K. Robert Schaeffer

Word of the Day: Bifurcation

Knew this guy back in county by the name of Jessup Waskey. We called him Jess. For me, he always epitomized one of Life's bastards. Slumped in a chair out in the dayroom, musing on all he'd lost, all that'd been taken away. Old. Skin all leathery, gray hair shorn and sloppy. Hands still a bit shaky with the DT's. Fattened by prison carbs and hours of Maury re-runs. Think of him more and more these days, maybe cause I'm about the age now he was back then.

Remember this time he called me over after he got some legal mail. Everyone there knew I'd done a two-year stint at Languor Area Community College—class of '09, Go Grackles!—and so they were always pestering me with their brain busters. “Worm'll know,” they'd always tell each other. "Worm" was what they called me, short for "Bookworm" I guess, though don't recall reading any more than the next guy. Anyway, loved the attention at the time. This was back when I knew it all... Twenty-one. God, I was a little shit.

So Jess waves me over and hands me this letter. “From those bloodsuckers my wife just hired,” he explains. Seal of Mingus, Mingus & Herbgartner on the envelope. Jess et ux. had their bets down on all variety of liability suits. Big one at the time was against some beer cozy manufacturer, Jess claiming that its defective product failed to contain the freezing temps of his brewski as it was nestled between bristly thighs, and that this somehow resulted in his tragic sterility. On the outside, his wife was supposed to be leading the charge on this elusive payday, ideally sobbing before judge and jury re: her want of issue. A match made in... somewhere.

Guy talked about her constantly—Pony was her name, the wife. They met at this bar called the Dew Drop way up in Feint Gulch, eloped the next morning, and settled into a life of modest comfort in his retro, twenty-foot Slipstream. Always bragging about their timeless benders and feral fornications. Lost in the feel of her fingers through his waist-long locks, and ah, that boozy breath in his face as they woke at mid-day.

Anyway, I'm standing over him skimming the thing, and he's griping away: “It's all that damn lawyer-talk. Like they don't want you to know what they're—What's this one mean right here.”

“Motion for... Hmm, interesting, yes.” I clear my throat, trying to stall to save face. “Shall henceforth proceed separately,” scrambling for some context, damn legalese. “Deemed in the best interests of both parties. Motion for, ahem... Bifurcation.”

“That good? What's it mean?”

“Um, I...know it, sure. But maybe we should consult the Scrabble gods on this one? Just to be safe?”

Now, in my thirty-plus years down, I've scoured my share of lexicons. Read straight from "aardvark" to “zyzzyva" and back again more times than I'd care to mention. Pored over etymologies, usage intrigue, you name it. And I can tell you with the utmost confidence that few guides are less useful for one's denotative needs than the Scrabble dictionary. Not only are its definitions wanting, but it includes pretty much no words longer than seven letters, seeing as how that's the standard tile allotment for sanctioned gameplay.

I grab the thing from the C.O’'s desk and let Jess flip through it himself. Teach a man to fish and all that. Meanwhile, half the block has gathered around, awaiting my newest revelation. No pressure, right? Well, Jess is getting all impatient, dollar signs floating to the surface of his med-glazed eyes: “Just tell me what it means! It's not in here!”

I do some nimble, SAT-grade word deconstruction and smirk like the little turd I was (and likely still am): “Oh, isn't it?”

Wish I could say all the eyebrows went up, that I earned a few audible gasps, but I'm not going to glorify any of this. Honestly, was just hoping to clear I my conscience a bit.

“Furcate,” I recite. “To divide into branches.”

Ah, crud. Try reading Jess's face next—but there's no comprehension to be found. Just sincere and unwitting hope.

Could he really not get it? After all those stories of two-sided infidelities, run-ins with the law? That month he spent beneath the overpass after pawning her dog for beer money? All the frying-pan bruisers she gave him? Or that last time he stumbled home and passed out on the lawn chair, and Pony cut off all his hair? (This being the event, as Jess saw it, which led to his Samson-like downfall and present legal woes.)

Start to spell it out for them: 'Bi, meaning two...so bifurcate, or bifurcation, would mean...'

Nada.

“The division into... two branches,” looking around at all the dumb stares. “Anyone with me?” Knowledge is a curse—don't let anyone ever tell you different. Especially in a place like this.

Anyway, they say the cost of any action should be weighed against its intentions, so there's that. And those guys all knew I was only in school for a lousy Business Associates. How was I to know that, in a strictly legal sense, "bifurcation" really had nothing in particular to do with divorce? That it just meant the judge had divided his lawsuit against the Cozy Can & Cushion Co. into liability and damages proceedings?

“Dang, man,” is all I manage. “Your old lady, she's... leaving you.”

Everyone gets quiet, wanders off. Couldn't say if I actually did any lasting damage. Got sent upstate soon afterwards. Maybe they made it through. Or maybe the natural strain of his sentence wore them down. But at the time—and I guess this is what gnaws at me the most—Jess just sat there with that dead look in his eyes. Picturing all the browned grass and crushed cans of his eight-acre plot, his old briefs abandoned to blow forever in the wind, Pony being traded off week by week among Herbgartner and the smarmy Brothers Mingus, her finally packing off by Pancoast busline to some distant and nondescript double-wide, maybe even signed on as some Atlantic trawler hag, who could know? Jess, he wasn't the brightest, but he could do the mental math, figure what that left him. All those memories, the fond and the screwy, a whole existence together, transmuted by legal mumbo-jumbo (and my misinformed bullshitting), all of it coming down to an eighteen-point Scrabble play.

Freaking life, man. Or versions of it, I mean.

K. Robert Schaeffer is originally from Oley, Pennsylvania. Incarcerated since 2009, he’s won five awards in the PEN Prison Writing Contest, including a 2019 PEN/Bunker award for first prize in fiction and, most recently, a 2021 first prize in drama for his play The Stairs. His essay “Tarkovsky by Countlight” appeared in the Gettysburg Review. He’s currently at work on a series of stories and plays set in Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione.