On the Power of a Name

Katarina Ysabella Lynch had too many letters to herself. It just wasn’t fair to the Jon’s and the Meg’s and the Ruth’s that she should own twenty-one letters and seven vowels when most people could barely claim half that. She blamed her parents for this selfish part of her character, and she felt the need to share with people who learned her name that if she could have, she would not have picked something so grandiose. 

Katarina learned how to spell her name when she was four years old, a whole year before she went to kindergarten and would be expected to know it. Her mother insisted that she had a head start, since most likely even her teachers wouldn’t know how to spell it correctly, and she may be called upon to teach them. 

On her first day of kindergarten she stood up in her chair when her teacher called her name, and spelled it out for her clearly and slowly, much to the wide eyed surprise of the other children, and the unstifled amusement of her teacher. Five year old Katarina took this as praise and admiration, and proceeded to show off her knowledge whenever she had the chance. 

Adorable can quickly become precocious with the passing of years, and by the time Katarina was in fifth grade most of her classmates had many names for her, very few relating to her Christian one. Katarina excelled in school, but not quietly or demurely, and it didn’t help matters that she was three inches taller than the tallest boy in her grade, and wore round glasses that forever slipped down her nose when she would raise her hand with viscous enthusiasm.

On her eleventh birthday, she made her first friend. Lham Choden, a recent immigrant from Bhutan, found herself tucked under Katarina’s bony wing on her first day, from the moment the latter realized that Lham did not understand enough English to protest when Katarina began one of her long speeches about cellular life cycles, and the ever changing mystery of the forest floor. 

Lham remained as Katarina’s only companion until they reached high school, and boys started to find Lham’s soft accent, almond eyes and perfect skin to be as appealing as Katarina’s moth-like blue eyes and skinny frame was unappealing. Out of duty that came from understanding what it was like to be spitefully ignored, Lham tried to remain friends with Katarina as she became popular, but it was not foretold. Katarina convinced herself thoroughly that Lham abandoned her for vapid popularity, but the truth was as soon as people other than herself began to show interest in Lham, Katarina became angry and jealous and known to say hurtful things because she was painfully insecure. 

By the time Katarina was eighteen years old and marched across a stage to receive her diploma, she had published a book of poetry to general success, had discovered an issue in the dissertation of a Harvard professor, and had a short story included in an anthology edited by Toni Morrison. She had filled out into her scarecrow frame, purchased contact lenses and now vaguely resembled a runway model. She was fond of wearing turtlenecks and ill fitting Goodwill jeans, but her braces were gone and her eyes had gone from being spookily lamplike to luminous, framed with naturally dark eyelashes instead of the Coke bottle glasses of her youth.

She had no friends, and all of her acquaintances were at least twenty years older than she was. Katarina, at this point self aware, blamed it all on her name. 

She told her parents that before she left for Oxford, a suitcase packed with six outfits and a toothbrush shoved into a corner, and books cramming full the rest of the space.

“If I had been a Meg or a Sue or even a regular Isabelle,” she told them coldly over her going away dinner, “I might not have been like this.”

“Like what, sweetheart,” asked her mother, although she knew what her daughter meant.

“You are perfect,” her father said, even though he cringed at his own lie.

“You can be whoever you want,” her mother said.

“I am Katarina Ysabella Lynch,” said Katarina Ysabella Lynch, “and that is all I will ever be able to be.”

In England, Katarina was sitting at a cafe writing a research paper. (In the United States, she wrote gothic poetry, in England, she wrote about science- the contradiction delighted her). A boy came up and sat down across from her, setting a plate of scones in between them. 

He had dark hair and dark eyes and shadow on his strong jaw. 

“What’s your name?” he asked, and when she told him he said, “Do you ever go by Kat?”

For this question she refused to have sex with him, but she did lose her virginity four months later to a Scottish boy who didn’t mind her condescending and endless intellect because he quite liked her long blonde hair and full teardrop breasts.

Afterward, while Charlie’s head still rested on her stomach, she announced that sex was the most overrated thing she had ever done. “And I moved to England to be a writer,” she added. Charlie wasn’t offended, only disappointed that she did not want to give it another try.

And so Katarina was so very Katarina for ten more years, until the day that she meant the homeless man who didn’t have any letters for himself at all.

Almost-thirty year old Katarina was on her way to her book signing in France wearing a wool Chanel suit and kitten heels, not because she cared anything about fashion, but because she liked how so long as she was wearing a visibly name brand outfit, it did not really matter what she was wearing at all. She thought it was a poignant statement about wealth and disparity and foolish consumerism which she talked about extensively in the book she was on her way to sign.

Back to the Parisian street where Katarina had nearly made it to her destination when a homeless man stepped into her path so quickly that water from a puddle washed over her kitten heels.

“These shoes were two thousand dollars,” Katarina said with mild aggression, staring at the water between her toes and avoiding eye contact with the ragged man in front of her.

“Have you ever been to the coast?” he said with an American accent, and Katarina looked up to look down her nose at him, even though he was taller than she was. 

The man had green eyes and a long brown beard and he wore a patched tweed coat. He might have been one of the many disheveled professors and academics Katarina had become acquainted with over the years, if it wasn’t for the shopping cart full of worldly possessions parked behind him, and for the fact that he was barefoot. 

“Yes,” Katarina replied, and tried to step past the man.

He stepped in front of her so quickly it was almost like they were playing a strange game of basketball. “Tell me,” he said in a hushed and frantic voice, “Did the waves speak to you too?”

“Sir,” Katarina said in her most prestigious tone, “Please remove yourself from my path, I have somewhere to be.”

The man gasped nearly theatrically and covered his mouth with both hands, like a child.

“How did you know what waves told me?” He breathed, and before Katarina could do anything the man reached out and clutched her shoulders, his fingers biting and desperate.

“I was standing on the rocks,” the man whispered, “And I was about to jump down to where the white foam gathered on the stony beach, where the water crashed again and again and again. I was about to jump to my death, to the complete end of me, when I heard the waves speak in my ears. Remove yourself from my path, you have somewhere to be. That’s what the waves said.”

Katarina blinked into the homeless man’s frantic and earnest gaze, and for a moment it might have appeared to a bystander that the man’s story had moved her, but the moment passed and she shoved him off of her with a push and exclamation.

The man staggered back, but as Katarina went to walk past him he reached out and clutched at her arm.

“Please,” he said, “My feet are so cold, could I have your shoes?” 

Katarina whirled around, indignant. 

“How dare-” she began, and then stopped suddenly, inexplicably. 

“If you are really going to wear my heels,” she said coldly, “I suppose I should give them to you.”

And than Katarina Ysabella Lynch, with complete dignity, bent down and slipped off her multi- thousand dollar shoes and handed them to the homeless man. 

He bowed to her, and said, with his face turned to the cold cement and Katarina’s now bare feet against it, “The ocean never forgets its debts.”

When Katarina walked into her book signing, the people gathered waiting for her saw an impeccably dressed woman with red, bare feet and a surprisingly pleased yet stoic expression. On the street, a homeless man pushed his cart slowly, his feet inexplicably encased perfectly in a woman’s small kitten heels. 

Katarina found herself unable to forget about the homeless man in the months that succeeded their chance encounter. She would think of him at random moments, while she dined alone at one of Paris’s upscale restaurants, while she was giving a guest lecture at a university in her perfect but slightly accented French, in the moments between awakening and sleep when her sharp mind briefly rested in dormancy. 

It was unclear even to her what about him she was unable to shake, and perhaps if she had allowed her analytical heart to pause and truly reflect, she would have come to the conclusion that what she couldn’t forget was her own response. Katarina’s life had been outlined the moment her parents wrote her name on her birth certificate, and if she had paused to really think, she would have been alarmed to see how her actions had so unpredictable diverged from her carefully placed path.

The homeless man was possibly the only person Katarina had ever met who had given her pause, who had made her unsure of herself, for even the briefest moment. 

She saw him again months later. Shockingly, it was in America, hundreds of miles from the Parisian street where they had first encountered one another. 

She was at Harvard to give a lecture on her dissertation on genetics, and saw the homeless man sitting beside a small pond on campus, resting beneath a maple tree beginning its beautiful death. 

Katarina stopped stock still and stared, sure at first that it was just a professor, worse for the wear and resembling a mad man she had met across the ocean from here. As she watched, the man turned, and she saw his eyes, wildly piercing under curtain brows and shining over his expanse of facial hair. It was him, there was no doubt. 

When he saw her he waved, and her mind, the morbidly curious one of a scientific poet, directed her feet off the stone path and across the grass to stand before him.

His shopping cart was perched next to him, and Katarina could have sworn it was the exact same one he had in France, but that was impossible. 

“You!” He exclaimed, as though it was her who was impossibly here in Cambridge. He stood and smiled eagerly. “Have you been to the coast yet?”

“No,” Katarina said, “How did you get here?”

The man stared at her blankly, and Katarina had the unprecedented thought that maybe she had just said something foolish.

“I’ve always been here,” he said and shook his head, like she was intentionally being slow. “Except for when I stood at the rock cliff overlooking the ocean, of course. I told you that story, didn’t I, when I saw you that other life ago?”

Katarina stared. “That was just a few months ago,” she said, “In Paris, don’t you remember? I gave you my shoes?” 

“Of course I remember,” the homeless man said, aghast, “Look!”

He held out one foot for her inspection, and she was shocked to see her shoe still on it, dirty and with holes, but unmistakable. 

“Oh,” she said, “But, how did you get here? I mean, did you take a plane?”

She felt almost angry, but didn’t know why. 

“Lady,” the man said impatiently, “I just told you, I have always been here.”

He turned away from her, shuffled back towards his shopping cart and tree. She stared after him, her throat burning with frustration, an almost frantic need to know overtaking her. 

He turned back to face her, right when she was about to leave, her senses slowly coming back to her with a completely unfamiliar rush of humiliation. “Hey!” He barked, startling her. “I need one of your names.”

“Excuse me?” Katarina said, completely dumbfounded for the first time in all of her three decades of life.

“You have too many names,” he explained patiently, reminding Katarina of the professor who she thought he was at first, “You have too many and I have none, so we will both feel better this way.”

“You are a madman,” Katarina said firmly, but before she left she gave him an olive branch. “You can take my last name, I never found much use for it anyway.”

The man beamed and pressed his hand to his chest, as though her name was a bird he had pinned there. “Thank you,” he said, “Now go to the coast, woman. The ocean always remembers its debts.”

That night Katarina Ysabella awoke from a dead sleep mortified at her actions, and desperately confused. She was furious at her strange compulsion to obey the homeless man, at her desire to know his story. She was humiliated, and confused at the emotion, having never felt it before. 

If she had paused, taken the time to feel the emotions rushing over her, instead of analyzing them, she would have noticed that ancestral grief was gone, genetic predispositions erased. She would have noticed that now, without her last name, her lineage began with her, the only stories she carried now were the ones she was making.

The homeless man found Katarina at Wellington Square, inside Oxford University where she was reading poetry. She looked up and saw him sitting in the back, his beard wild and his shopping cart squeezed into the aisle beside him.  

For the first time in her life Katarina became aware of the way that she read, and found herself self conscious of the way she pronounced her L’s. She gave them to the homeless man, later, when he asked her for her middle name. She handed it over to him along with a copy of her latest poetry book, which he tucked into his shopping cart.

“Where are you sleeping?” she asked him, thinking about the bitterly cold English winter that was waiting for them outside the warm stone walls. 

The homeless man smiled at her, showing perfectly white teeth, “I told you, lady, the ocean pays its debts and I’m paying mine too.”

“That’s not an answer,” Katarina insisted. 

“Go to the coast,” he said, “Don’t keep asking questions until you listen to the answers that are waiting for you.”

She watched him slowly make his way across the parking lot, snow swirling around him, until he disappeared beyond the glow of the streetlights. Katarina shivered, she was cold. She wrapped her arms around herself as she walked to her car, surprised at her own warmth. 

The homeless man begged her for her only remaining name at an Oklahoma gas station, where he refused a ride but accepted her spare tire. 

In Washington, DC, where Katarina had been invited to speak at an environmental summit, the homeless man pleaded again for her name. Kat gave him her wallet, her coat, her Chanel bag, but kept her name tucked close to her.

The last time the homeless man visited her was back in Paris, where he slid into a seat across from her in a cafe. She almost didn’t recognize him, and he almost didn’t recognize her. His beard was gone, as was the ragged tweed coat. He wore a linen button down shirt and dark slacks. His eyes were still wild and bright. She wore overalls and a white T shirt, and her hair was long and uncombed. Her face was still stoic, but her eyes were soft. 

One last time, he asked her for her name. 

“It’s mine to give,” she said. “Shouldn’t it be mine to keep?”

He kissed her palm across the table.

“It was never yours,” he said, “It was never you. Go to the coast, remember, the ocean always pays it’s debts.”

“What does that mean?” Katarina asked.

“The ocean gives,” the man said, “When the ocean takes. Good luck, but there is no such thing as luck, there is only what happens, and what doesn’t.”

Katarina went to a coastal town, checked into a small cottage on the beach and opened all the windows to let the salt air in. 

When she was ready, she went down to the beach, where the waves crashed onto white sand, and a little ways up, onto hard unforgiving rocks.

Kat, she wrote in the sand in the place where the waves would wash it away almost immediately, and she felt herself grow lighter as her name was erased, freedom flooding in right at the moment when she became obsolete.