The Date She Didn't Ask For

She does not go back the next day. She tells the estate she needs to type up the first four lines cleanly, and this is true, and it is also the smallest lie she has told in years, which is why it takes her so long to notice she is telling it. The four lines sit on her screen in three columns. Phonetic Vist. Ollan's Marnish. Her third tongue, clean as glass. She has done this a thousand times. She reads the third column and feels nothing, which is the proof that she has done her job. Then she scrolls up, past the columns, to the top of the page where she wrote the seventh word wrong, and the nothing goes away. The buzzer sounds at four. Deri stands in the corridor with his device held against his chest like something he is either delivering or refusing to hand over. He does not have the red eye with him. She notices this the way she notices missing consonants — by the shape of the absence. "I didn't record coming here," he says, before she asks. "In case you wondered whether this was work." She lets him in. Two chairs, one table, no poet between them to translate the silence. "You said you catalogue what's given to you." She sets no recorder down. Neither does he. "So who gave you the sealed file." "That's the thing." He sits without being asked, which she reads as fear rather than rudeness. "Nobody gave it. It was already in the archive when I inherited the archive. Bureau seal, a date, no speaker attached. Every other file has a mouth behind it — a name, a last speaker, a language dying. That one has only the date and the seal." He turns the device over in his hands. "An archive is supposed to be a room full of the dead. This is a room with one locked coffin and no name on it. It offends the whole idea of the work." "Ollan said it concerns me." "Ollan says a great deal." But his hand has stopped moving. "I checked, after. I'm not supposed to read the metadata but I can see the shape of a file without opening it. The way you said you can hear a word is Vist before you know its meaning." He looks up. "The seal is a language seal. Whatever's inside is spoken. And the classification isn't *preserve.* It's *do not hold.*" She has spent her career being a window. Windows do not flinch. She flinches. "There's a difference," Deri says, carefully, the way Ollan says things, and she wonders if the dying man has taught it to him without either of them noticing. "*Archive* means keep the shape. *Do not hold* means make sure no living mouth ever carries it forward. Someone didn't just want this forgotten. They wanted it un-holdable." He sets the device on the table between them, still dark. "I've never opened it because opening it puts a mouth to it. Mine. And then it's held, and then it's mine, and then whatever the Bureau wanted buried is walking around inside a person again." A pause. "You asked about a door. That's the door. I've stood in front of it for six years." The fog is not here today. The light is flat and ordinary and gives her nothing to hide behind. "You said it had a date," she says. His hand rises toward the device. Stays there, half-lifted, the way she has watched Ollan's hand stay over a word he will not translate — long enough that the not-giving becomes its own kind of speech. She counts three of her own heartbeats before it comes down again, not retreating this time, just resting. "If I say the date," Deri says, "and it's a year you buried, then I've held it, and I've given it to you, and neither of us can put it back. Translation transfers meaning. It doesn't return it." His voice is very level. "So I'm going to say it once. And you can decide, after, whether you heard it." He says the date. She does not write it down. She does not need to. Her mouth already knows the road — she can feel it, the way she felt the seventh word in the dark, some sound waiting behind her teeth for a language she stopped speaking so that this exact year could not follow her out of it. "I heard it," she says. And is a little surprised to find she is not lying now. Deri picks up his device. At the door he doesn't turn. "Tomorrow he'll have fewer lines than today," he says. "Whatever you're going to do about the coffin with no name, do it while there's still a mouth left to hold it." The door closes soft. She goes back to her screen. Three clean columns, and above them the wrong-spelled word she would not erase. Now, beneath the date on her page — the count, the scope, the lie about typing — she writes the year Deri gave her, in her own bad spelling, in the alphabet that will not hold it. Then she writes, in the clean third tongue she is paid to be perfect in, a note the file does not require and no one will ever ask for: *the poem is exactly as long as a life. Whose.* She does not cross that out either.