His first stop was the main department, where the long line of people snaking down the corridor made him cringe. Raising his head, he understood why the dead kept coming en masse, and why, despite the thoughts perched on the tip of their tongues, to judge from their troubled gazes, they waited in silence. The floor-to-ceiling sign read: BABEL—DON’T BE LATE OR YOU’LL DISCOMBOBULATE. Ben had a hunch that these tongue-tied dead brought the nasty habit of perpetual postponement with them from the old world. He assumed these dead were in a silent race against the clock to have their microchip updated before a full year of sand ran through the hourglass, forever trapping them in a languageless wasteland. Ben, at first, had a hard time imagining what would happen to a dillydallier; two hours later, the vein in his temple threatening to explode, his curiosity was more than satisfied, and he was left longing for a handful of extra-strength aspirin. But before witnessing the communication meltdown, he visited the second department, where the sign read LIFE AND DEATH AT THE HANDS OF THE TONGUE. Here, too, he was greeted by a divine hush. He turned to one of the dead and asked in a whisper about the department. The man smiled, opened his mouth, and pointed to the gap between his top and bottom teeth. Ben looked at him perplexedly and whispered, “I don’t…” Before he had a chance to complete his thought, Ben felt the mute’s dainty fingers clasp his tongue.
Coming out of the elevator on the third floor, he felt a rush of longing for the speechless. The This-and-That Department surged with unprecedented verbal activity. The thin dividers between the ten different lines failed to contain the ghastly commotion, and Ben, who had taken it upon himself to stand in each line to see if his wife was one of the verbal therapists receiving the loquacious patients, had to shield his ears from the tumult. For her sake, Ben hoped that Marian wasn’t a staff member in the cacophonous department but, spurred on by the steady drum roll of his own curiosity, he tamped down his rising aversion and waited patiently for five hours till he reached the front of the line, where he could inquire about his wife. While waiting, he endured a conversation between two former mutes, who, after a lifetime of silence, were so eager to make up for missed time that even when they tried to slow their chatter, they found they had lost control of their tongues. Ben was surrounded by people in the throes of their own personal Babel story. They were plagued by an array of disorders, the result of their dalliance: some people’s lips formed sentences that came out in a dozen different languages; some had voices that produced a disharmonic blend of languages and accents; some stirred a disorienting brew of the chip’s one-hundred-plus tongues, produced in a single sputtering stream of gibberish; some had an obsessive need to rhyme; some spoke in a sped-up pattern of speech that operated at three times its normal pace; some in a slowed down version that came out at half time; some could only make palindrome-ridden conversation; some dropped vowels, consonants, and letters; and, strangest of all, some exhibited an awful lack of synchronicity between their flapping lips and their voices.
In the elevator on the way up to the fourth floor, the throbbing in his temple spread down to the back of his neck. He couldn’t bear the thought that the next floor might be equally nerve-wracking. He closed his eyes, imagined his wife massaging his temples with one of the many aromatic oils she kept on hand for steamy nights, and left the elevator with a smile.
To his surprise, the hall was empty, and he made his way slowly, soaking up the silence. Soon enough, he learned that the hallway’s thirty-two doors were part of an academic maze of etymologists, philologists, and phoneticians who bored into the irregularities of language. Finding no trace of his wife in any of the rooms, he bounded up to the top floor, a trace of tension in his stride. The fifth floor, known as The Uppertongue, held thousands of experts, bent over tomes, engaged in fierce arguments in a multitude of languages. When Ben tried to ask about the department’s specialty, he was sent to the lab director’s office. The jovial and effusive old man explained with mounting zeal that he and many of his colleagues, dead and alive, felt humanity had no need for such a profusion of languages, especially in the current age of technology. Now, through the sheer brilliance of their communication programs, they were able to create a Father Tongue, a meticulous gleaning of words from all known languages, melded into a single, new language that would house all the needs of expression under one roof. Suppressing the urge to engage the professor in a Socratic conversation about the distinct advantages of each and every language, Ben muttered something about being in a rush and did an about-face. He walked into the elevator and pressed the basement button, deflated but unwilling to yield.
The sign on the green basement door made him laugh. He had spent the better part of a day in the lab’s different departments while, all along, just beneath him, in the basement, was the Human Resources Department. He sat down opposite a bespectacled woman, who asked how she could be of service. He wanted to know if there was a Marian Mendelssohn in any of the Other World’s several thousand labs.
She typed in the name, waited thirty seconds, and shrugged.
“None?” he whispered, his voice caught in his throat.
“There are twenty-seven Marians,” she said, pulling out the computer printout, “but none of them are Mendelssohns.”
“And Corbin?” he asked, “Might there be a Marian Corbin?”
Her eyes flitted across the page. She shook her head. “Sorry.”
Ben scanned the printed page, his fingers twitching with the urge to shred it. He got up, thanked her, and left. Fatigue tugged at his shoulders. Since he arrived in this strange world, he had managed to hear the life story of a bitter Belgian, meet a Marilyn Monroe look-alike, and tour every corner of the Multilingual Laboratories’ departments. But he had yet to justify his decision to come to the Other World. No one told him that if he ended his life he’d still have to search for his wife. He was sure she would be there, without strange announcements, mathematical living arrangements, and disappointing laboratories. No one prepared him for this wholly unnecessary surprise.
On the way to the nearest bus station, his thoughts were truncated by a kick in the ankle. He smiled at the bowlegged kid who had bumped into him and then continued chasing his ball. Turning toward the young boy, he wondered how it was that the beautiful park to his right was so full of young children. The child, in the meanwhile, let his ball go, stared straight at Ben, and marched toward him with remarkable determination. Ben couldn’t understand why his heart was pounding so, as if he feared harm. He flashed an innocent smile at the child, who returned a smile, continued toward his right leg, let out a long gasp of wonder, and latched on. Ben wanted to pat the five-year-old’s head, but something about his viselike grip made him flinch. Meanwhile, the child buried his head of thick brown hair in Ben’s leg as though he were trying to dig himself into his thigh. Ben had no idea what he wanted from him. The boy just held fast to his leg and made Y … aaah noises as though he had found a treasure whose worth only he knew.
Ben looked up and surveyed the park. Panic made its way into his throat as he looked at the kids and grownups frolicking only a few yards away. What would they think of him if they saw him like this, in the middle of the street, a naked kid clutching his leg? He chuckled and stuttered, “Hey, little guy … I gotta go … could you … l-let go of my leg?”
The kid ignored him. Ben prayed for the ground to open up and swallow him. He tried nudging the kid off his leg. Realizing, though, that if he didn’t use some force there’d be no end to this bizarre act of magnetism, he pushed him away with both hands. The kid looked up at him, hurt, and tried to get close to him again. Ben raised a finger in the air and said, “Don’t! I’m very sorry, kid, but I don’t want to be accused of God knows what kind of perversions. Promise me you won’t do it again, okay? It’s not alright to run around and hug strangers’ legs, you know.”
Realizing that the kid was gearing up for a third charge, Ben took off, only to find that the kid had the acceleration of a salivating cheetah hot on the heels of a well
-haunched antelope. Ben stopped four hundred yards from the improvised starting line and, as the kid approached, warned him in the sternest voice he had, “Go away! Get out of here, kid! If you come near me now, you’ll be sorry!”
The kid ground to a halt. Ben gesticulated wildly, shooing him away. “Get out of here! I’m not in the mood for this crap!”
The kid didn’t move. He just continued to cast his uncomprehending eyes at the man, who, for his part, sighed in relief when a multi-wheel arrived. He found a seat and watched the kid run back to the park, sit down next to an elderly woman, and hug her. The multi-wheel pulled away from the stop and Ben leaned back, closed his eyes, and decided it was high time he headed home. Maybe the next day would bring a fresh idea about how to find Marian.
9
The Sleep of the Guillotinesse
For five full weeks, Bessie hardly slept. The few times she succumbed to exhaustion were brief and she dreamed of guillotines. The severed dreams looped back and forth over the same awful ground. She escorts her husband to the decapitation device, raises a beguiling eyebrow, says there’s no choice, asks him to place his head in the proper spot, trumpets the start of the execution, and lowers the glinting blade on his neck.
Yet again, she woke from the chilling three-minute vision, and glared at her eerily tranquil Rafael. He had no idea how many times she had calmly gone through the motions of killing him, as though she truly wanted to see him dead. She hated the dream and even more so its meaning. She treated the pictures of the execution like a violent rape of her mind, perpetrated by her swirling conscience. Then she was forced into open-eyed vigilance by her husband’s comatose state. The recurring nightmare was nothing more than the ring of her alarm clock. Yet the abiding pattern surprised her each time anew. She fell asleep, she saw the guillotine, she woke up. Aside from the short bursts of sleep, she was awake at all times. She talked to Rafael, she went down to the cafeteria and ate, she went home for a shower and to change her clothes, she returned to his bedside. Three days ago she heeded the nurse’s advice and left the hospital for a night. She stepped into the bedroom, yawned, and lay down on the bed with obvious delight. For the past fifty years, the bed, which welcomed her with open arms, had known all of her secrets. She stretched her back pleasurably, in a way she had managed to forget since the stroke. The bed moaned beneath her, and Bessie felt herself merge with mattress, a wondrous sense of comfort engulfing her. The sweet sensation didn’t last long. Bessie stole a glance in the direction of her husband’s side of the bed and wondered how she could allow herself to rest in a double bed that had never known loneliness, a bed that in a single solitary instant made her feel like an invasive miscreant. After all, it was impossible to ignore the riotous absence at her side, the sheet was too taut, the pillow too chilled, and all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing. She tossed and turned, all too aware of her ears and the way they rejected the silence. She tried to conjure Rafael’s nighttime wheeze, that agitated donkey braying that had faithfully escorted her into a less clamorous world thousands of times before, but wasn’t surprised when the silence proved too loud. “How can you possibly expect to remember the wheeze of a man who can’t breathe unassisted?” she asked out loud, getting out of the bed and calling a cab to the hospital.
“The prunish nurse will be back soon,” she said, looking out the window at the early light of dawn rising out of a thick fog, and then whispered, “Rafael, I don’t like her. She hasn’t done me any wrong and she always asks me how I’m doing, but there’s something about her, not sure what, maybe it’s just her size. She’s tiny and she leaves the impression of a frail woman, but she isn’t what she seems. She won’t stop consoling me, as though you were already gone. She says that medically speaking you’re almost entirely dead. She explained something about the brain. You’ll be fully dead when all of your brain dies. Looks like you just can’t stop yourself from rebelling, ah? You’re keeping us all guessing with the living part of your brain.” She held her silence for a while and then resumed speaking, enthused. “You’re not going to believe who came to visit you. Yehoshua Dolev, the owner of that gallery that had your exhibition up five years ago, remember? Anyway, the gall on that guy. He came up here to ask me who you were leaving your work to, as if I care, as if I had any idea, as if you were already gone. I asked him to leave, but he said he’d be back. Next day Rafi was here, you know, from the museum. He also wanted to talk wills. Look how popular you are. For five years you didn’t exchange a word with them and now all of a sudden you’re a star. In this country, you’ve got to be unconscious to regain recognition. Not that you need any of that business. Okay, I won’t bother you. I’ll go out and get some air. Just pray she doesn’t drive me crazy again today. Even though I think she’s bound to relax a bit. There’s someone new on life support. Came in last night. His wife needs a lesson or two. She comes and goes all the time. Never stays for more than two hours. So, you see how it is? With my luck, he’ll probably wake up, and you? You’ll probably wait till they bury me and then you’ll get up and go look for some young girl, ah, Kolanski?”
“Good morning,” a small voice behind her said. Bessie stiffened. The nurse always managed to creep up and surprise her. She greeted Ann similarly, her eyes glazed with resentment. Ann approached Rafael’s bed and purred, “How are you today?”
Bessie shrugged. “I think I’ll go down to the cafeteria. I’d like a cup of tea.”
* * *
She walked out of the hospital and sat down on the front steps, gazing at the quiet street, watching it rise to life until her weighted eyelids were pulled close. Another guillotine came crashing down on her husband’s neck. Jolted awake, she checked her surroundings as though a blindfold has just been removed and put a trembling hand on her chest right after the small voice worked its way into her ear canal.
“Nightmare?”
Again she hadn’t noticed the nurse, who sat down beside her two minutes earlier and was getting ready to wake her.
“Yes, nightmare,” Bessie affirmed, preparing to change the subject.
“Bessie, I think you need to let go,” the nurse said.
Bessie didn’t turn in her direction. “I’m of a different mind,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the trickle of traffic.
The nurse’s voice went up a notch. “Bessie, Rafael’s chances of awakening are negligible. Infinitesimal. I don’t want to mislead you. How old is he again?”
“Eighty-three next week.”
“You really think a man of his age has any chance of awakening? He’s already…”
“Reached old age? He can keep on going.”
“Not in his condition. He wasn’t in good health in the first place. Bessie, for over five weeks he’s been lying there lifelessly. I have no problem artificially respirating him for several more years, but logic dictates a different course of action.”
“I’m expecting a miracle. Don’t taint it with logic.”
“But you’re not a young woman either. This type of grind will take a toll on your health, too.”
“My health is not up for discussion right now.”
“Your health depends on his. You need to understand that your situation is not going to improve because his is not going to.”
“From where, exactly, do you draw that kind of certainty?”
“Experience. Rafael could lay there for a month, two months, a year and … nothing. Then, one fine day, the machine won’t help anymore … and, you know.”
“I don’t.”
“Bessie, have you given some thought to your life after he’s gone?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“It’s always been clear to me I’d die before him.”
“Clear?”
“When you live with someone for so long his presence becomes as permanent as nature. The trees are always there, the sky’s always there, Rafael’s always there.”
“You can’t imagine the world without Rafael?”
“Bessie, excuse me if what I’m about to say sounds rude, but he’s not going to wake up. And worse still, he’s suffering right now for no reason.”
“Suffering? How do you know he’s suffering? You’ve been in his condition?”
“I’ve seen dozens of people in his condition. People who were so close to death but due to some sort of complication remained suspended between heaven and earth. As far as I see it, he’s stuck in the throes of death. Your husband’s been suffering for over five weeks because he’s not being released, not being allowed to rest in peace and quiet. True, no one can guess what’s going on in his mind, but one doesn’t need to be a mind reader to know with near certainty that if all he’s left behind is his shell, a body without life, then he’s probably not interested in staying with us.”
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