unnecessarily. On a clean hysteria he stood and torn the wallpaper in raptor-slashes like a falcon splitting up the dead corpse of a Siberian rat. It wasn’t random, vulgar madness so much as a spontaneous dance that shook his surrounding air molecules into spellbound membranes. He sat again. There, he felt his body opened by the empty space around him, where a foreign or multiple foreign matters passed through him. He fainted on the floor - this time indistinguishable to the dead.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

“Who-who-who is it…?” a violent banging on the door awoke Elliot.

“Jenny!”

“One second…”he dragged his numb legs to the door effortfully and opened it ajar, “What’s the matter?”

“Have you seen this?!” Jenny pointed at a newspaper.

“OW!” Elliot quickly covered his eyes, “You are stinging my eyeballs!”

“Sorry…” Jenny put it behind her back apologetically, “You are on the news.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I’ll read it to you: a mysterious man named Elliot has been popping up in every writer’s manuscript, short stories, blog posts, poems…you name it! But who is Elliot?!”

Elliot listened cautiously with the expression of a person calculating whether a miracle favours or insults them.

 “They say a lot of writers were saying about their crazy creativity - their hands basically wrote their works for them. Uncontrollably! And the uncanny thing was that all of those works were around someone called Elliot.” Jenny paused. She can see his brain was sent into a frenzy of improbable theories, but underneath that skin-deep shock, there was a discernible narcissistic faith on his own importance. She feigned an ignorance and continued coldly, “But you know, its less about Elliot, more that miraculously, each page is perfect, as if written by the best version of themselves, over and over. At this rate, we will be churning out millions of masterpieces by the day. “

Elliot didn’t respond. His lip slightly raised that looked like pride; then it quickly corrected itself into jealousy. Yes, he wants fame to justify his beaten down, dried up self-worth since birth. But to be the lubricant for other people’s greatness? To be the name their genius warmed its hands over after masturbating their ego into intellectual orgasm? He wanted a life written by his own hand, not a thousand nuanced versions of it by someone who is better than him.

But then, he is broke. Very broke.

“Help me monitor the writer’s forum?”

“Why?”

“Evolution.”

“What?”

“What?”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing…” Elliot led Jenny into the space, and gestured her to sit down at the mattress. “I need to put my fingers on the pulse.”

“On the pulse of what?”

“Writers.” Elliot took a sip from a bottle of water that happened to be in his hand, “Thousands – millions of them. All around the world. I need to see what they are saying. What they are thinking. What they are doing. I have a theory about this whole thing...”

“What theory?”

Elliot scratched his back to soothe a sudden unbearable itch, “One for all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you seen the recent rise in pandemics? We had about 1 pandemic every 20 years before the 21^st century. And now? Since the 2000, we had the SARS, the Swine Flu, the Covid….”

“Globalisation. Migration of people. That kind of thing. Isn’t it?”

“No. Someone somewhere had discovered something. A way to spread out their own brain.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever been in a room so safe you could stretch out your psyche from your terribly small skull?”

“I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Imagine if someone has found a way to spread their own pain into the world to get rid of it. And their disease? Their unfortunate genetic disorders? Their sorrow?”

“You think the pandemic is caused by someone who was trying to pour their own problems into the collective?”

“Well, that’s what’s happening to me…” Elliot took another sip of the water, “I think what’s happening right now is something is squeezing my creativity out of me to benefit the collective.”

“Are you saying all those masterpieces are from your brain?”

“We are only using 10% of our brain, each of us. Because individually, we can’t process 100%. But when you spread that out, it became possible. And who knows, maybe this is what my brain on 100% look like.”

“That’s certainly some kind of theory…” Jenny said, without the mercy of admiration. But Elliot didn’t really catch the sarcasm; he’s one head too deep into his revelation.

“Explain to me, then. Why do Elliot pop up everywhere in everyone’s books?”

Jenny lost for words. So instead, she just ignored his question to maintain her pride.

“What is the forum saying?” Elliot continued.

“Same thing. Just new cases of writers saying the same thing…Oh and this one.” She pointed, “This guy is writing on a livestream.“

“Put that on.”

The video showed a young college graduate writing as if possessed; his fingers typed with an inhuman velocity. Elliot walked towards his drawer, took out a notebook and wrote senseless words. Immediately, his skin flared; the kid stopped – blank brain. Elliot closed the notebook; his typing resumed. Again and again, the world obeyed his absurd train of thoughts.

Jenny looked at it blankly. She politely excused herself, for her brain’s filled with too many classics to entertain the implication of this nonsense. It’s less about being terrified of it, more that such supernatural phenomenon is too remote from her frequency of thinking that it became boring. For her, the news of his strange rise to fame was far more interesting than understanding the mechanism behind it. Plus, there was a Jane Austen themed literary salon that afternoon hosted by the Johnsons, which was, of course, a far better way to kill her time.

She left in a light-hearted mood like it was any other Saturdays.

Elliot didn’t pay much attention. He put a roll of hot towel between his teeth, and typed into the forum to declare himself as the Elliot. The rashes ruthlessly spread on his body with every word he typed, but he kept writing. In the end, he pinned an offer:

£99 a day for sleeping and meditating. When my head is completely clear, you will write better.

At first, burnt-out freelancers paid him the way people pray to saints: anonymously, impatiently. Elliot would sit in a blank room from dusk till dawn - no music, no phone, thinking nothing except the name of his clients. Each time, they wrote something magnificent with suspicious ease.

Soon, the myth of him spread virulently at the writer’s forum.

One day, a CEO from a major media conglomerate flew in from Seoul to offer him a six-figure retainer under one condition: during scriptwriting sessions Elliot would be induced to a light dream. They tried first in a pilot session, which worked well. Too well that, overnight, he became a national sensation with novelists, showrunners, musicians, publishers – anyone who needed words – knocking on his door. Soon enough, he became the title character for high-brow Cannes awarded indie films, addictive Netflix series, pop songs, novels….the list goes on.

But at Day 29, he started to have unsettling dreams.

He would dream of train stations he’d never visited, birthdays he’d never had, and arguments in other people’s voices. Worse – he started waking with emotions not of his own: regret over someone else’s divorce, nostalgia for a non-existent child, things like that…His mind became a sponge, soaking up the psychic runoff from the people he was helping to write.

The act of being blank-minded made him porous, osmotic.

He wandered into a small independent bookstore at Camden. Curiously the letters didn’t sting this time – perhaps pain couldn’t find him in the maze of his confusion. He read like a man released from the most literal prison. There, he found a new bestselling novel “The Inversion State” with comment on the cover saying “A genius of modern realism”. The author was a debut name he didn’t recognise. But the moment he opened the first page, his body went cold. It described a childhood memory: ants dismantling a cicada corpse under a magnolia tree. He had never told anyone that, even he forgot about it until now. And page after pages – detailing his life with an insulting tenderness not only of events but also of micro-emotions that were too fleeting to be caught: the burnt smell of a college toaster, the exact weight of afternoon light in a certain rented room…Thoughts he hadn’t formed until now that it was pointed out to him. He looked at his consciousness neatly and patiently presented in the book; it reminded him the skilful way his old nanny folded his shirtsleeve that has always made him feel ashamed to wear them on his dirty teenage arms.

Elliot dropped the book and ran back home.

At the door, he saw Jenny stood there eerily still. Her hair was shorter now. Eyes sharper. But her figure was shifting so violently, with a face too mathematical to be the Jenny he knew. Next to her, was a geeky looking man who looked far too foreign to exist in the orbit of her planet. She was saying something…more like mumbling from Elliot’s perspective. His eyes followed her fingers to a computer screen that showed a global dashboard: spikes in writing output, submissions; all time-stamped around his silent hours.

“What does this mean?” he asked blankly.

The man spoke. “I ran a correlation analysis. Writers worldwide – known and anonymous – are channelling you. Apparently, someone somewhere was able to capture your psychic blueprint when you were paid to sleep, because your bandwidth was released outwards. The blank state became a somewhat broadcasting frequency. You’ve became the zero they all calculate against...”

 “I don’t understand a word of what you are saying.” Elliot interrupted him; the man sounded to him like the noises bees make before they sting the tender skin of your neck.

“Your consciousness is the space where unused ideas pass through, pick up structure, pathos and emotional charge. And they exit, fully formed, from other people.”

“Yes, I already know that…when I don’t write or think, other people channel my creativity.”

“Exactly…But what that means also is your consciousness will be linked to their writing so your private thoughts and your memory will become part of their creativity energy. At the same time, their fictionalised versions of you will be leaked back to you. It will get very very messy in the end.”

“How do you know all these?”

“Look here,” he pointed at the dashboard. “It’s beautifully graphed here. Very neat. This line shows…”

Elliot looked at the math and thought, suddenly, of his own voice. He hadn’t heard it in days. The sentences he spoke just now sounded so strange, as if his mouth disagreed with the sound itself. Perhaps its the choice of words or the sentence structure or his raspy voice from his dehydrated, cigarette-stained throat.

He wandered off into the road and stood there – between lanes of fast-moving traffic, in the stale neon twilight of an overdeveloped city – with his mouth slightly open. The cars rushed beside him with their metallic aggression, where he heard a faint scream from Jenny. But her voice sounded artificial when combined with the horns from the cars - like it had been dubbed into the world after the fact; not quite synched yet. Elliot thought maybe she was the fiction now, or maybe she has always been that and he dreamt up this to sooth his increasingly unbearable need to be something.

That night, he vanished.

Three months later, a new novel appeared anonymously on the writer’s forum. The file had a cover image of an empty room with beige walls, that contains only a mattress and a bottle of water. The book – simply written with an intentional lack of style– described every single person who had ever channelled Elliot: their thoughts, their families, their lives. It read like a dossier. At the end of the book, the final chapter was written in a completely different voice. Poetic. Violent. Afarid. Fragmented. Like someone slipping through the cracks of themselves. It ended with a single, cryptic sentence:

Elliot was the pseudonym the world used.

With that, the ‘Elliot’ creativity was gone. The air resumed its ordinary burden, and words went back to their comeliness.

Years later, a scholar of literary disappearances would propose a theory in a paper that was banned from publication: Elliot was not a man, but an evolutionary response to linguistic exhaustion. That in a world oversaturated with narration, the only possible protagonist was the one who gave language back to the people. The scholar went on noting that before the creative surge of Elliot, the name appeared throughout minor works across cultures as a side character like a linguistic placeholder.

And he ended the paper with a single conclusion:

 In an era of empty language, Elliot was the only one who felt what words really were: parasites. Insidious, insatiable, itchy parasites who are always on the hunt for their new, juicy hosts. If, at the small hours, you feel their cold stare while you write that perfect sentence, stare back. Hold them with both eyes until they go looking for someone softer, hungrier; someone with skin that itches for fame.