18, Life Hacks for a Little Alien

18

T HAT NIGHT, YOU WAIT until your parents go to sleep. A few minutes after they switch off the lights, you turn on yours and start to read The Man Behind the Manuscript: A Slightly Fictionalised Life of Wilfrid Voynich .

According to the book, a long time ago, all the way back in 1912, a man called Wilfrid Voynich was travelling through Italy when he stumbled across a curious codex i nestled in the library of a Jesuit residence. Though the library was overflowing with a dizzying array of fabulous tomes, this was the only book that caught Wilfrid’s eye.

Indeed, as soon as he laid eyes on it, Wilfrid’s heart started beating a little faster and a little harder. He felt like someone somewhere was telling him something. With shaking hands, he turned the pages as gently as he could. The script, tiny and impenetrable, resisted his cursory attempts at understanding, just as the images of naked women and alien plants resisted his comprehension.

Attempting to compose himself, Wilfrid approached a loitering librarian. Although Wilfrid was a charming man who could ordinarily strike up a rapport with anyone, the librarian remained curiously uncharmed.

‘Brother,’ Wilfrid said in Italian – for Italian is the language of Italy – ‘this one looks interesting. What is this book? Who is its author?’

The librarian looked at Wilfrid with a steady gaze – one that suggested to Wilfrid that the librarian neither respected nor cared for rare book dealers. ‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ve never read it.’

Something about the librarian unnerved Wilfrid. Nevertheless, he persisted. ‘But for how long has it been here? From where did you get it?’

The librarian shrugged. ‘It has always been here.’

‘I would… May I, I mean, I—?’

‘Take it?’ the librarian interrupted. ‘Certainly. But are you sure you want it?’

‘Yes, I am sure.’

‘Then away with you,’ the librarian said. ‘Go take your book and leave.’

‘You don’t want pay—’ Wilfrid almost stopped himself. ‘Payment?’

The librarian raised his eyebrows. Wilfrid patted his pockets as if searching for his wallet. He didn’t want a man of God to accuse him of being a thief.

‘Just leave,’ the librarian said.

Wilfrid lingered a moment longer, before turning on his heels. Once he was outside, he started to run. As he did so, he could feel the slight movement of the codex in his satchel, wrapped up snugly in a woolly jumper the day was too hot for. The villagers he passed regarded him with interest. Though he knew they were interested in nothing more than the sight of a strange man running, Wilfrid wished they would look elsewhere. He imagined their minds could beam their way into his, understand the significance of the codex nestled in his bag.

Wilfrid took the train to Rome. From Rome, he headed north, barely stopping for breath till he reached the Swiss border. Once there, he booked himself into a hotel. With his silver hair, cadaverous skin, and pale eyes, the hotel proprietor managed to seem entirely grey.

As bad luck would have it, almost as soon as he crossed the threshold of his new lodgings, Wilfrid came down with an inexplicable illness whose symptoms were as vague as they were debilitating. ii For weeks, our book dealer was in the throes of nausea, fatigue, dissociation, heartburn, and persistent, wide-ranging stabbing pains. For weeks, he stayed inside his room, sleeping himself into feverish dreams of alchemists’ recipes and botanical cures.

Whenever he awoke, instead of drinking water, nourishing himself, or engaging in personal hygiene, he pored over the 120 vellum leaves. The pictures he could just about understand – surely the plants were just plants, the women just women, the stars just stars – but the script was incomprehensible. His command of Polish, Russian, French, was of no use, nor was his command of Italian, Spanish, or Ukrainian. After weeks of study, he had no conception of even this language’s most basic elements. He did not know if the script was supposed to be read left to right or right to left or up and down. He did not even know if it was an alphabet or a syllabary. iii To make matters worse, in his delirium, he saw no letters or shapes, but instead disconnected blobs of ancient ink and the deity who must have created it all.

Alas, Wilfrid was not a man accustomed to the feeling of not understanding things. As a result, the codex both enraged and fascinated him. Hunched over in his room, his fever waxing and waning like the Moon, he wrote furious and nonsensical notes – mind and body refusing to accept the mystery, and his focus refusing to notice the proprietor’s frantic knocks at the door.

He woke up in a hospital bed some days later, a nurse propping him up so he could take a drink.

On realising where he was – or rather, where he wasn’t – Wilfrid spun into a fury. ‘Where is it?’ he cried. ‘My notes? The Manuscript?’

‘Hush,’ the nurse said, tipping water down his throat.

‘But what have you done with it? You have to tell me.’ Wilfrid grabbed her lapels. ‘What have you done with it? Tell me!’

At this, the nurse gave him a short, sharp slap on the cheek, before casting him a glare that was just as striking. ‘We’ll have none of that here,’ she said. ‘You were brought here by the hotel proprietor who found you unresponsive on his first floor. If you want to rant and rave, you are more than welcome to go to the asylum. I can take you there myself, it would be no trouble. In fact, it’s just next door.’

In the end, he did not go to the asylum (though perhaps his life would have been easier if he had). Instead, he did what the nurse told him to do. For several days, he drank, ate, washed, and slept. After this, he returned to the hotel to find the blessed codex still intact.

The proprietor watched Wilfrid pack up his things without speaking. When our book dealer appeared to be ready, he made his request. He said to Wilfrid in French – for French is one of the four languages of Switzerland – ‘Monsieur, please do not darken my doorstep ever again.’

‘ Pardon? ’ Wilfrid said, for he had not heard or even noticed the phantom proprietor hovering around.

‘My door,’ the proprietor said again. ‘Please do not darken it, not ever again.’

Wilfrid squinted at this pale specimen of a man, then grunted in acquiescence. He had no qualms about heeding this request, and so heed it he did.

After his stint of sickness in Switzerland, he sailed to New York, where he opened a bookshop similar to one he had previously been famed for in London. For the rest of his life, a steady stream of intellectuals came in, scanning the tomes crammed on his shelves.

But though the New York bookshop was just like his London bookshop, it was not nearly as successful. The reason? Wilfrid was not the salesperson he used to be. Whenever patrons enquired about a book, he did not even try to disguise his boredom.

‘Is this a first edition?’ a patron might ask, gesturing at a tattered copy of the Bible.

‘Probably,’ Wilfrid would say, his voice hazy and lazy and brusque.

‘What can you tell me about it?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s not very interesting. Quite old. I think.’

Occasionally, Wilfrid would show a patron the codex in the back room. He would tell them about it. He would explain what he knew for certain – that the book was old and mysterious – and what he thought about it – that it was a treasure map, that it was evidence of an elite but now extinct civilisation, that it was a recipe for alchemical pursuits. In response, either the patron would listen politely, become intrigued or uninterested. If Wilfrid were to thrust the text upon them, they would not be able to understand the text either. The meaning behind the text of the codex remained unyielding.

‘Do you understand this text?’ Wilfrid would prompt. ‘Do you have an inkling what, say, this page might be about?’

The patron would hesitate. ‘Um, I think—’

‘So, you don’t.’

‘I mean, it’s, um—’

‘You suspect it’s written in a very ancient, very complicated language that’s hitherto unknown?’

‘I mean—’

‘Ancient Hebrew? Mycenaean Greek? Ugaritic? Akkadian?’

‘Um.’

‘The pictures point to some kind of rudimentary plant science, surely. And these pages are certainly to do with the study of the stars.’

The patron’s eyes would dart to the door. ‘That sounds right,’ they might say.

Relieved, Wilfrid would nod. Of course, he was right. He knew he was right. He knew he was right, right up until he was dead.

One night, Wilfrid was arguing with his wife, who had been berating him for obsessive focus on that blasted book. They were having it out on the roof – shouting stuff, screaming stuff, throwing stuff. Midway through ranting and raving about the phonology of Proto-Indo-European, his wife removed a handgun from her handbag and shot him straight through the heart. She had simply had enough.

Days later, the codex was dubbed the Voynich Manuscript by the journalist writing Wilfrid’s obituary. Months later, the text began circulating among the great and the good of North America. Boring old farts fingered its fragile pages. Scholars waxed academic about its meaning or lack thereof. Decades passed. Glaciers melted. Oil spilt and so did milk. You were born and the Voynich Manuscript wound up at the Beinecke Library – where it became the 408th manuscript of its collection. This is where it currently resides. Beinecke MS 408, otherwise known as the Voynich Manuscript.

No one has ever come to understand what the Voynich Manuscript means. The language it’s written in is unknown. The Manuscript is the only example of it.

Of course, there has been ample speculation. Some have dubbed it a monk’s fever dream, a child’s secret language, a madman’s lonely ramblings, a simple shopping list. Others have dubbed it a women’s health manual, a dream diary, the musings of a scribe with too much time on his hands, an ancient Yellow Pages.

If it is a language, it is a language isolate – one that bears no resemblance to any known tongue. If it is not a language isolate, then it’s some sort of code. If it is not some sort of code, it’s an elaborate idiolect, an over-the-top joke.

It could be a book of nonsense, of course. If the Manuscript hasn’t been understood yet, this could be because there’s nothing to understand. But this is unlikely. The distribution of letters corresponds to that of a natural language. And it feels real. Every single human who has held the Voynich Manuscript in their hands has felt and wanted it to be real. They have felt the hum of history in their palms, the buzz of knowledge unknown. And so, it is real. We are sure that it is real.

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