A Peculiar Accommodation

What will it be like when Charles Dickens rings your doorbell?

He arrives at seven, accompanied by the evening fog. Once inside, he sizes you up, sizes up the tender apartment into which you have packed a year’s worth of decisions made under duress, sizes up, too, the decisions themselves, which have fallen to earth in the form of cassette tapes, bottles of bright liqueur, and a taxidermied cat. 

“This is you, is it?” says Dickens. 

Now it is your turn to size him up, despite the fact that your powers of perception are as dim as a candle (and the candle has been positioned in front of the sun!). He looks intrigued but also melancholy. His voice sounds like honey, yet his vowels are harsh. His hair and his beard have the wattled aspect you know from photos. His clothes are modern, per your request. The company that printed out his aged body and piped his interpolated personality into it agreed with you that a touch from the present century might be a good idea, if your plan was to bring him with you to a party. And indeed, that is your plan.

You arrive at the party late. It is at an old warehouse in a dilapidated neighborhood of the city. Whether this fact amuses Dickens isn’t clear. You stand side by side at the drinks table, as you wait for somebody to come say hello to you. But nobody does.

“Will you do the flattening trick?” you ask him.

This trick is on the bill of sale, and Dickens knows precisely what you mean. 

He points to a woman across the room. “There’s Florence Tuttleton,” he says. “Have you noticed how she says well I never every other sentence and wipes the sweat from her brow despite it being quite drafty in here? A real bundle of nerves. That’s all there is to say about Florence.” 

Next, he indicates the man on your left. “Mr. Chester Flimsly, a professor of logic, physics, metaphysics, metalogic, and logico-philosophicus. He wrote a dissertation on the Cogito and Snuffleupagus. The professor loves to say goodness. He is plagued, every month of the year, by gout. That’s Chester for you.”

In this manner, Dickens flattens everyone in the room, and though you’ve been to this sort of party before and have encountered all of these characters in the neighborhood, you feel for the first time that you understand them. Whatever pleasure some take in being antisocial (or — to put it more enjoyably — misanthropic; or — to put it the way your dentist did, not without derision, when you reacted too forcibly to the noise of the drill — “a little bit on the spectrum”) has not redounded to you until this moment. But now, at last, you are able to see these partygoers as a legible collection of quirks, tics, habits, proclivities, and mannerisms. The party feels delightful.

Your friend Dickens is in the midst of sketching a newcomer when Mr. Chester Flimsly hobbles up, holding a portrait on his phone so that he can compare it to the person before him. “Goodness, you’re Charles Dickens! I’ve heard of this thing. I thought they were only bringing back Hollywood celebrities.”

Certainly, you knew that he would be recognized; certainly, you strolled up to the warehouse hoping he would be recognized; certainly, you expected the goodwill he created to enhance your own prestige. But your prestige is certainly unchanged. When the people in the warehouse gather around Charles Dickens, you are pushed aside. You claw your way back, whisper “let’s go” into his ear, and then the two of you are rushing away, all while you struggle to affix your wool cap to his head, in the hopes that he will blend in for the rest of the evening.

At home, too drained from socializing to speak (much though he wants to!) you sip tea mixed with brandy and stare out the window at the skyline. When the sun finally rises, according to the contract, your time with him is up. He stands, bows, and, quoting the preface to one of his beloved works, says, “May we meet again.”