Fewer Lines Than Yesterday

He is smaller than she left him. Not by much — a fingernail's worth of a man, the difference you'd only notice if you'd been counting. Ollan is propped against the pillows, and the light through the estate window lands on him the way it lands on paper left too long in a window: something has gone out of the surface. His hand is on the sheet, palm up, open. She has seen that hand close over a word and refuse it. Today it does not seem to have the strength to close. "You came," he says. The *ame* arrives clean. It is *begin* that has been going, the fronts of his words wearing away first, and she wonders which morning he will wake and find the whole front of a line has left in the night and taken its meaning with it. She sits. The recorder is on the far table, dark; Deri is not here. Good. What she is about to do has no shape for a machine. "Line five," she says. She has typed the first four clean. She does not tell him she also has a page he will never see, the wrong seventh word and a date and a count with no words under it, and that all three came here with her, riding under her tongue like a swallowed pill. He recites. It is shorter than yesterday's lines. She writes the Vist in phonetics, and her pen is steady, and this is the work, and the work does not stay in her, and — — on the third sound her hand stops. Three sounds. A pause. Then it should be two. She knows it should be two before he says them, the way you know a stair in the dark by the memory in your knee. He gives her three, and pauses, and gives her two. Three, pause, two. She does not look up. If she looks up he will see it on her, and she has spent a career being a surface nothing lands on. "Say it again," she says. Not: *I need to check the phonemes.* She has stopped, for once, at the true sentence. Ollan says it again. Three, pause, two. The same shape her thumb found in the cassette ribbon, in the dark, wound out of a grandmother or someone whose face has gone soft at the edges. The count is in his poem. The count was in her hands. She had told herself they were separate rooms. She sets the pen down the way you set down something that might be sleeping. "This measure," she says, and her paid voice, her clean third tongue, betrays nothing and this frightens her, "does it repeat. Through the poem." "It counts the—" He stops. The word does not come; the front of it has gone, or perhaps it was never a word he meant to give her. His open hand turns, slightly, the fingers curling and then failing to close, resting. "It counts," he says. "That's the—. Everything after counts down from it." *The poem is exactly as long as a life.* She wrote that in the alphabet that will not hold it, and asked, in her own bad hand, *whose*, and did not cross it out. Now the count is on both sides of the glass — his page and her body — and a window is not supposed to be on both sides of itself. She should ask him. *Whose life. Who is inside it. Is it the year I buried, is it me, is it someone the city decided never existed.* One question and the coffin has a name. She does not ask. Because she understands, sitting in the wearing-away light with his open hand between them, that to make it legible is to hand it over — to Deri's seal, to the Bureau, to the thing that classified something *do not hold* because that was worse to them than dead. Deri's warning is in her ear, but under it now she hears its other edge: *hold it* means put a living mouth to it, and the moment she does, whatever is inside is walking around in a person again. In her. "Sae," Ollan says. She looks up before she can decide not to. He has never used her name before. Professional courtesy, both of them, all these weeks — his poet's distance, her window's distance. He says it now the way he says the words he means to keep: slowly, as though checking whether the front of it is still there. "The last line," he says. "When we—. When we reach it. You will not translate it." "You've said." "I'm saying it while I still have the mouth to say it." The *saying* comes out whole. Some words, near the end, arrive intact, and she does not yet know the rule that governs which. "Promise me the last line, and I'll give you all the rest. Even the count." She thinks of her page. Three, pause, two, written under a date, under a wrong word, next to everything she refuses to erase. She thinks: he is offering me the thing my hands already stole. He is offering to let me hold it on purpose. "I promise the last line," she says. It is not a lie. She has almost forgotten what it costs to say a thing that isn't. His hand closes then — barely, the smallest muscle finding the smallest strength — around nothing, around the air where a pencil would be if he were the one winding. Three, pause, two. He does it without knowing he does it. She watches the count move through a dying man's fingers and knows, the way her mouth knew the road in the dark, that it moved through someone's fingers before either of them was born, and that the someone is the person the poem is counting down toward, and that she has just promised to keep the last of them unspeakable. "Line six," she says. He gives it to her. It is shorter than five.