Fastened in Response

The voice rang in her mind even after the headphones came off. 

Cassandra heard it behind her teeth, buzzing angrily. When it stopped, blood was drying beneath her fingernails. The man opposite her had wrapped a handkerchief around his hand with a grimace. 

“What did that last sentence mean?”

“I’m not sure, I need to hear it again.”

He glanced at the younger man beside the recording equipment. “We’ve played it half a dozen times, ma’am.”

Above them, fluorescent lights illuminate a vaulted ceiling, electric cables ran through the mouths of worn gargoyles. 

The details of how she’d gotten here were strange. The last thing she remembered was the university’s parking garage. The vague memory of her cheek pressed against the rubber floor of a black van. Now her wrists were secured to a chair. They’d taken her shoes and her toes were damp on the cold stone floor. 

“You can’t keep me here without a phone call, I need to talk to my sister.” Cassandra pleaded.

“Your absence has been accounted for.” The man adjusted the handkerchief, there was blood on it now, seeping through. He wore a grey suit without a tie and his voice was patient, almost kind if not for the setting. 

The younger man brought her water in a paper cup. He held it for her while she drank. He had a narrow moustache and a wedding ring. He said nothing.

“Where did you get the recording?” she asked. 

“A religious gathering,” the man in grey said.

“That language, no one’s spoken it for three thousand years at least, probably longer. It’s a cult?”

The man said nothing. She had reconstructed it from eleven brass funerary tablets. It was the center of her thesis, eight years of work. Only ten people had attended her last talk on the subject. No living person could speak it. Even she couldn’t speak it, the vowel sounds were largely conjectural. Yet she’d heard the first sentence on the recording and thought with equal measures of thrill and shame, so that’s how it sounds. 

“Show her,” the grey man said. “Just the beginning.”

The young man turned the monitor to her. She saw herself beneath the fluorescent lights. Her eyes were closed, her mouth opened. He muted the footage before she could hear herself. Her hands were free, she caught his hand, her lips moving while he tried to pull away. 

“What was that? The sentence you translated before that happened?”

Cassandra searched her memory. “Something about a door.”

He sat down carefully, “we need you to find out.”

They released her right hand so she could write. The grey man placed a photograph beside the paper. It showed a low stone chamber lit by the harsh beam of a flashlight. There were kneeling figures facing an upright slab of stone. Their clothes were modern but the slab beyond them bore writing that was ancient in comparison. 

The top line matched one of her tablets. Below it were characters she had only ever seen in fragments. 

“There’s more?”

“Considerably so.”

“Do you have a better photograph?”

He turned it face down. “We need the recording first.”

She scowled. He had seen she was interested. “Then you’ll let me go?”

“Cooperate, Dr. Ventman, and nobody here will hurt you.”

The young man fitted the headphones against her ears, his hands were shaking.

“What’s your name?” she asked. He stepped away without answering. The recording began again. It was an elderly man’s voice. He spoke with an unhurried, rhythmic lilt. 

Cassandra wrote the first phrase. Let the door be– She paused. The final verb carried a suffix she had interpreted as imperative. Spoken aloud, its stress fell elsewhere. She frowned. She continued listening, making notes where she could. Another voice answered, it sounded feminine. 

Cassandra felt movement behind her. She turned to see a metal trolley being wheeled into the room.

“Face forward,” the grey man said.

She knew the next word before the old man said it. Beloved. 

The room began to spin. There was a weight against her eyelids. Something pressed upon her throat. She could feel grains of soil against her skin. Roots entered her through wounds that would not close. Above her, her children were singing. She knew them by the weight of their feet. 

She had carried them once. Now they were dancing and she was alone. 

Cassandra woke with tears on her face. The young man was on the floor. Water sputtered from his mouth onto the flagstones. The grey man knelt beside him, pressing two fingers against his neck.

“What happened?” Cassandra shouted.

Neither answered. 

She pulled against the remaining restraint, knocking papers across the table. She saw her handwriting scrawled across the pages. 

The young man coughed, a long gout of black water emerging from his mouth.

“Turn him on his side,” Cassandra said.

The grey man obeyed. She watched the younger man’s back rise and fall until her own breathing steadied. 

“Get these off me.” She shouted. “Please. I can help.”

The grey man stood, wordlessly unlocking the restraint. She saw five shallow cuts across his hand. Scratches from her fingernails. She put her hands beneath her thighs. 

“I need a better photograph.”

The grey man nodded, fiddling with the computer. He printed another copy, blown up, sharpened. He placed it next to the first. 

“We need to finish,” he said. 

Through the headphones, she could still hear the old man’s voice. In this photo, the figures were laying down. A woman in a cardigan had fallen across the bottom of the slab, bullet casings glittered on the floor.

She looked at the grey man. “They were unarmed?”

“Doesn’t make them less dangerous.”

At the slab’s base, exposed by the fallen woman’s body, was a line of smaller script. Three strokes enclosing an empty space. Entrance. Here it occurred beside mouth and eye. An anatomical term then, something that could be opened and closed?

“Why am I here?”

“Your name came up when we identified the writing at the site.”

She didn’t remember that. Her head was still fuzzy. She picked up the photograph. “It’s a funeral. I was right about that. The suffixes–I’d never heard them before. They’re continuative. The action isn’t finished. Whatever they were honoring, they weren’t putting it to rest. They were… keeping it at rest.”

The grey man stood very still. “Can we restart it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out, ma’am. It’s important.”

She wanted to tell him to shove it. But he sounded earnest… and afraid. 

“Bring me more paper,” she said instead, “and don’t touch me.”

This time she listened without translating aloud. The old man described tending a body. Each phrase spoke of a part and the means of its care. The answering voice confirmed that the work was done. She wrote quickly. Eyes. Mouth. Horizon, or something close to it. 

She was beneath the earth again, but the earth was thin now. Things moved above her. Each footfall sounded against her ears, millions and millions of them, the pressure pricking against her skin.

Her children were gone. The creatures above had the same bones, but they were not the same. They had long since ground them into their fields and ate what grew. She tried to remember her children’s faces, and found only those that had come after. 

She began to lift her head. 

“Dr. Ventman.”

The grey man was speaking from a distance. 

“Dr. Ventman, look at the cup.”

A white paper cup stood beside her hand. 

“Tell me what’s in it, Dr. Ventman.”

“Water?”

“Good. Look at me.”

She couldn’t. Something behind her eyes was trying to look through them at the same time as her, they were pushing against her, pushing her out of the way.

“You have a sister,” he said. “What’s her name?”

“Helen?”

“Tell me about Helen.”

She thought of her sister calling to ask which detergent she used. Such an ordinary question that she had been impatient about it. 

The room returned. The young man was holding a pistol. It was aimed directly at her head. 

“Put it away,” the grey man said.

“You heard her!” 

“Put it away. Now.”

Cassandra looked down. Her newest notes were in English. Eyes are fastened. Mouth is fastened. The wound through which the morning enters is fastened. Who is that inside my head?

Cold stone touched her bare feet. 

“There’s a final response,” she said. “After the fastening. I need to hear it.”

“There’s nothing left on the recording.”

“I need to hear the end then.”

The young man shook his head. Cassandra held out her hand.

The grey man gave her the headphones. 

The final passage began.

There was a distinction she had never encountered before: two forms of the word dead. One described a condition. The other described an act, acknowledged by witnesses. The first could be reversed. The second had to be denied. 

Cassandra bent over her notes. The question asked for recognition of those who observed it. The response established who had died, and what had been done to maintain it. Repeating the sounds wouldn’t be enough, someone had to understand the context in which it was given. 

She heard shouting on the recording. The old man was hurrying, trying to finish his question. Then gunfire struck her ears, frighteningly loud.

Cassandra fell into darkness once more. This time, it knew she was there. 

Its attention passed over with a slow delicacy, pausing over the memory of Helen. Then sliding across university, her little flat, pausing over her work on the funerary tablets, and she felt its astonishment at the smallness of those who held it. 

It showed her its burial. Its children stood upon its body, with fastening wrapped in cloth. Before beginning, each knelt to kiss the place where they would drive the bolts of metal into the earth. She felt the kisses and the blows alike. 

There was a totality in the grief, she wanted to beg forgiveness for having been born upon its grave. She could have stayed there in its memory, loved like its children had once been. Newly made, asleep against a warmth too vast to comprehend. 

She forced herself instead to remember Helen waiting for an answer that did not matter. 

She pulled away. 

The grey man gripped the edge of the table. “Is it you?”

She nodded, though she was less certain than she had been before. 

She began writing. She wrote it all down, every response and fastening they would need to keep it in the earth. To keep it dead.

She finished the response and handed it to him. 

He looked at it, nodded and left the room. 

The young man returned later with a towel and a pair of shoes. He gave Cassandra a small nod. The grey man set a cup of tea beside her. 

“Is it over?” she asked. 

“I think so. There’s no more activity.”

She wrapped both hands around the cup. She began to cry. “I’d like my phone,” she sniffed. 

“Your belongings are being brought to your room, ma’am.”

She watched steam rise past his face. “What?”

“You’ll be comfortable, don’t worry.”

He led her beyond the door, down several long hallways. After awhile the strange stone gave way to a tiled floor, like that of a doctor’s office. They opened the door at the end of the hall. Inside was a room like that of a college dorm. A trolley carried folded clothes, including the blue cardigan Helen had given her for her birthday. 

The grey man gave her a file. “Rest,” he said. “Then take a look at this. Welcome to the Program, Dr. Ventman.”

The man left her alone in the room a moment later. She opened the file with a shaking hand. A photograph was clipped to the inside. It showed a hospital bed with a man, his eyes closed. Every window and mirror in the room had cracked in the same pattern. Writing filled the cracks in delicate, branching lines. 

She understood them all.