The First Word and the Last

The book of her own tongue begins the way all such books begin: with the small words, the ones a mouth learns before it learns to lie. She has been at it for eleven days. The words come. That is the cruelty she was warned about — the words come and the year they were spoken in does not. She says the word for *water* and her mouth remembers the shape of it, but the hand that held the cup, the face above the hand, stays a hole. Translation transfers meaning between people. It never carries a tongue back into the body that lost it. She knows this now the way she once knew it as a fact and now knows it as a wall she keeps walking into in the dark. She practices aloud, into the empty estate, because a language relearned in silence is only shape, and she has spent her whole life among shapes. Deri comes on the ninth day. In person, off any reel, the recorder left in the car — she watches him decide that at the door, the small tilt of him choosing not to bring the machine in. He sits across the table where Ollan's six lines are, and she teaches him the count the way you teach a child a rhyme: three, a pause, two. Not from watching. His hand is stiff. He has spent his life keeping the count outside himself, on tape, in files, and now he is letting it into the muscle where it will not come out again. "You built a thing to escape holding," she says — his own words, back to him. "It escaped into more holding." "I know what I said." His hand catches the rhythm, loses it, catches it. "I'm slower than I recorded. It turns out the reel was always the easy part." He resists the syllable longer than he resists the count. The *—reth*. She hears him not-say it three sessions running, letting the count in but keeping the root at his teeth, and she does not push. His whole life has been the argument that a sound preserved is a thing saved. To hum the root is to admit the argument was wrong. On the eleventh day she is ready. Or she is not ready, and there is no eleventh day that will make her more so, and Ollan told her not to do it quietly. "I'm going to say line seven," she tells him. "The last line. Her name. Not translate it. Say it." "To me." "To a living ear. Yes." She looks at the page — the whole date in her hand, *Whose* still unanswered above it, and she will not answer it there. It does not belong on paper. Paper is a drawer waiting to be sealed. He sets his hands flat on the table. "Then I have to be able to carry it. If you say it and I can't hold it after, you've made her live in one mouth again, and one mouth is —" "Half a coffin. I know." So he hums it first. The root, at last, in his own mouth — not because he has stopped believing the machine saves things, but because he has finally believed it doesn't. *—reth*, low, the tail she carried twenty years to bury. She lets it land. Then she reads the six lines aloud, loud, the count in every place it falls, the way the dead man asked, and when she reaches the seventh stair she does not skip it. She says the line. The name. It is short. It is nothing the Bureau could spell from a reel. It arrives in her mouth front-first and whole, the way Ollan's last words used to arrive, and it fills the room the size of a life, and then it is only air. Deri's mouth moves. He says it back. Badly, the front of it soft — but it is in him now, in a living body, held. Two mouths. For as long as they say it. Neither of them writes it down. The date stays a date in a drawer above Nemin's desk, unfiled, un-nameable, and the name stays what a name is supposed to be — a thing a mouth carries to another mouth, findable by no one who does not already love it enough to learn the count. When he is gone she takes out the page one last time. She does not add the name. Under everything she writes, in the hand that does not shake: *Said. Held. Not filed. I got the words back. I did not get the year. I am going to keep saying her anyway, and teaching the count, until there are more than two.* Then she turns back to the first page of her own tongue, where the child-words are, and begins again — because a holder is not a thing you finish being. She counts. Three. A pause. Two. Aloud, into the room, to whoever comes next.