Before I cut my hands off, I want to leave written record of how I unwittingly have victimized language and destroyed the various pulsating civilizations that once existed on our great planet. If I had known upon my conception that I would wreak linguistic and cultural havoc almost by my very existence, I would have released my tiny self into my mother’s juices and swum away into the sewer (although I suspect that even if I had, I would have mutated into a bacterium or virus of epidemic potential). Likewise, if I had known during innocent childhood or less innocent adolescence that I was ruining the lives of billions of people, I would have killed myself on the spot. Even if I had only known that I was alone on earth in being spared the terrible word loss, I would not have been able to bear the guilt. But since I am still alive, I have realized, in my maturity, that to kill myself, even though my existence is lonelier than that of the most solitary person, would be almost a greater crime than to continue writing. Instead, having finished my oeuvre, my lexicon of confusion, I cut off my hands, in the hope that I can, for the rest of my life, serve as a resource to those who would try to piece together their own minds, and perhaps even the universe of knowledge that I obliterated.

Before I continue, I wish to disclaim: I have paused before each word that I write to scan the hundreds of pages of the lexicon from beginning to end. I have ensured that not one of these words is new to my hand, that all have been included in the lexicon, and are thus already lost. Lost, at least, until the painful reconstruction of human thought gets under way.

¾ Jennifer Jennifer, 2079

I was born in May of 2047, in a world very different from the one in which I write this. There was little remarkable about my first three years. I was happy, as far as I remember.

At the age of three, I learned to write my name. At first I failed to write it correctly; like those of many children, my first E had more than three horizontal lines. My first N was backwards; perhaps my first J was as well. But I soon managed to write "Jenny" with each letter correctly formed. At that moment, the tragedy began which has steered time for the past twenty nine years.

This first instance mainly affected those women who answered to the name of Jenny (for that is how I first inscribed it) — and of course their families, friends, and acquaintances. Much as the first solitary victims of a plague fail to attract the attention worthy of their cause, the poor women (about 90,000, by my own estimate; and 2 men) with this name did not receive the media coverage or psychiatric treatment they should have if the public was to root out the cause of their confusion. Jennys all over the world, at that time already entirely English-speaking, forgot how to answer the question "What is your name?" To the inquiry "How are you called?" they were similarly at a loss. Nor could their families remember the names of their mothers, daughters, or sisters.

But I remembered my name. I knew it as well as I ever had. And I was stunned. Because although I remembered my own name, my mother forgot it. I distinctly remember the expression on her face as she fumbled for the name of her only daughter. I also recall – though I was but a toddler – her description of the experience.

"I’ve gone blank," she said. "As though I am having to introduce an acquaintance whose name has escaped me, and the pressure makes me scramble in vain to find it. I draw a blank, over and over." In my case, since I did remember my own name, I would remind her of it.

"My name is Jenny," I would say, "Jenny, Jenny, Jenny." And she would say, "Yes, of course, honey." But still could not repeat it, for it sounded like nonsense to her, like a word in another language, consisting of foreign sounds. Sometimes I would finally succeed, after saying it over and over, and showing her the wooden letters on my bedroom wall. She would utter my name. But the next day, or sometimes even sooner, it was gone.

Other Jennys might have considered it a luxury to try to remind the world what to call them, for they could not remember their own names. But it was painful for me, to constantly remind Mother of my name. So I changed it.

"Alexandra," I said. "My name is Alexandra." But soon my mother forgot that one too. "My name is Becky," then. Or Vivian, or Cassie, or Liz. Or Melanie, or Sara, or Lily. But always after a few days with the new name, no one would remember it but me.

This was the most disturbing thing to me. I was small. I didn't know how things were. I didn't know that that wasn’t how the world was supposed to work. But meanwhile, more and more women were losing their names. Every time I would change my name, within a week every woman with that name would forget what she was called, and would be forgotten by the rest of the world, except in the vaguest terms. Not that I knew it at the time, only later did I piece it together like this, so that it all made sense.

Soon after the problems with my names, small words began to disappear. First it was small nouns like CAT and BALL. People would look at an animal: they would know that it was feline. They might know that people called it "kitty" informally. They would even know that it was a kitten when it was small, and that it was related to lions and tigers and panthers. But no one, save me, could remember the normal name for a simple little thing. What was it called? It bounces, it rolls, you catch it with a mitt, or take it to the beach, but what is it? No one could remember. Is it an orb? Somehow that didn’t seem quite right.

At age seven, I became aware of my powers relative to the adults around me. I knew the meanings of the words I had learned not only in early childhood, but from television and books. My mother would watch television for the pleasure of the pictures, and what little story she could grasp, and I would absorb everything. And there was a library in our house, many books. The public libraries were locked and forgotten. People walked by them without seeing. But we had books, so I learned words. I began to write again, mostly out of my desire to communicate. No one was giving my life meaning, so I had to invent it. I had the power to want that meaning, a power others had lost.

My isolation in that time was nearly complete. Only the caresses of my mother kept me from insanity, for not even she understood me when I said the simplest of sentences. If I was hungry, I could not say "I am hungry!" or "Give me food!" because I had destroyed all of the words in those phrases except for "give." If I said the name of some specific food, I could usually get my mother to understand that I wanted to eat, and she would feed me.

If only the structures of society had continued to stand for a little while, I might not have continued to eliminate, little by little, the meanings of words. If there had been some emergency service which might have functioned to discover that I was the only one who remembered the words, perhaps I would have suspected that I was the one causing the problems. But there was nothing. Although I knew that I was a rarity, for no one I knew still had language, I never suspected that there was no one else out there. I assumed it was a matter of finding him or her.

When I was twenty-one, the brutal and rudimentary police forces came to my door to tell me that I was the only one in the country who could speak. I did not quite believe it at first, so I began to perform a series of tests, most of them on my mother. I would show her words in a book until she found one that she recognized. I tried making a list of the words that she knew, but found that as soon as I put a word on the list, she would forget it. In this way, I came to understand what was happening.

I immediately stopped writing, and worked to discover how far-reaching the problem was. I worked frantically to find words which I had not yet used, words that someone else might understand. I painstakingly listed all the words I had ever placed on paper, and through a process of elimination, found words that I had never written. Though they were an odd bunch of words, I managed to piece together a convoluted sentence (which, for obvious reasons, I refrain from writing here) that explained what I had discovered, and what, I suspected, I had done. The police allowed me to use the scant remaining structures of what had been the telecommunications industry; I quizzed people to find out if there were others like me, who could still speak in sentences, and perhaps others who, like me, were responsible for the crisis. I broadcast it through telephones, radios, computer wires, and the televisions.

I found, of course, that I was, beyond any doubt, alone.

I have used my previous work as a closed set of words, an impenetrable and complete whole that I have violated neither by adding even a single word, nor by omitting any definition from the lexicon. With this list I have written the lexicon, referring to it any time a flicker of doubt gave me pause before writing a word. The list totals some 30,000 words, as it turns out, for I was very prolific before I learned that the very abundance of my work was what was causing the great misery which, in turn – as has been the case for many writers – became the fodder for further literary production. Thus, the lexicon did no further damage to the language. I can only hope that it will be used by someone.

Now that I have told my story, in the hope that posterity will understand it in some way, I offer my hands to the mercy of the guillotine and the future. With the completion of the lexicon, and this, my confession, my apology, I offer these devices of thievery as a sign of my sincerest hope that humanity will rebuild itself, and that it will be capable once again of the creative contemplation that reason and art require.