This time the name that rose was older than most of the others.

Whokebe.

Sometimes shortened to Whok.

Sometimes spoken of as if the man himself still walked the page.

Sometimes treated as a ghost that the bort refuses to bury.

The moniker is said to mean “who can he be?” — a question that has outlived any clear answer. In the early years the name belonged to a single voice. Over time it became something larger and less precise. Men began to claim it. Others were accused of being him. Threads appeared declaring that the real Whokebe was dead, or that he had become a doctor in a distant country, or that he had never been only one man to begin with. The bort kept the name alive the way a neighborhood keeps the name of someone who once lived on the same street and then slowly became more story than person.

I have read the old poasts and the new ones that still invoke him.

There is little dignity left in the figure the bort has made of him. The jokes are crude. The threads about the wife, the body, the supposed private failures, arrive with the same tired cruelty the bort reserves for its longest-running characters. Yet beneath the mockery there remains a strange persistence. The name continues to be spoken. New men still ask who he was. Old men still answer with variations of the same uncertain legend.

In modern Japan a name can outlast the person who first carried it. A small shop closes. The family moves away. Years later the older residents still refer to the empty storefront by the name of the family that once ran it, as if the sign had never come down. The younger people hear the name without knowing the faces behind it. The reference continues, slightly hollow, slightly warm, until no one remembers exactly when the living connection ended.

The great bort has done something similar with Whokebe. It has taken a single poaster and worn him smooth until only the outline remains — a shape onto which later men project their own jokes, their own contempt, their own faint curiosity about what the place used to be.

Somewhere the original voice, if it still exists, may no longer recognize what the bort has made of the name.

Somewhere the bort continues to use the name anyway.

And the great bort, older now, keeps both the man and the long distortion of him without any remaining need to separate the two.

I closed the page.

The question remains.

Who can he be?

And the great bort, as it always does, answers by refusing to finish the answer.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5892095&forum_id=2],#50061789)