Eles Que Nós Não Nos Lembramos

[Mr. Kwako]

It was recently necessary that I send the following e-mail to a friend of mine:

Well, that explains it.

When I got off the subway this morning, one of the first things I noticed was that fully ninety percent of the people around me were scarcely over three feet tall. This 90% rate of hyper-dwarfism (“hyper,” because most little people are around four, not three, feet tall) is definitely not the norm here. But what was clear to me even then was that the rate of occurrence was only the surface of the odd vibe of this morning.

For instance, they were neither what you, Arthur, might think of as dwarves (those with regular-sized torsos and heads but truncated legs) nor midgets (proportionally “miniaturized” humans), but rather a sort of inverse dwarf – as in, their legs and arms were as long as most people’s, but their bodies and heads were severely pinched and stunted.

(I know a little bit about this inverse-dwarfism, incidentally. In the dwarf community, these types of dwarves are known as Imperials, and they were extremely popular in London in the 1920s. Imperials are like regular dwarves in that they are “normal” in terms of life expectancy, intelligence, emotional capacity, etc. Imperials are unlike regular dwarves in that they look ridiculous in suspenders.)

At any rate, what else seemed odd about the Imperials – beyond their preponderance – was how drawn we, the regular-heighted, were to be nice to them. Many of us complimented them on their suit jackets outright. I, personally, allowed four of them to pass ahead of me to the stairs, giving each a knowing nod as if to say, “Oh, obviously, you should go first – I’m sophisticated enough to know that.” (I, of course, am not nearly that sophisticated. In fact, I gawked like a yokel at how rapidly they seemed to get up those stairs, an illusion of speed due merely to proportion.)

It wasn’t simple politesse, though. When I got up the stairs, I noticed five specific storefronts had immense lines of the regular-heighted in front of them. The stores were: three banks, an antique dealer, and a jeweler. And the regular-heighted coming out of these businesses were handing over merchandise by the armload to the nearest Imperial. I considered how much I, personally, could afford to donate. (Thinking – obviously – as I did, “Donate?”) The figure eleven per cent took form in my head. 11%… So elongating… 11%... the ones of it, the percent sign that finishes it; all of it so… tall.

And then I had it! The oddness of the vibe was made complete by the fact that if you took the pinched and stunted faces of these Imperials and somehow stretched them out, they would look exactly like you, Arthur! Every one of them, the spitting image of you except that they each wore a different anchorman’s wig!

Reading your e-mail this afternoon explained to me how this all came about. Yes, when you happened to mix that wart that fell off your foot, that spider and your hair and blood in the toilet, you did inadvertently perform a voodoo rite on yourself. This is very dangerous, Arthur, for while this army of Imperials laden with 11% of New York’s personal holdings marching west to Seattle might seem like a good thing, I can’t help fearing that it might not be. What if when they get there they just keep placing goods and cash atop you until you are crushed? What if your severe mega-wealth makes those close to you a target for kidnappers? What if it’s not just New York where this is happening? What if it’s also in places like Tokyo, where the currency is difficult to read?

Keep in touch, Arthur. You’ve always been a good friend and later I might want to borrow some antique jewelry full of money.

Yours,
Cosimo Kwako​

 

[Mr. Kwako]

What's this about?

As evidenced in the above reprinted e-mail, I recently had an unusual morning. Unusual, but with a warm and exciting familiarity.

You see, the ethnological pursuit of normally unencountered peoples – such as these Imperials – was the pursuit which fueled my life from the time I was seventeen. My brain, my college thesis, and countless travel journals (OK – I just counted: four (but two of them are really thick!)) are crammed full of facts about the unknown, secret, invisible and forgotten peoples of the world. I possess vast histories of peoples unremembered, and I would like to share them.

I am not unqualified.

I have been to Opí, the little, lost island of the Aegean where every single native has a bone-deep appreciation for the television work of Ron Howard. I have been caught and held captive by Sweetypies on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and narrowly escaped the calico catacombs they call home. I have held a tiny, newborn Depot-Sammy in the palm of my hand, with his tightly pulled ponytail and his neatly trimmed mustache, his tiny gut already testing the material of his tucked-in shirt. I have seen the one facial expression each Depot-Sammy is allotted in his lifetime, and I saw this one say (as is said they all say): “Crap. I am to be a dude with a ponytail. And a mustache. I will brew my own beer and begin sentences with clauses such as, ‘This buddy of mine.’ Crap. Crap crappity crap.”

So let this journal empty my brain, my memories, and my four journals (it’s really six or maybe even seven, so thick are those two at the end). I hope that if you read it, you will get some reward from it, some gift greater than Mr. Kwako has ever received. I promise that everything in it is true. I promise that first entry up there will be the longest. I promise to explain why its title is in Portuguese. I promise to keep at this for about a week, and then abruptly lose interest and start a different journal under a different fake name. I promise all of this to you, dear reader. And I’ll promise other stuff to you to, if you’re, you know, into that.

 

[Mr. Kwako]

A People Not To Be Remembered

Doppelschatten

At the Pilchuck Research Library where I spent most of my time in college, there worked a young, thin librarian with long hair. In my senior year, an intern started with the same hair, height, build, and aesthetic. It took a week before I could tell one from the other instantly, but after that it was easy.

Easy perhaps, but not necessarily enjoyable for the two library-workers. After four months, the intern appeared dressed entirely in black with a ManicPanic red bob. It was her new look – a respectable enough choice – but clearly mindful of not again being confused for the librarian.

It didn’t work that way.

Whereas before, she had looked like a similar yet distinct person, now she looked exactly like the librarian in disguise. Further, it made clear that I had learned the intern in contrast to the librarian, and now I could no longer remember which subtleties belonged to which. (Who touches her tooth when she laughs? Which one gets so interested when colors are mentioned? If they had to be cartoon animals, I know one would be a donkey and the otehr would be an octopus with a monocle, but which?!?)

But more interesting was what was happening in my pajamas. When they were both merely slight and bookish, their greatest libidinal effect was that I would sometimes imagine hugging them in Autumn. Now, in dreams, one of them kept seducing me during matinees of Rockabilly films and the other kept posing come-hitheringly nude atop the spread-open Rare Books collection. Clearly, I had developed intimate (or at least porny) feelings for one of them, but upon waking, I could never remember which one. Perhaps it was both. Who could tell?

I never made a move, and today cannot remember either’s name. I do not believe either was a Doppelschatte, but I do believe that such an experience is necessary if one is to ever know the Doppelschatten.


Doppelschatten are seen and forgotten countless times each day and may in fact outnumber the wan as America’s third-largest minority. They work flexible hours and their tongues are black on the bottoms, white on the tops. They are morally, emotionally, and sexually capable of anything, are of normal height, and weigh between sixteen and eighteen pounds. They have their own century of channels on most DTV packages, which are always running shows that remind you of what else is on.

Doppelschatten look specifically “kind of like” people you know. You see them, consider the person they sort of resemble, then forget that person. The triggered person, then, is the one “actively” forgotten (imagining “forgetting” as an active verb), while the Doppelschatte slips from existence without record.

They remain in our subconscious, however, and come out in our dreams as figures we are sure are familiar but cannot quite make out. When people we know suddenly become monsters in our dreams, when we are chased or blindly hindered, those roles are played by lingering Doppelschatten. They also cater.

They are maddeningly difficult to study. The fact that they weigh so little, for instance, makes me start to write that they purposefully coarsen their feet to aid gravity, but then I realize I’m thinking of the Bloonia of southern Brazil, who mistakenly inverted their laws of physics one night over mojitos and now cannot get them righted. I then think about the Bloonia for a while. And then I forget about them. Now where was I…?

Studying them is also painful. It jostles them awake in one’s subconscious, bringing those dreams where one has to masturbate publicly in the torture-restaurant to save one’s family member. (You know the ones.) But it would be a mistake to disregard them. Like all of these peoples unremembered, the world would be in much worse shape without them. Much worse.

 

[Mr. Kwako]

A People to Leave Unknown

Dutch Smihrks

Dutch Smihrks are a laid-back people who – contrary to their geographic appellation – can be found all over the world. They are an extremely inventive – if not overly industrious – people, who invent, devise, and canoodle only for the sake of pure and extreme comfort. Among their inventions number the floor-length umbrella, which sheaths the entire body; and the weather condition known as “not-really-raining.”*

They are called Dutch Smihrks because they were first discovered in the medieval city of Utrecht. There, a horde of murderous, pillaging, Saxon assholes came across a community of Smihrks lolling about in the extreme comfort their unusual devices afford them. The Saxons – almost all of them jerks – claimed the devices as their own, even though the concept of comfort was entirely lost on them. Three of these devices – the krakkerpuller, the O-so-poyntie-zuit, and the suuthing fietsmassaj – ended up modified one-hundred eighty degrees from their intent of extreme comfort to become the devices of torture we know as the rack, the iron maiden, and the bed of hot coals.

Pressed into service to create more torture devices for their dick overlords, the captive Smihrks neither fought nor fled; they merely adapted their new environs to be as comfortable as possible. The inventions they came up with (still not fully understood) before they were banished from medieval society were a mixed and ill-received bag which included the Seventeen-Wheels-and-Fourteen-Feathers, whose name explains everything about it except that there’s a seat on it; the koolenslender, a chaise lounge made entirely of seemingly sentient teenage-girl-fingers; and, oddly, the joystick.

Smihrks fade from the historical record after this, mentioned only a smattering of times in botanical journals. (They invented awapuhi so they could grow their own shampoo, and aloe vera, because they wanted a “plump little cutie plant.”)

Their alphabet is essentially ours, but without unnecessary strokes (such as the crossbar on the A or the spine on the E) and unnecessary letters (C, Q, W, X). Knowing this alphabet led me to my one encounter with Smihrks (coincidentally in the Netherlands) when I found a mislaid invitation – with directions written in Smihrkanner – to an hors d’oeuvre party in Apeldoorn, outside the Hoge Veluwe National Park.

I went to this party, and I wish I could muster my initial fascination to tell you about it. When I try, I write things insufficient to describe an ancient and mysterious people, such as: “As interior decorators, they made purple work.” The truth is I felt horribly out of place there. It seemed like such a comfortable place to be, and my hosts dutifully kept asking if they could do anything to put me more at ease, but I just couldn’t get into it. I would sit on any one of the many backless couches and try to eat the raw oysters as naturally as they all seemed to, but the best response I ever got was that encouraging little smile everyone knows is reserved for younger cousins. By the time I left, my head was swimming with past failures I hadn’t thought of in years.

And this, I think, is what the Smihrks would count as their greatest innovation. They perpetrate – emanate is too personal – a mood which does not insinuate that they can’t be bothered with you, but rather leaves you knowing that you shouldn’t have bothered them. As hosts, they truly could not have been more welcoming, but I, personally, would not drag myself into a lair of Smihrks for a signed, first-edition Bronson’s Ancient Peoples Codex. It is, perhaps, the most comfortable way of being left alone, and it is only the Smihrks that could have devised it.



*It would, incidentally, be a mistake to deduce from these two inventions that they have an aversion to water. Smihrks are, in fact, excellent swimmers and have even developed a third eyelid to facilitate long-distance underwater vision.

 

[Mr. Kwako]

A People Hiding

The Mayswell Hideypoops

One of the more difficult things about being an esoteric ethnologist – and the difficulties are legion – is that discussing certain peoples can make you look like an idiot. Chief among these is… the following.

I first encountered… one of them when I was twelve years old and taking out the garbage. It was extremely quiet, made more so by my recent discovery that tipping slightly forward onto the balls of my feet removed even the pad-pad of my sneakers from the aural landscape. As I walked, slowing down to feel the perfect hotness of the summer night on my body, I became aware – certainly aware – that someone was behind me, something… some being walking there. Further, they were walking in a ridiculously exaggerated manner, as if what they were doing was somehow making fun of me. (I didn’t wear glasses; I don’t know why they thought a nerd-pushing-up-glasses motion would in any way relate to me. I also did not hold my butt way up high and sway it out so hard that I would turn sideways. The imitation was, frankly, preposterous.)

I wheeled around but just too late. Whoever it was had quickly – immediately – found the perfect hiding place.

Turning back (holding more tightly to my white plastic bag of kitchen garbage), it hit me: he must have been in the shadow of that green electricity box someone had arbitrarily erected to lessen our property value. And hadn’t there been a flash of movement, right there, the split-second I turned?

Thus began a bizarre dance, as each time I turned and saw nothing, I then turned back to realize the one place I hadn’t looked, but which must have been his hiding place. In the pear tree! No… Behind the Bolger’s mailbox! No…

I never caught him. Instead, I totally ignored him because he was stupid and also a jerk. Also, had I been able to say it to him, I would have added, “Whatever.”

Five years later, I audited a college course in ethnology called “Histories of Forgotten Peoples,” taught by the illustrious Dr. Laurenço De Souza. When I asked him about these maddeningly invisible people, he said that everyone had some experience with them, but so frustrating were they that no scholar had ever bothered to name them. His own name for them was Apenas-entãos – Portuguese for “Just-Thens” – but, as he said, “You may as well call them ‘Wobbly Podiums’ for all the good it will do you. They won’t respond. It’s like naming a cat.”

But just then a stupidly interesting discovery developed. Every student there had at some point encountered these people, and they had each given them some individual and now inescapable name. Someone who had first sensed them in a vineyard proposed that from this point forward we call them – as he did – Vineys; someone else had inexplicably called them Darrins, and suggested that. Two people had been reading Alice in Wonderland at the time they first encountered them, causing one to offer Snickersnacks and the other Vorpals. As each student suggested their name as the proper name for them, Professor De Souza shrugged, chuckled and said, “May as well.”

Professor De Souza then asked me for my suggestion. Sensing that my own name – Hideypoops – held neither scientific nor academic merit, I suggested an open-ended binomial. The latter name would be whatever each individual wanted; the former would always be Mayswell, as in we “may’s well” call it the latter.

It was a plausible suggestion, but Professor De Souza’s response was brisk: “Seriously, what do you call them?”

I don’t know why I had called them Hideypoops; I think I was mad. I do know that my bluff, “It’s from the Latin” didn’t fool anyone. And I also know that to this day, I have not succeeded in contacting the Mayswell Hideypoops.

 

[Mr. Kwako]

Why is the title in Portuguese?

If we were to believe the Student Guide, the short man fuming and ranting before us in Room 210 of McGuffey Hall was Laurenço De Souza, the world’s foremost authority on other people. He was a speedy man, whose suit fit him well, even if his silver cufflinks (mulberry-shaped and dangling) kept his jacket sleeves from properly sheathing his cuffs. He styled his black hair in what we call a “fonzie,” and though his Portuguese accent was pronounced (that is, it stood out; of course it was pronounced), he more than knew his way around the English language.

He was furious because the name of his class, “Histories of Forgotten Peoples,” was not at all what he had intended. And while he did not take the necessary break from his pleased-to-meet-you tantrum to fully explain how the mistake came to be made, I will, if only because I owe it to Marta.

Marta Bumps was the gloriously shaped registrar who had listed the course for the university. Though third-generation American, she spoke Portuguese beautifully, baffling her parents and thrilling her homesick Brazilian grandparents. Her Portuguese, though beautiful, was beautiful Brazilian Portuguese, not Portuguese from Portugal. This should really have made no difference, but speaking to a Portuguese Portuguese – even one who turned out to be a short, little man with a “fonzie” – intimidated her, and she over-translated what she mistook as formality in his speech.

Professor De Souza, due to a late transatlantic flight and a hangovering welcome party, did not realize the name of his course until he saw the sign on the door of Room 210. And so it was that his entire first lecture was that frothy spasm of sputter we all remember, with rants lapsing into Portuguese for minutes before he would remember us, the English-speaking audience he was frightening.

“Had I wanted to present historias de pessoas esquecidas, I would have said historias de pessoas esquecidas! These pessoas are pessoas que nós não nos lembramos!” The difference he was illuminating was that the course should have been called “Histories of Peoples Unremembered,” not “…Forgotten Peoples” since not all of the peoples “we” are unaware of have been “forgotten.” Many have never been known at all; others self-obfuscate; still others genetically confound our very conceptions of knowing and forgetting. The ways that peoples are unknown are in fact countless (one people refuses the census outright, giving as their justification: “I am so sure! Like I’m going to check all them boxes!”) and to claim that they are somehow ours to forget or not forget is a prime example of the arrogance that keeps so many of them away from us.

It is an important argument, even if his presentation of it struck us as a bit much, as if it were coming more from fear than respect. (Knowing what I know now, both about the unremembered peoples of the world and about Laurenço De Souza, I believe neither reason can be overstressed. I, in fact, personally never say the catalogue title of the class unless I am very sure I will be able to later explain, via the story I have just told.)

To us, one high school- and thirteen college- students, however, much more important than his admirable ethnological sensitivity, was the fact that he was foreign and therefore sounded funny when he talked. He kept repeating the phrase nós não nos lembramos, until we started singing it along with him, learning quickly how to anticipate the nós não nos refrain. And it may have been that day that I, seventeen and doing nothing but waiting around to fall in love with Marta Bumps, told myself that were I to ever publish my learnings, I would do so with the proper nod to this passionate and Portuguese little man, Laurenço De Souza.

 

[Mr. Kwako]

A People Whose Progeny Puzzles

Plumey Birds

It is perhaps impossible to spend your time studying the histories of peoples without occasionally bumping into the question of the origin of them. I am not here speaking of origin in the religious sense of some ridiculously powerful yet insecure Being creating little versions of Himself who prove their love by refusing fruit. Nor am I speaking in the mythological sense which sometimes involves an enormous elephant standing on turtles. No, I am speaking in the purely empirical sense, the essential scientific question of: “Where does the man put his thing to make a baby come out?” Human sexuality – that riddle wrapped in an enigma and often occurring inside a large, oiled plastic tube – is more puzzling even than those ridiculous metal puzzles your cousins you don’t like have.

One such puzzling people is the Plumey Birds. Plumey Birds are a flamboyant and all male people who take their name from the brilliant plumage that explodes from their chests and necks in dramatic fashion whenever something upsets them. What upsets them, usually, is when they think they’ve hurt your feelings or in some way caused you to think that the situation at hand isn’t “all about you right now; your thoughts, your feelings, your big ol’ Aunt Mae’s fanny if you want it to be!”

Plumey Birds love the Bettes, Davis and Midler, and will not not cry at baby animals. Their sentences end in exclamation points so often there is speculation they invented the mark. Their cardigans come in the shades of the cardinal colors with the word powder in front of it, as in, powder blue, powder pink -- even what we call peach they call “powder orange.” They can tell at a glance whether an armoire is of the style called Mission or Arts & Crafts, and they find the exploits of Oprah’s boyfriend, Stedman, “hilarious.”

All of which might make you wonder, if they are all male and all gay, how does the line perpetuate?

I cannot advise you strongly enough not to wonder this aloud.

The scorn you will receive is immense: “Can a straight man not be tan in early March? Are we so narrow-minded that we cannot allow a heterosexual male to have the Belgian movie poster of Evita framed in his foyer? Let me get this straight, Mr. Adolph Limbaugh – since “straight” is how you clearly insist things be – if they are so gay, how is it that they all have daughters?”

Because this is the odd fact about Plumey Birds (besides the earlier-mentioned feathers): they all have precisely one daughter. There are no adult females of the people; the males are all long-divorced and huge fans of men’s diving; and yet there are these daughters, pre-teen and prolifically photographed.

But do not be beaten, either. Yes, they have reproduced and yes, it’s never nice to assume, but state publicly that Plumey Birds are not homosexuals, and your credibility is ruined. No lecture this time; just a snuffling snort of patronizing agreement and suddenly you’re not invited to speak at seminars anymore.

The last resort – asking one outright – will at first be understood as an uncomfortable come-on, then answered with a just-out-of-date ambiguous reference (currently, “Whatever happened to ‘Don’t ask; don’t tell’?”), and finally answered with a sincere inquiry as to why you are so interested (“Because I’m a scientist” is not believed). All three responses seem to be answers via non-answer, but, upon reflection, are not quite.

And this is all we know of this particular riddle of reproductivity: there exists a people that are all male, that produce only female pre-teen offspring, and that work in really, really specialized antique stores. How a younger generation emerges from an elder is hidden; we know only and again that this world is a sphere rich and beautiful in its mystery.

 

[Mr. Kwako]

A People People Find Puzzling

Forcets

I have no idea why the reproductivity of Forcets is still thought of as such a mystery. The answer seems perfectly clear to anyone who can look past the salacious and headline grabbing aspects of this people to see the unifying truth. Yes, Forcets possess a sexuality which seems exclusively anal, and yes, that sniggering detail keeps the copies of our trade journals, People You Never Heard Of Quarterly and Incredibly Ponderous Theories on Things Affecting No One flying off the shelves; but, as usual, true understanding is reserved for those mature enough to see beyond the titters of titterers.



The captain’s voice was terse on the ferry’s intercom. An injured resident of one of the smaller Cyclades islands needed to be picked up and transported to an island with a hospital. From what rumors quickly spread around the boat, the captain was edgy because this island was not only too small to sustain a hospital; docking a good-sized, Coors Light-sponsored passenger ferry at its tiny "marina" was also an immense challenge.

I wondered about this island. What was life like where matters of life and death could depend on whether the nearby 20th century happened to be passing by on a boat sponsored by Coors Light? I decided that when the boat landed, I would sneak off and see.

Two things were remarkable upon arrival. The first was the landing facility, a canal whose already narrow mouth closed gradually so that no ship could possibly make it through. As the captain steered toward the opening, islanders lined the steep, stone shore, cheering when the boat smacked to its stop and marking with chalk how far it had been able to penetrate.

The other remarkable thing was the accident victim herself, laughing good-naturedly, yet with a white, six by six mile marker (or, as they say in Greece: “kilometer marker”) lodged grotesquely in her nostril. How it came to be stuck there was beyond any of us.

I rode with the islanders to the town of Hora in their cramped van. When my valise had difficulty fitting under the seat, they all began emitting strange falsetto chirps that sounded exactly like the English phrase, “Force it!”

It was a chirp I would hear often during my visit: when my hotel room key wouldn’t fit ("Force it!"), when I protested I couldn’t eat one more bite of souvlaki ("Force it!"), when they insisted I do my laundry in one load when it clearly warranted two ("Force it!").

I telephoned De Souza to see what he knew about this island, Forsos. He was thrilled for me, as Forcets are one of the most generous and hospitable peoples thus known. They are excellent leather-workers as well, having invented the foldable suitcase in 1811. He also told me that if I could solve the mystery of their reproductivity, I would be assured tenure at a community college at least.

But I never saw the mystery. Yes, it is true Forcets greatly prefer anal sex, but this is just the sexual expression of their overriding fascination. Put plainly: Forcets love jamming stuff into other stuff that won’t fit the stuff being jammed into it. And while the female genitalia, when prepared to procreate, is lubricated and welcoming of ingress, it is not always thus slippery. Which makes for perfectly attractive intercourse to a Forcet, whenever the female is not expecting it, or not in the mood, or when the last thing she needs right now is another pregnancy (often in some combination of the three).

I enjoyed my time among the Forcets. I should point out that although they are a very curious people very interested in the above activities, they are not at all rapey. I appreciated this, as do I still appreciate my collapsible suitcase, which to this day almost-but-not-quite fits enough items for a weekend away.