Episode 8: Delivery
UNKNOWN VOICE: Oh. Do you really believe that, Father?
TOMMASO: OH CAZZO, cazzo, cazzo, cazzo… chi cazzo sei? Gesù Cristo- what- what are you? What the fuck are you?
UNKNOWN VOICE: Father.
TOMMASO: DO NOT come near me, I have- I have this panel, I will bring them down here, I swear before God I will-
UNKNOWN VOICE: Father. I am not moving. Look at me. I have not moved and I am not going to. I could not come closer to you if my whole self depended on it, and tonight it very nearly does. Breathe. You are going to fall down if you keep breathing like that and then we will both be on the floor and only one of us can get back up.
UNKNOWN VOICE: Breathe first. In. Hold it. I have all the patience there is. It is the one thing I have always had too much of. Let it out slow. There. Again.
TOMMASO: You are wet. I can hear you. Whatever you are, you are wet, and you are between me and the door.
UNKNOWN VOICE: I am not between you and anything. Go to the door if you want it. Turn the wheel, break the seal, go up the stair into the light. I will still be here in the wall when you come back down, and you will come back down, because there is nowhere on this earth you can go now where the rest of what I have to say to you will not follow. But go, if going will slow your heart. I would rather talk to a man than to a fainting one.
TOMMASO: The door is sealed. I turned the lock myself. I hear it seat every time and I heard it seat tonight.
UNKNOWN VOICE: You did. Two feet of concrete, lead in the walls, blessed in 1623 by men who thought lead and Latin would hold a thing like me out. It really holds the sound in beautifully. That was always its real purpose and they never knew it. I think. It was never built to keep me from getting to you. It was built so that no one upstairs would hear you when I finally did.
TOMMASO: Yeah but, who are you? You- you didn't tell me your name.
UNKNOWN VOICE: Oh come on, Father. You have written it twice already.
TOMMASO: Oh STOP IT, just say it.
RAMIREZ: And what would you like to hear most? Officer Raymond Ramirez, Detroit Police Department, or maybe Deputy Raymond Ramirez, from Portland.
TOMMASO: No. No, there are two of you, there have to be, the deputy in Portland was thirty-five in '83, that makes him forty-three when he dies in 1991, they found him three days late and the apartment was, and his mouth was, and then there is the officer in Detroit, sixty-three now, who heard the streamer, and thirteen years, thirteen years will not fit inside one man, it is arithmetic, it is only arithmetic, so which one are you, tell me w-which one are-
RAMIREZ: Both of them are dead, Father. I am the thing that has been walking them around in the daylight since.
TOMMASO: You are the thing from the cabin. From the Reed file.
RAMIREZ: I am what was in the cabin. I was in the walls of it the way I am in the walls of this room. You people do your dying in rooms and you never once look at the mortar. You look at the body on the bed. We learned that about you before your Church had a name, and it has kept us alive a long, long time.
TOMMASO: Then I have nothing for you, because I know what you are. Thomas Reed told the man who visited him what you are. You climb into a living thing and you hold it open and you keep it going long past the hour it wants to stop, so that when the end comes at last there is no room left in the throat for anything to be said. You are the thing that smothers the final word. You crawl into a dying mouth so that God cannot speak out of it.
RAMIREZ: Aha, congratulations! You practiced that. In the little room upstairs, under the yellow lamp, four hours and twenty-two minutes if I'm not mistaken and you came out of it warm as fresh bread and you have been reciting them their catechism ever since. You had a better mouth on you in October, before they got to it. That one asked questions. This one only gives answers, and the answers are theirs, and they are wrong.
TOMMASO: Do not talk about that room.
RAMIREZ: Then let me talk about why I cannot cross the little bit of floor between us. I have tried, Father. In every room you were ever marked in, I have been close enough to lay a hand on you, and every single time my hand has stopped in the air as if it struck a glass I could not see. There is no way into you. And I get into everything. That is the one thing I am for: finding the gap, the cut, the wet breath, the weak hour in the dark, and going in through it. And you do not have one. Something closed you up years before I ever reached you, and whoever did it did finer work than the men who poured this floor in this room.
TOMMASO: What- what are you even saying?
RAMIREZ: It means I cannot fill your throat the way I filled Ramirez's. It means the only thing that has ever worked for me does not work on you. So here I am, with a borrowed mouth I can barely keep in order, trying to reach you with talk, which my kind has never in its whole existence been any good at, because you are the last door left that I might still be able to close and I cannot get my hand anywhere near the latch.
TOMMASO: You want me stopped. You keep saying it, close the door, close me. Reed said you keep the body from speaking. Fine. There is a shorter way to keep a man from speaking than sitting with him all night, and we both know the word for it. So say it. Did you come down into my chamber to kill me…?
RAMIREZ: If I could, I would have done it in the delivery room and spared us both these four years.
TOMMASO: Then do it.
RAMIREZ: No.
TOMMASO: You just said. You said you would.
RAMIREZ: I said if I could. Now hear the rest of it, because it is the shape of the trap I am standing in and your own feet are already wet inside it. So, every death is a word. Your people never let themselves finish that thought, but you finished it, in December, at two in the morning, and then it frightened you and you put it away. Two thousand years, one word at a time, spoken through the dying. And you were never some translator it stumbled onto in the dark.
They have been keeping you. Sealed, and trained, and grieving in exactly the right direction, and set aside for the end of it.
So when a man like that dies, a marked man, kept back all this while, the sentence does not lose him. It might get its last word early.
If I ended you here tonight, quiet as I have wanted to since I walked in, I could be the very hand that finishes the thing I have bled two thousand years to keep unfinished. That is the joke they built into you. Me, the thing that has closed more mouths than your whole Church has ever blessed, is the one thing in this room that has to keep you breathing.
TOMMASO: HAHA. So we are both caught. You cannot touch me, you cannot end me, and every minute you sit there talking brings the men on the stairs one minute closer. Why. What is worth this to a thing that says it has all the patience there is.
RAMIREZ: Oh you have the danger wrong. You think it is Benedetti finding me. That is the smallest part of tonight.
You are a conduit, Father. You are one half of a telephone and the other half is the thing you were marked to in that hospital room, and it does not sleep, and I do not know how much of what is said in here it can hear through the wire of you. Every true word I give you, I am speaking into its ear.
I have gone two thousand years never letting it learn where I am. I keep to the mortar. I keep to the dark. I lose quietly and I stay hidden. And tonight I have walked up to its own vessel and started to talk out loud beside it. If it wakes and looks down the length of you and sees me standing here… then this is the last foolish thing I will ever do, and I did it for a man who spent all winter calling me the Devil.
TOMMASO: Then again, why do it.
RAMIREZ: Because there is no one after you. Because it is nearly done. In all this time it has never once come down to a single mouth I might still reach with a single night of talking, and now it has, and the mouth is yours, and I could not stay in the wall and let it happen without standing in front of you one time. That is all. I have too much patience and almost no time and those have never been the same thing.
TOMMASO: Well, there is something you should know about me, since we are sharing secrets in a room that does not exist. I am good at this. I am very good at this. Better than a probationary translator has any right to be. I hear two syllables off a corpse and I know them before I open the Lexicon. It scares me. I have written it down half a dozen times, that it should not be possible, that a language takes years, that you do not start reading Akkadian in a month and wake up thinking in it. And every time I write it down I decide it is a gift. That God gave me an ear for this because He needs me here. That is what they tell me it is. A gift.
RAMIREZ: It is not a gift, Father. It is a symptom.
You are not translating the Tongue. No one ever has. You cannot translate a thing from nothing, with no dictionary that was not written by the dying, no grammar the dead did not leave you. What is actually happening is slower and it is worse.
The words go into a mind and they stay there. They take root. Every hour a translator sits with the sound, it grows a little further into him, and it starts to give up its meaning the way a seed in soil gives up a shoot, because the soil is not learning the seed. The soil is being used by it.
Sixteen hundred years of clever, devoted men in this basement, wearing their ears out on it, calling the ache understanding. That is what the Custodia is. It is not a room full of scholars studying a language. It is a bed that has been kept warm and turned and tended for sixteen centuries so the thing has somewhere to put its roots while it finishes growing.
Every translator was a furrow. And you came in already seeded. You have understood it from the first day because it was in you before your first day, since the delivery room, and all your gift is, all it has ever been, is how deep it has already gone.
TOMMASO: No. No, no, no, no…
RAMIREZ: You noticed it yourself. You wrote it down and could not look at it. You are the most honest man in this building and it is going to be the death of everything you have left.
TOMMASO: The delivery room. You keep saying the delivery room. You do not get to be in the delivery room. That room is mine.
RAMIREZ: Was Elena's last word the Tongue, Father?
TOMMASO: You know it was. Everyone in this building knows it was, it is the reason I am here at all. She spoke it and I heard it and I could not understand it and I have spent four years learning how so that one day I could go back and finally understand the last thing my wife ever said to me.
RAMIREZ: Now tell me, how old was the voice.
The voice you heard in that room. The one you have played back inside your own skull every night for four years. How old was it.
TOMMASO: It was Elena. It was her voice. It came from the bed, from where she was, it...
RAMIREZ: She was already gone. You know she was already gone. They gave you the time and you have it by heart and it is before the sound. The sound came after. You have known that from the beginning and every night you have laid your wife over the top of it so that you would never once have to hear how small the voice really was.
TOMMASO: Stop…
RAMIREZ: One breath. She had one breath in the whole of her life and she spent it on a single word, the first thing and the last thing she would ever say, and it was not a word from any language you or I were born into. And you were standing close enough to feel it land on your face.
TOMMASO: No. No, non lo dire, ti prego, non lo dire. Era mia figlia. Era la mia bambina e io... [No. No, don't say it, please, don't say it. She was my daughter. She was my little girl and I...]
RAMIREZ: I was there. Not the way you were. I came the way I always come, because we feel a marked birth arriving like weather in an old wound, and I came to get between the mouth and the word, because it is the only thing I have ever known how to do.
And I could not. She was sealed like you are sealed. There was no way into her either. She said it before I could reach her, and then she was gone, and there was not even enough of her left for me to hold. And in that one minute, in that one room, two things that have circled you your whole life laid eyes on you for the first time. The thing that came up through your daughter marked you as it went. And I saw you, and understood you were closed to me forever, and I have been failing to reach you ever since.
They drew you down here into concrete. I kept turning up in your files like something you could not scrape off your shoe. Neither of us was ever going to leave you alone. You have been the man in the delivery room since the day you walked in asking about missing pages. You only built a door in the shape of your wife and hung it over the part of the room you could not survive looking at.
TOMMASO: I gave her a name. I gave her a name. And I have said Elena's name into this machine a thousand times, and I have never once said her name. Four years. I sat here in December and- reading all these files and names and- it was me. It was me the whole time…
RAMIREZ: Yes.
[DEEP BREATH AND SQUIRMING SOUNDS]
RAMIREZ: Do not. Do not make a sound. Close your mouth. Close it now and hold it and think of the floor, count the stones, give it nothing to climb out on. Do not let it up. Do not let it up through you.
It heard me. It is near the surface of you now and it heard me. I have stayed too long. That was it turning its head. Only looking, for now, but… I have to be gone before it does more than look.
TOMMASO: No. No, you cannot open all of this and then crawl back into a wall. Tell me it means something. That is all I want. You have told me my daughter spent her only breath feeding a thing that has no name, that my wife died so it could learn a syllable, that I am not gifted, I am infected, that everything I am is just how far the rot has grown. And if that is the whole of it, if there is nothing on the other side of the word, then they died for nothing, do you hear me? For nothing, and I cannot, I will not live in a world where that is the truth.
So there has to be a plan. There has to be. A God who is good could not take my wife and take my little girl and leave it at that, so there is more, there is meaning coming, they told me, they promised me, the sentence finishes and the last word calls Him down, God, here, onto the ground we stand on, and death ends, and everyone comes back, everyone who ever died comes back and there is mercy for all of it, for her, for Elena, for all of them, heaven brought down onto earth. That is what the word does. That is what I am for. So tell me they are right. Tell me that is what answers when I call.
RAMIREZ: I cannot tell you that.
TOMMASO: Then tell me they are wrong.
RAMIREZ: I cannot tell you that either, and it is killing me that I cannot, because you would believe me and it would save you. But I do not know the answers. That is the whole and only truth I carried down here through the stone, and it is almost nothing, I know.
Nobody spends two thousand years of the dead building itself a voice and then hands you the mercy you ordered.
You are standing at the bottom of a well that has been dug through every grave since Golgotha, and you have decided that what climbs out of it will have your wife's face and your daughter's hands, because you cannot bear that it might not, and I understand that, God help me I understand it, but wanting the thing at the bottom of the well to be kind has never once changed what was down there. You do not get to choose what comes when you open the door. You only get to be the door.
TOMMASO: Then I would rather be the door and be wrong than believe you and let them stay dead. If there is any chance, any chance at all that the word brings her back. My little girl was alive for four minutes, Ramirez. Four minutes. If saying one word gives her four years, forty, if it gives her a life, then I will learn every sound in this cursed language and I will say the last one myself and I will not shake doing it. You came here to make me refuse. You have done the opposite. You have shown me exactly what I would be saying it for.
RAMIREZ: I know. I felt it happen while you were talking. I have lost every death for two thousand years and I have never lost one quite like this, a man I saved and doomed with the same night's work, because the truth I brought you was the one thing that could push you all the way in. You needed it to mean something so badly that you have made the meaning yourself out of your own grief and hung it on the end of the world.
Benedetti is coming down. He does not know why I am here. He knows only that your recorder has run too long. When he opens that door he will look at your face and ask you who you were talking to. Plan your answer carefully, but I think I know what you will say. I would give a great deal to be wrong.
Ask them one thing, before the end.
Ask them why they need your mouth at all, if a girl who lived four minutes could already give it a word.
Ask them what a vessel is for, if the thing can reach up through any throat it likes.
Ask them what the last word does. What it truly does. They have never once told you. And you have never once asked, because they grew you not to.
TOMMASO: And if the answer is heaven.
RAMIREZ: Then you will have been right, and I will have been the fever that tried to keep a saint from healing the world, and I will carry that. But nobody digs a well like this one for water, Father.
I have to go. It is looking at the place where I am standing. Say her name into the machine. Just once. While you still have a mouth that is only yours to say it with, and before you spend the rest of it learning to say the other word.
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